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“Ah, well, I’m not that fond of what the hat is doing to mine, either.”
She handed him the jeans.
“You’re asking for it, lady. That means I have one more choice, too.”
“You can’t do any worse than these earrings! My ears are growing by the second.”
His eyes fastened on her ears. For a moment it felt as if the air went out of the room. He hadn’t touched her. He hadn’t even leaned closer. How could she possibly have felt the heat of his lips on the tender flesh of her earlobe?
He spun away, headed across the store for one of the change rooms. She saw him stop and speak to Peggy for a moment, and then he disappeared into a change room.
Moments later, Peggy approached her with something. She held it out to Molly, reverently, across two arms. “He said he picks this,” she said, wide-eyed, and then in a lower tone, “that man is hotter than Hades, Molly.”
Peggy put her in the change room beside his. The dress fit her like a snakeskin. It dipped so low in the front V and an equally astonishing one at the back, that she had to take it off, remove her shoes and her underwear to do the dress justice. She put it back on and the lines between where she ended and the dress began were erased.
Now, that spectacular dress did her justice. It looked, not as if she was in a funky secondhand store, but ready to walk the red carpet. Molly recognized the intense over-the-top sensuality of the dress and tried to hide it by putting the feather boa back on.
It didn’t work.
She peeked out of the dressing room, suddenly shy.
“All the way out,” he said. He was standing there in his jeans and vest and hat, looking as dangerous as a gunslinger at high noon.
She stepped out, faked a confidence she wasn’t feeling by setting a hand on the hip she cocked at him and flinging the boa over her shoulder.
His eyes widened.
She liked the look in them so much she turned around and let him see the dipping back V of the dress, that ended sinfully just short of showing her own dimples.
She glanced over her shoulder to see his reaction.
She tried to duck back into the change room, but his hand fell, with exquisite strength, on her shoulder. She froze and then turned slowly to face him.
“I do declare, miss, I thought you were a schoolmarm,” he drawled, obviously playing with the outfit she had him in. Isn’t this what she’d wanted? To get the walls down? To find the playful side of him? For them to connect?
But if his words were playful, the light in his eyes was anything but. How could he do this? How could he act as if he’d had a front row seat to her secret fantasy about him all the time? Well, she’d asked for it by handing him that hat!
“And I thought you were just an ordinary country gentleman,” she cooed, playing along, loving this more than a woman should. “But you’re not, are you?”
He cocked his head at her.
“An outlaw,” she whispered. Stealing unsuspecting hearts.
She saw the barest of flinches when she said that, as if she had struck a nerve, as if there was something real in this little game they were playing. She was aware that he was backing away from her, not physically, but the smooth curtain coming down over his amazing eyes.
Again she had a sense, a niggle of a feeling, there is something about this man that he does not want you to know.
She was aware she should pay attention to that feeling.
One of the girls turned up the music that played over the store’s system. It was not classical, something raunchy and offbeat, so instead of paying attention to that feeling, Molly wanted to lift her hands over her head and sway to it, invite him deeper into the game.
“Would you care to dance?” she asked, not wanting him to back away, not wanting that at all, not really caring who he was, but wanting to be who she really was, finally. Unafraid. Molly held her breath, waiting for his answer.
For a long moment—forever, while her heart stopped beating—he stood there, frozen to the spot. His struggle was clear in his eyes. He knew it wasn’t professional. He knew they were crossing some line. He knew they were dancing with danger.
Then slowly, he held up his right hand in a gesture that could have been equally surrender or an invitation to put her hand there, in his.
She read it as invitation. Even though this wasn’t the kind of dancing she meant, she stepped into him, slid her hand up to his. They stood there for a suspended moment, absolutely still, palm to palm. His eyes on her eyes, his breath stirring her hair. She could see his pulse beating in the hollow of his throat, she could smell his fragrance.
Then his fingers closed around hers. He rested his other hand lightly on her waist, missing the naked expanse of her back by a mere finger’s width.
