A Sheriff in Tennessee (18 page)

Only a few weeks in his company and she'd come to believe it, too. Amazing how easily a woman who needed to feel better about herself could become delusional. But Belle had learned long ago to listen to her mama. She just hadn't lately—and therein lay her mistake.

She wasn't smart, but she
was
pretty—on the outside. She'd make do with what she had. There were worse things. Although the thought of performing that script the original way made her stomach roll and pitch.

She walked past Lucinda's. Maybe the roll and pitch was hunger. Just her luck, today was brownie day.

Ten minutes later Belle reached wardrobe. She'd slammed one brownie while still in the store, finished the second on the street in two bites. She was making her way through the third when Ruby stepped out of the back.

Belle swallowed. She'd worked with Ruby before. The woman could have passed for an army nurse. Maybe Danny had stolen her from the marines. But Ruby knew how to sew, an increasingly lost art in this day and age. She also knew how to browbeat models and actresses so that they could fit into whatever she'd designed, in time to face the cameras.

With a snarl, she snatched the brownie from Belle's hand and tossed it into the trash. Then she spun on her heel and marched back the way she had come. Belle followed.

“There—” Ruby snatched a length of khaki ma
terial from a rolling coatrack and shoved it into Belle's hands. “Put it on.”

Belle glanced around for a dressing room. There wasn't one. “Uh—”

“Since when are you shy? Off.” She waved at Isabelle's clothes. “On.” She pointed at the costume.

Two weeks in Pleasant Ridge and Belle had reverted to the innate modesty that it had taken her nearly a year of concentrated effort to suppress. In her day-to-day life, stripping to her skivvies and beyond in front of the wardrobe mistress and unknown others was no big deal. Or at least, it wasn't supposed to be. So Belle gritted her teeth and did what she was told—but she didn't like it.

The material Ruby had used for her sheriff's uniform was not the crisp cotton blend of Klein's but rather the stretchy, confining spandex of a swimsuit or biking shorts. The pants clung to her like a second skin, and the shirt was cut so low that her cleavage was the first thing anyone would notice. But the most disturbing thing about the costume was that she couldn't get the pants zipped.

“What have you been doing?” Ruby demanded. “Sitting on your butt and eating brownies for breakfast, lunch and dinner?”

Belle ignored that. “Your measurements must be wrong.”

“I don't do wrong. The costume was made to the measurements you sent me.” She pulled a tag off the hanger and shoved it at Belle. “See?”

Ruby was right, which made Belle even more nervous. How could she possibly have put on
enough weight in two weeks to pop out of her uniform? Of course, with a uniform like this, a single pound was a disaster.

“Take it off before you rip it in two.”

Belle didn't think there was any danger of that, but she yanked the uniform off, anyhow. She hated spandex.

“Do you want to measure me before I get dressed?”

“What for?”

“To fix the uniform.”

“What needs fixing is you. Here.” Ruby handed her a box of pills. “Use these for the next few days. By the time we shoot, you'll be ready.”

With a heavy feeling in her belly that was more than just brownies, Belle contemplated the package.
Diuretics.

She could already feel the dryness in her mouth that would follow several doses of the anti–water-retention aid. But she'd be able to dump a few pounds quickly, and in her crazy world that was what counted.

The disgusted expression on Ruby's face made old insecurities revive. The woman had looked at Belle and found her lacking. Belle had failed at the simple task of fitting into a costume. How was she going to manage anything if she couldn't even manage that?

She wished she had the luxury of throwing a snit fit, threatening to walk if she didn't get her way—on the uniform and the script—but she didn't.

Just this morning her mama had called. Her father needed another operation, and he needed it
quickly. Belle was scheduled to get paid as soon as they began to shoot the pilot. If she got fired, her family would suffer, and
that
she could not allow. So she'd better fit into that disgrace of a sheriff's uniform and she'd better do it quick.

The dream had been nice for a while, but it had been only a dream. Reality had intruded and wasn't going to go away.

Belle shoved on her clothes, pocketed the pills and headed for home.

 

K
LEIN HAD DRAGGED THE
mayor out of his office and put him to work on crowd control. Well, he hadn't actually dragged the mayor, but he'd imagined it. Several times in several different ways. The fantasy kept him from going crazy during the long afternoon in a town gone mad.

