by Maggie Wells
“Hey, now—” Holding the heavy china platter heaped with steaming slices of succulent beef, Ben tried to step into the fray. But he was no match for a Masters with a full head of steam. They ran over him from all directions.
“He never should have been out there. Jeffrey hated the lake house,” Carolee fretted.
Marlee ignored him, choosing instead to gape at her mother. Her eyes widened at what she considered to be a fairly large exaggeration, but she couldn’t be bothered with setting her mother straight. Not when she had her father to deal with.
Skipping right over Ben’s pleading expression, she leaned into her anger as she spoke to her father. “And he was my brother. Now that we have all our roles assigned, I’d remind you Jeff never wanted to run the business. You bullied him into coming home.”
“Bullied,” Henry said, tossing his napkin onto the table with a harsh laugh. “I didn’t bully either of you. I simply refused to foot the bill for you not doing your duty to the family.” He fixed her with a cold stare. “You and your brother. All you talked about was escaping this town and shirking your responsibilities. You think I was clueless?” His voice shook as it rose in volume. “You don’t want anything to do with the company your great-great-grandfather started, but you damn sure don’t mind spending the money it makes.”
“I had a job lined up, but you shot it down,” she reminded him in a harsh whisper.
“A job with a man who—” Henry stopped abruptly, his gaze flying to the opposite end of the table and locking on his wife. “A job with a man who was only speaking to you because your name is Masters.”
Awkward silence roared through the room.
Marlee dropped her gaze to her half-filled plate. They hadn’t even loaded their plates with roast beef yet and supper was a complete wash. She took two deep breaths and tamped down the urge to howl at the injustice of it all. Everything. Jeff’s death. Clint’s too. The job in Atlanta she’d thought she wanted. The texts. The jovial jackass seated beside her. The man across the table. How would Ben have fit into the life she’d abandoned in Atlanta? After witnessing the Masters family in their full glory, would he even want anything to do with her?
Beside her plate, her muted phone buzzed once to indicate a new message had arrived. Marlee stiffened. Everyone who might text her was seated at this table. Including Will Thomason. Instinctively, she glanced at the man beside her, but he was carefully selecting a roll from the bread basket. Squirming in her seat, she ignored the tingle of fear that trickled down her spine and steeled her resolve to get to the bottom of his involvement in the land transaction. She’d deal with the texts later.
Wetting her parched lips, she looked up and found Ben staring straight at her, his dark eyes watchful. “Ben?”
“Yes, Marlee?” His gaze didn’t waver from hers despite her mother’s sniffling and her father’s grumbles of displeasure.
“May I have the roast beef, please?”
Still holding her gaze, he offered the platter to her. She took it in both hands then placed it on the table between herself and Will Thomason. Gesturing for their guest to help himself first, she watched as he speared a slice, then served herself and her mother. The potatoes finished making the rounds as well.
Proving her patience and, yes, stubbornness were indeed equal to her father’s, she waited until Will had cut off a bite of roast and popped it into his mouth before starting her interrogation. “As president of the Sawtooth Lake Sportsmen’s Club, what do you think about losing nearly half your membership in the last year?”
* * *
BEN WOULD BE lying if he said he didn’t enjoy watching Will Thomason sputter and spin his wheels throughout Marlee’s killer line of questioning. She pressed him about how he’d met each of the members, how he’d come to step into the position of president after her brother’s death, what all the job entailed. She carried the whole interrogation out while her mother sat sniffling on one end of the table and her father repeatedly tried to intercede from the other. Through it all, Marlee remained utterly unflappable, her performance even more breathtaking than the woman herself.
Sure, some of her angles of attack were a bit awkward and some of her phrasing too close-ended, but he didn’t interrupt or try to correct her course. He’d had years of training on how to get the most out of a suspect. She might be newly admitted to the bar, but she cross-examined the squirming man with aplomb. She had the right instincts. The rest would come with time and experience.
Carolee Masters drained her wineglass early in the meal, but no one leaped to fill it for her. By the time Marlee picked up her phone and rose to start clearing plates, Ben almost felt sorry for the poor woman. When Mrs. Masters started to rise too, he set his napkin aside and waved her back into her chair. “No, ma’am. Let me help.”
Henry and Will stayed seated, their stunned expressions confirming his suspicion they’d never made such an offer in their lives. Feeling fairly smug for a man carrying a stack of delicate china through the swinging door leading to a surprisingly modern chef’s kitchen, he placed the plates he’d collected on the counter next to Marlee’s.
“You were magnificent in there,” he said quietly.
“I didn’t get anything out of him,” she said with a huff of disappointment.
“I think you did,” he argued.
She lifted her eyes to meet his. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I think we can agree Will Thomason is ambitious and opportunistic.” He lifted his chin. “Check your message.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, then beamed the smile to unlock the phone.
No one believes you were with Sheriff Kinsella. You must be paying the man to cover for you.
“Crap,” he whispered as Marlee seemed to deflate.
“I could have sworn those texts came from Will. There’s something about the way he talks to me.” She gave a shudder. “But there’s no way he could have unless he schedules them to come at different times. How could he know what I was doing ahead of time, though?”
