At the mention of her daddy, Rachel's head swung around and their eyes clashed momentarily before she turned away again. He worked the edges of his teeth together, then studied the glowing tip of the cigarette while drawing circles with it on the bottom of the ashtray. "You're still scared of him, aren't you, Rachel?" he asked quietly.
Was she? She didn't want to think so, but she couldn't deny how much she hated the thought of all the strife there was bound to be if her father found out about tonight. And there was a facet of her misgivings that Rachel had been afraid to examine too closely up until now, because she didn't want to believe it might be true. But she could hold it inside no longer.
"By marrying me, you'd show them all, wouldn't you, Tommy Lee? You'd have your revenge for what they forced us to do all those years ago?" It was a thorn that had pricked each time he'd called, each time she'd seen him over the past several months. No, she didn't want to believe it, but wasn't it possible?
"Is that what you think, Rachel? That I'm only using you to get back at them?"
She covered her face with both hands and shook her head until her hair fluttered. "Oh, God, I don't know what to think. All of this would be so much simpler if you'd made your peace with your parents, and if they'd made their peace with mine. But everything's so… so complicated!"
His warm palm caressed her back, sending shivers around her ribs to the tips of her breasts. "There are some things I can't change. But those that I can, I have. I love you, Rachel… for yourself, and for no other reason. And that's why I want to marry you. You've got to believe that. You're the only thing I ever wanted… not other women, not… not liquor and fast cars and shiny boats and..." He broke off and dropped his head back wearily, letting his eyes slip closed and swallowing noisily. "Oh, God, Rachel, I'm so tired of being that way. I need you in my life to give me some peace at last."
A sob escaped her throat as she whirled and flung herself into his arms. He caressed her head, embracing her with a strength close to fury, shutting his eyes against the thought of facing more Rachel-less years, now that he'd come this close.
"Oh, Tommy Lee, I'm so mixed up. Sometimes I don't think I deserve you. You've been more faithful to me than a husband in a lot of ways, no matter how many women you've known."
"There haven't been any others since the day of Owen's funeral. Nobody but you, Rachel. I love you so much… do you really think I'd blow it all now that I stand a chance of having both you and Beth in my life again?"
There came a time when trust had to take its rightful place in a relationship. He had changed. Dramatically. And if he thought the changes were permanent, her belief in him could be all he'd need to make it true. She thought about all he'd said that first night he'd come to her house, the years of misery he'd suffered. She thought about the house he'd built, the hope that had spawned such a task-and there wasn't a doubt in her mind that he loved her. So wasn't it time she began believing in the wonders love could work?
His voice rumbled quietly beneath her ear again. "You said you love me. Is that true, Rachel?"
"Yes…" She squeezed him mightily. "Oh, God, yes. I'm falling in love with you harder than the first time, and it's the scariest thing I've ever gone through in my life."
"Then we'll have to face some things… some people. But it'll work out, you'll see," he promised, then set the ashtray on the bedside table and settled back against the pillows, cradling her again, catching his chin on top of her head. She let his confidence imbue her, and lay in his protective embrace while peace settled over them like a soothing palm.
The minutes slipped by, and his hand moved absently in her hair. "You know," he murmured, "she's old enough to have kids of her own already. Do you realize that? Somewhere in Michigan we might have grandchildren."
She chuckled tiredly against him. "Oh, Tommy Lee, I don't think I'm ready to be a grandma yet. I surely don't feel like one tonight."
He jiggled her a time or two and grinned down lovingly. "You sure's hell didn't act like one. Grandmas are supposed to bake gingerbread cookies and go to sewing circles."
"Remind me to join when I grow tired of this."
She felt his chest lift with silent chuckles. Again his fingers sifted idly through her hair. "Have you ever thought about trying to find our Beth?"
"Yes, I've thought about it. But never for long. It would be too hard to see her, possibly even talk to her, then walk away. And what good would it do? She has parents to love. If she learned about us it could be devastating for her, too. Does it bother you?"
He shrugged. "No, not like it used to. Especially since my other Beth has come to live with me."
