BARELY MISTAKEN Read online

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  Contents:

  Prologue

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

  © 2002

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  Prologue

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  Olivia shifted on the cold concrete bleacher, and closed her eyes in bliss. Snuggling deeper into a sweater delivered earlier in the week by the church charity group, she absorbed the moment. The bite of a brisk autumn night. The rallying charge of the marching band overlaid by the cheerleaders' chant. The glare of lights illuminating the field in an otherwise dark night. The smell of popcorn, hot dogs, and the occasional waft of hot cocoa. The collective surge of excitement in the stands and on the field. "Earth to Olivia."

  She blinked her eyes open to find her best friend Beth's freckled hand waving in front of her face. "I love football games."

  Beth sighed and dreamily eyed the second string quarterback parked on the sidelines. "Yeah. Doesn't Chuck Lamont look cute in his uniform?"

  Olivia rolled her eyes and grinned. The question was purely rhetorical. Beth didn't expect an answer.

  A frisson of awareness tingled against the back of her neck—the feeling that someone was looking at her. She turned her head. A rowdy group hovered at the edge of the bleachers, drawing several disapproving glares from parents in the booster section. Her gaze skidded to a stop as it locked into the bright blue eyes of Luke Rutledge who stood slightly apart from his crowd. Tough.

  Wild. Older. Her stomach flip-flopped and her pulse ran amok, even as a wave of self-consciousness washed over her. He quirked one corner of his mouth in a smile.

  If she absolutely didn't know better, she might, for one wild flight of fancy, think one of the sexiest bad boys in the senior class was flirting with her mousy, bookworm self. She attempted to smile back. Her awkwardness produced something much closer to a grimace.

  Burning with self-consciousness and an attraction much more intense than the benign crush she'd had on Barry Elwell last year, she glanced away before she made a total fool of herself.

  What had seemed like minutes must have only been seconds. Beth remained fixated on second-string Chuck Lamont. Olivia peeked from beneath lowered lashes at Luke. He stood, laughing with his friends, oblivious to her presence. What if some of them had seen her mooning at him? Was that why they were laughing? She shivered into her sweater. Forget it. She read too many books and possessed too much imagination.

  "So, who wants the scoop?" Amy Murdoch's voice drifted two rows back to Olivia and Beth. Lucy Jacobs and Melissa Bowers, sitting on either side of Amy, squealed their excitement.

  Beth screwed up her face, imitating them. "They sound like greased pigs in a race," she muttered to Olivia.

  Grateful to concentrate on something other than her imaginary exchange with Luke, Olivia snickered. "Yeah. Kind of." Amy, Lucy and Melissa were the reigning queens of sophomore cool. You only had to ask them.

  "Tammy Cooper … health department … birth control pills…" Even though Amy lowered her voice to a conspiratorial level, bits and pieces drifted up to them. Lucy and Melissa visibly gasped, "…trashy…" "…in her blood … their mother ran … another man…" "…Olivia … honor society … same way … born that way."

  Olivia blinked hard to stem the tears stinging her eyelids, her flesh crawling with humiliation. It didn't take a rocket scientist to fill in the blanks between the snatches of conversation.

  Driven to escape, Olivia surged to her feet.

  "Bitches," Beth muttered, eyeing her cup of steaming cocoa and their well-groomed tittering backs with intent. "Meet me in the bathroom. I've got business to take care of."

  Olivia stumbled off the bleachers and dashed behind them, desperate to find a dark place to hide. She forced air into her lungs in great shuddering breaths. The words chased around in her head, searing her with their poison … born that way … Olivia … same way. She huddled in the dark, against the cold concrete.

  Olivia looked up at a movement. Luke Rutledge stepped into the shadows with her. Olivia's heart hammered. She dashed at the trickle of tears behind her glasses with her gloved fingers.

  "Olivia? Are you okay?" His big hands cupped her shoulders. A tremor of recognition rippled through her. She hadn't imagined the look they'd shared earlier.

  "I'm fine." Her voice squeaked out. She ought to feel threatened. Luke stood six feet tall with broad shoulders and it was dark beneath the bleachers. Instead, he seemed genuinely concerned, almost comforting—totally at odds with his bad boy image.

