Chapter Twelve
“Houston, we have a problem.”
Normally the joke, heard so many times in her lifetime she’d long since stopped keeping track, was worthy of an eye roll or two—but Whitney was impervious to raillery today, a not-uncommon occurrence when one’s not-a-boyfriend had yet to call.
It wasn’t that she needed the reassurance about where she stood with Matt—the arrangement was clear. No rules, no ties, no pressure.
She was just worried about him.
And she wished she knew what Laura was angling to get out of the recent cancer bombshell. If Whitney found herself facing a life-threatening diagnosis, she’d be on the phone with a travel agent to book her the most fabulous Caribbean getaway money could buy for her and her nearest and dearest, not...she shivered. Ugh. Not calling Jared for a chat.
“When do we not have problems?” Whitney asked lightly, ignoring her warring feelings and focusing on Kendra’s grim face instead. They were like gloom and gloomier. “I think that should be our new name. The Spa of Disappointment.”
The pair of them sat in what would soon be their front office, enjoying the sights and sound of construction going on all around them. Despite Matt’s ominous warning that the town would never accept them, things were looking quite nice on the inside—and for once, she wasn’t talking about the construction workers.
Kendra had her eye on one of said construction workers, a strapping young man who looked as though he had recently entered the legal age of drinking. Even though the thermometer barely registered fifty degrees outside, he never wore a shirt while he was working. In most men, it would have looked like conceit. Who was she kidding—it looked like conceit on this guy too. And even she had to admit conceit looked good.
They ogled from a discreet distance, pretending to take a profound interest in paint swatches. Or that had been the plan, anyway, when they picked up a few salads from the deli and headed over.
Kendra toyed with her lettuce, not really eating so much as rearranging the pieces. “It has to do with the little personnel issue we encountered last week.”
“I told you not to worry about that,” Whitney said breezily. “Let’s just focus on getting this place finished. We’ll hire from out of town if we have to once it gets closer to opening. Candidates from the city are going to have more medical experience, anyway.”
“That’s not the whole problem.”
Whitney paused to watch the shirtless laborer walk by, his gloved hands bearing a huge load of two-by-fours. Now that she thought about it, he was a little too chiseled for her. Men who had necks the same size as their heads freaked her out. Give her a stealthily strong, hairy chest any day of the week. Or now. Now was good too.
God, she missed Matt. Why didn’t he call?
“Hello?” Kendra snapped. “Earth to Whitney. Are you even hearing me?”
Whitney shook herself off—as well as the lingering image of Matt, stripped to the waist and lowering her onto the bed. “Sorry. It’s because you’re making me eat salad. I can’t concentrate without red meat.”
“Yeah, like that’s the kind of meat flashing through your filthy mind right now.”
“You’re one to talk,” Whitney returned, looking pointedly over at the barely legal Adonis. “So what’s the big problem? Are building costs running over? They always do...I thought we had that accounted for.”
“It’s bigger than that. People not showing up to our job fair was just the beginning. The real problem is that the loan officer we thought was on our side to make this all happen? He pulled out.”
Normally Whitney wouldn’t let such an opportune “that’s what she said” moment go unchallenged, but once again, jokes were the furthest thing from her mind. What is happening to me?
“What do you mean he’s out? How can a bank just cancel a loan?”
The money issue required to pull New Leaf off successfully was one they’d revisited time and time again. In addition to the three of them saving every penny they’d earned over the course of the past five years, Whitney had taken a painfully generous loan from her parents. Financing covered the rest, but they’d have to go into debt by so many zeroes it made her head woozy to even look at the paperwork. That bank loan was, unfortunately, the biggest piece of the whole money puzzle.
You have to spend money to make money, her father’s voice said, loud and clear and proud of her.
We have a lifetime to build riches together, said another male voice, this one accompanied by a wash of emotion that filled her vision with red. It’s just two years. It’ll be good for us.
“Are you ready for this?” Kendra’s words cut through the haze of Whitney’s thoughts, forcing her back to the present. “You should probably be sitting down.”
Whitney double checked, confused. “I am sitting down.”
“It seems that when we signed the paperwork,” Kendra began, her voice ominously quiet, “we failed to take into account the bank’s morality clause.”
“I’m sorry—did you just use the term morality clause?”
“I’m not sure how we missed it.” Kendra frowned. “But in choosing to approach a local bank for funding as a way to build community appeal, we failed to notice that our loan could be revoked within ninety days should we fail to meet a standard level of moral restraint.”
“You lie. That is not a real thing.” Whitney looked around for John, assuming he’d pop out from behind one of the piles of drywall, camera in hand. “Is this your way of telling me to tone it down?”
