by Linda Conrad
The childhood hometown he had hated and loved was now twisting in the wind, left to rot away all by itself. And the thought of that gave him absolutely no pleasure. It only made him sad.
His attitude toward Kate was much more conflicted. Sometimes when Chase looked at her, ice water ran through his veins, freezing his heart to her predicament. At other times, just one glimpse flamed his blood and burned a path right through his hardened soul.
Somehow when she was near, old half-remembered dreams assailed him with soft sighs and warm waves of staggering desires. He didn’t know what to do about the weakness she brought to him. But destroying a whole town just to hear her beg would make him every bit as contemptible as old Henry Beltrane had ever been.
Chase shook off both the anger and the desire. There were no easy solutions here.
Looking back at the rotting hulk of the mill, he still had to wonder if it was worth trying to save. Or if he had the expertise to even try. He was a well-known turnaround magician when it came to bringing casinos and resorts back to life. But he wasn’t sure at all that he could be a miracle worker for a dying rice mill.
Slowly Chase pulled the Jag back onto the blacktop road and headed toward Live Oak Hall. For today he would not think of the mill. He would not consider his narrow choices on that account.
For today he would take the step that had always seemed so unimaginable when he’d been the boy from the wrong side of town. Today was the day when he would move into Live Oak Hall and make his mark as the richest man in town.
Deep down, somewhere in the very dark recesses of his mind, Chase knew that just the change of address would not really give him the social standing and admiration he so craved. But he brushed the knowledge aside along with the rest of the cobwebs in his dusty memory. Today was his day. There could be no room for second guesses or self-examinations.
A few minutes later he guided the Jag down the oak allée toward the portico of the plantation. With a deep breath of early-spring air, Chase pulled up at the front door and climbed out of the car.
He was home.
Dragging his luggage from the narrow backseat, Chase let his mind go blank, allowing himself to just feel. Being here felt right. Though, he remembered a time when he would have been arrested for trespassing if Kate’s father had caught him anywhere on the property. Getting to see Kate back then had been tricky, full of secrets and sneaking around behind her father’s back.
Chase shook out the remnants of memories and walked toward the house. The veranda was bathed in comforting shade as he moved up the front steps. Sun had warmed the air, birds chirped, bees stayed busy at the flowers.
But when he set his bags down to knock at the front door, Chase noticed some of the floorboards were hanging loose from their joints and bits of paint had begun to peel off of decades-old exterior walls. He looked closer and found cobwebs lurking in dark, dingy corners of the veranda.
Apparently the maintenance had been ignored for quite some time. A flash of anger at Kate for letting things slide came—and quickly went. This much deterioration had to have begun with her father. Princess Kate would know no better. No sense blaming her for things she hadn’t done. There were plenty of other things for which she deserved the blame.
“Welcome, Chase.” The alto voice was feminine but not Kate’s.
He turned to see a slight woman in her midtwenties with ash-blond hair and soft-gray eyes, standing at the open door with a toddler in her arms. It was the quiet look in the woman’s eyes that made the schoolday memories reel forward in his mind.
“Hello, Shelby,” he murmured. “It’s been a while.”
She stood aside and let him move through the doorway. “Ten years. This is my daughter, Madeleine. We’ve been expecting you this morning.”
“How do you do, Madeleine,” Chase said to the serious baby with the big blue eyes, before he returned his attention to her mother. “Kate tells me you and your daughter are living in one of the guest cottages, Shelby. You divorced?”
Shelby chuckled, turned and headed toward the sweeping, main staircase. “You get right to the basics, don’t you, Severin? No, I am not divorced. Maddie’s father was a marine. Went off and got himself killed before he even knew he had a child on the way. And no, I’m not his widow, either. We weren’t married.”
Chase followed Shelby up the wide, carpeted stairs. He could easily see now why Kate had wanted to help this woman and her child. Her story had disturbed him a great deal, and he barely knew her.
“Kate didn’t mention which room you’d be wanting to occupy,” Shelby said when she reached the top of the staircase. “I try to keep up with the cleaning, but I didn’t know you were moving in until this morning. If you want one of the rooms that isn’t made up, it’ll only take me twenty minutes or so to…”
“Would you mind giving me a short tour of the house first?” He still did not know what his own intentions were. “Where’s Kate?”
Shelby moved the baby to her hip and gestured to the faded carpet. “Leave your luggage here on the landing. I’ll show you around. Kate is outside doing Saturday chores.”
“Kate? Doing chores? You’re kidding.”
“Hold it, Severin,” Shelby said as she stopped and poked a finger at his chest. “You’ve been gone a long time. Maybe before you just jump to conclusions, you might want to take the time to really see the way things are now.”
He dropped his luggage and smiled at the irate woman and her child. “Point taken.” Chase wasn’t sure he would be able to stand spending enough time here to see anything though, not with all the unwanted feelings that kept getting dredged up whenever he was around Kate. “Lead on with the tour.”
For the next half hour Shelby showed him through the ten upstairs bedrooms, the kitchen, dining room, library and four parlors. Everything was clean but shabby. It made him melancholy to think of a grand historical house like this one falling into such disrepair.
