Consequences

Teachers were already gathering in the lounge, getting themselves cups of coffee and cans of soda, chatting about the day. Jim nodded at a few people he knew, then settled next to Willard Kilmer, who was seated quietly in a corner, reading a physics textbook.

“Hi, Will.” Jim extended his booted feet comfortably. “What’s new with you?”

Willard looked up, beaming with warmth behind the thick glasses. “Hello, Jim. I hear you’re planning to take on the gang of seventh-graders.”

“You bet.” Jim bared his teeth. “I’ll eat ’em for breakfast.”

“When do you start?” Willard asked.

“Tomorrow morning. No sense wasting time, right? I need the work, and Lucia needs the help, so I might as well get myself in harness.”

Jim noticed that Willard Kilmer looked a little startled at this casual reference to the school principal.

“What’s that you’re reading, Will?” he asked, nodding at the textbook.

“It’s the new physics.” Willard’s thin face lighted with enthusiasm again. “I’m studying the principles of particle analysis. Did you know that in the world of the infinitely small, our universal laws of physics no longer apply?”

Jim chuckled and patted the other man’s shoulder. “You’re a good man, Will. It’s going to be a lot of fun working with you.”

Willard flushed with pleasure and was on the verge of responding when Lucia entered the room and moved toward a desk at one end.

Even viewed casually from this distance, the woman was so beautiful that Jim could only watch her in stunned silence.

Her body was tall and graceful, with an understated grace that made the other women in the room seem clumsy and overdressed by comparison. Everything about her, from the cap of silvery blond hair to the fine leather shoes on her feet, spoke of breeding, elegance and a cool, unapproachable personality.

But again Jim sensed that breathtaking undercurrent of emotion. There was such promise in the rich curve of her mouth, a flicker of banked fires in those level blue eyes.

It would take a hell of a man to win this woman and awaken her passion, Jim thought. But if she ever trusted her lover enough to give herself fully, he suspected she could be a tiger in bed.

With shattering vividness, he had a mental image of that slim body in his arms, warm and naked, twined around him while her soft mouth devoured him, and her silvery hair fell across his skin…

All at once he was so passionately aroused that he felt weak and shaky.

Pitiful, he thought ruefully. As bad as some high-school kid, having erotic fantasies about the teacher.

She was seated now, speaking his name aloud, and he forced himself to smile and nod casually as the other teachers turned to look at him.

“As of tomorrow morning, Mr. Whitley will be taking over the vacant seventh-grade position,” Lucia said formally, shuffling papers on the desktop. “Jim, we’re very happy to have you join us at Crystal Creek Middle School.”

“Well, I’m happy to be here.” Putting aside his lustful thoughts, Jim shifted awkwardly in the chair and addressed the circle of teachers, hoping his voice wouldn’t betray him. “Howdy, folks. I already know most of you, and those who are new, I hope we’ll get to be friends soon enough.”

“You’ll be sorry, Jimmy,” an older woman said darkly. “That’s one tough class you’re taking on. Horrible little delinquents, every one of them. I wouldn’t want to tackle them.”

Jim grinned at the speaker, Betty Rickart, who’d been at this school for almost as long as Lettie Mae had cooked at the Double C.

“Come on, Betty,” he said to the assistant principal. “There’s not a kid in Texas you couldn’t handle. Back in fifth grade, you had me so scared I couldn’t talk for a year.”

This drew a general burst of laughter from the assembled staff, but Betty frowned and shook her curly gray head.

“Kids are different these days,” she said gloomily. “They used to have some respect. These kids just ignore us and do what they want.”

“Discipline is a real challenge nowadays,” Lucia said at the front of the room. “But Jim assures me he can handle our seventh-graders.”

“If he can, we’ll all bow at his feet.” This was from Jilly Phipps, an attractive young redhead who taught sixth grade. She gave Jim a meaningful smile that he returned with startled warmth.

Miss Phipps looked as if she might enjoy bowing at a man’s feet. The image was momentarily diverting. But then his mind filled with tantalizing images of Lucia’s silky fragrance. He was fascinated by her face, the pale curve of her cheek and the delicacy of those eyebrows against her fair skin.

