The Way Home (5 page)

“Now, if ever I saw a potential indiscretion …” Ty muttered, guiding the Chrysler to the side of the road and stopping a few yards in front of her.

He swung open his door and got out, turning to watch her approach across the width of the car. He put on his best, nonthreatening smile, trying to look as harmless as possible. Accosting women on the street was not his usual style, but he simply had to see if the front view was any match for the slim allure of her rear view. And it most definitely was.

Golden blond hair framed a soft oval face. Dark brows arched over large blue eyes that seemed to echo the summer sky above. Her nose was short and straight. Her mouth was a soft rose pink that owed nothing to lipstick, the full lower lip an almost blatant invitation. Her chin held more than a hint of strength, a contrast to the incredible — kissable — softness of her mouth. As he watched, color ran up under her skin, tinting it a delicate pink, making him realize that he’d been staring like a lovesick schoolboy.

“I didn’t mean to stare,” he said, widening his smile in what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “It’s just that … I know this sounds like a pickup line, but don’t I know you?”

“Perhaps.” She blushed again, lowering her eyes so that the dark crescent of her lashes was visible against her cheeks.

“I’m Tyler McKendrick.”

“I know.” She looked at him from under her lashes, her mouth curving in a shy smile.

“So we
have
met.” He shut the Chrysler’s door and walked around the hood, stepping up on the sidewalk to stand in front of her.

“We’ve met,” she admitted.

“I can’t believe I’d have forgotten a girl who looks like you,” Ty said, thinking that he finally understood how a woman’s skin could be compared to a rose petal.

“I was a bit younger the last time we met,” she said, still blushing.

“I haven’t been home much the last few years,” he said, speaking as much to himself as to her. How old was she? Twenty? He glanced up the street behind them, mentally going over the inhabitants, trying to come up with someone who had a daughter the right age.

“Do you live around here?”

“I live in town,” she allowed. She sent him another one of those shy smiles, and Ty was shocked by the urge to kiss it from her mouth.
Good grief, I must have been spending too much time indoors.
A fellow just didn’t go around kissing strange girls, even ones as pretty as this. Now, if he got to know her a little better… .

“Give me a hint,” he said.

“Well, last time we met, you took me flying.”

“Took you flying?” Ty’s brows rose as he considered that. Since just the sight of him with an airplane made his mother’s heart go in to palpitations, he hadn’t flown home in years. And surely, if he’d taken her flying, he’d have remembered. It wasn’t like he took every girl he met up in an airplane. That was more Jack’s style.

He stared at her, trying to place her face, his attention coming back to her eyes. It was those eyes he remembered. They were such a clear blue, smiling now but with something behind them that spoke of loneliness. And he had a sudden image of those big blue eyes looking up at him from under sadly flattened golden curls and a childish voice thanking him for giving her a glimpse of heaven.

“Meg Harper?” The words weren’t exactly a question, nor were they quite a statement.

“You’ve grown up,” he added awkwardly. And grown into quite a beauty, he added to himself. But not grown nearly enough. She must be, what? Sixteen? Seventeen? Just a kid.

“Most people do,” she said, her smile revealing a dimple in one cheek. Ty blinked, still struggling to shift his thinking, to see her as the kid she was rather than the woman she seemed.

“Can I give you a ride home?” It was the offer he’d planned on making when he stopped, but his original intention had been to suggest a detour for coffee at Rosie’s Cafe or an ice cream soda at Barnett’s Drugstore.

“That would be nice.” She gave him that shy smile again and Ty felt a twinge of real regret. If only she was a few years older.

Meg felt Ty’s hand under her elbow, steadying her as she stepped up onto the running board. She hoped he couldn’t tell that her pulse was beating too fast. She’d heard that he was home, of course. Mrs. McKendrick had told Mr. Fenton at the general store and Mrs. Jennings had overheard and mentioned it to Ruth when she brought over a top to be quilted. Meg’s mother hadn’t been much interested in the news that Tyler McKendrick was going to be spending the summer at home. But Meg had been very interested.

More interested than she had any business being, she admitted to herself as she settled onto the leather seat of the little roadster. Ty might have figured in more than a few of her girlish fantasies but, at seventeen, she was old enough to know just how foolish those fantasies were. Still, she couldn’t seem to help the way her heartbeat accelerated when she saw him.

“Are you staying in Regret long?” she asked as he started the car.

“For the summer. I let my mother talk me into looking after the house while she and my father are in Europe. Otherwise, I’d be on my way back to California by now.”

“In Hollywood?” Meg’s voice held the reverence of one who spent every Saturday afternoon in the movie house watching the flickering celluloid images on the big screen.

“That’s the plan.” Ty slowed at a comer and glanced both ways before turning left onto Main Street. “Jack’s lined up some work in the movies for the two of us. Only then I tried to land on top of a tree so…” He shrugged. “I’ll head out that way at the end of the summer.”

Hollywood
and
flying. Meg wondered if it was possible to come up with anything more perfectly romantic.

“What about you?” Ty asked, glancing at her. “Are you still in school?”

“I graduate in a couple of weeks.” She wished she could add something to that, something sophisticated and witty about her future plans. But the truth was, she didn’t
have
any plans for the future, at least none that had any hope of coming true. There wasn’t any money for her to go on to college and not much chance of her being able to find a job, not with the whole country in the midst of a depression.

“Is Miss Klienman still teaching English?”

“Yes. I think she’ll be there forever.”

“Does she still carry that ruler to smack your knuckles if she catches you passing notes or being inattentive? For such a small woman, she packed a powerful wallop into that skinny little ruler.” Ty’s smile was reminiscent, even a little fond.

“She still carries a ruler, but I can’t say whether or not she still packs a wallop since she’s never hit me with it.”

