Cinderella Next Door
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Nancy Robards Thompson
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HarlequinChapter One
Ginny Sanders stepped back from the easel and surveyed her painting—a riot of roses, hydrangeas and cherry blossoms that she’d gathered from her yard and put into a vase for today’s personal painting challenge.
The plan was to knock out a still life in thirty minutes every day for a year.
Every. Single. Day.
No excuses.
She’d set the goal on January first. Today was April first. That meant after she finished this one, she would have completed ninety-one paintings. A swell of accomplishment bloomed in her chest.
The canvases were small—only six by six—but that was fine. What mattered was that she was showing up at the easel every day.
The painting challenge was part of a bigger plan. On New Year’s Eve, as the old year gave way to the new, Ginny had done some soul-searching and decided she couldn’t ignore the discontent that had been following her around like a rain cloud.
Last year, she felt...stuck. Stuck in her job. Stuck in her mundane life. The realization had hit her with the power of a tsunami. It was a shame to settle for discontent when she was only twenty-seven years old.
After graduating from college, she’d spent three years working to land a teaching job at Rambling Rose High School. She’d volunteered at the school and accepted last-minute calls to substitute-teach while working afternoons and evenings at Kirby’s Perks coffeehouse.
She could’ve left Rambling Rose to teach at another school, but she didn’t want to. This was her hometown.
She knew if she waited long enough, something was bound to open up. And it had. Ginny had eventually gotten the job teaching English after her mother had given up the position, when she and Ginny’s father had accepted a teach-abroad opportunity and had moved to Japan to teach English as a second language.
Yep. Miss Sanders had replaced Mrs. Sanders.
Now, just two years after attaining her position on the Rambling Rose High School faculty, Ginny fought the hollow feeling that this was the best life had to offer.
And it wasn’t enough.
On New Year’s Eve, she’d been hyperaware of this growing discontent. She’d spent a quiet night at home with her brother Jerry, who was her roommate. He’d also been dateless.
The entire night, she couldn’t stop thinking about the elegant Fortune wedding that was unfolding at the Hotel Fortune. While she was at home watching the ball drop on TV, five glamorous couples were tying the knot. She’d never been into fancy affairs or the trappings of wealth, but for some reason, she couldn’t stop thinking about the perfect couples who were starting off their lives together.
It seemed symbolic: new year, new life.
That prompted Ginny to lament her general sense of ennui to Jerry, who had diagnosed her with a classic case of, all work and no play made Ginny a very dull girl. “You need to take stock of your life and figure out what’s missing.”
It had been a good suggestion.
After much self-examination, she’d concluded that she missed painting. She’d painted in high school and into her first semester of college, when she’d quit. Since graduation, she’d pushed painting so far back on her life’s back burner, she’d forgotten how much she loved it.
That’s why she’d created the painting challenge and why she was standing on the front porch behind her easel mixing paint, when Draper Fortune’s white Tesla turned into his driveway next door.
Her heart leaped and hammered, and she tried to make herself as small as possible behind her easel until she heard his front door shut and she could breathe a sigh of relief. In her paint-splattered clothes, with her brown hair knotted haphazardly on top of her head, she wasn’t exactly a picture of loveliness.
She might have had a tiny crush on the guy next door, but the thought of talking to him made her break out in hives.
It hadn’t always been this way. In the beginning, he’d wave if he saw her taking out the trash or picking up the mail or painting on the front porch. The hedge between their houses was so high that they either had to be on their porches or meeting at the street for mail or weekly garbage to see each other. After a few weeks, one glorious day, Draper tried to strike up a conversation. He had been unlocking his front door when he’d paused with his hand on the knob and called over the hedge to her.
“What are you painting?”
He’d caught her so off guard, at first she’d looked around to make sure he was actually speaking to her. Then she’d gotten so tongue-tied, she’d awkwardly merged the words flowers and nothing so that it came out as flowthing.
What are you painting?
Flowthing.
Draper had given her a weird squinty-eyed look, as if he’d misheard. Before she could explain herself or make a joke out of it, Draper’s phone rang. He’d smiled and motioned to his cell, the international signal that he had to take the call, and disappeared inside, leaving her wishing she could fall through the porch’s floorboards.
Flowthing?
How could she have said flowthing?
Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.
He hadn’t attempted conversation since. Imagine that.
Perhaps because, ever since that mortifying day, she’d made a point of being inside when he got home. Instead of painting in the early evening, when the light was beautiful and Draper usually arrived, she’d decided to tackle her day’s painting right after she got home from school, wrapping it up by four o’clock so she didn’t have to face him.
