The Beauty, the Beast and the Baby (Man of the Month)

by Dixie Browning

  “If I need help, there are any number of people I can call on. I have friends in Muddy Landing, believe it or not.”

  Behind them, Jessie studiously fingered the dozen or so keys on the ring. Finding the one she was searching for, she gummed it contentedly while Gus and Mariah glared at each other.

  Mariah gave in first. She sighed heavily. “All right, if you insist, I’ll call Basil’s answering service and leave word for him to have a car seat delivered. He’s into computers. People with computers can send anything anywhere.”

  “They use car seats on the information highway?” Gus quirked a brow, wanting to take her in his arms. Not quite daring to touch her. She looked tired and worried and fragile, which only made him want her more. If there was one thing he’d always been a sucker for, it was a woman who needed him. Anything that needed him. Which meant he usually ended up getting in way over his head, he reminded himself.

  “Look, why don’t I stick around until tomorrow, and we’ll see what can be had around these parts. Even people in Muddy Landing have babies and cars, don’t they?”

  It was hours later, long after Mariah had put Jessie down for the night and turned in herself, that Gus’s restlessness drove him into the living room. TV was a washout. Freaks interviewing freaks. A science-fiction movie about creatures with heads that resembled English walnuts.

  He switched it off and picked up yesterday’s newspaper, then put it down again. The place was a mess, but oddly enough, it was a comfortable mess. Kind of homey. Gus couldn’t remember the last time he’d thought in terms of “homey.”

  There was still that damned box of books, though. He’d manhandled it in and out of her car, in and out of her motel room—at least he could unpack the thing and get it out of her living room. No telling when she’d get around to unpacking it, what with the baby, and her hand still bothering her.

  Raking aside a few old books and a collection of whatnots on the oak shelves, he made room and began taking out books, hardback and paperback, a handful at a time. He was about two layers down when he found the album. It never even occurred to him not to open it, and once he did, there was no turning back.

  A couple squinting in the sun, standing beside a 1950 Pontiac. Her parents? The man was tall, the woman small. She stood in his shadow, literally and probably figuratively. There were several more snapshots of the woman with two kids, a boy and a girl. No more of the man. One of the woman with the two kids and a baby on her lap. Gus figured the baby must be Burdina, the boy obviously Basil. He’d looked like a nerd even then. The tallest kid had to be Mariah. For a long time he studied the skinny little girl in the sagging dress, with the tight braids and the knobby knees. She wore glasses. She hadn’t been a pretty child, he could tell that much even though she was looking down at her bare feet in most of the pictures.

  Poor kid, her mama hadn’t even bothered to tie a bow on the ends of her pigtails. Probably hadn’t had time.

  Gus leafed through the album, lingering over all the pictures he could find of Mariah. There weren’t many. After a few more pages the woman disappeared and most of the pictures were of the school variety. None of the kids, so far as Gus could see, bore any resemblance to the Mariah he knew. One of them—he figured it might be the one called Alethia—had the same delicately stubborn jaw that made Mariah’s face so distinctive. The pair of them, he thought, must have been a handful.

  He was closing the book when the two eight-by-ten glossies slipped out. They were professional shots, obviously not a part of the family album. He started to’ shove them back in place when a familiar pair of legs caught his attention. Long, lean, glistening with oil, they were made even longer by one of those bathing suits that was cut all the way up to the waist.

  The model was standing on a beach, the wind blowing her hair across her face, blowing an oversize, transparent top that was held together by a single finger against her body. The top part of her face was covered by her hair, leaving only a portion of it v isible. A portion that included a wide, sweetly curved mouth and a firm but delicate jaw.

  Gus swore softly. Anger shot through him, bitter as gall. With bleak eyes, he stared down at the two pho tos, the other one not quite so revealing, and then he slid them back inside the album and placed it back in the box.

  Eight

  They got it all out in the open the following morning. Gus felt like the very devil. He hadn’t slept until nearly daylight, and then he’d thought about Dina, who had broken his heart nearly twenty years ago, and Lisa, who had bruised his ego only a few weeks ago. He dreamed the pair of them had pulled up to the bank of the Little Charlie River in a yacht the size of an aircraft carrier and asked for Gus.

  He’d tried to tell them he was Gus, but they’d laughed and told him to go find Gus, and then he’d found himself on a scaffold trying to find his way into the second story of a two-story house that had neither stairs nor windows.

  All in all, he’d had better dreams.

  “Were you going to tell me about your other career, or are you into playing games?” He’d confronted Mariah the moment she’d entered the kitchen, angry because she’d deceived him, angry because he didn’t want to care. And he did.

  “My other—Oh. You mean modeling. How did you find out?”

  Gus’s sneer would have done credit to a B-movie villain. “You mean, I wasn’t supposed to find those pictures? I thought that was why you’d left the box sitting out so long.”

