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Those who knew her would say that if she was inspired by anyone, it would be some iconic fashion designer such as Coco Chanel or Yves St. Laurent. But the bit of inspiration she’d always remembered had come from a quote Mrs. Morretti, who owned a little Italian restaurant not far from where Rebecca had grown up, kept taped to the mirror above her cash register.
You must do the thing you think you cannot do. Eleanor Roosevelt.
Regardless of the fact that both Mrs. Morretti and Mrs. Roosevelt could have used some major style advice with their respective wardrobes, Rebecca had found the challenge pushing her off and on over the years. It pushed her now.
A hike held all the appeal of a root canal for her. Going would be the self-improvement part of the program. As for the job perspective, she figured the hike might help her better understand the suburban male, and thus better understand his apathy toward fashion. If she could find an angle, she might even be able to get another article out of it.
Trying not to look as tentative as she felt, remembering that Eleanor’s advice applied to the dog, too, she swallowed hard, reached down and when he didn’t bare his teeth, shook his paw.
“Nice…dog.” Not sure what else one said to a canine, she straightened as Bailey pulled back his paw and watched him look to his owner.
Joe gave him a pat on the head and motioned him back into the truck.
“It won’t take long to get to the trailhead,” he said, walking her around the blunt nose of the vehicle to the passenger’s door. “Less than half an hour or so. I brought granola bars, trail mix and water. If you want anything else, we can stop at the market on the way out of town.”
Not wanting to alter the experience with a request for a bagel and a latte, Rebecca told him that whatever he normally took with him was fine. Waving to Mrs. Fulton across the street, she climbed into the cab of the truck and promptly stiffened again.
Bailey, looking expectant, had claimed the console in the middle. The dog also apparently knew he couldn’t stay there. The moment Joe climbed in on the other side, the dog turned in the confined space, brushing her forehead with his long tail and settled on one of the small jump seats behind them.
She hugged the door. “You seem to be good with them. Animals, I mean.”
His deep chuckle sounded easy and oddly relaxing. “I hope so. I’d starve if I wasn’t. You never had any pets growing up?”
She couldn’t tell if he’d asked because he couldn’t imagine such a possibility, or because he didn’t want to talk about himself. Having never met a man who didn’t consider himself his favorite subject, she decided he simply found her lack of animal companionship as a child somewhat incomprehensible. Or, maybe, unfortunate.
Having been under a bit of stress when she’d first met him, she couldn’t quite recall if she’d mentioned the impracticalities of pet ownership in the city, or if having one had simply never occurred to her or her mom. If she had, he didn’t seem to mind if she repeated herself as they left Danbury Way with her neighbors still watching and headed for the Catskills.
Except to go shopping in Albany, Rebecca hadn’t been outside Rosewood since she’d arrived. She had also never in her life set foot in a national or state park. She knew there were people in the city who kept summer homes or lodges in New England where they “escaped” during the summer or skied in the winter. She wasn’t one of them. Neither were her friends, though Carrie Klein, her onetime roommate and unfortunately no relation to Calvin or Anne, had dated a stockbroker with a great little place in the Hamptons. Her vacations were always to the fashion meccas of the world. Rome. Milan. Paris. Stateside, she stuck with Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Or the beach. She liked to be where there was room service, cabs and at least some semblance of nightlife.
She didn’t consider herself spoiled. Heaven knew there had been times that the only reason she could afford to go out with her girlfriends from work was because the happy hour hors d’oeuvres were free so she didn’t have to pay for a meal. The designer clothes she wore came from sample sales, or sales at Barneys or Saks, but mostly from the Vogue clothes closet, which housed cast-off items from photo shoots.
Roughing it meant having to walk thirty blocks in the rain because she couldn’t get a cab. Though she wasn’t about to mention it, within five minutes of leaving Joe’s truck to follow a narrow dirt path through the woods, she would have preferred a walk in a downpour from Union Square to East 59th to the trek she was on now.
The trail was too narrow to walk side by side, so she followed Joe into the forest with bushes brushing her on either side. She kept shifting her focus between the bright orange day pack slung across his strong back to the vegetation attacking her legs and snapping beneath her feet. The dog had run ahead. He returned now with a short piece of tree branch in his mouth. Obviously, he didn’t mind the taste of dirt.
“How far is it to the meadow?” she asked.
She watched Joe take the limb from the dog and toss it ahead of them. With the dog making the bushes rustle as he took off after his new toy, she glanced down in time to avoid tripping over a skinny tree root sticking up through the leaves and pine needles. Seeing bits of bush clinging to her jeans, she brushed them off.
Joe glanced at her over his shoulder, waited for her to catch up. “Only a couple of miles.”
