The Hometown Hero Returns

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She nodded and walked back down the stairs, holding the paintings as if they were made of gold. Which, Luke supposed, they might as well be if they were anything like the one of his great-grandmother. Surely that was a fluke, though—an old family portrait, by an artist who was unimportant at the time it was painted.

Because Nicki had been so careful, Luke also checked the paintings he carried, even though he didn’t know what he was looking for. He brushed away a few spiders and their webs, but they weren’t doing any harm as far as he could tell.

“Do you need anything else?” he asked after they’d carried down several armloads and crowded one side of the room with paintings. He recognized some from when they’d hung in the house; others were unfamiliar.

“No, I’m fine.” She opened her briefcase and removed notebooks and a magnifying glass. “Don’t let me keep you.”

Luke scowled. Once again he was being dismissed. He tried to remind himself that Nicki was a college professor accustomed to dealing with students. Only he wasn’t a student; this was his grandfather’s house, and he still wanted to learn more about her.

Nicki seemed to have a curiously appealing inner peace. But it wasn’t just that. She was different from the women he knew. She didn’t hide her feelings beneath a sophisticated veneer, and seemed willing to do her part.

“How long were you in Europe on your study trips?” he asked, turning a chair backward and straddling it.

She cast him a startled glance. “I thought you had work to do.”

Luke lifted his shoulders, a wry smile quirking his mouth. He did have work to do. A mountain of work. There were contracts to review and sign, proposals to study, negotiations pending, calls to make, endless e-mails and a flood of other paperwork to review. A lot of money was riding on his taking care of business, yet at the moment he’d rather talk to Nicki. The feeling reminded him that she was a distraction that might prove problematic.

“I…um, decided to knock off for a while,” he said. “So, how long?”

“Three months the first time, six on the second trip. I also did an intensive course of study at the Sorbonne for several months.”

Though he expected her to run off at the mouth like always, she instead bent over a small painting and began examining it as if her life depended on the results. His jaw tightened. “What did you enjoy seeing the most?”

She slapped a notebook on the table and glared. “Why are you still here? Don’t you want me to get the inventory done quickly? I’m sure I’m the last woman you want hanging around—you always preferred women with bra sizes bigger than their IQ.”

“Look, if it’ll help if I…well…apologize for the way I acted when we were kids, I will,” Luke said in the least apologetic tone he’d ever used. He counted to ten and tried again. “I was a jerk. Okay? You have every right to hate me.”

“It has nothing to do with when we were kids. That is, you obviously haven’t changed—you practically have ex-jock tattooed on your forehead.”

It wasn’t hard to guess that “ex-jocks” weren’t Nicki’s favorite kind of men. It ought to have been reassuring, considering the way he hadn’t been able to control his uncomfortable thoughts about her. But after the accident he’d disliked being called a jock. He was about to say so when Nicki stuck out her chin.

“And besides, I don’t hate you,” she added.

“Yeah, right.”

“It’s just that I don’t like you very much,” Nicki admitted, then felt heat rising in her face. “Oh…sorry.” She put her hands over her cheeks and peeked to see how angry Luke might be. To her surprise, he looked pleased.

“That’s one of the few honest things a woman has ever said to me,” Luke murmured, thinking about his one-time fiancеe, Sandra, declaring that she adored him, only to continue sleeping around like a cat in heat. One thing he’d learned since leaving Divine, women were as faithless in big cities as they were in small towns.

God, what a fool he’d been over Sandra. So crazy in love he couldn’t see straight—even decking his best friend for suggesting she wasn’t a paragon of virtue. Luke grimaced, remembering his own anger, and the blood that had trickled from the cut over his friend’s swollen eye.

“You don’t meet the right women,” Nicki said, breaking into his thoughts.

His shoulders lifted and dropped. It didn’t matter. After accepting the truth about Sandra he’d decided there wasn’t any point to getting married when he could enjoy temporary affairs with like-minded females.

“Sherrie says the same thing, but she doesn’t really understand what—” He froze at the sound of a loud voice rising from the first floor.

Luke raced down the stairs and Nicki followed. She’d never heard John McCade’s voice raised in anger, but the furious tirade really was coming from the dear old man.

“Never…can’t believe…such a mess. The Little Sergeant would never have permitted this disgrace. I’ve got to get this place in order…it’s never been so bad…where did these come from?”

The French doors leading to the rear garden were open and Mr. McCade was tearing at a flowerbed by the house.

“Granddad, please come inside. I promise we’ll fix everything,” Luke said, crouching next to him.