  “Oh, Gus, for heaven’s sake. I left it out because with everything stacked out of Jessie’s reach, I didn’t have room to unpack it. And anyway, what difference does it make?”

  “That’s what you were doing down in Florida, right?”

  “So?” Her tone dared him to make something of it.

  “So? So what’s the big secret? What was all that gar bage about being a clerk in a hardware store?”

  “I worked at Grover’s store for twelve years—more than that, if you count a part-time job after school. I was a model for less than a year.”

  ”Why’d you quit?”

  She looked at him as if he’d lost his wits. “Because Basil needed me. You know that.”

  “There has to be another reason. No woman walks away from a modeling career just to baby-sit her brother’s kid.”

  “Well, this one did.”

  “But you’re going back, right? All this business about looking for a job around here…it’s so much moonshine, isn’t it?”

  “Do you want bacon or sausage with your eggs?”

  “Sausage! Are you going back, or aren’t you?”

  “Whether I do or not, it’s nothing to do with you. I’m not Lisa.”

  No, she wasn’t Lisa. Mariah was…well, she was Mariah. Which was one of the reasons this thing had hit him so hard.

  And then she dropped the iron skillet. It slipped out of her right hand, landed on the floor, and cart-wheeled over onto Gus’s foot. He swore, snatched up the heavy pan and set it on the stove. “Go sit down, I’ll make breakfast,” he growled. “I told you you were trying to do too much with that hand of yours! You can’t even take care of yourself, much less a kid!”

  Furious, Mariah stalked out.

  Frustrated, Gus watched her go.

  The next two days were both strange and strained. Gus found one excuse after another to hang around. Tempers sparked and then fizzled. They quarreled over nothing at all, apologized and then quarreled again. Gus told himself it was like being married with all the responsibilities and none of the perks, and increasingly, it was the perks he wanted.

  Sharing the small intimacies of daily living with Mariah left him in a near constant state of arousal, which was how he rationalized his short temper.

  He wondered what her exc use was.

  Forcing himself to ignore his most pressing masculine instincts, Gus repaired ancient plumbing, replaced a section of railing on the small back stoop, and soldered several pinhole leaks in the old copper pipes. He thought of a dozen reasons to leave and two
dozen reasons to stay.

  As her hand slowly mended, Mariah dug up shrubs from one side of the yard and replanted them on the other. Gus thought she was slightly nuts. Even so, it was all he could do to keep from removing the spade from her hands, laying her down on the sweet-smelling pinestraw, and making love to her until neither of them could remember all the reasons why they shouldn’t.

  Basil checked in a couple of times. He’d found Myrtiss. They were working things out. Jessie was a constant source of amazement. Gus knew next to nothing about babies, but he was learning fast. Twice he drove into town to the hardware store and the cluttered country store that passed for a supermarket in a village of several hundred souls. There he had ample opportunity to observe other members of the human species in the larval stage.

  “Y’know, I notice some babies are pretty noisy. Screaming, whining, kicking up a fuss at the least little thing. Is that normal?” he asked. They’d both been working outside; Mariah hanging laundry on the clothesline he’d mended and then pulling up handfuls of chickweed, Gus shoring up the shed that was threatening to tumble in on itself. Now they were taking a break.

  “I’m no expert,” she murmured lazily, her eyes closed against the sun. “I suppose babies are just like anyone else. Some whine. Some don’t.”

  Gus leaned back, placing his elbows on the step above the one on which he sat, which, incidentally, gave him an excellent view of the top of Mariah’s head and her long, muddy-kneed legs on the steps below.“ Jessie doesn’t whine, do you, possum blossom? when Miss Jessie wants something, she map s out a plan of action and then puts it in gear. This morning, while you were in the shower, I watched her set her sights on that wastebasket over by the green-striped chair. She thought about it for a few minutes—you could practically see the wheels turning—then, damned if she didn’t slide down off the sofa, grab the coffee table and work her way around so she could grab hold of the chair, and then she—”

  “Gus, you didn’t let her reach it, did you? Darn it, you know she eats everything she gets her hands on!”

  He was in no mood to fight. “Tell me about it,” he said dryly, combing- his beard with his fingers. The little dickens had yanked on it, chewed on it and mas saged a good part of every meal into it. She got more food on his outside than she did her own inside. He’d been down to his last clean shirt this morning.

  Eyeing the line of freshly washed clothes flapping in the soft Georgia breeze, he knew a moment of embarrassment. While he was in the shower, Mariah had gathered up his clothes and tossed them into the washer along with her own and Jessie’s. Now, there they hung, together in all their intimacy—her skimpies, his boxers, her sweats, his khakis, a row of Jessie’s tiny garments and three of his shirts.

