Read the book: «Barely Mistaken»

1

Thirteen years later…

“YOU’LL BE THE BELLE of the ball tonight,” Beth cajoled as she brandished the package of hair color at Olivia.

Olivia paused in the middle of pressing her dress for the costume ball and sprayed extra starch on a pleat that refused to cooperate.

“I’m not concerned with being the belle of the ball,” she argued. “I’m quite fond of my mousy brown hair, thank you. Why would I want to trade it in for late-blooming, tramp-in-training red?”

Beth stretched out on Olivia’s four-poster Rice-carved bed. “You couldn’t look like a tramp-in-training if you tried. Trust me. But you could try shucking the prude disguise. You’d be a knockout. A little hair color, some contact lenses and dressing as if you really are twenty-nine instead of sixty-five.”

Flamboyant, outgoing Beth just didn’t get it. Olivia wasn’t interested in being a knockout—not that she even considered herself KO material. Beth was a force of nature. Olivia was a rock. Olivia liked her quartz status.

She rolled her eyes at Beth and picked up the long-standing argument. “My eyes are allergic to contacts, as you very well know.” She mentally reviewed her wardrobe of conservative skirts and blouses. “And I dress like a twenty-nine-year-old librarian with good taste—”

“Maybe you should borrow something from Tammy.”

“Maybe when pigs fly.” Her older sister maintained an inverse fashion philosophy—the least amount of clothes showing the most amount of flesh. And Tammy had a bountiful amount of flesh up top. Olivia shook her head as she peered down at her relatively flat chest. “Can you imagine these in one of Tammy’s halter tops? Even if I dared to bare, there’s nothing there. I’d have enough extra material to make a skirt.” Not to mention she’d set every tongue in town wagging.

Beth snickered. “Okay. You’ve got a point. But at least you’ll skip the sag factor. You’ll still be Ms. Perky Boobs at sixty when Tammy’s playing soccer with hers. Now about this color…”

Olivia pushed her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose and peered across the ironing board at the hair-color model. She’d invested a lot of thought and care into cultivating a conservative, tasteful “look.” Olivia always carried with her the sense that everyone in town was watching—waiting for her to slip up, to do or say something inappropriate.

For the span of a heartbeat, a shadow of restless longing tempted her. And then it passed. She shook her head. “Forget it. I’m not going to look tacky or cheap. Adam wants to discuss something important tonight.”

The thought brought an involuntary smile to her face. Adam had begun to affect her that way.

“What?” Beth scowled in suspicion.

Beth’s scowl dampened her good mood. “I don’t know, but it sounded important.”

“You’ve been dating a month, maybe he’s gonna put the move on you. Sex is always important to men. Right up there with breathing, eating and television.” Beth sighed and placed the hair color box on the nightstand.

“Beth, you’ve got the gutter mind.”

“What’s gutter about that? You’ve been out half a dozen times. He’s kissed you, hasn’t he?”

“You know he has.” Twice to be precise—both times their kiss had proved a pleasant, perfunctory end to their evening. At first, she’d merely considered Adam a friend—a very attractive, very influential friend. Lately, their relationship had taken a more intimate turn. However, it wasn’t that intimate, yet. “He’s mentioned his grandmother’s birthday several times. I think he’s going to invite me to the party. It seems more likely than sex.” Olivia examined the pressed dress. Each pleat lined up in perfect, starched order. “That looks good.”

She turned off the iron and hung up her dress. The dark purple complemented her pale skin and dark hair. At least that was the salesclerk’s opinion.

“Hmm.” Beth cast a considering eye over the floor-length, lady-in-waiting gown. “Almost as stiff and upstanding as Adam. I’m sure he’ll approve.”

Olivia moved the dress to the back of the door and sat on the opposite end of the bed, crossing her legs at the ankles. Hortense jumped up and settled her immense kitty weight across Olivia’s lap. Olivia administered the obligatory scratch behind the ears and turned her attention back to Beth. Usually, Beth was brutally frank—it was one of the things she admired about her long-standing friend—but, for weeks now she’d been beating around the bush, dropping snide comments. “If you don’t like him, why don’t you just say so?”

“I don’t like him.”

Hortense seconded the opinion with a short meow.

Ask and ye shall receive. “Why?”

Beth held up a freckled finger. “He’s supercilious.” She held up another. “He’s a snob.” A third finger joined the first two. “And he thinks he’s all that.”

Based on Beth’s earlier comments, Olivia had known her friend wasn’t wild about Adam, but he didn’t deserve this. “That’s not fair. He’s been a tremendous help in raising money for the new addition to the library. And he’s responsible for my invitation to the costume ball at the country club tonight. I should manage to raise another couple of hundred.” And I think he could be The One. Now wasn’t the time to break that particular news.

