Admit One (Sweetwater Book 2)

by Clark O'Neill, Lisa

  Tucker muttered something far more offensive under his breath, and Mason took a moment to place the woman’s face.

  Victoria Hawbaker.

  He hadn’t run into Allison’s ex-sister-in-law since he’d been back in Sweetwater, and quite frankly had forgotten not only that she owned a shop of this sort, but indeed her very existence. Upon seeing her again, he marveled as to how that could be, considering she was the type of woman most men – or other women, for that matter – didn’t forget easily. She had the breathless, slightly dim air Mason often associated with Marilyn Monroe’s public image, but one look at her eyes disabused him of any further notions of that ilk.

  Her eyes, though an undeniably lovely shade of green, were the patient, hungry eyes of a predator.

  She came from around an elaborate desk, somehow managing to exude cool professionalism while looking like sex on a stick.

  Victoria Hawbaker was beautiful and gracious, charisma oozing from her perfect pores. And all of it was artifice. It was rather horribly like looking in a mirror, gender reversed.

  Victoria angled her body – aimed it, really, exactly like the weapon it was – toward Mason, apparently having marked him as the easier target for her charms.

  “Something I can do for you gentleman?”

  Mason was tempted to turn around and walk out, even though he found the idea distasteful. But he thought that that sort of rude rebuff would afford the woman far more importance than she deserved.

  “I’d like to have a look at the necklace in your window display.”

  “The teacup?” Her gaze was calculating. “Adorable, isn’t it? I found it at an estate sale outside Summerville. One of a kind. It seems the father of the elderly gentleman who owned the estate had it commissioned for his second wife, who was a descendant of Doctor Charles Shepard. Shepard, in case you’re not familiar with Lowcountry history, ran South Carolina’s first successful tea plantation in the eighteen hundreds.”

  “How fascinating.”

  Her lips curved in a feline smile. “I certainly hope I haven’t bored you by prattling on. I know how… dry historians – especially amateur ones – can be.”

  Mason glanced toward Tucker. “Did you happen to bring a shovel with you?”

  “Not this time,” Tucker said without missing a beat.

  “Pity,” Mason murmured. “One always likes to assist a lady when she seems inclined to dig.”

  The laugh that sprang out of Victoria was so genuine that it seemed to surprise even her.

  “Aren’t you witty,” she said, tapping Mason’s arm with a single, slim finger. Then she sashayed toward the window, bent over – just in case they hadn’t a good enough view of her backside as she’d walked away – and lifted the necklace from its resting spot. When she straightened, it dangled from her prettily manicured hand.

  “Would you like to have a closer look?”

  The question was so loaded that he could practically smell gunpowder in the air.

  Mason extended his hand, arching a single brow when Victoria’s fingers brushed lightly over his palm. Her eyes, when he met them, held both amusement and a hint of challenge.

  Rarely, he guessed, did she meet a man who offered her much of either one.

  “Thank you,” he said, brutally polite.

  “Any time.” She smirked, amusement winning out. Then, cloaking herself in professionalism once again, she turned her attention to Tucker. “Is there anything I can help you with today?”

  “Nope.” Tucker shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans and sent Mason a look that suggested quick and painful retribution should Mason tarry a moment longer than necessary.

  Mason returned the look with one that indicated Tucker’s leash must be short indeed, but he began studying the necklace. He was well aware of Sarah’s feelings about the shop’s proprietor, and had no wish to earn her ire.

  But he wanted the necklace. He’d wanted it from the first moment he saw it, and upon closer inspection of the quality of the craftsmanship – delicately wrought, yet durable – he could perfectly imagine it gracing Allison’s neck.

  He would deal with the issue of the necklace’s origins when the time came.

  “I’ll take it,” he said.

  “Wonderful.” Victoria beamed. “Let me just box that up for you.”

  When she carried it toward the back of the shop, Tucker slid a glance at Mason. “If wooing a woman,” he said in a low tone, “involves buying her jewelry from a woman she hates, then you’re off to a great start.”

