His Cinderella Next Door Read online

  She sorted through the underwear, more self-conscious because he had selected it. They were all so delicate, so beautiful, so feminine. Somehow the fact he had chosen them made it feel as if each piece were burning her hands.

  She finally chose a bra, a confection of spiderwebs and butterfly wings, slipped off her old one and put on the new one. Then she found the matching pair of briefs.

  When she turned and looked at herself in the mirror, it felt as if she had slipped off one skin and put on another. She could feel herself going very still as she looked at her reflection in the mirror.

  She looked sexy. She felt sexy.

  It was just the fabric, Molly told herself. She was unused to delicate silks up against her skin.

  She quickly took the top outfit off the choices Oscar had hung for her. It was a pale pink blouse, nearly as wispy as the bra, in its construction. The dark ruby skirt seemed very structured—not an improvement over the navy shirtwaist—but in fact, it was made of a stretch material that hugged her, and made her slender frame look delicately curvy.

  “Pink is not my color,” she called through the door.

  “Tell your toes.”

  “Did you pick this just to match my toenails?”

  “Yup.”

  She assessed the result in the mirror. It wasn’t just an improvement; there was that sense, again, of having slipped out of her skin, of being brand new.

  The skirt was really just a background piece for the blouse, which was gorgeous. It was sheer, gauzy, semitransparent. It felt as if she were wearing fog, and the silhouette of her new underwear peeked through, subtle, sensual.

  “It’s not really me,” she called.

  “Okay,” he said. “Just pick the last one, and let’s go.”

  “I didn’t like the last one,” she reminded him.

  “I thought it grew on you? Show me this one. Let’s compare. That would be the scientific thing to do.”

  Only he would think dress shopping could be turned into a science.

  She didn’t want to. She wanted to. Good grief! She was a woman who often placed herself in harm’s way to get a photo—she couldn’t possibly be scared to show Oscar this outfit, could she?

  Taking a deep breath, Molly the princess stepped out of the fitting room.

  Oscar gave Molly a grin, so slow, so loaded with frank male appreciation, that it felt physical, as if he had touched her, as if she were turning to butter, melting on a hot griddle.

  “Nice toes,” he said. He didn’t even glance at her toes.

  “It’s not really me,” she repeated.

  “Isn’t it?” he asked softly.

  And in the way he said it, she saw a different her, the one she tried to keep as hidden as her pink toenails.

  “You look beautiful,” he said. “But then, you always look beautiful.”

  Beautiful. The fact that he found her beautiful—this man that she could trust for his absolute honesty—hummed along her skin.

  “Could you find me some shoes that might go with it?” she asked, deliberately breaking the intensity of what was going on between them.

  After that, it felt genuinely fun putting on her princess persona. For him. But mostly for herself. Molly embraced the role she was playing.

  “What is it with men and stilettos?” she asked with fake chagrin as she waltzed out in the shoes he had found.

  Oscar had exquisite taste—she had to give him that. The shoes added a subtle layer of sophistication to each outfit she tried on. And a not-so-subtle layer of pure—

  “Sexy. They’re sexy as hell,” he growled.

  She gulped at the spark in his eye when he said that.

  Every dress he had chosen was different, and yet each seemed to celebrate her shape, each moved her closer to embracing her feminine side. Every time she modeled one for him, and saw the approval in his eyes, her confidence grew.

  She was actually a little sad when she came to the last dress. She took it off its hanger, and even before she pulled it over her head, the fabric spoke to her fingertips. It had to be silk. It floated down around her. Except for the new underwear, Molly had never had a fabric touching her make her feel quite so exquisitely feminine.

  “I’m not a yellow person,” she called to him, turning slowly to stare at herself in the mirror.

  “You said that yesterday. Remember von Goethe!”

  “It has roses all over it. Like as big as cabbages.”

  “But they’re pink,” he called back, “remember our theme?”

  “It’s very loud. I don’t like to call attention to myself.”

  “It’s an experiment,” he reminded her.

  Her protests faded away. In all the other dresses, as beautiful and sexy as they had been, she had felt like a girl playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes.

  This dress made her feel as if, until this very moment, she had been a woman playing dress-up in a girl’s clothes.

  The dress was gorgeous, summery, fun. And yet, underneath all the summery fun of the color and the extra-big flowers, was an extraordinary fit that celebrated womanhood. It was sleeveless and, minus the thick strap of her regular underwear sticking out, it made her arms look lean and tanned and lovely.

  The neckline was a deep V, much more plunging than anything she had ever worn. But, with the new underwear, it showed the snowy swell of her breast to sweet advantage. The waist was belted and the skirt flowed out from it, wide, wispy and full of movement. It ended at mid-thigh—way too short—but the way it swished around her legs made it an utter temptation.

  One she had to resist!

  “I’m going to take it off,” she called through the door. She felt ridiculously shy, as if she didn’t know who this person looking back at her through the mirror was.

  “Okay. I’m getting hungry, anyway. You owe me lunch.”

