Cupid, Texas [1] Love at First Sight (28 page)
Here is a sneak peek at
The next in the delicious Cupid, Texas, stories,
available in mass market and as an e-book
June 25, 2013
And
If you want to know how
the legend of Cupid, Texas,
all began,
here’s a tidbit from
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Prologue
Millie Greenwood High School, Cupid, Texas, 2001
Dear Cupid,
I am crazy in love with Pierce Hollister! You should see him in his gym shorts when he’s out on the football field running sprints. Omigod, he’s got the most amazing thighs. Of course, that’s nothing compared to the way his butt looks in Wranglers. Be still my pounding heart!
And his eyes! Blue as the ocean. He made eye contact with me once. It was a moment I will never, ever forget until my dying day. I’d dropped my books in the crowded hallway and I was fumbling to pick them up, when suddenly, out of nowhere, I see a pair of black cowboy boots and a hand reaching out to help me.
I looked up and it was him! I got tingly all over, and honest to God, I thought I was going to die right there on the spot! This is no ordinary boy. He’s the quarterback of the football team! He dates cheerleaders! His daddy is the biggest rancher in Jeff Davis County and here he was helping me!
And I’m nobody. I’m pudgy (Mama calls me fluffy) and I wear glasses and I stutter. I’ve had speech therapy, but I still can’t speak without stammering, and that is in a relaxed atmosphere. Believe me, there was nothing relaxed about this. Every muscle in my body was tuned as tight as the strings on a concert violin and I couldn’t have said a word if my life depended on it.
His eyes met mine and he smiled.
Smiled! At me!
“Here you go,” he said, handing me my biology book (it had to be biology, didn’t it?) and our knuckles brushed. I don’t know how I kept from bursting into flames. “Have a nice day.”
And then he was gone, leaving his heavenly sunshine and leather scent lingering behind, as I stared after him with my mouth gaping open.
Pierce Hollister had smiled and touched my hand and said seven whole words. To me!
I have no chance with him. I know that. He’s a senior. I’m a freshman. He’s handsome as a movie star. Way out of my league. He’s filet mignon and I’m day-old bread. Okay, so I am a direct descendant of Millie Greenwood, but so are half the people in this town. It’s not a unique claim to fame.
It’s silly of me to wish and pine, I know. But Cupid, I just can’t stop thinking about him, no matter how much I try. Every night before I go to sleep, I imagine what it would feel like if he were holding me tight against his muscled chest, our hearts beating in perfect time together. Beating as if we were one.
That’s why I’m writing to you, Cupid. I’m miserable with love for him. I want him to love me back so badly that I can barely breathe. Please, Cupid, please let Pierce Hollister fall in love with me. I know I’ll have to wait for him. I am only fourteen after all and he’s got a girlfriend and a football scholarship to the University of Texas next year, but one day? Someday? Please!
Yours in total despair,
Hopelessly Tongue Tied
Lace Bettingfield stood frozen in freshman homeroom, half in the doorway, half out of it, her backpack slung over one shoulder.
Seated in front of her were seventeen students, and every single one of them was reading the current issue of the school newspaper, the
Cupid Chronicle
.
Ominously, hairs on the nape of her neck stood up.
The fact that
everyone
was reading—including the stoners and the jocks—was odd enough, but when they all looked up at her with what seemed to be perfectly choreographed smirks, Lace’s stomach took the express elevator to her Skechers.
In a split second, her gaze darted to the student nearest her. It was Toby Mercer, her biology lab partner.
Toby was six-foot-six and weighed the same as Lace, a hundred and sixty-two pounds; on him the weight was gaunt, on her it was zaftig. He possessed strawberry blond hair and skin so pale he’d earned the nickname Casper way back in kindergarten. She’d known him her entire life. His family lived just down the block from hers. She’d comforted him when kids had picked on him. They’d attended each other’s birthday parties. They’d dissected frogs together.
But right now, Toby was looking at her all narrow-eyed and smug, like she was a dilapidated barn and he was a wrecking ball.
She flicked her eyes from Toby’s face to the paper that he held in his hand and there it was.
Dear Cupid,
I am crazy in love with Pierce Hollister!
It was the letter she’d written to Cupid, her private letter that had never been meant for anyone’s eyes but her own, printed on the front page of the school newspaper.
