LET ME CALL YOU SWEETHEART Page 3

  But instead of getting up to obey, Faith turned on the seat and surprised Bess with a warm embrace.

  "Thanks for inviting me to stay with you this summer."

  Bess hugged her tight, fighting down the swells of emotion crowding up to clog her throat. "Anytime, baby. You're welcome here anytime." Then she pushed away with a husky "Get up to bed."

  "Wear that red outfit tomorrow, the one Mom got for you. It's hot" was her sage advice as she rose, then with a quick buss of Bess's cheek, bounded back into the house.

  Bess sat out in the gathering night shadows, her hand to that cheek, her heart full of bittersweet tears. Happiness warred with long-standing regrets.

  She'd spent half her life wishing for that night back, for Zach to ask again for her answer.

  She rocked on the glider where she and a surly Zach Crandall had once sat while she'd tried to explain Euclidean geometry. At eighteen, he had almost a man's height and looks that could stop a heart. Hers had been beating like crazy: with curiosity, with agitation. He'd made no secret of his reluctance to be tutored. It was that or expulsion.

  The education system, like all of Sweetheart, had written the eldest Crandall off as a lost cause. He was perpetually truant, had been caught underage with alcohol, he smoked on school grounds, showed no respect for authority and didn't care what anyone thought of him. Many of his teachers were afraid to confront him, even in the classroom. Not that he ever did anything to support their fears; he just had a latent air of violence about him. A violence he'd inherited. Discipline did no good. If calls were made home to his parents, he'd miss several days of school, then return with suspicious bruises but with no less arrogance. Everyone knew what was going on. His father was beating the hell out of him, the same way he did his mother and brothers, and the town was afraid to do anything about it.

  Tutoring was the last straw, and Bess was the only student who agreed to work with him. He was so menacing she almost withdrew her services. Until he'd growled that he had no use for education. He was a Crandall, going nowhere. Something sparked in her at that belligerently given claim … because she'd heard a faint tone of remorseful anger, of frustrated hurt. She couldn't stand the thought of anyone or anything in pain. She'd turned on him with a snap of uncommon vinegar.

  "You can be anything you want, Zach Crandall," she'd told him. "You're certainly not stupid. It's ignorance holding you back, the ignorance of a whole town, and if you were any kind of a man, you wouldn't let them dictate your future."

  He'd just stared at her. After weeks of studying together, it was the first time she'd ever looked him straight in the eye. She didn't back down, though she'd wanted to, in fear of his reaction.

  He'd kissed her.

  It happened so fast. He leaned in while she sat fuming, taking her by surprise. She'd never been kissed, but she'd imagined what it would be like. The reality amazed her.

  His mouth moved softly and so sweetly upon hers, steaming the stiffness from her pursed lips, causing them to yield to a sensuous shaping, giving her an exquisite taste of what she'd only dreamed pleasure could be. Gentleness was the last thing she'd expected from someone of Zach Crandall's reputation. So was honor, yet he moved back, leaving her shaking virtue untested.

  And for the briefest instant, while they were breath-sharing close, she saw a kindred longing in his long-lashed eyes, a vulnerability he would deny to the last dying moment and beyond.

  Zach Crandall was a fake. He wasn't heartless or deviant or anything like that. He was alone and afraid and hiding both behind a wall of blustering hostility.

  It was then she realized she'd been as guilty as all the rest in prejudging him.

  She vowed never to do it again. She would not listen to ugly whispers about his after-hour doings with an older, faster, more experienced crowd. She wouldn't let him get by with that chip of attitude keeping everyone else at bay. She would be his mentor, his confidante, his friend. And in the end she had been much more.

  But she hadn't been able to keep her vow, and time hadn't eased the guilt for failing him. He'd needed her to be strong and she hadn't been. He'd wanted to trust her and she'd abandoned him.

  She'd been seventeen, young and afraid. She'd never been beyond the limits of Sweetheart. She'd never broken her mother's edicts … except with Zach. He'd asked for more than she could give, and she'd never forgiven herself for buckling under pressure.

