Mistletoe Cinderella

Chapter Twelve

What did a woman wear to her own downfall? Chloe wondered as she scanned the contents of her closet Saturday at dawn.

Dylan had e-mailed her after his newscast late Thursday night to tell her he was really impressed with some of the notes she’d made regarding his condo. She’d happened to be awake at the time, working on her laptop, so she’d responded immediately. They’d gone from exchanging e-mails to instant messaging-it was almost a little sad how much easier it was for her to express herself through emoticons than face-to-face communication.

Though she’d enjoyed flirting and chatting during her cyber interaction with Dylan-typing was more deliberate than speaking, protecting her from the nervous babbling she was prone to-the computer screen was a lackluster substitute for the man. The more they’d talked, the more she’d wished she was with him. As a teen, she’d bought into the illusion that he was the guy who effortlessly had it all. The reality of him was far more fascinating, an intoxicating puzzle. She wanted to learn all his edges and pieces; everything he’d revealed about himself so far only attracted her more. As a bonus, when she was with him, she’d also been discovering more about who she was. The only downside to their time together was that she lived in fear of blurting out the wrong thing, clumsily exposing herself as a liar.

You’re living on borrowed time, C.J.

When he’d broached the subject of when she could go with him to look for furnishings and decor, she’d agreed to come to Atlanta today. They’d spend the day shopping then have an early dinner before he had to work. She was resolved that, over dinner, she’d tell him everything and hope for the best. She didn’t know if he would forgive her, but if she didn’t rectify the situation, she wouldn’t be able to forgive herself. One way or the other, this stressful pretense would be ended by tomorrow.

She wasn’t sure what they’d be eating, but she hoped it would be good. A girl had high expectations for her last meal.

DYLAN TRIED to keep his eyes on the road, but it was damn difficult with Chloe right next to him, smiling as she reclined her head against the passenger seat. Some of the shorter strands of her layered hair had escaped the barrette, framing her face in soft tendrils.

“Enjoying the convertible?” he asked.

“Mmm. If I had this car, I’d get a job delivering pizzas so I could be driving all the time.”

He chuckled. “You’d need to make really good tips delivering pizzas if you were going to pay for it, though.”

She mock-glared at him over the top her sunglasses. “I’m daydreaming over here. Do not bother me with trivial stuff like reality.”

Reality. Was it as clear-cut as he’d once assumed? He’d been angry at her for lying, but there was more C.J. in her than she realized. Whatever her technical job description really was, she’d thrown herself skillfully into the task of suggesting changes for his apartment. Once, he’d assumed that the reality of his injury was that baseball wouldn’t be part of his life anymore, but maybe he’d been needlessly limiting his opportunities. On a gorgeous spring day like this, spending his afternoons coaching a bunch of eager kids who loved baseball as much as he did sounded far better than spending six nights a week alongside Grady Medlock. Maybe it was time for both him and Chloe to reexamine what was real and what was malleable.

They reached the interior-decorating warehouse shortly after it opened for the day. While Dylan secured the roof on the car, Chloe fussed with her windblown hair and withdrew a slim tube of lip gloss from her purse.

“I have to know.” He watched her put on the shiny layer of color, wanting to kiss it off of her before she’d even finished applying it. “What flavor?”

She blinked, looking startled by the question. “My gloss? Butter pecan.”

It made him think of ice cream, the cold sweetness of it melting on his tongue. He hardened at the thought of Chloe against his tongue.

“This cosmetic habit of yours is thoroughly distracting,” he told her. “I never know what you’ll taste like. It’s like dating a woman who wears staid business suits with naughty lingerie underneath. A man could go crazy wondering what’s next to her skin. A whisper of ivory silk or a leopard-print thong?”

Chloe’s cheeks flamed pink. Had he offended her with the analogy?

After a moment, she smiled. “I’m glad I distract you. Even if it is just my makeup.”

He echoed what she’d once said to him in his apartment. “It’s not ‘just’ anything. It’s you.”

“Thank you for asking me to come with you today,” she said. “I…wanted to see you.”

“Ditto. And I don’t trust myself to decorate the condo by myself. You saw what happened when left to my own devices.” He gave an exaggerated shudder, listing some of the feng shui terms she’d taught him. “Elements in conflict, ‘secret arrows’ every place you look…catastrophe. Save me from myself.”

“Don’t worry, my assistance is yours as long as you want it.” Opening her door, she added softly, “I plan to see this through.”

