“I’ll tell you, but you have to tell me a secret about yourself.”
“I don’t have any secrets,” she said, glaring at him, reminded of his refusal to tell her where he’d gone.
“Oh, yes, you do. Who put the snakes in my lunch pail and the grasshoppers in my pencil box?”
She blinked a couple of times. “I’m not sure, but I think it might have been the same person who put the taffy in your shoes, who sewed the sleeves of your jacket closed, who put hot peppers in your sandwiches, who—.”
“At my mother’s garden party!” he said. “I sat there and ate those sandwiches and thought everyone else’s were hot, too, and that I was just a coward because they were about to kill me. How did you manage it?”
“I paid Jimmy Summers a penny to release his muddy dog when I dropped my spoon. The dog ran into the garden, and you, always the rescuer, ran to get rid of the dog. Everybody watched you, so I had plenty of time to doctor the sandwiches on your plate. I thought I’d burst to keep from laughing. You sat there sweating, but you ate every bite.”
He loomed over her, shaking his head. “And the dried cow pie in my favorite fishing hat?”
She nodded.
“And the pictures of Miss Ellison on my slate?”
She nodded.
“Did anyone besides me ever catch you?”
“Your father did once. Houston said you were going fishing, so I sneaked over to your house, dumped out the worms you’d just dug and put a garter snake in the can. Unfortunately, your father caught me.”
“I would imagine he had a few words to say. He hated any pranks of Nina’s.”
“He said that I was never going to be a lady.”
“And he was right,” Lee said solemnly, beginning to rub about on her. “You aren’t a lady at all. You’re a flesh and blood woman.” He grinned. “Lots of flesh in all the right places.”
Her eyes widened. “Are you planning to take my virtue, sir? Oh, please, sir, it’s the only thing I have left.”
“You don’t deserve even that for what you’ve done, young lady,” he said, leering, lowering his voice. “You’ve been tried and found guilty, and you are to be punished.”
“Oh?” she said, arching a brow. “Taffy in my shoes?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of your becoming my love slave for the rest of our lives.”
“Isn’t that a little severe for a bit of taffy?”
“It’s for the hot peppers and the—.” His eyes widened. “Did you put the sneezing powder on my crackers? And the soot on my father’s binoculars the day I took them to school?”
She nodded, beginning to feel a little guilty about the sheer volume of pranks she’d played on him.
He was looking at her with some awe. “I knew you did some of them but I’d always thought John Lechner did most of them. You know, I saw him four years ago in New York and I remembered all the things I thought he’d done to me, and I’m afraid I was barely civil to him.”
“You didn’t retaliate?”
“About a hundred times. I spent years with bruises from fights with John.” He grinned. “And to think: he was innocent. As for the ones I knew you did, what could I do? You were six years younger than me and, besides, just thinking of the whipping my father gave me after that one time I did punch you was enough to make me think twice about striking a girl.”
“So now I have to pay for some childhood foolishness,” she said with an exaggerated sigh. “Life is hard.”
“That’s not all that’s hard,” he said with a one-sided smirk.
“It’s a good thing I’m a doctor and impossible to shock.”
“It wasn’t your doctoring that attracted me.”
“Oh? And what did attract you to me?”