  Just as he would never forgive her.

  So why had he asked her to the parade and picnic? And why had she been crazy enough to say yes? Was the risk worth the danger? Was spending a few hours flirting with an old dream worth placing all her carefully constructed lies in jeopardy?

  Then she remembered the feel of his arms curled about her, the scent of leather swirling around her senses.

  And the answer was yes.

  * * *

  In the darkness, the simple two-story frame house seemed sinister. When he'd arrived during daylight hours, the homey touches his sister had added made it more appealing: colorful lemon yellow curtains, a flower garden bursting in riotous shades of purple, white and red, fresh white paint on the front gate and porch posts, hanging begonias. Like any other house on the block.

  Crouching in the shadows, with no light of welcome glowing inside, it made a stark angular silhouette with steeply pitched roof and blank windows scraped by the fingernails of two ancient walnut trees. A haunted house. He opened the gate on soundless binges, but in his mind he heard its rusty creak and could envision the hulking mass of his father rising up from the front porch steps, weaving in perpetual drunkenness.

  "Where you been, boy?"

  A cold sweat broke out as he made his way slowly up the walk. He could hear the echo of belt leather clearing the loops of his father's worn chino work pants.

  "Answer me, boy. Sheriff Baines was by today asking after you. Seems someone broke out some windows down at the high school with empty beer cans."

  Even before he could claim innocence, the crack of the belt brought sizzling fire. Prepared for it, he made no sound, not even when a huge cruel hand clenched in his hair, dragging him up the steps, flinging him through the storm door. Later, he'd sat stoically while Doc Meirs put the first of twenty-seven stitches in his face and hands, as his mother's thready voice claimed, "You know how careless kids are. He and his brothers got to roughhousing…"

  The doctor couldn't look at her, because he knew. They all knew what went on at the Crandall house. Zach had been thirteen. His carelessness brought him to the doctor's office for broken ribs and arm, for fractured fingers and dislocated shoulder. No child was that clumsy. The doctor knew, just as the teachers who saw him slip into class late with his eye swollen shut or the imprint of a hand outlined in bruises against his cheek or neck. They didn't ask, and he didn't tell, and everyone wanted the unpleasant situation to go away.

  So, instead of helping or stopping the abuse, they turned their backs, pretending not to hear the screams even closed windows couldn't shut out, looking away from the bruised features and battered hearts. Trapping a woman and her five children with a monster because of their own guilt and fear. How he hated them all for that.

  Zach climbed the steps, soul steeped in resentment and helplessness as memories crowded close. His body tensed, hands fisted at his side, ready to protect against the horrors of the past as if they were something tangible he could strike. He wanted to strike and strike hard, but the target was long buried.

  He stared at the front door, shaken by the ghosts hidden behind it. He never crossed its threshold without a chill of terror. Even though the years had brought a bubbling rage to ferment inside him, the fear remained. Ceaseless, shivering, desperate fear, for himself, his siblings, his mother, locked up like a wild thing within those rooms. He'd never spoken of it to anyone except Bess Carrey, who'd understood what it meant to be victimized and so alone that the spirit ached.

  In that one fragile girl, he'd found the strength to break away from the cycle of fear. H
e'd done it because he wanted something better for the two of them, because she'd taught him that they deserved it. Only, she hadn't believed her own words as much as he had.

  He'd left her behind and tried to forget everything the town of Sweetheart had done to him through its neglect. But no matter how far he traveled, how many years slipped by, he knew, he knew he would come back. For Bess Carrey. Because nothing in his life had ever felt so good as her respect.

  Unable to enter that empty house with its whispering remembrances, Zach sat upon the front steps, leaning back against the porch post with eyes closed, listening to the sounds of the night, to the lazy rhythms of the small Iowa town. The prowling restlessness stilled as he pictured Bess with her prim spinsterish clothes and fresh-scrubbed face. No one since him. Her sweet lips had gone untasted, her generous heart untested. Were the men in Sweetheart all eunuchs? Couldn't they see beyond her shyness, beyond her effort to go unnoticed, to recognize the passionate fire simmering inside? He'd thought her hesitant glances sexier than the most sultry come-on. He still did.