  “Get stuffed,” Mason invited cheerfully.

  “I’m going to go check on the dogs. Make sure Cruella back there didn’t turn them into a coat when we weren’t looking.”

  “Somehow, I don’t think that fur of mutt is quite her style.”

  But after Tucker left, Mason’s brows drew together. He hoped he wasn’t making a colossal miscalculation.

  “Here you are.”

  Mason looked over to where Victoria had placed a small craft paper bag, bursting with an array of fancy tissue paper and ribbons, on the counter.

  He pulled out his wallet while she rang him up. “Thank you,” he said, after scrawling his signature on the slip of paper.

  “Oh, the pleasure’s been mine entirely.”

  “I’m sure you’re correct.”

  She laughed again, and sent him off with a playful wave.

  “Mason?” she said when he was almost to the door. He glanced back over his shoulder. “You be sure to give my love to Allie now, you hear?”

  Mason didn’t even bother to wonder how she’d gleaned that information. The Sweetwater grapevine never seemed to be denuded of fruit, despite the greedy hands always reaching to pluck it.

  “I’m sure she’ll be delighted.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ALLIE felt like an old woman as she climbed from her car. Grief, she’d learned, was a weight that slowed your steps, stooped your shoulders and dimmed your spirit just as effectively as the passing of years.

  Funny that losing something – or someone – seemed to create another, heavier, entity, something that you had to carry around with you. There didn’t seem to be much logic in that.

  She’d grieved when her mother went away. There’d been a ruckus, of course, the police called in to ask their questions, neighbors stopping by with casseroles and thinly veiled speculations. For a time, Allie knew now, they’d suspected foul play. They’d suspected her father. Women, especially women of her mother’s station, didn’t simply walk away from their families without a word, disappear without a trace.

  But her mother, it seemed, had done just that. And one day the police had stopped asking their questions, the neighbors had stopped coming by. Their mother was gone, their father said with the kind of finality that brooked no argument. They’d go on.

  And life did go on. But the rhythm of that life became just a little slower, a little heavier.

  She’d grieved when her larger-than-life older brother – the star quarterback, the reckless charmer, the man whose every move seemed star-kissed – started slipping further and further into the bottle. When Harlan had very nearly destroyed himself over the loss of his family’s financial stability, his reputation, his marriage. His self-respect.

  Allie had grieved the loss of that financial stability as well, though not because she was the type of person who loved money for its own sake. It was only that her identity had been so tied up with being a Hawbaker. And Hawbakers, as everyone knew, were quietly but unquestionably wealthy. And she hadn’t entirely known who she was supposed to be – whom she was capable of being – when that aspect of her identity was gone.

  She’d grieved, and grieved still, the loss of her father. To watch the man she adored slip away, while his body remained, was perhaps an even crueler fate than if they’d lost him outright.

  And she’d grieved the loss of the life she might have made with Wesley. All of the other losses she’d endured seemed to have piled slowly on
, until she’d needed, and needed desperately, someone on whom to lean. Branson had gone to Europe, Sarah’d moved away. Harlan had his own troubles and poor Will was struggling to keep everything together while holding down a demanding full-time job. The fact that Wesley hadn’t been willing to be that safe haven, that sure and steady rock, when she’d most needed him had been a shock, and an ugly one. It pared away her self-confidence, her sense of security, right down to the bone.

  That he’d seen fit to use that loss against her in such a way…

  Allie closed her eyes as the breeze washed over her. It carried the scent of warm earth, the fecund smell of spring along the river, of new life bursting into bloom. She let the grief, the weight of it, come then, didn’t try to stop it, to bury it deep. It would only fester there.

  But she also wouldn’t let it break her. She’d broken once, and she wasn’t going back to that place. She’d worked too hard to put the pieces back together, to find her own sense of self, to be her own safe harbor. So she let it come, and though it bent her a little, she knew she could withstand it.