They lay silent for some minutes, then Tommy Lee said the most startling thing.
"Rachel, suppose you're pregnant right now."
She snapped back and gaped into his dark, amused eyes. "But… but I can't be pregnant now!"
"Why not? You're only forty-one, and you're not on any kind of birth control." His brow wrinkled. "Are you?"
"But I'm allergic to sperm!"
"You were allergic to Owen's sperm, not mine. If we had one baby, why isn't it possible for us to have another?"
Suddenly Rachel burst out laughing. "Tommy Lee, you're crazy!"
He smiled crookedly. "Maybe. But it's fun thinking about it… 'cause then we'd have to get married." He settled her back where she'd been before. "Imagine the expressions on our parents' faces when we walked up those church steps together, and you pregnant out to here." His hand caressed her abdomen, and they laughed together, imagining it. Then Rachel fell serious.
"Forty-one is too old to become parents."
"Who says?"
"I do, for one." But her heart lurched at the thought, gave a little kick of independence, and left her feeling slightly giddy.
"I know I wasn't much of a father, but I always thought that if it had been you and me together I'd have been so much better at it, loving you the way I did. They say a child's security stems from the love of its parents for each other, so think about it, okay?" He reached out to snap off the light and knocked a few pillows onto the floor, then curled her tightly against his body. "With or without a pregnancy, we're both getting a second chance with Beth."
What a stunning and beautiful thought. Mulling it over, Rachel fell asleep.
They awakened to a butterscotch sun streaming through the bedroom. Tommy Lee stretched and quivered magnificently, then opened his eyes to find Rachel beside him, watching.
"Hi." He grinned with half his mouth.
"Hi." She thought he looked wonderful with his hair tousled and whiskers beginning to show.
"What're you grinning at?"
"What're you grinning at?"
"Rachel Talmadge, all messed up."
"Yeah, well, look who messed her."
"Tell me, Miss Talmadge, what do you think about morners?"
"I always kinda liked them myself. Tell me, Mr. Gentry, what do you think about morners?"
"They rate right up there with nooners and afternooners."
"In that case I don't suppose you'd care to indulge with a messed-up woman who just might be a grandma."
He reached out lazily and ran a knuckle across her lips. "Ohh, Grandma, what nice lips you have."
"The better to kiss you, my dear." And she made a pretense of gnawing his knuckle.
His hand moved down to cup one small breast.
"Ohh, Grandma, what nice breasts you have."
She gyrated the breast against his palm. "The better to entice you, my dear."
He came up slowly and turned her to her back while running a hand down to explore her sweet mysteries. "Ohh, Grandma, you ain't like no other grandma I ever come across in the woods."
She smiled and indulged in some sensuous writhing that felt positively wonderful. She nuzzled the silver hair on the side of his head, then bit his ear and asked seductively, "Isn't this the story where somebody's always eating up somebody else?"
"Oh, nasty, nasty Grandma," he sa
id against her lips, then lowered his open mouth to her breast as they set about ushering in the morning properly.
A half-hour later Rachel was dressed in a floor-length robe of pink satin and coffee was perking as she wrung out Tommy Lee's shirt in the laundry basin.
"Rachel, can I use your brush?" he called from the bathroom.
"Sure. It's in the top left drawer of the vanity."
She heard the drawer open, tossed the shirt into the dryer and turned it on, then stepped into the kitchen.
When the rush of running water stopped at the far end of the house, she called, "Help yourself to towels." Then she cocked her head and asked, "Do you like bacon?"
"I love it, but it's fattening!" he called back.
She smiled as she laid several thick strips on the hot griddle. The bacon was sizzling and the buttons of the shirt were ticking noisily against the tumbling dryer, so she didn't hear the front door opening.
She wasn't aware of Everett's presence in the house until she turned the corner into the family room with a glass of juice in her hand.