He had no answer for her. Placing one hand on her shoulder, he rubbed gently as they both read the message again. “Whoever it is, their spelling and punctuation have improved,” she said with a forced laugh that fell flat.
He was about to tell her not to fake it with him when something about her observation struck a chord. “Wait. Go back through the others.”
Marlee did as he asked, scrolling back to the message she’d received right after she’d returned to town. By the time they got to the last few, one thing became glaringly obvious. This was one case where punctuation counted.
Ben read the message over her shoulder, then pulled out his own phone. He turned away as the call connected. “Mike? I want you to call Judge Warner and ask for a warrant for all electronic devices belonging to Bo or Kayla Abernathy. Then call up to Albany and tell them we need a tech guy down here ASAP.”
“Kayla Abernathy?” Marlee asked when he ended the call. “Why?”
“Jealousy?” He shrugged. “She’d have access to his phone or computer or whatever he was using. Only a handful of people know you gave a statement about us being together last night.”
Their gazes locked. “I guess.”
“He was trying to talk to you. She was trying to scare you away.”
“It almost worked.”
“God, I hope not.” He sighed, then ran a hand over her hair. “We can talk about this later, but for now, we’d better get back.” He cast about the kitchen. “You said something about dessert?”
Nodding, she headed for the oven, snagging a dish towel from the counter along the way. “Grab the ice cream from the freezer.”
Ben did his best to keep his gaze aboveboard when she bent, protecting her hands with the towel so she could extract a covered dish from the rack. She set it on the stovetop, then tossed the towel over her shoulder. “Ta-da! Peach cobbler.”
“Peach cobbler and a beautiful woman,” he said as he pulled a container of ice cream from the freezer. “Proof there is still good in the world.”
Chapter Fifteen
The moment they were settled in his car, Marlee turned to him. “Tell me about your parents.”
The request startled him. Ben wrapped his hands around the steering wheel and drew in a deep breath, then let it go in a steady stream.
“Come on. You’ve witnessed mine in all their glory,” she cajoled.
He plugged the key into the ignition and cranked the engine, giving it some gas so it roared to life. “Let’s take a drive,” he said gruffly.
If he was going to tell her a story about a man falling for a girl so far out of his reach that it had ruined him, he sure as hell wasn’t going to do it while parked in front of the family mansion.
Without giving it much thought, he wheeled the car around and headed for the highway. “My dad played basketball,” he said, beginning at what he considered the man’s downfall. “Mostly neighborhood stuff, youth groups, wherever he could.” He drummed his fingers on the wheel. “I’m told he was good. So good people from the private high schools came scouting around, looking to recruit some raw talent to add to their rosters.”
He didn’t bother glancing over at her as he headed down the road that would take them out of the town she would essentially run one day. “My grandmother was ecstatic. All she wanted was for her son to get a good education and get out of the neighborhood. Peachtree Academy was supposed to be the answer to her prayers.”
When he fell silent for a moment, she pushed. “What happened?”
“He fell for the Homecoming Queen,” he answered without missing a beat. “I guess she was the queen of everything. Blond, blue-eyed, the girl who had everything.” He chanced a sidelong look at her. “No telling what she saw in him, exactly. Maybe she thought dating a guy from the ’hood was exotic or something. Probably nothing more than teenage rebellion.” He shook his head in disgust. “In the end, she got pregnant and her parents kicked her out.”
“Whoa.” Instinctively, he let off the gas, but another peek at Marlee told him she wasn’t commenting on his driving. “She must have been so scared.”
Both annoyed and touched by her compassion for the mother he barely knew, he let the truck coast as they approached the lake road. “Keep going or turn off?”
If Marlee thought the question had two meanings, she didn’t let on. She simply gestured to the narrow lane and said, “Go on.”
They bumped along the lake road for a minute before Marlee said, “Tell me.”
He shrugged. “There isn’t a lot more to tell. They moved in with my grandmother. If my mother was scared of anything, it was the neighborhood. It was a fairly hopeless place. Lots of drugs. More than our fair share of thugs to go with them.” The truck downshifted to a crawl as he revealed the rest of the story. “Three weeks after I was born, my mother took off. She hadn’t lost touch with her old friends. One of them picked her up and drove her back to her parents’ house, where I can only assume there was a joyful, mixed baby–free reunion.”
“And your dad? He didn’t try to go after her?”
He gave a bitter laugh. “My dad. He was still a true believer in those days, I guess. He thought her parents had taken her, so he hitched a ride up to Buckhead and tried to bust her out.”
He heard Marlee’s sharp intake of breath and let the pause stretch for a moment. “What happened to him?”
“He served ten years for criminal trespass, felony damage to property, kidnapping a person over fourteen years of age,” he reported flatly.
“You’re kidding me.”
He quelled her outrage with a hard look. “Do you think I’m kidding?”
“No, you’re not,” she said in a horrified whisper.
He could feel her searching look but refused to glance at her. He couldn’t let her see the shame and degradation he felt on behalf of his grandmother, a steady, God-fearing woman who’d never done anything to deserve the hardships life piled on her.