“It’s not you—it’s all of us.” She met Whitney’s eye. “Well, it’s mostly you. But the fact of the matter is, they’re simply looking for ways to close us down at this point. Your relationship with Matt, mine with Lincoln. And Brett. And that guy who does those tree stump sculptures out by the old sawmill.”
“Ew. Really?”
“You know I have a thing for lumberjacks.” Kendra shrugged. “Anyway, only John remains a paragon among us, but it’s only a matter of time before they find something objectionable about his behavior too. It was bound to happen one way or another.”
“This place is seriously so repressed its business owners aren’t allowed to be sexual beings? That can’t possibly be true.”
“Well...there’s something else.”
Whitney didn’t like Kendra’s tone. Having been friends far too long for women of a certain age to mention, Kendra had a scary amount of insight into Whitney’s inner workings. If she was holding something back, it could only mean she was trying to protect Whitney.
And they both knew the only thing she needed protecting from was herself.
“Spill it.” Whitney pushed her salad away. Not even the buttery croutons seemed palatable now. A few more weeks of this and she’d be withering away.
“The guy who owns the bank is someone you know. I get the feeling the reason he’s pushing this morality clause is personal.”
No way. That sort of thing didn’t happen in real life. “I swear to God, if you tell me Matt is secretly a bazillionaire holding all the strings to our financial future, I’m going to kick out our new separator wall.”
Kendra laughed and shook her head. “It’s not Matt. And you might not know him face to face—just circumstantially. Walter Horn? Ring any bells?”
Whitney mentally rifled through her little black book of the past few years for lovers scorned, but nothing seemed to connect the dots. One of her crowning triumphs in life was that she always left her lovers a little better than when she met them—happier, more confident, sated. It was a gift. “Nothing comes to mind. Should I know him?”
“I guess that depends on how much time you’ve been spending at the golf store lately.”
“That’s not funny. You know I was banned. That Natalie woman—” Natalie Horn. That was why the name sounded so familiar. “Please tell me this Walter guy is some sort of third cousin eight times removed.”
Kendra shook her head sadly. “Married eight years. Two kids. Huge house, luxury cars, the whole bit. You messed that one up big time, Whit. Between the two of us, this project is doomed.”
Whitney’s heart sank. Not because getting their funding stopped put a kink in their plans—this fight was by no means over—but because no matter how kindly Kendra might pretend her sordid affair with a chainsaw artist was the cause of their problems, this was Whitney’s doing.
Antagonize people. Overreact. Repeat.
“What if I go issue a formal apology?” she asked, the words tasting of regret. And salad. Neither one was very delicious. “I might need you to promise to funnel wine and happiness down my throat later, but I’ll do it.”
“I think it’s too late for that,” Kendra admitted. “This whole thing is snowballing way out of our control.”
“I don’t understand how we could have so grossly misjudged this town.” In all their earlier visits, the people had seemed friendly and receptive, if slightly snobbish. She refused to believe that a group of individuals this concerned about appearances had no need for a medical spa. “They need us. They want us. They just refuse to admit it.”
That sounded rather familiar, actually. The citizens of Pleasant Park. A certain young, nubile kindergarten teacher she couldn’t seem to get out of her mind.
“We’ll find a way around it.” Kendra took Whitney’s hand and gave it a squeeze. “I’ve got some ideas in the works. Just keep your head down and play nice for a while, okay?”
Whitney squeezed back. “I can do one better.”
She ignored Kendra’s look of anxiety and started plotting. No way was she going to sit back and let life happen to her. Whitney might not be the paragon of femininity that this town seemed to idealize, but she wasn’t without her strengths.
Foremost among which was her refusal to give anything up without a fight.
* * *
Matt lined his kids up in the hallway, watching tiredly as they swung lunchboxes and chattered their way into the cafeteria. This had to be the longest week of his life. Between Laura’s diagnosis and the argument with Whitney, he was running perilously near his empty gauge.
But that didn’t stop him from noticing a morose face at the end of the line.
“Cecily, no one is going to make you eat the fish sticks if you don’t want to.” He offered an encouraging smile to the little girl bringing up the rear. Since the first day of class, colorful beads had clacked at the end of her multiple braids, and he’d developed an extraordinary ability to interpret the sounds. Those were near-tears ticks. “Here. I’ll go in with you and tell Ms. Patterson you want the gluten-free option today. I hear it’s yummy. Chicken and stars.”
Click, swash. Happy nodding.
He took Cecily’s hand and followed the class into the lunchroom. Technically, teachers got lunch off to recover and refuel. Between the cafeteria workers and the playground attendants, most teachers were able to sneak in a full forty-five minutes to themselves.
