Page 19 of Just What She Needed

Rhys lowered the bottle and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. "Prue or Paige?"

"I've reached the second season of the Paige years," she replied with a laugh. "I'd never have taken you for a Charmed fan."

"When you spend as much time as I do in hotel rooms, you end up watching a lot of television re-runs at odd hours. And Charmed is far more entertaining than a lot of things I've seen." He ran the ends of the towel over his face again. "You watch it while you work out?"

"Yeah. I turn it on and get on the elliptical, and it makes the time go by faster. One episode and I've gotten in forty to forty-five minutes of a workout. And whenever the show transitions where a commercial break should be, I increase the incline or the resistance on the machine."

"What a brilliant idea," he said. "I'll have to remember that. But much as I'd like to spend time with you and the Halliwell sisters, I've got to hit the shower. I'm flying up to Chicago this afternoon to take Dax shopping for a new car. Some idiot hit his while it was in a parking lot and mangled the damn thing."

She beat back a wave of disappointment that she wouldn't be running into him while he was gone and held up the DVD once more. "We'll just get witchy when you get back then. Enjoy your shower."

His pupils seemed to dilate as he looked at her, and Rhett's breath caught in her throat.

"Get witchy, huh?" he asked softly. "I'll look forward to that. Later, Rhett."

9

I may not believe in myself, but I believe in what I'm doing.—Jimmy Page

As Rhett prepared to turn the car into the driveway, her hand rose to press the remote that would raise the garage door. Only there wasn't a remote, and an embarrassed little laugh escaped her as her fingers encountered nothing but the soft gray felt-like material on the visor. Even though she hadn't been to the house in Claiborne in two months, her eighteen-year habit of reaching for the remote was still there.

The garage door opener and all the house keys were turned over to Les Joslin when she hired him to sell the house, and this afternoon he would hand them over to the new owners after the papers were signed. If he'd been surprised when Rhett showed up at his office two hours early, he didn't let on. In fact, he acted as if her request for a key so she could see the house one last time was something every homeowner did. Maybe it was. Maybe she wasn't being a sentimental fool now that the time had come to relinquish her claim to the house.

She parked in the driveway and cast a critical eye across the front of the place she called home for so long. Someone had shaped the boxwood that grew in an orderly row under the windows, and she frowned at the squared-off look of them. Perhaps that was the way they were supposed to look, but she always preferred them to be a bit rounded on top, more informal. Another small laugh, this one rueful, shook her shoulders. It wasn't her house anymore, not really, nor was it her boxwood. So why should she care what it looked like?

Well, time to get it over with. She turned off the car, slipped the keys into her purse, and stepped out into the baking heat of a Texas summer afternoon. Sweat sprang up immediately along her hairline, and she waved her hand in an ineffectual gesture to cool her face.

"'S'cuse me. Can I help you?"

At the sound of the voice, she turned toward the neat white picket fence that separated the front yard from that of the house next door. Sam Harris squinted at her with distrust from under the bill of his Rangers baseball cap, his hands still clutching the handles of the wheelbarrow filled with red pine mulch.

"Hey, Sam," Rhett called out. "It's just me."

"Rhett." His seamed face broke into a pleased smile, and he lowered the wheelbarrow. "Didn't rec'anize the car." He stripped off his yellow leather work gloves as he hurried—well, as much as Sam could hurry, anyway—to the end of the fence. Rhett met him near the street where the white pickets stopped and grasped his thin old hands in hers.

"It's good to see you, Sam." She gave his gnarled fingers a careful squeeze. "I just came back to say goodbye to the house."

"Yeah, I seen that real estate feller puttin' that SOLD sticker on the sign a couple of weeks back. Guess y'all are really gone, then."

"'Fraid so. But, hey! My realtor said the new owners are a really nice young couple. The husband's just out of the Air Force after eight years, and the wife's a kindergarten teacher. Oh, and they have a four-year-old daughter."

Sam's eyes lit up, and Rhett smiled, remembering how he and his late wife always doted on Lilith.

"You don't say. It'll be good to have another youngster in the house. I may not be able to bake cookies like Nelda did for little Lil, but I can sure lay in a supply of lollipops."

"I'll bet that little girl will love it." Rhett slipped an arm around the old man's shoulders and gave him a quick hug. "Sam, I've got to get a move on. I'm supposed to be back at the real estate office pretty quick, so if I'm going to go through the house one more time I'd better get after it."

"All right, then." Sam returned her hug. "You take care, Rhett."

"You, too."

As Sam headed back to his wheelbarrow, Rhett hurried up the driveway, eager to get out of the heat. The humidity was so thick it was like trying to breathe through a hot wet bath towel slung across her face. She stepped onto the small covered front porch and dug the key Les gave her from the front pocket of her white linen slacks. It felt odd to be entering the house through the front door. When she lived there, she always used the door off the kitchen that gave on the garage.

The odd feeling escalated as she stepped inside. Goosebumps rose on her bare arms, and she couldn't attribute all of it to the air-conditioning. The once familiar living room was now a foreign landscape with its gleaming hardwood floors and freshly painted walls. It seemed large and bright and airy without the worn, stained carpet and the collection of tired furniture that occupied the space for so long. Her footsteps echoed back at her as she walked toward the hall, and she had to resist the urge to tiptoe, as if she was intruding on a place of worship.

The bedrooms and baths were just as alien as the living room, and after a quick glance into each of them she moved on. When she entered the kitchen she came to a dead halt, disoriented. Every surface of the room was changed, and the sight of this new and modern room just cemented the feeling she had since she opened the front door. This was no longer her house, and she wondered why she thought it so important to see it one more time. There was nothing left to indicate the Davis family ever lived there. Even the balky sliding glass doors that led to the back yard were gone, replaced by French doors that broke the sunlight shining through them into orderly squares that glowed on the new tile floor.

Rhett stepped over to them and looked out at the eight-foot-high wooden privacy fence that had gone silver-gray with age. That, at least, hadn't changed, and a wistful smile drew up one corner of her mouth as she remembered how Todd had taken a whole week off work to put up that fence.