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He didn’t care.
It was just that all of a sudden his mind offered him a reprise of a very naked, very rosy, very jiggly Chloe Madsen—and she didn’t look like anyone’s fiancée!
“Who’s the idiot letting her run around loose?” he demanded.
“If you’re asking who she’s engaged to, it’s Dave Shelton. He’s a very nice young man. You remember Ernie and Lavonne Shelton? They farm north of town. Dave is their son.”
Gib vaguely remembered the name. “There was a Kathy Shelton,” he said, “in my class.”
“Dave’s older sister. She got married and moved to Dubuque. Then about three years ago, she divorced and came home with her kids. Until a couple of months ago, she was living in a mobile home on the farm where Dave and Chloe had been going to live. She’s the reason they didn’t get married three years ago.”
“They’ve been engaged for three years?”
“Not three,” Gina said. “Eight, I think.”
“Eight!”
“I’m talking out of turn,” Gina said quickly. “I don’t know all the particulars, so I shouldn’t be gossiping.”
Gib was willing to bet Gina knew almost every particular. In a town the size of Collierville, everyone knew everyone else’s particulars.
But Gina just said, “I’ll let you go now, darling. Just keep me posted. And if you want to know more about Chloe and Dave, I’m sure Chloe will be happy to tell you. Just ask her.”
The hell he would.
Chloe supposed she ought to be feeling guilty.
She knew Gibson Walker did not want her working for him. If he could have turned her out onto the street and slammed the door on her back, she thought he would have.
Sensing how he felt, she knew she ought to say, Fine, I’ll leave.
But she didn’t.
She’d made such a deal out of leaving home—of needing this two months away, just to say she’d been out in the big wide world once—that she couldn’t just give up and go back home and tell Dave she’d changed her mind.
He would want to know why.
And Chloe, being Chloe and incapable of dissembling, would have had to tell him-about the mix-up, about the naked photo shoot, about what a fool she’d made of herself.
And there was no way she was going to do that.
So she was staying. And she only felt the tiniest bit guilty. There was no room for guilt in a soul so full of embarrassment.
Now, hours later, high up in the hotel room where Gibson had unceremoniously stashed her, she pressed her face to the glass and saw, not the Empire State Building out her window, but her own silly self prancing around in the buff—and she still wanted to die.
But not yet, she admitted.
First she wanted her two months in New York.
The phone rang.
She picked it up. “Hi,” she said, knowing it had to be Dave. She’d called him as soon as she’d come upstairs, forgetting the time difference and that he would be out doing the milking for at least another hour. She’d left him a message with a number to call her back.
“Hi yourself. Are you fulfilled yet?”
She almost smiled. “Not quite yet. How are you?”
He was fine. Of course he would be. She’d only seen him sixteen hours ago. But he told her anyway. He told her about his day, about the weather, about the cows, about the meal he’d just had with his parents at their house.
“Mom invited me for supper. I think they wanted to see if I’d show up alone, if you were really gone,” he told her. “They can’t believe you’re really doing this.”
Most people couldn’t.
The twelve hundred and forty-two people who called Collierville, Iowa home were not given to eagerness when it came to spending a summer in New York City. Everyone she’d told thought she was out of her mind.
Chloe had given up trying to explain—except to Dave.
She needed Dave to understand. She’d thought he would. She and Dave had grown up together. They’d played as children. They’d gone steady in high school. They were serious about each other when everyone else was still playing the field.
Chloe had always assumed she and Dave were destined for each other. Certainly there was nothing about Dave she didn’t know.
And nothing he didn’t know about her—except that she’d danced naked this afternoon!
“You’re happy?” he asked her now.
“So far,” she said. There was room for a tiny bit of happiness along with the embarrassment. So it wasn’t a lie.
“Is it all you were expecting?”
“More, actually.” And wasn’t that the truth!
Fortunately he didn’t ask what she meant. “So where are you staying? What’s it like?”
She told him about the hotel. It was a no-frills place. “Respectable,” Gib had told her. “Safe.” She remembered a muscle in his jaw ticking as he’d steered her in. “Wish they had locks on the outside of the doors, too,” he’d muttered.
She wasn’t sure what he meant by that She hadn’t asked.
Dave was surprised. “I thought you were going to rent somebody’s apartment.”
“This is just temporary. He hasn’t found a place yet.” She didn’t tell Dave he’d been hoping against hope that she wasn’t coming.
“You’re not staying with him!”
“Of course not!”
Gibson Walker didn’t want her at his apartment any more than Dave wanted her there. There had never been any question. When he’d realized he was stuck with her, he’d taken her to this hotel.
“I can’t afford a hotel,” she’d protested.
“I can,” he’d said in a voice that brooked no argument. He’d marched her up to the desk and paid for one night’s lodging.
She’d dug into her purse for her credit card. “I can manage one night!”
But he hadn’t paid any attention. He’d checked her in, handed her bags to the bellboy, tipped him, told her he hoped she came to her senses by tomorrow and went home. And then he’d turned on his heel and started toward the door.
“Wait!” Chloe had called, and he’d stopped, then turned. “What time do we start in the morning?”
For a long moment he’d just looked at her. Then a corner of his mouth had twisted and he’d replied. “First shoot’s at nine.” Then he’d turned again and strode out the door.
“I’ll find a place tomorrow,” she told Dave now. “After work.”
“A safe place,” Dave instructed her.
