Dress Me in Wildflowers (25 page)

He walked around the kitchen island, took her hand and led her into the living area, guided her to an overstuffed leather couch. When she sat, he sank down beside her.

“Practice on me.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“I mean the interview, though we’ll keep other options open for later.”

Farrin swallowed hard, and Drew smiled when he saw her reaction.

“I don’t know, maybe winging it would be the best approach.” One in which she didn’t have to go over every detail of her past with Drew.

“Have you ever gone into a challenge without planning for it?”

She sighed. “No.”

“I didn’t think so.” He rose from the couch and walked toward the front door. “Here, I’ll turn out the lights. Sometimes it’s easier to talk in the dark.” He flipped the switch, then walked back to the chair opposite the couch in the faint glow of the quarter moon. “Now, tell me about your early school years. What did you enjoy about them?”

“Are you a shrink on the side?”

“Think about it. What do I do for a living? I dig to find the truth and get people to talk about it. Avoiding this isn’t going to make it go away or make it any easier when Zora Marshall shows up. I’ve practiced testimonies with dozens of clients. Trust me, it works.”

“Fine,” she said on a long exhale that felt a little like surrendering to an opposing army. “I liked art class and history, was terrible at gym. I once tripped while jumping rope and broke my wrist.”

“I remember that. You had a cast forever.”

“Yes, evidently it takes me a long time to heal.”

“What did you like to do out of school?”

“Read. Hike in the woods. Draw. Daydream.”

“Daydream about what?”

Farrin thought back to the endless progression of daydreams, years worth crammed into the recesses of her mind. “Mainly the world outside Oak Valley.”

“Why? Did you not like it here?”

“It was a beautiful place and had some interesting characteristics like all the old buildings downtown, but the people . . . well, there was no hiding anything. Everyone knew everything about everyone.”

“And you had something to hide?”

Drew’s quick questions proved his expertise in the courtroom. She hoped to never have to face him in that venue.

“It’s embarrassing, being poor when you’re a kid.”

“What about it embarrassed you?”

“It just did, okay?”

“Farrin, just because you know Zora Marshall, don’t think the interview is going to be a walk in the park. She’s a trained interviewer and she’s going to want to get to the core of you, to reveal what no one else ever has.”

“I must say I’ve never been grilled like this when I’ve gone out to dinner with anyone else.”

“I’m only trying to help.”

She paused and let his words sink in. “I know.” She shifted, slipping off her shoes and bringing her legs up beside her on the couch. “It’s embarrassing when you live in a trailer in the middle of the boonies, when you don’t have enough money to have a phone, when you have to make one box of macaroni and cheese last two people for three days, when you can’t afford a single item of fashionable clothing. I know that last part sounds really shallow, but kids can be very cruel. When you’re eleven or twelve years old, not having a pair of brand name shoes or the latest style of jeans is very traumatic because the kids who do have them make fun of you so everyone can hear. You want to curl up and disappear.”

Now that she was letting the words come out, they seemed to be gaining momentum. If she wasn’t careful, everything would come spilling out and she’d never be able to face Drew again. She’d have to leave in the darkness and avoid him from now on.

“Did that change as you got older?”

“The teasing? It got meaner.”

“How so?”

“The stakes are higher when you’re a teenager. All of your emotions are in turmoil anyway, so when someone takes aim at you with harsh words, it’s awful.”

“Was there a particular person who hurt you?”

Farrin stared hard at Drew in the dim light. “You know there was.”

“Don’t think of me as Drew. Right now, I’m Zora Marshall and there’s a TV camera rolling.”

She swallowed and looked down at the floor. “All high schools have cliques that make it their business to torment those they deem outsiders.”

“What did these cliques do?”

“They basically make sure you don’t have a social life.”

“They have that kind of power?” Drew asked, keeping up the barrage of questions.

“Yes.”

“Did you date?”

“No, that’s one of the casualties of the clique attack.”

“Was there someone you would have liked to date?”

“All girls have crushes that come and go.”

“Any stronger than the others?”

Farrin looked up at him again, then away toward the darkened fireplace. “Can we light the fire? I think it’s getting colder outside.”

He didn’t press her like she expected. Instead, he rose and moved to the fireplace, lit the fire, then returned to his seat without a word. “Better?”

“Yes, thank you.”

Drew continued to stare at her as she focused on the fire. Maybe if she didn’t look at him, pretended she was alone in the room, she could do this.

“There was one boy I liked more than the others, but that was a long time ago. All girls have infatuations that seem silly in later years.”

Please don’t let him delve further.

“So, you’ve recently come back to your hometown. What’s changed? Or has it?”

“I avoided coming back here for a long time because I didn’t think I had any reason. No family, no ties other than one friend. Actually my best friend’s mother, who was like a second mother to me. It’s still small, everyone still knows everyone else’s business, but it’s not as bad as I remember. There are good people here, many of whom are now working at the inn I bought.”

When Drew launched into a series of questions about the inn and its occupying businesses, Farrin relaxed. She enjoyed talking about the improvements, the excitement of the artists involved in the gift shop, the homemakers who’d crafted quilts and who were the first employees of her new dress business. She was surprised by how much passion that now pumped inside her for the new line.

“You lost your mother a few years ago. What do you think she would say about your coming back to Oak Valley and everything you’ve done since you’ve been back?”

That question caught Farrin off guard. What would her mother say? “I think she’d be proud, but then she always was.”

