Make Me Over_ Getting Real - Leslie Kelly [9]
He quickly changed the subject. “Can I assume you’re here for the, uh, reality show?”
Almost grunting her response, she plopped down onto the leather sofa, where Drew had been sitting until she’d arrived. “Ayuh.”
He sat down beside her, not too close—not trusting himself to get within touching distance of her. His thoughts were too jumbled, his emotions too sharp as he spoke to this unusual young woman for him to risk physical closeness.
The wise thing, given his instant attraction to her from the moment he’d seen her earlier, would be to leave. Immediately. To go to his room and think about whether Burt Mueller had really meant it when he said he’d pull the plug on the whole show—and the charitable donation—if Drew didn’t stay to participate.
Something, however, kept him here, in the secluded darkness of the quiet room, where he could hear nothing more than the soft tick of a mantel clock and her even softer breaths.
“You don’t seem too happy about being on television,” he murmured.
“How’d you like ta be a lab rat?”
Interesting. She wasn’t here by choice. “So why did you come?”
“Deathbed promise.”
He gave her a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“That someone died. Someone you cared about?”
“He didn’t die, the stubborn ole mule. But he held me to the promise anyway. Weren’t fair.”
“Wasn’t fair.”
“Do you know you keep repeatin’ everything I say?” she asked. Then she leaned forward, dropping her hand on his knee. The contact was innocent, yet made warmth explode upward from there, flooding his whole body with awareness of her touch.
“If you got a problem or somethin’, you know, with your talkin’, that’s okay. I’ve known people who repeated everything twice. ’Course, they was old…or, like my aunt Millie, they’d got kicked in the head by a mule or somethin’.” Then she frowned in concentration. “No, come to think of it, Aunt Millie always repeats herself, on account of her havin’ so many kids in her family nobody’d ever listen to her.” Then she smiled. “I remember now. The time she got kicked in the head, she just started talkin’ in Latin. Took her fallin’ off the porch a few weeks later to get her speakin’ natural again.”
Amused by her story—and the way she told it—he could only grin at her. “You mean someone you know really began to speak a foreign language after a head injury?”
“Heck, pig latin ain’t foreign t’anybody,” she said with a snicker. “Every five year old knows it.”
Pig latin. He sucked his lips into his mouth to prevent a laugh, liking her down-home humor more and more. “I’m sorry I’ve been repeating your words. I was automatically trying to correct your grammar.”
“You a teacher or somethin’?”
He nodded.
“For real? I figured you was one’a them TV folks.”
“I teach anthropology and sociology at Georgetown University in Washington .”
She snorted. “Sociology?”
He nodded.
“Jiminy crickets, they got college classes for everything these days, don’t they? As if a body needs to learn how to be sociable. Down in Sheets Creek, bein’ sociable’s about second nature, since neighbors gotta rely on each other most times.”
“Sheets Creek?” he asked, more interested in where she was from than in explaining the much more boring details of his job.
“Tennessee. It’s a teeny town, twenty miles from the nearest grocery store. There’s a little shop inside the gas station for emergencies, but you can’t never be sure if you’re buyin’ somethin’ that’s fresh or that’s been settin’ there for five years. So you gotta be sociable with your neighbors, because, if’n you run outta flour or sugar you sure don’t wanna have to make a twenty mile trek right in the middle of baking day.”
“I see. Do you like living there?”
She shrugged, glancing away, not meeting his eye directly for the first time since they’d sat down. “I s’pose. I get to travel a lot, so it’s not like I ain’t never seen the rest of the world.”
“Not like I’ve never seen the rest of the world.”
“You travel a lot, too?” Groaning, she shot him a glare. “Stop doin’ that teacher stuff