It was a shame because every time she saw him, Ginny could still find something new and beautiful about his face—the light brown hair and hazel eyes, chiseled features, that brooding full bottom lip.
Draper was like a character in one of the classic books she taught in her literature classes. Mr. Darcy? Or Heathcliff?
Yes, Heathcliff!
If only she was more like Catherine Earnshaw. She could be Cathy to Draper’s Heathcliff.
Her heart tripped over itself at the thought.
She loaded her brush again. With Heathcliff still on the brain, she sighed and stepped back to look at her work.
That’s when the purring engine of the Porsche caught Ginny’s attention. She looked up just in time to see the red sports car turning into the driveway next door, parking behind Draper’s Tesla. Draper’s girlfriend du jour, Ines Bartholomew, who happened to be a minor-league celebrity as a field reporter for the television show Entertainment Right Now. Ines slid out, catlike, from behind the wheel, fluffed her long blond hair, smoothed her black pencil skirt and walked in red-soled stilettos to Draper’s front door.
The squeeze of disappointment that pinched Ginny’s heart was fleeting but very real. It was ridiculous because Ines was dating him and Ginny couldn’t even find the words to talk to him.
A few weeks ago, Ginny had noticed the fancy red car turn into Draper’s driveway for the first time. She’d immediately recognized the beautiful woman as Ines Bartholomew. Actually, Ginny’s first thought had been that the woman was a doppelgänger for Ines. Because what were the chances of someone like her being in Rambling Rose, Texas?
The minute the woman had disappeared inside Draper’s house, Ginny had gone inside her own home and googled “Ines Bartholomew.”
A celebrity gossip site confirmed the pair had been spotted canoodling at a charity function. It made sense. Ines was what Ginny had imagined the prototypical Draper Fortune woman would be like—movie star gorgeous, wealthy, a former Miss Texas and fourth runner-up in Miss USA.
After the initial sighting, Ginny had spied Ines’s Porsche in Draper’s driveway on several occasions. The car would be there when Ginny went to bed—yes, she’d checked—but it was always gone the next morning when Ginny left the house at 0 dark thirty to get her latte at Kirby’s Perks before work.
This afternoon, Ginny’s gaze went rogue and shot to Draper’s porch just in time to see him open the door and Ines lay a big kiss on him. For a few stolen seconds, Ginny gaped at them, riveted by the sensual scene. What was it was like to be the woman who had captured Draper Fortune’s heart?
The kiss gave way to an embrace. Now she had an unobstructed view of Draper’s handsome face—his eyes were closed, but she knew they were an intriguing shade of hazel that made her want to pick out the various colors that made up the whole... She’d noticed his eyes the first time he’d said hello at the mailboxes.
But the memory of how she’d tripped over her words the day he’d tried to talk to her preempted the daydream.
She was cringing to herself when she realized Draper had opened those hazel eyes and was watching her. Still in Ines’s arms, he raised his right hand in greeting.
White-hot pinpricks of mortification needled Ginny’s body. She felt her face flame, and she was sure it was the same shade as the crimson paint on her palette.
Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.
Not again.
She ducked behind her easel, hoping he’d think she’d been staring off into the middle distance and hadn’t even noticed him.
A moment later, she heard the door shut.
She plunked her brushes into the mason jar filled with water and began capping her paint tubes, then tossed them into the small basket she used to transport them.
Every single time she let her guard down around Draper Fortune, she managed to make a fool out of herself.
He and his perfect girlfriend weren’t even supposed to be here right now. They never arrived this early.
This is my time.
Rather than stamping her foot, she let out a quiet growl on a long, slow breath.
By the time she held the final tube of paint in her hand, her embarrassment had dulled into a muddy wash of guilt because she was using Draper and Ines as an excuse to break her promise to herself.
She hadn’t finished today’s painting.
Should she take her easel inside and try to salvage what was left of today’s session?
She glanced down at the speckled floorboards, where the occasional errant blob of paint had landed. The porch floor could be sanded and repainted. Inside, the hardwood floors of her parents’ house wouldn’t be so easily fixed, which was one of the reasons she’d chosen to paint outside in the first place. It freed her from worrying about the inevitable mess that was part of the process.
Nope. Moving inside was not an option.
If she stopped before she finished this painting, she wouldn’t achieve her goal for the year.
If she quit, it wouldn’t be Draper’s fault. It was her choice to fail at only a quarter of the way into the challenge.