  Suddenly, even though it felt as if it would take all the courage she had, Molly wanted to see this stranger who stood before her in the mirror through Oscar’s eyes. She stepped out of the change room.

  Oscar was silent. She watched his Adam’s apple slide up and down the column of his throat as he swallowed. Then, he let out a low appreciative whistle. There was no smile this time. He met her eyes. “Now why wouldn’t you want to call attention to yourself?” he chided her.

  She lifted a shoulder.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said softly, “that I didn’t win this bet.”

  Had he won? Oscar asked himself. It was obvious everything he had chosen fit her perfectly, as if in his mind’s eye, at some level of pure male instinct, he knew. He knew every sweet gentle curve of her.

  But sharing this experience with her had created a deep and abiding awareness of the hunger in him that had nothing to do with friendship.

  He had just made everything more complicated. But the look on her face—kind of a shy delight in herself—made it worth it.

  Even as it called for him to be stronger than he had ever been before.

  “Which one should I get?” she asked him.

  “Get all of them.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll buy them if you’re worried about the cost. I want to get all of them, for you.”

  Most women would have loved that. Not Molly, of course.

  “Uh-uh. I’m not the poor kid who hangs out with the rich kid anymore.”

  “I never thought of you as poor.”

  “Our house was practically falling down. My dad was employed sporadically. I never had the stuff the other kids had.”

  “You had such panache I don’t think anyone—including me, really—ever thought of you as not having. You had things the rest of us didn’t have. World travel experience. You met movie stars. And once you started taking photos, you seemed the furthest thing from poor. Rich in ways most people will never be.”
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br />   This was Oscar: he could take the thing she felt the worst about, and somehow weave magic into it.

  “You thought of me as poor,” she challenged him. “You were always trying to buy me things.”

  “You never let me buy stuff for you,” he reminded her sourly. “Stupidly, stubbornly proud. Sometimes at my expense. I wanted to see Episode VII, The Force Awakens, and you wouldn’t go.”

  Speaking of the force awakening, he felt like a powerful force was awakening right now. In him. And in her.

  “You could have gone with someone else.”

  “I did. I took Ralphie. But I wanted to see it with you.” Then again, he would have probably been watching her changing facial expressions instead of the movie. He would have lived it vicariously through her reactions to each of the scenes.

  That was how dangerous she was, he reminded himself. She could distract the world’s biggest nerd from a science fiction classic.

  She could distract him—a guy who considered himself very goal-oriented—from his goal.

  A force awakening wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

  “When you’re poor,” she told him, “that’s all you have. Your pride. Your sense of honor. You cling to it like you’ve found a log to ride down a swollen stream. I couldn’t let you buy things for me.”

  “As would any guy who was completely besotted with a girl?”

  Molly went very still. She looked at him with wide eyes. He realized he had said something that was as secret to him as her pink toenails were to her.

  “You weren’t!”

  “Yeah, I kind of was. I mean not when we were five, obviously, and probably not even when we were twelve. It was when you came back from Africa that you seemed like this exotic, mature stranger. You had a style and a strength about you that took my breath away.”

  But, he reminded himself, when he had acted on that, she had rejected him. She had practically moved to a different planet. This wasn’t how he’d pictured addressing this—in the middle of a women’s clothing store—but he realized he had always wanted to address it.

  “Then your dad died, and I kissed you. And my timing was the worst ever. I never got a chance to apologize for it. You were just gone.”

  He didn’t know how far to take this. The truth was, he had not known how he was going to survive his world without her. She had been the fresh air blowing into a stuffy room. She had been the sunshine on gray days. His world without her had turned so bleak.

  He felt wide open, and he didn’t like it one bit. There was some unknown named James lurking in the background.

  “Hey,” he said, his tone forced in his own ears, coming across as flippant, “why don’t I buy you the dresses to make up for it?”

  “There is nothing to make up for,” she said. “Nothing. I didn’t go because you kissed me, Truck. I went because you were inviting me into a world I couldn’t belong in. Not ever.”

  “That’s not true.” Somehow, this conversation had gone seriously off the rails. Things tended to not go as planned with Molly. Why hadn’t he remembered that?

  A lighthearted excursion to buy her a party dress turned into this: him making a mess of apologizing to her for something she had probably nearly forgotten.

  “It is true. I can’t fit into your world, Truck. Even the offer to buy the dresses shows that. Every one of these dresses requires a different set of shoes. It gets complicated. And I’d never get it all in my bag.”

  What kind of woman thought about being practical when it came to buying dresses? Though he was aware she was giving him a deeper message. And it was very true: around Molly, it got complicated.

  “You could buy a new suitcase.”

  “See? It just becomes more and more stuff. I don’t need all this stuff. I travel light, Truck.”

  Ah, yes, there was the hidden message in all of her photos, the one that he thought he might be the only one that could see it. The reminder of what kind of woman Molly Bentwell was. She traveled alone. And she traveled light.