  "You're sure?" He rubbed small circles against her shoulders with his gloved hands. Even through the layers of gloves, coats and sweaters, his touch left her tingling in a way she'd never felt before.

  She shoved her glasses more firmly onto her nose. "Really. I'm okay." Her breath lodged in her throat. She'd never realized how a boy smelled up close. Different than girls. Interesting. Exciting.

  "Good." Other girls might've seen it coming, but surprise rooted her to the spot when he pulled her closer and kissed her. She'd dreamed about kisses. She'd read about kisses.

  None of it had prepared her for the real thing. His mouth pressed against hers, hot and hard. She leaned into him and kissed him back, giving in to the spontaneous need flashing through her.

  …born that way … Olivia … same way. They couldn't be right, could they? But this was exactly how girls from the wrong side of the tracks behaved. Was that why he'd followed her? Kissed her? She was easy? Trashy?

  Horrified, she wrenched away from Luke. She ran out of the shadows as fast as her trembling legs carried her.

  She was not that way. She wasn't and she'd prove it. To them. To him. And to herself.

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  1

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  Thirteen years later…

  "You'll be the belle of the ball tonight," Beth cajoled as she brandished the package of hair color at Olivia.

  Olivia paused in the middle of pressing her dress for the costume ball and sprayed extra starch on a pleat that refused to cooperate.

  "I'm not concerned with being the belle of the ball," she argued. "I'm quite fond of my mousy brown hair, thank you. Why would I want to trade it in for late-blooming, tramp-in-training red?"

  Beth stretched out on Olivia's four-poster Rice-carved bed. "You couldn't look like a tramp-in-training if you tried. Trust me. But you could try shucking the prude disguise. You'd be a knockout. A little hair color, some contact lenses and dressing as if you really are twenty-nine instead of sixty-five."

  Flamboyant, outgoing Beth just didn't get it. Olivia wasn't interested in being a knockout—not that she even considered herself KO material. Beth was a force of nature. Olivia was a rock. Olivia liked her quartz status.

  She rolled her eyes at Beth and picked up the long-standing argument. "My eyes are allergic to contacts, as you very well know." She mentally reviewed her wardrobe of conservative skirts and blouses. "And I dress like a twenty-nine-year-old librarian with good taste—"

  "Maybe you should borrow something from Tammy."

  "Maybe when pigs fly." Her older sister maintained an inverse fashion philosophy—the least amount of clothes showing the most amount of flesh. And Tammy had a bountiful amount of flesh up top. Olivia shook her head as she peered down at her relatively flat chest. "Can you imagine these in one of Tammy's halter tops? Even if I dared to bare, there's nothing there. I'd have enough extra material to make a skirt." Not to mention she'd set every tongue in town wagging.

  Beth snickered. "Okay. You've got a point. But at least you'll skip the sag factor. You'll still be Ms. Perky Boobs at sixty when Tammy's playing soccer with hers. Now about this color…"

  Olivia pushed her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose and pee
red across the ironing board at the hair-color model. She'd invested a lot of thought and care into cultivating a conservative, tasteful "look." Olivia always carried with her the sense that everyone in town was watching—waiting for her to slip up, to do or say something inappropriate.

  For the span of a heartbeat, a shadow of restless longing tempted her. And then it passed. She shook her head. "Forget it. I'm not going to look tacky or cheap. Adam wants to discuss something important tonight."

  The thought brought an involuntary smile to her face. Adam had begun to affect her that way.

  "What?" Beth scowled in suspicion.

  Beth's scowl dampened her good mood. "I don't know, but it sounded important."

  "You've been dating a month, maybe he's gonna put the move on you. Sex is always important to men. Right up there with breathing, eating and television." Beth sighed and placed the hair color box on the nightstand.

  "Beth, you've got the gutter mind."

  "What's gutter about that? You've been out half a dozen times. He's kissed you, hasn't he?"

