Birthright (6 page)

The gym was warm, although the open door let in a breeze. But the kids looked hot, and Aaron looked hotter. He had such long legs, muscular and taut, covered in a fine mesh of dark hair. She lifted her
gaze to his chest, outlined by the clinging T-shirt, and then moved higher, to his glistening face and his unruly hair. “Come on, Stacy, pass the ball!” he shouted to a girl. She passed it and he gave her a huge grin. “There you go! That’s the way! This is a team sport, everyone!”

He blew his whistle and scooped the ball into his hand. “Okay, guys—water break.” He led his charges to the bleachers, where several large insulated jugs of water stood. After handing out paper cups, he proceeded to fill the cups for the kids. “Sip it, guys, and then take seconds. Remember what I said this morning?”

“Drink lots of fluids,” one of the boys called out.

“That’s right. Always drink lots of fluids when you’re doing heavy physical activity. That may be the most important thing I can teach you.” He paused. Then, “How much fluid should you drink?”

“Lots!” the kids chorused. Aaron smiled.

Lily smiled, too.

She felt like a trespasser, lurking unnoticed in the doorway, dressed in a floaty pale-blue jumper with a matching blue shirt under it and a pair of rope-soled sandals. She didn’t belong here, yet she couldn’t walk away. Not when Aaron was grinning so magically at his scruffy band of athletes. While they sipped their water, he lifted a smaller water bottle to his lips and took a swig. Then he lifted the hem of his shirt to wipe his face, offering Lily a view of his abdomen, a sculpture of lithe muscle shiny with sweat.

God, what a body.

The thought stunned her. She blinked and fell back a step, surprised that she could be turned on by a
fleeting glimpse of a man’s midsection, surprised that she could be turned on by anything at all. It had been so long since she’d felt any sort of sexual stirring. She’d been married to Tyler, and once she was married she’d never even looked at another man. But Tyler had come to bed drunk too many times, and when there was sex, it had been ugly.

There was nothing ugly about Aaron Mazerik. Absolutely nothing.

Lowering his shirt, he reached for his water bottle again, then spotted her hovering in the doorway. He smiled, this time not the broad grin reserved for his kids but a quiet, questioning smile. She smiled back, feeling suddenly shy and uneasy. Was he aware that she’d been ogling him? Could he tell what one quick look at his bare abdomen had done to her? Was she blushing?

“Keep drinking,” he ordered the children, then jogged across the court to the door. She wanted to shrink from him. Heaven knew, if he got too close to her, she might not be able to control the urge to touch his skin, to lift up his shirt and run her fingertips over the hard, sleek surface—

She must be insane even to think such a thing! This was Aaron Mazerik, an admittedly handsome man but one with whom she had nothing in common.

He loomed in front of her, his hands on his hips, his breathing heavy from all his running and his eyes glittering like emeralds set in silver and gold. And she felt something. Something scary. Something dangerous. Something unforgivably tempting.

Something she hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

A
ARON TOLD HIMSELF
he was standing in the open doorway of the gym, grinning like an idiot at Lily Holden, because her being there implied that maybe she was going to donate money to his program. He told himself the awareness buzzing through him, as fierce and physical as an electric shock, had nothing to do with her personally, her beauty, her eyes the color of her dress, her hair the color of the sun. He told himself the reason he was having trouble catching his breath was that he’d been running pretty much nonstop for the past half hour.

After a moment his breathing finally began to get more regular. His eyes adjusted to the bright outside light, and once they did she looked more like a human being than an apparition out of his dreams.

Money,
he thought.
Money is the only thing Lily Holden can give me.

“Have you been standing here long?” he asked.

“Just a couple of minutes. I hope you don’t mind.” She gave him that shy smile that said she wasn’t quite as self-assured as he assumed.

“No problem.” He glanced over his shoulder at the kids, who were beginning to look bored. Another few seconds, and they’d be hurling cups of water at each other. “I’ve got to get back to work,” he said,
then gestured toward the bottom bench of the bleachers, which were folded shut along one wall. “If you want to sit and watch, feel free. We’ve got about an hour still to go here.”

“Thanks.” She entered the gym and arranged herself neatly on the end of the bench, smoothing the skirt of her dress over her knees.

He returned to the children, who were gathered across the gym from where Lily was seated, and told himself not to think about the fact that she was there, watching him. “All cooled off?” he asked them.

“Yeah!”

“Okay. I want each of you to take a ball.” He loosened the drawstring on the mesh ball bag and passed basketballs around until each child had one. He took one for himself and tossed the bag aside. “Everybody spread out a little so you won’t be in each other’s way. Now what we’re going to do—” he waited until they’d arranged themselves around the gym “—is dribble with your right hand. Everyone raise your right hand.” Jimmy raised his left hand. “Jimmy?” Aaron prodded. Jimmy quickly switched hands and smirked. “Okay. You’re all going to dribble with your right hand while singing ‘Happy Birthday.”’

This prompted roars of laughter. “Happy Birthday to
who
?” Jessica wanted to know.