Long about suppertime things slowed down. All the California visitors had settled into their temporary homes. The hotel-motel was full. Every spare apartment was rented. Even unused storefronts had been snapped up. All the parking spaces on Longstreet Avenue were taken, and in a field beyond town they'd parked trailer after trailer and motor home. Pleasant Ridge resembled a tourist mecca, and he hated it.

Klein groaned and rubbed the small of his back as he climbed the stairs to Isabelle's apartment. He'd been on his feet all day and what he wanted was a glass of wine, a hug and then a kiss. Not necessarily in that order.

He used the key Isabelle had given him after their first night and slipped into the darkened apartment.
The place was so quiet; maybe she hadn't returned yet.

In the back of his mind all day had hovered a question: Had Dimato liked her script as much as Klein had? The guy seemed to have a few brain cells. If Dimato didn't recognize her brilliance, Klein would be surprised.

A muffled shuffle from the bathroom made him glance up just as Isabelle came into the room. She raised her head and then she stiffened, eyes darting to the kitchen table, the countertop, then back to him. The fear on her face made him nervous.

“What is it? You look like hell.”

Her skin was pale, her hair sweaty and tangled; her hands shook when she reached up to rub her eyes.

“I'll be all right.”

He crossed the room and pulled her into his arms. Her skin was clammy, and she shivered.

“You're sick.” He led her over to the couch, and she sat down at his urging like a child. “What's the matter?”

Her eyes flitted to the table again. Klein strode over and picked up a packet of pills.

“No!” she cried.

But it was too late. Anger bubbled in his belly as he read the label.

He'd wanted to give her a chance to confide in him, to trust him, but the time for patience was past. Klein tossed the pills on the floor and ground them under the heel of his boot. Then he grabbed the laxatives off the counter and did the same thing with those.

He lifted his gaze to hers. “Anything else around here I need to know about?”

She shook her head, wide-eyed.

“Good. Now we're going to talk.”

H
E KNEW THE TRUTH
that no one else had ever discovered. He knew just how ugly she was beneath her skin. Now he'd never touch her again. Belle waited for Klein to sneer at her weakness and walk out the door.

But he didn't.

Instead, he sat down next to her on the couch and drew her against his side, just as he always did.

“Talk to me.”

“I—I can't.”

“Why not?”

“I've never told anyone.”

“So many secrets, Izzy. Why do you think you have to keep everything locked inside?”

She stared at him with her mouth hanging open. He'd called her Izzy. As if nothing had happened. As if everything was still the same. As if he hadn't just discovered the monster inside her.

“What set you off?”

How could he sound so calm when her head, her stomach, her heart whirled in weary confusion?

“Set what off?”

“Anorexia, bulimia. One or the other—I'd say the latter, since you don't look so thin you make my teeth ache.”

Hearing the words made her cringe. What if the entire world found out? What would happen to her then?

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“Obviously, since you never have. But maybe you should, hmm?”

He smoothed her damp hair away from her face and kissed her brow. She wanted to turn herself over to his care, to let him make everything all right. But she'd been self-sufficient for so long, and now nothing would ever be all right again if she lost him.

“How can you touch me now that you know?”

“I've known all along.”

She stiffened. “You have not!”

“All right, maybe not from the first. But I started to suspect when Lucinda brought you the brownies, and you kept staring at them as if they were poison.”

“That's not a crime.”

“Then there was the jogging and the dancing. The whole control issue.”

“So?”

“The tossing out of a perfectly good cherry turnover.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Cutting your food into itty-bitty pieces. One night you ate lasagna and garlic bread. The next day you didn't touch a thing. I'm not blind or stupid. Binge and purge, Izzy.” He shrugged at her surprise. “I looked up eating disorders on the Internet.”

“When?”

“The afternoon before we first slept together. Why do you think I came over here in the first place? I wanted to talk about it, but I got a little distracted. And then—” he shrugged “—I wanted you tell me on your own. To share it with me by your choice and not mine.”

He had known and still he had slept with her? He'd known, yet he'd continued to come to her again and again, day after day? She just couldn't fathom that.

“I don't believe you.”

“Here—” He pulled out his wallet, tugged several sheets of folded paper free and tossed them into her lap.

She picked them up. Internet information, run off on a printer, dated the afternoon in question.

She raised her gaze to his. “I still can't understand why you'd touch me if you discovered this.”

“And I can't understand what one has to do with the other.”

