Wendy Warren - The Oldest Virgin In Oakdale

“I’m grateful I didn’t go out with him tonight. I definitely am,” she told Gus, who had settled atop the heat vent. “You and I are going to have a terrific evening, Guster Buster. We’re going to get out of this rut, and we don’t have to prove anything to anyone in order to do it. I can’t wait to try that spicy eggplant, and after dinner we can tune in to the sci-fi channel. That’ll be a change, won’t it? See? Already this is good. It’s a good evening.”

Eleanor kept up a running commentary as she unpacked the dinner from Yee’s. One whiff made her eyes water.

Mr. Yee had frowned heavily when she said she wanted the eggplant dish. “No.” He’d shaken his head, waving a hand emphatically. “Too spicy for you.”

That was all it had taken for Eleanor to insist, “The hotter the better, Mr. Yee.” Carrying her tray to the coffee table in the living room, Eleanor was about to sit down when the doorbell rang. Who— she wondered, then winced. “Mrs. Grilley.” Shaking her head, she crossed the living room. The elderly woman had slipped her mind until that moment.

Florence Grilley was her eighty-three-year-old neighbor, whose King Charles spaniel, Pearlie, suffered from ear mites. Eleanor had promised to make a house call earlier this week. She readily agreed to her neighbor’s frequent requests because she knew that, in part, Mrs. Grilley simply needed the company.

Opening the door with an apologetic smile, Eleanor exclaimed, “You must think I’m the most absentminded person in the world—”

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

Eleanor froze in surprise.

Cole Sullivan stood in her doorway, dressed in a fawn sport jacket, straw-colored shirt and pants. His wavy hair had been trimmed since yesterday, falling in thick waves, neat enough for a boardroom, but enticing enough to tempt a woman’s fingers to comb through it.

Never had he looked more wonderful.

Never had she felt more awkward. “What are you doing here?”

Cole gazed at her with pointed irony. “I think that’s my line.”

Glancing at his watch, Cole arched a brow. “We had an appointment at six-thirty.”

Relaxed, as if he didn’t mind at all conducting this discussion in Eleanor’s doorway, he leaned against the doorjamb and crossed his arms. “I haven’t been stood up in years.”

“I told Chloe to tell you—”

“Ah, yes, the ‘prior engagement.’ Did you know Chloe’s neck itches when she lies?”

He reached out a hand. Eleanor stood rooted to the threshold as his index and middle fingers grazed her just below the jaw.

“Right there,” he said, folding his arms again. “Copious scratching.” He shrugged. “It’s a dead giveaway.”

His tone and words were pleasantly ironic, but his kaleidoscopic eyes darkened from Pacific blue to stormy gunmetal gray.

Eleanor cleared her suddenly dry throat. “I asked Chloe to tell you I forgot I had a previous engagement, because I do.” The aroma of Szechuan eggplant called her a liar. “Did,” she amended awkwardly. “I had plans, but…now I don’t.”

She should probably wash her mouth out with soap. She hadn’t lied since the third grade when she broke her father’s favorite petri dish and told him the dog did it.

“My plans were canceled,” she ended in a small voice.

“Yours, too?” Cole glanced toward the living room. “Mind if I come in, then?”

He straightened away from the door frame and walked past her without waiting for a reply. Stopping a few paces into the room, he made a brief study of Eleanor’s small home.

When his gaze found the coffee table, where her solitary meal awaited her, she blushed.

Cole turned to regard her, noting the heightened color in her cheeks, the way she fiddled with a pearl button at the top of her sweater. He felt a measure of satisfaction in her discomfort—unchivalrous, he knew, but he wasn’t used to being stood up. He didn’t like it.

Worse, he had not been stood up by just any woman, but by Eleanor Lippert.

A lot had changed in the dozen years he’d been away from Oakdale, superficial changes like the landscape around Quinn Park and new businesses along California Street. Other things appeared to be exactly the same, and he found himself wanting, fairly or not, for Eleanor Lippert to be one of those things.

He had not returned to Oakdale for pleasure or because he’d had a sudden urge to stroll down memory lane. He was not a sentimental man.

Moodily Cole gazed at Eleanor, who looked hopelessly awkward, then glanced again at the food laid out on the coffee table. Plowing a hand through his hair, he shook his head. Maybe she’d had a prior engagement, after all.

“I’m interrupting your dinner.” The words emerged more gruff than graceful.

“How did you find out where I live?”

Cole tried not to wince visibly. Eleanor hadn’t given him her home phone number, let alone her address. Arriving uninvited, he’d invaded her privacy as well as her home. He could have retreated at that point; he probably should have. Instead he felt his lips curve into a smile. Easily—a little too easily—he shifted to the slick charm he used to persuade boards of directors across the continental U.S.

“I coerced it out of your assistant. She was very reluctant,” he assured, then paused, musing. “There are two ways we can handle this. One, I can apologize for barging in here, leave and get something to eat on my own…”

Ducking her head, Eleanor mumbled the response she knew he was waiting for. “What’s the second way?”

Cole felt his muscles relax. “You always did like multiple choice, Teach. The second way involves a bit more participation on your part. I still apologize, of course, but then you take pity on me, pull another plate out and invite me to share your Chinese food.”

“Where’s Sadie?”

“Sadie? I dropped her at home on my way here.”

“Oh.” Eleanor nudged her glasses. “Does she have a soft, clean place to rest? I don’t think I’d leave her unattended so soon.”

Cole grinned.

Eleanor blushed, unsure of whether she was being a responsible vet or simply stalling for time.

“There’s a housekeeper in residence,” Cole informed her. “Jasmine loves dogs. Sadie’s being looked after.”

Jasmine, the housekeeper? Eleanor blinked. Cole had changed in more ways than one over the years.

It had been common knowledge when they were kids that Cole lived in “Butcher’s Row,” a distressed area of company-owned housing for the employees of Orly’s Meat Packing and their families. There’d been terrible stories circulated about Butcher’s Row, the kind kids told to distance themselves from their less fortunate peers. The most enthusiastically whispered rumor was that if you spent a night in Butcher’s Row, you could hear the haunted moo’s of deceased cattle. Or worse, that everyone who lived in the row smelled like raw meat.

No one had ever taunted Cole, though, with such gibes. By tacit agreement, the young people with whom he attended school each day either forgot or overlooked the fact that he returned to The Row each night. And yet to Eleanor even this had seemed somehow discourteous. Ignoring the situation had made it impossible to help when his clothes clearly had suffered one washing too many or when he’d appeared exhausted again after working the graveyard shift at Orly’s on a school night.

It was hard to reconcile the memory of that boy with the man who stood before her today. Cole had clearly become a man of substance, someone who had seen and, no doubt, sampled the world well beyond Oakdale.

Silently she studied his broad frame, clothed beautifully in a suit that must have been tailored especially for him.