“I’ve called this meeting,” she said quietly, “because we have a problem at our school, and I’m sure you’re all aware of it.”

“We’ve got a problem all right,” Betty said grimly. “And her name is Gloria Wall.”

“What’s going on?” Willard asked, looking bewildered. He avoided gossip, and was usually the last to know what was happening in his community.

“The school board wants to close our school and throw us all out of work,” Betty told him. “They’re taking it to plebiscite in the spring.”

Willard gaped, looking distressed. “But…I don’t know what you’re talking about. Where would the students go?”

“To Holly Grove,” one of the teachers told him. “On buses.”

“Hey, Willard, maybe you can get a job driving one of the school buses.” Jilly chuckled, then looked around to see if others appreciated the joke. Jim noted that nobody shared her amusement.

“I don’t believe it,” Willard argued with uncharacteristic stubbornness, though he still looked stricken. “It’s just crazy. Why would they do such a thing?”

“I heard it’s Gloria’s personal vendetta,” Betty said. “For some reason, she wants the whole middle school gone. And she’s the one who’s got the board all stirred up.”

“I have a cousin on the school board,” Clyde Tuttle said from the doorway, where he leaned against the wall holding a can of soda. “Sometimes she tells me a bit of what’s going on at their meetings.”

Tuttle was the gym teacher and basketball coach, dressed casually in navy blue sweatpants and a school T-shirt, with a whistle hanging around his neck. Clyde had been a few grades behind Jim when they were in school. An easygoing, good-hearted athlete with a big circle of friends.

Jim grinned at the younger man. “Hey, this is great news,” he told the assembled staff. “Clyde’s got an agent in place. A spy behind enemy lines.”

Despite the tension in the room, this drew another ripple of laughter, and an answering chuckle from the gym teacher.

“Damn right,” Clyde told his colleagues smugly. “And it’s not cheap, either. I have to buy the woman a steak dinner and at least three beers before I can get her to talk.”

“So what’s your cousin telling you, Clyde?” Jilly Phipps asked.

Clyde shrugged and toyed with the whistle on its black nylon cord. “The school board knows the whole idea won’t be an easy sell in this town, even if moving the school means lower taxes for everybody. So the board’s going to war. They’ve got themselves a plan.”

“A plan?” Lucia asked from the front of the room. “What kind of plan?”

“They’re going to start watching this school real close,” Clyde said.

“What for?” somebody asked.

Clyde shrugged and took a long gulp from the soda can. “Looking for any signs of mismanagement, wasted money, discipline problems, anything they can use to stir up public feeling against us.”

Jim was watching Lucia as Clyde spoke, and for a moment he detected a fleeting expression on her face. It was a look of stark fear.

Intrigued, he studied the beautiful blond principal more closely. She looked almost as if she had some kind of guilty secret, and the threat of this kind of close scrutiny terrified her.

But as he watched, Lucia got herself under control. When she spoke, her voice was as cool as ever, her expression remote and watchful.

“Does your cousin have anything else to say about this plan, Clyde?”

“Just that the board’s also been planning a series of surprise visits to the school,” Clyde said. “Different members will be dropping by here without warning, and strolling around to look in on our classrooms while we’re working.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Betty Rickart said indignantly. “Now, why would they want to do something like that?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Lucia said, her cheeks coloring briefly. “They want to see if they can catch us making mistakes. You all know how gossip travels in this town. If they can convince people we’re not doing a good job, or that some of us can’t handle our students, they’ll have no problem getting enough votes against us when they hold their plebiscite.”

Jim glanced in sympathy at the circle of worried faces around the room. If Gloria Wall succeeded in her attempt to close the school, a lot of these people would be thrown out of work and forced to leave the town where some of them had lived all their lives.

“Well, folks, we have nothing to worry about,” Clyde said heartily from the doorway. “We’re all good teachers, so I reckon none of the board members will find anything wrong when they drop in on our classrooms. Will they?”

“I certainly hope they won’t,” Lucia said from her seat at the front of the room.

As she spoke, she gave Jim a glance of such pointed significance that he was startled again, and a little wary. Her words had been for everybody, but it was almost as if she’d issued a specific warning to him alone, letting him know he was on probation and she expected him to toe the line.

