Barely Mistaken

Based on Beth’s earlier comments, Olivia had known her friend wasn’t wild about Adam, but he didn’t deserve this. “That’s not fair. He’s been a tremendous help in raising money for the new addition to the library. And he’s responsible for my invitation to the costume ball at the country club tonight. I should manage to raise another couple of hundred.” And I think he could be The One. Now wasn’t the time to break that particular news.

Beth snapped her fingers. “That’s it. You’re besotted ’cause he helped you fund-raise. You’d like Freddie Krueger if he helped you with your library.”

“You make me sound like the village idiot. It’s true, I appreciate Adam’s help with the library. Do you know what a difference that new kids’ section is going to make—”

“Sure I do, ’cause you’ve told me.” Beth cut her off before she could really wind up on her favorite topic. “Okay, how about this? I caught him admiring his reflection in his office window when I went to make the deposit at the bank yesterday.” Beth wrinkled her entire face in disgust.

“So?” Olivia heard the defensive note in her own voice.

“He was so pleased with himself. I bet he got a stiffy.”

“What?” Even irrepressible Beth hadn’t just uttered what Olivia thought she had. Had she?

Beth tossed her a defiant look. “You heard me, girlfriend. A stiffy. A woody. A boner. Take your pick.”

Ewww. She could live without this level of bluntness. “If you’re going to be disgusting, I’m not listening.”

Beth threw up her hands in surrender. “You’re warped, Olivia.”

Amusement edged out insult. “That’s it. My life has reached an all-time low when you call me warped.”

“You’re dating the guy, and you think his stiffy is disgusting.”

“No. You talking about it is disgusting. He was probably checking his tie or something.” Olivia had noticed him watching himself in the mirror once when they were out to dinner. “He’s very particular about his appearance.” She shifted Hortense to a spot on the bed beside her and plucked the new bottle of nail polish off her nightstand. A lifetime of insecurities reared their ugly heads. “I wonder sometimes why he goes out with me.”

Olivia began to paint her toenails with meticulous care.

“Are you nuts? You’re smart, funny, successful, attractive—in a severely understated kind of way. And you’re ten times the person he is.”

She paused and raised a brow in Beth’s direction. Beth was just a wee bit prone to exaggeration when she climbed on a soapbox. Olivia couldn’t resist teasing her. “Ten times? Really?”

Beth scowled at her. “Who was the valedictorian of our graduating class?”

Olivia shrugged and resumed painting her nails. “Who never had a date to the Senior Prom?”

“Who started the local literacy drive?” Beth fired back at her.

“Who was asked out in high school by Deke Richards because he thought her brother could sneak him some beer?”

“Olivia, you’ve got to move past this ‘wrong side of the tracks’ label you’ve given yourself.”

“Come on, Beth. My family provides plenty of fodder for the gossip mill. And I didn’t have to label myself. My Daughter-of-the-Town-Drunk title was inherited.” Along with the faint wash of shame so familiar she wore it like a second skin. Caste systems thrived in small towns.

At times she craved the anonymity and the freedom of living where her background didn’t define her. But leaving seemed tantamount to conceding defeat—accepting her title and slinking away in shame. No, she’d vowed long ago to stay and prove a Cooper could contribute more to the community than bail money.

Beth shared a rueful grimace and crossed her legs Indian style. “Speaking of your family, I heard Marty got hauled in night before last for drunk-and-disorderly.”

Olivia sighed in resignation. “Yep. That’s my brother, upholding the Cooper family tradition in jail. They even put him in Daddy’s old cell. Daddy passed down his spot in the tank.” She rolled her eyes. “It does a gal proud.”

“And you bailed him out.”

“Of course I did. And then I took him home to Darlene and dared her to let him out of the house again.” Her sister-in-law had promised to keep her brother, king of the Wild Turkey, home. She shook her head. “Marty’s got a good heart and a good mind, when he isn’t pickled. But I swear, he spends half of his life drunk and the other half sobering up.”

“What about Tammy? Did she really leave Earl for Tim? That girl changes husbands almost as often as I change my underwear.”

Olivia shrugged, out of touch with her sister’s latest antics. Tammy often made unwise decisions, in Olivia’s opinion. Had she left her third husband for his best friend? “I don’t know. Likely as not. She wouldn’t tell me because she knows I consider that a crazy way to live.”

“You, Olivia, are living proof that gene mutation exists. I’d even theorize adoption, but you look like them. Even if you don’t act like them. I’ve never seen one family member so different from the rest.”

Olivia’s mother swore she’d known her youngest was different from the moment she’d popped out. While she’d named her two other children after country music stars Tammy Wynette and Marty Robbins, her third child didn’t seem like a Loretta or Tanya or even Patsy. Hence, she’d named her youngest Olivia, in honor of one of her favorite soap stars. Olivia still clearly recalled her mother spending hours in front of the TV with her soap operas. Of course that was before Martha Rae Watson Cooper abandoned her family in search of greener pastures. Olivia had neither seen nor heard from her mother in twenty-three years.

