the best of times, let alone when she was kneeling in the dirt. “Whether or not you choose to believe me, I’m trying my hardest to do a good job.”
She took off her sun hat and wiped her forehead with her sleeve. It came away damp with sweat. “You have to understand how new this is to me, Noah.” She touched his arm, but he pulled away, so she dropped her hand to her side. Even before she’d hit him on Friday night, he’d always seemed to go out of his way to avoid her. Why did he dislike her so much? “I want to get this right. I really do. Okay?”
“Okay,” he muttered, but she had the sense it wasn’t, that there was something going on beneath the surface that Noah wasn’t explaining to her—something she couldn’t figure out on her own.
It messed with her nerves so she gave up trying. “I have to leave. I start work in forty-five minutes and I have to wash up first.” She took a small pink notebook and matching pen out of her back pocket and wrote down a sentence indicating she’d put in her first two hours of her sentence. She handed the book to him. “Initial here, please.”
“Aren’t you the organized little beaver?” Ignoring the pen, he fished a pencil stub out of his jeans and scrawled his initials across the page, a messy slash beside her tidy script.
She held back a knee-jerk response, totally getting that he had a right to be angry, but his sarcasm hurt. She rose above it by ignoring it. One of them had to be the adult here.
“Write down all of the details about your bike, too.”
When he’d finished and handed the notebook back to her, she said, “I’ll be back tomorrow morning at the same time.”
She trudged to her car, tired already, and she still had to put in a full day at work.
With Noah’s hot gaze burning through the shirt on her back, she started the car and drove away.
Once in town, she detoured to her apartment to shower and change for work. It wasn’t quite ten and here she was having her second shower of the day.
She threw on a bit of makeup then ran out the door.
For over a year now, Monica had been working at The Palette, the only art shop in town. She stepped through the doorway and found the gallery cool, a godsend after the past two hours spent under the hot sun.
The owner, Olivia Cameron, Noah’s mom, stood talking to one of the sculptors whose work they stocked. Gorgeous Aiden McQuorrie had his focus squarely centered on Olivia. Even though she was fifteen years his senior, she held him in sway. Monica sighed. So romantic. Everyone in town knew they were getting it on every chance they got. In the year since Olivia had started to date Aiden, after much persuasion on Aiden’s part to get her over her reluctance because of their age difference, she had blossomed.
Monica smiled. Understandably, Aiden was Olivia’s favorite sculptor.
When Aiden stepped past Monica to leave, his glance sympathetic—he knew how angry Olivia was with her—he squeezed her arm then left the gallery.
Olivia approached, every beautifully dyed strand of hair in place, her peach suit expensive and understated—her sophisticated demeanor a sharp contrast to Aiden’s rough-hewn, restless energy.
Another case of the attraction of opposites, like me and Billy.
Olivia, a former housewife, had started the art gallery years ago and, through determination and sheer grit, had nurtured it into a successful enterprise.
Oh, how Monica admired her. She would love to be a businesswoman, but had no idea what kind of business she would start.
Working on commission in an art gallery and living on a small widow’s benefit, Monica didn’t have a lot of money, wasn’t married and didn’t have children, nor did she really have a career. In short, she was floating through life, about as aimless as a leaf drifting on the surface of a stream.
She certainly wasn’t directing her life toward any place she wanted to go.
Olivia glared at Monica. It was all too much—first her son and now her. Monica’s nerves jangled like someone plucking loose guitar strings. Olivia had been cool with her since she’d run down her son last week.
It made Monica’s heart ache because she truly liked Olivia. They’d become good friends. Monica had—dare she think it?—begun to see Olivia as a mother figure.
Now the relationship suffered because of Monica’s flawed decisions on Friday night. Monica couldn’t be more grateful to Olivia for giving her a job, for showing faith in her, but Olivia had also gifted her with friendship...only to now withdraw it.
It hurt.
Monica stifled her longing for things to be normal. She had loved spending time with Olivia on their monthly spa days. She would secretly pretend she had a mom she could hang out with.
The sadness of that loss overwhelmed her. It left a heaviness in her heart more burdensome than the guilt she felt when she was with Noah. She wanted her affectionate relationship with Olivia back. She turned away to surreptitiously wipe her damp eyes.
Struggling to make amends, she said, “I’m sorry I’m late, Olivia.”
“How did it go in court yesterday?” Olivia asked, her tone too cold for Monica’s liking. “Everything okay?”
“I have to perform two hundred hours of community service.”
Monica straightened a painting. She genuinely loved the shop and the art they sold. A little more challenge in her job wouldn’t hurt, but at least this brought in a paycheck. “My lawyer plea-bargained down from a driving with ability impaired to a wet reckless.”
Olivia’s mouth thinned. She didn’t like the break Monica’s lawyer had managed to negotiate any better than Noah had, but then she was a mother bear concerned for her cub. Monica just wished Mama Bear wasn’t also her boss.
“Community service?” Olivia asked. “There’s nothing like that available in Accord. Where do you have to go? Denver?”
“Noah’s farm. I have to grow plants.”
A mean little smile tugged at the corners of Olivia’s mouth. “You have to farm?”
Oh, dear. It looked like Olivia was going to enjoy Monica’s discomfort just as much as Noah. “I don’t know a thing about farming and now I have to help Noah grow his vegetables. Yes. I have to farm.”
Olivia’s glance took in the sleeveless sage linen dress and the rose pumps Monica had donned in a hurry a few minutes ago.
“Good luck.” The hard edge of Olivia’s voice saddened Monica even while she tried to cut Olivia some slack.
“I was already there this morning pulling up plants instead of weeds. They all look the same to me. Noah was angry.” Monica crossed her arms and grasped her elbows. She knew she sounded unhappy, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. What had the judge been thinking? She needed to talk to Daddy, to find out why he’d groaned when Judge Easton had entered the courtroom yesterday morning. Unless Monica had it wrong, there was history between the two of them—and now she was paying the price.
Olivia’s
