No Kind of Hero (Portland Devils Book 2) Page 4

  “Their heads are big in comparison to, say, puppies, because human brains are so big. They can’t get born as . . . as far along, because a woman couldn’t give birth to them otherwise. It hurts a woman a lot more already than a puppy hurts a dog. Imagine if babies had to be born able to walk. Think how big their heads would be then. You’d never get them out of there.”

  This was what he’d always loved about Beth. The way her mind worked, the things she said. She seemed so quiet, but she was so damn smart. “I’m surprised you got born at all,” he said, and found that he was smiling despite every bit of better judgment. “With how big your head must have been. So tell me why Gracie has to scream for that bottle. Evolution-wise.”

  “Well,” Beth said, “she’s helpless. She can’t get it if you don’t give it to her. She can’t even reach for it and bring it over to her mouth. She has to scream, and her scream has to trigger something in everybody who hears it—not just you, but you most of all. It’s better, though, if it triggers that response in everybody—that almost everybody within earshot is agitated and wants to do something, because a baby’s mother wouldn’t always be around, right? She needs to be able to signal somebody else besides her mom, or she won’t survive.”

  That one wiped the smile off. He’d been stabbed in the heart, and she was trying to twist the knife? That wasn’t like Beth. But then, he didn’t know who Beth was anymore. Nine years was a long time.

  He looked down at Gracie, at the dreamy look on her face, at her hand rubbing over her hair like the pleasure of getting that milk was so good she had to feel it all sorts of ways, and thought, I might not have a girlfriend anymore, but I made a good trade.

  A few seconds passed before Beth said, her voice sounding much more constrained, “I just realized I should apologize.”

  “You just realized that, huh,” he said before he could stop himself.

  She wasn’t drinking her milkshake. He was looking at his—which was melting, of course—wishing he could drink it, and she was just shoving the straw up and down in hers.

  “You should drink that,” he said, “before it melts.”

  She shrugged, still not looking at him. “I haven’t been doing so hot at eating lately.”

  He remembered that. When she got tense and stressed, she had trouble eating. It had driven him crazy, and then, when she’d been lying in bed with him, eating a sandwich he’d made her, rubbing her bare legs against his as if she couldn’t bear not to touch him . . . he’d felt like her hero. Her safe place where she could relax.

  Stop that. What was he, the world’s slowest learner? Gracie was done with her milk, and he put her up on his shoulder, started to pat her back, and said, “Maybe you should give me that apology, and then you’d be able to drink your shake.”

  She took a deep breath and said, “I realize I shouldn’t have been talking to you like you were still a single guy. I came up to you on the beach, and I know that if I’d been your wife, that wouldn’t have been all right with me at all. For your old girlfriend to be trying to reconnect like that, to ask you to be friends. I’d have hated it. Sorry. I saw you, and I . . . I suppose I didn’t think. But I’ve thought better since.”

  “I don’t have a wife,” he managed to say. If I’d been your wife.

  She made an impatient gesture with one hand. “Your girlfriend. Your fiancée. I don’t know. Whatever she is, I was out of line. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “Know what?” She looked at him full-on for the first time, her blue eyes wide. “Did something happen to her? Oh, Evan . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  He sighed. “She didn’t die. She took off, that’s all.”

  “She took off? And left the baby?” She looked like she was about to hop up and holler “Objection” or something.

  “Yep. Well, she didn’t sneak out in the dead of night or anything. She did a whole scene first with lots of sobbing and telling me how awful she felt, how she hadn’t been able to sleep, she’d been in so much pain over it. But same difference. She took off.”

  “I’m so . . . Wow.” Beth actually took a drink of her milkshake. She seemed to have forgotten to be nervous. “I’m just . . .” She waved a hand. “Flabbergasted.”

  “Let’s say I wasn’t. Seems I have experience in women taking off.”

  “Oh, now.” She slammed the milkshake back onto the table so hard, he was surprised the plastic didn’t split. “Oh, that’s low. I didn’t leave my baby. I can’t believe you’d say that.”

  “But I did. Leaving’s leaving.”