More often than not, though, Matt ended up sitting with the kids at the miniature fake wood-grain tables. Six hours a day wasn’t enough time to connect with all twenty-four students, and it was amazing how much he could learn over Lunchables and juice boxes.
Cecily, for example, recently lost a grandmother and was struggling to understand the monumental finality of death—it wasn’t just the mushy, tasteless fish sticks making her cry. As Matt had been a similar age when his own mother had passed, he knew just how much that extra kindness mattered, how much the little things became everything.
He murmured a warning to Ms. Patterson—a somewhat grouchy lunch volunteer whose arms were so short in proportion to her bulk the older kids had nicknamed her T-Rex—about the need to tread lightly. In the middle of his entreaty, Matt glanced up toward the entrance of the cafeteria. He wasn’t sure what compelled him to do it, unless it was the flash of color, so out of place in the drab beige school and his own muted state of mind. Or maybe it was just that he could sense her. When Whitney approached—even from a hallway halfway across a building—he felt it. A change in the atmosphere, a tightening in his stomach. She moved the very air around her, and his body was calibrated to detect each shift.
She turned the opposite direction, though, toward the front desk. The tightening in his stomach took a turn for the worse. He’d been half afraid he wouldn’t ever see her again. Seeing her and having her walk away from him was worse. Especially since her motivations were unclear.
“I don’t want to eat that.” Cecily gripped his hand tighter.
“No, no. You’ll like it.” He squeezed back. “I promise.”
“It smells funny.”
“What if I got some too?” He looked at the plate, broiled chicken and some unpronounceable gluten-free grain that could maybe, possibly, barely be mistaken for star shapes. It did smell funny. “We could eat it together. Maybe we can even convince Ms. Patterson to throw in an extra brownie.”
“The brownies aren’t gluten-free.”
“Work with me here, Lisa,” he said. “This is a brownie emergency.”
It was also a Whitney emergency, but she’d disappeared into the maze of administrative offices. And no matter how much he might want to talk to her right now, his first loyalty was to helping Cecily tackle gluten-free stars. And Ms. Patterson’s chocolate-disapproving ways.
He managed to wrest an extra brownie out of the woman and sat down to eat with Cecily. For the next fifteen minutes, he refused to imagine Whitney waiting for him in his classroom without a shirt on, or the conversation she might be having with his coworkers about his sexual preferences.
And he did a pretty admirable job at it, if he did say so himself. He even got Cecily to laugh.
With the kids safely out to recess, Matt moved quickly through the halls. It wasn’t that he felt worried, exactly. Whitney was a competent human being who, despite outward appearances, would never do anything to cause him harm.
But unpredictability was her calling card, her trump. A large basis of his attraction hinged on her refusal to accept things at face value, in her ability to mold the world around her until she was comfortable with the fit. He gulped. That was a large basis of his fear too.
“I understand that Mrs. Horn runs the PTA, and I respect that you feel the need to support her in this.” Whitney’s voice, as usual, carried down several doors. “But I think you’re missing out on an important opportunity here.”
An odd mixture of relief and anxiety thrummed in Matt’s heart. Relief that the conversation had nothing to do with him. Anxiety that it contained anything else.
“I looked over your list of speakers. You’ve got an incredible array of professions covered, including the medical ones, but you can’t deny they’re strongly skewed toward the male persuasion. Where are the role models for girls who want to be more than medical receptionists or dental hygienists? Why is every non-secretarial professional on here a man?”
Matt stopped, pausing just outside the principal’s doorway. That sounded an awful lot like the argument he’d made at the last staff meeting about next month’s Career Day assembly. Every year, they marched a parade of successful men and the women who supported them across the stage. And every year, he had to spend the next two days explaining to the female students in his class why that parade should in no way limit their future aspirations.
“Yes, I’m new in town, but you can call my references, check my credentials. I graduated at the top of my class and received my board certification last year. From a professional standpoint, my qualifications are impeccable.”
He couldn’t hear what Mr. Gregoire said in return, but Matt had the feeling it wasn’t what Whitney wanted to hear. Or what he wanted to hear. The kids would love Whitney. Colorful, bright, scarily accomplished, strong and unwilling to let anyone tell her no. She was exactly the kind of woman little girls could—and should—look up to.
With a soft rap of his knuckles, he announced his presence at the door.
The principal’s office was spacious but windowless, which always gave him the sensation he was entering some kind of prison. Harry Gregoire himself didn’t help matters any. A balding, humorless man, he’d had his eye on a superintendent position for years. He saw his current job as a stepping stone rather than a place of honor, and his office reflected it. No color, no artwork, no indication that kids were welcome there. There was just his tiny, reflective head and his oversized desk, which was designed to intimidate even full-grown adults who happened to find themselves seated on the other side.