She groped for the words to explain what she felt. The duality that lived within her. The darkness she could never quite conquer. The truth she hid and never shared with a soul.

“Isabelle is perfect and beautiful. But if you understood what lived beneath…that I'm Belle in here—” she thumped her chest “—and I'm ugly beyond redemption—”

He touched one finger to her chin and turned her face toward his. “You're Izzy to me. Funny and smart.”

She winced. Secrets and lies—she didn't think
she'd ever be able to share them all. Not even with him.

“Smart,” he repeated. “Talented. Gentle. Giving. Kind. From the skin all the way into your heart.”

“And you're delusional.”

“I've been called worse.”

“So have I.”

“Who told you you weren't beautiful?” he murmured. “Who made you believe it, too?”

He used her own words against her, and made her want to tell him everything she'd hidden for so long.

“I'm not beautiful. Not inside where it counts. Inside I'm lost and lonely and dumb. And when I look in the mirror, I'll always be—be—”

She faltered, and he took her hand in his. “What?”

“Fat. Just because I lost weight and grew into my face doesn't make me any less the fat little girl who never had a friend.”

“Ah, I wondered about that.”

How could he be so nonchalant? “Don't you hear what I'm saying? I was fat. Huge, in fact. No one liked me. Then I dropped out of school. No wonder I can't spell.”

“And didn't you hear what I've been saying? Spelling is overrated, and being fat isn't the end of the world.”

“Obviously you've never been a teenage fat girl.”

“True enough. But that's behind you. Why do you let the past affect the present?”

“Because for me the past lives in here.” She touched her heart. “And in here.” She raised her hand to her head.

“You need to make it stop.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“No. No, it isn't. I haven't let the past die, either. I still let memories hurt me, and I've lived my life so I can't be hurt the same way again. Until I met you, anyway.”

“I don't understand.”

“We're not done talking about you,” he warned as he pulled her close. “But maybe it'll help you to understand why I was such a jerk in the beginning. Why I understand how a person's past can leak into their present and flood their future.”

“I know why you behaved the way you did. You were forced to help me. You have better things to do than teach a ditzy underwear model your job.”

“If you keep calling yourself names, I'm gonna get mad.” He sighed. “I have…or make that I
had
an aversion to beautiful women.”

“What?” She leaned back so she could see his face. He wasn't kidding.

“I know. What kind of man am I? But you see…” He struggled with the words.

She wanted to help him, but she wasn't sure how.

“My mother is a very beautiful woman. It killed her to have a son like me.”

“Strong, proud, brave, a marine?”

“Shh.” He hugged her, then held her a moment. “She's not here. You don't have to defend me.”

But Belle wanted to. Just as he defended her—even
to
her.

“I never knew my father,” he continued. “My mother kept trying to replace him—five times now.”

“She's had six husbands?”

He shrugged. “She was a woman who needed to be taken care of. Between men, she leaned on me, and those were good times, when it was just the two of us. But they never lasted long. There was always another man around the corner. I embarrassed her. How could someone as beautiful as her have a son who resembled…well, a hound dog.”

Belle's eyes narrowed. Without knowing it, her hands had clenched. She wanted to meet Gabe's mother—in a dark alley, just the two of them.

“I can see why beautiful women annoy you.”

“I'm not done yet.”

“There's more?” she muttered.

He took a deep breath as if bracing himself for the rest. Instinctively, Belle slipped her arms around his waist and held on.

“Her name was Kay Lynne. She was seventeen. The prettiest girl in school. A cheerleader, class president, homecoming princess.”

Belle growled. She didn't like Kay Lynne already.

“Down girl.” He passed a hand over the top of her head, and she quieted. “When she asked me to take her to the dance, I knew it was a joke. But she kept following me around. Sitting with me at lunch. Calling me. After a few weeks…” He shrugged. “I was eighteen. Never had a girlfriend, and she wouldn't leave me alone. So I took her to the dance, then we started dating.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“She was the prettiest girl in school. I was the biggest guy.”

Belle frowned. She was missing something here. “So?”

“Boys bothered her constantly. Once she started dating me, they backed off—because I made them.”

“Okay. I still don't see where this is going.”

“Neither did I.”

He paused, and Belle knew he'd never told anyone what he was about to tell her. It would probably hurt him to say the words as much as it would hurt her to hear them.