  “Of course it isn’t.” She was drinking her shake again, maybe because she’d been waving it around and had forgotten that she wasn’t supposed to be able to drink it. “What we did is break up. I broke up with a grown man who was stronger than me. I didn’t abandon a . . . how old was she?”

  “Twenty-seven. Not all that young.”

  Beth sighed as if he were slow. “Not your girlfriend. Wife. Whatever. How old was Gracie when her mother . . .” She was slinging her glass around again. “What’s her name?”

  “April. My girlfriend. Gracie was about three weeks.”

  “A newborn. She left a newborn. I don’t like women who are named after their birth month anyway.”

  Well, that was fairly random. “It wasn’t her birth month,” he found himself confessing. “Dumbest thing I’d ever heard. She was born in May. Her mom was hoping she’d be born in April, because she liked ‘April’ but she didn’t like ‘May.’ So she named her April anyway. I should’ve known right then.”

  “Well, yeah, I’d say so.” Beth grinned at him, sipped at her milkshake, then looked at the plastic cup in surprise. “Huh. This is good.”

  Evan realized he was still patting Gracie’s back, she’d burped a long time ago, and she was now, in fact, asleep. He got up and put her carefully back into her stroller, holding his breath, as always, that she wouldn’t wake up and start hollering again. She didn’t. Phew. He sat back down, swung himself around to face Beth, picked up his not very ice-creamy milkshake, took a grateful sip anyway, and said, “So. Why are you here? Why really?”

  “I was just starting to feel cheerful, and you had to ask that?”

  “Well, yeah. Hey, nobody gets to be cheerful all the time. It’s called life.”

  “Sorry.” She sobered fast.

  He sighed and drank some more not-very-freezing shake. “Forget being perfect and just tell me.”

  “Oh. Right.” She fussed with her straw all the same before saying, “I had a big case. We lost. I got overstressed.”

  “Uh-huh. You think you’re telling me, and you’re basically failing.”

  She laughed, and he’d forgotten what that looked like. Sweet and smart, like they were sharing something special. “You haven’t changed at all,” she said.

  Dial it back, he told himself. Half an hour with her, and he was falling right down that rabbit hole again. Hadn’t he learned a damn thing? “So what was it?” he asked. Of course, a guy who’d actually learned something wouldn’t even have asked.

  She didn’t answer for a minute, just looked out at the creek, at the reflection of the willow’s branches in the shadowy water, as peaceful a sight as you could see. “I guess,” she said slowly, “that’s what I’m here to figure out. I thought I just needed a rest, because I burned it pretty hard all that time. Seven days a week, months on end. But I’ve rested. I’ve slept . . . whoa, so much it’s crazy. I’ve hiked, I’ve swum, I’ve read books. I’ve barely done a thing for twelve days. Almost thirteen. I’m halfway in, and I still don’t feel back to normal. I’m just sort of . . . blank.”

  “Uh . . . you realize that twelve days isn’t exactly six months. Not exactly a cruise to Tahiti.”

  “When you’re going after a partnership with a big firm, twelve days is more than six months. Twelve days is way too long. I asked for almost four weeks off because I thought it was a crisis. Clearly it wasn’t, because I don’t feel like t
he breakdown’s imminent anymore. I’m crazy to be here. I should either go somewhere else or go back to work. I know it, but it’s like I’m still drifting. Overemotional. Blown around.”

  “Bet your parents have something to say about that.”

  “You know they do.”

  “On the other hand,” he said, setting each word down like he was deliberately planting them, “there’s the new resort. All those rich guys. NFL players. Doctors.”

  “Oh.” She looked at her milkshake again. “That’s true. I went out with a doctor last night, in fact. Maybe you know that.”

  “I didn’t. Now I do, though.”

  “You say that like it proves something. About what? My gold-digger status? Here you go, then. Perfect example. On the one hand, there’s what I know I should say. On the other hand, there’s the truth.”

  “Which is?”

  “What I should say is something that would save my pride. The truth is that we fizzled out like a firecracker in the rain. If Dr. Anderson St. Clair and I were chemistry partners, we’d have gotten an F.”

