and streetlights, even when she had all the time in the world, gaily waving her beer can at every policeman she passed.
And boys…she could have had anyone in the school, from the greenest freshman to the married principal himself. But she had been picky. She wanted only the best. And only the ones who were already taken.
Like Trent.
Susannah tapped her pen against the calendar blotter. Finally, she stood up, unable to resist temptation any longer. Forget playing it cool. She had to see Missy for herself.
It would probably make her feel much better. Surely another decade of bleaching, boozing and bed-hopping had taken its toll. If there was any justice in this world, Missy probably looked a rode-hard fifty, and that would be a sight for sore eyes.
Susannah made her way to Restorative, passing from the relative quiet of the administrative wing to the noisy corridors of the clinic. Though she hurried, it was the lunch hour, and the trail was a bit of an obstacle course.
When she reached the small room where special restorative nurses were feeding the patients, she realized she was too late. The volunteers didn’t hang out in any of the working areas. They would be intruding. They just stood to the side, observed quietly, then moved to a classroom for further discussion.
Darn. Susannah had lost her chance to do this the easy way. Of course, as the coordinator of volunteers, she had every right to poke her head into the training classroom and summon Missy Snowdon up for inspection any time she wanted. She had the power around here, not Missy. For once.
But she didn’t want to use it. What would be the point? If she treated Missy badly, it would only prove that she still held a grudge, which would make her look pathetic. Their troubles had happened nearly eleven years ago, practically in another lifetime. They’d barely been out of high school, for heaven’s sake. High school dramas had no power here, in the real world.
Just when she almost had herself convinced, a low, throaty laugh came from the west wing. The sound went right through her brave facade, like a dart busting a cheap balloon.
It had to be Missy. Because Susannah suddenly felt insecure and jealous and angry as hell.
She looked down the hall and saw a blonde woman moving toward her, flanked by two handsome, white-coated doctors who bent over her as solicitously as they would any critically ill patient in their care.
Susannah instinctively turned her head away, pretending to read a flyer at the nurses’ station while the trio floated by, still laughing. She caught only a momentary flash of Missy, but that was enough.
Damn it. The woman was more beautiful than ever, still a princess in her candy-pink pinafore, still sashaying her hips as if she walked to secret salsa music. Still flashing the wide white smile that dazzled quarterbacks, traffic cops, algebra teachers—and apparently surgeons—into instant enslavement.
“Ms. Everly?” Evelyn Marks, the charge nurse, had returned to the station and sounded surprised to see Susannah standing there. That made sense. This wasn’t Susannah’s part of the building.
“Sorry…I mean Mrs. Maxwell.” Evelyn smiled. “I guess I gotta get used to that.”
Susannah looked up just in time to see Missy and the doctors disappear onto the elevator. She turned to the nurse, who had been a casual friend for years. “Me, too, Evvy.”
Evelyn, a bouncy, round mother of six daughters, three of whom were also nurses at the center, grinned. “You look tired. How’s married life treating you?”
Susannah hesitated. But, like everyone else, Evvy knew the situation, so there was no point pretending to be a dewy-eyed bride.
“Well, it’s…tricky,” she admitted, opting for at least a degree of honesty.
Evvy laughed, but Susannah’s ears were tuned to the tinkling sound as the elevator doors slid shut.
Missy was gone. For now. But even as Susannah breathed a sigh of relief, she knew she’d been a coward. And it was only a temporary reprieve. Sooner or later, she’d encounter her old nemesis face-to-face.
More importantly, so would Trent.
* * *
TRENT HAD his bulky work gloves on, and he’d just arranged the chain saw, pole pruner and baling cord under one arm and the old wooden paint ladder under the other, so naturally his cell phone chose that moment to ring.
He glanced back into the garage, where Zander was working on a broken hedge clipper.
The old man laughed. “Women,” he said with a snort. “They have the devil’s timing, don’t they? Want me to tell Trixie Mae Sexpot to get lost for you?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
Trent wasn’t expecting any calls from females, but he stood still as Zander reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the phone. He would have let it go to voice mail, except that he was stealing these last few hours of daylight from the Double C and using them to cut back the worst dead branches on Everly’s old oaks. If the Double C had a problem, he was honor bound to deal with it.
“Trent Maxwell’s phone. Zander Hobbin speaking.” Zander listened for a few seconds, during which his teasing expression soured into one of real annoyance. “No, Maxy isn’t available. You can tell by how he didn’t answer the phone. See how that works, sugar?”
Trent felt his eyebrows draw together, and the chain saw slipped an inch under his elbow. Maxy? No one called him Maxy. Not anymore. Not since high school. And the only one who’d done it, even then, was…
“Who?” Zander cut a strange look toward Trent. “Missy Snowdon? Oh, you bet I remember you. Sure, I’ll tell him. But just between you and me, don’t hold your breath on that callback. Trent got married last week. You been gone a long time, so I’ll just assume you didn’t know, or you wouldn’t have called, right?”
Trent could hear the high, quick voice still talking on the other end as Zander snapped the phone shut. The older man glowered at Trent from under his bushy eyebrows.
“I heard that little minx was back in town, but I didn’t think she’d have the nerve to call you, just like that.” He ran his upper lip through his teeth, as if he were trying to comb the mustache that tickled down over it. “Unless…you didn’t make the first move, did you, son?”
Trent raised one eyebrow. That tone might have worked if Trent had been ten and had got caught with his hands in the wrong cookie jar, but not now. Trent wouldn’t have telephoned Missy Snowdon if she were the last woman surviving this side of Saturn, but frankly, who he called or didn’t call wasn’t Zander’s business.
“What’s wrong, Zan? She is pretty hot. You jealous?”
Zander started to bluster, but he must have noticed the tucked corner of Trent’s grin, because he ended up grunting and shaking his head.
“Jealous about Missy Snowdon? Hell, no. I wouldn’t dream of going barefoot into that particular mud puddle.” He slipped the phone back into Trent’s jacket with two fingers, as if Missy Snowdon had infected it with something disgusting. “And neither should you, my friend. Neither should you.”
“I don’t go barefoot anywhere.” Trent smiled. “Your generation might not have learned that, but ours has.”
Zander grunted again, clearly aware he wasn’t going to get anything but sardonic deflections, no matter how long he probed. Trent had mastered this technique in grade school. He could bat away Zander’s curiosity all day long.
The two men were friendly colleagues, as managers of adjacent spreads tended to be, but they weren’t confidants. Forty years stood between them, and so did Trent’s natural preference for emotional privacy.
Zander slapped his hands against his overalls, raising dust in the sunbeams that angled into the dim garage like transparent gold two-by-fours. “So go on, then. Light’s fading. Don’t you have some limbs to cut?”