On Common Ground (Harlequin Super Romance) (8 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“A
RE
YOU
SURE
YOUR
FRIEND
there can lift a full keg?” Tony, the manager of the Lion Inn asked skeptically. Like the other social clubs at Grantham University, Lion Inn was located on the edge of campus, but it was actually an independent organization open to student members and run by a board of alumni members. Members, alumni who were members as undergraduates and their guests were welcome at all events.

Press and Matt had joined Tony by the club’s side entrance next to the basement keg room. It was around two o’clock in the afternoon, and they were there to get their instructions for working at Reunions, starting that night.

“Sure, no problem,” Press assured him with an easy smile. “He may look puny, but he’s tough. You wouldn’t know it, but he wrestles for Yale at the one-hundred-thirty-two-pound weight class.”

Tony smiled with a look of incredulity. “You’re right. I wouldn’t know it. But, hey, if you say he’s okay, then that’s good enough for me.” Tony stamped out his cigarette butt on the pavement, and like the good manager that he was, he picked up the butt and deposited it in a plastic baggy that he carried in the back pocket of his jeans along with his trusty Bic lighter. “So, why don’t you come inside now, and I’ll show you where to stow the kegs.” Since the two were nominally only shifting the supplies around and not manning the open taps, the club didn’t need a special license for them to work.

They tromped in through the side door off the driveway while Tony lectured them on putting kegs in the cooler, bringing them out at the right time and working the taps. “So, is that all clear now?”

Both boys nodded.

“We didn’t get into college on our good looks alone, Tony,” Press reminded him.

“I think you got in on your silvery tongue,” Tony wisecracked back. “And how you work the taps is clear?”

“No problem. It’s easier than milking a cow.”

“Which you do about as frequently as your buddy here goes ten rounds on a mat, I’ll wager.” Tony searched the top of the bar. “I thought I had left the order forms here, but they must be in my office. You’ll need them to keep track of deliveries. Listen, I’ll be right back.” He lifted the flap to the bar top and headed upstairs.

Matt watched him go, and then nudged Press. “Hey, why’d you make up all that stuff about me being a wrestler? You didn’t need to do that?”

Press ignored Matt and prowled the wood-paneled, dark room. Once upon a time, the keg room had been a bastion of good ol’ boy camaraderie, its wooden countertop scratched with the engraved initials of future male captains of industry and government leaders. Then Grantham had gone coed in the seventies, and Lion Inn’s women members had added their names to the handiwork. Coed or single sex, by now the place could best be described as beloved shabby chic—with the emphasis on
shabby.

“I’m really stoked about working Reunions,” Press said in between checking the flood of text messages on his phone. “It will be great just to relax after busting my butt all school year. Plus I could really use the cash.”

“You? Need cash? Can’t you just borrow from your dad?”

“I’m not sure my father would recognize me if he saw me. We don’t cross paths that often.”

“Maybe you could send him your résumé to refresh his memory? There’s always your mother I suppose.”

“I don’t think Mother’s in town. I think she might have mentioned something about going to La Quinta to work on her backhand. Or maybe it was Pebble Beach, to perfect her putting. Besides, the way she’s spending her alimony, she’ll be the one hard up for cash pretty soon. Oh, goody-goody—perhaps I’ll have a new stepfather.”

“At least you’ve got Noreen.”

“Yeah, she’s pretty cool besides being ama-zing-looking.”

“Is it me, or is there something wrong to think your stepmother is hot?” Matt asked.

“It’s you. Anyway, you got to hand it to Noreen. I figure she’s the first woman to ever have my father by the balls. He’d do anything for her. Heck, he might even make it to my graduation next year—keep up the old family ties and everything.”

“Does that mean he goes to his class Reunions, too?” Matt wandered from the taproom to the basement hallway and peered up the stairway, waiting for Tony to come down again.

“Yeah, I think so. I’m pretty sure he still marches in The Parade—when I was little and he and my mom were still getting along, we all marched one year.” Grantham alums and family members were famous for their annual parade during Reunions through the campus and down Main Street, complete with marching bands, a few flimsy floats and everyone decked out in gaudy class outfits—special orange-and-black costumes that screamed big fashion mistake.

Finally, the sound of footsteps and someone talking on a cell phone could be heard.

“At least if I’m working, I shouldn’t run into him. Besides, Lion Inn is the locale this year for the Tenth Reunion parties. So I doubt he’ll show up here.”