As they crossed the asphalt toward the massive shopping complex, Chloe asked, “So, which of the eight areas do you want to really focus on? Harmonious balance is key, but what are your immediate goals? Wealth? Career? Love? I’ve…been surprised that there’s no girlfriend in your life. There’s not a girlfriend, right?”

“What the hell kind of guy do you think I am?” Dylan was incensed. He’d kissed Chloe on multiple occasions-not brief pecks of greeting or farewell, either. Deep soul kisses that had shaken him. He knew players who had “girlfriends” in cities up and down the Eastern Coast, but that had never been his style.

She bridged the gap between them, taking his hand. “I’m sorry. That came out sounding like, I don’t know, an accusation. It was just a surprise.”

He grunted, not mollified. It was ironic that she suspected him of being untrustworthy, the kind of guy who would nonchalantly cheat on a woman.

“You’re smart and funny and successful,” she continued. “The best-looking guy I’ve ever seen in real life and not on a movie screen. In short, a man some single women would commit unholy acts to meet.”

It was difficult to stay angry after praise like that. She thinks I’m smart? Rationally he’d known for years that dyslexia was a reading disorder and no reflection of actual intelligence. He was not stupid, but he had to remind himself of that routinely.

He held open the heavy glass door for her. “You asked about the area I’m most interested in? Knowledge. With the right knowledge, the information and wisdom to make good decisions, it seems like a lot of the other areas would fall into place.”

For instance, should he play it safe and keep his lucrative job in Atlanta, the city that had become home over the past few years? Or throw that away on Coach B.’s whim and return to the place that held some of his ugliest memories?

“Good thinking,” Chloe said approvingly. “Of course, some people feel that too much knowledge can be dangerous. Just ask Adam and Eve.”

“I’ll take my chances. Ignorance gets good PR, but I don’t think it’s as blissful as people say.”

Chloe had pulled a little memo pad out of her purse. He watched over her shoulder as she jotted down colors that he assumed were applicable to wisdom: yellow, brown and other earthy tones, blue.

“You have that small bookshelf in your living room. We could move it to the knowledge area. And we should find you a great lamp while we’re here.” She tapped her temple. “For enlightenment.”

“It disturbs me that I can’t tell if you’re being sincere or if you’re just making bad puns.”

She gave him a cheeky smile. “Can’t I do both? Oh, we should go down that aisle. Vases!”

“I hear vase and my only two associations are priceless Ming, which is not in our budget, and girly bud vases. I’m evolved enough that I don’t think I have to decorate in leather and moose heads to prove anything, but-”

“Nothing pink and curvy and filled with flowers?” Chloe rolled her eyes. “Duh. Trust me, Echols.”

Paradoxically, he did.

AFTER DYLAN’S wholehearted appreciation last time, Chloe had briefly considered bringing another key lime pie with her to dinner at his place. Instead, she’d opted to make the drive to Atlanta with a bottle of white wine. She was going to need a little liquid courage for after they’d eaten, and there was the hope that wine would mellow Dylan before she dropped her bombshell.

While he sautéed the shrimp, she found a corkscrew. Chardonnay helped get me into this mess, chardonnay can help get me out.

“Can I pour you a glass of this?” she asked.

“Yes, thanks, but just one. I still have to do my broadcast later.” He sounded endearingly disgruntled. “Trust me, I would much rather be here with you than delivering the sports news alongside Grady Medlock.”

She clucked her tongue sympathetically. “He’s still being a jerk?”

“At this point, jerk would be a step up. He disliked me from the word go, but the hostility’s gotten more personal.”

“How so?” She settled on a stool, observing him cook for the sheer joy of watching his body move. Poetry in motion had always sounded like a cheesy cliché no one but professional ballroom dancers could ever live up to, but Dylan made her rethink her cynicism.

He took his wine, casting her a sheepish glance. “You asked earlier about my being single? I wasn’t until recently, right before the reunion as a matter of fact. I was dating a woman named Heidi. She expressed keen interest in helping me maintain friendships with my former teammates, saying that it wasn’t healthy to shut myself off from people close to me in a dark time.”

Advice that might arguably have some merit to it, but Chloe sensed from his tone that Heidi had not turned out to be entirely altruistic.

“On about three-quarters of our outings, she made sure we met buddies at a club or we double-dated with another Braves player. Then when she found the one she wanted, she broke up with me with a Dear John e-mail telling me to have a nice life.”

