What the Heart Wants (What the Heart Wants, #1)(2)
Dear God in heaven, who was this on her doorstep?
Her caller was a giant, a big man darkly silhouetted against the red blaze of the high-summer Texas sunset. She couldn’t make out his face because of the glare behind him, but he was built like a tank and stood maybe six four, six five. Definitely not Prince Charming. More like the Incredible Hulk. She glanced down to make sure the screen door was still locked.
“Laurel? Laurel Harlow?”
The voice seemed familiar. She couldn’t quite place it, but her visitor sounded more surprised than dangerous. She pushed the door open wider, and the man’s face came into focus as he moved forward to examine her through the wire mesh.
She stepped back a pace. He responded by taking off his dark glasses and smiling, a slight baring of his teeth.
“It’s Jase Redlander, from old Bosque Bend High.”
Her heart did a quick rabbit hop. Jase Redlander, of course. His voice was deeper now, his shoulders broader, and he’d grown a good three inches in height, but it was definitely Jase.
Jase, whom she’d loved to distraction. Jase whom she thought she’d never see again. Jase, who sixteen years ago had been run out of town for having sex with his English teacher.
He folded his sunglasses and put them in his pocket. “Sorry to bother you, but I just drove in from Dallas and I’ve got sort of a…well, a family emergency that might end up in your lap.” He grimaced and glanced behind himself at the evening traffic moving along Austin Avenue. “Can we talk inside?”
The noise got bad this time of day, with everyone driving home from work and out to play. Back in the 1880s, when Great-Grampa Erasmus built Kinkaid House on a narrow dirt road that headed toward the state capital, he never could have imagined that it would one day be widened to four lanes, with a central turn lane being proposed for next year.
Laurel tried to keep her hand from shaking as she unlocked the screen.
“Of course. Come in.” Her voice got stuck somewhere in the back of her throat. “How nice to see you,” she managed to murmur.
But, standing aside as he entered, she saw that this was a different Jase Redlander than the teenager she’d fallen in love with sixteen years ago. The cut of his coal-black hair, the upscale Levi’s and European-style polo shirt, the set of his shoulders—everything about him signaled money and power and confidence. Obviously he’d wrestled with life and won. She, on the other hand, had lost big-time. Could he tell?
Not if she could help it.
She relocked both outside doors, led him down the wide central hall, and unfolded the doors into the drawing room.
Three generations of her mother’s people, Kinkaid women with money to burn, had managed to make the overlarge room, originally a double parlor, into a popular gathering place for Bosque Bend’s moneyed elite in times past. Victorian sofas, heavy chairs, and grotesquely carved little tables, all flanked by potted greenery, formed intimate conversation groups, while fragile undercurtains, confections of snowy lace, filtered the harsh Texas sun coming in the front windows into fantastic arabesques on the oriental carpet.
Jase had always loved this room. Years ago, he’d told her that if he ever died and sneaked into heaven, God’s front room would look like this.
She hoped he wouldn’t notice that heaven was somewhat the worse for wear. The upholstery was threadbare, the drapes faded, and the windows dingy. She glanced uneasily at the dark rectangles on the far wall, where the more saleable paintings had hung, then at the entrance to Daddy’s study, which looked positively naked since she’d sold the fig-leafed marble youths who’d guarded the doorway for as long as she could remember.
The antiquities man from Austin had almost salivated as he loaded them into his van, and the money had, fittingly, paid off the last of Daddy’s obligations.
Claiming a spindly ribbon-back chair for herself, Laurel gestured Jase toward the same velvet-upholstered sofa on which the two of them would sit and talk while Jase was waiting for Daddy to emerge from his study and summon him for his weekly counseling session. At first they had discussed school events in stilted little conversations, but after a while, when he started coming half an hour early, they’d relaxed with each other and began talking about what was going on in their lives. Jase had shared her joy when she made straight As and was elected sophomore representative to student council, and he’d consoled her when Mama and Daddy said she couldn’t have unchaperoned dates until her next birthday.
In turn, she tried not to look shocked as she learned about the way he lived. Everyone in Baptist-dry Bosque Bend knew that Jase’s father was a bad-tempered bully who kept a rowdy tavern just over the county line, but Laurel had been horrified to learn that Growler Redlander was such a poor excuse for a parent that his son had been working odd jobs since he was nine to support himself.
Jase had shrugged off her concern. “Laurel, I was five six when I was in the fourth grade. By the time I hit middle school, I was five ten and could pass for an eighteen-year-old any day of the week. The car wash is easy, and it’s only one night a week. The only problem with the yard work is hiding the mower from my father so he can’t toss it in the river like he does everything else.”
Laurel’s fifteen-year-old heart had opened to him. He was so brave, so valiant—and so handsome, just like the heroes on the covers of the romances she borrowed from Mrs. Bridges’s extensive collection of paperbacks.