A Husband of Her Own

“That’s what you hold against me?” he cried. “That I moved in across the street from you? How the hell was I supposed to help that? I was eight years old, for crying out loud.”

She hadn’t really meant what she’d said, of course. He hadn’t ruined her life by moving in across the street. He’d ruined her life by being everything her father had ever wanted. But trying to explain that would sound equally ridiculous. She was thirty-one. Her father’s preference for Josh shouldn’t bother her anymore.

“Never mind,” she said. “Are you planning on staying or what? Because you don’t have to, you know. I’ll just tell my father that you chickened out at the last minute. I’m sure he’ll understand.”

“Chickened out?” he repeated.

She smiled sweetly. “Isn’t that what you’d call it?”

“I’d call it an issue of trust. The thought of you standing over me with a sharp instrument strikes fear into my heart.”

“Oh, come on. You’d have to have a heart for that,” she said, and thought she heard Mona snicker.

Josh rubbed his chin as though she’d just delivered a nice left hook. “You certainly haven’t changed much,” he said sulkily.

“You have good reason to worry,” Mona muttered from where she was sitting at her station up front, filing Nancy’s nails.

“I bet five bucks he won’t stay,” Nancy piped up.

“I’ll put ten on that,” Katie said.

“What’s the bet?” Mrs. Vanderwall had been too busy trying to straighten her girdle so she could sit down to pay much attention to what was going on around her. At eighty, her hearing wasn’t what it used to be. Katie started to explain, but she only got partway before Mrs. Vanderwall waved her to silence. “Never mind the rest. It doesn’t matter. No one’s a match for Rebecca. I’ll put twenty on her getting the best of him.”

Rebecca wasn’t flattered by this show of support. She wasn’t that much of an ogre, was she? Sure, she’d lost her temper a few times in the past. Once she’d blackened Gilbert Tripp’s eye when he backed into Delaney’s car, but he’d deserved it. He’d tried to drive away before she and Delaney could get out of the Quick Mart, and when Rebecca finally chased him down, he’d blamed the accident on Delaney’s parking. Their argument had quickly escalated and the next thing Rebecca knew…well, she’d let one fly. But she didn’t doubt Josh would have done the same!

“Forget it,” she told him. “I’m not out to get the best of you or anyone else. Just go down to the barbershop and buy yourself a haircut.” Her voice had gone flat. She cleared her throat and tried to put more inflection in it. “I’ll tell my father you stopped by and everything went fine, okay?”

He stared at her for a long moment without speaking. She lifted her chin and threw back her shoulders, praying he wouldn’t realize that her friends’ banter had stung. She was tired of being the bad guy, tired of being a laughingstock. But as long as she remained in Dundee, there was no escaping her reputation.

“Okay?” she repeated when he didn’t respond.

He started to move. She thought he was going to swing around and head right back out, onto the street. But he didn’t. He strode across the salon, doffed his hat and planted himself decisively in her chair.

“You’ve probably got a big day,” he said. “We’d better get busy.”

Rebecca blinked at him. She could’ve sworn he’d decided to stay for her sake, to silence the others. But that couldn’t be. That would take intuition and an unusual degree of sensitivity, and this was Josh Hill. The Testosterone King. The boy who wrote, “For a good time call anyone but Rebecca Wells,” on the bathroom wall at the A&W, starting a whole section of graffiti about her, none of which was very flattering. His staying probably had more to do with proving to everyone else in Hair And Now that they’d been foolish to bet against him—why would anyone do that? He was the great Josh Hill.

The others grumbled about being wrong but finally returned to minding their own business. Rebecca nodded in acknowledgement. “Fine. It shouldn’t take long.”

Spine so rigid she was surprised it didn’t creak when she moved, she draped her cape over his broad shoulders, covering his polo shirt and most of his blue jeans. As she fastened the collar, her fingers brushed his neck and he swiveled to look up at her.

She raised her hands to show him she held nothing sharp. “Just fastening the cape,” she said.

“I didn’t think you were going to stab me,” he grumbled.