“That’s awful!” Chloe was outraged on his behalf. “The social-climbing witch.”

“No argument here. Don’t worry, I didn’t languish around the condo heartbroken. Mostly I felt dumb for having been so blind. She was clearly manipulative in retrospect, and I must have been brain-dead to get close to her in the first place.”

And how is he going to describe me “in retrospect”?

When she blanched, he added, “We weren’t that close, really. I’m making this sound more important than it was. The reason it has anything to do with Grady is because he has a thing for our makeup artist, who’s made it clear she wouldn’t mind my asking her out-”

“A woman with taste,” Chloe decreed.

“But she didn’t make an issue out of it before because she knew I was seeing Heidi.”

“So now that you’re a free agent, she’s doing nothing to conceal her feelings, which is getting you even more enmity from Grady?”

“In a nutshell. That must be one of the benefits of being self-employed. No annoying co-workers. No office politics.” He reached for the soy sauce and sprinkled a liberal amount over the shrimp and seasoned vegetables steaming in the pan. “Did you know from the beginning you wanted to work by yourself? I’d imagine it could get lonely, not having colleagues to chat with over break or join for drinks at the end of a long week. You miss out on the time-honored tradition of griping about your boss because you are your boss.”

“It’s not lonely.” Much. “After all, I have my clients and the people I’m trying to win over as clients. To some extent, I get to control how much I interact with others and choose the days when I want to be a hermit. I’m not very social by nature.”

“Not what one would expect to hear from a former cheerleader,” he remarked, stirring chopped mushrooms into the stir-fry.

The ginger-scented perfume of dinner cooking would have made her stomach gurgle in happy anticipation if it weren’t already tied up in so many knots. She’d planned to tell him tonight. Was it too blunt to respond with, “Yes, but I was never a cheerleader because I’m not the person you’ve thought I was for the past three weeks-more wine?”

Lord, the poor man would join a monastery. This bimbo Heidi had just done a job on his trust, and now Chloe was going to follow it up with identity theft? At the very least he’d require two forms of ID and a federal background check on the next woman he invited to dinner.

“Ready to eat?” he asked her.

She smiled weakly.

Though she took the first bite just to be polite, the balance of peppers and garlic-a kick without overwhelming the more delicate flavors-soon seduced her. “When I was rattling off your attributes in the parking lot this morning, I forgot to highlight the fact that you can cook.”

“Only about four complete meals,” he said modestly.

“Maybe, but when they’re this good, you can just keep cooking them over and over and nobody would mind. At least with shrimp and veggies, I can enjoy them without feeling I have to do a marathon on the treadmill. My mother cooks old-school-everything has half a pound of butter or bacon grease added for flavoring. She is perplexed by this wacky, newfangled thing we kids call ‘cholesterol.’ I mentioned to her that Nat’s mom was doing the South Beach Diet, and Mama misinterpreted that to mean Mrs. Young was on vacation.”

He grinned at her anecdotes, but there was a serious note in his voice when he asked, “Was it hard growing up with such a generation gap?”

As much as her parents loved her, it seemed ungrateful to complain.

“Plenty of kids had it more difficult than I did, but their age did factor into things,” she admitted. “They didn’t think they’d have children, and Mama encountered some difficulties with such a late-in-life pregnancy. They were hyperprotective. Not just in a ‘your curfew is sundown’ kind of way, but hovering. Maybe that’s why I’m a self-contained non-people person.”

“A lot of kids start to chafe under too many restrictions. Did you ever rebel?”

She wrinkled her nose. “I got highlights once.”

“Wild woman.”

“I didn’t really do the angry teen bit. I loved my parents, and they loved me…almost to the point of neurosis. Right up until middle school I think Mama was afraid that if she let me out of their sight I might have some horrible asthma attack. I used to wonder what it would have been like if I’d had a sibling and wasn’t living under the magnifying glass by myself. Being the only recipient for their attention got a little intense sometimes.”

“I’m with you on that.” Dylan stabbed a shrimp with his fork but didn’t lift it to his mouth. He glared at his plate, as if seeing something she couldn’t.

“You felt smothered, too?” She actually thought Barb had done a laudable job making sure Dylan and Chloe had some time alone the other night. Of course, Barb had also suggested pulling out baby pictures and sports mementos. Maybe I shouldn’t have encouraged her.

But Dylan was shaking his head, making it clear she’d misdiagnosed the problem. “My father was ashamed of me,” he stated calmly. “Being the only recipient for his disapproval could definitely get intense.”