“Isn’t the Tenth your sister’s reunion year?”

“That’s right.”

“So it’s Lilah Evans’s, too? Maybe I’ll still have another chance to get to talk to her, then?”

Press approached his friend and, pointing his index finger, he looked him squarely in the eyes. “The question is, are you man enough to talk to her, or are you just going to stammer and get all nervous when you come face-to-face while drawing her a tall glass of Yuengling?”

Matt balled his fist. “I’ll do it. I promise.”

“If you don’t, I will personally beat up that one-hundred-and-thirty-two-pound puny body of yours.” Press playfully pounded his friend on his back and shoulders. What he didn’t say was that he figured he could always talk to Mimi on Matt’s behalf. Talk about scary! But, hey, he’d risk it for his friend.

Tony stepped back into the room and flipped his phone shut. “Okay, sorry to keep you guys waiting. That was the liquor store on the phone. They want to pick up the empty kegs tonight and not wait until tomorrow morning since there’s so much stuff going on on campus. That means you guys need to stay here until closing—normally 2:00 a.m., but you never know. You got it?”

“Since when have I ever left before a party was over?” Press boasted.

Matt nodded earnestly. “I got it. But listen, Tony. There’s something I gotta tell you. About this whole wrestling thing?” Matt had a concerned, I-need-to-confess look on his face.

Tony dismissed him. “Don’t worry, kid. I know Press is full of it. That’s part of his charm. Besides, I also know that whatever the job is, he’ll pull his end
and
yours. Press always comes through—in spite of himself.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

A
FTER
FIDDLING
WITH
THE
dials at the stoplight, Lilah ended up turning off the radio in the rental car. All she’d wanted was a little classical music to soothe her brittle nerves. But with all the stop-and-go traffic on Route 206, she needed to keep both hands on the wheel and eyes forward instead of being tied up with distractions.

Talk about distractions. Justin had insisted on standing in line with her at the Enterprise office.

“This is boring, trust me. I’m sure you must have other things to do,” she had tried politely. Being around Justin was just too confusing at the moment, too unsettling. And, really, was she supposed to make a move in a car rental agency? Then again, did she really want to?

“Besides, we’ll see each other tomorrow at the ceremony in the afternoon, not to mention all the wining and dining through the night, right?” she added, attempting to send him on his way.

“Actually, tomorrow’s festivities begin in the morning with The Parade.
And
it’s not just tomorrow that you’re stuck with me. We’re scheduled to be together for the annual Reunions softball game this afternoon, followed by the pig roast.”

“Softball? But I’m supposed to pick up my father. Then I’m going out to dinner with him and Mimi,” she protested.

“You didn’t read your schedule, did you? The game doesn’t start until around five, five-thirty, so you should have plenty of time to make it back.”

Lilah gritted her teeth. “Well, I guess I’ll try to make it, but if my father’s plane is late, I can’t guarantee anything.” Really, the last thing she wanted to do was run around a softball field.

Justin pulled his iPhone from his pocket and tapped on the screen. “Not to worry. I have this handy app, keeps me completely up-to-date on flights. See—your father’s plane is actually scheduled to come in a few minutes early.” He held the screen up to her face.

Lilah squinted to read the unwelcome news. She nodded, and Justin hit the Sleep button. She saw a photo of a bunch of kids, probably his class, she guessed. Her first impulse was to say, “Aw-w,” but she swallowed it. If she reacted emotionally like that, would he take that as an offer of interest? And was he interested? She thought so, but her antennae were not exactly functioning at top speed. Argh-h.

“Well, that’s good to know,” she said instead. “But I think it would be kind of rude just to drop my dad off where he’s staying and then rush out to play some softball game, especially when I haven’t seen him for months, almost a year even.”

“This is not just some softball game!” Justin said with the right amount of righteous indignation. “Besides, when I told him about it, he was all excited about playing. I didn’t realize that he played baseball for the University of Washington?”

Lilah took one step closer to the car rental counter. She hung her head, accepting the inevitable. “Yeah, Dad played center field. He was the batting champ for two years running. What was I thinking? Obviously he would want to play. He’ll probably bring his mitt.” She stopped and turned to Justin. “Hey, wait a minute. You talked to my father?”