  “Anderson St. Clair? That his real name?”

  She smiled, and it looked good again. It made her look less tired. Well, he couldn’t help but notice. “Yeah. At least that’s what he said. Who names their baby ‘Anderson’? And then doesn’t call him ‘Andy’? But then, who would make that up?”

  She seemed to catch herself, looking down at her milkshake as if it were interesting. It was only half-gone, which Evan couldn’t say about his own. She said, “I should get going,” then stood up, picked up her trash and the dog’s leash, which woke the dog up, and then she stood there, practically jumping from foot to foot, while the dog stretched and shook and generally let it be known that he’d been having too nice a nap to wake up that fast.

  “Me too,” Evan said, and went to get the stroller.

  “I’m this way,” she said. It was the same direction he was headed, so he kept on with her. She was silent, which was fine. They’d said enough that it wouldn’t bother him anymore to see her. She was just some girl he’d once known, with a life that couldn’t be more different from his own.

  “So you said you were done with a painting job,” she said. “What’s next?”

  Making conversation, he thought. Polite to the help, like her mother taught her. “Painting the interior of the old movie theater. They’re doing a remodel.”

  “Oh.” He had a feeling she was going to ask him some Queen of England question, like, “And do you enjoy your work, Mr. O’Donnell?” But instead, she stopped and said, “This is me.”

  A metallic-gray Audi SUV, looking like it had rolled off the dealer’s lot three months ago. He said, “Looks like a lawyer car.”

  “For estate planning, it is. It has to be a luxury car, because you want the client to think you’re good at your job. But a Mercedes or a BMW could say, ‘I’m overcharging you.’ My dad’s advice, borne out by the company parking lot.”

  “And gray . . .”

  “Well, gray naturally,” she said solemnly, then smiled at him. “Isn’t that stupid? I also can’t have red nails.”

  “Do you want red nails?” They wouldn’t really suit her.

  “No. I want . . . oh, charcoal gray. Lavender. Navy with a little glitter in it, if I got all crazy. Who knows?”

  “Gray nails,” he said. “Different from a gray car.”

  “Exactly. See? Exactly.”

  “Guess you should probably buy some nail polish, then.”

  She looked startled, like it hadn’t occurred to her, then said, “Guess you’re right.”

  He said goodbye to her, walked home with Gracie still sleeping in the stroller, and thought, But you’re still driving an Audi, you’re still a lawyer, and you’re still listening to your parents. No matter what kind of nail polish you buy.

  Beth stood, her keys in her hand, and watched Evan walk away pushing the stroller. Another man might not have been able to look tough—all right, hot—doing that, but Evan did. Maybe it was the size of him, maybe it was his shoulders, or maybe it was the way he stood up so straight and didn’t smile. Evan was quiet, but he never looked casual. Something about his stillness, maybe, and his reserve. When he walked into a room, you noticed him.

  Or maybe that was just her.

  She opened the back door of the car, and Henry jumped up on the seat. Too hot in there, though. She’d need to blast the A/C.

  She didn’t. She didn’t even unclip Henry’s leash from his collar. Instead, she told him “Down,” shut the door again as soon as he leaped to the pavement, and took off the way they’d come. Back toward the drugstore.

  Maybe she should feel bad about dragging Henry all over town, but he wasn’t complaining. Anyway, he was all right. He’d had a long drink of water and a swim in the creek after their hike, and it wasn’t like he had something better to do.

  Because he was a dog. She had to stop caring this much, like she’d scraped away three layers of skin and exposed all her nerve endings, forcing her to receive everybody else’s emotions and opinions on her frequency and jamming her own signal. She should have scheduled her breakdown for someplace where she didn’t know a living soul, not even of the canine variety. Someplace where she could have grown her skin back.

  The bitterness in Evan’s face and voice when he’d talked about his girlfriend, though, and about Beth, too. That hardness—she’d never seen it in him before. She knew the heart underneath, or she’d thought she had. When had he grown his shell that thick? If her nerves were exposed, his were buried.

