Southern Comforts

by JoAnn Ross

  “’Nite, Chelsea.” He enclosed both her hands in his in an interested, but unpushy way. “I sure do hope you decide to stay. And not just because you pretty up my house.”

  “Lordie, how you southern gentlemen do go on.” She laughed at his light flirtation. When he released her hand, she bestowed a warm, sincere smile on him before arranging her expression into a polite mask as she turned toward Cash. “Good night.”

  “Night, Irish. Sweet dreams.”

  Both men watched her walk away. “Now that,” Jeb said, obviously enjoying the sway of her hips in the same red silk suit Nelson had vetoed for the “Good Morning America” appearance, “is one lusciously put together female.”

  “She’s also taken.”

  “I heard Roxanne telling someone she’s involved with some guy in New York. Is that the Nelson she mentioned needing to talk things over with?”

  “That’s the guy. And I notice her supposedly belonging to someone else didn’t stop you from bird-dogging her.”

  “Well, hell, Cash, the guy’s just a Yankee. The way I see it, I’d be doing the little gal a favor to help her see the error of her ways.”

  “It’s not the damn Yankee who’s got dibs on her.”

  “Dibs?” Jeb gave him a blank look. Comprehension dawned. “Sweet Jesus, you’re a fast worker.”

  “Nothin’ fast about it. Tell you what… Let’s you and me go out and get drunk. And I’ll tell you a story about Cash Beaudine’s long-ago adventure in Yankeeland.”

  Jeb’s gaze went from Cash to inside the French doors, where Chelsea was saying goodbye to Roxanne. “I take it this tale involves a certain gorgeous redheaded writer.”

  “You always were a quick study.” He put his arm around his longtime friend’s shoulder. “And you look at Chelsea that way again—”

  “What way?”

  “Like a starving man staring through the diner window at a piece of hot peach pie with vanilla ice cream meltin’ on top. Now, I’m not saying I can’t understand the attraction, because I can,” Cash allowed. “But keep it up, and I’ll have no choice but to kick out your lung. After I break your nose again.”

  Jeb unconsciously rubbed the widened bridge of his nose. “As fond as I am of breathing, I gotta tell you, Cash, when you’re talking about a woman that fine on the eyes, lookin’ kinda comes natural.”

  Cash had to give him that one. A man would have to be blind not to notice Chelsea Cassidy. And even then, her scent would get to him.

  “You can look,” he decided magnanimously. “But that’s all. Touch and you’re a dead man.”

  Jeb chuckled. “And to think people have accused you of bein’ unreasonable.” He gave Chelsea one long last look, then sighed, knowing when he was licked. “Since the best-looking female in Georgia’s just been put off-limits, I may as well get drunk to soothe my wounded heart.”

  “May as well,” Cash agreed, none too pleased with the idea that Chelsea was on her way back to his rival in the morning. “How about dropping into The Swamp Fox and shooting some pool?”

  “I’d say that’s a plan.” Jeb’s natural good spirits returned. “Lilah Sue Jackson’s had her eye on me for some time. Last time I was in there, she even gave me a free draft on the house.”

  “Lilah Sue always has known how to squeeze a penny ’til old Abe cries uncle,” Cash said. “If she’s giving away the profits, I’d say that’s a right positive sign.”

  “We had good times back in high school, all those nights down at the river watchin’ the submarine races, before she married John Henry.”

  “They’ve been divorced, what, six months now?”

  “Seven.” Jeb grinned. “Maybe tonight’s the night sweet little Lilah Sue’s gonna get lucky.”

  Cash laughed. “I do admire your powers of recovery, son.”

  Unlike many other self-made men, Vernon Gibbons made no secret of his humble beginnings. Instead, he flaunted his plebeian roots.

  Born in a hollow in rural Tennessee, Gibbons had dropped out of school when he was sixteen to support his ailing mama and five younger brothers and sisters. He did not see having to leave school as any great loss. All a high school diploma would have gotten him would be a job in the mines, like his daddy before him who’d died of black lung disease.