What was that Eleanor Roosevelt quote about no one having the power to make you feel like an idiot...only you could do that to yourself? Or something to that tune.
She tapped her paint-smeared fingernail on the tube of cadmium yellow that she was holding in her hand, eyeing her phone, which was turned facedown on the small table.
She stared at it for a moment, as if she could will the timer to go off. When nothing happened, she sighed and picked it up.
The screen showed fourteen minutes and three seconds left on the clock.
Ginny exhaled again as she looked at her sad little painting, which amounted to nothing more than a few random strokes that hardly resembled the flowers she’d intended to paint. With the distraction of Draper and Ines pulling her out of her zone, she’d barely started.
When she was in the zone—and not distracted by the handsome guy next door and his perfect girlfriend—the time flew by. But today felt like New Year’s Day, the first day of her project, all over again—the looming presence of the timer, the pressure to accomplish something, the way every little thing distracted her.
“Come on,” she murmured. “You’re better than that. And you’re halfway through the painting.” Well, according to the timer, she should be—if she hadn’t been distracted by the couple next door having a life.
But really, now that Ines was here and they were inside together, the chances of them coming out again in the next—she glanced at the timer—thirteen minutes and twenty-eight seconds was slim.
Judging by that kiss, they were probably pretty busy.
“And that is none of my business.”
She blinked away the thought and reset the timer for a full thirty minutes, picked up her brush and focused on the beautiful arrangement perched on the wide porch railing.
She managed to lose herself for a good twenty minutes. She knew that because when Draper’s front door opened—again—her gaze darted to the timer on her phone, which she’d left faceup.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “I give up.”
She was tempted to throw her brush across the front porch when Ines’s angry voice, punctuated by a slamming door, had Ginny glancing across the hedge again.
Teetering on her stilettos, Ines gripped the handrail as she made her way down the porch steps. She looked like an angry fawn—all unsteady long legs and murderous expression. Ginny held her breath, hoping the woman didn’t take a spill.
Draper opened the door and stepped onto the porch, and Ines unleashed a string of insults so unsavory that Ginny ducked behind her easel.
What fight through yonder hedgerow breaks?
Ines seemed to be the one doing all the fighting, and the words coming out of her mouth would make a biker blush.
Draper stood on the porch clutching a gold package with a red ribbon.
“Ines, wait,” he said. “I don’t understand.”
She turned to face him. “Really, Draper? Is a box of candy the best you can do? After a month together, that’s all I get? Come on, it’s my birthday.”
Uh-oh. Someone was in trouble.
But the way she was acting, you would’ve thought he had forgotten her birthday. Clearly, the chocolate was expensive. Maybe a little impersonal, but it seemed like a nice gift.
“I’m sorry you’re disappointed,” Draper said. “What exactly did you expect?”
Ines threw her arms in the air. “Do you really need me to spell it out for you? If you don’t know, then obviously I’m wasting my time.”
Wait, were they breaking up?
Ginny knew it was wrong to eavesdrop. She should go inside and give them some privacy, especially after the earlier incident, when Draper caught her staring. But now that Ines wasn’t screaming, Ginny was afraid if she moved from behind her easel, she might give herself away. So she stayed, trying to make herself as inconspicuous as possible.
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Draper said. “Will you at least take the chocolate? And let me go back inside and get the cookies that Belle baked for you.”
“Don’t bother.” Ines spit the words like they were rotten. “In fact, you know what you can do with your box of chocolates, Forrest Gump?”
She stomped back up the porch stairs, snatched the candy from Draper’s hands, turned and made her way down again, disappearing out of Ginny’s view.
For a moment, Ginny wondered if, despite Ines’s protests, she was going to take the chocolate with her and rage eat the entire thing, but suddenly the gold box flew over the hedge into Ginny’s yard, landing in the grass with a soft thud.
The red ribbon appeared to have held the package together, because after it landed, it sat on the grass intact like a golden duck.
Was this an April Fools’ joke? It was April first, after all.
The purr of the Porsche’s engine and the screech of tires as the red sports car disappeared down the street confirmed that this was no joke. Ginny’s gaze moved from the candy to Draper’s porch, but he wasn’t there.
Poor guy.
She stood there contemplating what to do about the candy. She couldn’t just leave it in the yard for racoons to devour later. Or, worse yet, to be eaten by a sweet dog, like Otis, who belonged to the Billings family two houses down.
Ginny wiped her hands on a rag and walked down to the yard to retrieve the gold box.
She’d just picked it up when Draper appeared on the sidewalk in front of her house.
“Oh!” she gasped.
