Fool for Love: Fooling Around\Nobody's Fool\Fools Rush In (25 page)

“S
O
,
WHAT EXACTLY
is a demolition hearing?” Mark asked.

Claire settled deeper into the bucket seat and clutched her hair. She'd fastened it into a ponytail as soon as she'd seen him driving up Bradford Street with the convertible top of his car open. But even with an elastic and her hand containing most of her hair, gusts of mild spring air whipped loose strands into a frenzy. By the time they reached his parents' house, her hair would resemble a fright wig.

She didn't care. The only impression she had to make on Mark's parents was as their son's non-fiancée. She could be his non-fiancée as definitively with wild hair as she could with neat hair.

His hair blew freely, the thick dark waves tossed back from his face. His eyes were hidden behind sunglasses and he wore an off-white cotton sweater and jeans. He looked like someone heading to the beach, even though it was barely sixty degrees out and they were driving in the opposite direction from the ocean. Claire had chosen to wear tailored wool slacks, a silk blouse and a blazer. Glancing at his faded jeans, she realized she was grossly over-dressed.

He looked much too good in jeans, she acknowl
edged. Then again, she couldn't imagine anything he wouldn't look much too good in. Or out of.

She had to stop thinking that way. She had to accept that this relationship was going nowhere—other than to Williamstown for the day. In fact, she had to accept that it wasn't even a relationship. It was…a practical joke.

He tilted his head slightly, reminding her that she hadn't answered his question. “If someone wants to tear down a building,” she said, raising her voice to be heard above the wind, “he has to deal with our office. Even if the building itself isn't a landmark, we need to consider the integrity of the neighborhood. Boston's historical architecture is one of its most important characteristics.”

“So they have to get your permission to bulldoze a building? Even if it's an ugly old garage or something?”

“They have to go through lots of steps before they can bulldoze a building. My office is only one of the steps.”

“My mother's going to want to discuss your work,” he warned, accelerating to pass a slower car. “My parents' house is more than a hundred and fifty years old.”

“Really?” Claire didn't want to love the Lavins any more than she wanted to love their son, but she might just let herself fall in love with their house. “Is it farmhouse style, or more of a town style?”

“Farmhouse. It's small.”

“Of course.” Early nineteenth-century farmers in western Massachusetts generally didn't build palaces for their families.

“Low ceilings, uneven floors, the whole bit. When I was a kid, I could never get my Matchbox cars to roll very far on the wood floors. The planks were too uneven.”

“So you grew up in this antique farmhouse?”

“It didn't feel like an antique to me,” Mark said, dissatisfaction mingling with fondness in his tone. “It felt like a rattletrap. Hot in the summer, drafty in the winter. Things were always falling apart. Whenever anything broke, my mother would head out to her garden and leave my dad and me to fix it.”

“Antique houses are like that. Constantly in need of repair.”

“I live in a condo now. If anything needs repairs, I call up the association and say, ‘Fix this window,' or ‘Rewire this outlet.' It's not that I can't do the repairs myself—I learned a hell of a lot about fixing things while I was growing up. I just love the luxury of having someone else do the fixing for me.”

Claire studied him. In profile, with his sharp sunglasses and his sharper nose and chin, he looked sleek and modern. Yet she could imagine him in an old house, armed with a screwdriver and a can of putty, patching and restoring and grumbling good-naturedly the entire time.

“So, your mother gardens and your father does the repairs?” she asked.

“That about sums it up,” he said. “My mother teaches history and my father teaches political science. My mother cooks and my father does the dishes. My mother's published four books and my father's published five—and that really bothers my
mother. She's knocking herself out to get her fifth book finished so she can catch up to him.”

“They sound very accomplished.” Claire glanced at his jeans again—damn, but he filled them nicely—and decided she was glad to have dressed a little more elegantly for the afternoon.

“They're down-to-earth,” Mark said, “like your mother.”

They didn't sound like her mother. They were professors at one of the nation's most prestigious colleges. Claire's mother was a secretary. But she did like to garden.

“They have a dog. You aren't allergic to dogs or anything, are you?”

“No,” she assured him.

