John Riley's Girl

Olivia froze, and then her heart took off in an out-of-control gallop. Any semblance of poise she might have gained in her years as a professional broadcaster completely deserted her. She stood in front of him as vulnerable as if she was seventeen again and head over heels in love.

To say he looked good would have been an understatement.

“Olivia.”

Olivia. Not Liv as she had once been to him. The greeting was arctic cold, his whole demeanor one of stiff politeness.

“Hello, John.”

“Mind if I ask what you’re doing here?”

People were staring. She felt their curious gazes and heard the whispers. She willed her voice toward something close to indifference when she said, “The same thing as everyone else in our class.”

“Everyone else is welcome here.”

Dear Reader,

I’ve always loved a good reunion story. I like to believe that certain people really are meant to be together, and that even when life throws them some pretty hefty obstacles, they still find their way back to each other. Such is John and Olivia’s story.

There are a lot of ways to define success in the careers we’ve chosen. For me, it’s the letter I receive from a reader who thought about my story long enough after closing the book to write and tell me so. With so many outlets to turn to for entertainment in our increasingly high-tech world, I think we readers share a special understanding of what it is to open a book and spend a few hours engrossed in the lives of characters we grow to love. I really hope you’ll enjoy following John and Olivia to their fifteen-year high school reunion and meeting their old friends Cleeve and Lori.

I would love to hear from you! My e-mail address is inglathc@aol.com, or write to me at P.O. Box 973, Rocky Mount, VA 24151.

All best,

Inglath

John Riley’s Girl

Inglath Cooper

For my Lori. Who would have thought, all those years ago,

we would still be best friends?

And for Mac. Again, for believing.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

The Invitation

“AND THAT’S YOUR update for this Friday evening, May 23. I’m Olivia Ashford sitting in for Robert Marshall.”

Olivia held her smile, a smile reflecting cool assurance that she was there to report the truth and nothing but. The cameraman directly in front of her signaled they were off the air and gave her a thumbs-up.

“Good job, Olivia,” he said.

A chorus of agreement from the rest of the crew followed the compliment.

“Robert better get back from that island soon, or he might not have a job waiting for him!” Mandy Overstreet was a young assistant producer whose smile held the same wattage as her red hair. Unlike Olivia’s, it did not reflect the polish of practice so much as spontaneity. But then she was still in the early throes of infatuation with broadcasting. Olivia had been, too, early on. Before she’d learned that expendable was a word that loomed on her career horizon with a billboard that read: Mess Up and There’s Always Someone to Replace You.

“Thanks, everybody. You guys make it easy.” Olivia unhooked her microphone and got up from behind the desk.

“Nicely done.” Michael O’Roarke stood a few feet from the anchor platform, his arms folded across his chest, his blue gaze warm.

“Thanks.” Olivia unbuttoned her suit jacket and loosened the collar of her blouse.

They wound their way through a maze of desks to the long corridor that led to Olivia’s office. “Hey, we like you up there in the top spot,” Art, a senior writer for the evening news, boomed out in a Boston baritone.

“Thanks, Art. Your words, though.”

He grinned. “You make ’em sound good.”

Inside Olivia’s office, Michael closed the door behind them. Olivia had intended to change the formal mahogany furniture in which someone else had dressed the room, but she had never gotten around to moving it to the top of the to-do list. And so she’d left it, feeling the ill fit of it, as if she were borrowing someone else’s clothes. Sometimes, her whole life felt like that, as if it didn’t really belong to her.

“It’s yours, you know. That job is yours.” Michael sliced a hand through the air, a smile cracking his face wide open.

“Isn’t that jumping the gun a bit?” Olivia laughed, raising an eyebrow. “This was my first night sitting in for him.”

“But Robert’s going to retire. Everyone knows it. You’ve been on the morning show for almost three years. And I’m sorry, but people are going to like your beautiful blue-eyed self in a spot where they’re used to seeing a stiff.”

“Michael—”

“I know. You don’t like to talk about things before they happen. But I don’t think you can jinx this one. It’s just about as sure a thing as sure gets.”

“There’s nothing sure or predictable in this business,” Olivia disagreed, even though it was clear she was at least being considered for the position. Who would have thought the nearly destitute young girl who’d answered an ad in a newspaper for the job of receptionist would ever end up here?

It had been a long climb.

Michael tilted his head in reluctant agreement. “Granted. But I think it’s going to be yours if you want it.”

Olivia rubbed the back of her neck where tension had unfolded and now blanketed her shoulders with clamplike intensity.

“Here, let me.” Michael stepped forward to knead the knotted muscles, his touch efficient. “Wow, you are tense.”

“You should do this for a living.”

“Michael O’Roarke. Personal masseur,” he teased.

“You’d miss the power lunches.”

“Ouch. But yeah, probably so.”