  She stepped aside for a group of older ladies coming out of Robinson’s. There was something new in the ice-cream-store window, she saw now, a stained-glass close-up of purple lupines on a green hillside. It was so striking, it had to be Dakota’s. Evan’s painting partner was easing out of the business now, Beth’s dad had told her, and devoting her time to stained glass. Which Beth hadn’t even known she made. You thought you knew everybody in a small town, but it turned out you didn’t know much at all.

  Evan, for example. He was different, but he was so much the same, too. Ignoring his melting milkshake to hold his baby girl, his arms so strong but his touch so gentle, and the way all the wariness had dropped away when he looked down into his daughter’s face. The way her tiny hand had gone up to clutch his fingers while she drank, and how she’d snuggled into him while he was patting her back, like she knew down to her bones that she was safe in his arms.

  Beth knew exactly how that felt. No matter what else had been going on in her life, being with Evan, until that last week, had made her feel like everything would be all right, because he was big enough and strong enough to hold her all the way through anything.

  Which had been nothing but weakness on her part, of course. Entitlement, like she was a princess who deserved to be shielded from everything bad in the world, and like she needed to be, because she couldn’t handle her life. That was a dangerous road, and a false one. Thank goodness she hadn’t gone down it. Anyway, Evan had his own problems, and they were a whole lot worse than hers had been.

  His girlfriend had left him. She’d left her baby. How could a woman do that? Why would she do it to Evan? At least Beth had only been twenty-one. And scared.

  And despite all that, Evan had asked about her, about why she was here, and he’d seemed to care about her answer.

  Except when he hadn’t. When that shuttered look had come back into his eyes and he’d taken off. As soon as she’d talked about her car, and her dad, and the firm.

  The thing about Evan was—he didn’t forget. As steady as he was when he loved you, that was how steady he was once he’d dismissed you. Once he’d cut you out. And that wasn’t one bit protective or one bit understanding. That was unforgiving. That was cold.

  It was also the past. Another problem with the home town—the past kept coming back to slap you in the face. But she didn’t have to be stuck. Here, in Portland, or anyplace. She tied Henry up outside the drugstore, s
aid, “This is the last stop, I promise,” and ignored the fact that she was talking to the dog again. Apologizing to the dog again. Then she went into the store and dropped a bottle of charcoal-gray nail polish into her shopping basket like a boss.

  She didn’t stop there, either. She also bought a whole pedicure kit, including a little gadget that promised to buzz your soles and heels silky-smooth.

  Gray toenails? No. Pink toenails. Red toenails. Or something even wilder. You needed wild for high-heeled sandals, and your feet had to be perfect. She might not have big breasts, but she did have pretty feet. All she needed was a foot fetishist and she’d be all set, sex-life-wise.

  You didn’t wear high-heeled sandals in Estate Planning, needless to say. Open toes? Completely unprofessional. And conservative, careful women on their way to the top didn’t wear, oh, for example . . . sky-high black heels with lacing that went all the way up your foot and tied around the ankle, even on a date. No bondage shoes, not out where a client or a partner might see you.

  Not that she would. She’d feel completely ridiculous, like she’d pulled those heels from the Dress-Up Box and was clomping around in front of her mother’s mirror. But wouldn’t that be fun?

  Once, many months ago, after perhaps one too many glasses of wine—meaning two—she’d asked her last boyfriend, Greg, what he liked about her. He’d said, “That you’re so intelligent, and so—refined. You’ve got class, and you’re always—” He’d laughed, shaken his head. “Sounds outdated. Unenlightened. That you’re always a lady. Crazy, except it’s true. I know that wherever I take you, even if it’s to dinner with the senior partner, you’ll be appropriate. Cool. Classy.”

  Maybe the case wasn’t the only reason she’d stopped being available when Greg called. Who wanted to be appropriate? Always appropriate? Who didn’t want to be a vixen sometimes?

  Not that she ever had been. But she wanted to think it was within the realm of possibility. She paid for her inappropriate purchases and headed outside, where a patient Henry, lying in the shade of a sidewalk tree with his muzzle on his paws, whapped his tail against the pavement in a hopeful manner.