Jennifer Greene: Wild in the Moment

That was her whole problem with men. They looked at her a certain way, she caved. He was one of them, she could sense it, smell it, taste it. For right now at least he was hurt. How much damage could a guy do when he was hurt? Particularly when she refused to look at him. She wasn’t volunteering for any more of those ka-booms.

“Please,” he begged charmingly.

She plunked down her soup, growled a four letter word in total disgust, then marched into the kitchen to spoon out another bowl. A small bowl. She brought it back with a scowl. “You get two spoonfuls. No more.”

“Okay.”

“You keep that down, then we’ll talk. But I don’t want to hear any whining or bribes.”

“No whining. No bribes. Got it,” he promised her.

Yeah. That big baritone promising not to whine was like a bear promising not to roar, but she slid the ottoman over and sat down with the bowl. “Don’t try sitting. Just lean up a little bit.”

“I think there’s a slim chance I could feed myself.”

“I think there’s a big chance you’ll eat the whole bowl. That’s the point. I’m controlling this.”

“Ah. A bossy, controlling woman, are you?”

“No. A scared woman. If you die or get hurt any worse, I’m going to be stuck with you until this blizzard is over.” She lifted the spoonful, and he obediently opened his mouth, his eyes on hers. Again she told herself he was hurt, for Pete’s sake. But how the hell could an injured guy have so much devilment in those eyes?

“Are we going to sleep together in here?”

She sighed, then plugged his mouth with another spoonful. “When I’m hurt,” she said pointedly, “I usually make an extra point of being nice to the people who are stuck taking care of me.”

“Well, if you won’t sleep with me, would you consider taking a shower with me? Because I’ve got sawdust itches from my neck to my toes. My hands are full of grit. I just want to clean up.”

“No showers. No baths. What if you fell?” But when she fed him another spoonful, she had to consider the thought. “It could be a good idea to make sure there isn’t any dust or debris near that head wound, though.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. And I couldn’t fall if you took the shower with me. Maybe if we got around to formally introducing ourselves? I’m Teague Larson-”

“I know. The sheriff told me. And I’m Daisy Campbell. You can either call me Daisy-or Battle-Ax-but either way, no shower. I’ll try to cook up some way to get your hands clean. If we still have water and power tomorrow, maybe we can talk about a shower for you then. But tonight we’re doing what the sheriff said for a concussion.”

“I don’t have a concussion.”

“You knocked yourself out. You could very well have a concussion,” she corrected him.

“I knocked myself out because I was an idiot, took a chance I shouldn’t have taken. But my head’s too hard to dent, trust me, or ask anyone who knows me. In the meantime, I don’t suppose there’s any more soup? Or any real food somewhere?”

“The kitchen’s a complete disaster-which you should know, since you’re the one who tore it up. I was lucky to find the soup and a pot to put it in. You’re not getting any meat or heavy foods, anyway, so don’t waste your breath looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

She fed him one more spoonful of soup, then ignored those soulful eyes and carted the dishes into the downstairs bathroom. Without running water in the kitchen, she was stuck doing dishes in the bitsy bathroom sink-but that was the end of the chores. She could still do a dozen more things to prepare for a loss of power, but they just weren’t going to happen. She was two seconds away from caving.

When she returned to the living room, she brought the invalid a fresh glass of water and a warm washcloth to wipe his hands, then knelt at the hearth. Once the fire was tended, she fully intended to sink into a nightlong coma. The blaze was going strong, but she needed to poke the fattest logs, tidying up the bed of ashes, add on two more slow-burning logs.

“The way you talked to the sheriff, you seemed to know him.” Teague, darn him, sounded wide awake.

“George Webster? I went to school with him.” She hung up the poker and turned around. “He followed me around my whole senior year with his tongue hanging out.”

There, she’d won a grin. His eyes tracked her as she pushed off her shoes and shook out a blanket. “I’ll bet a lot of boys followed you with their tongues hanging out,” he said wryly.

“A few,” she admitted. “What kills me now is realizing how immature I was. I wanted the guys to like me. I wanted a reputation for being wild and fun. And whether that was dumb or not, I had two younger sisters, both of whom looked up to me. I should have been thinking about being a role model for them, and instead…”

“Instead what?”

“Instead…” She curled up in the overstuffed recliner and wrapped the blanket around her. God knew why she was talking. Probably because she was too darn tired to think straight. “Instead there was only one thing in my head in high school. Getting out. I couldn’t wait to grow up and leave White Hills and do something exciting. I was never in real trouble-not like trouble with the police. But someone was always calling my mom on me. My skirt was too short. My makeup was too ‘artsy.’ I’d skip English to hang out in the Art Room. I never did anything big wrong, but I can see now it was all just symbolic little stuff to show how trapped I felt in a small town and how much I wanted to leave.”

“Yet now you’re back.”

“Only for a short time. I just need a few weeks to catch my breath before moving on again.” Even though her eyes were drooping, she could hear the ardent tone in her voice. She so definitely wasn’t staying. A few hours back in White Hills, and already she’d been caught up in a blizzard and a guy problem. It was a sign. She should never have tried coming home. Even for a month. Even knowing she’d been pretty darn desperate.

“If you don’t mind my asking, how did you come to be living in the south of France?”

Her eyes popped open-at least temporarily. Maybe tiredness had loosened her tongue, but she couldn’t fathom how he’d known she lived in France.

He explained, “Pretty hard not to know a little about you. You’re one of the exotic citizens of White Hills, after all. Daisy Campbell, the exotic, glamorous, adventurous girl…the one all the other girls wanted to be, who had the guts to leave the country and go play all over France with the rich crowd…”

“Oh, yeah, that’s sure me,” she said wryly, and washed a hand over her face. Sometimes it was funny, how you could say a fact, and it really was a fact-yet it didn’t have a lick of truth to it. She hadn’t been playing in a long time. Anywhere. With anyone. “Anyway…I ended up living in France because I fell in love with an artist. Met him at one of his first American shows, which happened to be in Boston. I can’t even remember why I was visiting there…but I remember falling in love in about two seconds flat. Took off and married him right after high school.”

“I take it he was French?”

“Yeah, he was French. And he wanted to live in Aix-en-Provence, where Cézanne had studied with Emile Zola. And then Remy-en-Provence, where Van Gogh hung out for a long time. And then the Côte d’Azur-because the light on the water is so pure there, or that’s what all the artists say, that there’s no place like the French Riviera.”

“Hmm…so you traveled around a lot. Sounds ritzy and exciting.”

“It was,” she said, because that’s what she always told everyone back home. They thought she was gloriously happy. They thought she was living a glamorous, always-exciting dream of a life. No one knew otherwise-except probably her mother, and that was only because Margaux had the embarrassing gift of being able to read her daughters’ minds.