“To me. Coach Maz. Okay? Let’s—”

“Is it your birthday?”

“No. We’re just singing to Coach Maz because Coach Maz is the boss. Okay? Ready, set, go.” He started dribbling and singing, all the while surveying the children. The task, which had obviously sounded
silly when he’d described it, was actually quite challenging. The kids kept stopping and starting the singing as they struggled with their dribbling. By the third line of the jingle, no two kids were singing together. By the end, they had all dissolved in laughter, except for Andy, whose ball had gotten away from him and rolled to the far side of the gym.

Once Andy had returned with his runaway ball, Aaron settled them down and said, “Now we’re going to do it again, only this time you have to alternate hands—one dribble left, one dribble right, left, right.” He demonstrated. “Got it?”

“Are we still singing?”

“Still singing. Ready, set, go!”

This time both Andy and Stacy lost their balls, and everyone was giggling well before they got to “Happy Birthday, Coach Ma-a-az…”

Aaron didn’t mind. This wasn’t a voice lesson. It was an exercise designed to help them learn how to focus, and once the children calmed down he told them so. “The idea,” he explained, “is to reach a point where dribbling is so natural to you, you don’t even have to think about it while you do it. You can be dribbling and thinking about something completely different—like, is the rest of your team set up for a play? Do you have an opening for an inside shot? Is your forward ready to receive the ball? Will Coach Maz love me because I sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to him?” The kids laughed. “You don’t even want to be thinking about dribbling. So we’re going to take this one step further. Everyone get in a line—that’s right—and follow me. We’re going to walk and dribble and sing ‘Happy Birthday’ all at the same time.”

“Walk or run?” Jimmy asked.

“You guys can hardly do this standing still, and you want to run? No, we’re just going to walk.”

He led them in a serpentine parade around the gym, listening to their off-key warbling. Every few dribbles, he’d spin around and walk backward, facing them, so he could make sure they were all following him. They were—sort of—but the task clearly wasn’t easy. Most of them still looked down at the ball a lot more than they looked ahead at where they were going. Collisions ensued, stumbling and jostling. The song got massacred along the way.

Aaron didn’t care. He didn’t even care that the kids were all over the gym, losing balls, chasing balls, bellowing the song off-key. What he cared about was that they were having fun and learning a new skill.

He ended the day with a relay race, partly to work on their running speed but mostly to burn them out. They were all replenishing their supply of fluids when Stacy’s mother arrived to pick her daughter up.

Over the next few minutes he greeted a string of adults—mostly mothers, but one uncle and one older sister—who had come for the children. He answered questions, said goodbye and waved everyone off. Only when the last of the kids was gone did he allow himself to look at Lily.

He hadn’t had to look at her earlier to feel her presence. He’d deliberately avoided the corner of the bench where she sat, but he’d never lost his awareness of her. Like white noise, she’d been there, a constant hum in the room, in his mind. He’d inhaled
her, felt her on his skin, sensed her along his nerve endings.

If taking money from her was going to be so distracting, maybe he ought to thank her for considering a contribution to his program and send her and her checkbook away. But damn, the money wasn’t for him. It was for Andy and Stacy and Jimmy and Jessica, and the other thirty kids who wouldn’t be starting the program until next week or the week after because he couldn’t take them all at once. It was for kids who had nothing to do with their time, nothing to keep them busy on a lazy summer day, nothing other than Aaron to prevent them from wandering the back alleys behind the Main Street shops scavenging for cigarette butts, or stealing money from their mother’s purses for marijuana, or—in the case of the younger kids—sitting mesmerized in front of their TV sets, watching shows filled with violence.

It was for the kids that he would tamp down whatever conflicted feelings he had about Lily and try to woo a little money from her.

Using the hem of his shirt to wipe the excess sweat from his face again, he crossed the gym to where Lily was sitting. She rose to her feet and smiled hesitantly. “Towels,” he said, letting his shirt drop back down over his shorts. “If you donate some money, I can buy towels.”

Her smile faltered slightly, as if she wasn’t sure whether he was joking. In truth, he wasn’t sure whether he was, either. The physical-education department used a laundry service that provided towels during the school year, but he couldn’t afford that. He would have worn a headband and brought his
own towel if he’d realized that he was going to be running around and sweating as much as the youngsters.

He gestured toward the gym’s rear door, which led to the phys-ed offices. His office was so small the desk and file cabinets nearly filled it, but he’d managed to wedge a compact fridge into a corner. He pulled out a couple of bottles of iced tea and extended one to Lily, who shook her head.

Of course she wasn’t thirsty. She hadn’t been sprinting around a gym for the past several hours. Her skin was dry, her dress unwrinkled. Looking at her refreshed him almost as much as taking a swig of iced tea.

He indicated for her to sit in the guest chair. Then he circled the desk and settled into his creaky swivel chair. He took another swallow of iced tea, screwed the cap onto the bottle and leaned back, waiting for her to speak.