Her letter. Front page. Declaring her love for Pierce.
How? How had this happened?
Tourists often deposited letters to the Roman god of love in the special box in the botanical gardens, expecting them to be answered by town volunteers and published in the Cupid Chamber of Commerce’s weekly circular, but Lace had never meant for anyone to see this letter. She’d written it in study hall three days ago as she gazed out the window, watching the football team practice. She’d carefully folded the letter and tucked it into her side pocket of her notebook with every intention of burning it in the chiminee on the back patio that weekend when her parents were out of town.
Reality hit her like a fist to the face.
Mary Alice.
Mary Alice Gilbert, her second cousin, who was also editor of the
Cupid Chronicle
. Pierce had recently dumped her for the head cheerleader, Desiree Hartford. Two nights ago, Mary Alice and her parents had come over to Lace’s house for dinner, and at one point, Lace had caught Mary Alice snooping around in her bedroom.
Oh God!
Now, everyone knew her secret crush. Her life was ruined. Nausea splashed hot bile into her throat. Her entire body flushed hot as August in the Chihuahuan Desert.
One heartbeat later, and the class erupted into a feeding frenzy.
“Do you imagine she calls out Pierce’s name when she’s touching herself?” sniggered Booth Randal, a smart-assed stoner who spent the bulk of his time in detention.
“P . . . Pa . . . Pa . . . Pa . . . Pierce,” another boy stuttered in a fake falsetto, “Yo . . . yo . . . yo . . . you . . . ma . . . ma . . . make me so hot.”
Moaning and breathing heavily, the two boys pretended to kiss and fondle each other, while the other students hurled derisive catcalls like stones.
“Poor me,” wailed Tasha Stuart, whose mother worked in the teller cage next to Lace’s at Cupid National Bank. “I’m sooo in love with the most popular boy in school and he doesn’t know I exist.”
“Who knows,” someone else called out. “She might stand a chance. Pierce could be a closet chubby chaser.”
“Na . . . na . . . na . . . not unless she can sta . . . sta . . . stop stutt . . . stutt . . . stuttering.” Toby stabbed her in the back.
“Yeah, who wants a girl whose tongue is hopelessly tied?”
“One day. Someday.”
“Please, Cupid, please, please, please.”
The words slapped her harder than any physical blow. She knew these people. Was related to some of them. Had thought many of them were her friends, but they’d turned on her like hyenas. Blindly, Lace spun on her heels, and almost crashed into the teacher, Mr. Namon.
He put up his palms, “Whoa, slow down, what’s going on here?”
Head down, Lace shoved past him, and fled down the corridor.
But there was no sanctuary here.
The hallways were lined with students, several of them holding copies of the
Cupid Chronicle.
Some laughed. Some pointed. Some made lewd gestures. Some threw out more catcalls. A goth girl was slyly singing, “Crush,” a song about a stalker.
Everyone was going to think she was a stalker.
Hey, Tongue Tied, drop thirty pounds and maybe you can land your dream man.
Reality check. No guy like Pierce could ever love someone like you.
Yes, he touched your hand, but I heard he washed it off in Lysol afterward.
Lace plastered her hands over her ears, willed herself not to cry, but it was too late, tears were already streaming hotly down her cheeks.
Nightmare. It was a living nightmare.
And just as in a nightmare, everything moved in slow motion. It felt as if she was trying to run through knee-deep mud. Her lungs squeezed tight. Her heart was pounding so hard she thought it was going to beat right out of her chest.
Good. If her heart beat out of her chest she would be dead.
It seemed to take hours to traverse that hallway. She kept her head down, didn’t once make eye contact. She was headed for the exit, desperate to find a place to lick her wounds.
The morning sun glinted against the metal bar in the middle of the exit door. Almost there. Salvation was just a few steps away. She rushed forward, her legs breaking through the slow-motion morass.
Her hand hit the bar and she gave a hard shove.
But fate, that vicious bitch, wasn’t done with her yet.
The door smacked into something solid. Someone was coming in the door at the same time she was trying to get out. Trapped. She was trapped. No exit.
Knock ’em down if you have to. Just get the hell out of here.
In one regrettable moment, she raised her head and found herself staring into Pierce Hollister’s blue eyes.