  "You know he has." Twice to be precise—both times their kiss had proved a pleasant, perfunctory end to their evening. At first, she'd merely considered Adam a friend—a very attractive, very influential friend. Lately, their relationship had taken a more intimate turn. However, it wasn't that intimate, yet. "He's mentioned his grandmother's birthday several times. I think he's going to invite me to the party. It seems more likely than sex." Olivia examined the pressed dress. Each pleat lined up in perfect, starched order. "That looks good."

  She turned off the iron and hung up her dress. The dark purple complemented her pale skin and dark hair. At least that was the salesclerk's opinion.

  "Hmm." Beth cast a considering eye over the floor-length, lady-in-waiting gown. "Almost as stiff and upstanding as Adam. I'm sure he'll approve."

  Olivia moved the dress to the back of the door and sat on the opposite end of the bed, crossing her legs at the ankles. Hortense jumped up and settled her immense kitty weight across Olivia's lap. Olivia administered the obligatory scratch behind the ears and turned her attention back to Beth. Usually, Beth was brutally frank—it was one of the things she admired about her long-standing friend—but, for weeks now she'd been beating around the bush, dropping snide comments. "If you don't like him, why don't you just say so?"

  "I don't like him."

  Hortense seconded the opinion with a short meow.

  Ask and ye shall receive. "Why?"

  Beth held up a freckled finger. "He's supercilious." She held up another. "He's a snob." A third finger joined the first two. "And he thinks he's all that."

  Based on Beth's earlier comments, Olivia had known her friend wasn't wild about Adam, but he didn't deserve this. "That's not fair. He's been a tremendous help in raising money for the new addition to the library. And he's responsible for my invitation to the costume ball at the country club tonight. I should manage to raise another couple of hundred." And I think he could be The One. Now wasn't the time to break that particular news.

  Beth snapped her fingers. "That's it. You're besotted 'cause he helped you fund-raise. You'd like Freddie Krueger if he helped you with your library."

  "You make me sound like the village idiot. It's true, I appreciate Adam's help with the library. Do you know what a difference that new kids' section is going to make—"

  "Sure I do, 'cause you've told me." Beth cut her off before she could really wind up on her favorite topic. "Okay, how about this? I caught him admiring his reflection in his office window when I went to make the deposit at the bank yesterday." Beth wrinkled her entire face in disgust.

  "So?" Olivia heard the defensive note in her own voice.

  "He was so pleased with himself. I bet he got a stiffy."

  "What?" Even irrepressible Beth hadn't just uttered what Olivia thought she had. Had she?

  Beth tossed her a defiant look. "You heard me, girlfriend. A stiffy. A woody. A boner. Take your pick."

  Ewww. She could live without this level of bluntness. "If you're going to be disgusting, I'm not listening."

  Beth threw up her hands in surrender. "You're warped, Olivia."

  Amusement edged out insult. "That's it. My life has reached an all-time low when you call me warped."

  "You're dating the guy, and you think his stiffy is disgusting."

  "No. You talking about it is disgusting. He was probably checking his tie or something." Olivia had noticed him watching himself in the mirror once when they were out to dinner. "He's very particular about his appearance." She shifted Hortense to a spot on the bed beside her and plucked the new bottle of nail polish off her nightstand. A lifetime of insecurities reared their ugly heads. "I wonder sometimes why he goes out with me."

  Olivia began to paint her toenails with meticulous care.

  "Are you nuts? You're smart, funny, successful, attractive—in a severely understated kind of way. And you're ten times the person he is."

  She paused and raised a brow in Beth's direction. Beth was just a wee bit prone to exaggeration when she climbed on a soapbox. Olivia couldn't resist teasing her. "Ten times? Really?"

  Beth scowled at her. "Who was the valedictorian of our graduating class?"

  Olivia shrugged and resumed painting her nails. "Who never had a date to the Senior Prom?"

  "Who started the local literacy drive?" Beth fired back at her.

  "Who was asked out in high school by Deke Richards because he thought her brother could sneak him some beer?"

  "Olivia, you've got to move past this 'wrong side of the tracks' label you've given yourself."