“The pleasure is all mine,” he said. But he did not pull her closer. Instead, a stiffly formal schoolboy, ignoring the raunchy beat of the music, he danced her down the aisle of Now and Zen.
She didn’t know how he managed not to hit anything in those claustrophobic aisles, because his eyes never left her face. They drank her in, as if he was memorizing her, as if he really was an outlaw, who would go away someday and could not promise he would come back.
Molly drank in the moment, savored it. The scent of him filling her nostrils, the exquisite touch of his hand on her back, the softness in his eyes as he looked down at her. She had intended to find out something about him, to nurse something about him to the surface.
Somehow her discoveries were about herself.
That she longed for this. To be touched. To be seen. To feel so exquisitely feminine. And cherished. To feel as if she was a mystery that someone desperately wanted to solve.
Ridiculous. They were virtually strangers. And he was her boss.
The song ended. Peggy and the other clerk applauded. His hands dropped away, and he stepped back from her. But his gaze held.
And for a moment, in his eyes, her other secret longings were revealed to Molly: babies crawling on the floor; a little boy in soccer; a young girl getting ready for prom, her father looking at her with those stern eyes, saying, You are not wearing that.
Molly had never had these kinds of thoughts with Chuck. She had dreamed of a wedding, yes, in detail she now saw had been excessive. A marriage? No. A vision of the future with Chuck had always eluded her.
Maybe because she had never really known what that future could feel like. Nothing in her chaotic family had given her the kind of hope she had just felt dancing down a crowded clothing aisle.
Hope for a world that tingled with liveliness, where the smallest of discoveries held the kernels of adventure, the promise that exploring another person was like exploring a strange country: exotic, full of unexpected pleasures and surprises. Beckoning. For the first time since Molly had split from Chuck she felt grateful. Not just a little bit grateful. Exceedingly.
She could have missed this. This single, electrifying moment of knowing.
Knowing there were things on this earth so wonderful they were beyond imagining. Knowing that there was something to this word called love that was more magnificent than any poem or song or piece of film had ever captured.
Love?
That word again in the space of a few minutes, not in the relatively safe context of a bald budgie this time, either.
Pull away from him, she ordered herself. He was casting a spell on her. She was forgetting she’d been hurt. She was forgetting the cynicism her childhood should have filled her with.
She was embracing the her she had glimpsed in the garden, who thought hope was a good thing.
But couldn’t hope be the most dangerous thing of all?
Pull back, she ordered herself. Molly, I mean it! This wasn’t what she had expected when she had decided to live a little more dangerously.
This was a lot more dangerously.
Yes, she had decided she needed to be true to herself, but this place she was going to now was a part of herself unexplored.
He was her boss, she told herself. In her eagerness to reach him, to draw him into the warmth of her world, she had crossed some line.
How did you get back to normal after something like that?
How did you go back to the office after that? How did you keep your head? How did you not be a complete pushover?
“Dior,” Peggy whispered, interrupting her thoughts. “I’ve been saving that dress for Prom Dreams. Do you want to see the poster I’m sending out to the schools to advertise the Prom Dreams evening? It just came in.”
Molly slid Houston a look. Whatever softening had happened a moment ago was gone. He was watching her, coolly waiting for her to do what she needed to do.
But she couldn’t.
The mention of the probably defunct Prom Dreams should have helped Molly rally her badly sagging defenses, make her forget this nonsense about bringing him out of his lonely world, showing him the meaning of soul.
It was just too dangerous a game she was playing.
On the other hand, she could probably trust him to do what she could not! To herd things back over the line to proper, to put up the walls between them.
Outside he said to her, no doubt about who was the boss now, “Why didn’t you tell her Prom Dreams has been canceled?”
He said it coolly, the remoteness back in his eyes.
She recognized this was his pattern. Show something of himself, appeal to his emotion, like at the garden, and then he would back away from it. There he had tried to hide behind the threat of a parking lot.
This time by bringing up the sore point of Prom Dreams.
He knew, just as she did, that it was safer for them to argue than to chase each other with worms, to dance down dusty aisles.