“And that makes you sad?”

How did he pick up on her feelings so well?

“That was the worst thing about the embarrassment I felt growing up, that I hurt my mother with it.”

“How so?”

Farrin stared into the fire as if it were a window to the day after her junior prom. She saw the anger on her face, the pain in her heart, the surety that she’d never be able to go to school again and face her classmates.

“I told her that she embarrassed me, that I was tired of being poor and laughed at, and I couldn’t wait to graduate so I could move away and never come back.” Farrin swallowed against the rising lump in her throat at the memory of how she’d held up the shredded prom dress in front of her mother’s face and told her she’d ruined her life, that she’d never been so mortified.

“Don’t all teens say hurtful things to their parents at some point?”

“Probably. But my mom didn’t deserve it. She did the best she could, alone and with little education.” Farrin swallowed, and despite her best efforts a tear slid down her cheek. She turned so Drew couldn’t see it. “She suffered from depression, and what I said was the worst possible thing. I was all she had, and I made her think I didn’t love her.”

“I’m sure she knew you were upset, that you really did love her.”

Farrin turned toward him, not caring if he saw the tears in her eyes. “No, I don’t think she did. She was never the same after that, and when I graduated I made good on my threat and left without a backward glance. When she died, I was convinced that it wasn’t a heart attack, that it was a broken heart and I was to blame.”

He looked like he was about to move to comfort her, so she sprung from the couch and walked into the kitchen, wiping her tears as she went. She poured another glass of wine and took a fortifying drink. Drew walked up behind her, but he didn’t touch her.

“Bet you’re sorry you asked, huh?”

“Not at all,” he said.

He’d be distant from now on, and he’d have admirable and plausible excuses like a heavy caseload or needing to do something for his parents. She couldn’t blame him. Who wanted to be weighed down by so much baggage? Maybe it was a good thing to have this out now before she really got attached and it hurt worse when he stopped popping by the inn with surprise takeout lunches.

Drew touched her shoulder and she went rigid. Worse than him avoiding her would be him pitying her. That she couldn’t stand. She resisted the urging at first but gradually let him turn her to face him. Damn, he looked good standing there in the faint light.

He didn’t pull her into his arms, and despite the fact she knew she’d let him she was glad. Instead, he let his hands drop and wrapped them around hers.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?”

“Trusting me enough to open up like that.”

“You didn’t give me a lot of choice.”

He squeezed her hands. “I think you’re a woman who doesn’t let other people push her around.”

“No. But I’ve been persuaded a lot lately.”

“I think we’re only persuaded when we’re already leaning a certain direction.” He took a step closer. “I’m not going to stand here and tell you I’m not sorry about all the things that happened back when we were kids because I am. And I’m sorry about any part I had in making you feel embarrassed or ashamed.”

“It was a long time ago,” she said, her voice threatening to crack.

“Yes, it was. Just like the people we were then is in the past.” Another step and their bodies were almost touching. “Farrin, I don’t think of you as you were then. I think of you as the incredibly sexy woman I’ve been dying to kiss since the night of the reunion. All I ask is you forget who I was then, how I acted, and concentrate on who I am now. This very minute.”

Her heart beat so loudly she felt as if her veins were going to explode from the rush. “Okay,” she whispered.

As Drew’s mouth lowered toward hers, Farrin closed her eyes and let go of that girl in the second-hand prom dress.

****

Farrin caught herself whistling as she walked in the front door of the inn the next morning. She stopped in mid-whistle when she noticed Janie standing in the doorway to the gift shop, her smile as wide as she’d ever seen it.

“I take it the big date went well,” Janie said.

Farrin stepped the rest of the way in and shut the door behind her. “It was fine.”

“Fine? I’m sorry, I’ve never heard you whistle. And I think whistling indicates it was a little more than fine. Come on, dish. I want to live vicariously since I have no love life.”

“I wouldn’t say I have a love life.”

“Did he kiss you?”

Farrin couldn’t help the blush as she remembered how incredibly thoroughly Drew had kissed her.

“I knew it!” Janie said.

“What are you, thirteen?” Farrin placed her coat on the coat tree and headed for the kitchen for some coffee.

Janie, undeterred, followed. “So, you’ve got to give me more than a blush.”

“If you must know,” Farrin said, actually excited to share the account of the incredible evening with someone her own age. She’d felt like a teenager who’d experimented a little too much when Drew had dropped her off at Faye’s the night before. “We had a nice dinner at his house, and then he quizzed me in preparation for the Zora Marshall interview.”

Janie’s face fell. “You’re kidding?”

“No.” Farrin took her coffee and sat at the kitchen table. Janie sank into the chair across from her. “He made me realize that I had to practice if I didn’t want to fall apart during the interview.”

“I can’t imagine you letting a reporter get to you.”

“I’ve never been interviewed about being poor white trash before.”

“You weren’t trash.”

“Semantics. Anyway, he grilled me about the things Zora is likely to cover.”

“So, where did the kiss come in?”

“Right after he said we should leave who we were then in the past and start from now.”

Janie sighed. “Oh, that’s so romantic. Maybe I should have snatched him up when I had the chance.”

“Too late.”

Janie stuck her tongue out at her, and Farrin laughed.

Farrin took another drink of her coffee, pushing away the last of the chill that had soaked in during the short walk from her car to the inn.

“Do you think you’re ready for the interview?”

“As ready as I’m going to be.”