One Summer (10 page)

A little boy with shaggy blond hair and a thin, pointy-featured face sat in Ben’s big leather chair behind the desk. Johnny was perched on the edge of the desk, talking to the boy, his back to the door. His overlong hair had been gathered into a neat ponytail and secured by a blue rubber band at his nape, and in his T-shirt and jeans he could not have looked more different from the heavy-set, bespectacled Ben, who leaned against the side wall, arms crossed over his chest. Ben’s neatly pressed gray trousers, blue-striped shirt, and navy tie were inexpensive but immaculate and served as silent testimony to the way he felt a man should dress in his place of employment. Rachel wondered with an inward sigh if Johnny had chosen to wear the ponytail just to irritate Ben. Probably. It seemed like something Johnny Harris would do.

Closing the door gently behind her, Rachel steeled herself to deal with the problem at hand. Glancing up, she discovered three very different pairs of eyes focused on her. Ben’s were transparently relieved, while the expression in Johnny’s was more difficult to decipher. She had neither seen nor spoken to him since their unfortunate dinner together. At the memory of the terms on which they had parted, butterflies fluttered in her stomach.

Uncertain of what to expect from him and equally uncertain of the relative degree of her own guilt and anger, Rachel let her gaze skim past his. By default, the boy’s eyes were the ones she met: golden brown, thickly lashed, they were ringed with faint shadows and wide with what she took for fear.

“Rachel.” Ben came away from the wall, picked up a small plastic alarm clock from the desk, and held it up for her inspection. “This is what he took. Olivia saw him do it, and when I stopped him, I found it hidden down the front of his shirt, just like she said.”

“It’s a goddamned lie!” Coming from such a little boy—he didn’t appear to be more than seven or eight, and he
no longer looked in the least afraid—such profanity was shocking. “I never took nothin’!”

“We caught you red-handed, you little thief! There’s no way you can deny it!” Ben’s voice was tight with anger as he swung around to wave the alarm clock at the boy. “And this isn’t the first time, either. You and your friends are always in here stealing something.”

“We never took nothin’ from you, and you can’t prove we did.” The small voice was defiant.

“That does it.” Ben turned back to shake his head at Rachel. “He’s not even remorseful. If we don’t call the police, we might as well send out an invitation to every kid in town to come in and steal us blind.”

“I told you about calling the police, Zeigler, and I meant it.” The quiet warning came from Johnny, who had slid off the desk to join them after whispering something to the boy.

“You don’t tell me anything, Harris. You work for me.” Ben’s hushed rejoinder sounded no less furious for its lack of volume.

“I work for Rachel, not you.”

The insolence of Johnny’s voice matched the insolence in his eyes as they moved over Ben. Ben bristled. Johnny smiled at him with slow challenge.

“You both work for me,” Rachel said sharply. She looked up into Johnny’s narrowed gaze. She saw no apology for his behavior at their last parting there—and no anger, either. His use of her given name was not lost on her, but this was not the time to dwell on its portent. “Ben is exactly right: Store policy is to prosecute shoplifters, and this child is one of a gang of boys whom we have suspected of stealing things from us for nearly six months. We finally caught one of them in the act. Why shouldn’t we call the police?”

“Because he’s nine years old, and he’s scared to death.”

“A businesswoman,” Rachel hissed, glancing at the child again. It was a mistake. He did look scared, she decided, as he watched the three adults arguing his fate in undertones, though it was clear he was trying valiantly to hide it. She glared at Johnny even as her heart threatened to overrule her head. He was such a small boy, for all his nasty talk. She wouldn’t have guessed he was nine.

Rachel sighed, already knowing that she was not going to call the police. “Let me talk to him a minute. What’s his name?”

Ben shrugged. “The little hellion wouldn’t even tell us that much.”

“Jeremy Watkins. I know his mom.” Johnny’s answer was abrupt.

“Oh?” Rachel looked at him with eyebrows raised.

“Remember Glenda, the waitress at the Clock?”