“What happened to your parents?”
He shrugged then, out of habit more than necessity, and flipped the signal on to indicate the turn into the drive. “My mother went off to college at Auburn. She couldn’t stay anywhere local because everyone knew,” he said dryly. “She ended up marrying a guy from Mobile.”
“And you have never heard from her?”
“I tried to contact her when I was seventeen. I’d signed up for the marines and wanted her to see I wasn’t some loser. Wanted to tell her I was going to serve my country and she should be proud of the mutt she’d abandoned.”
“Ben—”
Rather than listen to her give him the pep talk he’d needed then but didn’t need anymore, he pressed on with his story. “My dad fell in with a gang while he was inside, continued with them when he got out. My grandmother refused to take the money he made dealing, so we pretty much had nothing. She passed away right after I finished boot camp. Breast cancer.”
“What happened to your dad?”
“Oh, he was already dead. Got popped when a drop went south on him. I was a sophomore in high school. The guys he ran with tried to recruit me. Said taking care of Big Benji’s family was the least they could do, but my grandmother wouldn’t let them come anywhere near me.”
“Big Benji,” she repeated. “You were named for him.”
He nodded. “The last in a long line of losers.” He coasted on the approach to the house, the tires crunching on loose gravel as they rolled to a stop. “I’m not even sure why I drove us out here.”
Marlee stared bleakly at the house where her brother had died. “Because you were telling me about the mess you lived through, and this is where my mess started.” She gestured to the house, her voice quiet and reflective. “This was where Jeff and I cooked up the plan for me to go to law school. He was going to play the game until he took full control of the company, then sell out.” She bit her lower lip and let it go when she exhaled. “He didn’t want to be like Daddy, and he wasn’t.” When she looked over at him, her eyes gleamed with unshed tears. “I am.”
“Why do you say so?”
She motioned to the house, then to the woods around them. “I can’t let it go. Any of it. Jeff’s death, this land, the business. I haven’t figured out how I’m going to handle it, but I can tell you I won’t be selling out. I don’t want to live here in Pine Bluff and be the queen of all things Masters, but I won’t—I can’t—let anyone else do it.”
Ben tightened his grip on the steering wheel until his knuckles shone pale against his skin. “I can’t let this go any further between us. I won’t go down the same path as my father.”
“You’re afraid getting involved with me will turn you into a gangbanger who deals drugs?”
“I refuse to be a cliché. Nothing good can come out of a guy like me reaching for a woman like you.”
“That’s the second time you’ve tried to pigeonhole me,” she said, her voice soft and dangerous. “What have I shown you to make you think I think I’m better than you?”
He shook his head, at a complete loss but unable to let go of his convictions too easily. What if he was only seeing what he wanted to see in her? What if she was only putting on a show? Or worse, what if he gave her everything he had and she decided he wasn’t what she wanted? After all, his mother had chosen his father once upon a time, but it didn’t take long for her to change her mind.
“Forget my looks or whatever,” she implored. “Forget who my father is, and pretend my last name is Smith. Would you want to be with me?”
He laughed, but this time there was nothing harsh about it. He laughed because the notion of imagining her in any other way was absurd. She was who she was because she was Marlee Masters of Masters County, Georgia. Her blonde beauty queen looks drew a man in, but she was so much
more than an attractive package. Marlee was smart, funny, friendly and, yes, a bit daring. Even then, mere adjectives failed to capture the essence of her. Because above all else, Marlee was genuine. A real person with foibles and fancies but also with feelings. Deep feelings she didn’t show to just anyone. But for some reason, she showed them to him, and he’d be damned if he could figure out why.
“It’s not a matter of wanting, Marlee,” he said at last. “I want to be with you. Any man with half a brain would, and I have a whole brain. But I can’t help but wonder why you keep hanging around me. You can have your pick of men. Why me? What do you want from me?”
For a moment, she looked ready to toss out one of her flippant retorts, but she didn’t. Instead, she pressed her lips tight and swallowed hard, then made such intense eye contact with him he felt the urge to draw back.
“Why you?”
Arrested by her, he could only nod in response.
“I could give you a handful of reasons, but to even the playing field, I will skip your looks, the sexy uniform and all other superficial stuff.” She stared deep into his eyes, needing to be sure her point hit home. “But don’t for one minute think all those things don’t work in your favor as well, because they do.”
“Noted.”
“My father may be a pain in the behind in a lot of ways, Ben, but there’s one thing he is and has always been. A man of integrity. As such, he looks for the same in others. He sees what I see in you. A stand-up guy. Someone who will do anything to do the right thing.”
“You don’t know me.”
“Maybe I don’t know everything about you, but I think we understand one another. I feel...comfortable with you.”
He gave a husky laugh. “The ringing endorsement every guy hopes for.”
She could only answer that with a wan smile. “I know, but maybe you’ll believe me when I tell you it’s a better compliment than it sounds?”
“I believe you.”
Her smile widened. “And that, right there. You have a sort of...self-assurance that’s compelling.”