Finally they arrived back at the base of the main staircase. “You won’t need to make up a room for me,” he said before they could climb the front stairs again. “I’ll store my luggage for today and Kate and I will work out the sleeping arrangements later. Thanks.”
Shelby released the baby on the marble floor, letting her crawl free. “No problem. Do you mind if I ask you a personal question? Something’s been bothering me for ages.”
He figured the way she’d hesitated that she wasn’t curious about his plans for either the house or the mill. Good thing. Because Chase had no clue as to what he had in his own mind to do about them.
“Ask whatever you want,” he said with a chuckle. “I reserve the right not to give you an answer.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “Will you tell me what really happened that night ten years ago when you left town? I’ve heard tons of gossip about it over the years, but I’d like to know the true story.”
“You haven’t gotten the real story from Kate?”
Shelby folded her arms over her chest. “She won’t talk about it. I was gone for the whole summer and part of that fall. By the time I came back, Kate…well…Kate was a different person from when I left.”
“Different how?”
Shelby shrugged a shoulder. “I dunno. More serious, maybe. Certainly less fun loving and less popular with the other kids. She had stopped going to parties and worked much harder at getting good grades.”
That didn’t sound like the young Princess Kate he had left behind. But it did sound a little like the ice-princess rumors he’d heard since he’d been home.
“What about boyfriends? Dates?” he inquired.
“Not so much. In fact, none at all that last year in high school. But there have been a few guys since then. One, the good-looking tractor distributor from New Iberia, was real serious about Kate for a while. But she…she just never got into him.
“Then the word went around that Kate was, uh, frigid,” Shelby continued hesitantly. “I actually think Kate believes that one herself.”
<
br /> Chase didn’t buy it for a minute. He remembered the sizzle the two of them had created ten years ago. Kate had been the furthest thing from frigid then. And he’d seen the heat still there in her eyes just last night.
No. Kate was definitely not a cold fish. Not then. Certainly not now.
Shelby scooted over to her baby daughter and made sure the little girl hadn’t put anything into her mouth, then she turned back to Chase. “So what happened to make you leave and to make Kate change so much?”
Chase wasn’t sure talking about that night would be a good thing. But he hadn’t ever told his side of the nightmare. Maybe it was past time.
“I have no idea what could have changed Kate,” he said quietly. “But then, I left without knowing much of anything. I left in a hurry, before I could be run out of town bodily or locked up in the parish jail for good.”
“Why?”
He shook his head. “Recently I’ve managed to piece together some of the puzzle about that night. But at the time, I was just as confused about why as anyone.” He patted the breast pocket of his chambray shirt before he remembered that he’d quit smoking.
“It was the night of the prom,” he began. “But Kate and I didn’t go. We had a favorite place down by the river where we liked to…be together. We’d dream of the future and talk about what we wanted to do with our lives.”
The years melted away in his mind, and through the mists of time he saw the young couple he and Kate had been—so desperately in love. With a start he amended that thought. One of them had been in love. The other was apparently a good liar.
He came back to the present with a thud. “Out of nowhere, four of the rougher guys we went to school with showed up and picked a fight for no reason. They weren’t enemies of ours, but they were drunk and wouldn’t talk—just started swinging.
“At first, I wasn’t too concerned about taking them all on, they were pretty drunk…but then one of them grabbed Kate and ripped her shirt off. I guess I lost it. The next thing I knew the sheriff showed up and stopped me from killing the guy.”
“You whipped all four boys?”
He tipped his chin. “They were drunk.” It was still not something he was terribly proud of. “The one that had grabbed Kate ended up having to be taken to the hospital, and the sheriff said it was touch-and-go with him for a while.”
“But why would the sheriff put you in jail?” Shelby asked. “They attacked you and Kate first.”
“The other three boys gave a statement to the sheriff saying they’d seen me attacking Kate. They claimed they had been the ones to come to her rescue.”
“What? Everyone in town knew you and Kate were a couple. Why would anyone believe such a thing?”
Chase drove his hand through his hair, wishing that he’d never started this trip down memory lane. Shelby was not going to like hearing what he had to say next.
“Kate told the sheriff it was true,” Chase said in a low but clear voice. “She swore I’d been drinking and had dragged her out of the car and was attacking her when those boys came along and tried to save her.”
Shelby’s mouth dropped open, and for a minute she just stared at him. “I can’t believe that.”
Chase shook his head and gave her a wry smile. “I had some trouble with the concept at the time, too, but her old man turned up right then and offered me a deal. Henry Beltrane told me that because my father’s family had been in the area for generations he would give me a break. If I’d leave town for good, he would see to it that no one pressed charges against me. I’d be in the clear, but I could never come home.”
Shelby was still shaking her head. “There’s something wrong with that story. I don’t buy the part about Kate.”
“It took me a few years to accept it myself. About six weeks ago I finally located the grown man that once was the boy I had put in the hospital. I never could understand why those kids were out there by the river that night. Nobody but Kate and I ever went to that place.
