Wendy Warren – Do You Take This Baby? (страница 7)

Elyse had already hinted that she’d traded on his name to get a friend of hers from college to cover the wedding for The Oregonian. Ethan didn’t come home to Thunder Ridge often, and when he did he valued his privacy, but he’d figured he could grin and bear Elyse’s desire for a taste of celebrity. That, however, was before the Department of Human Services had called to tell him he was about to become the guardian of one very tiny baby.

“This is where we’re going to dance!” Vivian pulled her sister to the large wood-floored square in the middle of the room. The girls began to spin, watching their skirts swirl around their legs. Cute.

“Come twirl with us, Auntie Gem,” Vivian invited. “It’s easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy!”

“Twirl!” her sister echoed.

Ethan looked at Gemma. As long as he’d known her, she’d been serious, studious, responsible. Not exactly the twirling type. Smart in a way he could never be. He’d been at the Goulds’ once, hanging out with Scott and Elyse, when Gemma and a friend of hers were studying for an English exam. He’d barely known what she was talking about, but listening to the conversation, he’d felt a pang of envy and a yearning so deep he’d made some smart-ass comment to Scott just to cover his discomfort.

Having a friend like her would have been impractical. Impossible. They’d had zero in common. And then Elyse had convinced him to ask her to the homecoming dance. He’d been a sophomore, already making a name for himself on the football team, and she’d been a senior. Elyse had insisted that Gemma needed to attend at least one high school dance before she graduated. He remembered thinking how wrong Elyse was, how bored Gemma was bound to be, especially if a bonehead like him accompanied her.

“Are you going to twirl?” he asked now, nodding to the spinning twins. Gemma might not be interested in dancing, but her skirt was made for it. Sea-foam green with alternating sections of lace from the knees down, it flirted with her legs when she walked. Her silky top was deep purple, and on her very nice feet were coral-colored shoes with just a couple of straps. All those colors might have clashed on someone else. On Gemma, the outfit looked artsy. Joyful. Suddenly it occurred to him that her clothes had always been the least serious thing about her. “I like the way you dress.” He surprised them both by speaking the thought out loud.

“Thanks.” She blushed, her cheeks turning a deep pink.

Inexplicably not dizzy, the girls ran over and tugged on their aunt. “Come on!”

Gemma chewed the inside of her full lower lip.

A smile tugged at Ethan’s mouth. The women he knew had no problem dancing in public. They fed off the attention. Gemma, however, looked sweetly self-conscious.

Hoping to help her out, he bowed in his best impression of Prince Charming. “May I have this dance, Princess Professor?”

The girls giggled and clapped.

“I’m not a professor, yet. And there’s no music,” Gemma pointed out reasonably.

“You don’t hear anything, Professor?” He looked at the twins. They wore huge smiles, by which he concluded that small children were a lot easier to impress than tiny babies. Or maybe it was because they were female. He didn’t have a wide range of talents, but football and females? Yeah, he had that down. Tilting his head, he insisted, “I hear the castle musicians. Girls, can you hear it?”

“Yes!”

“It’s loud!”

“Then let the dancing begin.” As the twins resumed an energetic ballet, Ethan looked at Gemma. “We’ve danced before. I’m sure it’ll come back to us.”

At the reference to their single awkward dance at homecoming, Gemma narrowed her gaze. “You danced with me once. Then you spent the evening with a varsity cheerleader.”

Yee-ouch. He’d forgotten that part. The cheerleader hadn’t intimidated him at all. Wagging his head, he figured it was time for the apology he’d been too embarrassed or too egotistical to offer her back then. “I was a punk kid, Gemma. I didn’t think much beyond the moment. Or about other people’s feelings.”

He’d been too busy trying to protect his own. From the moment he’d arrived at Thunder Ridge High, Ethan had struggled to appear more confident than he’d felt. Actually, it was more accurate to say he’d been struggling since elementary school. His deficiencies had simply become more noticeable in high school.