Beth snapped her fingers. “That’s it. You’re besotted ’cause he helped you fund-raise. You’d like Freddie Krueger if he helped you with your library.”

“You make me sound like the village idiot. It’s true, I appreciate Adam’s help with the library. Do you know what a difference that new kids’ section is going to make—”

“Sure I do, ’cause you’ve told me.” Beth cut her off before she could really wind up on her favorite topic. “Okay, how about this? I caught him admiring his reflection in his office window when I went to make the deposit at the bank yesterday.” Beth wrinkled her entire face in disgust.

“So?” Olivia heard the defensive note in her own voice.

“He was so pleased with himself. I bet he got a stiffy.”

“What?” Even irrepressible Beth hadn’t just uttered what Olivia thought she had. Had she?

Beth tossed her a defiant look. “You heard me, girlfriend. A stiffy. A woody. A boner. Take your pick.”

Ewww. She could live without this level of bluntness. “If you’re going to be disgusting, I’m not listening.”

Beth threw up her hands in surrender. “You’re warped, Olivia.”

Amusement edged out insult. “That’s it. My life has reached an all-time low when you call me warped.”

“You’re dating the guy, and you think his stiffy is disgusting.”

“No. You talking about it is disgusting. He was probably checking his tie or something.” Olivia had noticed him watching himself in the mirror once when they were out to dinner. “He’s very particular about his appearance.” She shifted Hortense to a spot on the bed beside her and plucked the new bottle of nail polish off her nightstand. A lifetime of insecurities reared their ugly heads. “I wonder sometimes why he goes out with me.”

Olivia began to paint her toenails with meticulous care.

“Are you nuts? You’re smart, funny, successful, attractive—in a severely understated kind of way. And you’re ten times the person he is.”

She paused and raised a brow in Beth’s direction. Beth was just a wee bit prone to exaggeration when she climbed on a soapbox. Olivia couldn’t resist teasing her. “Ten times? Really?”

Beth scowled at her. “Who was the valedictorian of our graduating class?”

Olivia shrugged and resumed painting her nails. “Who never had a date to the Senior Prom?”

“Who started the local literacy drive?” Beth fired back at her.

“Who was asked out in high school by Deke Richards because he thought her brother could sneak him some beer?”

“Olivia, you’ve got to move past this ‘wrong side of the tracks’ label you’ve given yourself.”

“Come on, Beth. My family provides plenty of fodder for the gossip mill. And I didn’t have to label myself. My Daughter-of-the-Town-Drunk title was inherited.” Along with the faint wash of shame so familiar she wore it like a second skin. Caste systems thrived in small towns.

At times she craved the anonymity and the freedom of living where her background didn’t define her. But leaving seemed tantamount to conceding defeat—accepting her title and slinking away in shame. No, she’d vowed long ago to stay and prove a Cooper could contribute more to the community than bail money.

Beth shared a rueful grimace and crossed her legs Indian style. “Speaking of your family, I heard Marty got hauled in night before last for drunk-and-disorderly.”

Olivia sighed in resignation. “Yep. That’s my brother, upholding the Cooper family tradition in jail. They even put him in Daddy’s old cell. Daddy passed down his spot in the tank.” She rolled her eyes. “It does a gal proud.”

“And you bailed him out.”

“Of course I did. And then I took him home to Darlene and dared her to let him out of the house again.” Her sister-in-law had promised to keep her brother, king of the Wild Turkey, home. She shook her head. “Marty’s got a good heart and a good mind, when he isn’t pickled. But I swear, he spends half of his life drunk and the other half sobering up.”

“What about Tammy? Did she really leave Earl for Tim? That girl changes husbands almost as often as I change my underwear.”

Olivia shrugged, out of touch with her sister’s latest antics. Tammy often made unwise decisions, in Olivia’s opinion. Had she left her third husband for his best friend? “I don’t know. Likely as not. She wouldn’t tell me because she knows I consider that a crazy way to live.”

“You, Olivia, are living proof that gene mutation exists. I’d even theorize adoption, but you look like them. Even if you don’t act like them. I’ve never seen one family member so different from the rest.”

Olivia’s mother swore she’d known her youngest was different from the moment she’d popped out. While she’d named her two other children after country music stars Tammy Wynette and Marty Robbins, her third child didn’t seem like a Loretta or Tanya or even Patsy. Hence, she’d named her youngest Olivia, in honor of one of her favorite soap stars. Olivia still clearly recalled her mother spending hours in front of the TV with her soap operas. Of course that was before Martha Rae Watson Cooper abandoned her family in search of greener pastures. Olivia had neither seen nor heard from her mother in twenty-three years.