At the sight of her father she came up short and her stomach seemed to tilt. He was standing in the middle of the family room, staring at the surface of the pool, where miscellaneous pieces of clothes were caught in the skimmer. Her eyes darted outside to find even her shoes visible, lying in the aquamarine depths of the shallow end. Everett's stormy gaze moved from the pool to scan her pink wrapper, pausing for the briefest second on the fabric shimmering unmistakably over bare nipples.
"Daddy," she gulped.
"I came to have coffee with you before you left for the store," he said acidly. But just at that moment Tommy Lee stepped out of the bathroom and entered the room from the opposite direction, dressed in nothing but trousers, toweling his wet hair. When his face emerged from beneath the towel he stopped dead in his tracks.
The suffocating moment seemed to stretch forever while Everett fired angry glances from one to the other and nobody said a word. His face turned stony while Rachel's began to redden.
"Well, well," he drawled after several interminable seconds. "What have we here?" Tommy Lee glanced helplessly at Rachel while Everett went on silkily. "But I guess it's obvious what we have here. The county's most notorious whoremonger, preying on one of its most vulnerable widows."
Tommy Lee and Rachel both spoke at once.
"Now just a minute!"
"Daddy, it's not that way!"
Everett pierced his daughter with malevolent eyes and pointed an outraged finger. "You shut up, girlie, I'll get to you later!" Then he spun on Gentry. "How dare you set foot in my daughter's house!"
"I didn't realize I had to ask permission to see a forty-one-year-old woman."
"See?" Talmadge hissed. "It appears you did more than see her! It isn't enough that you have every two-bit whore between here and Montgomery? Do you have to drag my daughter down with you?"
Tommy Lee's hands tightened into fists on the ends of the towel. "Your daughter is a lady, and my being here doesn't change that."
"Oh, doesn't it? I wonder if her neighbors agree with you!"
Suddenly Rachel came to life. "Daddy, stop it."
He whirled on her again. "Have you no respect for yourself, or for Owen? He hasn't been gone for..."
"Don't keep throwing Owen up in my face. I married him and gave you the kind of son-in-law you wanted, and I stuck with the marriage, no matter how dull and disastrous it was. But I will not keep revering a dead man at the cost of my own happiness!"
"No, instead you cheapen yourself with trash like him!" Everett thumbed over his shoulder, and Tommy Lee had all he could take. He stalked across the room and whirled Talmadge around by an elbow.
"I'm getting mighty damn sick of you thinking you can control our lives, so get this through your head." He nudged Talmadge in the chest with two strong fingers that set him back a step. "You're all through interfering!"
"Not when she's about to make the same mistake twice, I'm not!"
Tommy Lee's face was grim, his fists clenched at his sides while blue veins bulged up the length of his bare arms. "The mistake wasn't hers, it was yours! But you just can't admit it, can you, Talmadge? You took something away from her that you had no right taking away, and the disaster was doubled when you found out it could never be replaced. And now here I am, back in her life, bringing it all back for you to face. That's what you're fighting against!"
Talmadge's face was mottled and his jowls shook. "I love my daughter, but I won't stand..."
"Love her! Hah!" Tommy Lee glared, jamming his fists onto his hips. "If you love her you've got a damned strange way of showing it. You don't give a damn what she's feeling. All you care about is protecting yourself from having to admit that the decision you made twenty-four years ago made more people miserable than you'd care to count!"
"Don't go laying the blame on me, Gentry. You screwed up your life all by yourself. You didn't need any help from me!"
Exasperated, Tommy Lee rammed four fingers through his damp hair and shook his head. "How blind can you be, man? How long are you going to keep fighting what's right before your eyes? Rachel and I never should have been forced apart-never! We tried to tell you that twenty-four years ago, but you and my mama and daddy knew so much better than Rachel and me what was good for us, didn't you?"
"And if I hadn't, where would she have ended up? Married to a drunkard who couldn't be satisfied with one woman."
"She was the only one I ever wanted, and you know it," Tommy Lee growled dangerously.
"Well, you finally got her, didn't you? And you made sure the whole town knew it by leaving your car in front of her house all night long!"
Suddenly Rachel intervened. "What about me? You talk as if I had no choice in the matter. Daddy, I asked him here. I did not ask you. I should think, since you saw the car, you would have had the common decency to respect my privacy."