As the morning show’s executive producer, Michael had hired Olivia three years ago as a fill-in anchor. She’d eventually become full-time. The two of them had tried a route other than friendship in the beginning. But a week skiing in Aspen had given them both a reality check. Seven straight days together had etched a convincing enough picture of why permanent wasn’t in the cards for them.

It had taken them both a good six months to admit it wasn’t going to work. But miraculously, they’d survived as friends. Good friends, really. And that was something she didn’t take for granted.

Before Michael, she’d kept her life bare of serious relationships. There had been a couple of forays toward something more than casual dating, but there was always a reason to nip it in the bud. The guys were too assertive, too passive, too tall, too short, too aloof, too needy. Too something.

From this, she had developed a reputation for being career-driven in each of the stations where she’d worked. She’d heard the labels attached to her name by some of the men whose interest she had not indulged: ice princess, Miss North Pole. None of them exactly original, and there had been a few that didn’t get anywhere near that flattering. But the reputation suited Olivia. As did being alone. At least until recently.

Recently, the void in her life seemed to yawn wider with every achievement and every year that went by. She had once thought success, like ordinary old spackle, would fill the holes, heal any residual wounds and declare to the world that she was a person who had something to offer. But sometimes, mostly at night, she would wonder: Am I going to be alone for the rest of my life? Is that what I want? Isn’t there anything more than this?

In the light of day, the panic resumed its day job as logic, and her own answer to the question was that a person could not expect to have everything. She had made work the emphasis in her life, and for the most part, it was a good life.

The phone buzzed. She stepped away from Michael’s attentive hands and picked up the receiver. “Yes, Daphne?”

“There’s a woman on line three who says she went to high school with you. A Lori Morgan Peters? Want me to take a message?”

Olivia blinked. Her lips parted, then pressed together. Lori?

“You still there?”

“Ah, yes. Thanks, Daphne. I’ll take it.” To Michael, she murmured, “Excuse me,” then circumnavigated the desk and sat down in her chair.

He hooked a thumb toward the doorway. “See you in the morning.”

She nodded, exhaling hard. Lori. It had been fifteen years since they’d graduated from high school, since Olivia had left the town where they’d both grown up, without ever saying goodbye. Sheer cowardice nearly made her buzz Daphne back and ask for that message. But an inner voice taunted. Come on, Olivia, be an adult. The past is a lot of miles behind you. She drew in a deep breath and pushed the blinking light on her phone. “Lori?”

“Olivia? I can’t believe I actually got through to you!”

The voice, laced with shock, sent her reeling back a decade and a half, to another place, another life. “Goodness. What a wonderful surprise. How are you?”

“Fine, fine.” Her one-time best friend laughed. “And I don’t have to ask how you are. Obviously, great!”

The assertion carried not an ounce of resentment. But then that was the Lori she remembered. Olivia pictured her as she’d been during their high-school years. Barely five feet tall. Sky-blue eyes. Freckles scattered across her nose. A petite-framed girl with an unerring belief in herself and the possibilities available in the world around her. “Things are pretty good,” she said.

“We keep up with you around here, you know. The town library even has a whole section devoted to your career.”

Olivia knew this, of course. The Lanford County Library had contacted her a number of times, asking if she would be willing to address some of the high-school students interested in journalism, but she had never accepted the invitation. Doing so would have meant going back to Summerville, and after that one last time, it had never again been a consideration.

Olivia gripped the receiver. “Where are you? What are you doing these days?”

“In Summerville. After college, I worked as a chemist for a pharmaceutical company. Then I met the love of my life, moved back and now have four children. Dorothy was right. There’s no place like home.”

Home. By all rights, Summerville wasn’t really home to her. She had no family there anymore. No ties. Other than memories, of course. But while a person could pack her bags and leave a place behind for good, the same could not be said of memories. Memory had tentacles. “Your family. They’re all okay, I hope?”

“I lost my dad a few years ago,” Lori said, her voice softening.

“Oh, Lori.” Olivia’s hand flew to her chest. “I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

Olivia didn’t miss the catch in her old friend’s voice. She remembered spending nights at Lori’s house, a big white pre–Civil War farmhouse that had been in her family for generations. It had a fireplace in every bedroom, an amazing thing to Olivia who’d never imagined houses having such things. It was the kind of house that always smelled as though there were oatmeal cookies baking in the oven. And she remembered envying the closeness of that family. How they had all so obviously loved one another despite the typical arguments between brothers and sisters, which Lori’s round, cherry-cheeked mother had refereed with good humor. In many ways, it had seemed like heaven on earth to Olivia. So different from her own home.

“Mom’s fine, though,” Lori went on. “And Sally-Anne, you remember my youngest sister, she’s pregnant for the first time, big as a small elephant, and making us all pay for the fact that we said the family needed another grandchild.” An affectionate chuckle followed the assertion, setting off another unwelcome hollow echo inside Olivia.