“A safe place,” Chloe agreed.
“I miss you.”
“I miss you, too. But I’ll be home before you know it.”
“I’ll know it,” Dave said gruffly. “It’s sixty-one more days.”
He’d counted, Chloe realized guiltily. Well, so had she, but with anticipation, not annoyance.
“Compared to forever, sixty-one days isn’t so long,” she said gently. “And once I get home, we’ll have forever.”
And that was the truth. She had had Dave in her life for so long she couldn’t imagine him not being there. Sometimes she wondered if she existed without him. Maybe that was what she was trying to find out.
“Sister Carmela has a lot to answer for,” he grumbled.
“It wasn’t just Sister Carmela.”
But Dave wasn’t convinced.
And he was right that it had been Sister Carmela, the new abbess at the monastery just outside Collierville, who had put the idea into Chloe’s head.
She’d interviewed Sister last month for the newspaper. They’d hit it off at once, going on to talk much longer than the actual interview required. And in the course of their conversation, Sister Carmela had told Chloe not just about her new position as abbess, but the spiritual journey that had brought her there.
She had, she’d told Chloe, come to the abbey just after college, fresh with the enthusiasm and idealism of youth.
“I loved it,” she’d said, her brown eyes sparkling. “I felt at home at once. More alive. Centered. As if this was where I’d always been meant to be. And everything went smoothly until right before I was to make my final profession. And then I began to get worried. What if I was wrong? What if I was foreclosing on my options too soon? What if I was doing this just because it seemed easy for me? Maybe too easy? I got restless, fidgety, unsettled.”
Chloe, who had been feeling some of those very same feelings for the past few months, leaned forward earnestly and held her pencil, poised to note the reply. “How did you overcome it?”
“I didn’t,” the abbess told her with a smile. “I left.”
“Left?” Chloe dropped the pencil. Scrabbling to pick it up, she’d looked up at the nun again to see if she was joking.
But though there was a smile on Sister Carmela’s face, she was apparently quite serious. “I couldn’t stay. Not until I was sure. So I decided to test my vocation, to go out, live in the ‘real world’ for a while and see if that was where I belonged. So I did.”
Chloe smiled. “And that’s when you realized...you didn’t like it?”
Sister Carmela shook her head. “I did like it. A lot. It was wonderful, and by the ‘real world’s’ standards, I was a success. But in the end, I knew it wasn’t right for me. I saw that, no matter how ‘successful’ I was out there, I belonged here. And so I came back.”
It made sense. It made an incredible amount of sense. While Sister Carmela had been talking about her monastic life, she might as well have been talking about Chloe’s.
She’d been feeling every bit as unsure, every bit as restless as the date she and Dave had finally set for their wedding approached. Granted it had been, at that time, still four months off. But some nights Chloe couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking about the rest of her life...and wondering if it was going to be any different than what she’d already had.
It wasn’t that she was dissatisfied really. It was just that she didn’t know!
She and Dave had been together so long, they seemed so perfect for each other—like Sister Carmela and the monastery—that it made her nervous.
“You’re asking for trouble,” Dave said.
But Chloe knew that wasn’t true. She was asking for a test. She needed to see what was beyond the rolling hills and river bluffs of the northeastern Iowa town where she’d grown up. Collierville was wonderful. Dave was wonderful. She loved them both. But maybe, like Sister Carmela, she was taking the easy way out.
Maybe she should leave, too.
“Not for fifteen years!” Dave had said when she told him how long Sister Carmela had stayed away.
“Of course not! A couple of months. That’s all. What do you think?”
“I think it’s nuts,” Dave had said with his customary bluntness. “What’s out there that isn’t here? Besides crime, poverty, dirt and air pollution, that is.”
Dave knew they had all that, to some degree, in Iowa. He was just trotting out the time-honored arguments that all self-satisfied midwesterners indulged in when they felt morally superior to big city folks.
But in the end, he’d supported her. He’d told his parents that if Chloe felt she had to do it, then she had to do it. He’d told her parents that he didn’t mind waiting to get married. They’d waited often enough.
“I’ll be back in August,” Chloe had reminded them all.
“Leaving me to do all the work,” her mother had said darkly.
But in fact, Chloe thought her mother was secretly pleased. She had far more interest in making it a wedding to remember than Chloe did.
“I’ll take the phone book with me. I’ll contact the florist, the caterer,” Chloe promised. “I’ll send out the wedding invitations from there.”
She’d brought the phone book. But she wasn’t working on lists of florists and caterers tonight. Tonight she was staring out at the New York skyline, periodically pinching herself, hardly able still to believe she was here.
It was going to be wonderful. The experience. The job. She would do a good job—she was determined about that. Despite her disastrous, humiliating beginning, she would salvage her job. And she would go home at peace, having seen the bright lights and big city; she would be ready to settle down with Dave.
Like Sister Carmela, she would get her taste of the big broad world, and then she would go home.
“The grass isn’t greener on this side of the fence,” she said aloud now. Then she giggled. From where she stood and looked out the window, there wasn’t any grass to be seen at all.
She closed her eyes and thought about Iowa. She thought about how green the grass was now, how blue the sky. She thought about Dave. Strong. Steady. Dependable. Dave.
He was all she’d ever wanted in a man.
But just before she went to sleep she found herself hoping that, when she came to him naked on their wedding night, he would look at her with the same intensity that Gibson Walker had.