Gemma Gould, on the other hand, had been the president of the National Honor Society and captain of the debate team, had started both their school’s geography bowl and Spanish club and led an after-school program called Community Kids, a group that performed socially conscious acts in their own neighborhood. Hadn’t she played the flute, too?

He, on the other hand, had played football and flirted with cheerleaders. When Elyse had told him Gemma needed to go to homecoming and would write an essay for him if he took her, he’d balked at first. His fall progress report had been worse than bad, however, and to keep playing football, he’d needed to pass social studies. So he’d agreed to accompany Gemma in return for an essay guaranteed to bring his grade up. When he’d picked his “date” up that night, she’d been so nervous and he’d felt so damn awkward when she’d presented him with a boutonniere that he’d started babbling about the paper she was going to help him with, and somehow the night had turned to crap really quickly. He wasn’t even sure why.

Fifteen years later, he still cringed. The more uncomfortable she had seemed, the more he’d started to act like a jerk, leaving her to find her friends while he hung out with his. And when another girl—the cheerleader with grades on par with his—had asked him to dance, he’d accepted. Gemma had paid him back but good for his behavior that night. Even though her brand of retribution had infuriated him at the time, deep down he’d figured he deserved it.

“Auntie Gem, you’re not dancing!” Vivian stomped her foot, came over and tried to mash the two of them together. “You need to start dancing.”

Sliding an arm around Gemma’s back, Ethan pulled her body closer to his, leaving what he deemed to be a pretty respectable space between them. Still, he could feel her go rigid.

“For their sake, hmm?” he murmured, though he realized that dancing with her was a good opportunity to get the guilt monkey off his back. “About that homecoming date,” he began, surprised by the nervous adrenaline that pumped through his body. He must be overtired. “I should have danced with you more. I should have danced with you the whole night.” He was merely stating the truth. He’d agreed to take her; he should have behaved like a gentleman.

“Don’t be ridiculous. We shouldn’t have gone to homecoming together at all.”

“Maybe not,” he said. “But I could have behaved better. I was young. And a jerk.”

Gemma stopped moving and gently pulled her hand from his. “This—” she gestured to the dance floor “—is awkward. I mean, there’s no music or anything. Maybe we should—”

“Here.” He pulled his phone from his pocket, tapping it a few times, and Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” began to play. The twins were delighted. He handed the phone to Vivian—despite his better judgment—and pulled Gemma toward him again.

Her head only came up to his chin, and she kept her gaze straight ahead. Because he wasn’t sure what else to say at the moment, he simply danced until she murmured something he couldn’t quite make out. “What’s that?”

“I’m sorry about the social studies essay.”

A reluctant smile curled his lips. “Don’t be. Best grade I ever got.”

“You were teased for weeks. That was my fault.”

“True. But I forgave you.” He stared at the top of her head, wishing she’d look up. “After the initial impulse to throw you into Long River.”

Ethan had felt like the world’s biggest jackass when his social studies teacher, Martin Oleson, had read his paper—the one Gemma had written—out loud in class. Gemma had penned a ridiculous, but grammatically correct, essay on how participating in a sport like football increased testosterone in young men and made them want sex all the time. How could they be blamed if that’s all they focused on, even when they were sitting in their social studies class? The paper had gone on to propose that school funding be put toward maintaining a library of men’s magazines, which would be far more useful than textbooks to retain student attention. Ethan had been mortified. His only recourse had been to brazen the moment out, laughing along with everyone else. Humiliation had been preferable to admitting he hadn’t written the paper, couldn’t have penned something that articulate no matter how hard he’d tried.

Gemma lifted her face, plainly revealing the guilt she felt after all this time. “I never expected you to turn it in, you know. I thought you’d look at it first and ask for an extension so you could write it yourself.”

Ethan stiffened. Look at a ten-page paper twenty minutes before he had to turn the thing in? Not damn likely. “Too lazy,” he lied.

Gemma frowned. “You’re not lazy. You play professional sports. You won the Super Bowl. You work during the off-season and you mowed my parents’ lawn every Sunday morning for five years.”