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“SO WHAT’S WITH my new neighbor?” Zack said, applying his elbow to Fred Spangler’s gut when the man attempted a rush toward the basketball. Zack dribbled around his old college friend, made a feint that put Fred further off balance, then pulled up and sent the ball arching toward the basket.
Swish.
Fred staggered off the court, red-faced and dripping with sweat. “You win. Again. Man, Zack.” He collapsed onto a bench. “Thought you said you’d gone soft in Idaho.”
“Not soft enough.” Zack grabbed the spinning ball off the cement court and beamed it toward Fred’s bulging midsection. “Allie’s turned into a good cook?”
Fred caught the ball and shot it back as hard as he could. “She’s terrible.”
The ball slammed into Zack’s waiting hands. He laughed, glad to be home, among friends with a shared history. “Yeah. I remember her Home Ec experiments. Chicken-fried salmon. Salsa-flavored taffy. Snow pea flambé.”
“Since the kids came, Allie’s given up on cooking. The munchkins get PB&Js. The adults get Chinese take-out three times a week. She even lets me order in pizza at midnight.” Fred yanked off his sweatband, releasing a floppy halo of golden curls. “It’s great. Just like our fraternity days. Except with a woman at hand there’s also regular sex.”
“Married sex.”
“Way better than college sex, bud.”
“Maybe for you.”
“Yeah, well, we can’t all be the campus heartthrob.”
Zack shrugged. “I never applied for the job.”
“I know, man, I know. The coeds just handed it to ya.” Fred cackled. “It’s a nasty job…”
“But someone’s got to do it,” Zack finished, somewhat sheepishly. He’d never intended to become known as a ladies’ man. He’d just always done what he’d been brought up to do. Which was the right thing. The polite thing. The considerate, generous, honorable thing.
Women seemed to appreciate it.
He palmed the basketball and held it threateningly over Fred’s blond head. “Say, Shirley T, you’re never gonna rev up enough to beat me subsisting on take-out food. Try tofu instead.”
Fred sneered at the old nickname, braced himself for a ball bouncing off his skull, and asked mildly, “You eat health food?”
Zack set the ball on the bench. He swiped his damp forehead with the ragged hem of his T-shirt. The light breeze cooled the hot skin of his abdomen. “It’s not so bad.”
“Yeah, sure. You just go for the nature girls. Long hair. No bras. Equal opportunity Kama Sutra.” Fred squinted into the sunshine. “Got a recipe?”
“For Allie?” In Allie’s hands, tofu would take on terrifying configurations. Maybe Fred was referring to one of the more complicated positions from the dog-eared copy of the Kama Sutra they’d studied in college, some of which ought to come with a recipe. And scorecard.
“Naw,” Fred said. “For me. One of us has got to learn how to cook healthy pretty damn soon. The sex won’t be much good if I can’t see past my gut.”
“Exercise,” said Zack. “Swimming. Low-impact aerobics.” He slanted a smile at Fred. “Good for the stamina. I’m sure Allie’d appreciate it.”
“Don’t you worry. Allie’s a tiger in the sack. Got enough stamina for both of us.”
“Hey, that’s my childhood pal you’re talking sleaze about.” Zack scooped up the ball, bounced it a few times, went up on the balls of his feet and lined up another perfect shot.
Swish.
Fred groaned. “Show-off.”
Zack let the ball roll away along the cracked cement. They’d chosen to play one-on-one at the old Riverpark courts instead of the busy set of courts at the youth center. Zack was still unsure of his reception. The Barnards had a lot of friends around town and he hadn’t felt like running into their public disapproval quite yet.
He walked to the bench and sat, then flexed his hands and laid them on his thighs. “So.”
Fred lifted an arm and took a sniff. “Man. I stink like a goat. Gotta go home and take a shower before I head back to the car lot.”
“What about the neighbor?” Zack prodded.
“Eh. Allie knows her. But she’s not your type.” Fred rested his head against the chain-link fence. He made quotation marks in the air, his tenor rising and falling like a graph. “She’s creative. Which translates to sensitive and temperamental in my book. High maintenance. She presides over a coven of crafty women at her store on Central Street.”
“And her name?” Zack thought of the woman, splendidly nude, bathed in golden light, a visual poem of languid female grace. She’d been natural, yet seductive. Enchanting. Even today, he was feeling kind of strung out, empty and restless, hungry for another sight of her.
“Cathy Timmerman,” Fred said with a grunt. “New in town.”
“Boyfriend?”
“How would I know?”
“Allie.”
Fred scratched his head. “Yeah, like I listen when she talks.”