“No, life’s pretty normal around here. Not too exciting the way your life must be. Interviewing celebrities every day. Sitting on the same couch as that gorgeous Derek Phillips.” She drew gorgeous out to three syllables. “I bet you can’t wait to get out of bed every morning. I know I wouldn’t be able to.”

The awe in Lori’s voice was something Olivia had grown used to hearing in the voices of strangers since she had become a public figure. But hearing it in her old friend’s voice felt off-key.

“So did you get the invitation?” Lori asked.

“Invitation?”

“To our high-school reunion.”

Surprise zinged through Olivia. Reunion. “No. I didn’t.”

“Oh, no,” Lori said, her voice devoid of its former buoyancy. “I was certain it would have gotten there by now. I was just calling to make sure. I sort of got lassoed into organizing the thing.”

Olivia glanced at the stack of mail in the center of her desk—three days worth. “It could be here. I have a bunch of mail I haven’t opened yet.”

“Well, anyway, it’s on the fifth of June. Is there any way you could come? It’d be so great to see you.”

“It would be wonderful to see you, too, but I don’t think I could possibly get away,” Olivia said quickly, not giving herself a chance to consider doing anything else. There had been times, through the years, when the yearning to go back to Summerville had throbbed like an old injury that makes itself known on rainy days. She had not indulged the throbbing, intense as it had become at times. Her old life in Summerville was over.

“I should have called you sooner,” Lori said, disappointment edging the words. “But actually, everyone else thought you’d be too busy to come. With your schedule and everything, I mean. I thought there might be a slight chance.”

Olivia felt somehow small and disloyal for proving Lori wrong and the rest of them right.

“I’m sorry,” she said, even as a little voice screamed in her ear: Don’t be a coward, Olivia! You could go! But logic asserted itself as well, and there was too much old pain there, too many memories better left in place.

“Oh.”

A dozen questions weighted the one-word response. Her friend from long ago would have asked them. Why did you leave? Why haven’t you ever come back? Olivia felt tangible distance between them now, and part of her rebelled. Lori had once been her best friend, and hearing her voice for the first time in so many years stirred up fresh regret for letting something so meaningful slip away.

“I’d really love to see you, Lori. Maybe you could come to D.C. and visit sometime?”

A pause and then, “Well, sure.”

The words sounded empty, and too polite. Not the kind of words you said to someone you’d once saved a seat for on the school bus every day, shared lockers with, written notes back and forth to during Mr. Primrose’s study hall. “Really, let’s plan a weekend sometime soon.”

“I might just take you up on it,” Lori said, her voice brightening a little.

“I hope you will.”

Silence gripped them then. How could awkwardness manage such a stranglehold on two people who had once been so close?

“Well, I know you must be busy, Olivia. It was good to talk to you. If you change your mind, here’s my number.” She reeled it off while Olivia scribbled it on the notepad in front of her, vowing to call and invite Lori for a visit just as soon as things slowed down a bit and ignoring the voice that said they never did. Or she never let them.

“We’ll talk soon, okay?”

“Sure, Olivia. Take care.”

They said goodbye and hung up. Olivia’s hand lingered on the receiver, some part of her reluctant to break the connection. She was overcome by a sudden urge to call Lori back and tell her she would come. She missed their friendship with a keen sense of longing and loss.

Olivia let go after a few regretful moments, then reached across the desk and picked up the pile of mail. Sifting through the stack, she singled out an envelope, turned it over and looked at the return address on the back seal.

Summerville, Virginia.

Her heart dropped, even though over the years, she had received what amounted to boxes of mail with postmarks from her former hometown. But her reaction was always the same. Her hope, unwelcome though it was, always the same.

Daphne had already slit open the envelope. Olivia slipped out the heavy card inside.

Hard to believe, but yes, we are old enough to have a 15-year class reunion! (Yikes!!)

Are you brave enough to attend?

We hope so!

What: A weekend of reuniting!

Events taking place Thursday through Saturday.

Where: Lanford County Community Center

When: June 5-7

Why? Because that’s the only way you’ll get to see how we all turned out!

She dropped the card onto the desk, overcome with a wave of nostalgia for some precious things she had lost long ago. She swiveled her chair away from the desk and settled her gaze on the D.C. skyline outside her office window. So many buildings. So many people. In comparison, Summerville was another world altogether. Had it changed? Were the people there any different than they’d been fifteen years ago? Was the dilapidated old house she’d grown up in still standing? Was the farmer’s market still held downtown every Saturday morning rain or shine? Was John still there?