  Having no intention of spending his life below ground, only to die wheezing his guts out in some charity ward, Vern got a job in the local five-and-dime store, unloading stock in the back room, polishing the front windows and sweeping the floors.

  One hot steamy August afternoon, on the day before his seventeenth birthday, he was unloading some drums of cleaning supplies when he caught the manager, an overweight bottle-blond divorcée in her thirties, with a doughy face and a frizzy perm, looking at him the way he intended to look at the ice-cold Dr Pepper waiting for him when he finished the job. Janey Porter’s pale eyes, magnified behind the thick lenses of her glasses, were riveted on his bare chest.

  He slowly ran a hand down the sweaty flesh. Her avid gaze followed. All the way to the metal button at the waistband of his faded, patched jeans. Then lower, still, to where the worn denim hugged his sex.

  Although she was no beauty queen, the blatant desire that flamed in those wide blue eyes, and the way she unconsciously licked her lips, sent heat flooding into his groin.

  He’d grinned, a bold knowing grin that caused color to flood into her cheeks and sent her scurrying back to the safety of her cramped and windowless office. But later, after the store had closed and the other clerks had gone home for the night, he’d taken her, right on top of her scarred wooden desk, driving into her like a jackhammer until she’d screamed with the force of her orgasm.

  They fell into a comfortable pattern. During the day, Janey taught him everything she knew about the discount retail business. A smart boy, and an ambitious one, Vern had learned quickly. At night, he kept her sexually satisfied and though it curtailed his social life, he considered it a small price to pay for such a valuable business education.

  Her glowing monthly reports to the home office won him a series of promotions, from loading dock, to clerk, to assistant manager, to weekend manager. She was his most avid supporter and although the term had not been in use in those days, she was his mentor. A role she realized, too late, that she’d played too well. Eighteen months after having sex on top of her desk, Vern arrived at the store to find her bawling her eyes out.

  She was being transferred to the home office, she’d told him between sobs. To work as a bookkeeper in shipping. His heart pounding in his ears like cannon fire, he’d had to ask. Who was the company planning to move into her spot as manager?

  Vern had tried like hell not to display his pleasure at her answer. But hot damn, not only was he now the top dog, with a corresponding raise in pay, he was also going to be free to return to catting around with the local lovelies. Life didn’t get much better than this!

  Pasting a regretful frown on his face, he allowed Janey to take him out for a combination congratulations-farewell rib eye steak dinner with all the trimmings at the Chat and Chew. For the first time since their affair had begun, he spent the entire night with her, treating her alternately with passion and gentleness that brought her to drunken tears more than once.

  Although it wasn’t his nature to be tender, Vern understood the concept of debt. His success was due to this woman; he figured he owed her a night to remember.

  And it wouldn’t hurt, he’d reminded himself as he’d helped her pack her few shoddy belongings into her battered old Pontiac Bonneville the next morning, to have a friend in the home office.

  Utilizing what his lover had taught him, along with his instincts for knowing what customers wanted even before they knew themselves, he began making changes that nearly doubled the profits of the store in the first year. Two years later, he was netting out more profit than most of the big-city Nashville stores.

  He’d been manager for five years when the chain was sold to a New York retailer who had no inte
rest in keeping the rural stores running. Getting a loan from the bank was a snap; he’d met the bank owner at a Chamber of Commerce mixer and routinely went hunting with him. Using the borrowed funds, he’d bought the building, expanded the floor space to double the capacity and renamed it Mega-Mart. Then he hired his old lover away from their former employer and made her his comptroller.

  At the gala grand opening celebration, he’d boldly announced that this was only the first store in a chain that would set the world of retailing on its ear.

  Although some of the locals scoffed at his high-and-mighty attitude, Vern had the last laugh. By his twenty-fifth birthday, he’d expanded to twenty-five stores throughout Tennessee, Arkansas and West Virginia. By age thirty he was a millionaire. And that was just the beginning.

  Now, at age sixty, Forbes ranked him the third richest man in America. Never one to be satisfied with being less than the best, he figured he still had plenty of time to make that number one slot before he was eligible for social security.