“Leave me alone. It’s my fault. I should never have let this happen. She would be so unhappy. I can’t bear for her to be unhappy.” He continued to rip at the long grass, his hands white and shaky in the humidity.

“Please, Granddad, I’ll take care of it.” Luke took his grandfather’s arm, only to be shaken away by an angry exclamation. Luke looked at Nicki, his eyes dark and filled with pain, stripped of arrogance. “I don’t know what to do,” he whispered.

Without thinking Nicki knelt and laid her hand on the old man’s shoulder. “It’s all right, Professor McCade. We’ll take care of the garden.”

Her quiet voice seemed more effective than Luke’s frantic tone. The elderly man turned and brushed shaky fingers across his brow. “She would be so…so disappointed.”

“Then we’ll fix it, so she wouldn’t be.”

“It was so beautiful,” he breathed, looking around with tears falling like memories down his face. “She painted this garden for me. A living canvas. Art, young lady, is not confined to a museum.” The last thing sounded so much like an old Professor McCade lecture that she smiled.

“Art is the accomplice of love,” she said obediently, though she didn’t finish the quotation she’d heard him say so often in his lectures…. Take love away, and there is no longer art.

She didn’t think he needed a reminder that his love had been taken away.

“You were always an excellent student, Miss Johansson.”

The fact that he remembered her name startled Nicki, and her gaze met Luke’s equally surprised eyes.

“Thank you, Professor. I teach now, out at the college.”

“Yes, I recommended you for the position when I retired.”

That, too, was a shock. She’d been shy in all his classes, particularly when she was tutoring Luke and her emotions seesawed between terminal infatuation and utter loathing. Though kind to his students, she had never expected Professor McCade to take special notice of a mousy, underage kid who always sat in the rear. He certainly hadn’t seemed to recognize her at his recent yard sale.

“Th-thank you, sir. I appreciate your confidence.”

“It was well deserved.”

His eyes began to lose their focus as he looked again around the garden. It was beautiful, though overgrown and neglected. Nicki could feel the love that lingered there and knew there was beauty in the memory of love, as well. His love had changed shape, and wasn’t nearly as immediate, but it wasn’t wholly lost, either.

“You promise to fix it for the Little Sergeant,” Professor McCade whispered. It was a statement, more than a question.

The Little Sergeant? Nicki mouthed at Luke.

My grandmother, he mouthed back.

Nicki wondered if it was a promise she could keep. She’d never gardened in her life, and Luke surely didn’t want her hanging around any longer than necessary. Yet there was an appeal to working with the earth and painting a picture with growing things. And if it would help Professor McCade…how could she say no?

She gulped. “Um, yes, I promise. Maybe we can get a good yard service. They could put everything in order in a few days.”

“No.” His thin arms made an agitated gesture. “Not in her garden. I won’t allow it.”

“All right,” Nicki soothed gently. “But it’s too warm to work out here right now. Come inside where it’s cooler. I’ll start early tomorrow.”

They drew him back into the house, where he sat on the same chair as before. But instead of staring blankly, he gazed outside with an unwavering intensity, as if the answers to all the questions ever asked waited there to be discovered. “You promise,” he said without blinking.

“Yes. I promise.”

Chapter Three

Luke grabbed Nicki’s hand and pulled her into the library lined with books on built-in floor-to-ceiling shelves, then sank into a chair and rubbed his temples.

Nicki watched, trying to understand how she could let him affect her so much, creating a softening that was neither welcome nor wise. He was a bottom-line kind of guy. She’d returned that lovely painting, but the only thing that had caught his attention was its monetary value. Luke McCade was the last man she should find attractive—partly because of his similarity to her ex-husband, partly because of his difference from her. Luke didn’t like small towns, he wasn’t the least bit interested in art, and, despite his concern for his grandfather, he was well-known as a hardheaded businessman. She had a feeling that falling in love with an adult Luke would be much harder to survive than a girlhood crush.

Physical attraction was nice, but it was more important to respect someone and find things in common with them. She probably had no more in common with Luke than her likeness to the footballs he played with. Footballs were ugly things, too—brown and awkward and bumpy.

Of course, Luke wasn’t ugly.

Or the least bit awkward.

And his only bumps were the ones from muscles.

She bit her lip and sat in a nearby chair, wondering how in less than an hour she’d gone from disliking him to…admiring his biceps. She needed to find her willpower. Fast. The thought of being drawn into a relationship with someone like her ex-husband again made her stomach clench.

It didn’t help that Luke had actually apologized. Well, sort of apologized. She’d once thought it was an over-used clichе that men couldn’t say they were sorry, but it seemed to be a true one.