He met her eyes steadily. After a brief moment of tension, she was the first to look away, down at the notes on her desk. For the remainder of the meeting, she didn’t glance at him again.

IN THE EARLY EVENING, Lucia sat upstairs on the cushioned dormer seat in her living room, gazing down at the shady backyard.

June was baby-sitting for her niece, Sally Carlyle, who went bowling on Tuesday evenings. The landlady sat on a bench beside her garden, with a length of blue knitting in her lap, while Sally’s two children played on the grass nearby.

The older boy was almost three, a sturdy red-cheeked cherub who ran around shouting and chasing after a ball with Duke, June’s old spaniel. A fat baby sat on a blanket gnawing the head of a yellow rubber duck and staring at the dog with round, solemn eyes.

While Lucia watched, June leaned over casually and drew the baby onto her lap, cuddled him for a moment and reached inside his plaid overalls to check the diaper. Then she kissed him and placed him back on the blanket where he resumed his contemplation of his brother and the big dog. The much-chewed duck was still gripped in his chubby hand, but for the moment he seemed to have forgotten it.

Lucia touched the waistband of her khaki shorts and felt a warm, melting trickle of love.

“Hello,” she whispered. “Are you really in there? And are you a boy or girl?”

Outside, the setting sun glimmered through the branches of the oak tree as if it had caught and tangled among the leaves. Golden fingers of light caressed June’s hair and the bright curls of the two children.

In a stone birdbath near the lilac hedge, a robin perched at the edge of the bowl. He preened and ruffled his feathers daintily, then bent to dip a wing in the brimming water. The older boy stopped running to gaze at the bird, his thumb jammed thoughtfully in his mouth.

This was all like some kind of waking dream, Lucia thought, watching the two children.

She couldn’t possibly be having a baby. Not now, when the school board was planning to launch its scrutiny of the school, and so many people depended on her for their jobs. And all because of a fleeting encounter with a virtual stranger who meant nothing at all to her.…

Maybe the test had been wrong, and none of it would happen after all.

But in spite of the wishful thinking, Lucia knew that her pregnancy was real. This baby existed. In fact, though infinitely tiny, it was every bit as much a reality as that fat little fellow down on the blanket in his plaid overalls, gnawing on a plastic duck.

And Lucia already loved her baby more passionately than she’d ever loved another person in all her life.

“We’ll get through this,” she whispered to the unseen presence within her. “I still don’t know how it’s all going to work, darling, but somehow we’ll manage.”

Lucia glanced out the window again, stroking her abdomen gently.

“Maybe if everything else is going just perfectly, and they can’t find a single thing wrong at our school except that the principal happens to be pregnant and there’s no father in sight—”

She stopped abruptly, tensing as Jim Whitley came through the back gate with his dog, strolled up the path and paused to say something to June, who set her knitting aside to greet the new tenant.

He wore a short-sleeved cotton shirt and faded denim shorts. Even from this distance, Lucia could see how the thick dusting of hair on his powerful legs glistened warmly in the dying light. His bare arms looked brawny and muscular under the fabric of the shirt.

He’d just moved into the house, but already his presence seemed to dominate everything. Though Lucia hadn’t spoken more than a few words to the man since he’d arrived, she was painfully conscious of Jim Whitley in the rooms just below hers. Even worse, she was dismayed by a warm tingle of excitement when she pictured him listening to her footsteps, the sound of her shower, the creaking of the wooden floorboards as she got into bed.

Nothing separated them, actually, but some old timbers and a few feet of space. The man’s personality was so powerful that Lucia felt his nearness in every cell of her body.

In the yard below, he gave June a questioning glance and said something. At her reply he crossed the grass and bent to lift the baby in his arms, holding him close.

June laughed as the tall man kissed the little boy’s cheek, then held him aloft and nuzzled his fat stomach while the baby kicked and squealed with delight.

Jim walked back to the bench, still carrying the baby, and settled next to June with the child in his arms and his long tanned legs extended on the path. The two adults talked casually as Jim cuddled the little boy and watched the older child run and play with the two spaniels.

Something about the scene below brought a painful lump to Lucia’s throat.