Mark passed another car, then slowed as Route 2 narrowed from four lanes to two. Claire had traveled west through the state before, but only on the Mass Pike, which remained a major highway from the New York state border all the way to Boston Harbor. Route 2 had started out as a highway, then had wandered through a few towns, then had widened into a highway again and now was back to two-lane wandering. Mark had to lower his speed to accommodate the traffic, much of which seemed to be pickup trucks and SUV's towing boats or carrying canoes and kayaks on their roofs. “Is there a lake around here?” she asked.

“Rivers, lakes and we're not too far from Quabbin,” he told her, naming a huge reservoir at the center of the state. “It's finally warm enough for people to put their boats into the water.”

Since they were no longer cruising so fast, Claire
could relax her grip on her ponytail. Above the roofless car stretched a clear April sky, baby blue and fresh. The air smelled clean and piney from the forests that covered the gentle hills on either side of the road. She needed to get out of the city more often, she decided.

She also needed the company of good-looking men more often. The way Mark's wind-tousled hair fluttered in messy waves around his face softened its angles. “Tell me about your work,” she said. “What exactly does a radio station's general manager do?”

“Everything except spin disks on the air,” he answered. “Although I could do that, too, if I had to. I got interested in radio work at college, when I took a deejay slot on the school's station. It's a real power trip, you know? Just you and the mike, and you get to decide what everyone has to listen to. Listeners either accept your choices or turn you off. After college, I moved into commercial radio and discovered that some program director got to decide what I should be playing. I wanted the power, so I did graduate work at Emerson College and got into radio management.”

“And now you decide what everyone has to listen to again?”

“Actually, the program director does most of that. But I have input. I deal with musicians and their reps who are trying to get their songs on the air. I also oversee the business side of the station—ad revenues, ratings, promotion, community outreach.” A loaded logging truck slowed to a crawl in front of them, but then took a wide turn off Route 2. Mark smiled and
hit the gas, obviously glad for the stretch of open road before them. “Rumor has it you like Dvorak.”

Startled, Claire eyed him sharply. The rumor happened to be true; she couldn't listen to Dvorak's
From the New World
without weeping over the symphony's transcendent beauty. Still, Mark's knowledge of her musical taste surprised her. “Where did you hear that?”

“Rex mentioned it.”

That Mark had discussed her with Rex both flattered and unsettled her. “What else did he tell you about me?” she asked, not sure she'd like his answer.

Mark glanced her way, then turned back to the road. “Nothing much.”

Oh, hell. The creep must have told Mark all sorts of things. She scrambled through her memory, trying to recall what, other than a speeding ticket and a sour aftertaste, she'd gotten from her acquaintanceship with Rex. They'd gone out for dinner in the North End one night, but by nine o'clock Rex had been yawning and complaining that he always got tired early because he had to wake up at 4:00 a.m. to do his show. On another occasion, they'd had a blistering argument over who was the greatest rock band out of Ireland—he'd claimed it was U2 and she'd contended it was Van Morrison, and Rex had scoffed that a solo performer like Van Morrison couldn't be compared to a rock band. She recalled a Saturday she and Rex had spent at a beach in Plymouth. They'd left early when the clouds unexpectedly opened up and drenched them, and Rex had kissed her and pawed her chest a bit in his car outside her building, his approach about as erotic as a horny
high-school boy's. Unable even to fake a response, she'd extricated herself and said she really didn't think they should see each other anymore. Then she hadn't heard from him until more than a week later, when his friend had phoned and said Rex was in a coma and needed her. And she'd gotten that blasted speeding ticket.

She turned to Mark and caught him glancing at her again. “Really,” he insisted. “He didn't say anything.”

His discretion made her smile.

Route 2 grew narrower and twistier as they pushed farther west, climbing into the Berkshires. The woods on either side of the road grew thicker. A stream ran parallel to the road, tumbling over rocks and fallen trees. The gravel shoulders sprouted signs warning of deer crossings, bear crossings and a dangerous hairpin a few miles ahead. The air felt cooler, probably because of the higher altitude and the forest's shadows.

“We're really in the wilderness, aren't we,” she said as they passed another Bear Crossing sign.