“You jumped.” What else would make him react that way? She’d barely touched him. In any case, she wasn’t going to argue the point. She was too determined to get through this as quickly as possible.

“What would you like me to do for you?” she asked.

“Do for me?” he repeated as though the question somehow surprised him.

“To your hair.” Stepping on the lever, she lowered the chair as far as possible. She was tall, but he was several inches taller. She needed to accommodate his height. “What would you like me to do to your hair?”

“Just give it a trim.”

“Okay. You don’t want me to shampoo it, though, right?” She reached for her spray bottle. “We’ll be done much faster if we just wet the hair down and go from there.”

He leaned away from her. “Isn’t shampooing included in the price of a cut?”

Rebecca hesitated, spray bottle in hand. “Um, yes, it is, but…I’ll give you a discount. A good discount.”

“No, thanks,” he said. “I’ll have the full treatment.”

“O-k-a-y. Sure.” She glanced from Katie to Mona to see if they’d done something to challenge him, thereby causing him to prolong the agony, but they seemed engaged with their own clients.

Setting the spray bottle on top of the rolling cart that held most of her supplies, she took a deep breath. She’d shampooed hundreds of people without a second thought. But she didn’t want to shampoo Josh. “Then…uh…you need to come back here with me.”

He stood and followed her past the short row of old-fashioned hairdryers, shelves of products and racks of hair magazines to the sinks at the very back of the salon. Waving him into a cushioned seat on her left, she levered the adjustable black vinyl chair so he could lie with his neck resting comfortably in the crook of the porcelain bowl.

Mostly decorated in pink, with a wide stripe to the wallpaper and a black canvas awning over the door, the salon was about as feminine a place as Rebecca could imagine. It smelled of bleach and acrylic and perm solution—a virtual self-improvement paradise into which few men ever ventured. Until recently, anyway. With the growing popularity of spiked, bleached hair among young boys, Rebecca’s male clientele had grown sharply.

But Josh looked out of place all the same. His body was too big for the chair, which had been designed twenty years earlier for women, and his well-scuffed boots and the slightly frayed hem of his jeans provided a notable contrast to the muumuus and cotton print dresses Rebecca generally saw sticking out from below her plastic cape. He smelled different, too. More…evocative. A blend of warm skin, leather and soap reminded her of that night a year ago last summer when she and Josh were dancing at the Honky Tonk. While they were swaying to the music, he’d put his hands possessively on the small of her back, drawing her closer, and then he’d kissed her neck just below the earlobe….

A shiver ran down Rebecca’s spine, and she quickly forced her mind back to the present. She didn’t want to think about that. That night was an exception, the only exception, to the way she normally felt about Josh. And it made her nervous again.

“Remember when you taped up that Playboy centerfold inside my locker our senior year?” he asked, out of nowhere.

His comment took Rebecca off guard. She didn’t know how to respond. If she said no, they’d both know she was lying. If she said yes, they’d be back on adversarial ground. “It was just a joke,” she said, mumbling slightly in hopes he wouldn’t pursue the conversation.

“Someone reported me to the principal before I even knew it was there and I got suspended for three days.”

She adjusted the water temperature. “Three days? That’s not so long.”

“It was during finals,” he added dryly.

She stretched her neck, hoping he wasn’t going to recount their other shared experiences. “Those were crazy days.”

He made a face. “That’s all you have to say?”

“What do you want? An apology? It was years ago.”

“Thanks for the sincere remorse.”

Remorse. Rebecca was too apprehensive for remorse. The prospect of touching her childhood nemesis was causing an odd reaction in her body. She was trying to convince herself it was revulsion, but sweaty palms and a racing heart weren’t the most indicative symptoms.

Wetting his head, she poured shampoo into her palm and began to work it through his hair. She told herself to stick to the same routine she gave all her clients—a thorough ten-minute head massage, followed by a gentle raking of the scalp with her nails. She was a professional, after all, with a background in massage therapy, and he was paying for her services.

But somehow she couldn’t maintain any emotional distance. Having Josh right there, so accessible and pliable beneath her hands, changed the whole experience.