“I never saw it coming. I was in love with her. Foolishly, blindly, stupidly crazy for her. And she was laughing at me all the time.”

She inched out of his arms so she could see his face. But he was staring into the past and not at her.

“We went to the prom. She didn't come back from the ladies' room for quite a while, so I went searching for her. She was with a group of friends, standing just outside the door on a balcony. I heard every word.”

“What did she say?” Belle whispered, and slid her hand into his.

“One of the girls asked her if she was serious about me, because I was definitely serious about her. Kay Lynne laughed. Of course she wasn't serious. After all, she wanted children, and could anyone imagine what my children would look like.”

Anger flashed through Belle with a heat and in
tensity that surprised her. She wanted to meet Kay Lynne in a dark alley, too.

“She was a vicious, selfish, vapid little girl, Gabe. Forget her.”

“There's more.”

Hell.

“The entire relationship was a setup. Kay Lynne had a boyfriend away at college. He'd suggested she pick out the biggest, dumbest geek in school and give him a thrill. That way none of the other guys would bother her. He wouldn't have to be jealous, and I'd do anything she asked of me because I'd be so damn grateful just to have her. Then when he came home from school for the summer, she could dump me and never look back.”

“I'm sorry.”

“It was my own fault. I should have known no one like her would ever want someone like me.”

“She threw away the most beautiful thing she could ever have hoped to have.”

He shook off her praise as he always did. “That's my story. Let's hear the rest of yours.”

They were back to her, and suddenly she couldn't sit still. So Belle extricated her hand from his and stood. “What else do you want to know?”

“Why would a woman with your health issues choose a career dependent on appearance?”

“I didn't choose the career—the career chose me.”

“You should do something else. Something less stressful.”

“What we should do and what we can do are often two very different things.”

“You can do anything you want to do.”

“No, I can't. I never got past the eleventh grade. All I've got is what you see.”

“You sell yourself short.”

“No, I face the truth.”

“The truth being that you have to risk your health, your very life for your job? That's bullshit, Izzy. Quit. Nothing's worth such a risk.”

“There you're wrong.”

“You need to see your face on television so badly?”

Agitated, she began to pace. “I admit I want this show to do well because it'll be a step up. No more posing in skimpy spandex on a beach in the sunny winter. No more taping low-cut outfits to my skin so I don't fall out of them when I walk. No more wedgies for weeks on end until I can't remember what it's like not to have one. So sue me. I want something else for me, too.”

“Too?”

No moss on Gabe Klein. He picked up on every little word that she said. Well, she'd told him everything else; why not tell him the rest?

“My family need money.”

“Give them some.”

“I give them most of it. And that's still not enough.”

His gaze sharpened. “Why?”

She could imagine what he was thinking—drugs, gambling, other overindulgences of the rich and famous. But, as in most cases, the truth was far from glamorous.

“My father was a farmer. We didn't have much,
but we made ends meet. Until one Saturday when he was clearing an old tree and a widow maker crushed his legs.

“He lived, but he couldn't work.” She went silent as she remembered her father's pain and her mother's tears. “Those words don't describe how our lives were torn apart. My father was always a happy man, full of energy. He loved the outdoors. He was big, bluff, tanned…and then he was in a wheelchair—sickly pale and too quiet.”

She began to pace again. “My mother, brothers and I tried to keep the farm going, but in the end all we could do was hang on and go deeper into debt. My mother didn't have any schooling past sixteen when she had me, and my three brothers were too young to get jobs. We'd never had enough money for insurance, and now my father needed extensive medical care, special help—the house even had to be altered.”

“So you learned first aid and CPR.”

She gave a wan smile. “Among other things.”

“How old were you?”

“Sixteen. I'd had a late growth spurt, and it was just like that ugly duckling story. I didn't become a swan overnight, but near 'nuf. I still had some baby fat, and one day I was listening to some of the girls talk at school. It was cool to eat like mad, then throw up.”

She shrugged at the disbelief on his face. “Teenage girls are the craziest people on the planet. Believe me. They'd pass around tips about laxatives, speed, water pills, fasting. Weird diets like eggs,
bananas and hot dogs only. High protein, low carb. You name it, they knew about it.”

“You have to be kidding.”

“I wish I were. I tried out a few of their ideas, lost some more weight, and people started to remark that they'd always thought I'd have a pretty face if I could just find some self-control and lose the weight—”

“Morons,” Klein muttered.