“Civilization returns on the other side of the hairpin turn,” he promised. And it did. Once they'd eased around the treacherously sharp curve, they descended into a valley of old mills and modest houses. “North Adams,” Mark informed her. “Williamstown is the next town up the road. The last town. After Williamstown, you're out of Massachusetts.”

As they drove past the campus where Mark's parents taught, he pointed out some of the buildings to her. “You may feel you're in the sticks,” he said, “but there's always something happening in a col
lege town. Concerts, plays, lectures, visiting dignitaries. Sports, too. My parents used to take me to all the college home games—football, hockey, lacrosse. It wasn't a bad place to grow up, although at this stage I prefer city living.”

“I imagine being one of the top five bachelors in Williamstown wouldn't carry quite the same prestige as being one of the top five bachelors in Boston.”

He angled his head toward her, as if trying to assess whether she was teasing him. She was, sort of. But she was testing him, too, attempting to measure just how important his top-bachelor ranking was to him.

After a minute, he cracked a smile. “I always say, if you're going to be something, you might as well be tops at it. Why be a mediocre bachelor if you can be a top-five bachelor? Why be a small-town bachelor when you can be a hub-of-the-universe bachelor?”

“The only people who think Boston is the hub of the universe are people who live in Boston,” she noted.

“And they're right,” he said as he slowed the car and steered onto a gravel driveway.

The house at its end was charming: white clapboard with black shutters flanking the windows and a welcoming red front door. A plaque next to the door identified the year of the house's construction as 1848. Ancient oaks, sycamores and evergreens stood sentry in the yard, and brave blades of new grass struggled to poke through the earth. “Oh, Mark! It's fabulous!”

“Trust me, it's a rattletrap,” he muttered, though
his smile widened. He shut off the engine and they both climbed out of the car.

By the time they reached the door, Mark's parents had it open and the yard filled with spirited canine barking. Mark's mother had long, silver-laced black hair braided down her back and large gold hoops piercing her ears. His father looked like an older version of Mark, his thick, wavy hair streaked with gray, the lines in his face etched more deeply, but his eyes as dark and his smile as engaging. Like Mark, both his parents wore faded jeans and sweaters. Claire had to remind herself that they were both
Dr.
Lavin, because they looked like a couple of organic-farming hippies.

“Come in, come in!” Mark's mother urged them, swinging the door wider and nudging a medium-size tan dog back from the threshold with her knee. “Get back, Lovey,” she scolded, then returned her attention to her son. “Mark! Give me a kiss.” He didn't have a chance to object, because she wrapped him in a smothering embrace and pulled him down so she could kiss his cheek. As he straightened up and hugged his father, his mother gathered Claire's hands in her own and beamed at her. “Claire! It's such a pleasure!”

Claire found the greeting rather effusive, given that she wasn't Mark's fiancée or even his girlfriend. If all went well, she might emerge from this trip as his friend, period. Their drive that day was the longest time they'd ever spent in each other's company.

But she liked being enveloped in such familial warmth. She sensed nothing phony in his parents'
behavior, nothing forced. They seemed genuinely happy to see their son and meet Claire.

“So that's the new car,” his father said, stepping out onto the small porch and scrutinizing Mark's sports car. “I am…” he paused, then laughed “…green with envy.”

“Go.” His mother gestured toward the vehicle. “Go play with the car.” She shooed her son and husband out to the driveway, then ushered Claire inside the cozy house.

In the Landmarks Commission office, Claire dealt almost exclusively with urban buildings. But she appreciated many of the features of the Lavin family farmhouse—the wide plank floors, the narrow halls and doorways, the multitude of fireplaces, the rippling settled glass in some of the twelve-over-twelve windows. A wood-burning stove occupied a corner of the huge farm kitchen, which was furnished with a massive table and four chairs of knotty pine. Braided rugs lay scattered across the floor. A dog's food and water dishes sat on a mat on the floor near the sink. The dog who'd barked so enthusiastically when she and Mark had arrived wandered over to the water dish and had a drink. Claire couldn't identify its breed, but it was the color of taffy and had floppy ears and a friendly face.