In college, he’d fallen hard and fast for Allie the first time she’d visited Zack. Within a day, Fred had shaved off his incipient goatee, torn down his Cindy Crawford posters and started dogging Allie like a Springer Spaniel. At the moment, Zack was too lazily distracted to point that out.
“Man, your radar must be off,” Fred complained. “Trust me, Zack. You don’t want this one—she wears baggy clothes, Birkenstocks and Mr. Magoo glasses. She’s not in your league.” Absently, he stroked his belly. “Hell, I don’t think her type even has a league.”
“Outside of softball, neither do I.” Were they talking about the same woman? They had to be. Instead of being put off, Zack felt…privileged. As if Cathy Timmerman’s beauty was his alone.
“Yeah, sure,” scoffed Fred. “Like Laurel Barnard isn’t in a class by herself. Talk about high maintenance!”
Laurel. Zack gritted his teeth until his jaw bulged.
“Yup.” Fred nudged his pal in the ribs. “Laurel. She’s still mad at you.”
“I assumed as much.”
“I heard she said that if you ever showed your face in town again, she was gonna sic her daddy on you. Planned to sue you big time—public humiliation, alienation of affection, something like that. She’s out to recoup the cost of the, uh, wedding.” Fred glanced sidelong at Zack. “I’d be worried if I was you. Laurel’s got a hidden nasty streak.”
Not entirely hidden. “Hmm. Guess I’ll start rounding up character witnesses.”
Fred leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. “Steer clear, is all I’m saying.”
“What about Julia? Does she hate me, too?”
“With her, who knows? Jule doesn’t run off at the mouth like the rest of ’em.”
Zack expelled a huge breath.
Fred’s shoulders hunched. “Gotta be strange for you, being the whipping boy instead of the hero.”
“The whipping boy?”
“Women take weddings mighty seriously. And vanishing grooms—” He whistled, slowly wagging his head from side to side.
In Zack’s note to Laurel, he’d offered to pay for half of the cost of the cancelled wedding; he’d even provided Adam’s temporary address. She’d never responded. A matter of hurt pride, he’d assumed, and possibly even remorse for her part in the fiasco.
He shoved the matter to the back of his mind, leaving it for a personal confrontation with Laurel that was coming as surely as the next Quimby garage sale. “Stuff that,” he told Fred. “I’d rather talk about my new neighbor.”
“Why her? You can’t be that hard up.”
“What do you mean? She’s…” Zack waved his hands in the air.
Fred scratched his scalp vigorously, making the yellow mop of hair slide back and forth. “We are talking about Cathy Timmerman, the woman who’s renting Allie’s family’s house?”
“None other.” Zack’s face felt warm, and not because of the sun. There had to be a dopey look on it, too, judging by his friend’s baffled expression.
“This is weird,” said Fred.
“Very.”
“Something’s not right.”
Oh, but it is, Zack thought. Very right.
He’d bet what was left of his good reputation on it.
ZACK TOOK his time reintroducing himself to Quimby. After leaving Fred, he stopped for a cold drink at the Burger Bucket drive-in and flirted very mildly with the waitress, who, despite several tattoos and piercings, looked no more than nineteen. She stood at the counter, smoking, trying to maintain her cool while whispering to the fry girl. Zack looked away, smiling at a squalling toddler in the next car until he recognized the child’s mother, Liz Somebody from high school, who gaped at him with her mouth open. After the first moment of shock, she recovered enough to shoot him an impressively nasty evil eye.
He drove away, remembering that Liz had been one of Laurel’s bridesmaids. And that there were six of them.
Enough for a posse.
Next he went to the lake. In another week the water would be warm enough for pleasant swimming, but even now there were several hardy bathers. Pale, fleshy bodies lined the sand like walruses basking in the sun. Little kids dashed in and out of the shallows, squealing and splashing, the lifeguard poised to take flight from his peeling white throne.
Zack parked and sat on the hood of his car. The water and sky were complementary shades of blue, drenched with so much sunlight his eyes began to water and he had to fish a pair of shades from his pocket. He smelled pine resin, warm tar. Hot sand. The medicinal odor of sunscreen and the indefinable dank, marshy tang of lake water.
Memories came in a flood. He’d been the lifeguard at Mirror Lake for four summers, from ages sixteen to twenty. An uncomplicated time. He remembered the slow roasting hours of midday, the usual teenage horseplay with his swim team buddies, the day Julia Knox had pranced across the sand in braids and a yellow bikini and he’d decided that she was the girl for him.
Zack grimaced. His life would have stayed uncomplicated if only they’d married. For a time, he’d thought that eventually they would…until Julia had come to him at the start of their junior year of college and confessed that she loved someone else. The worst part of it had been that he wasn’t devastated by the news, not really. He and Julia…they’d never truly sparked. Not in the crackling, fiery way that burned hot enough to last a lifetime.