God knows, Olivia loved the only family she had left—Pops, Marty and Tammy—but they exasperated her. Frustrated her. She’d spent a lifetime trying to rise above her birthright as the white-trash daughter of the town drunk. She often resented the Cooper escapades that were the talk of the town.

Was she so different from them? Every once in a while she gave in to impulse and blew off steam—a skydiving excursion, cold-cocking slimy Bennie Krepps when he tormented a stray cat, attending Willette Tuttle’s bachelorette party at a male strip club, a naked midnight dance in a soft summer rain in the privacy of her backyard. If she ever really loosened the tight rein she held herself on, would she make the same poor decisions as the rest of her family?

Maybe she was a shallow person, maybe even a bad person, but the fact that a respected pillar of the community had chosen to date her carried its own brand of validation.

Olivia glanced around her bedroom. Like the rest of her house, it was small, but tastefully furnished. She’d hated the shack she’d grown up in, that her father still lived in. Even as a child, she’d clipped magazine photos of quietly elegant rooms, determined to have a place like that one day, determined to have a life like that one day. Adam, vice president of his family’s bank, fit the life she wanted.

She wasn’t a social climber. Not by a long shot. It wasn’t about fancy cars or diamonds. No, Adam offered the respectability she so craved.

Olivia recapped the nail polish and waved her feet in the air to dry her toenails. “I’m sorry you don’t like Adam. We’re well-suited.”

“Humph.” Beth snorted. “If it were me, I’d be barking up the other side of that family tree. Give me Luke over Adam any day. Talk about another genetic curveball. I’ve never seen two brothers who looked so much alike but were so different.”

“No kidding.” Olivia suppressed a faint shudder. Luke, the black sheep of the Rutledge family, disquieted her. Worse, he shook her up. Mercifully, he lived in the next county over. He and Adam moved in different circles. And although Luke’s company had won the contract for the new library wing, he was out of state, so his partner was heading up the project.

“What’ve you got against poor Luke? What’d he ever do to you?” Beth turned the tables on her.

Memory of “poor” Luke’s kiss from thirteen years ago assaulted her. Had he acted on a dare? A joke? She still had no clue as to why he’d kissed her. All she’d known was that kiss proved true every unkind word she’d overheard between Amy, Lucy and Melissa. She’d run as if Beelzebub himself—actually Luke wasn’t far off in her book—had cornered her. She’d never ever mentioned it to anyone. And she wasn’t about to confess now. That kiss had haunted her for years. More than once she’d dreamed of Luke and that kiss, only to awaken in the grip of restless discontent.

“Luke’s never done anything to me. He’s just not my type.” A shiver chased down her spine. Damnation. Simply speaking his name set her nerves on edge.

Olivia jumped off the bed and walked over to the dresser, the hardwood floor cool beneath her bare feet. She shifted a stack of mail off her jewelry box and opened it to search for a pair of earrings for the evening. “I can’t understand someone born into privilege and opportunity, squandering it by thumbing their nose.” She plucked out a pair of amethyst stones in a dangling filigree setting from among the jumble of earrings and held them up.

Beth nodded her approval and went back to the subject of Luke. “Luke’s a rebel, all right. I think he was born with a streak of wild in him. The thing about those bad-ass boys, when they finally settle down, they make good husbands. Guess it’s ’cause they’ve sown all those wild oats.” Beth shook her head, her eyes dancing with devilment. “And I’d say Luke’s almost sown himself out. If I hadn’t already invested five years of marriage in Chuck and almost had him trained…”

Olivia laughed, eager to latch on to a topic other than Luke Rutledge. “Yuh-huh. You are such big talk. Chuck is a saint.” Well, perhaps Beth’s husband wasn’t a saint, but he was a very nice man, which was close to one and the same these days. “Not to mention the father of your child.”

Beth, nine weeks pregnant, grinned all over herself while she rubbed her tummy. “Well, there is that little matter.”

Olivia pulled out the satin-and-lace merry widow she’d mail-ordered on a whim. She unfolded the undergarment and held it up in front of Beth.

“Ooooeeee. Adam is a lucky man.” She plucked the sexy lingerie from Olivia and turned it one way and then another. “Hot. Definitely very hot. You go, baby.”

“You don’t think it’s too…” Olivia pursed her lips and pretended to evaluate the underwear “…let’s see, how did you describe my wardrobe earlier…oh, yes, prudish?” Actually, she still couldn’t quite see herself in such a sexy getup.

“This,” Beth dangled the satin and lace from one finger, “is a start. A step in the right direction.”

“A start? A step? How about a big flying leap?” Compared to her usual white cotton briefs and the occasional splurge for matching bra and panties, buying this qualified as a veritable walk on the wild side. She felt a little excited and a whole lot naughty just owning such a garment.