“Anyway, I found him working as a night security guard in New Orleans,” Chase continued. “He confessed that Henry Beltrane had paid those four boys to find us and to beat me up…run me out of town. The rest of the story is that their fathers had been recently laid off from the mill and their families needed the money bad. But still…they had to get stone drunk to have the nerve to do such a thing.”
“But why?” Shelby cried. “And why would Kate…?”
Chase shrugged. “Since that bastard Beltrane is dead, we’ll never know his reasons.”
Shelby looked so horrified that Chase decided to say something more. “I suspect that Kate must feel some guilt for her part since she refuses to talk to you about it.”
“That story is just so unlike Kate,” Shelby insisted. “I can’t understand it.”
All of a sudden, Chase knew he had said too much. “I can’t understand it, either,” he hedged. “But I didn’t mean for these old ghost stories to come between the two of you.”
“Oh, they won’t,” Shelby quickly told him. “That story has nothing to do with the Kate I know. And the Kate that I know saved my life.”
Shelby reached over and swung her daughter up in her arms. The baby giggled before she nestled down against her mother’s breast. “Right after Maddie was born…I thought I was going to have to give her up. I had nothing. No job and no family. I didn’t have anywhere to live that would accept a baby, and I’d been begging friends for scraps of food.
“Kate’s father was still alive at the time but he was sick,” Shelby continued. “So Kate snuck us food and helped me fix up that old guest cottage out back so we’d have a place to stay. She even babysat so I could go round up some catering jobs.”
Shelby placed a soft kiss against her child’s forehead. “If I’d had to give up Maddie so soon after losing her daddy… Well, I wouldn’t have wanted to go on. That’s a fact. I owe Kate everything.”
Chase was speechless. The two stories of Kate didn’t mesh.
“I’m not going to ask Kate again what happened ten years ago,” Shelby declared with a frown. “Eventually the truth will come out. It always does.”
Chase nodded. He wasn’t so sure he wanted to hear the whole truth himself. Sometimes secrets were best left buried.
The air in the house turned sticky—too close, stifling warm and still. He needed a fresh breath. Some way to clear his head.
He thanked Shelby for the welcome tour and stepped out the front door, looking for a little peace.
Kate hopped down off the rickety riding mower and dislodged the weeds that had glued themselves to the blades. She took a moment to put a hand on her lower back and stretch. It was a wicked, hot day for so early in the spring, and she could feel the sweat trickling down between her breasts.
Wiping a hand across her brow and glancing over to the house in the distance, Kate’s vision cleared just in time for her to spot a movement on the front veranda. Confused, she looked around a little more and noticed Chase’s car, parked in the shade of the front portico.
He was already here. Narrowing her eyes, she searched the shadows to find him. It was a little early yet, but it would be nice to get things settled between them.
She found him there all right, pacing up and down the long veranda. Tall and still so spectacularly good-looking women must fall madly in love with him at first glance, the sight of Chase this morning made her weak in the knees.
Looking cool and casual, he walked up and down past the double-wide front doors. He was wearing tight jeans and a chambray work shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
The image dragged out a ten-year-old memory that Kate had tried to lock away. It was of another too-hot spring day when the two of them had nothing in the world to worry about except where to find enough shade to have their picnic lunch.
She’d been sweaty on that day, too. But most of the heat in those days had come from their close, hard young bodies, holding on to each other as they frantically looked for a place to be together an
d to be alone with their desperate need.
Under a favorite willow, they had found shade and privacy. She remembered his touch…the way he tasted as his mouth crushed down on hers.
The faded memories by themselves were enough to perk up her breasts and send fire skittering down her spine. Kate blinked and tried to fight it, but a long-ago picture came to mind of Chase sitting beside her and watching her undress. He had imprisoned her and made her squirm by simply watching—and wanting—with those sinfully darkened eyes and fierce gaze.
The startling memory of him watching her undress opened her own eyes. No wonder last night’s striptease had caused such erotic sensations in her body.
His heat had already scorched her as a girl. Blazed a sensual path down her body and tattooed her soul forever with his marker.
Back then, even as an inexperienced girl, Kate had climaxed just by staring into those dangerous steel-gray eyes. And she had fallen completely under the spell he had woven around them with soft words and tender touches.
As the sweat from the current steamy day rolled down her temples and blurred her vision, Kate swallowed past her dry throat and took a deep breath. She also remembered much too clearly the shy, coward of a girl she had been all those years ago. Too timid to seek out what she really wanted. Too eager to let the threat of scandal rule her desires and her life.
And much too afraid of her father’s influence to go for her dreams.
But no more. Her father was dead. Everything she loved was on the verge of being lost forever. She could no longer afford to be a coward. Kate intended to ask for what she wanted from now on.
Chase fisted his hands on his hips and surveyed his property from the vantage point of the veranda. Though the landscape was scruffy and unkempt, the long vistas of grass and trees, spreading out for acres, gave him a world of satisfaction.
It was his…this land for as far as eyes could see…owning this land and coming from the right side of town had been his childhood dream. It made him briefly think about the old gypsy and her legacy gift—the gift that was supposed to bring him to his heart’s desire.