Her knee-jerk reaction was to insist that there was no way his father had been ashamed of him-the man would have to have been crazy. Half the town of Mistletoe was glowingly proud of Dylan. How could his own flesh and blood be so unnaturally different? But beneath Dylan’s neutral expression was a gravity that made it clear he believed his words and hadn’t arrived at the conclusion lightly.

Her second reaction was to pronounce his father an idiot, but it seemed wrong to speak ill of the dead.

“I’m dyslexic,” Dylan said by way of explanation.

“I didn’t know that!”

He smiled wryly. “Is there any reason you should have?”

“No, of course not.” It had been a silly response to his declaration, but it seemed bizarre when she knew so many details about him-his favorite dessert, his baseball stats, even what his bedspread looked like-not to know something that had obviously been a defining factor in his life.

“School was a struggle for me,” he said.

She experienced a surge of guilt, recalling her own feelings of adolescent inadequacy and her misplaced certainty that people like Dylan Echols had it easy. If nothing else, tutoring Natalie and seeing her friend’s tears of frustration over math should have disabused her of that notion.

“If you were struggling, it didn’t show. Other students, even teammates of yours, had noticeable difficulties in some of their classes. Or with girlfriends. Or with their parents divorcing or losing jobs or whatever. You always seemed to have everything so together.”

His laugh was hollow. “Then I’m definitely not who you thought I was.”

She caught her bottom lip between her teeth. Was now the time to tell him she wasn’t who he thought, either? It seemed tactless to interrupt what he was trying to share with her to make her own revelation. She was incredibly touched that he would tell him about his dyslexia and his father, which were both clearly difficult subjects for him.

“You think your dad was bothered by your dyslexia?”

Dylan pushed his plate away. “I think my father saw me as an extension of himself. Mom said he was so proud for the first three years. He had his own boy, a strapping lad! When I pitched a no-hitter, he lived vicariously. But any time I got in trouble or flunked a spelling test or got sent to the principal’s office in grade school because I was making jokes, I was an embarrassment to him.”

“Then I feel sorry for him for the way he screwed up having a decent relationship with you.” And now, with Michael Echols dead, it was too late. She suddenly felt motivated to call her parents on the way home tonight, just to say she loved them.

“As I get older and look back with more perspective, I try not to take it personally. I don’t think he was kind in general,” Dylan said. “He ran roughshod over Mom, but she mostly learned to let him have his way and keep the peace. I wasn’t so diplomatic.”

Recalling his earlier question about her own youthful rebellions-of which there were none-she hazarded a guess. “You sought out trouble?”

“Until seventh-grade baseball,” he affirmed. “I knew that if I got suspended, no more playing. After middle school was high school and Coach Burton, who kept me on the straight and narrow. He’s the one who told me the great Nolan Ryan was dyslexic.”

Even if Dylan’s career had been cut short, it sounded as though baseball had saved him. It gave her a new appreciation for organized sports.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” he said. “It sounds like a poor-me sob story, doesn’t it?”

“No! And I’m honored that you’re confiding in me.” Everything he said made her admire him even more.

“You just really impressed me with what you said over breakfast the last time I saw you, about how teaching kids depends on finding the right way to get through to them. That a student isn’t stupid simply because he doesn’t digest information the same way other pupils do. I wish more people had expressed that sentiment to me when I was younger.”

So did she. “People can be cruel in what they say, even if it’s not intentional.”

He shrugged. “More than people insinuating I was dumb, what really bothered me were the times I actually felt that way. Making bad judgment calls, stupid mistakes. But I guess everyone has their share of those, right?”

Lord, yes.

She wrestled with the desire to tell him about her own lapse of judgment when she’d let him believe she was someone else. But juxtaposed with her desperation to own up was the dawning realization of how she might make him feel. Would he blame himself for not seeing through her pitiful attempts at deception? He’d called himself “brain-dead” for not seeing Heidi more clearly. Chloe had seen the banked pain in his eyes when he talked about his father. She never wanted to do anything that brought him that same pain.

She’d thought tonight was going to be her downfall, and she was partially right. After a day of joking with him and sharing opinions at the decorating warehouse and an intimate evening of dinner and conversation, she had fallen for him completely. But she couldn’t tell him the truth. Chloe would rather finish this “job” and walk away from him than do anything that made him doubt his own intelligence and self-worth.