straightened up. “I never stalked him. ”I...watched him. From a discreet distance.”
“Yeah,” Meg said on another laugh. “From behind every tree and bush on the block.”
Remembering those long-ago days brought back echoing waves of teenage angst. How she had loved Rick Bennet. Her big sister’s boyfriend.
From below, she heard a brisk series of knocks on the door. Releasing old memories, she jumped into action.
“Gotta go, Meg,” Tracy said, ignoring her sister’s yelp of protest. “See ya soon.” She hung up and hurried to the bathroom. Rick would have to wait a minute or two. She wasn’t going to meet him with only one lens in. If she was going to pull off this little plan of hers, she wanted to get it right from the beginning.
Flipping on the light, she picked up her other contact lens and tipped her head back. She’d been practicing using the damn things for a week now, and she was still uncomfortable sticking foreign objects into her eyes.
But she’d get better. She had to. Her thick glasses were a part of the old Tracy. And that girl was not going to the reunion.
“Done,” she said to herself, and tried to stop the wild blinking of her left eye. Like a twitch, her eyelid jerked and fluttered as if it was catching on the lens, which it probably was.
The doorbell rang, clanging and bonging like the bells of Big Ben. Apparently, he’d given up on knocking.
“Oh, swell,” she said and clamped one hand over her left eye. Rick was downstairs and she was going to meet him for the first time in years looking like a one-eyed pirate. No time to start over, though. She had to hurry down and let him in before he rang that stupid bell again.
The previous owners of her condo had obviously suffered from delusions of grandeur, installing a doorbell with tones that rivaled a church organ. And, since moving in six months ago, she hadn’t had time to have it replaced.
She’d been too busy establishing her at-home business and then getting herself in shape for what promised to be a very interesting high school reunion. With any luck.
Half stumbling down the stairs, Tracy muttered curses as behind her hand, her eyeball watered and itched. She ached to rub it but was afraid she’d send that new lens into what was left of her brain.
The bell pealed again and the reverberations had hardly faded away before she opened the door and came face-to-face with a big part of her past.
He still looked blurry.
But her memory filled in the blanks and her stomach did a quick series of twists and flips. Just like the old days.
Oh, this was going to be a long road trip.
“Tracy?”
“Hi,” she said and winced at the squeaking sound coming out of her mouth instead of her normal voice. Lord, his voice still had the power to rumble along her spine with mind-numbing speed. Tracy swallowed hard to dislodge the sudden lump in her throat, but didn’t try to speak again just yet. Instead, she stepped back and waved him inside with her free hand as she tried to remind herself she was not fourteen anymore. That shy, gawky teenager had grown into a widely sought-after computer wizard.
So why, she wondered, could she almost feel the tin wires of her braces digging into her lips? “Come on in,” she finally managed to say.
Rick Bennet had not been looking forward to this. He’d only agreed to give Tracy a ride as a favor to Meg, his high-school girlfriend. But the Tracy he remembered was nothing like the woman standing in front of him now.
In his memory, she was a shy, slightly overweight, fingernail-chewing, ponytail-wearing irritant. The younger sister he’d had to put up with every time he’d arrived at the Hall house to see Meg.
The girl who used to walk past his parents’ house a dozen times a day. The girl who had trailed after him like a smaller shadow.
Obviously though, times—and Tracy—had changed.
He experienced a quick, hot jab of pure male admiration. It had been a long time since a woman had so instantly affected him. A flash of desire spurted into life as his gaze swept over her.
Her short blond hair was a fluffy tousle of curls that made him want to reach out and touch them, to test their softness against his skin. She wore a simple yellow blouse tucked into a calf-length, filmy looking summer skirt and small strappy sandals on her dainty feet. Pale pink nail polish decorated her toes, and with surprise he noted her tiny silver toe ring. Long, abstract silver drops hung from her earlobes, glinting in the afternoon sunlight. A honey-golden tan accentuated her blond hair and blue eyes, making her look like a magazine ad for youthful living in Southern California.
She made his mouth water. And though his brain had a hard time believing this desirable creature was really Tracy Hall...his body didn’t care.
“Wow,” he muttered. “You look great,” he said, yet noted the hand she kept clamped over one eye and the fact that she was squinting with her other eye.
“Yeah,” she grumbled just under her breath. “For a one-eyed pirate princess.”
“Something wrong?”
“No,” she said, as he stepped past her into the entry hall. “It’s just these darn contacts.”
Well, that explained the absence of the thick, wirerimmed glasses he’d recalled. But what explained the rest of her transformation? he wondered silently. Like a butterfly from a little caterpillar, Tracy Hall had become a stunner.
His gaze followed her as she shut the door and turned to face him.
“Look,” she said, keeping her hand firmly clasped over her eye. “Why don’t you go into the living room while I run upstairs and see if I can get this darn thing out without blinding myself?”
Grabbing a fistful of skirt, she hiked the hem up to her knees and raced up the steps leading to the second story. Rick watched her, idly admiring the flash of her legs and the sweet curve of her behind.
That thought caught him up short. Tracy’s behind? Little Tracy? Bookworm and math whiz? “Whoa,” he told himself and rubbed the back of his neck. Shaking his head at this unexpected development, Rick turned and walked toward the doorway opening into the living room.
Another surprise.
He didn’t know why, but he hadn’t imagined Tracy living in such quiet elegance. Twin white sofas, their stark surfaces brightened with boldly colored throw pillows, sat facing each other. A low-slung coffee table that looked like a polished redwood stump lay between them and held a scattering of magazines neatly fanned out on its surface. A couple of overstuffed chairs, small decorator tables and reading lamps made up the rest of the furniture in the large, airy room. Two of the four walls were completely covered by bookcases. Another wall boasted floor-toceiling windows with a view of the ocean in the distance. On the last wall was a fireplace with a basket of wood sitting on its hearth. The wide plank floors gleamed in the splash of sunlight streaming through the uncurtained windows.
Just one surprise after another. When he had agreed to give Tracy a ride home to Oregon, he’d somehow expected to find her in a small apartment, locked away from the world. Stupid, he supposed,