  Which was why he’d signed the multimillion dollar deal with Roxanne Scarbrough. He was already the king of mass-market discounts. What he needed, was the touch of style she’d provide.

  “Class for the masses,” he’d dubbed it.

  At the same time, he’d make her a household word, even with people who considered a picture of Elvis on black velvet to be the height of decorating chic.

  After her other guests departed, Roxanne invited Vern into her office to show him the working drawings of the plantation house. She poured them both a glass of Rémy Martin and offered him a cigar. Vernon Gibbon’s appreciation of food, aged cognac and illegal Cuban cigars were legion. As were tales of his sexual liaisons.

  For a man who seldom made a bad business decision, his personal life had proven less successful. He’d been married eight times at last count, fathered sixteen children. Never one to dwell on the negative, he actually joked that his annual alimony and child support payments cost him more than most men made in a lifetime.

  “Well,” Roxanne said, after they’d gone through the spec sheets and Cash’s preliminary drawings, “what do you think?”

  He chewed thoughtfully on his cigar. “You’re taking on quite a challenge. You know, you could end up feeling like a dog who’s just caught himself an eighteen-wheeler and doesn’t know what the hell to do with it.”

  “It’s quite a challenge,” she agreed. “But I believe I’m up to it.”

  “Hell, I don’t doubt that for a minute, honey bun,” he said. “But what about this Beaudine fella?”

  “He comes highly recommended.”

  “I had my people do a background check on him,” Vern revealed. “The word around San Francisco is that he’s a maverick.”

  “Most highly successful men are.” Her smile suggested the description could certainly be applied to him. “But I can handle him.”

  His dark eyes swept over her. “I’ll just bet you can.”

  Vern took a long puff on the cigar, sending a noxious cloud of smoke up to the ceiling, then stabbed it out into a Lalique ashtray. He patted his lap. “So, now that we’ve got business out of the way, sweetie pie, why don’t you come to daddy?”

  She smiled as she rose slowly from the chair. Her eyes glittered with raw, lascivious intent. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Roxanne had dressed carefully for the evening, choosing a simply elegant Yves Saint Laurent black crepe dress with a high neckline, long sleeves, white cuffs and collar. She’d kept her makeup simple. With the exception of the four-inch high heels and sheer black hose, she looked as demure as a nun.

  She slowly unbuttoned the snowy cuffs at her wrists, then reached around to unzip the dress. When it fell to the floor, she stepped out of it and walked across the room, clad in a black lace bustier, matching garter belt, jet stockings and hooker heels. She’d bleached the hair framed by the belt this morning; the pale blond curls contrasted vividly with the ebony lace.

  “You are a sight for sore eyes, sugar,” he said, expelling a long deep breath.

  Those were the same words George had used. Roxanne suffered a momentary panic, then reminded herself that the only thing George Waggoner and Vernon Gibbons had in common was that they’d both started out poor.

  George was the quintessential loser, while Vern was a winner all the way. Which was why she hadn’t protested when he’d explained in an offhand way that sex would be part of their deal.

  As hard as she’d tried to exorcise the ghosts of her past, deep down inside in the furthest reaches of Roxanne’s mind, a bit of the barefoot girl with the Salvation Army hand-me-down clothes still lingered. And that girl found it exciting as sin to be screwing the third richest man in America.

  He’d been sexually attracted to her from the beginning. And during these past months, she’d appealed to that attraction, making her most tried and true cast to net him and keep him.

  Kneeling beside the flowered chair, Roxanne brushed her lips lightly against his. When he didn’t respond, she traced a sensual circle around his mouth with her tongue, coaxing a response. Again, nothing. She tilted her head back and gave him a knowing smile.

  “You’re being purposefully difficult tonight,” she accused lightly.

  “I’m an old man. Guess I need a little more convincing.” He might be sixty but sexually he was far from over the hill. Roxanne knew from personal experience he had the stamina of a stallion.