  No, she’d never break again.

  “Okay,” she said to herself, and opened her eyes. “Okay. You’re okay. In fact, you’re great.”

  Great may have been an overstatement, but at least she no longer felt old. She no longer felt vulnerable. In fact, she was starting to feel ever-so-slightly pissed off.

  Deciding that was an odd and possibly inappropriate attitude with which to visit a graveyard, she studied the pretty, happy faces of the flowers she’d been sent in a gesture that was singularly ugly.

  “Screw him,” she told them as she picked her way across the spongy ground. There’d been rain – a brief but soaking shower – a few hours ago, and the damp hadn’t entirely burned off.

  Besides, she thought as she stepped around a gravestone – gray with lichens – that had tumbled almost entirely on its side, Cousin Eugene could probably appreciate the sentiment. From what she’d learned, he’d been a young man who’d been willing to stand up for himself, even against the powerful weight of family expectation.

  So surely Allie could stand against one idiot lawyer.

  As she rounded the corner in the path, Eugene’s gravestone – aged and unassuming – came into view. And standing beside it, looking contemplative, was another young man who’d stood against the weight of family expectation. She still didn’t really know why Will had abandoned the legal trail their father was so set on him blazing, but he’d done more than well enough for himself in carving out his own path once he’d finally set his feet on it.

  Personally, Allie’d rather a stick in the eye than do what Will did, but then it took all kinds.

  She sighed. It spoke to her level of distraction that she hadn’t even noticed Will’s car in the lot. She’d hoped for some time alone here. Why it was a comfort to her, she couldn’t say, but she found that she liked visiting with her long departed relative. Perhaps it was her interest in history; perhaps it was a sense of kinship that came down through the blood. Odd that she’d prefer to seek the company of dead kin rather than the one who was standing in front of her, but there was just enough sad lurking beneath the surface of the anger she’d embraced that it made talking to Will dangerous. Cop that he was, he was good at picking up on body language, on emotions, even when she thought she’d disguised them.

  He glanced up then, gaze sharp, then going softer as he recognized her, and Allie squared her shoulders.

  “No help for it,” she murmured to the flowers. “He’s already seen us.”

  “Al,” he said, brows rising as she walked toward him. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “We should call Harlan and Bran down here and have ourselves a regular little family reunion.”

  “As long as you don’t expect Eugene here to make small talk. I’ve tried, but he doesn’t seem inclined to hold up his end of the conversation. Pretty flowers,” he added.

  “Thank you,” she said. And because Will would likely find out sooner or later, she told him the truth. Or part of it, anyway. “Wesley sent them this morning, and I figured Cousin Eugene would appreciate them more than I did.”

  One corner of his mouth lifted, and he patted her shoulder in approval. “That’s my girl.”

  “Are you here out of respect, or am I interfering with your investigation?”

  “Nothing much here left to investigate, officially. Though seeing as how this is family, and I’ve never been one to leave a puzzle unfinished, I have… dropped a few lines, I guess you could say. I stopped by to think them through while I wait to see if anything bites.”

  So Will had come here for much the same reason as Allie. “Strange, isn’t it, that a burying ground seems to be such a good place for the living to do their thinking?”

  “Well, it does help put things into perspective.” His phone emitted a beep, and Will pulled it from his pocket, studied the text. “How about that. Looks like something’s nibbling on one of those lines.” He shot off an answering text, then glanced up at Allie, blue eyes assessing as he slid the phone back into his pocket.

  “Is it anything I can help with, or would you be better off alone with your thoughts for a little while? Well, not completely alone.” He nodded to the grave marker, quirked his lips. “But at least your companion’s quiet.”

  “I’m fine,” Allie said, relieved to find that was basically true. “But I do think I’ll stay a little longer.”

  He studied her a moment, then reached out and tugged her hair. “I’ll catch you later, Al. Try not to let the limey do anything that’ll land him in handcuffs on YouTube tonight.”