Her heart literally stopped and a whimper escaped her lips.
Mary Alice printing her letter in the school paper was a horrible betrayal. The bullying by classmates she thought she knew was unbearable. Breaking down and crying was humiliating, but nothing that had happened to her that morning was as bad as the expression written on Pierce’s handsome face.
Utter, abject pity.
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Chapter 1
Whistle Stop, Texas. May 25, 1924
I
met John Fant on the worst day of my life.
There he was, the most handsome man I’d ever seen, standing at the bottom of my daddy’s porch clutching a straw Panama hat in his hand, the mournful expression on his face belying the jauntiness of his double-breasted lightweight jacket and Oxford bags with sharp, smart creases running smoothly down the front of the legs. An intense, magnetic energy radiated from him, rolled toward me like heat waves off the Chihuahuan Desert. I felt an inexplicable tug in the square center of my belly.
His gaze settled heavily on my face. There were shadows under his eyes as if he’d been up all night, and there was a tightness to his lips that troubled me. A snazzy red Nash roadster sat on a patch of dirt just off the one-lane wagon road that ran in front of the house. It looked just as out of place as the magnificent man in my front yard.
My knees turned watery as the mustang grape jelly I canned last summer that hadn’t set up right, and suddenly, I couldn’t catch my breath. I hung on to the screen door that I was half hiding behind.
“Is this Corliss Greenwood’s residence?” he asked.
“Yessir.” I raised my chin and stepped out onto the porch. The screen door wavered behind me, the snap stretched out of the spring from too many years of too many kids bamming it closed. Without looking around, I kicked the door shut with my bare heel.
He came up on the porch, the termite-weakened steps sagging and creaking underneath his weight.
Shame burned my cheeks.
Please, God, don’t let him put one of those two-tone wingtips right through a rotten board.
He was tall with broad shoulders, and even though he was whip-lean, he looked as strong as a prizewinning Longhorn bull. A spot of freshly dried blood stained his right cheek where he must’ve cut himself shaving. He’d shaved in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week? His hair was the color of coal and he wore it slicked back off his forehead. His teeth were straight and white as piano keys, and I imagined that when he smiled, it went all the way up to his chocolate brown eyes, but he wasn’t smiling now.
Mr. Fant had caught me indisposed. I must look frightful in the frayed gray dress I wore when cleaning. The material was way too tight around my chest because my breasts had blossomed along with the spring flowers. Strands of unruly hair were popping out of my sloppy braid and falling around my face. I pushed them back.
Another step closer and he was only an arm’s length away.
My heart started thudding. His masculine fragrance wafted over to me in the heat of the noonday sun, notes of leather, oranges, rosemary, cedar, clove, and moss. Perfume! He was wearing perfume. I’d never met a man who wore perfume before, but it smelled mighty good, fresh and clean and rich.
My daddy always said I would have made a keen bloodhound with the nose I had on me. A well-developed sense of smell can be good for some things, like telling when a loaf of warm yeast bread is ready to come out of the oven, and inhaling a snout full of sunshine while unpinning clothes from the line, but other times having a good sniffer could be downright unpleasant—for instance, when visiting the outhouse in August.
“Is Corliss your father?”
My throat had squeezed up, so I just nodded.
“I’m John Fant.”
I knew who he was, of course. The Fants were the wealthiest family in Jeff Davis County. Truth be told, they were the wealthiest family between the Pecos River and the New Mexico border. The Fants had founded the town of Cupid, which lay twenty-five miles due north in the foothills of the Fort Davis Mountains, and they owned the Fant Silver Mine where my father worked. Three years ago, when John had returned home with a degree from Maryland State College, his father, Silas Fant, had turned the family business over to his only son.
The screen door drifted open against my calf and I bumped it closed again.
He arched a dark eyebrow. “And you are . . . ?”
“Millie Greenwood,” I managed to push my name over my lips.
“How old are you, Millie?”
The way he said my name sent a shiver shaking down my spine for no good reason. It seemed a nosy question and I was within my rights to go back inside and shut the door in his face. It wasn’t proper for a young lady to have a prolonged conversation with a good-looking bachelor on her front porch without a chaperone present, but I answered him anyway. “I turned eighteen last week.”
He flicked a glance over my shoulder. “Is your mother home?”
