additional pa renting skills.”
“Wait a second,” Curt said, a light bulb suddenly going on in those brown eyes of his as he leaned forward to stare at her as if seeing her—really seeing her—for the first time. “I know who you are.”
Oh, no, not now. Not here. She wasn’t ready for this yet.
“You’re Jessie the Brain!” he said triumphantly. “We went to high school together.”
Chapter 2
“YOUR HAIR WAS LONGER then, but you gave me the same speech about being ‘willing to learn’ when you offered to tutor me in Geometry.”
Jessie the Brain. Curt couldn’t believe that she was back in his life again after all this time. The last time he’d seen her was…
He frowned. It had to have been that night before he’d left to join the marines. The memory was blurred by his having indulged in way too much alcohol that night. He recalled them bumping into each other and his surprise—first that he’d asked her to join him for a joy ride in his old red Mustang, second that she’d actually accepted, and third that he’d let her drive his car. They’d ended up in some park some where, and he’d kissed her…several times.
What happened after that wasn’t clear. But the next morning, he’d woken with the worst hangover of his life. His temples throbbed just thinking about it.
As for the vague sense of guilt he was feeling, no doubt it was a result of the fact that he’d never gotten in touch with her again after that night.
At the time, he’d briefly wondered how far their making out had gone. Had he reached first base…or third? There was little to no chance he’d hit a home run and gone all the way—not with Jessie the Brain. She was a “good” girl, pure and demure. His total opposite.
Maybe this explained why she’d stared at him with such underlying hostility earlier. He’d probably made an idiot of himself that night, and she’d put him in his place when he’d tried to seduce her.
He looked at her with new eyes. Her honey-blond hair used to be longer, almost down to her waist. It was barely shoulder-length now, in one of those layered cuts that women these days seemed to favor. A hazy memory of him threading his fingers through her long silky hair flashed through his mind with the abruptness of an exploding land mine. He blinked at the unexpected vision. But when he tried to recapture the image, it was gone.
She had cat’s eyes, tipped up at the outside corners. Leaning forward, he saw that they were an intense shade of green that reminded him of the jungles in the Philippines. Unless she was wearing colored contact lenses?
He cynically reminded himself that women had various ways of camouflaging them selves into something they weren’t—everything from nose jobs to breast implants.
His gaze slid down her body with quick efficiency. She was wearing a pair of khaki slacks and a pink shirt. Nothing sexy there. Very practical attire. But beneath that no-nonsense outfit she had a Marilyn Monroe kind of figure that wasn’t popular on TV and movies these days, but which any man preferred over skinny orphan looks. He’d seen too many skinny orphans during his tours of duty overseas. Their grateful looks and shy smiles when he’d handed out candy bars that he’d always kept in his pocket still haunted his sleep some nights.
Jessie the Brain wasn’t the type of woman who’d haunt a man’s dreams. There wasn’t anything about her that really stood out, aside from those catlike green eyes. But there was some thing about her just the same, an inner strength combined with a warm heart.
Here was a woman who faced life head-on. Here was a woman not im pressed by his uniform. Here was a woman staring at him with disapproval and dismay—the kind of look he’d gotten from a majority of the adults in his teenage life. Not a look he’d received lately.
“It’s been a long time,” he murmured.
She shrugged.
“Jessie the Brain.” He shook his head, as if still unable to believe they’d run into each other again. “After all these years. Your hair is shorter now.”
Her hand flew up to her hair as if guilty at being caught. “So’s yours,” she shot back.
He nodded with a sense of sat is faction. Oh, yeah, she was definitely the kind of woman who could hold her own.
“But getting back to your daughter.” Her voice held a no-nonsense tone that made him smile for some reason. “I really do think it would be best if you took one of the pa renting classes at the community college—”
He cut off her words with a sharp wave of his hand. “You already said you’d be willing to work with me. There’s no backing out now.”
“I wasn’t trying to back out.”
His look challenged her claim.
“Okay, maybe I was,” she admitted. “Because I’m not at all sure of your commitment to learning and to working with me.”
His narrowed gaze had made new recruits quiver in their boots. “You’re questioning my commitment?”
She showed no signs of being intimidated. Instead she gave him a narrow-eyed gaze of her own. “Do you really think you can hack Daddy Boot Camp?”
“Just try me,” he said.
“If I think for one minute you’re slacking off—”
“I’m a marine,” he interrupted her. “We don’t slack off.”
“Fine.” She grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled down a few things before handing it to him. “Read these books by the weekend. I’m busy on Saturday, but I have Sunday free. I’ll put you through some pa renting exercises then.”
“Out standing. Your place or mine?”
His place or hers? Which would be the lesser of two evils, Jessica wondered. Having him invade her domain, or venturing into enemy territory by going to his place? The practical side of her pointed out that if she went to his place, she’d have a chance to see for herself where Blue lived and under what conditions.
“Your place,” she said crisply.
“Excellent.” His voice was just as crisp. Frowning, he said, “Do you keep in touch with anyone from the old neighborhood?”
She didn’t want to talk about the past, but his question was so innocuous that it would raise a red flag if she didn’t reply. “Only Amy Weissman. I wasn’t exactly the most popular girl in school.” She was pleased to hear that her voice sounded matter-of-fact and dis played no bitterness.
Instead of commenting on her statement, Curt said, “So I guess you went on to college just like you planned? The University of Illinois was it?”
She was surprised he’d remembered that much. “That’s right.” She didn’t want to talk about the past any longer. It was a part of her life she’d put into a sealed box and stored in a distant part of mind. That had worked until this man had walked back into her life. “But that was a very long time ago.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “It was.”
He gave her no indication that he remembered what they’d shared, that night of passion in the back seat of his car. He’d probably had so many women since then that he couldn’t keep track of them all, she thought tartly. What had been a momentous occasion for her had clearly been nothing much to him.
That all-too-familiar stab of pain pierced her heart, as it had when he’d first walked into her class room.
Get over it, she fiercely ordered herself. Keep your mind on the goal here, make things better for Blue. The pain lessened, and she gazed at him without revealing her inner turmoil.
“I’ll see you on Sunday then,” she said in a dismissive voice.
“You certainly