  “I… wait, YouTube?”

  “Huh.” Will paused, scratched his chin. “Thought for sure you would have seen that by now.”

  “Seen what?”

  “Well now don’t go taking that tone, Allie. Somebody shot a thirty or so second video clip of Mason’s arrest the other night is all.”

  “That’s all? That’s all?” Allie’s anger found a new target. Or rather the same target, but for a different reason. If Wesley hadn’t pushed the issue, Mason never would have been arrested. It’s not like bar fights weren’t common enough, and unless there was property destruction or serious injury, Will tended to let the bar owners handle it.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t know about this.” Obviously, she’d been so wrapped up in her own issues that she hadn’t given a second thought to how any of this was affecting Mason. Her blood began to boil at the idea that someone could so selfishly try to cash in on his celebrity just to gain a little notoriety for themselves. “Who put it on YouTube?”

  “Easy Tiger. A man in Mason’s position has lawyers and whatnot to deal with this sort of thing. And it’s not like he’s not used to being in the spotlight.”

  “There’s a difference between being on stage or on screen and in having your private life invaded.”

  “True enough,” Will acknowledged. “But I talked to the man, and he seems to have it under control. Listen Al, I’m sorry I said anything. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  Allie heaved out a sigh. “No, I’m glad you told me.” Seeing the concern on her brother’s face, she laid a hand on his arm. “Go ahead and check your ‘line’ before whatever was nibbling gets away. I’ll be fine. I promise.”

  He hesitated, but then nodded. “Okay. Have a good time tonight, which is probably what I should have said in the first place without being such a smartass.”

  “Willis, if you stopped being a smartass, I think the world would spin right off its axis.”

  “It seems to be a family trait.”

  When he’d gone, Allie knelt down next to the grave. The earth was still disturbed, though the recent rain had helped flatten it a bit. “Disagreements, rifts and scandals,” she said aloud. “I wonder if you would be interested to know that our family is still prone to them.”

  Since, as Will mentioned, Cousin Eugene seemed inclined to let her do all the talking, Allie took daisies fro
m the basket and laid them on the grave.

  The baby’s breath she’d already disposed of.

  Arranging the flowers gave her something to keep her hands busy while she sifted through the emotional residue of the day.

  She could absolutely blame Wesley for his callousness today, but she knew, logically, that she couldn’t hold him entirely responsible for Mason’s arrest being posted on the internet. She’d provoked him, he’d reacted. Mason had reacted to that and then some opportunist in this day and age of social media mania had done what people with cell phones and an internet connection tended to do – tried to attract attention.

  It was annoying, and there was no question that she felt guilty for setting that chain of events in motion, but getting angry over things you couldn’t control was probably no more productive than feeling sad about them.

  She only hoped it didn’t do too much damage to Mason’s public image, or that he wasn’t in violation of his contract in some way. Much as she didn’t want to bring it all up again, she would ask him about it tonight.

  The air changed direction, and where once it had carried the fresh scent of new life, this time it bore the smell of decay that was an integral part of the marshy areas around the river. Clouds moved over the sun, and as Allie glanced up, noted the bruised looking sky, she thought they just might get another passing shower. It seemed they were destined for a wet and muggy spring.

  And buggy, she added, slapping at whatever insect had lighted on her arm. But Lord knew it wouldn’t be the Lowcountry otherwise.

  She tilted her head to study the flowers she’d arranged in front of the headstone. She wondered if Eugene’s father had ever come by here, laid flowers on his son’s grave. If he’d regretted the hardness that had come between them before death brought a final separation. Surely his mother would have, even if she’d been loath to go against her husband’s wishes, as women so often were at that time. Of course, not every woman took motherhood to heart.

  Hers certainly hadn’t.

  “Getting maudlin again,” she muttered as she pushed to her feet. Considering, she bent over to pick up one of the gerbera daisies. “Even if your family abandoned you,” she told Eugene. “You had a friend who stood by you, who cared for you, even after death.”