His friends had snickered, and for a moment, Josie looked incredibly hurt, like a puppy who had been kicked. But to her credit, she quickly rearranged her face to a neutral setting and walked away with her chin up, like Beau wasn’t worth her hurt look or another moment of her time.
But his cruel words got the job done. After that, he didn’t have to worry about Josie finding out just how much he liked her because she went out of her way to avoid him at school, home, or anywhere else. In fact, they didn’t exchange more than two words until her stick of a best friend decided to make moves on Mindy.
When Beau had let Mike get him riled up on beer and big talk, he’d told himself that hunting Colin down was a matter of pride.
But as soon as he saw Josie, his body had reacted. It had been all he could do to mask how much he wanted her under the cover of wanting to fight the boy she spent most of her time with outside of school.
And when she’d stepped up to protect Colin from Beau, talking about how much more talented he was, he’d just snapped. Before that, he’d only been planning to scare the junior a bit, but now he wanted to punch the guy’s face in. And it had only pissed him off more when Josie jumped on his back, refusing to let go, so his only choice was to hurt her in order to get him off of her, or agree not to hurt Fairgood.
He’d been furious as he watched them walk away, furious to the point that the plan, which took form in his head, didn’t only seem like a valid way to get around the promise he’d made not to beat up Fairgood, but also the best way to get the revenge he deserved.
Two days after the almost-fight, he went looking for her in the shed, where she’d set up a slab of wood across two piles of extra bricks that she used as a desk. He knew this was where she preferred to study on nights when it wasn’t too hot or cold.
However, when he found her hunched over her little makeshift desk, reading a textbook with an elegant, brass magnifying glass, he almost abandoned his plan. Yeah, she had crossed him and the one thing he’d inherited from his successful father was an in-born refusal to ever let anybody get away with that. But unlike him, Josie didn’t have a bedroom of her own, which must have made it hard to find quiet places to study even in a house as big as theirs.
But then he remembered her calling him talentless in comparison to the guy who’d stolen his girlfriend, and he hardened his heart.
“Well, look what we’ve got here,” he said with false camaraderie.
She squinted up at him like a myopic squirrel then jumped out of her seat, hiding the magnifying glass behind her back. “Beau, what are you doing here?”
“I see you got into my dad’s desk,” he said, nodding toward the magnifying glass. “It’s an antique, you know, passed down in our family for at least three centuries.”
Josie had spunk to spare most days, but he knew Loretta had taught her from her first day at the Prescott home that she was never to touch anything she wasn’t cleaning, much less take it out to the shed for her own personal use.
Just as he expected, she responded to his joking accusation like a Saturday sinner on Sunday morning. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I’m going to put it back as soon as I can. Please don’t tell your daddy. It was the only one I could find in the whole house, and my mama won’t be able to get me new glasses until she gets paid at the end of the month, but I have to do my school work…”
She trailed off when he held out a rectangular-shaped case wrapped in last year’s Christmas paper to her. “What is that?” she asked, squinting harder.
“A gift,” he answered. “Take it.”
She might have felt bad about stealing the magnifying glass, but that didn’t stop her from throwing him a suspicious look.
“Why would you, Beau Prescott, be buying me, Josie Witherspoon, a gift?”
“Because, despite what you think, I’m not the devil, and I want to make amends. Now open it, will you?”
The look on her face said she didn’t quite believe his claim about not being the devil, but she took the present from him anyway. Then she opened the package, with the look of someone expecting a snake to pop out.
However, her suspicion rapidly disappeared when she found the clamshell eyeglass case inside. Someone would think he’d given her a diamond necklace the way her face lit up.
“You got me glasses?” She pulled out the cat-eye glasses and put them on, blinking her large brown eyes behind the thin lenses. “And they’re just right! How did you know my prescription?”
“I went back, got your old glasses up off the ground, and brought them into LensCrafters. They said they could make you a new pair based on the prescription from the old pair. All I had to do was pick out some new frames. Hope you like them, they didn’t have that many cat-eye glasses in the store.”
“I love them!” she said. Then she sheepishly admitted, “The truth is, the only reason I was wearing cat-eyes was because those were my grandma’s old frames from the sixties. You wouldn’t believe how heavy they were. I think they must have made them out of lead or something back then. But these are real light!” She took the glasses off and turned them over in her hands like they were a precious artifact. “Are these featherweight lenses?”
“The lady at LensCrafters said those were the best kind for a prescription as strong as yours.”
She put the glasses back on and smiled at him for the first time in almost a year. “Oh Beau, I don’t even know how to begin to thank you. I mean, you really didn’t have to. Mama and me would’ve managed, but this is just so… I don’t even have words. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
He shrugged. “No big deal. Sorry about stepping on your glasses.”
“Sorry about jumping on your back. I was just trying to—”
“I know what you were trying to do,” he said, finding it hard to keep the bitterness out of his voice, even though that wasn’t part of the plan.
She smoothed her hair, which she wore in long, synthetic braids, behind her ear. “I’m just real surprised, that’s all. I thought you hated me.”
“I don’t hate you.”
She snorted. “Could have fooled me.”
Even though this had all been pre-planned, his heart started beating faster when he insisted, “I don’t hate you. If anything, I like you too much.” He cast his eyes away. “That’s why I’ve been trying to keep my distance from you since you started at Forest Brook.”