Girl Trouble

She looked as though any number of sizzling retorts were on the tip of her tongue. He watched her swallow them as four more people came through the door. “Fine,” she snapped. “Just don’t overdo it your first day, I’d hate to see you hurt yourself.”

“Come off it, Lori,” he said softly. “You’d like to see me carried out on a stretcher.”

“No, I wouldn’t, it would ruin my reputation as a teacher,” she said with a sweet and patently insincere smile. “Enjoy, as they say.”

He watched her walk away. Today her top was green, her shorts navy. Both were shiny and both clung to all the right places. She didn’t look like the mother of two children. Cade positioned himself in the back row and prepared to pay attention.

A considerable number of people had gathered in the room by now. At the last minute a middle-aged woman rushed in the door and headed for the back row. Inwardly Cade flinched; it was the woman from the studio, the one where he’d seen the photo of Lori and her two daughters. The woman caught sight of him, gave him a pungent glance liberally dosed with suspicion, and pointedly moved forward a row. This, at any other time, might have amused Cade.

The class began. Very soon Cade concluded that Lori was very good at her job, no matter what her reasons were for having it. She referred to people by name, she kept up a running stream of encouragement and banter, and she insisted on good technique. The sequence of moves was extremely vigorous, disabusing him of any notions that aerobics was for sissies. The others in the class were accustomed to these moves; Cade was not. More than once he found his arms and legs at odds not only with each other but also with the smoothly orchestrated steps everyone else was taking. Including the big blond student called Tory, stationed once more in the very front row. He, Cade, had been smart to stay in the back, he thought irritably.

He found himself sidestepping to the left and doing bicep curls while the rest were stepping to the right and had switched to a rapid overhead move Lori was calling the arrowhead. Wishing he had half his father’s coordination—for Dan MacInnis had been an inventive dancer—Cade struggled on. It wasn’t the moment for Lori to look down at him, give him another sweet smile and say in a carrying voice, “Get your legs doing the moves first. The arms can follow. And you can always march on the spot if this is too strenuous.”

If sweat hadn’t been dripping into his eyes—he hadn’t worn his sweatband figuring he wouldn’t need it for a mere aerobics class—and if he hadn’t been determined to accomplish what students who were roughly half his age were doing with ease, Cade might have thought of a witty retort.

Just as he was getting the hang of what she was up to, Lori switched to something called the grapevine. “Keep your hips angled forward, not sideways...like this,” she called out. Cade looked at her hips, at their supple movements and delectable roundness, and stumbled out of step again.

He thoroughly disliked feeling like an uncoordinated klutz, he who rather prided himself on his body’s fitness. He scowled at Lori as his arms alternated triceps and lateral raises, thinking meanly, I bet you can’t bench press 250 pounds, lady.

Pretty childish. About Liddy’s level. Even if it does make you feel better.

She was jogging now, jogging as lightly as if she had springs in her heels, carrying the class along on her own energy and cajoling them in a way they plainly loved. This was not the woman he remembered. She wouldn’t have lowered herself to such a mundane task, let alone enjoyed it.

Some of the stretches in the last ten minutes used muscles Cade hadn’t even known existed; by the time the class ended, his hair was clinging wetly to his scalp and he was in dire need of a shower.

As Lori ran to the back of the room to get her tapes, he walked over to her. There were patches of sweat on her green top both down her spine and under her breasts; he thought they were one of the most erotic things he’d ever seen. He said truthfully, “I sure know I’ve been exercising. You run a good class—thanks.”

“It’s my job,” she said dismissively.

“Got time for a coffee? Or a sandwich in the cafeteria?”

“No. Thanks.”

It was time to make his move, the one he’d rehearsed on the way over. “Lori,” Cade said, taking her by the elbow as she would have walked past him, “it must be as obvious to you as it is to me that you and I need to have a talk.”

Her lashes flickered. She said in a rush, “I have only one thing to say, Cade...although it is important. I’m truly sorry that all those years ago I was partially responsible for getting you fired. Truly sorry. Now let go of me, please.”