God knows, Olivia loved the only family she had left—Pops, Marty and Tammy—but they exasperated her. Frustrated her. She’d spent a lifetime trying to rise above her birthright as the white-trash daughter of the town drunk. She often resented the Cooper escapades that were the talk of the town.

Was she so different from them? Every once in a while she gave in to impulse and blew off steam—a skydiving excursion, cold-cocking slimy Bennie Krepps when he tormented a stray cat, attending Willette Tuttle’s bachelorette party at a male strip club, a naked midnight dance in a soft summer rain in the privacy of her backyard. If she ever really loosened the tight rein she held herself on, would she make the same poor decisions as the rest of her family?

Maybe she was a shallow person, maybe even a bad person, but the fact that a respected pillar of the community had chosen to date her carried its own brand of validation.

Olivia glanced around her bedroom. Like the rest of her house, it was small, but tastefully furnished. She’d hated the shack she’d grown up in, that her father still lived in. Even as a child, she’d clipped magazine photos of quietly elegant rooms, determined to have a place like that one day, determined to have a life like that one day. Adam, vice president of his family’s bank, fit the life she wanted.

She wasn’t a social climber. Not by a long shot. It wasn’t about fancy cars or diamonds. No, Adam offered the respectability she so craved.

Olivia recapped the nail polish and waved her feet in the air to dry her toenails. “I’m sorry you don’t like Adam. We’re well-suited.”

“Humph.” Beth snorted. “If it were me, I’d be barking up the other side of that family tree. Give me Luke over Adam any day. Talk about another genetic curveball. I’ve never seen two brothers who looked so much alike but were so different.”

“No kidding.” Olivia suppressed a faint shudder. Luke, the black sheep of the Rutledge family, disquieted her. Worse, he shook her up. Mercifully, he lived in the next county over. He and Adam moved in different circles. And although Luke’s company had won the contract for the new library wing, he was out of state, so his partner was heading up the project.

“What’ve you got against poor Luke? What’d he ever do to you?” Beth turned the tables on her.

Memory of “poor” Luke’s kiss from thirteen years ago assaulted her. Had he acted on a dare? A joke? She still had no clue as to why he’d kissed her. All she’d known was that kiss proved true every unkind word she’d overheard between Amy, Lucy and Melissa. She’d run as if Beelzebub himself—actually Luke wasn’t far off in her book—had cornered her. She’d never ever mentioned it to anyone. And she wasn’t about to confess now. That kiss had haunted her for years. More than once she’d dreamed of Luke and that kiss, only to awaken in the grip of restless discontent.

“Luke’s never done anything to me. He’s just not my type.” A shiver chased down her spine. Damnation. Simply speaking his name set her nerves on edge.

Olivia jumped off the bed and walked over to the dresser, the hardwood floor cool beneath her bare feet. She shifted a stack of mail off her jewelry box and opened it to search for a pair of earrings for the evening. “I can’t understand someone born into privilege and opportunity, squandering it by thumbing their nose.” She plucked out a pair of amethyst stones in a dangling filigree setting from among the jumble of earrings and held them up.

Beth nodded her approval and went back to the subject of Luke. “Luke’s a rebel, all right. I think he was born with a streak of wild in him. The thing about those bad-ass boys, when they finally settle down, they make good husbands. Guess it’s ’cause they’ve sown all those wild oats.” Beth shook her head, her eyes dancing with devilment. “And I’d say Luke’s almost sown himself out. If I hadn’t already invested five years of marriage in Chuck and almost had him trained…”

Olivia laughed, eager to latch on to a topic other than Luke Rutledge. “Yuh-huh. You are such big talk. Chuck is a saint.” Well, perhaps Beth’s husband wasn’t a saint, but he was a very nice man, which was close to one and the same these days. “Not to mention the father of your child.”

Beth, nine weeks pregnant, grinned all over herself while she rubbed her tummy. “Well, there is that little matter.”

Olivia pulled out the satin-and-lace merry widow she’d mail-ordered on a whim. She unfolded the undergarment and held it up in front of Beth.

“Ooooeeee. Adam is a lucky man.” She plucked the sexy lingerie from Olivia and turned it one way and then another. “Hot. Definitely very hot. You go, baby.”

“You don’t think it’s too…” Olivia pursed her lips and pretended to evaluate the underwear “…let’s see, how did you describe my wardrobe earlier…oh, yes, prudish?” Actually, she still couldn’t quite see herself in such a sexy getup.

“This,” Beth dangled the satin and lace from one finger, “is a start. A step in the right direction.”