The four of them looked so peaceful and surreal in the fading light, like a misty image from some sweet, half-forgotten dream. And Jim’s arms were strong and brown against the baby’s fragile bare shoulders. He looked powerful and protective, as if nothing bad could happen to a child as long as this man was nearby. For no reason at all, Lucia found herself crying. She wasn’t even aware of the tears until she felt them running down her cheeks.

To her alarm, she saw Jim glance up briefly at the window where she sat. There was no way he could see her behind the heavy chintz drapes, but still she drew back hastily and huddled against the wall, dashing a hand across her streaming eyes.

When she peered out again, she saw Jim as he stood up to kiss the baby again, hand him to June and come toward the back door. He paused by the rose trellis and called something to the landlady, then vanished inside the house, leaving his dog out in the yard.

Lucia turned from the window and looked around at her snug little apartment, thinking she should get up and tackle some of the paperwork in her briefcase. But she couldn’t seem to stop crying. Maybe pregnancy had this effect on a woman, unsettled her emotions for no reason.

Soon she would need to visit a doctor and make sure she was eating properly, taking vitamins and doing all the right things. But she would have to go to Austin and she’d have to find a doctor who wouldn’t ask too many questions.

Lucia rubbed at her eyes again and got up from the window seat, then stiffened in panic when she heard footsteps clattering up the last flight of steps to the third floor. Before she could do anything to prevent it, the door opened and Jim Whitley’s curly auburn head appeared.

CHAPTER FIVE

“YOU LEFT the door open.” He stood on the threshold, regarding her with startled concern. “And you’ve been crying again.”

“Go away!” Lucia turned aside to rub angrily at her reddened eyes. “You have absolutely no right to barge in here without knocking.”

“Like I said, the door was ajar. When I reached up to use the knocker, it just opened.”

She hesitated, afraid her voice might break when she tried to speak.

“I leave it that way on hot nights,” she muttered at last, “to let the breeze from the window in the hall into the apartment. But,” she added bitterly, “obviously I can’t do that anymore, since you have no respect for anybody’s privacy.”

“I have all kinds of respect for your privacy, Lucia,” he said, leaning against the doorjamb. “And I’m really very sorry if I’ve embarrassed you.”

He sounded contrite and utterly sincere, but his eyes were sparkling. Lucia glanced at him suspiciously, then gave a brief nod and moved toward the kitchen.

“If you’ll excuse me,” she said, “I have some school-funding applications that I need to fill out.”

She seated herself at the table and opened her briefcase in a businesslike, dismissive manner. But he followed and straddled a chair next to her, folded his arms on the back and rested his chin on them, still watching her thoughtfully.

As always, his presence seemed to fill the room. Lucia was sharply conscious of his muscular bare legs almost close enough to touch hers, and the pleasant, clean scent of worn cotton and shaving cream that drifted from him.

“Why were you crying?” he asked.

“I wasn’t crying. Please go away.”

“Come on, Lucia.” He hitched the chair a little closer, still watching her intently. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong. Could you hand me that green pen, please?”

He gave her the pen. “I thought I caught a glimpse of you up here in the window a few minutes ago. You were watching us, weren’t you?”

She opened one of the application forms and tried to concentrate on it, but the fine print blurred in front of her eyes.

Jim put out a tanned hand, covering the page. “I’m not going away,” he said, “until you tell me what’s upsetting you.”

She sighed and looked toward the window. “It’s nothing, really. I just…sometimes I get lonely at this time of the evening. There’s something so melancholy about the setting sun, and those long shadows lying across the ground.”

“You know, I’ve always been just the same way,” Jim said, surprising her. “No matter how good my life is, there seems to be a little time right around sunset when nothing feels worthwhile, and I get flooded with this huge sadness.”

She forgot her annoyance and gazed at him in surprise. “You get those feelings, too?”

“All the time.” He studied her face and reached a hand toward her, then drew it back. “Are you upset about the school board?”

Gratefully, Lucia seized on this. “I’m sure that’s part of it. It’s so awful to know what they’re planning, and that—”

She stopped midsentence, looking down at the papers on the table and wondering how much she should allow herself to be drawn into conversation with this man, no matter how sympathetic he seemed.

