Rachel Gibson - Not Another Bad Date

“Oh, yeah.” Tiffany grabbed two cans of cola and shut the refrigerator. “Kendra, this is my daddy.” She moved to the other girl and handed her a Coke. “Daddy, this is Kendra. She’s new to my school.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Kendra,” he said as he opened a cupboard and put away the box of Corn Flakes. “Where are you from?”

“Fort Worth.”

“Are you a Cowboys fan?”

“No, sir. I don’t watch football.” She popped the top on her Coke and took a drink. “My daddy used to take me to see my grandmomma in South Carolina, and we’d go to Darlington sometimes.”

“Ah, you’re a NASCAR fan.”

She shrugged and looked about the kitchen. “It was kinda boring.”

“Can you believe she doesn’t like football?” Tiffany asked as she grabbed the bag of chips. “I’ve never known anyone who doesn’t like ball.”

“I used to play on my school’s soccer team.” Kendra returned her gaze to Zach. “It’s kinda the same.”

Tiffany gasped, and Zach laughed. “Don’t say that too loud around here,” he said, and changed the subject to save her from uttering any more unforgivable faux pas. “What brings you to Cedar Creek?”

“My momma used to live here. She and my daddy are getting a divorce, so we moved here for a while.”

Kendra didn’t offer more, and Zach didn’t pry.

“Come on.” Tiffany opened the chips as she walked past her friend. “Let’s go watch a movie.”

“I’m going to bed, so keep it down. And try to get to sleep at a reasonable hour.” Zach spoke to the girls’ backs as they headed down the stairs to what his wife had called the “theater room,” which was more like a big family room with a seventy-two-inch high-definition TV.

Zach left the kitchen light on, but turned the others off as he moved through the house. In the living room, the leather sofas, chairs, and wooden end tables had been pushed to one side. Tiffany had obviously been practicing her dance routines, which also explained the loud music when he’d first arrived. Unlike her mother, Tiffany was not a cheerleader. Instead, she much preferred her school’s dance team. She’d inherited coordination and timing from both parents, but her fierce competition came directly from him. People had accused Devon of being competitive, but she hadn’t been so much competitive as she’d been territorial.

He moved past the entry and down a short hall to his bedroom. The house had been built with his and hers walk-in closets, but Zach had never cared about clothes. He had a few nice suits, but he preferred hundred-percent cotton, and as a result, his closet was fairly empty. Until a year ago, when he’d finally convinced Tiffany that it was time to donate her mother’s clothes to the Junior League, Devon’s clothing had filled her closet and half of his.

The soles of Zach’s shoes sank into the thick beige carpeting as he moved across the room to a set of dresser drawers. The headboard of his king-size bed rested between two large windows covered in green-and-blue-striped drapery. Once he’d decided to move into the house, he’d had his bedroom furniture shipped from his condo in Denver, and he’d replaced the pastel colors Devon had favored with bolder, more masculine prints. The bedroom was the only room in the house that reflected Zach’s tastes, and it was one of a very few rooms in the house he could walk into without seeing photographs of his dead wife.

Zach stripped down to his boxers, remembered that Tiffany had a guest, and pulled on a pair of gray sweatpants. His daughter wasn’t ready to put away Devon’s pictures, and while having Devon’s green eyes watching him from one end of the house to the other was kind of weird, Tiffany found comfort in the images.

Zach set his watch on a maple chest of drawers. During the ten years he’d played pro ball, he’d thrown close to four thousand passes and rushed for over a thousand yards. He’d been in three pro bowls, won a Super Bowl, and been voted MVP. He’d be eligible for induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in two years, and it was expected that he’d be voted in on his first attempt. He had more money than he could spend in two lifetimes and made more every day from investments. He owned memorabilia businesses, and he was coaching high-school ball for twenty-five grand a year.

Zach moved to one of the windows that looked out the backyard and over the lighted grounds and pool covered by a thirty-six-foot-by-sixty-eight-foot retractable Plexiglas dome. He really didn’t have any complaints. His life was surprisingly good…except for his sex life. Having a teenage daughter made it very difficult, if not downright impossible, to have any sort of sex life. Out of all the things he missed about his former life, and there was a lot to miss, he missed his sex life the most.

He pressed a hand to the cool glass window and thought about the woman he’d seen in the hospital parking lot. He thought about her nice behind and her long blond curls. He thought about the girl he’d known his senior year in college and how she’d driven him insane with just a look from those big blue eyes of hers.

He hadn’t thought of Adele Harris in a long time, but all these years later, the memory of her was still clear. After a lifetime of knocks to the head that made it hard to remember some things, he remembered her wild hair and amazing eyes, he had no troubling remembering how she felt beneath his hands and how her hands had felt on him. He had no problem remembering the first time he’d kissed her in her dorm and the day he’d touched her through her clothes. They’d only dated for a short time, but he remembered her. He supposed it might have something to do with the fact that she’d been a virgin until the night she’d let him touch her without her clothes.

Zach looked down at the patio and across to the guesthouse. In a lot of ways, Adele had been different from the other girls he’d dated, and he’d really loved that about her. Hell, at the time he’d thought that maybe he’d loved her.

Now, he was older and supposed to be wiser, and he wasn’t even sure he knew what that meant anymore.

The house was huge. Even by Texas standards. It was made of stucco and stone and had a red tile roof. Adele guessed it was supposed to look like a Tuscan villa of some sort, but it had a slight Romano’s Macaroni Grill look to it, and she got an urge for shrimp scampi. Or maybe she was just hungry from spending all night in the hospital.

She parked her sister’s car under the portico, then moved beneath the vine-covered walk to a set of heavy wood doors with wrought-iron handles. She rang the doorbell and folded her arms against the morning chill. She’d run out of the house in such a hurry the night before, she’d forgotten a jacket.

The moment she’d driven into the gated community, she’d felt a slight unease. It reeked of the kind of money and exclusion that had always made her uncomfortable. Like an interloper. It wasn’t that she herself didn’t feel good enough. She was successful and made a very good living off her writing, but being back in Cedar Creek again reminded her of growing up in the small town. Of growing up just inside the boundary between the haves and have-nots.

As a kid, she’d been bused to schools in the wealthier neighborhoods, and she’d never really fit in. Partly because her family had been middle class, and partly because she’d lived a lot in her own head. She’d made a few friends in middle and high school, but she’d lost track of them after she’d left for UT.

She fit in a lot better with the good friends she’d made in Idaho. She felt like she belonged there more than she ever had in the place where she’d been born and raised. But here she was, back in Texas, standing on the porch of a mansion, out of place in her coffee-stained, thin white sweater that zipped up the front.