With the name a memory came floating up and emotion knotted in her throat. Lori working the summer of their junior year at the Just-a-Minute Drive-In. Olivia and John parked out front in his battered old Dodge pickup boasting four different layers of paint. He’d bought it himself with money he’d saved working summers on his dad’s farm, and he couldn’t have been more proud of it had it been bought right off the assembly line. Olivia sitting in the middle of the seat, her shoulder tucked under his arm. Lori ducking inside the rolled-down window and telling them not to order any fries because Cecil Callaway had just dropped a fly in the deep fryer.

She could still hear John’s laughter, the deep, full rumble that had never failed to warm her, fill her with something satisfying and secure. She had loved to hear him laugh, had taken delight in being the one to make him do so. And as strange as it would have sounded to anyone else, considering that nearly every cheerleader at Summerville High would have given up her spot on the squad for a date with John Riley, it was his laughter that had drawn her to him when he’d asked her out at the beginning of their junior year.

There had been so little laughter in her own house. Her father had long before convinced himself he had nothing to laugh about. And Olivia had learned early on to censor hers if she wanted to avoid the frown of disapproval that always followed.

To her, John’s laughter had held the power of a healing touch, made her feel that everything would be all right. She’d been wrong about that part. Laughter didn’t fix anything; it just made things a little more bearable.

She could have asked Lori about him. Wished now with an ache that she had. But then what good would it have done? John had made another life for himself, moved on to someone else.

Olivia picked up the card, read it again, then stuck it back in the envelope. She thought of the possibilities in her immediate future—a chance at the main anchor position for her network, a position someone starting out in broadcasting could only dream of.

This was a good change, the kind that should fill a person with satisfaction and a feeling of success.

She got up from her desk, went to the window that took up nearly one side of the corner office and looked down at the traffic below.

With all that, why then this feeling of rootless-ness, as if her entire existence were only surface-deep and the slightest unbalancing would topple her over into nothingness? Why was it that she lived her life like someone afraid that a snap of the fingers would make it all suddenly disappear?

There was something about hearing Lori’s disappointment that made her wonder: Why can’t I go back?

It would be so great to see you.

Why not?

For so long, she had avoided too much thought of the place where she’d grown up, the people she had known there. She’d ignored it, as if in doing so the memories would eventually disappear altogether.

But life didn’t really work that way, did it? Wasn’t it only in facing up to those things with the power to haunt that a person ever stood a chance of overcoming them?

And Olivia had never done that.

She’d just walked away, closed the door.

Fifteen years ago, she had needed to cut all ties to her home. To maintain even one would have been to remain piped into things too painful for her to hear. And so she had shoved her entire life there into a box that she’d sealed up and vowed never to open.

But Lori’s call had brought front and center recognition of exactly how much she had lost fifteen years ago. Not just John and the future they had planned together. But so many other things, as well. A friendship whose equal she had never again found. And the simple right to revisit the place where she had grown up. Rocky as that childhood had been, it was hers.

Standing here above a city where she had never felt as if she really fitted, Olivia wondered if maybe it was time to go home. Maybe it wasn’t too late to reclaim some of the past—own up to it and then put it away for good. This time with peace and acceptance.

Was she strong enough to do that and walk away again?

There was only one way to find out.

CHAPTER TWO

Should Have Said No

HE DESERVED a good swift kick in the pants.

Any man who let his home be turned into a three-ring circus for a weekend deserved nothing less.

From the door of the brood mare barn, John Riley watched the half-dozen workers in his front yard hammering tent stakes into the ground, transforming the state’s biggest cutting-horse farm into the stage for his fifteen-year class reunion.

When a water pipe had burst at the Community Center earlier that morning, flooding the place and rendering it unusable, Lori Peters had called John in a panic, vowing indebtedness to him for life if he would agree to have the weekend-long reunion at Rolling Hills. In the face of her desperation— Please, John, I’ll never ask you for another favor as long as I live. The park is already booked this weekend, and there’s nowhere else we can rent last-minute big enough for all these tents—there weren’t many excuses he could have made without sounding like a selfish jerk. So here he stood, cursing the decision that ensured there was no earthly way he could get out of going to the thing now.

On a normal day, Rolling Hills Farm was not an inactive place. In the summer heat, horses were worked early, starting at 6:00 a.m. There was usually a tractor or two running somewhere within earshot, a cow calling for its calf, a mare nickering for her foal. But the reunion being staged on his front lawn had turned it into nothing short of chaos.

Given the choice, he’d gladly snap his fingers and make it all disappear, the Great Party Setup’s cotton-candy-pink van and all.

Across the yard stood a man in overalls, a sleeveless T-shirt and a tattoo of a rooster on his left arm. He hammered a tent stake into the ground, straightened and, without missing a beat, sent a stream of tobacco juice arcing over his right shoulder. It landed on a cluster of snow-white azaleas encircling the base of an old oak tree.

Anger launched John straight across the stretch of grass between the barn and the house where he lit into the man like fire on October leaves.