She didn’t seem to know what to say. She met his eyes fleetingly. Then her gaze darted around the small office, pausing at the file cabinets, the computer on a small table next to his desk, the clipboards hanging from hooks beside the doorway and finally the team photos lining the walls. Aaron was in the most recent one, as coach, and he was in three old ones in uniform, as a player. When he looked at those photos—especially the first one, taken when he was a sophomore with one foot still in the world of petty crime—he hardly recognized himself. The features were the same, the lean build pretty much the same. But the eyes…God, his eyes had looked angry back
then. He didn’t want to think he still had that much anger in him.

Lily’s gaze lingered on the old photos for a while, and then she turned back to him. “You were right,” she said, breaking the silence. “My painting was too safe.”

Her comment surprised him. He’d thought she’d come to discuss his summer program. But hell, if there was a nice fat check at the end of the conversation, he’d talk about her painting.

As if he could think of anything to say on that subject. He could identify the
Mona Lisa
if he had to, and that painting of the skinny old farmer with a pitchfork and his wife, but that was about the extent of his knowledge of art.

Lily was looking directly at him now, her gaze almost a challenge. He had to say something. “I was just talking off the top of my head when I said that.”

“No, you were absolutely right. Everyone always says my paintings are nice and pretty. But I’ve been thinking ‘nice and pretty’ might not be such a good idea.”

“You think nasty and grotesque are better?”

She laughed. “Maybe they are. My problem is that I wouldn’t begin to know how to do that.”

“Good,” he said automatically, then grinned and shrugged. He had a feeling they were talking about two different things. The only problem was, he didn’t know what she was talking about. He wasn’t sure what he was talking about, either.

“The nice, pretty thing for me to do would be to give you money for your basketball summer school,” she said.

“Well, then, I’m all in favor of nice and pretty.”

She laughed. He watched much too intently as her laughter faded and her smile grew quiet. She could never be anything but pretty, he realized. Even if a terrible accident befell her, leaving her disfigured, she would still be pretty. Her prettiness didn’t come from her features, even though they were lovely. It came from something inside her, something tender and sweet and vulnerable. Not even losing her husband in an auto accident could make her interior grotesque. She was doomed to be pretty forever.

“Nice” was another matter, though. “Nice” was within her power to change. Aaron had learned how to be nice, more or less, over the past fifteen years. If he could learn that, he supposed even the nicest person in the world could learn how to be nasty.

“Do you have a budget for your program?” she asked.

“I’ve got several.” He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out his budget folder and passed it across the desk. “I’ve got a reality-based budget, a dream-based budget, and everything in between.”

She opened the folder and began to read. “This must be the reality-based one,” she guessed as she skimmed the numbers on the top sheet.

“Yeah.”

“Where’s your salary?”

“What salary?”

She gave him a hard look. “Aren’t you paid a salary to run the program?”

He shrugged again. “There’s no money for it.”

“Then how can you afford to do this?”

“I’m a school counselor,” he reminded her. “We
get paid enough during the school year to cover the summer months. In theory, anyway.”

Frowning, she resumed her study of the budget plans he’d written up. Lacking anything better to do, he watched her read. It didn’t seem fair that he found her so attractive. Mother Nature should have designed things so that people would be attracted only to people they could conceivably hook up with.

Yeah, Mother Nature had been slacking off when she’d worked out the chemistry between Aaron and Lily. Seated in the tiny office with her, he felt the same crazy sensations he’d felt the first time he’d glimpsed her—sensations that could drive a screwed-up adolescent not to care if he got detention yet again for staring at her and forgetting the incriminating open doorway.

For four long years of high school, he’d had a near-fatal infatuation with her. Even after he’d learned she was Dr. Bennett’s daughter, he’d felt the zap of desire whenever he saw her. He’d never had any classes with her, but he would see her—in the hallways, at the assemblies, in the stands during basketball games, in the cafeteria on those rare occasions he ventured into that room to buy a bottle of apple juice.

He’d avoided the cafeteria most of the time. It was a place for the kids who belonged, not him. Once Coach Drummer had taken him in hand, he’d been allowed to eat lunch in this very office where he and Lily were sitting now. His lunches were invariably leftovers his mother brought home from the café. Coach Drummer must have understood that Aaron would have felt embarrassed if he’d unwrapped a
lunch consisting of half an omelet, a slab of meat loaf and a pickle spear in front of his classmates.

But when he did go into the cafeteria to buy a drink, he’d search for Lily. She was always at a table with other pretty girls or with those River Rat kids. They’d all be laughing and sharing confidences, nudging each other or crumpling their napkins into balls and tossing them at each other. Amid the crowd, amid the din, she was like a beacon to Aaron, snagging his attention. He would stand by the beverage machine, turning his quarters over and over in his palm while he stared at her and wished she was his—and hated himself for wishing.

He didn’t hate himself now. He’d learned over the years that self-hatred wasn’t good for much. Still…life would be a little easier if merely gazing at her as she flipped through the various budgets he’d printed out didn’t make his blood run hotter than normal.