“What?” he asked. “You were going to tell me something.”

Again she hesitated. But Lucia seldom had the luxury of a confidant with whom to share her troubles, and, despite all her misgivings, she found herself wanting to tell Jim Whitley things she wouldn’t normally say.

“I feel so responsible.” Miserably, she twisted her ringless hands and studied a chip on her thumbnail. “All those teachers are going to lose their jobs if this happens, and the town will lose its middle school. And everybody knows why it’s happening.”

“They do?” Jim asked.

Lucia gave him a level glance. “You can’t pretend you haven’t heard that Gloria Wall resents me, and she’s launched this whole school-closure program just to spite me.”

“You’re right, I’ve heard that,” he said quietly. “But I wasn’t sure if it was true.”

“Well, I believe it is,” Lucia said. “Of course, Gloria denies it, but I realize she’s never liked me much. I honestly don’t know why, though.”

He leaned back on the chair and laughed, his eyes crinkling with amusement.

Lucia glanced up at him. “What’s so funny?”

Jim regarded her thoughtfully, his smile fading. “You really don’t know why Gloria Wall dislikes you?”

Lucia’s cheeks warmed with embarrassment. “I think it has to do with her perception that I’m…snobbish, or something. She seems to believe I think I’m better than other people in this town. I realize,” Lucia added when he kept watching her gravely, “that the…the way I behave might have something to do with that. But I can’t change who I am, can I?”

“No, and I don’t think it would help anyway,” he said. “Not even if you started wearing clothes like that to school every day.” He gestured at her khaki shorts, sandals and plaid shirt. “You could even join a bowling league and drink beer down at Zack’s on Friday night with all the cowboys, and Gloria Wall would still be out to destroy you.”

“Why?” Lucia asked with genuine curiosity.

He leaned back in the chair, arms folded, eyeing her with disconcerting steadiness. “Because no matter what you do, Lucia, you’ll always stand out in a crowd. And there’ll always be some women who are going to hate you for that.”

His gaze embarrassed her, and made her uneasy. “Look, I really have to get this paperwork done,” she told him.

“Come on, it’s a beautiful evening. Leave the paperwork. In fact, why don’t we walk down to Zack’s and have a beer right now? Let’s show these people you’re just plain folks.”

Lucia felt a rising panic. “I couldn’t possibly,” she said.

“Why not? Don’t you like beer?”

“Well, actually, I much prefer a good Beaujolais,” she said, and then smiled wanly when he laughed at her small joke.

“Maybe Zack has some wine.” He put a hand on her bare arm. “Come on, let’s go.”

His palm was hard and callused, and so warm that Lucia’s skin burned at his touch. Hastily, she pulled away.

“This town is terrible for gossip,” she said. “If you and I even went outside for a walk, it’d be all over town inside an hour that I’m socializing with one of my teachers.”

“Would that be so bad?”

“Some people might think so. At this point, I can’t risk even a breath of scandal.”

Involuntarily, Lucia touched her waistband again, then clasped her hands tightly together in her lap.

“Scandal?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “When two unattached adults go out together for a walk and a glass of beer?”

“Obviously you don’t know this town,” she said bitterly.

“Lucia, I was born in this town.”

He seemed on the verge of pressing to get his way, and if he did, Lucia was afraid she wouldn’t be able to resist him.

Especially if he happened to touch her again…

Desperately she cast around for something to change the subject. “There’s something else I’m worried about. I just found it out the other day,” she said, getting up to turn the heat on under the copper teakettle.

Maybe if she gave him a cup of coffee, he’d take the hint when their drinks were finished, and return to his own apartment.

“What did you find out?” Jim got up to turn his chair around, then sat down again, watching with obvious pleasure as she moved about the kitchen.

Lucia flushed, trying not to think about his warm hazel eyes gazing at her bare thighs under the khaki shorts.

“You mustn’t tell anybody,” she warned him, taking down a tin of oatmeal cookies that June had given her. “It’s a very private matter.”

“Cross my heart.” He touched his broad chest with boyish solemnity, and Lucia was suddenly almost overcome by an astonishing urge to kiss him.