The Christmas Clock and A Song For My Mother - Kat Martin Page 0,12
the instant he had spotted her standing in the grocery aisle, he had wanted to ... to what?
It wasn’t Syl’s fault he’d started drinking and carousing and wound up in jail. So she’d broken their engagement. It happened to guys all the time.
But Joe had never thought it would happen to him, not with Syl. And once he had lost her, he just couldn’t pull himself together. He had started hanging out in the bars, drinking and getting into fist-fights. He had dropped out in his third year of college and given up the football scholarship he had won to the University of Michigan, and his friends had stopped calling. He took up with a bunch of rowdies he wouldn’t have given the time of day before Syl left town.
Joe pulled the car up in front of the repair shop and turned off the engine.
Damn, she was still beautiful. He had imagined her older, with little wrinkles around her mouth and that hard, used look some city women got. At twenty-eight, Syl Winters could have starred in a movie. Well, at least any movie Joe might want to see.
Her skin was as smooth as he remembered, her hair the color of honey, a little darker now, maybe, but that short, glossy cap of curls was as fetching as ever. Her eyes were that same pretty sea green and she still had freckles on her nose. And a knockout figure.
He felt a sexual stirring he hadn’t expected and clenched his jaw, refusing to allow his thoughts to slide in that direction. But he couldn’t help remembering that night by the lake just two weeks before their wedding. He’d made love to Syl Winters and though he had been with other women over the years, he had never truly made love to any other woman since.
Not that he hadn’t tried.
For nearly a year, he had dated Diane Ellison, a local kindergarten teacher, but in the end, both of them realized it wasn’t going to work. After they had ended the relationship on a fairly cordial note, Joe had come to the conclusion that unless something drastically changed, he was never going to get married.
His expectations were just too high. Worse yet, they were based on a woman who had never really existed. Still, they were stuck in his head and he couldn’t seem to shake them loose. Sweetness and generosity, kindness and good nature, a sense of humor, and a deep, abiding love that would last until they were both old and gray and beyond.
He sighed as he climbed out of the Mustang and headed for the back door into the shop. Syl was back, the woman who had broken his heart, and now that she was here, he realized he still felt the pull of attraction he had felt for her the first time he had seen her that autumn day on the Dreyerville College campus.
The weather had been perfect, though the leaves had begun to turn, and in her bright yellow sweater, she was as pretty as the day. He’d asked her out and she had agreed and they were together nearly every day after that. They were so well matched, like two pieces of a puzzle that fit perfectly together. Whenever he was about to lose patience over a class assignment, she could soothe him with a word or a touch. When she began worrying too much about an upcoming exam, his solid, practical advice often helped melt her fears away. They had been so compatible. Or at least it had seemed that way.
Not that they didn’t argue. Syl had a temper and so did he, and both of them felt free to speak their mind.
Which was why it was so hard to understand what had happened, why in the end, everything he had believed about Sylvia Winters had been wrong. She wasn’t sweet and generous and loving. She was flighty and artificial. The love she had professed to feel for him was a lie of the very worst sort.
Joe thought of her standing in the aisle at the grocery store and felt a fresh rush of anger. For the first time in the last four years, he wished he had never come back to Dreyerville.
“Have you seen him yet?” Mary Webster sat next to Syl on the sofa in her apartment. It was hot outside, the air thick and heavy. Both of them were drinking Diet Coke.
“I ran into him at the grocery store last night after work.”