One Track Mind by Bethany Campbell Read Free Book Online Page A

get her homework done with lightning speed; she must never have to take it home—instead she’d be reading something he’d never heard of. That always made him feel curious…and inferior, a know-nothing.
    What, for instance, was Wuthering Heights? She’d sat at the study table, reading it so intently she seemed to tune out the rest of the world. What did wuthering mean, anyway? It wasn’t in the dictionary, because he looked it up, and it wasn’t in the library because he’d looked there, too.
    He hadn’t expected to see her that afternoon he went to work in her father’s backyard.
    The whole time he was there, he kept stealing glances at her, but he never once caught her looking back. Why should she? She was like a princess who lived in a castle, and he was like the raggle-taggle gypsy in the song.
    He made himself concentrate—almost ninety-seven percent—on pruning the roses. He was lucky to get this job from Old Man Merkle, and he intended to keep it. He wanted to do a good job, so Mrs. Simmons would want him back. “She’s picky, that one,” Merkle had said in disgust. “Can’t ever please her.”
    He’d checked out two books on roses from the public library and spent Friday night reading about how to prune roses, for God’s sake. Every other guy in town was out hooting and cruising and raising hell, and he was cramming his brain full with stuff like “growth nodes” and “nutrients in woody canes.”
    But three percent of the time he couldn’t help himself, and he’d steal a look at the princess, who, as a princess should, ignored him. But his heart vaulted and stuck in his throatwhen she stood, shed her white gauzy blouse and lowered herself into the pool. That made concentration difficult.
    Then she got out, the full sunshine on her gold-red hair and water streaming down her pale body, hidden only by the two green pieces of her bathing suit. That made concentration almost impossible.
    But he had a lot of willpower—“stubborn as hell,” his mother called him—and he did fine until he started to work on that central trellis. There was something wrong with the trellis itself, he sensed, and Merkle had let the vines overpower it.
    He was half-convinced that the lattice work was rotten under all those vines, and that old man Merkle should have replaced it long—
    Then the damn thing came down on top of him. A broken slat shot into his ribs, and he had his arms full of thorny roses about to crash into the dirt. Merkle would kill him.
    He fought with all his strength to save the thing, and at last it seemed stabilized, and he realized his head and arms and throat stung with scratches, and his side was bleeding.
    And while he still seemed half-smothered by roses, he looked between them and saw—oh, humiliation—that now she noticed him. Her mouth dropped open, and the book fell out of her hand. She didn’t even seem to know it. Her attention was focused on him.
    He felt like a perfect fool. He extricated himself and made for the shed to repair the damage from the broken trellis, but Lori Simmons was on him like a duck on a june bug. He was appalled. He felt like a clumsy peasant, and he did all he could to ward off her attempt to help him.
    She was not a girl who could be warded off once she’d made up her mind. He didn’t think the U.S. Marines could ward her off. And before he could help himself, he’d been captured.
    He’d sat at the edge of the pool’s concrete, and she actually seized his hand to examine it, and her touch made him hot, dizzy, confused, desirous and so desperate to impress her that he’d blurted out some lines of poetry, hardly knowing wherethey came from. He’d been trying to be a smart aleck, show her he wasn’t like some poor yard dog who’d got a thorn in his paw.
    And she’d kept hold of his hand and looked into his face as if she really saw him for the first time, and he found himself mumbling some nonsense about study hall, but all he could look at were her