  The anger, the betrayal, the hurt still lingered in the heart that evolved from boy to man. Through matured eyes, he could understand her choice, yet could not condone it. She'd tried to explain it to him seventeen years ago, and he hadn't had the patience to listen.

  Now, before he left Sweetheart for the last time, he would listen and he would know why his love had not been enough.

  * * *

  Chapter 3

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  "Wow!"

  Bess stared hard at the reflection in her bathroom mirror, trying to justify Faith's earnest decree. She'd never been a "Wow!" before, not sensible Elizabeth Carrey who never showed bare ankles in public beneath her ever-present skirts. In the red-hot shorts set her sister had sent her, all she could see were immodest miles of leg, from strappy sandals to the barely there cuffs.

  "I don't know…"

  "I do, Aunt B. You're a knockout. Don't you dare change a thing. You'll have to set up metered parking for John Deere tractors out on your lawn."

  "Great," she muttered. That's all she needed on top of the Sweetheart lonely hearts brigade trying unsuccessfully to match her up with every unmarried man between high school graduation and the seniors' center. Think of the speculation should Zach Crandall be the one to get her decked out like a show pony after she'd turned all the "respectable" men down. She sighed, wondering what insanity possessed her.

  "Let me do your hair and face. Pleeeeease!" Why not go the whole nine yards? Bess surrendered, nudging her fanny back onto the bathroom counter with a sudden "Ooh!" as bare thigh connected with cold tile. She gave herself up to the artful handling of the teenage Jose Eber, enjoying herself despite her misgivings. She had no experience with this type of girlfriend-to-girlfriend behavior. Her mother refused to allow cosmetics in the house, saying a decent woman didn't need to paint herself up like a harlot to attract a man. The bathroom was for hair-brush and toothbrush, not the tools of vanity. Even now, Bess felt positively sinful applying a whisper of mascara and lip gloss. Her smile froze as Faith reached into her pastel box of facial magic.

  "Go easy now," she warned, as Faith twirled up a tube of fire-engine red lipstick. "I don't want any of the children to mistake me for one of the clowns."

  "Don't worry. You don't have the feet for it. You've got great lips. Are you sure I can't paint your toenails?"

  "No!" Images of a flashy circus wagon came to mind. All she needed was gold fringe.

  Faith examined her work critically, then nodded, picking up a hairbrush. Pale baby-fine hair crackled with new life under the girl's enthusiastic tutelage. Finally she smiled in satisfaction.

  "All done."

  When Bess tried to turn toward the glass, Faith caught her shoulders.

  "Promise you won't scream. Give yourself time to get used to it. Promise?"

  How bad could it be? Bess took a breath. "Promise." Then she looked.

  And she stared at a total stranger with voluptuous red lips, beckoning blue eyes and delicate bone structure framed by loose waves of spun gold.

  "Wow."

  "Told you!"

  Bess fingered the locks of hair curling against the collar of her sleeveless red vest. She never wore her hair down. It felt odd brushing her neck in a teasing caress. Faith plucked one fair strand up in a carefree loop, securing it above her left ear with a small red barrette, then hung tiny crystal hearts suspended on gold French earring wires to dance at her jawline whenever her head moved.

  Who was this gorgeous free spirit, and what had she done with the mousy bookstore owner?

  A soft knock at the front door startled Bess from her daze. The illusion of playing dress up vanished. Zach! Panic jolted through her as Faith squeezed her arms and warned, "Don't touch a thing! He's gonna love it!"

  Then the teen dashed down the steps, leaving Bess confronting the somewhat threatening glamour queen in her bathroom mirror, one who exuded a confidence she could never claim. Nervousness fluttered in her belly. Anticipation tingled along all those inches of bare skin. The unnatural weight of cosmetics settled more comfortably as she tried a smile to ward off her fright. Stiffness eased in her expression, replaced by a warm glow that was neither artificial nor glaringly apparent. She exhaled shakily, amazed by the first recognition of her own loveliness.