“Partially?” he flashed. “That’s not the way I see it.”

“Partially. That’s what I said.”

“Let’s not get hung up on semantics—you got me fired.”

“It was more complicated than that.”

“It was very simple. You told Daddy and Daddy fired me.”

“How very convenient for you that rich rhymes with bitch!” Refusing to drop her gaze, Lori yanked at her arm. “Let go! Because that’s it. There’s nothing else we could possibly need to discuss.”

He said in a level voice, “Why did you look so frightened the first time you saw me?”

“Cade,” Lori said, “the past is the past. Dead, gone and buried. I’ve never believed in reincarnation and I’m not going to start now. I don’t want you talking to me. I don’t want you talking to my children. Have you got that straight?”

“I probably shouldn’t have said anything to Rachel and Liddy...I apologize for that.”

“I don’t see how you knew who they were.”

“Come off it—they look enough like you to be clones. Plus I saw a photo of the three of you in the window of a studio downtown. The woman who owns it was in the class this morning.”

“You mean Sally put that photo on display? I’ll have her hide for that!”

Cade didn’t want to talk about Sally. “Just answer me one question. Why are you working at a low-paying job that must get monotonous as all get-out, as well as being hard on the body, when you’ve got a rich husband and a very rich father?”

With a touch of her old haughtiness she ignored his question. “Take a hint, will you?” she retorted. “I have nothing to say to you. Not one word. If you persist in harassing me like this, I’ll lay a complaint and have you barred from the class.”

“For all your faults, you were never a coward,” he drawled, and decided the time had come to fight dirty. “Do you remember the night you threw yourself at me, Lorraine? Or have you conveniently buried that memory along with another one—the way you spoke to me at the gas pumps in August? Remember? I had a black eye, three fractured ribs and two broken fingers.”

For a moment her teeth clamped themselves to her lower lip. Her infinitely kissable lip, thought Cade, and wondered if he’d thrown away any chance of her ever speaking to him again. He hadn’t liked her using the word harass. Hadn’t liked it one bit.

“There’s no point in this!” she cried “I hate rummaging through the past, hauling stuff up that’s better left buried. We went our separate ways all those years ago—and that’s the way it still is.”

Abruptly he dropped her elbow and held out his hands; he was never fully able to remove the traces of grease ingrained in the creases of his skin from his work at the garage, and his knuckles were marred by scars and scratches. “I’m still not good enough for you, am I?” he grated. “I’m just a mechanic. A grease monkey. So far below you that you won’t even have a coffee with me in the university cafeteria.”

“That’s not—” Her eyes widened and her fingers, light as falling leaves, rested on his wrist. “Cade, what happened there?”

A jagged white scar ran from the back of his left hand to the inside of his wrist. He stared down at her fingers, feeling their warmth burn his flesh, and said flatly, “Accident on an oil rig in the North Sea. A couple of years ago. What do you care, Lori?”

She dropped her hand to her side and took a deep breath. Then she said quietly, “We’ve both got scars, haven’t we? Some outside and some in. That’s what living does to you. Please listen to me-I don’t want to hurt you and I certainly don’t look down on you. But you and I have nothing more to say to each other. You must accept that and leave me alone.”

“And where are your scars?”

“Cade...please.”

He’d always loved the shade of her irises, a color that hovered somewhere between blue and green, reminding him of the shimmering reflections along a lakeshore on a summer’s day. Right now those irises were full of appeal. He said nastily, “Very touching. You’ve learned a trick or two since I last knew you.”

She whispered, “You hate me, don’t you?”

“Now you’re beginning to get it. Can you give me any reason why I shouldn’t?”

Her face hardened. “I can’t give you anything,” she said, each word as brittle as a shard of ice.

“Ray always struck me as the kind of guy who’d be insanely jealous. Is it him you’re afraid of? That somehow he’ll find out you and I have met up again?”

An indecipherable expression crossed her features. “I’m a married woman,” she said, “that’s one—”

“Why aren’t you wearing your rings?”

“Here?” she said ironically. “The famous Cartwright diamonds? I don’t think so.”