"Don't you go preaching to me about common decency, missy! Not when I walk in here and find your clothes floating on the top of the pool and him half naked at eight o'clock in the morning!"
"That's exactly what you did! You walked right in as if it were your God-given right. Well, it's not. I'm all grown up now, Daddy, and this is my house, and you have no right to walk into it unannounced and give me a lecture on how to live my life!"
Her fists were clenched, and the tendons in her neck stood out. Everett raised a hand in appeal. "Rachel, for God's sake, don't you care what people think?"
"No, not anymore. I've lived my whole life according to some nebulous code that you pushed down my throat. But there's no room in that code for mitigating circumstances, is there? Tommy Lee has changed. I've changed." She pressed her hands against her chest and leaned toward him supplicatingly. "Why can't you see that?"
"All I see is a daughter I have to be ashamed of. Lord, girl, I protected you from gossip all these years. What do you suppose it does to me to see you take up with him again?"
"Daddy, please, for once, could you think about my feelings instead of your own? Would you ask yourself why I'm with him again?"
His face grew hard and he pierced Tommy Lee with a venomous gaze that passed from his naked chest to his bare toes. "I believe that's altogether too obvious."
Rachel moved a step nearer Tommy Lee until her shoulderblades touched his chest. "No. You're seeing only what you want to see. Your own stubbornness is making you blind. Daddy, I love him. Can't you accept that and let us all try to forget the past?"
Everett's face turned scornful. "Love him! For God's sake, girl, don't delude yourself because I caught you red-handed."
Tommy Lee's hands came up to rest on Rachel's shoulders as he stated, "It's you who are deluding yourself, Talmadge. I have a feeling it's the only way you could have lived with the decision you made all those years ago."
The sight of Tommy Lee's hands resting possessively on Rachel's shoulders made Everett cringe. "Marshall would have..."
"No, Daddy." Rachel's eyes clo
sed for a long moment, as if in finality. "You've chosen all the men for me you're ever going to. Marshall is a carbon body of Owen, and though it's taken me some soul-searching to admit it, Owen was not the kind of man I needed to make me happy. This time I'm doing the picking," she ended prophetically.
Her voice softened to an appealing note. "Daddy, Tommy Lee has asked me to marry him. If I do, will we have to fight you every step of the way, just like before? Would you do that to us… again?"
Everett's shock was complete. He gaped from Rachel to the man behind her, and to his daughter again. "You can't mean it. Rachel, you've never had a vindictive bone in your body, but if you're doing this just to get back at me for-was
"No, Daddy. I told you. I love him." On her shoulders, Tommy Lee's hands tightened reassuringly.
Everett sensed himself losing ground and blustered, "You love some… some teenage fantasy. But we're talking about real life here. We're talking about a man with three ex-wives!"
To Tommy Lee's surprise, she smiled and squeezed his fingers, which still rested on her collarbone. "Then I'd better watch my p's and q's, hadn't I?"
Everett was stupefied. "Rachel, for the love of God..."
But she calmly stepped forward and cut him off. "Daddy, as I said earlier, I didn't invite you here." She led the way toward the foyer without turning to see if he followed, but when she reached it, he was right on her heels, hoping to talk some sense into her. He didn't get the chance. She opened the door and stood waiting for him to walk through it. "In the future when you come to see me, I'd appreciate your knocking before you come in."
When she had closed the door behind his angrily stalking form, she turned to find Tommy Lee waiting in the archway. He opened his arms and she walked into them and clung, her cheek pressed against the silky hair on his chest, and his arms circling her shoulder tenaciously. "Darling, I'm so sorry," he said gruffly.
She was trembling uncontrollably as she shook her head against his chest. "No, it's not your fault. Oh, Tommy Lee, how could he just… just come in here like that and start shouting at you?"
He rubbed her shoulder and kissed the top of her hair. "He's desperate, Rachel. He's clung to his self-righteousness for a long time. Imagine how frightening it is to a man like him to have to admit he was wrong."
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