Anything for Her(72)

Grimly determined, Nolan scrolled through the freshmen. Despite his mood, he found it briefly entertaining, since Sean was that age. The prettiest girls were trying so hard to look sophisticated, the rest of the girls were clearly wishing to be anywhere at all but in front of the camera, and the boys might as well have been eight-year-olds who’d grown strangely tall. Except for one—a guy with serious shoulders who was probably already shaving and could have been eighteen. Maybe he’d been held back a year. Or not. Nolan had had a classmate like that. He got all the girls until the rest of the boys starting catching up, maturity-wise, their junior and senior years. Nolan smiled reminiscently. He’d been pretty damn happy when he started needing to shave—and when he’d realized he was as tall as Mitch Judson.

Sophomores were noticeably more relaxed. Even the girls who weren’t the prettiest were using makeup with more confidence, relaxing into who they were. Allie’s face was not among them.

He was feeling some reluctance by the time he started in on the juniors. Was he really so set on confirming that she’d lied to him? And he already knew there was no Allie Wright among the students pictured in this yearbook. He was being stubborn, that’s all, not wanting to admit she’d really do that to him.

That he meant so little to her.

Halfway through, he was only glancing from face to face. He’d lost interest in reflecting on his own high school years, or how Sean would change so much over the next two years. He felt a little sick. Could he possibly have been so wrong about Allie?

His gaze stopped on some poor kid with the unenviable last name of Parfomchuk. Bet he’d spend his whole life having to spell his name.

But that wasn’t what had stopped Nolan. Going back, his eye reluctantly passed over several faces—Opgaard, Oliver, Oakes, Numley, Neumiller...Nelson.

Stunned, he found himself looking at a very young and pretty Allie Wright—whose name, according to the yearbook, had been Laura Nelson.

He closed his eyes then opened them again. Yep. It was still undeniably her. Different, of course; at sixteen, she’d been astonishingly beautiful, and yet unlike most of the other girls she wasn’t smiling. Her expression was...shy, maybe, but also grave.

He imagined her walking through the halls of the high school with that untouchable air. Pretty as a fairy princess, but he still bet she’d been labeled stuck-up. Unless the day this picture had been taken was a very bad one for young Laura Nelson.

And just who in the hell was Laura Nelson?

Or maybe the better question was, why, when Allie and her mother ran, had they been so scared they assumed new identities?

And what would Allie say if he asked her?

* * *

NOLAN BROODED ABOUT it for three straight days.

He called Allie Wednesday night and they talked for nearly half an hour, but his questions weren’t the kind he wanted to ask when he couldn’t see her face.

Thursday he took lunch to her shop again. He would have sworn she was glad to see him—but he also saw the flicker of apprehension in her beautiful green-gold eyes. She didn’t used to be nervous with him, but she was now, and he didn’t like knowing that.

He kept reminding himself that she hadn’t lied to him. There was a reason she and her mother didn’t want to be found—domestic violence was rearing, real ugly, in his mind—but despite everything Allie had chosen to be honest with him. Nolan held on tight to that knowledge.

As they finished lunch Nolan nearly choked on the question, Who is Laura Nelson? Wadding up his sandwich wrapping, he was on the verge of blurting it out when three older women entered the shop.

Smiling, Allie rose and went to greet them. They’d apparently brought quilts for her to consider for her next mini-quilt show—he got that much out of what he heard—and it was clear that his private time with her was over. He couldn’t decide whether he was frustrated or glad he’d been saved from possibly making a huge mistake.

He spent the next day trying to talk himself into letting it go. She had been truthful, insofar as she thought she could. Shouldn’t he be satisfied to know that much?

But he wasn’t, and Nolan knew himself well enough to be damn sure he wouldn’t be able to live with this kind of ever-present itch. He was in love with a woman who was living a lie of some kind.

The parallels with the lies his parents had told were too blatant. Too powerful.

He had to know.

Ask?

Or get the answers some other way?

By Friday he’d decided. Allie might not forgive him if she found out...but maybe she’d never need to learn what he’d done.