  "Come on, Beth. My family provides plenty of fodder for the gossip mill. And I didn't have to label myself. My Daughter-of-the-Town-Drunk title was inherited." Along with the faint wash of shame so familiar she wore it like a second skin. Caste systems thrived in small towns.

  At times she craved the anonymity and the freedom of living where her background didn't define her. But leaving seemed tantamount to conceding defeat—accepting her title and slinking away in shame. No, she'd vowed long ago to stay and prove a Cooper could contribute more to the community than bail money.

  Beth shared a rueful grimace and crossed her legs Indian style. "Speaking of your family, I heard Marty got hauled in night before last for drunk-and-disorderly."

  Olivia sighed in resignation. "Yep. That's my brother, upholding the Cooper family tradition in jail. They even put him in Daddy's old cell. Daddy passed down his spot in the tank." She rolled her eyes. "It does a gal proud."

  "And you bailed him out."

  "Of course I did. And then I took him home to Darlene and dared her to let him out of the house again." Her sister-in-law had promised to keep her brother, king of the Wild Turkey, home. She shook her head. "Marty's got a good heart and a good mind, when he isn't pickled. But I swear, he spends half of his life drunk and the other half sobering up."

  "What about Tammy? Did she really leave Earl for Tim? That girl changes husbands almost as often as I change my underwear."

  Olivia shrugged, out of touch with her sister's latest antics. Tammy often made unwise decisions, in Olivia's opinion. Had she left her third husband for his best friend? "I don't know. Likely as not. She wouldn't tell me because she knows I consider that a crazy way to live."

  "You, Olivia, are living proof that gene mutation exists. I'd even theorize adoption, but you look like them. Even if you don't act like them. I've never seen one family member so different from the rest."

  Olivia's mother swore she'd known her youngest was different from the moment she'd popped out. While she'd named her two other children after country music stars Tammy Wynette and Marty Robbins, her third child didn't seem like a Loretta or Tanya or even Patsy. Hence, she'd named her youngest Olivia, in honor of one of her favorite soap stars. Olivia still clearly recalled her mother spending hours in front of the TV with her soap operas. Of course that was before Martha Rae Watson Cooper abandoned her family in search of green
er pastures. Olivia had neither seen nor heard from her mother in twenty-three years.

  God knows, Olivia loved the only family she had left—Pops, Marty and Tammy—but they exasperated her. Frustrated her. She'd spent a lifetime trying to rise above her birthright as the white-trash daughter of the town drunk. She often resented the Cooper escapades that were the talk of the town.

  Was she so different from them? Every once in a while she gave in to impulse and blew off steam—a skydiving excursion, cold-cocking slimy Bennie Krepps when he tormented a stray cat, attending Willette Turtle's bachelorette party at a male strip club, a naked midnight dance in a soft summer rain in the privacy of her backyard. If she ever really loosened the tight rein she held herself on, would she make the same poor decisions as the rest of her family?

  Maybe she was a shallow person, maybe even a bad person, but the fact that a respected pillar of the community had chosen to date her carried its own brand of validation.

  Olivia glanced around her bedroom. Like the rest of her house, it was small, but tastefully furnished. She'd hated the shack she'd grown up in, that her father still lived in. Even as a child, she'd clipped magazine photos of quietly elegant rooms, determined to have a place like that one day, determined to have a life like that one day. Adam, vice president of his family's bank, fit the life she wanted.

  She wasn't a social climber. Not by a long shot. It wasn't about fancy cars or diamonds. No, Adam offered the respectability she so craved.

  Olivia recapped the nail polish and waved her feet in the air to dry her toenails. "I'm sorry you don't like Adam. We're well-suited."

  "Humph." Beth snorted. "If it were me, I'd be barking up the other side of that family tree. Give me Luke over Adam any day. Talk about another genetic curveball. I've never seen two brothers who looked so much alike but were so different."

  "No kidding." Olivia suppressed a faint shudder. Luke, the black sheep of the Rutledge family, disquieted her. Worse, he shook her up. Mercifully, he lived in the next county over. He and Adam moved in different circles. And although Luke's company had won the contract for the new library wing, he was out of state, so his partner was heading up the project.