“We’ll talk flying leaps when you go crotchless.” Beth wagged her brows.

“Crotchless?” she squeaked. Olivia imagined herself stretched out on her bed next to Adam, the sheets folded back neatly. In her mind’s eye, Adam’s expression registered disgust rather than excitement when he noted her crotchless state. “I don’t think so. This is plenty wild for me.” Olivia toed the line between seductive and trashy, careful not to cross it.

“You’ve got the right idea in mind. But it seems a shame to waste this on Adam.”

Olivia opened her mouth to protest that Adam wouldn’t be viewing her underwear.

Beth, who always had to have the last word, laughed and cut her off. “Just kidding. I know you’re going to tell me he won’t see your underwear.”

Her sense of humor surfaced. Olivia smiled a secretive smile, sure to make Beth nuts. Also, just to counteract her predictability.

Worked like a charm. Beth popped off the bed like a spring-loaded action figure. “Are you holding out on me?”

Olivia laughed. “No. It’s just a feeling I have.”

“It could be gas.”

“Maybe it’s love.” She made a joke of it, in light of Beth’s earlier comments. But, just maybe she was on to something. Her feelings had developed into something more than friendship, and Adam had definitely sent similar signals. What kind of husband would he make?

“It’s more likely gas. You better go take your shower if you want me to help with the hair and makeup. What time is Adam coming by for you?”

“I’m meeting him at the country club around eight-thirty. I need to check on Pops before I go, and there’s no need to drag Adam out there with me.”

“Mr. High and Mighty too good to go out to the farm with you?” Beth asked, sniffing.

“No. He’s been before. And he was very nice.” Perhaps he’d laughed a bit too heartily, his air faintly patronizing, but her father was a far cry from his. Two beers shy of polishing off a twelve-pack, Pops had been feeling no pain as he’d subjected Adam to the farm tour in his rundown pickup. Actually, Adam had requested the tour. Pops maintained, drunk or sober, that it didn’t matter how much money was sitting in the bank or buried in the backyard, if a man owned land, he was wealthy beyond compare. Even if the screen door was held together with duct tape. She hadn’t invited Adam out again.

“He has a meeting late this afternoon. Something to do with policies regarding special deposits. He may be running a little late to the party.”

Beth shoved her toward the bathroom. “So will you, if we don’t get you ready. And don’t forget to shave your legs!”

LUKE RUTLEDGE PULLED INTO the garage next to the stables and killed the engine. He slid out of the driver’s seat and slammed the door. His parents’ his-’n’-her matching Cadillacs, his brother’s late-model BMW and Luke’s old pickup sporting the Rutledge & Klegman Construction logo along with more than a few dings and dents. Which one of these did not belong? He grinned at the joke only he found funny.

A pirate costume hanging in the back of Adam’s car caught his eye. His brother as a pirate? He didn’t think so. Adam was definitely the starched chinos and tasseled loafers type.

Luke crossed the manicured lawn of River Oaks to the back of the Greek Revival mansion. The return of the prodigal son to his ancestral home. He knew exactly how his father regarded him. The black sheep once again darkening the door.

He’d displayed a knack for finding trouble early on. At what age had he finally figured out that not everyone fell prey to the wildness that seized him at times? He couldn’t put an exact memory to the time he realized he was different from the rest of his family. But lines had become clearly drawn about the time he’d discovered they primarily cared about money and position and they figured out he didn’t give a damn what people thought.

Rutledges didn’t ride big, black motorcycles, sport tattoos, wear an earring, or make a living at something as menial as manual labor. It didn’t make a rat’s ass difference he’d earned a civil engineering degree, owned his own construction firm, and had more money sitting in the Colther Community Bank than he’d ever need. He’d tainted his success when he’d gone into business with Dave Klegman, a transplanted New Yorker.

Nope. Luke didn’t look like a Southern gentleman. He didn’t conduct himself like a Southern gentleman. He didn’t judge people by their last name or the amount of money they did or didn’t have. Luke didn’t measure up to Rutledge standards.

He paused at the mudroom that led to the kitchen and checked the thick soles of his scuffed work boots. Ruth would have a piece of him if he tracked mud in on her floors.

The familiar noise from the kitchen brought a smile to his face. Thunk-rolllll, thunk-rollll, thunkrollll. Ruth rolling out piecrust. An assortment of smells wafted out on the early evening air, evoking earlier years as clearly as a photo album. Chicken and dumplings, blackberry cobbler, crisp pickles, pungent turnip greens—some of his better boyhood memories. Ruth had cooked and run the house at River Oaks since before he’d been born.