“Oh.” There was a wealth of meaning in the syllable. So that was why Johnny was championing the boy—for the sake of his mother. For some reason, that notion didn’t suit Rachel well at all. Neither did the realization that Johnny had obviously taken the waitress up on her invitation to visit, if he had gotten to know the boy. Unbidden came the memory of his voice drawling,
It’s been ten years since I’ve had the pleasure of a woman’s company. You might be worried that I’m kinda horny
. Apparently he had since taken the opportunity to remedy his lack.

“The parents are getting a divorce. It’s tough on the kid. Cut him some slack, can’t you?”

“Of course, you would condone criminal behavior, Harris. Maybe if someone had refrained from cutting you some slack when you were a child, you wouldn’t have ended up in prison.” There was no mistaking the venom in Ben’s whisper.

“And maybe if someone had rearranged your face when you were a child, you wouldn’t have ended up being a sanctimonious dick-head. But we’ll never know, will we?”

“Why, you—” Ben’s fists clenched, and his face darkened with anger.

“Come on, Zeigler. Anytime.” Johnny smiled again, unpleasantly, his eyes bright and clear. It was obvious to Rachel that he was spoiling for a fight, and Ben, from whom she would have expected more restraint, was just as bad. She guessed the only thing holding Ben back was the certainty that the younger, taller, stronger man would wipe the floor with him.

“Damn it, I have had enough!” Rachel hardly ever swore. That they had driven her to it between them increased her fury. “I will not listen to another word of this exchange. Ben, would you kindly go back out to the store? I’m sure Olivia could use some help. As for you”—her eyes flickered up to Johnny’s face, their expression boding nothing good—“I’ll talk to you in a minute. First I want to deal with this child.”

“If you don’t press charges against that little brat, I quit.” Ben’s voice vibrated with anger.

“Good.” It was the merest breath of a taunt from Johnny, but Ben didn’t appear to hear it. Rachel was able, for the moment at least, to respond with no more than a sidelong glare at Johnny while she did her best to placate her store manager.

“You’re being ridiculous, Ben. You’ve worked here for six years now, and I’m not about to let you quit. But I do reserve the right not to call the police if I don’t feel it’s warranted. You know as well as I do that we make exceptions to policy all the time.”

“If you don’t call the police, I quit,” he reiterated fiercely. Swinging around, he stalked out of the office.

9

“A
sshole,” Johnny said.

“You shut up.” It was all Rachel could do not to shout it. Instead, she shot him a furious glance, turned her back on him, and walked around the desk to confront the boy.

“Jeremy—is that your name?”

He looked up at her, huge eyes dark with suspicion.

“Maybe it is, maybe it ain’t.”

“You can trust her, Jeremy. She’s okay.” Johnny was beside her, his voice gentle as he spoke to the boy. Rachel gritted her teeth.

“Would you please let me handle this?” she said, too sweetly. If she said what she really wanted to say to the aggravating son of a gun, in the tone she really wanted to say it, she would scare the child to death.

“Be my guest.” Johnny settled back down on the edge of the desk with a gesture that said the problem was all hers.

Ignoring him, Rachel crouched down beside the child so that they were at eye level.

“Jeremy, I know you put the clock in your shirt, and that you and your friends have done things like that before. It probably seems pretty exciting, doesn’t it, to take things and not pay for them? You want to see if you can get away with it. But I don’t think you realize that what you’re
doing is stealing. Stealing is wrong, and you can get in big trouble for it. The police will come, and you’ll be arrested and have to go before a judge. What happens after that is up to the judge, but I guarantee it isn’t any fun.” She paused to let her words sink in, then continued. “I’m not calling the police this time, because I think everybody deserves one warning. But if you ever do such a thing again, in here or in any other store, neither I nor anyone else will have a choice. Do you understand me?”

While she talked, his vanilla-wafer eyes had grown suspiciously moist, as though tears lurked just beneath the surface. Hurting for the child, she impulsively leaned forward to put her arms around him. As soon as she touched him, Jeremy shoved her away. Rachel sat back on her bottom, prevented from tumbling all the way over only by Johnny’s hand catching her shoulder at the last split second.