“I bet she hasn’t. You’re probably one of those students who actually work,” he said, throwing her a look of mock disapproval.

“And you were probably one of those ‘rowdy young men’ who give her such trouble.”

“Guilty,” he admitted without a trace of remorse.

“I think she secretly likes the students who give her trouble,” Meg said. “They’re more of a challenge.”

“If she liked me, I wish she’d have gone a little easier on my knuckles.” Ty left one hand on the wheel and rubbed the fingers of the other over the knuckles as if he could still feel the bruises from Miss Klienman’s ruler.

Meg laughed, a soft, light sound, and Ty took his eyes off the road long enough to look at her. The wind blew her hair back from her face, giving him a clear view of her profile.

Damn, but she’d grown into a beauty.

He followed her directions and turned into the long drive that led up to a small house on the edge of town. He’d almost forgotten that her mother had married Harlan Davis. He remembered his mother commenting that it hardly seemed proper, what with George Harper in his grave less than a year. But from what Ty remembered of George Harper, he couldn’t imagine that anyone, not even his widow, had spent much time grieving over the man’s death.

He stopped in front of the small, almost painfully neat house. Flower beds marched in regimented rows along either side of the short walkway. Harlan Davis owned the small hotel in Regret, and he prided himself on his reputation for keeping a neat establishment. From the perfect symmetry of the house, Ty guessed that pride extended to his home.

He was almost sorry to see the ride end. He’d had two weeks of his own company and that was more than enough. He’d enjoyed these few minutes with Meg Harper. On the other hand, she made him think things he had no business thinking, so perhaps it was just as well that they were parting soon.

Meg felt no such ambivalence. Sitting high up in the roadster, with the sun shining and the wind blowing through her hair and Tyler McKendrick at the wheel was like a dream come true. She only wished they had a lot farther to go. But Ty had already stopped the car in front of her stepfather’s house.

Ty got out of the car and came around to open her door,

the first time Meg had ever experienced such a common courtesy. She set her hand in his, letting him help her out of the car. A shiver of awareness ran along her spine as his hand closed around her fingers, and she kept her eyes down, afraid of what he might see in her face.

“Thank you for giving me a ride home.” She looked up at him and smiled, wishing she could think of something clever and witty to say to keep him with her for a few more minutes, wishing he’d suggest seeing her again and knowing he wouldn’t.

“You’re welcome.” He smiled at her, his brown eyes warm, and Meg felt her heart thump.

Though she wanted to linger, she gave him what she hoped was a casual smile and then turned away. She didn’t want to stand there gaping at him like an infatuated child, even though that was what she felt like.

Meg was conscious of Ty watching her as she moved up the dirt walkway to the front porch. She wished she knew how to swing her hips the way her sister Patsy always did. She wished she were older, more sophisticated, the kind of woman a man like Tyler McKendrick would want to see again.

As she climbed the steps to the porch, she heard him start the roadster’s engine, and it took every ounce of her willpower to keep from turning around. But the minute she was safely inside the screen door, she spun around, confident that, even if he looked, he wouldn’t see her. And he did look. Before he began backing down the short lane, he looked right at her, or so it seemed. She was too far away to read his expression, but surely the fact that he’d looked meant something. Didn’t it?

Meg watched until the roadster reached the main road before turning away from the door, her expression dreamy. Her mother was in the parlor, sitting in front of the quilting frame that hung from hooks in the ceiling. She looked up as Meg entered.

“Did Mrs. Rutledge pay you for the quilt?”

“Five dollars. And she gave me fifty cents for delivering it.” Meg pulled five neatly folded bills from her pocket, along with two quarters, and handed it to her mother.

“You keep the money she gave you, sugar. By rights, you ought to have at least half of this, too. You did at least half the quilting.”

“I don’t mind.” She knew as well as her mother that the money Ruth made doing quilting for other women helped make up the difference between what Harlan Davis was willing to give his wife for housekeeping and what it actually cost to feed and clothe the three of them in a manner he thought appropriate.

Meg slipped the quarters back into her pocket and walked around the quilting frame to sit across from her mother. Sliding on a worn silver thimble, she picked up the needle where she’d left it at the end of a row of quilting the day before.

“You’ll never guess what happened today, Mama. Tyler McKendrick gave me a ride home,” she continued, too impatient to share her news to wait for a guess.

“Helen McKendrick’s boy? I’d heard he was home, recovering from crashing that airplane of his. I didn’t think he’d be up to driving.”

Ruth Davis squinted down at the fabric in the frame, concentrating on sliding the needle in and out along the dimly marked quilting lines.

“He limps a little, but he looks just fine other than that.” Meg’s tone made it clear that it would take more than a limp to make Tyler McKendrick look anything less than perfect.

Ruth glanced across the frame, taking in her daughter’s dreamy expression as she used the thimble to rock the needle in and out of the muslin. Worry deepened the lines beside her mouth.

“The McKendricks live on the Hill,” she said, her words a warning against the dreams she saw in Meg’s eyes.

“I know.” Meg’s mouth tightened at having the fragile bubble of her dream pricked by the reminder of the gap that existed between the families on the Hill and everyone else. “He just gave me a ride home, that’s all.”

They quilted in a silence for a few minutes.

“Don’t tell your stepfather,” Ruth said abruptly.

“Don’t tell him what?” Meg had been thinking about Ty, wondering if she’d see him again, wondering if he thought she was pretty.

“Don’t tell him about Tyler McKendrick giving you a ride home.”

“Why not? There was nothing wrong with it.”

“Just don’t say anything,” Ruth repeated. If she felt Meg looking at her, she refused to lift her eyes from her quilting. “Do as I say, Margaret.” The use of Meg’s given name was deliberate, emphasizing how serious she was.