Victoria Pade - Hometown Cinderella

But when it came to her face and hair? If she’d been about to meet up with anyone other than Cam Pratt she probably would have gone as she was—face scrubbed clean, hair stuck in an untidy ponytail.

Only she wasn’t meeting up with anyone else and she just couldn’t go without reapplying blush and mascara using her purse compact and the glow of the moon coming through her bedroom window.

Hating herself for her vanity, she also took her hair down from the ponytail, brushed it, and then pulled it to her crown once again, this time holding it with a clip rather than a plain rubber band.

Nothing fancy, she judged upon final inspection in the compact mirror, but passable.

Still dreading seeing Cam again today, she nevertheless resigned herself to it, slipped on a peacoat and felt her way to the front door to go out into the cold night, regretting that she’d put this off now that it occurred to her that it was after ten o’clock and he might have gone to bed.

If he had she was just going to freeze to death, she decided. Better that than waking him up.

He hadn’t gone to bed, though. Because once Eden had crossed their joined-at-the-property-line driveways and was walking in front of his house, she could see that not only were his lights still on, he was in his living room. In fact, he was in clear view through the undraped picture window as she climbed the four steps to his front porch.

He’d apparently showered in the time between her ogling him and now. He was dressed in a different pair of sweatpants—gray ones—and another white T-shirt that had long sleeves instead of short. Although the T-shirt didn’t cling to him with the dampness of perspiration, it did fit him tightly enough to prove the chin-ups had been worth it because the knit followed his shoulders, biceps and the expanse of his chest to great effect.

Really great effect…

Inside he was drying his hair with a towel in one hand while using the other to hold the TV listings he was scanning. He didn’t notice Eden’s approach and, once again, she couldn’t refrain from covertly watching him.

It would have been helpful if the good-looking teenage boy hadn’t grown up to be one of the hottest men she’d ever seen. And while it shouldn’t have had any effect on her, it did.

“I’m just tired,” she whispered to herself again.

He’d finished drying his hair and he draped the towel over one shoulder. But running his hands through that wavy hair, finger-combing it back on top, didn’t bolster her resistance because even that haphazard grooming gave him a sexiness that was so potent it came through the glass of the picture window and nearly knocked Eden’s socks off.

Before she could lapse into another transfixed state, she forced herself to march the rest of the distance to his door and ring the bell.

She also made sure to stare straight ahead so she didn’t give any indication that she even knew he was right there in his living room, and as a result she only saw him from the corner of her eye when he peered out the window to see who she was.

Her enthusiasm for being there was not boosted by the epithet she heard him say when he saw her. But she stood her ground, bracing for more of his unpleasantness when he opened the door.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said before he made it any more clear how he felt about her being there. “But I knocked out my power, I don’t know where the breaker box is and I can’t find my flashlight. I thought, since the houses are alike, you might—”

“Know where the box is and have a flashlight,” he finished for her. Sardonically and impatiently, of course.

This was getting old.

“Yes,” she said.

She half expected him to refuse. But after a moment of glaring at her yet again he pushed open his screen door and stepped aside, inviting her in.

“Thanks,” she muttered.

“I’ll put on some shoes and get a coat. I’ll have to show you where the box is,” he said begrudgingly, leaving her standing in the entry as he went the six feet to the hallway that led to the bedrooms in her house, too, and disappeared around the corner.

Eden didn’t make herself at home but she did peer from where she was into his living room.

Decorating was not his long suit.

The room was furnished for comfort not for style. There was a large brown leather sofa and matching armchair beside each other, both of them facing the television rather than angled to allow for conversation. In front of the sofa was a coffee table cluttered with what appeared to be the remnants of Cam’s dinner and a few meals before it. But other than a serviceable end table between the couch and chair, one lamp, and a television and stereo system all together on an elaborate entertainment center, there wasn’t a single knickknack or picture on the wall. There also wasn’t one book on the built-in bookshelves and Eden marveled at that fact, thinking that her moving expenses would have been considerably less had she not had boxes and boxes and boxes of books.

“I’d think it would occur to a brain trust like you to ask where something like the breaker box is in a house you’d just bought.”

He’s ba-ack….

Eden turned her head from the direction of the living room, glancing at him again as he rejoined her in the entry wearing running shoes and a gray hooded sweatshirt, and carrying a flashlight the size of a drainpipe.

“You just aren’t going to let up, are you?” she said, more to herself than to him.

“Let up on what?” he asked, pretending not to know what she was referring to.

And that was when Eden decided that they were never going to be able to merely go on from here. That awkward or not, she needed to address the events that had put this thorn in his side and apologize to him if she ever hoped for him to treat her civilly.

“I know I was awful to you when our mothers arranged for me to tutor you in physics—”

“Awful? You spent every session calling me stupid, calling me every other lousy name you could come up with to let me know you thought I was too ignorant to live. I’d say brutal is more what you were to me,” he said as if she’d unleashed something in him.

Eden hid her grimace by dropping her head and rubbing her forehead. “Okay, brutal,” she conceded, embarrassed and wishing he didn’t recall quite so much.

“You said you were amazed an ignoramus like me could even read,” he continued. “That I had no business in a kindergarten class, let alone a physics class. You asked me if you were going to get honorable mention at the bottom of my diploma because I wasn’t able to get it on my own. You—”

“I remember it all,” Eden said to keep him from going on, shoring up her courage to look at him again. “It’s the one thing that I’m mortified I did. I’d never treated anyone that way before and I never have since.”

“Am I supposed to feel special to have been singled out?” he asked.

“No. But it was special circumstances. And it wasn’t the real me and I’m sorry.”

“Who was it, if it wasn’t the real you?”

“It was a person who was out of her league being a sixteen-year-old senior. A person who was the target of what passed for humor with you older, cool people every day—four-eyes, pizza-face, metal-mouth, pumpkinhead, Halloween-hair, geek-bot, nerd-girl—”

“I don’t recall ever calling you any of that. Or even being aware of you until the tutoring.”

“But your friends, your crowd, did—Steve Foster, Greg Simmons, Frankie Franklin—they were the worst. They never gave it a rest. Even though I tried to keep to the shadows, I was still fair game that whole year. And then I came home from school one day—a month before I thought it was going to end—and my mother told me I had to tutor you, of all people.”