Whitney had elected to stand.
God, he adored that woman.
“She’s right, you know,” he said by way of greeting. “A female surgeon is exactly what our Career Day needs. We’ve had the same tired lineup of Pleasant Park residents for years, always giving the same speeches, always opening the same doors for our kids. Isn’t it time we let them see what else is out there? Expand their horizons beyond town limits?”
“Mr. Fuller.” Harry’s slightly nasally voice twinged, clearly displeased. “I believe Miss Vidra here is a friend of yours? Surely you are aware of the things being said—”
“Dr. Vidra,” he interrupted, correcting him. He caught Whitney’s gaze. Expecting her to be full of the usual light and laughter, he was surprised to find her mouth firmed in a line, her eyes sparking with wrath. She’s barely holding on here.
He hardly blamed her. Harry was not an easy man to get along with under the best of circumstances. When he was being a condescending, misogynistic prick, all bets were off.
“And yes,” Matt continued. “I know a little something about the current popular opinion on the subject of New Leaf.”
“New Leaf?”
“The medical spa she’s opening. You know, as a board-certified plastic surgeon and female business owner? Two things you have to admit we’re sorely lacking on that list in her hands.”
Whitney’s insides twisted into a strange and new contortion as she watched Matt come to her rescue. He leaned over the desk, his hands gripping the surface, staring down the bespectacled little rat on the other side. Even though Matt wore the haggard look of a man who hadn’t slept—or shaved—in at least forty-eight hours, it was obvious he meant business.
“Come on, Harry. You know as well as I do that Natalie can’t interfere with the school’s academic program, no matter how much noise she makes. This has nothing to do with the PTA or fundraising or appeasing parent tempers. It’s about the kids.”
A staring contest commenced. Whitney, not normally one to stay silent while a pair of obstinate men debated the outcome of her life for her, found herself curious to see how things would unfold.
Considering how she and Matt had left things the other day, angry and underpinned with the devastation of Laura’s diagnosis, she’d half expected him to be on the principal’s narrow-minded, belittling side. But he’d marched right in and taken over, embracing Whitney’s fight as if it were his own, finding the good in it.
Not once did it occur to him that Whitney needed to repair her reputation with the community and had simply found an efficient way to do it. Nobility—it was so ingrained into his own character he didn’t realize how unique an attribute it was. He saw it in everything and in everyone. Even her.
How easy it would be to fall in love with a guy like that. And how dangerous.
She saw the possibility of a future with this man, and it scared the crap out of her. No matter how hard she would try to hide her true nature, no matter how much she might bend over backward to fit his ideal, he’d eventually find out that there was nothing noble about her. And then she’d be right back where she started.
Stranded in a strange town. Brokenhearted. Alone.
“You’ll vouch for her, Mr. Fuller?” The principal’s voice broke Whitney’s thoughts.
“I’ll vouch for myself,” she said firmly and extended a hand. Matt’s heroism would be well-rewarded, she’d see to that herself, but she refused to let him bear the burden of responsibility for her actions. “I’m good at what I do, Harry, and my medical spa isn’t going anywhere. Your school will be lucky to have me.”
“I have to talk it over with my staff first,” he warned, his nod effectively ending the conversation. “We don’t much care for change here at Hamilton Elementary.”
“It’s the Pleasant Park curse.” Matt placed a hand on the small of her back and led her toward the hallway. She shivered when his pinky finger slipped under the waistband of her skirt in a tiny yet defiant gesture of possession. Mine. “If there’s one thing we fear more than change, it’s a beautiful woman like you carrying it in. Take it easy on us, Whitney. We’re trying.”
She turned to face him, aware that they were talking about much more than a kids’ school assembly and a town that refused to evolve. Dimples, rumpled hair, boyish grin—even with the taut, tired expression underlying it all, he was still capable of making her heart go pitter-patter like she was twenty again.
She pushed a lock of hair out of his face. “I’m not asking you to change, Matt. I’m just asking to be accepted for who I am.”
“And who are you, Whitney Vidra?”
Good question. “I’m the rebound girl. I’m the selfish plastic surgeon who plans to use a little kids’ assembly to boost her fledgling business. I’m the crazy lady who yells at men when their ex-wives have been diagnosed with cancer.” And most important, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I can’t be more.”
The school bell rang, signaling the end of lunch and a stampede of boots and coats making their way indoors. As if carried on a rising tide, she and Matt were pulled apart.
And that was okay. For the first time in days, Whitney felt like she and Matt were in, if not a good place again, at least somewhere familiar.
Also? Kendra was going to freak when she found out Whitney had just scored a seat in an elementary school career fair.