Page 12 of No Kind of Hero
Because he was adog.She had to stop caring this much, like she’d scraped away three layers of skin and exposed all her nerve endings, forcing her to receive everybody else’s emotions and opinions on her frequency and jamming her own signal. She should have scheduled her breakdown for someplace where she didn’t know a living soul, not even of the canine variety. Someplace where she could have grown her skin back.
The bitterness in Evan’s face and voice when he’d talked about his girlfriend, though, and about Beth, too. That hardness—she’d never seen it in him before. She knew the heart underneath, or she’d thought she had. When had he grown his shell that thick? If her nerves were exposed, his were buried.
She stepped aside for a group of older ladies coming out of Robinson’s. There was something new in the ice-cream-store window, she saw now, a stained-glass close-up of purple lupines on a green hillside. It was so striking, it had to be Dakota’s. Evan’s painting partner was easing out of the business now, Beth’s dad had told her, and devoting her time to stained glass. Which Beth hadn’t even known she made. You thought you knew everybody in a small town, but it turned out you didn’t know much at all.
Evan, for example. He was different, but he was so much the same, too. Ignoring his melting milkshake to hold his baby girl, his arms so strong but his touch so gentle, and the way all the wariness had dropped away when he looked down into his daughter’s face. The way her tiny hand had gone up to clutch his fingers while she drank, and how she’d snuggled into him while he was patting her back, like she knew down to her bones that she was safe in his arms.
Beth knew exactly how that felt. No matter what else had been going on in her life, being with Evan, until that last week, had made her feel like everything would be all right, because he was big enough and strong enough to hold her all the way through anything.
Which had been nothing but weakness on her part, of course. Entitlement, like she was a princess who deserved to be shielded from everything bad in the world, and like she needed to be, because she couldn’t handle her life. That was a dangerous road, and a false one. Thank goodness she hadn’t gone down it. Anyway, Evan had his own problems, and they were a whole lot worse than hers had been.
His girlfriend had left him. She’d left herbaby.How could a woman do that? Why would she do it to Evan? At least Beth had only been twenty-one. And scared.
And despite all that, Evan had asked about her, about why she was here, and he’d seemed to care about her answer.
Except when he hadn’t. When that shuttered look had come back into his eyes and he’d taken off. As soon as she’d talked about her car, and her dad, and the firm.
The thing about Evan was—he didn’t forget. As steady as he was when he loved you, that was how steady he was once he’d dismissed you. Once he’d cut you out. And that wasn’t one bit protective or one bit understanding. That was unforgiving. That was cold.
It was also the past. Another problem with the home town—the past kept coming back to slap you in the face. But she didn’t have to be stuck. Here, in Portland, or anyplace. She tied Henry up outside the drugstore, said, “This is the last stop, I promise,” and ignored the fact that she was talking to the dog again.Apologizingto the dog again. Then she went into the store and dropped a bottle of charcoal-gray nail polish into her shopping basket like a boss.
She didn’t stop there, either. She also bought a whole pedicure kit, including a little gadget that promised to buzz your soles and heels silky-smooth.
Gray toenails? No. Pink toenails.Redtoenails. Or something even wilder. You needed wild for high-heeled sandals, and your feet had to be perfect. She might not have big breasts, but she did have pretty feet. All she needed was a foot fetishist and she’d be all set, sex-life-wise.
You didn’t wear high-heeled sandals in Estate Planning, needless to say. Open toes?Completelyunprofessional. And conservative, careful women on their way to the top didn’t wear, oh, for example . . . sky-high black heels with lacing that went all the way up your foot and tied around the ankle, even on a date. No bondage shoes, not out where a client or a partner might see you.
Not that shewould.She’d feel completely ridiculous, like she’d pulled those heels from the Dress-Up Box and was clomping around in front of her mother’s mirror. But wouldn’t that be fun?
Once, many months ago, after perhaps one too many glasses of wine—meaning two—she’d asked her last boyfriend, Greg, what he liked about her. He’d said, “That you’re so intelligent, and so—refined. You’ve got class, and you’re always—” He’d laughed, shaken his head. “Sounds outdated. Unenlightened. That you’re always a lady. Crazy, except it’s true. I know that wherever I take you, even if it’s to dinner with the senior partner, you’ll be appropriate. Cool. Classy.”
Maybe the case wasn’t the only reason she’d stopped being available when Greg called. Who wanted to beappropriate? Alwaysappropriate? Who didn’t want to be a vixen sometimes?
Not that she ever had been. But she wanted to think it was within the realm of possibility. She paid for her inappropriate purchases and headed outside, where a patient Henry, lying in the shade of a sidewalk tree with his muzzle on his paws, whapped his tail against the pavement in a hopeful manner.
She hesitated. “Five more minutes,” she told the dog. And then she went into the shop next door. The new one.Soap You Up.After that . . . she really went wild.
Well, relatively.
All those inappropriate thoughts might have been why, when Dakota Savage called her the next day, Beth said what she did. Or maybe it was the book.
“Hey,” Dakota said when Beth picked up the phone after checking that it wasn’t Portland and it wasn’t her mother. She was lying in the hammock, and she wasn’t reading her paperback. She’d started the thriller the night before, and when her attention had wandered, had gone searching through the virtual stacks instead. Somehow, she’d downloaded something even more high-octane, and she was now on Book Two. A billionaire and a librarian, a lifetime Good Girl with a kinky side. They were putting each other through hell, but they were also putting each other through their paces, and Beth could tell she was going to be reading Book Three today.
The only progress she was making so far was in laziness and debauchery, but she was batting a thousand there. Halfway through her break, and had she bought a juicer and started a detox program? She had not. Had she journaled her journey? Nope. Had she even left this property today, other than for a long, cool swim in the lake that made her hammock time feel even more delicious? Not a hope. Kegel-wise, though, her training was going great. She was tuned up and ready to go.
“Hey,” she said back to Dakota. She stretched out a little more luxuriously, rubbing one silky red-toenailed foot over the other and making the hammock sway, inhaling the scent of pines mingled with her mother’s roses and dragging her mind away from the throb in her body. “What’s up?”
“I thought you might go out for that dinner with me,” Dakota said. “A drink, anyway. Blake’s out of town, I’ve been working like crazy on my glass to catch up on the orders after my layoff, and I need some stimulation. If I watch another baseball game with my stepdad, I’ll go insane. Help me out. Want to go to Heart of the Lake?”
Dakota had broken her arm on the Fourth of July. Beth knew that, too. A whole lot more exciting things had happened in Wild Horse in the past few months than had happened during her own eighteen years of residence, and none of them were more surprising than the whirlwind romance between Dakota Savage, house painter, and demigod NFL-star-turned-businessman Blake Orbison.
The words came out of her mouth before she could stop them. “That’d be good. But maybe we should go someplace redneck instead.”
A pause, and then Dakota said slowly, “Why would that be?”
Oh. Stupid. Thoughtless.“Not because of you,” Beth hurried to say. “Because of me. I know you’re not a redneck. I mean, you’re an artist. I don’t know. I was thinking it would be fun to sort of . . . step out a little. Dance, maybe. Drink beer.”
“I’m still a redneck,” Dakota said, her voice easy again, and Beth breathed a sigh of relief. “Artist or not. Right. You can step out, and I’ll be the sober friend who doesn’t dance. That’ll be a switch.”