“Miles?” They were going miles?
“Only a couple,” he repeated. “It’s an easy walk.”
Easy was a relative term. In the interests of job research and self-improvement, however, she trudged on.
“Why do you do this?” she asked, falling into step beside him as the trail mercifully widened.
“I like being outside.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m cooped up inside most of the week.”
“Why else?”
Joe adjusted the weight of his day pack. “Because it’s a great way to unwind. It puts you back to basics.” Her inquisitiveness reminded him of his four-year-old nephew. Why was his favorite word.
“So it’s a primitive thing? Like you’re feeding your inner pioneer or something. You know,” she coaxed, when a frown creased his face, “like your inner child.”
He knew all about the inner child. His little sister was a psychologist who’d blithely informed him after a family dinner last year that his lack of a serious romantic interest was probably his inner child’s fear to commit. That remark had only fed his mother’s fears that, unlike his married siblings, he was going to wind up old and alone, which was no doubt why she’d resumed her efforts to find him a suitable mate.
He loved his family. He just wished they’d stay out of his love life.
“It’s not that complicated,” he assured her. “I just like being where you can hear the wind in the trees and get some exercise.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to join a gym?”
“Why pay to run on a treadmill when you can do this for free?”
She swiped at something small and pesky buzzing past her ear. “Because there are no bugs?”
“These aren’t bad at all. You should be out here during mosquito season.”
“Thanks, but I think I’ll pass. I’m not crazy about things that suck blood.”
“So you don’t date lawyers?”
“Not anymore,” she muttered.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Joe glance toward her. The smile that deepened the vertical lines carved in his cheeks faded with his curiosity.
“Burned bad?”
The only lawyer she’d ever dated had been Jack. “Barely singed,” she murmured, though the experience had definitely contributed to the void that didn’t feel quite so awful at the moment. Marveling at that, she started to smile at the man beside her, only to notice that the path had turned—and that there were no longer any trees on their left.
They were now parallel to a ravine. With Joe between her and the edge of that rocky drop-off and a wall of trees to her right, she deliberately edged toward the foliage.
“Do heights bother you?”
Clutching the insulated water bottle he’d given her, she quickly shook her head. Heights normally didn’t bother her at all. “I used to work on the thirty-second floor. My apartment was on the tenth.” There had also been glass or a guardrail between her and all that space.
It only looked to be about ten feet to the bottom. A single story. Still, with all the rocks down there, a fall would hurt. Joe, however, seemed totally unfazed by how close he was to the edge as he told her that this section of the trail was short, only an eighth of a mile or so. Short or not, she needed to pay less attention to how he actually enjoyed being so far from civilization and more attention to where she was putting her feet.
Narrowing her focus to the path, she concentrated on where she stepped while he pointed out a squirrel darting up a tree and Bailey trotted ahead of him. It was only when the trail curved again, trees once more hugging both sides of it, and the path angled what seemed like straight up that she let herself be distracted by the scream of her thigh muscles and the rustling in the bushes.
She wanted to know if there was anything carnivorous in these woods. He told her there probably was, but that on the carnivore side, he’d personally never encountered anything bigger than a fox. What she’d heard was probably just a rabbit.
A few hundred yards later, a raccoon streaked across her path. She didn’t scream. The hand she clamped over her mouth after she gasped prevented it. It was the same way she usually reacted to the cats.
Joe said nothing to minimize, patronize or otherwise imply that she was acting like a girl. He just identified the little masked beast, stuck a little closer to her and called Bailey back to walk with them since the dog had been responsible for flushing out the critter to begin with.
His attitude remained patient, almost…relaxed, she thought. Still, she had the feeling when he glanced toward her at times, that he was mentally shaking his head at her. Or, most likely, having second thoughts about having brought her along. Even if he wasn’t, she was.
With her heart rate finally back to racing only from exertion and not from fright, and with Joe within grabbing distance, she reminded herself of her purpose for subjecting herself to his little slice of heaven and let herself be distracted by the crumbly-looking silver-green stuff growing on some of the trees and fallen logs.
“What is that?” she asked, pointing to a patch lit by a sunbeam.
“Lichen.”
Whatever that is, she thought. “It’s a great color. Perfect for a shimmery fabric like dupioni or charmeuse.”
“It’s made up of an alga and a fungus.”
“Algae?”
“That’s plural. Alga is singular. The plant is thallophytic.”
She eyed him evenly. “I have no idea what thallophytic is.”
He eyed her back. “I have no idea what you just said, either.”
His mouth wasn’t smiling. Only his eyes were. But any thought of explaining silk fabrics to him evaporated with her next heartbeat.