“Thanks for the help,” Luke muttered after a long minute. “We tried hiring a yard service after Grams died, only Granddad would have none of it. We manage to keep the grass mowed and things watered, but that’s all. He didn’t want strangers in her garden. Or in the house, for that matter.”

“But I’m a stranger—as much as anyone else in Divine. People know each other here, and he’d probably be acquainted with someone working for a yard service.”

Luke shook his head. “It’s different with you. I don’t know why—maybe because you were his student and he recommended you for his teaching position. We have a hard time getting a word out of him at the best of times, but he really sparked when he realized who you were.”

“That’s because we have a common point of reference.”

“I know. Art. But we’ve tried to get him reconnected to his friends and other professors at the college, and nothing has worked. There must be something different about you.”

It wasn’t just art, Nicki thought, it was a deep appreciation of love and beauty. Unless someone could connect on that level, it wouldn’t be the same. “Um…the garden seems really important to him.”

“Yes, but don’t worry about working on it.”

“What if I want to work on it?” she asked dryly. “What if keeping my word is important to me?”

“Granddad isn’t himself. He won’t even remember what happened by tomorrow—he probably doesn’t remember now.”

“I’m not so sure of that. But it doesn’t matter, because I’ll remember,” Nicki said as gently as possible. She wasn’t nearly as convinced as Luke that his grandfather would forget. Something in the old professor’s face had suggested much more awareness than his family seemed to believe.

Luke gave her an exasperated look. “And I’m telling you it’s all right.”

She tried not to get angry. Even if Luke was an insensitive jock, she should be understanding. After all, he had come back to Divine to help his grandfather. A lot of people wouldn’t have bothered, or else would have hired someone to take care of everything. “If you don’t want me around that long, then maybe you can help to get it done faster.”

“It isn’t that I don’t want you around,” he growled. “But that garden is more work than you seem to realize.”

“That doesn’t matter—I like being busy and having lots to do. My classes are over and I have plenty of free time, except Tuesdays when I deliver meals to shut-ins or when I have meetings for stuff. I also volunteer at the nursing home twice a month, but you don’t garden at night, anyhow.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “What do you do at the nursing home? Some sort of craft class, I suppose.”

Nicki’s face turned warm. Luke hadn’t needed to know about her various volunteer activities, especially since he’d probably think it was provincial to be involved in small-scale community concerns. “I…um, call the bingo games.”

Luke grinned. “You call the bingo games?”

“Well, yes. It’s better than strip poker.”

His grin broadened. “I don’t like bingo, but I wouldn’t mind a game of strip poker. We could play now if you like. Though I have to warn you, I’m damn good at filling an inside straight.”

“You’re pathetic,” she snapped, forgetting she ought to be understanding. “Go play with one of your old girlfriends.”

“They’re all married.”

“Fortunately not to you, right?”

“Yeah. Lucky escape on my part. Besides, can you see me driving a minivan and giving the dog a bath every Saturday?” He shuddered.

“Only if you develop amnesia or have a personality transplant.”

“See how life works itself out? I’ve been saved from a life of domesticity.”

Luke grinned as Nicki rolled her eyes in disgust, yet he also saw a hint of laughter in their depths. After that scene with his grandfather, he’d felt as if a truck had run him over. But Nicki was a breath of fresh air. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad having her around for a few days, and if she wanted to work on his grandmother’s garden, then fine. She’d give up soon enough—she was used to teaching, not back-breaking labor.

“So why haven’t you ever gotten married?” he asked.

“Who says I haven’t?”

The idea that Nicki might be married, or even that she’d once been married, disturbed him. “Because you’re using your maiden name and you aren’t wearing a wedding ring.”

“And you think you’re a modern guy. This is the twenty-first century. Lots of women don’t wear rings or take their husband’s name.” Nicki tossed her head, sending gold curls flying, and Luke remembered the way she used to drag her hair back from her face in a ponytail, leaving a set of crooked bangs to hide her eyes.

No one had ever gotten to look at her eyes in the old days. It was a shame, too. They were clear and blue and bright and broadcast every emotion she tried to hide. He was big on eyes. He was also big on other parts of a woman’s body, but eyes were important.

“So you’re telling me you’re married?” He kept a narrow look on her, certain the answer was no but wanting to hear it confirmed. He’d flirted with her, and flirting with married women was a taboo in his book.

“Divorced,” she said, her mouth tightening. “And before you make a dumb assumption, I’m the one who left. It turned out we weren’t compatible.”