  "Aunt Bess, Mr. Crandall's here."

  Her hands flew up to tremble against suddenly overwarm cheeks. She couldn't go downstairs, all lips and legs, in a Look-at-me! blaze of red. How could she parade around before the whole town of Sweetheart like a brazen advertisement for sin, on Zach Crandall's arm? She was on the library board, she sang a clear, rich contralto in the church choir. The thought of their horror shivered through her.

  It would only take a minute. She could slip on a casual broomstick skirt and knee-highs. She'd twist her hair up into a no-nonsense knot. With a quick scrub of her face, no one would ever know this bold butterfly had ever emerged from its staid cocoon. No one but Faith.

  She stopped her frantic thoughts, clamping down on her panic. Faith would be so disappointed in her. Abruptly, the crushing of one girl's joy outweighed the whole town's censure. She couldn't be the one to purposefully snuff out the delight in a young girl's eyes. Even if she created a spectacle so shockingly out of character it got her regular customers checking their bifocal prescriptions. Faith was worth it. She'd prove to the girl that she wasn't hopelessly craven in the face of change.

  Even if it was true.

  So with consummate dignity and quivering heart, she left the bathroom to start down the stairs. The moment she took the turn on the landing, she saw him standing just inside the front door next to a proudly beaming Faith. For a timeless minute she couldn't move.

  He looked so formidable, so out of place amongst her mother's antiques and bric-a-brac. The contrast accentuated his in-your-face virility to an alarming degree. Against the prim formality of Joan Carrey's front room, he was a slap of masculine nonchalance in a soft chambray shirt with sleeves pushed up over dark-furred forearms, in faded jeans worn white at the stitchings and creased with suggestive snugness at the inseam. A shock of bare ankles showed above low-cut running shoes.

  His face tipped up toward her, and the effect of his intensely blue eyes was the same as plunging into the deep end of a pool: a shock of icy contact followed by the delicious chill of complete immersion. She might have drowned there if not distracted by the slow spread of his smile.

  Never had a man looked at her quite that way, with such naked appreciation. And she smiled back, hesitantly at first, then with giddy thanksgiving that she'd managed to find the courage to change nothing about her lips or legs or free-floating locks.

  "I was afraid you'd changed your mind," he said at last. The slight rasp of chiding nudged her back into full functioning. She continued down the stairs, very aware of the way his gaze followed.

  "I told you I'd be ready." She reached the bottom of the stairs, pausing there as if ste
pping off that last riser meant free-falling into a dangerous unknown.

  His gaze stroked over her again, this time, slowly, beginning at thankfully unpainted toes up the clean lie of her legs, over the formfitting pleats in her short shorts and weskit top to the gradual flush coloring her cheeks. "You look ready for anything."

  The rumble of innuendo held her mesmerized. What kind of signal was this "new you" look sending? Her breathing stopped as he reached out to pull a length of pale gold between the gentle pinch of his fingers.

  "I like your hair this way."

  She stood paralyzed until catching sight of Faith mouthing two words. Numbly, Bess verbalized them.

  "Thank you."

  "You look—" He couldn't find the right words.

  "Great," Faith interjected, losing patience with their awkward ritual. "She looks great. Now, let's get going so we can grab a spot where we can see everything."

  And everyone could see them … together.

  As Faith rushed outside to snatch up the lawn chairs, Bess's resolve buckled.

  And Zach said very softly, very firmly, "Don't be afraid."

  His quiet command shook off her brief trepidation. What did she have to be afraid of? They were two old friends catching up on the past, not unlike three-quarters of the populace. But it was those who returned who were supposed to surprise with the change in their looks, not the ones who stayed behind. Bess had gone to bed Little Bo Peep and had woken up as Rapunzel.

  Angling her chin a notch higher, she came down off that bottom step and boldly took his arm, pretending she hadn't heard his words, to say with feigned cheeriness, "After you."

  And as she turned to close the door behind them, knowledge of her mother's disapproval speared her to the soul. Bess swallowed hard, then looked up at her escort, smiling tightly.