I’d sent my brothers and sisters off blackberry picking so I could clean the house after Mama took a BC powder and went to bed to sleep off one of her migraines, but I didn’t want him to know I was basically alone. “She’s inside.”
“May I come in?”
“I’m not allowed to invite strangers into the house.”
“I’m not a stranger, I’m your father’s boss.”
That was true enough. I hesitated, uncertain of what to do next.
“I’m afraid I’ve got some very bad news,” he said in a soft voice. The expression in his eyes was far too kind. “This isn’t the sort of thing that should be discussed on the porch.”
I went sick all over when he said that. This time, when the screen door hit me in the behind, I didn’t close it, but instead held it wide open. “C’mon in.”
A fly came in with us, buzzed lazy circles around the sitting room. My chest was so tight that I was having trouble breathing and my head pounded hard. Was I gonna hafta take a BC powder myself?
I waved at the sofa. “Please have a seat, Mr. Fant, while I fetch my mother.”
He didn’t sit, just stood there, holding his hat.
I slipped down the short hall to the bedroom my mother and father shared and knocked lightly on the door. “Mama,” I called. “Mr. John Fant is in our sitting room.”
Less than a minute later, the door wrenched open. My mother wore only a thin chemise and her hair was all mashed up on the side. Her face was ghostly pale the way it got every time she had a migraine, but what scared me to death was the look of pure terror in her eyes. “John Fant is here? In our house?”
Mutely, I nodded.
The blue vein at the hollow of her throat pulsed fast. She ran her fingers through her hair and moved into the hallway.
I rested a hand on her shoulder. Her skin felt so cold. “Mama, you need to put on a dressing gown.”
“Yes, yes,” she murmured, disappeared into the bedroom, only to poke her head out again. “What was I looking for?”
“Dressing gown.”
The lump in my throat grew bigger with each passing second, and I struggled to keep my mind from leaping to conclusions, but dread settled into my bone marrow. I clenched my hands into fists, closed my eyes.
Please, God
.
Finally, Mama came back out, trying to cinch the belt of her faded pink floral dressing gown, but her hands were shaking so hard she couldn’t manage it.
“Here,” I said, and tied it for her.
“Thank you, Millie,” she whispered, and cupped my cheek with her palm.
I took her hand and led her to the sitting room. Mr. Fant was still standing, still held that silly Panama hat that he was turning around and around in his hands.
He nodded at my mother, his face somber. “Mrs. Greenwood.”
Mama drew a shuddering breath so deep that I felt it in my own body. “Mr. Fant.”
“Please, sit down,” he invited like it was his house instead of ours.
Mama sagged against me and made a soft mewling noise like a newborn kitten. I guided her over to the threadbare sofa. She wilted onto it and I perched beside her, making sure to sit on the grape jelly spot, permanently embedded into the fabric, so Mr. Fant couldn’t see the stain.
He pulled up a Hitchcock chair from the corner of the room and sat down in front of us.
Mama was plucking restlessly at the lapel of her dressing gown, like she was picking off lint. I touched her hand so she would stop.
Mr. Fant’s grim eyes met mine.
I curled my fingers into crabapple knots against my thighs.
He leaned over and laid his big palm on my closed fist. I was surprised to discover it was calloused like a workman’s. I expected a man of Mr. Fant’s status to have palms as smooth as a baby’s backside. If the situation hadn’t been what it was, I would have been both alarmed and excited by the feelings that his touch stirred, but considering the circumstances, I was just plain numb.
“Mrs. Greenwood, Miss Greenwood.” He stopped, cleared his throat. “I’m afraid I have some tragic news.”
“Just say it!” I blurted, unable to stand the tension one second longer.
“There’s been a cave-in at the silver mine,” he said gently. “I’m so—”
“No!” my mother wailed before he finished speaking, clutched her head in both hands, and began rocking to and fro. “No, no, no!”
I felt my mind break away from my body and drift up toward the ceiling. I was outside myself, watching the whole proceedings from afar. You could have slapped a scalding hot branding iron against my bare foot and I wouldn’t have felt a thing.
“I deeply regret to inform you,” he went on stoically, but the pain in his dark eyes gave him away. This event had touched him profoundly. “That Mr. Corliss Greenwood has lost his life.”