  She sighed, causing her breasts to rise above the lace cups of the bustier. “I suppose I’ll just have to try harder.”

  His dark eyes held a wicked glint. “There you go.”

  She gave him a teasing love bite on his chin, then covered his mouth with hers, treating him to a long, deep kiss and was rewarded when his tongue tangled momentarily with hers in a slow, sinuous dance. Leaning closer, she placed a palm against his snowy shirtfront and felt the increased beat of his heart.

  She stood up and backed away again, inviting him to take a long look at her. Which he did. She watched the bulge straining against his trousers and knew he was not as unaffected as he liked to pretend.

  Teasing him with the flair of a skilled concubine, she spread her legs wide apart. The provocative stance caused a flame to leap in his dark, unblinking eyes.

  Knowing she had his undivided attention, reveling in the role of exhibitionist, she began caressing her breasts, squeezing them, stroking them, cupping them in her palms, lifting them toward him as if offering the most succulent of ripe fruits. He was breathing harder now and his face was growing flush. A thrilling feeling of power surged through her veins. Improvising, she slipped the index finger of her right hand between her vermillion lips and began sucking on it, while her left hand did not cease its sensual caresses.

  Vern stood up. “Come here,” he ordered roughly.

  When she did as instructed, he put a hand on the top of her head, urging her back down to her knees. Knowing what he wanted, she unzipped his suit pants; his straining penis jutted up from the wiry nest of pewter hair like a tree branch.

  She stroked it. Ran a carmine-tipped nail from the root up to the huge purple-pink knob, then repeated the fiery path with her tongue. When she pointed the tip of her tongue and stuck it as deeply as she could into the slit, moving it around and around, he groaned.

  “You keep doing that, and I’m gonna fucking explode.” He grabbed hold of her hair and lifted her head, taking advantage of her still-parted lips as he shoved his engorged penis into her mouth, holding the top of her head in order to force her to accept every throbbing inch as he thrust it harder and deeper.

  Just when Roxanne thought he was going to come in her mouth, he pulled out, dragging her to the floor. He ripped off the rest of his clothes and began driving into her with rough animal ruttishness, his thrusts so deep, so powerful, that she came again and again, gasping as she brokenly spurred him on with sexual obscenities.

  Finally, he let go, flooding her with his seed in a cl
imax that went on and on. His shout echoed around the room like the victorious mating bugle of a bull elk. Then he collapsed on top of her, his passion spent.

  The room was dark, illuminated only by the soft glow of the television monitor. The lone viewer sat in the shadows, watching the couple’s raunchy mating. The unblinking eye of the lens took in the long white thighs wrapped around the man’s thickened waist, focused on the thick cock as it disappeared into the slit hidden by those swollen pink folds and glistening pale pubic hair.

  If there was one thing this tape proved, other than the fact that Vernon Gibbons was even butt uglier without clothes than he was when dressed, it was that Roxanne Scarbrough was a whore. Oh, she didn’t sell her body on the street corners for twenty-five bucks a blow job, the way Cora Mae Padgett might have done. But whether you fucked for pocket change or millions didn’t change what you were.

  The watcher picked up a pistol, stroked the blue steel and imagined replacing that thick penis with the gun barrel. Pain and pleasure were so often interchangeable; it was difficult to know where one ended and the other began.

  But Roxanne would discover the difference. And soon.

  The watcher pointed the pistol and pulled the trigger.

  “Bang, bang, bitch. You’re dead.”

  The idea was, as always, immensely pleasing.

  Chelsea was not all that surprised to arrive at the Savannah airport the following morning and find Cash waiting at the gate.

  What worried her was the unbidden fluttering in her stomach created by the sight of him, looking sexier than any man had a right to in something as simple as jeans and a blue chambray shirt.

  “What are you doing here? And don’t tell me you have a sudden urge to visit the Big Apple.”

  He flashed his killer grin. “Now that you mention it, that’s not such a bad idea. I don’t suppose you know anyone who’d be willing to give a country boy a tour of the big city?”

  “I’m afraid not.”