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one of the most beautiful women in the room, he felt like a testosterone-fueled kid his first time off the farm.
“We’re going Dutch,” Addy announced, perusing the menu in front of her.
“No, we aren’t.” There were just some things a man did. To show respect.
With the top half of her long hair held back with a black clip, she looked as refined as the prices on the menu when she gave him the blue-eyed stare he was coming to recognize as her “I mean it” look. “Just friends,” she leaned forward to say. “You agreed.”
“I asked you to dinner and I picked the place so I’m paying. It’s the decent thing to do. If it makes you feel any better, I’d pay if you were Nonnie, or my fifth-grade schoolteacher, too.”
Those rose-tinted lips smiled at him—and food was the last thing on his mind. Paying for it, or eating it. “You’d take your fifth-grade teacher out to eat?”
Picturing Mrs. McDougal—short, plump and just a few years younger than Nonnie—he shrugged. “If she was hungry and I was there, sure, I guess I would.”
“But you never have?”
“No, why?”
“Because.” Still smiling, folding her pale-pink-tipped fingers together on the table in front of her, she leaned toward him again. “Your life is just so different from mine. I can’t even remember my fifth-grade teacher and I’m pretty sure I never saw her again after leaving elementary school. Where I come from, you don’t usually run into your teachers or your doctor when you’re out and about. Too many people, too many neighborhoods.”
He felt sorry for her. And slightly backward at the same time.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she continued. “I love hearing about your life. I find it fascinating.”
Like a bug under a microscope? Or...
“I’ve wondered sometimes, what my life would have been like if I’d been raised in a smaller town.”
Resisting the urge to cover her hands with his, he said, “You’d have had people like Nonnie in your life every minute of every day.”
“You make that sound like a bad thing.”
Shrugging again, he looked at the menu. “Sometimes it is and sometimes it’s not.”
“There’s good and bad in everything.”
“Right.”
“So when is it a bad thing?” The edges of her lips still tilted upward, but her eyes were serious. Searching. Curious.
A combination that hit him right in the center of his pants.
* * *
“YOU BUILT A RAMP out of aluminum siding from the town dump and attempted to fly across the creek on your bike?” Addy laughed so hard she almost choked on the steak she’d put in her mouth. Addy couldn’t get enough of his childhood stories. And couldn’t remember ever having so much fun.
She’d enjoyed herself before, of course. Been happy. But...fun? It wasn’t something she was good at.
“I was eight,” he said, jabbing his fork into the rattlesnake he’d ordered for dinner—because it was on the menu and he’d never heard of anyone eating it before. “At least I didn’t put on a red cape and try to fly off a roof.”
Addy stopped laughing and looked at him, the rugged, gorgeous features that were taking up way too much head space these days. “You know someone who did?”
His nod was accompanied by a smile—and sadness, too. “My best friend, Jimmy. Now there was a boy who couldn’t turn down a dare. Unfortunately, he didn’t always take the time to think before he acted....”
She wondered if Jimmy’s death at the plant the year before had come about due to lack of forethought.
Wondered, too, if Mark had been responsible for getting Jimmy a job at the plant in the first place. According to Nonnie, he’d been the first of his friends to have a full-time job. And while he’d worked other jobs on the side, he’d been at the plant for most of his life.
“Jimmy was the one who had the bright idea of filling an old milk jug with rotten eggs and leaving it outside old biddy Buchanan’s bedroom window.”
