The Hometown Hero Returns. Julianna Morris
when it came to Nicki. Why had she decided to live in Divine? With her brains she could have done anything, gone anywhere. Yet she’d chosen to come back, and talked about the town as her home. He couldn’t see why anyone would live here if they had a chance to get out.
“You must have family here in Divine, right?” he asked abruptly, again breaking his cardinal rule of noninterference.
“No.” She blinked. “My mom died right after I was born, and my father passed away when I was a junior in college. He did have a sister—in Texas, I think—but they’d lost contact. I’m not sure if I have anyone else—Dad wouldn’t talk about family.”
“I didn’t know about your father. I’m sorry.”
Nicki looked pensive, then sighed. “We weren’t close.”
For some reason Luke wanted to know more, to hear why Nicki and her father hadn’t been close and why he hadn’t talked about family. But it wasn’t his concern, any more than anything else was about Nicki.
“I’ll go get a load,” he murmured.
Luke went up the steps to the attic, memories crowding in on him. Once his grandparents’ attic had been a place of vast adventure where he and Sherrie and their cousins played to their hearts’ content. The floor had been clear and open then, and his grandmother would bring up lemonade and apple cake to slow them down when things got too rowdy. Grams’s apple cake had been delicious, always winning awards at the county fair until she stopped entering the competition, citing her eight grand-prize ribbons as an embarrassment of riches.
A nostalgic smile curved Luke’s mouth before he shook his head. Times changed, he reminded himself. Grams was gone and he wasn’t eight and content with imaginary adventures any longer. Yet it was nice to be reminded of happier days in Divine. Usually, his memories lingered on that disastrous last year of high school.
“Do you need some help?” Nicki asked. She had followed and was cautiously peering around the door frame.
“Don’t tell me, you thought you saw a mouse up here,” Luke guessed dryly. He’d never met a woman who wasn’t scared of mice. Even his sister hated rodents, which was a problem when someone brought one to her as a veterinary patient.
Nicki shrugged. “I’ve seen several, actually. You need to set some traps to get rid of the old ones, then get a cat to scare any new ones away. I don’t have anything against mice, I even think they’re cute, but they’re dirty houseguests and destroy paper and fabric.”
“Cute?”
“Sure. With their big ears and bright eyes, field mice look like they walked right off a greeting card.”
Luke grunted in disbelief and shifted a large basket to one side. Predictably, three mice went scurrying, two of them in Nicki’s direction. Despite her claims of being unafraid, he expected her to scream. Yet, while a screech came from one of the mice, she watched them run across her feet without a peep.
“Definitely a cat,” she announced. “Da Vinci would have a ball up here. He loves to hunt.”
“Stands to reason you’d name your cat after Leonardo da Vinci,” Luke grumbled, though he secretly wanted to laugh. Two mice had just done aerobics over her sneakers and she hadn’t blinked an eye. Some men wouldn’t have taken it so calmly, but she was obviously made of sterner stuff.
“It fit. Da Vinci is curious about everything, and so was his namesake.”
“All cats are curious. It’s one of their defining characteristics.”
Nicki looked surprised. “I didn’t know you liked cats.”
“They’re all right. It isn’t like I have one or anything.”
She shook her head at his hasty denial of a feline soft spot and reached for a painting. Picking it up, she looked carefully at the front, back and sides, then selected another, checking it just as carefully. “What room do you want me to use?” she asked.
“Second floor, second door to the left. It’s Grams’s old sewing room, so there’s a big table you can work at.”
She nodded and walked back down the stairs, holding the paintings as if they were made of gold. Which, Luke supposed, they might as well be if they were anything like the one of his great-grandmother. Surely that was a fluke, though—an old family portrait, by an artist who was unimportant at the time it was painted.
Because Nicki had been so careful, Luke also checked the paintings he carried, even though he didn’t know what he was looking for. He brushed away a few spiders and their webs, but they weren’t doing any harm as far as he could tell.
“Do you need anything else?” he asked after they’d carried down several armloads and crowded one side of the room with paintings. He recognized some from when they’d hung in the house; others were unfamiliar.
“No, I’m fine.” She opened her briefcase and removed notebooks and a magnifying glass. “Don’t let me keep you.”
Luke scowled. Once again he was being dismissed. He tried to remind himself that Nicki was a college professor accustomed to dealing with students. Only he wasn’t a student; this was his grandfather’s house, and he still wanted to learn more about her.
Nicki seemed to have a curiously appealing inner peace. But it wasn’t just that. She was different from the women he knew. She didn’t hide her feelings beneath a sophisticated veneer, and seemed willing to do her part.
“How long were you in Europe on your study trips?” he asked, turning a chair backward and straddling it.
She cast him a startled glance. “I thought you had work to do.”
Luke lifted his shoulders, a wry smile quirking his mouth. He did have work to do. A mountain of work. There were contracts to review and sign, proposals to study, negotiations pending, calls to make, endless e-mails and a flood of other paperwork to review. A lot of money was riding on his taking care of business, yet at the moment he’d rather talk to Nicki. The feeling reminded him that she was a distraction that might prove problematic.
“I…um, decided to knock off for a while,” he said. “So, how long?”
“Three months the first time, six on the second trip. I also did an intensive course of study at the Sorbonne for several months.”
Though he expected her to run off at the mouth like always, she instead bent over a small painting and began examining it as if her life depended on the results. His jaw tightened. “What did you enjoy seeing the most?”
She slapped a notebook on the table and glared. “Why are you still here? Don’t you want me to get the inventory done quickly? I’m sure I’m the last woman you want hanging around—you always preferred women with bra sizes bigger than their IQ.”
“Look, if it’ll help if I…well…apologize for the way I acted when we were kids, I will,” Luke said in the least apologetic tone he’d ever used. He counted to ten and tried again. “I was a jerk. Okay? You have every right to hate me.”
“It has nothing to do with when we were kids. That is, you obviously haven’t changed—you practically have ex-jock tattooed on your forehead.”
It wasn’t hard to guess that “ex-jocks” weren’t Nicki’s favorite kind of men. It ought to have been reassuring, considering the way he hadn’t been able to control his uncomfortable thoughts about her. But after the accident he’d disliked being called a jock. He was about to say so when Nicki stuck out her chin.
“And besides, I don’t hate you,” she added.
“Yeah, right.”
“It’s just that I don’t like you very much,” Nicki admitted, then felt heat rising in her face. “Oh…sorry.” She put her hands over her cheeks and peeked to see how angry Luke might be. To her surprise, he looked pleased.
“That’s