Zack stood up. Enough wallowing. Someone looked over and waved at him from a beach towel as he slammed the car door. He didn’t stop. Gravel spit beneath the back wheels of the Jag as he peeled out of the parking lot like a hot-rodder.
He pulled together a bagful of groceries at the little mom-and-pop convenience store at the crossroads. Mom was too myopic to see beyond her nose. Pop looked at Zack with a vague recognition; Zack was gone before it jelled.
The sun had dropped significantly lower in the sky by the time he returned home, its beams slanting through the green lacy screen of the willows. The grass looked like a velvet carpet. The buds on the rhododendron were on the verge of opening, but for now the pink petals were still tightly furled.
Turning into the drive, he almost clipped the mailbox. Several wan tulips lost their drooping heads beneath the left front wheel as he stepped hard on the brake and the car shuddered to an abrupt halt.
Cathy Timmerman was home.
He climbed from the Jag in a daze.
She was washing her car. In bare feet and denim cutoffs. With a sleeveless white T-shirt knotted below her breasts. Above a triangle of smooth abdomen, her pointed nipples pressed against the damp, clinging fabric. A thick, shiny ponytail bobbed at the back of her head when she stood abruptly with a sponge in one hand and a hose in the other, its spray wetting her cement driveway and the grass and then the tips of his athletic shoes as she slowly turned his way.
No Birkenstocks. No Mr. Magoo glasses. No baggy tent dress to disguise what he already knew to be a perfect figure.
Just a shy flicker of her lashes. A deep, deep breath.
And a welcoming, sweetly seductive smile.
4
“HI,” SHE HEARD herself say almost normally, “I’m your neighbor, Cathy Timmerman.” Breathe. “I’ve leased the Colton’s house from Allie Spangler. And Kay Estress sold me her craft shop.” Keep talking. Be friendly. “The place on Central Street? It’s been renamed Scarborough Faire….”
“So I’ve been told,” Zack said. His smile was kind, but there was something in his eyes, a mischievous glint perhaps, that made her remember every excruciating detail of the previous night’s performance. “The grapevine, you know.”
She blinked. “Oh. Right. The grapevine.”
“You’re wetting my shoes.”
“I’m wetting your…?”
She looked down at herself, both hands clenching reflexively. Water spurted in a hard stream from the nozzle of the hose, blasting Zack’s shoes and jeans. With a sharp exclamation, she threw away the hose and the sponge. The nozzle bounced on the pavement and landed trigger-down in the grass, its angle such that the spray fanned in a wide arc, dampening each of them with a fine mist.
“Yikes.” Holding up her hands to block the spray, Cathy darted toward the hose.
“I’ll get it,” Zack said, reaching for it at the same instant. They grabbed it from opposite sides, making the cold water spurt through their fingers and onto their faces. Cathy let go. Zack redirected the spray, pressing the rusty trigger until finally it sprang back to the off position.
“Oh, gee, I’m sorry.” She backed away a step, wiping at her chin. She’d soaked him. His face was streaming. His faded purple Kingpins T-shirt showed a darker splash pattern around the shoulders and his jeans—
Don’t think about the jeans.
She already knew what he looked like in wet jeans.
“No problem,” he said. “Just like old times. Allie’s family left the garden hose snaked over the lawn all summer long.” He grinned as he swiped the back of a wrist over his face. “I’ve been doused by this hose more times than I can remember.”
The corners of his lips curled tightly when he grinned, carving dents in his cheeks. Not dimples. Just shallow dents. His eyes crinkled, too, and his warm brown irises were glinting at her again, sharing the joke, asking her to laugh. She was utterly charmed, but she couldn’t quite manage a laugh. There was too much of him. Too much tall, handsome, strong, healthy male.
She had to say something. The group had coached her on how to engage him in conversation, but they hadn’t foreseen a renegade water hose. It seemed prudent to jump straight to the invitation. “Umm, since you’re so wet anyway, want to help me wash my car? You look like you’d be good at rubbing bumpers and…” Heavens, this was embarrassing! “…p-polishing headlights.”
Surprise flashed across his face. His gaze dropped to her wet T-shirt, then quickly back up to her face. “Sure,” he said, somewhat quizzically. “I’d be glad to rub your bumper.”
Cathy’s next line was supposed to be even more suggestive, but darned if she’d say it. There was no way on earth she’d seduce him sounding like a bad Mae West imitation. Instead she pointed at the front bumper. “Be my guest.”
He kicked off his shoes and threw them into his own yard with a natural athletic grace, the muscles in his shoulders flexing beneath the clinging shirt. She blinked, realizing that wet T-shirts worked on both sexes.
“They were squidgy,” he explained, intercepting her stare.
