Mike may have climbed from the pickup more slowly, but his son’s oh-wow opinion echoed his own. Certainly he’d never seen the behemoth of a lawn mower parked in his front yard before.
“We don’t climb on equipment that isn’t ours, Teddy,” he admonished. But hey, he couldn’t resist doing a leisurely stroll around the thing, giving it a thump and pat and an admiring general look-see. Slugger ambled out of the dog door to greet them-well, mostly to greet Teddy. The hound hadn’t appreciated having his man parts clipped at the vet’s, and he was still letting Mike know about it. Still, all three boys slowly circled the machine with equal reverence.
“Is it ours, Dad?”
“No.”
“Why not? If it’s in our yard? Whose is it?”
“I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure I can make a good guess.”
“Maybe I could just sit in the seat for a second.”
“Maybe we never do that without the permission of the owner.”
Mike wanted to shake his head. Not at his son. At the mower. It was a John Deere. A beauty. One of the X700 series. Forty-eight-inch mower deck. Color-coded buttons, cruise control, CD player, four-wheel steering.
It was the kind of riding mower that a landscaping company owned. Or maybe a golf course. Not that Mike knew much about tractors, but he was pretty sure this one checked in at several thousand. No one-that is, no one normal-would buy such a thing for a regular-size yard that he could imagine. So that was the first clue to its owner.
The second clue was that his yard had been mowed. It would recover, of course. Grass always grew back.
The third clue was when he figured out why it was sitting in his yard. It had run out of diesel.
Add it all up, and Mike glanced next door…only to see Amanda bouncing into her drive. She pelted out of the car, popped the lid on the trunk. “Hi, guys!” she called out. “I’ll get the mower out of there! Would you believe it? I ran out of fuel! So I had to run to the gas station, but I’ve got it, I’ve got it-”
“Miss Amanda? Can I sit on it? Can I?”
“Yes, honey-but only if your dad or I’m there. Okay? No one else can give you permission but us.”
“Okay. I love you,” Teddy mentioned, and that was the end of his talking to her. Amanda kind of stopped dead when he said the word love, but instead of looking at his son, her eyes shot straight up to his.
Mike’s response was identical. To make eye contact that instant. It was one of those rare mind-meld moments. As if they were the only two people in the universe who realized there was an avalanche big enough to destroy them all. Maybe no one else saw it. But they did. Maybe no one else had a clue. But they did.
All morning he’d tried to reassure himself that he wasn’t falling. It should have helped that she’d been as unreasonable as a shrew with PMS that morning. But it hadn’t.
After a morning of major plumbing messes, apparently lawn mowing, then running out of diesel, Amanda was still Amanda. Her scoop-neck top had grass stains; her shorts looked almost wrinkled…but they matched. Pale blue and dark blue. Her hair hadn’t seen a brush in a while, which meant it was like copper on fire in the sunlight, pretty wild…but she still had on lip gloss, cute sandals, earrings.
She almost fell under the weight of the diesel can, but she managed to pluck it out of the trunk, her smile fifty times more powerful than a kilowatt. “You don’t have to thank me,” she chattered on. “I owed you, for all the stuff you’ve done for me. I was totally happy to find something I could do the other way around! I just didn’t realize how much fuel it would take to mow both yards. Or how much fuel they put in to start with. And it took me a little while to figure out how to run it. I’ve never mowed grass before! Would you believe it?!”
He believed it. It just didn’t seem wise to agree with her, much less while she was still struggling with the fuel container. “You want me to do that for you?”
“No, no sweat, I can do it!”
“Amanda.”
“Huh?”
He tried to make his voice sound light and conversational and delicate-although possibly he was incapable of managing “delicate.” “Who sold you this mower?”
“Oh. The hardware store. The guy was wonderful. Seriously. Gave me exactly what I asked for.”
He aimed for the same ultralight tone. “And you asked for…?”
“I told him that I only wanted to buy one mower in a lifetime, so for sure I didn’t want junk. And I wanted one with power, because I’m not particularly physically strong. I wanted quality, serious dependability, nothing that I’d have trouble servicing…”
Okay, he was beginning to see how she’d gotten in so much trouble. She’d asked good questions. She’d just asked the wrong salesperson. “Did he ask you what size yard you have?”
“Sure. But it’s not as if I had the exact dimensions. I just told him straight. Big.” She shot him another grin, as she finished feeding diesel into the mower and screwed the top back on. Suddenly, though, her smile faded. “Why all the questions? Do you think I made a bad choice?”
She’d made a terrible choice. It wasn’t just the money, but that it was way too much machine for what she needed. But suddenly that wasn’t the point. Her breathtaking smile had completely disappeared now, and in its place was a look of uncertainty…fragility.
In a flash, he realized he’d seen that look of raw uncertainty before. This morning. In between moments when she’d more or less been chewing him up, no matter what he said. Still. There’d been glimpses of That Look.
He remembered her saying more than once that she’d been raised as a spoiled, sheltered princess.
But he hadn’t added it up before. How much she’d been life-crippled by her background, and how much that bothered her. The basic practical information most people knew, she just plain didn’t. Common sense wasn’t common, not the way she was raised. And she was trying. Watching her with the plunger and the “Dare To Repair” book that morning…watching her in the hardware store, picking out tools, painting on her own, and yeah, now, diving into the mechanics of lawn mowing and mowers.
“What?” she said impatiently. “You think I didn’t pick the right machine?”
“I think you’re brilliant. That you picked the best.”
The shoulders eased. The smile went back to being shiny and disarming…and sexy. “Well. I know I didn’t know what I was doing. But I tried to ask the right questions-”
“You’re going to be the envy of the neighborhood.”
“I don’t care about that. But I can do this. My lawn. Your lawn. That kind of maintenance. There’s no reason I should have to ask for help. Or hire it out.”
He didn’t look back at the butcher job. And if anyone else made a remark to her, well, he’d just have to kill them.
As if suddenly realizing he wasn’t the center of attention, Teddy edged forward and said to Amanda, “Guess what? I went to the dentist this morning. For the first time in my whole life. The dentist let me squirt the water. It was really cool.”
Mike stared at his son, astonished at Teddy’s volunteering such a creative version of this morning’s events. But then, men seemed genetically programmed to reinvent certain events or truths, if it meant impressing a female they cared about.
Damn. It was getting harder and harder to deny it. It wasn’t just his son who cared. Mike was sinking in deeper and thicker than quicksand. He just didn’t know what to do about it.
Clouds bunched in fists. Thunder grumbled, bringing on another session of wild, slashing rain. Amanda glanced next door as she raced to the car.
She’d barely seen Mike in the past two weeks, except in passing.