  That’s why she had left after he kissed her. It required more of her than she could give. Or maybe more of her than she wanted to.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “REJECTED AGAIN,” OSCAR said casually, as if there was no sting at all to Molly’s words that she traveled alone and traveled light.

  “Don’t say that.”

  He lifted a shoulder.

  “You may buy me one outfit,” she said, a little desperately, as if that could heal what she had hurt in him. That was one of the problems between them. It didn’t matter what words you said. There was a deeper meaning.

  “One,” Molly said, holding up one finger, as if he might miss the point if she didn’t. “But I’m buying the shoes. Which dress?”

  It was obvious to him which dress. The yellow with the roses had been spectacular on her. “You choose,” he said. “Surprise me.”

  She tilted her head at him and nodded. “Okay.”

  He tried to smile, but somehow he didn’t feel like it. Somehow, it felt like whatever dress she chose was going to have a secret message.

  Complicated.

  Because then he remembered she wasn’t buying the dress to surprise him. In fact, as he stood at the cash register paying for a dress that she wouldn’t show him, it occurred to him he had just bought her a dress to go to a party with James!

  As the transaction completed, her phone rang. She fished it out of her pocket and glanced at it.

  “Oh,” she said, “I’ve got to take this.”

  Speak of the devil, he thought, as he watched her walk away, needing privacy, apparently, a little smile on her face that made Oscar achingly aware how little he now knew about her new world.

  Whoever that was, she’d been pleased.

  “And just for your information,” she said, when she came back, “I didn’t really lose the bet because the sizes of stuff you brought for me to try on were all over the map.”

  Was she beaming like that because she hadn’t really lost the bet? He wanted to ask her who had been on the phone, but it seemed way too “teenage boy.”

  “But the right size was in there.” Oscar made himself follow her conversational lead.

  She tilted her head at him and tapped her lips thoughtfully with her finger. He really wished she wouldn’t do that.

  “I guess we could call it a partial win for you,” she decided.

  “What’s that mean?” he asked, his grumpiness not all pretend. “Partial lunch?”

  “Lunch, but nothing fancy. Do you have a favorite food truck?”

  Somehow, he had the feeling she would think he was a complete dud if he admitted he had never eaten at a food truck.

  “Not really,” he said.

  “After lunch, let’s do something.”

  It seemed to Oscar they had been doing something, almost nonstop since her arrival. He suspected she wanted to put awkward conversations behind them. Who could blame her?

  “I’m picking this afternoon’s activity,” Molly announced.

  “And what can I look forward to?”

  “A zip line, I hope.”

  That should, indeed, be a conversation killer. “Molly, have mercy, you know I’m afraid of heights.”

  She chortled happily. “We’ll call it pirate school.”

  With her parcels wrapped up like she were carrying state secrets, they walked to a place where several food trucks congregated each day. Molly ordered the Zombie Special from Hong Bong. It claimed to be a fusion of Asian and West Coast culinary influences.

  He ordered a plain burger from a nice plain-looking truck called Mike’s.

  They found a little park, and even though there was a very respectable-looking bench there, vacant, Molly threw herself down on the grass, belly first, legs crossed up behind her, propped up on her elbows.

 
; He could see why Molly and dresses weren’t necessarily a good match.

  He eased himself down on the grass, gingerly, keeping a sharp eye out for any sign a dog might have enjoyed the spot before them.

  “Want a bite?” she asked him, opening her food box and eyeing the contents with a certain rapturous delight.

  The temptation to take food off the same fork she had used was countered by the appearance of the food: a mishmash of mushrooms, sprouts and unidentifiable items. He shook his head and unwrapped his burger.

  “Delicious,” she proclaimed. “How’s yours?”

  The aroma of hers was drifting up to him. It smelled delectable. His burger was predictable.

  Which was what he liked...normally.

  “You’re not eating very much,” she said, looking at her own overflowing plate a bit guiltily.

  Less to chuck up if the zip-line experience went as badly as he suspected it was going to. Not that he was going to admit that to her.

  Which brought him to her plan for the afternoon’s activities.

  “About zip-lining,” he said.

  “Yes, I’m on it.” Eating with one hand, she thumbed through her phone with the other. “Here’s one. A two-hour tour. Is this close to here?”

  She turned her phone to him.

  “Unfortunately,” he muttered.

  “Oh,” she read enthusiastically, “Zip lines reach speeds of eighty kilometers an hour and can be up to two hundred feet above the ground.”

  “Molly, you know I hate heights.”

  “Yes, I know. But I did something I don’t really care for this morning.”

  “But it was your idea. Plus, I’m actually afraid of heights. You can see the difference between dislike and fear.”

  “You live on the fortieth floor of an apartment building!”

  “You haven’t noticed how I avoid the railing around the deck?”

  She got that stubborn look on her face. He loved that stubborn look, though it almost always foreshadowed trouble. For him.

  “I did something I didn’t like, and I enjoyed it,” Molly said.