“It means it’s a plant with a single-cell sex organ. There’s another explanation, but then we’d have to get into gametes and haploid chromosomes.”
His glance had slipped to her mouth, causing her pulse to jerk and pick up speed all over again.
She absolutely did not want him to know that he affected her. Not wanting him to have any effect on her at all, she simply turned away and moved on, slapping at bugs as she went.
“What’s dupioni?” he called after her.
She kept going. “It’s a silk fabric, woven with slubbed yarns. You’d get a nice drape in the ten momme range.”
“What’s mummy?”
“It’s a Japanese unit of weight used to measure and describe silk cloth. That’s not how other fabrics are assessed, but then we’d have to get into weight grades and thread counts.”
Joe hung back. Watching her go, his attention moved from the totally impractical little purse strapped to her back to the sweet curve of her backside, to the long length of her legs. His glance had barely reached the heels he couldn’t believe had carried her this far when she gave a little jump to the side and frowned at a stick she must have thought was a snake.
He couldn’t help wondering when she was going to tell him she was done, that she’d had enough of the nature thing and that he could take her home now. She wasn’t having a good time. But when he caught up with her, she didn’t say a word other than to remark about the intensity of the fall colors and the crystal-blue sky. She did, however, look visibly relieved when they finally entered the wide meadow and he led her to a spot by the wide stream cutting through it.
Surrounded by green pines and sugar maples the color of fire, he watched her sink to a flat boulder. Beside her, the water bubbled white as it tumbled over a dam of rocks.
“Who’d have thought,” she murmured, over the water’s burble and splash. “A spa.” Watching the bubbles, she casually slipped off her boots to reveal socks that matched her rust-colored vest and rubbed one arch. “You have no idea how I miss massages and seaweed wraps.”
He hadn’t a clue what a seaweed wrap was. Some kind of sushi, maybe. Massage, however, he definitely understood.
Slipping off his backpack, he lowered himself to the rock across from her. With his boots planted a yard apart he pulled the pack to him and took out two granola bars.
He handed her one. “What else do you miss?”
Thanking him, she peeled the wrapper back halfway, took a bite and continued rubbing. “Thai takeout at two in the morning,” she said as soon as she’d swallowed. “There’s this place around the corner from where I used to live that makes the most amazing shrimp soup with lemongrass, and their Pad Thai is to die for. And shopping the sample sales. And all the theaters and the clubs and my friends.” She lifted the granola bar, started to take a bite, stopped. “I think I even miss the sirens.”
She’d never known quiet could be so…silent…until she’d moved to Rosewood. She glanced around her. Out here, it was quieter still.
“What about you?” she asked, not wanting to taunt herself with anything else she could have mentioned. “If you were to move from Rosewood, what would you miss?”
Two-thirds of his bar was already gone. As he considered her question, the last third disappeared.
With his forearms on his spread knees, he watched her work at her arch.
His expression thoughtful, he nodded to what surrounded them. “Access to this. My friends. My practice.”
Leaning forward, he reached out and circled his hand around her ankle.
“Let me do that,” he said, and propped her sock-covered foot up on his knee. Pushing his thumbs into her heel, he rotated them in tiny circles to the middle of her arch.
Rebecca slowly slid to the ground to lean against the rock. If she’d intended to protest, she forgot all about it as her toes curled.
“My patients’ pets,” he continued as if he’d had no break at all in his thoughts. “The lakes where I boat. High-school football games in the fall. Basketball in the winter. Baseball in the spring. We have some pretty good teams,” he informed her, still rubbing. “We could use some new turf on the football field, though. It’s going to be a mud bog when it starts to rain.”
She’d thought his touch calming before. Now, with even the muscles in her shoulders going limp, she thought it purely…magic.
“Did you play sports in high school yourself?”
“Some. Basketball mostly because the season didn’t interfere with my chores at home.”
“In Rosewood.”
He shook his head. “Peterboro. It’s a little farming town north of here. When I went to college, I played a little in undergrad,” he continued before she could ask anything about his home, “but I gave it up in graduate school.”
“Where did you go to college?”
“Ithaca. Cornell,” he clarified. “Excellent veterinary school.” He switched feet, started rubbing the other one. “Where did you go?”
“Fashion Institute of Technology. Excellent bachelors’ and graduate programs. You’ve probably never heard of our basketball team.”
He kneaded her toes. “Can’t say that I have.”
“Do you miss it?” she asked, praying he wouldn’t stop. “Playing, I mean.”
“I still play a little. I help coach sometimes at South Rosewood,” he said, speaking of the youth center in what was considered the poor side of town. “The director there is a client. And a few of us have a pickup game once a week at the community center. Anyone who wants to play can come in and start playing on either team. Adam Shibb plays with us.”
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