“Jeremy!” Johnny said sharply, and stood to help Rachel to her feet. Rachel was already scrambling up. If she hadn’t been wearing heels, she wouldn’t have toppled over in the first place, she thought with disgust, feeling a fool.

“Are you all right?” Johnny’s voice was low, his hand circling her forearm warm and comforting. She looked up to find his face disturbingly close. There was concern for her in his eyes, and it went a long way toward disarming her. The memory of their acrimonious last encounter still rankled, but it was rapidly losing its sting.

“I think I’ll live.” As she spoke, she brushed a hand down the back of her dress where it had made contact with the floor.

“Here, let me.” The concern vanished, replaced by cool deviltry as he ran his hand palm-down over her derriere just as she had herself, though his hand tended to linger where hers had not. Similar though the two gestures were, their effect on her was wildly divergent.

“Stop that!” Rachel was so startled by the intimacy of
his touch that she jumped away, and the reprimand was louder and shriller than she had intended. For a moment she feared Ben would come bursting back through the door to her rescue, but to her relief he did not. He must have taken himself off beyond earshot.

“I was just helping you brush away the dust,” Johnny said innocently, though his eyes teased her. Red-faced, Rachel gave him a look that should have brought him to his knees with shame. Every single time she was on the verge of congratulating herself for discerning the basic decency behind his arrogant, aggressive, infuriating demeanor, he immediately did something to set her back up again. She began to suspect it was deliberate. Rachel toyed with the thought, then pushed it aside for later consideration as she remembered the presence of the boy. Self-consciously, she turned her gaze on him to discover that he was observing the pair of them with obvious interest.

“Will you promise me that you won’t steal anything again, so I don’t have to call the police?” Her thoughts were still befuddled by trying to make sense of Johnny Harris, so her voice was perhaps softer and gentler than it should have been to achieve the result she hoped for. She was all too conscious of the man watching her with his wicked smile and damnable sex appeal to be properly stern with the boy.

“You cain’t prove nothin’,” the child said.

For a moment Rachel was speechless at the ingratitude of the surly response. Then, her mind effectively cleared of all but the matter at hand, she shook her head at the boy. “You’re wrong, Jeremy. If Mr. Zeigler, the man who was just in here, and Miss Tompkins, the lady behind the counter, were to go to court and testify against you, we could prove that you tried to steal the clock. But we’re hoping not to have to do that, this time. If it happens again …”

“It won’t happen again. I’ll say something to Glenda.”
Johnny moved to stand beside her. Fortunately for Rachel’s peace of mind, Johnny’s attention was focused on the child.

“Don’t tell my mom.” Jeremy’s bravado suddenly crumpled. His lower lip quivered, and at last he sounded like the small, scared boy he was. “Please don’t tell my mom.”

“The way you behaved to Miss Grant here, I don’t reckon I have much choice.” As intrigued as Rachel was by this discovery of an Achilles’ heel to the child’s tough-guy facade, Johnny crossed his arms over his chest, his expression severe. Jeremy met his gaze briefly. Then his lids dropped, and he stared at the floor, the very picture of youthful misery.

“If you tell her, she’ll cry. She’s been cryin’ a lot lately. On account of my dad havin’ a girlfriend and leavin’ us to live with the whore, and us not havin’ any money even with Mom workin’ all the time. They turned off our lights last week, and it took three days before she was able to pay ’em enough to turn ’em back on again. It got real hot in our trailer with the air conditioner turned off. And the meat spoiled in the freezer, and we couldn’t afford to buy no more till yesterday. And the clock by her bed, it’s broke and she cain’t buy another one ’cause she spent all her extra money for meat, and if she’s late to work much, she’ll lose her job. Then she’ll cry and cry and cry, and we’ll prob’ly have to go live with my dad and the whore, and they don’t want us, or else we’ll all starve.”