The man in front of her in black shorts and an orange T-shirt moved to the side, fumbling with his rental form and keys. A picture-perfect family of one blonde wife with toned upper arms and two perfect towheaded children—the boy with a cowlick and the girl with pigtails and a missing front tooth—swarmed around him.

That could have been me—me and Stephen,
Lilah thought ungrammatically. But what made her wistful was not the thought of Stephen but the two kids and the toned arms. Yes, her memory of Stephen seemed to be rapidly dimming in the reality of Justin.

“Sure, I called your father. Since you’re my responsibility, he’s mine, as well—for the weekend, that is,” Justin answered her.

“Do you have your rental confirmation number?” the perky woman behind the desk asked. Her white teeth sparkled and matched the high-gloss sign hanging behind her.

Lilah narrowed her eyes. “So you two talked about me?” She waved off her own question. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.” Then she turned and dealt with the tedious process of renting her car.

And now as she inched along Route 206, she glanced to the right at the tiny strip mall with its row of small shops—a tae kwon do academy, a high-end marble and tile store, and a fresh pasta shop.
So Grantham, isn’t it?
she thought and she told herself she had been right to practically push Justin into that ridiculous little car of his.
It was cute, wasn’t it?
And she had been right to insist that, no, she wasn’t too tired to drive to the airport and that she would meet him at the baseball field by the university football stadium. “Yes, I remember where it is,” she had said, not bothering to mask the irritation in her voice. “After all, how hard is it to miss a football stadium?”

“But there’s a new physics building blocking it from Adams Road as you cut across campus,” he had tried to explain as he reluctantly eased his way into his car.

He’d looked up, all puppy-dog eager—she could picture what he must have looked like as a young child.

And then she’d slammed the door in his face and inserted the keys into the late-model Hyundai sedan that she’d rented.

She’d been right, definitely, she told herself, creeping forward as the cars crawled in the end-of-lunch hour traffic. She had needed space, distance, to decide just what she was going to do with Justin Bigelow. She eased her foot off the brake, letting the car roll forward.

“What’s stopping you?” she asked out loud. “You’re thirty-two, a free woman. Why not enjoy yourself for a change? There’s nothing wrong with feeling good or having a good time. People do it all the time—feeling good and having sex.”

Lilah glanced at the clock on the dashboard. If the traffic kept up like this, she would be cutting it close. She tried not to feel anxious. So she was late. It wasn’t like her father would disown her—unlike her mother for whom punctuality superceded godliness. Besides, she could always text him. Now that he had acquired his iPhone—in addition to his iPad—he had officially become a techie.

And just like that, thoughts of smart phones had her thinking about a certain cuter-than-cute photo on someone else’s phone that she had recently seen. Justin. He had been so proud, so engaged, so geeky so… Her thoughts turned decidedly away from geeky....

She slammed on the brakes as the traffic abruptly came to a halt. Then she saw the reason. Two cars up, a minivan put on its turning signal to take a left onto a side road.

“So what if Justin and I—this weekend—kind of…?” she asked herself out loud, barely able to form the words yet somehow wanting an answer.

She got it.

A violent jolt from behind. A crunch of metal. Her car lurched forward. Her head snapped back against the headrest. Her chest pressed against the seat belt.

Her first thought was thank goodness she’d taken full insurance coverage on the rental. Her second was to look in her rearview mirror. She saw a lightweight truck, a man at the wheel—older, and a woman in the passenger seat—talking, no, yelling at each other.

She turned off the car engine and located the emergency flashers. Watching for traffic in her side-view mirror—this being New Jersey, the cars insisted on passing around her without bothering to stop—she carefully inched open her door and stepped out. Well, it might have been a lightweight truck, but it had a giant bumper that had managed to dent every panel in the back of her gray sedan. Luckily, it looked as if the structure had survived unscathed, no doubt due to the low speed of the truck on impact. That would explain why the airbag hadn’t triggered.

The inspection over, she walked back to the truck. The driver, a diminutive man, sat there shell-shocked behind the wheel, blinking rapidly as his wife loudly complained to him. Then when Lilah came into view, she turned her complaints on her. She rifled in her purse and pulled out a cell phone, punched in a number and proceeded to complain to the person on the other end.

The driver got out and circled the front of his truck. He stared at his bumper, then her car before looking up guiltily at Lilah. Not a word passed his lips.

“I think we better share insurance information,” Lilah said.

His back hunched, he retreated silently to the truck and leaned over his wife to open the glove compartment.

