Confessions of a Small-Town Girl

“If it’s yours, what is it doing here?”

“It wasn’t always here,” she explained, the faint ache at the back of her head making her rub there, anyway. “I’d kept it at the gristmill until I heard that some of the boys from school had started hanging out there, too. I was afraid they’d find it, so Michelle let me put it in the hiding place in her room.”

She let her hand fall, brushing back her hair on the way, and crossed her arms protectively around herself. “I’d only meant to leave it there for a while. But it fell past the ledge she’d said was in there and we couldn’t get it back out.”

For a moment, Sam said nothing. He just stood with his eyes narrowed on her decidedly pale features. The knot of hair she’d wound near the top of her head had loosened when he ripped off the cap laying on the floor. Strands of that flaxen silk fell against her cheeks. One lock tumbled over her shoulder.

Not trusting himself to touch her to push it back, not sure if he wanted to ease the disquiet in her eyes or shake her, he stepped back instead. He couldn’t believe the trouble she’d gone to to retrieve something she could have simply asked him for.

Feeling as if he’d wound up in Oz, he moved to where he’d left the book he’d found that afternoon. The thing had been between the walls dividing the rooms, along with a tube of dried up lipstick and a pile of candy bar wrappers. The only reason he hadn’t tossed it along with everything else was because of the name on its pale pink cover. Kelsey had been written out in hot pink glitter. Much of the glitter was gone, but the looping outline of the name remained visible enough.

More concerned at the time with how he was going to reroute the electrical wiring in the wall, he hadn’t considered much about his little discovery. The only thought he’d given it was to mention it to the Kelsey, who’d brought him the pie that was now nearly gone, in case it belonged to her, since she’d known the Bakers, or some relative of theirs who shared her name.

“Is this what you’re looking for?”

Kelsey’s eyes widened on what he held.

“That’s it,” she confirmed, and was halfway to him when she lifted her arm to grab it from his hand.

“Not so fast.” Remaining by a pile of panels he’d salvaged, he held the diary up out of her reach. “I want to know what’s so important about this that you’d do what you did to get it.”

The nightmare Kelsey had felt coming on began to materialize.

“It’s just a diary I kept in high school,” she insisted, minimizing drastically as she tried again to reach for it.

He held it higher.

She was inches from his bare chest. Looking past the hair shadowing his armpit and the sculpted muscles along the underside of his arm, she breathed in the scents of soap and something warm, vaguely spicy and totally, undeniably disturbing. He’d showered before he’d gone to bed.

Not sure if the heat she felt radiated from him or from a purely primitive female awareness of his big body, she swallowed hard and backed away.

“It’s nothing. Really. It’s just…sentimental stuff.”

“A lie detector would be wasted on you.”

Kelsey opened her mouth, only to close it because she couldn’t decide if she should beg or just try again to snatch for what he’d just lowered. He had an easy six inches on her, and a decidedly longer reach. Even if he hadn’t been so much taller, and bigger, the thought of getting up close and personal with the rock wall of his chest definitely gave her pause. It also added a new element to the anxiety clawing at her when he stepped back, took a small piece of wire from the toolbox and deftly popped the lock guarding the pages between their faux-leather covers.

A new form of panic surged. “What are you doing?”

“I don’t believe it’s ‘nothing,’” he said simply. “There’s something in here. Since you just took ten years off my life breaking in to get it, I want to know what it is.”

“No!”

A sense of impending humiliation made her grab for the book again. He promptly stuck it back in the air. Already in motion, she raised on tiptoe, stretching her arm the length of his, getting far closer than she would have intended had she felt she had any choice. With her breasts pressed to his chest, she reached over him, her stomach flattening against abdomen and his zipper as he edged the book farther back.

Catching her glance, one dark eyebrow slowly arched. Something dark glittered in his quicksilver eyes.

Her breath went thin. Their bodies were molded from chest to thigh. Something liquid gathered low in her belly. Totally disconcerted by the way his heat moved into her, she lowered her heels and jerked back.

Looking totally unfazed by their contact, and her desperation, he stepped back himself to move beneath the lightbulb. Opening the paperback-size book, he flipped through the pages of small, looping script.

