Inglath Cooper - John Riley's Girl

Cleeve put a hand on his shoulder. “What is it? You look like you just saw a ghost.” And then, “Holy smoke.”

John went numb. He felt like a teenage boy again, spotting for the first time the prettiest girl he’d ever laid eyes on, hit with an immediate blood-heating attraction that fills a boy with the absolute certainty that she is the one, and imbues in him the instant inability to speak in front of her.

His first uncensored thought? Cleeve was right.

She had turned out to be one beautiful woman.

Her hair was still long, shoulder-length and blond. His fingertips instantly ached with remembrance of it.

She was leaner than she’d been then, the bone structure in her face clearly defined with angles and hollows. Her lips were the same though, a shapely, full mouth that made his own throb with sudden memory.

But one difference was apparent. She no longer looked like the small-town girl he’d dated and loved. She looked, instead, like a woman who had made it in the world—clothes, posture, the whole picture.

“What is she doing here?” He tried to inject thunder in his voice and heard his own failure. He sounded like he’d just had the breath knocked out of him.

“That’s what I was trying to tell you.” Clearly, Lori had no idea how to handle this. She looked as if she thought he might strangle her. “I should have told you this morning,” she said, “but I was afraid you’d say no to letting us move the reunion out here if I did.”

“And you would have been right!” The anger hit him full blast then. There was thunder in his voice now. And plenty of it. “Damn it all to hell, Lori. She can’t stay. She cannot stay,” he said, unable to bring himself to say her name because to do so would drive a knife right through the heart of the fury that was the only thing keeping his knees from buckling. “Go tell her. Now.”

Lori shot him a look that somehow managed to convey both panic and absolute horror. “John! I can’t possibly do that. You’re blowing this out of all proportion.”

“Now wait a dadblame minute,” Cleeve began, reason in his voice. “She’s no different from anybody else here who was in our class.”

“She is different,” John said, hearing the steel in his own words. “Either tell her, now, Lori, or the whole weekend is off.”

“For Pete’s sake, John,” Cleeve said, “that was all a long time ago.”

“Not long enough.”

“You don’t have to talk to her!” Lori said, hands splayed in appeal. “I’ll make sure you’re never within fifty yards of one another. We can’t just ask her to leave.”

“Nobody’s askin’ you to throw down the welcome mat for her,” Cleeve tossed out, tipping back his hat, “but you can’t kick her out.”

They didn’t understand. They couldn’t understand. “She isn’t welcome here! And if you won’t tell her, I’ll tell her myself.”

The Unwelcome Mat

THE LAST THING Olivia wanted was to be the center of attention. She wanted to blend in, just walk around and say hello to people she hadn’t seen in nearly half a lifetime. But she had only moved a few steps past the front table since she’d arrived. There were so many people she hadn’t thought about in ages, and yet remembered as if they’d seen each other only yesterday. Tommy Radcliffe, whom she’d sat beside in ninth-grade science class and shared homework notes with. Sarah Martin from eleventh-grade P.E., the only girl to consistently beat her at the six-hundred-yard dash. Noah Dumfrey who had ridden her school bus and whom she still hadn’t forgiven for putting chewing gum in her hair in eighth grade. “I can’t believe I actually did that to someone who’s now on TV every morning!” he’d said upon seeing her, reeling her in for a hug against his now well-cushioned chest.

Most people simply looked like adult versions of the children they had once been—some heavier, some thinner, some with gray hair, some with no hair at all. But they all looked at her differently now, with awe on their faces, as if they could no longer see the Olivia Ashford they’d known in the woman she was now.

And while it was good to see so many familiar faces, hear so many still-recognizable voices, her gaze kept skipping across the crowd. She glanced at her watch. Nine o’clock, and she still hadn’t caught a glimpse of John. If she could just get that part over with, she could relax. Seeing him was inevitable, and the longer the wait drew out, the heavier her dread became.

She envisioned the two of them circling the crowd, weaving in and out until they finally ran head on into one another. Olivia could not picture him as he would look now. Couldn’t imagine how time would have changed him. She found herself studying the face of every man who walked by.

How would she know him?

And then, suddenly, she didn’t have to wonder anymore.

Because there he was. Cutting a path through the crowd with long strides, his mouth set in a grim, no-nonsense line.

Olivia froze, shut down inside. And then her heart took off in an out-of-control gallop that would have made her EKG reading look like a seismograph monitoring an L.A. earthquake.

Any semblance of poise she might have gained in her years as a professional broadcaster completely deserted her. She stood in front of him as vulnerable as if she were seventeen again and head over heels in love. She couldn’t smile. Couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move.

He didn’t look old.

He hadn’t gained forty pounds.

He had all his hair.

And she would have recognized him in a crowd of a thousand on the other side of the world.

To say he looked good would have been an understatement.

Living in Washington, D. C., Olivia had gotten used to men in suits. The professional man’s uniform: polished loafers, socks with crests on them, starched white shirts, hundred-dollar ties. Washington was full of men like that. That was the kind of man today’s women were supposed to find irresistible.

She never had.

And now she realized why.

Because she would forever be comparing them to John. But John Riley as a boy was quite different from John Riley as a man.

There was no questioning which one he was now.

His shoulders had gotten broader. He was more muscular, solid, strong. The changes were unsettling, maybe because that John, she knew. This one, she did not. And the reality of him, standing here in front of her, felt like a kaleidoscope of then and now.

“Olivia.”

At the sound of his voice, she jumped. Olivia. Not Liv as she had once been to him. The greeting was arctic-cold, his whole demeanor one of stiff politeness as if he’d just bumped into someone he had vaguely known in first grade, but wasn’t quite sure he remembered.

“Hello, John.” She folded her arms across her chest to hide her shaking hands. The urge to flee was nearly irresistible. All of a sudden, she felt like a country girl who’d never been farther than twenty-five miles outside Summerville, who had grown up in a four-room house and gotten her new clothes from the church’s Helping Hand closet.

“Mind if I ask what you’re doing here?” The question was clipped, his anger barely concealed.

Olivia’s stomach did a roller-coaster plummet at the recognition of it. She locked her knees and forced herself to return his scrutiny.

People were staring. She felt their curious gazes. Heard the whispers. She willed her voice toward something close to indifference when she said, “The same thing as everyone else in our class.”

“Everyone else is welcome here.”

The words snagged her like barbed wire, cutting through the skin and refusing to let go, their harshness in opposition to the boy she had once known, a boy whose eyes had looked at her as if she were every good thing he’d ever imagined. A flash of memory hit her. The two of them up on Lookout Mountain, lying on their backs in the bed of his old pickup, a quilt beneath them, staring up at the stars and holding hands. Her head was on his shoulder. Amazing that with all the time that had passed since then, she still remembered the depth of the security she’d felt there. I want us to have four children, Liv. At least four. That way they’ll never grow up lonely. Days like Christmas will be loud and out of control. I like out of control.