But despite the fact she knew she should balance caution with this newly awakened sense of adventure, she felt unusually brave, as if she never had to play it safe again. Of course, the formidable obstacle of his will was probably going to keep her very safe whether she wanted to be or not!
She tilted her chin at him. “Why didn’t you?”
“I guess I wanted to see if you could do it.”
“I can. I will if I have to. But not yet. I’m hoping for a miracle,” she admitted. Because that was who she was. A girl who could look at herself in a wedding dress, even after her own dreams had been shattered, even in the face of much evidence to the contrary, a girl who could still hope for the best, hope for the miracle of love to fix everything.
And for a moment, when his guard had gone down, dancing with him, she had believed maybe she would get her miracle after all…
“A miracle,” he said with a sad shake of his head. He went and opened the car door for her, and drove back to Second Chances in silence as if somehow she had disappointed him and not the other way around.
A miracle, he thought. If people could really call down such a thing, surely they would not waste that power on a prom dress. Cure world hunger. Or cancer. He was annoyed at Molly.
For not doing as he had asked her—a thinly veiled order really—and canceling Prom Dreams, at least she should have told that girl to get ready for the cancellation of it.
But more, for wheedling past his defenses. He had better things to be doing than dancing with her in a shabby store in Greenwich Village.
It was the type of experience that might make a man who knew better hope for a miracle.
But hadn’t he hoped for that once?
The memory leaped over a wall that seemed to have chinks out of it that it had not had yesterday.
It was his birthday. He was about to turn fifteen. He’d been at Beebee’s for months. He was living a life he could never have even dreamed for himself.
He had his own room. He had his own TV. He had his own bathroom. He had nice clothes.
And the miracle he was praying for was for his mother to call. Under that grand four-poster bed was a plain plastic bag, with everything he had owned when he came here packed in it.
Ready to go. In case his mother called. And wanted him back.
That was the miracle he had prayed for that had never come.
“I don’t believe in miracles,” he said to Molly, probably way more curtly than was necessary.
“That’s too bad,” she said sympathetically, forgiving his curtness, missing his point entirely that there was no room in the business world for dreamers. “That’s really too bad.
“Why don’t we call it a day?” she said brightly. “Tomorrow I’ll take you to Sunshine and Lollipops, our preschool program. It’s designed to assist working poor mothers, most of them single parents.”
Houston Whitford contemplated that. Despite the professionalism of her delivery, he knew darn well what she was up to. She was taking down the bricks around his carefully compartmentalized world. She was getting to him. And she knew it. She knew it after he had chased her in the garden with that worm, danced with her.
She was having quite an impact on his legendary discipline and now she was going to try to hit him in his emotional epicenter to get her programs approved. Who could resist preschoolers, after all?
Me, he thought. She was going to try to win him over to her point of view by going for the heart instead of the head. It was very much the romantic versus the realist.
But the truth was Houston was not the least sentimental about children. Or anything else. And yet even as he told himself that, he was aware of a feeling that he was a warrior going into battle on a completely unknown field, against a completely unknown enemy. Well, not completely. He knew what a powerful weapon her hair was on his beleaguered male senses. The touch of her skin. Now he could add dancing with her to the list of weapons in the arsenal she was so cheerfully using against him.
He rethought his plan to walk right into his fear. He might need a little time to regroup.
“Something has come up for tomorrow,” he said. It was called sanity.
“You promised me two days,” she reminded him. “I assume you are a man of honor.”
More use of her arsenal. Challenging his honor.
“I didn’t say consecutively.”
She lifted an eyebrow, knowing the effect she was having on him, knowing she was chiseling away at his defenses.
“Friday?” he asked her.
“Friday it is.”
“See you then,” he said, as if he wasn’t the least bit wary of what she had in store for him.
Tonight, and every other night this week, until Friday, he would hit the punching bag until the funny yearning that the glimpse of her world was causing in him was gone. He could force all the things he was feeling—lonely, for one—back into their proper compartments.