His wife pushed him aside and clambered out of the truck. With a melodramatic heave, she began patting her chest. “My heart, my heart. I can’t take this.”

“Is there something I can do?” Lilah asked.

“My heart! I was just at the doctor. I have pain. Something terrible. Why did you keep going and stopping and going and stopping?”

“Well, it
was
stop-and-go traffic,” Lilah replied. She watched the husband come to his wife’s side, and the older woman let him guide her to sit on the curb. She adjusted the keyhole opening of her navy T-shirt.

“Do you want me to call 9-1-1?” Lilah offered.

The woman’s head snapped up. “I already called it and ordered an ambulance.”

Lilah pursed her lips, wondering when someone was going to ask her how
she
was. After all, she
was
the one who had been rear-ended.

In the distance, she heard sirens, and as she looked south toward the center of Grantham, she caught the flashing lights of a police car. And another police car. The first car slammed on the brakes in front of Lilah’s rental. The other blocked the entrance to the strip mall.

Some shoppers at the strip mall came out to aid the moaning woman. “Did you hit her?” a man, wearing a PSE&G uniform, asked Lilah.

Lilah tried to keep her cool. “No, they hit me.”

“Are you on medication? I’m a nurse.” A female shopper in crepe-soled shoes rushed to the woman, who now rocked back and forth.

“My heart. My heart,” she keened.

More sirens approached from the other direction—this time the ambulance. It pulled into the strip mall parking lot, blocking the exit. The EMTs jumped out and immediately started questioning the woman on the ground. Soon, more stranded lunchgoers gathered around. Then, a green Mazda pulled up behind the first police car. Out jumped a twenty-year-old coed who looked remarkably like the woman on the ground, minus thirty pounds and the dark red hair dye. “Mama,” she shouted and rushed to the moaning woman. Lilah, standing there like an outsider, took in all the commotion. The only other person not involved in the action was the driver of the truck. He had withdrawn several feet from his wife, though still within shouting distance.

Lilah could easily sympathize, if she weren’t starting to feel sorry for herself.
I’m the victim here,
she wanted to scream, which of course she didn’t. Instead, like the good citizen she was, she stood silently by, watching as the woman, talking again on the phone, was carried off on a stretcher.

Finally, two policemen came over and surveyed the damage. The older male officer, who obviously lifted weights in his spare time, looked up. “You were in the truck?” he asked. He wore a sensitive smile on his face.

“No, I was in the car that was rear-ended.”

He blinked. “Are you all right? Should I call the EMTs?”

“No, I’m fine.” Her neck was a little sore, but that was to be expected.

“So the woman was your passenger?” He nodded toward the ambulance that had just pulled out into oncoming traffic. Lilah waited for another accident to occur, which miraculously didn’t.

“No, she was the passenger in the truck that hit me. Her husband, at least I presume it’s her husband, was driving.” Lilah pointed to the silent little man in the heavy blue trousers with a thick belt and short-sleeved shirt tucked into his pants. He looked like a good breeze could knock him over. He was nodding, his chin tucked into his concave chest, as the young woman from the green Mazda talked to him. His daughter, she figured.

“So why don’t you tell me what happened?” the policeman asked nicely.

And Lilah ran through the whole scenario. He nodded at all the correct moments. Lilah felt in the comforting presence of Mr. Rogers, if Mr. Rogers had worn a walkie-talkie on the epaulette of his cardigan and looked like he could bench-press twice his weight.

His younger partner, his ferocious eyebrows furrowed into a corrugated line, looked on sternly. “We’ll need your license and registration,” he demanded. “And your insurance card.”

Lilah blinked, a little taken aback by his aggressive approach, but decided to cooperate without question. One thing she had learned dealing with law enforcement personnel worldwide was to stand firm but act politely. She’d even kept her cool in dealing with warlords, when it came down to it. What was one obnoxious Grantham cop?

“My license’s in my bag on the front seat of the car, which is a rental, by the way. The insurance and registration information is with the rental packet in the car, too.”

“A rental,” the policeman exclaimed with disdain.

Lilah schooled herself to keep from rolling her eyes. “Yes, a rental,” Lilah replied as if she had been asked for a weather report. “I am here for the Grantham University Reunions, and I rented a car to pick my father up at the airport. He’s flying in this afternoon.” She looked down at her watch. “Speaking of which, is this going to take much longer? My dad’s due in in less than an hour.”