When Sam had found the little volume, it had simply looked like a girl-thing to him. Preoccupied with his project and the constant and nagging knowledge that he had weeks to go before he could leave, it had been of no real interest at all where he was concerned.

Aware of how uneasily Kelsey watched him, he conceded that he was definitely interested now. On a number of levels. The feel of her tempting little body arched against his had seared itself into his brain. As conscious of her effect on his long-neglected libido as he was the pages themselves, he started reading a page toward the front. The date was April 23.

The math test was awful, she’d written. I think I passed it, but I was so not ready for cosigns. Tommy M kept trying to look over my shoulder. He’s such a jerk. I helped Mom in the diner before homework. Bertie Buell came in to have another slice of mom’s coconut pie. Mom says Bertie is trying to figure out her recipe and is all bent because she won’t give it to her. I told her Mrs. Buell is always bent. I overheard Carrie’s mom say its because she’s never had sex.

Seeing nothing incriminating there, he flipped to the middle.

I’m at the mill. Carrie is grounded. She sneaked off to see Rob again. Shell has to baby-sit her sister. I wish I could live here. I could fix up the old miller’s quarters and plant flowers in the window boxes. The building seems sad sitting here with nothing to do. It’s like it’s just sleeping and waiting for someone to wake it up and put it back to work.

He’d never thought of a building being sad. And just that afternoon, she’d said the house they were in seemed lonely. He had no idea what made her think such things about inanimate objects, but other than a bent toward sentiment he couldn’t begin to relate to, nothing he read accounted for why she looked as if she were holding her breath.

Or so he was thinking when he skipped forward a few more pages.

His own name stared back at him, written in a half dozen ways.

Sam. Sam MacInnes. Samuel MacInnes. KES + S?M. Mr. and Mrs. Sam MacInnes. Kelsey MacInnes.

Frowning, he turned the diary toward her. It was out of her reach, but still close enough for her to see.

“What’s this all about?”

Heat moved up Kelsey’s neck. “It’s just something teenage girls do. It doesn’t mean a thing,” she insisted, reaching for the diary again.

He immediately lifted it away, leaving her to back off once more as he flipped ahead a few pages.

“‘I dreamed about Sam again,’” he began aloud, only to pause, glance up, then start reading more slowly. “‘It was just like on The Tame and the Torrid when Jack kissed Angela’s neck and backed her into her bedroom. My heart was pounding when I woke up and my stomach felt weird. Just like when I’m around him. I’d give anything if he’d kiss me. Really kiss me. The way Jack did Angela.’”

Thinking this was definitely getting better, he turned back a few pages to see what he’d missed, skimmed over an entry that began with I haven’t seen Sam for four days, then began again when he noticed his name once more. “‘Carrie asked what I like best about Sam,’” he read. “‘I didn’t know where to start. I like his smile and the way he twists his mouth when he seems to be thinking about something. And I like his eyes and how big his shoulders are—’”

Kelsey heard him cut himself off as he read the rest of the line to himself. A moment later, he looked at her with a grin that would have stopped her heart had she not been so busy being mortified.

“You thought I had a great butt?”

He watched her press her fingertips to her forehead, and slowly shake her head as she lowered it. Her cheeks had turned a telling shade of pink. If he had to guess, he’d bet she was burning with embarrassment from the inside out.

He should put her out of her misery, he thought, and give her back her diary. It would be the decent thing to do, given how uncomfortable she clearly was. She really did look pretty thoroughly humiliated. But he wasn’t ready yet. He honestly couldn’t have imagined anything that would have so completely diverted his focus from what he’d nearly done to her.

He also couldn’t remember the last time anything had made him genuinely feel like smiling. Especially after his perusal of a few more pages revealed him to be the subject of a few more rather specific fantasies. Very specific, actually.

“I can see why you wanted this back.”

Kelsey was dying inside. “May I have it now? Please?”

She couldn’t remember exactly what else she’d written. All she knew for certain was that whatever she’d felt toward him had been fueled by a huge romantic streak—and that whatever he was now reading must be fairly provocative. His eyebrows had risen just before his mouth formed a thoughtful upside down U and he gave what looked very much like an approving nod.

She noticed, too, that the tension had left his face, allowing his smile to reach his eyes when he finally looked to where she stood wishing she could evaporate.