  Sunlight shafted down from the pines and the tall, moss-hung cypress trees that shaded a good portion of her backyard. “Your pines are dripping all over my truck,” he said, lacking the energy to move both vehicles around back.

  “Sorry. Sap’s rising.”

  Boy, was it ever! In an effort to quell his own rising sap, Gus inhaled the mingled scent of resin, damp earth and the rich, marshy essence of the nearby river. From somewhere in the distance came the rapid-fire sound of a woodpecker. Actually, Muddy Landing wasn’t half bad, he decided. Quiet, peaceful. The kind of place that lagged half a century behind the rest of the world. A guy could get addicted to this kind of life….

  Which was just one more sign that he’d better start thinking about moving on before he got sucked in any deeper. No woman who had tasted the kind of life she obviously had would be content with life in a small town for very long.

  He glanced at the playpen where Jessie, a plastic mixing bowl forgotten on her head, studiously examined a muddy, starfish-shaped hand. She’d been reaching out through the playpen fence, sampling the dirt on all four sides. Gus figured it was probably pretty clean dirt after all the rain they’d had.

  Once the rain had stopped, the weather had turned unseasonably warm. Made a man lazy—too lazy to fight. Too lazy even to fight off temptation, when he knew damn well there was no future in it.

  His gaze shifted to where Mariah lay sprawled in drowsy abandon on the steps below him. She was wearing a pair of baggy shorts and a man’s shirt, one bare foot toying with the handle of her spade. He pictured her the way she’d looked in that eight-by-ten glossie, her legs exposed up to her waist and that sexy, see-through top held with one finger.

  This was even sexier. She’d piled her hair up on top of her head and now it was sliding down in curling tendrils. Her skin—or at least, the parts of it that were visible—had already turned a deeper shade of ivory from working outdoors in the dappled sunlight. Gus thought he’d never in all his born days seen anything quite so delectable as the shallow valley of her nape.

  “I’d better do something about lunch,” she murmured, stirring reluctantly. “I’m beginning to feel a mite peckish.”

  “Yeah, and I’d better finish up the shed and think about heading north.”

  He was beginning to feel a mite peckish, too, but he had an idea they were talking about two different kinds of hunger. Every morning since he’d arrived, he had made up his mind to leave before the day ended. Last night he’d almost split without even sayin g goodbye.

  Yet here he was. He tried to tell himself it was because of Jessie—because a scrap of blue-eyed mischief in baggy diapers had dug herself a place in his heart and refused to get out—but he knew better. He’d fallen under the spell of a woman who made it too easy to believe what he wanted to believe and not what experience had taught him.

  Once bitten, they said, twice shy. Gus had been bit-ten once too often. This time he knew better than to get within striking distance.

  At supper that night Jessie was fretful, which wasn’t at all like her. After flinging handfuls of liver and green beans in all directions, she deliberately threw her bowl to the floor, then glared at Gus, her stubborn little chin set in a way that reminded him of her Aunt Ri. Her big blue eyes seemed to say, “Go ahead, sucker, make my day.”

  Gus was on to her methods. Women were women, even in the infant stage.“ Listen, possum, if I didn’t think you’d enjoy it too much I’d make you climb down out of that contraption and clean up the mess yourself.” His gruff tone was nullified by the big, gentle hand that was tenderly holding one small, fat foot.

  “Let me,” Marish said tiredly, rising just as Gus did. After washing and hanging clothes, she’d spent the rest of the day moving plants. To Gus’s untutored eyes, the yard didn’t look any better than it had when she’d started out, but then, he was no more expert on landscaping than he was on babies. Maybe he would get Angel to send her some books.

  They both reached for Jessie at the same time, and their arms tangled. Automatically, he steadied her by clasping her upper arms, and for one brief moment she allowed her head to fall tiredly forward onto his shoulder.

  Gus shut his eyes and struggled with his private demons. “You’re asleep on your feet,” he accused softly.

  “Too much digging. I’m out of practice. Yoga just do esn’t do it for me anymore, not that it ever did.”

  Yoga? He hadn’t a clue what she was talking about. At the moment, he didn’t care. It was all he could do to resist the urge to sweep her into his arms and carry her off to the nearest bed. He’d seen electromagnets less powerful than this thing, whatever it was, that had sprung up between them.

  Mariah sighed. “I’d better get her bathed and into bed. If she’s coming down with something, I’m going to have to track Basil down and find out what to do. Maybe she’s just cutting another tooth. Do you think that could be it?”

  “I expect that’s all that’s wrong with her,” Gus said, trying to sound as if he knew what he was talking about. He’d noticed she was favoring her right hand again. He’d warned her not to go at it so hard, but once the woman got a shovel in her hands, she was unstoppable.“ Look, you just peel her down and run her a bath while I put the dishes in to soak.
I’ll take it from here. You got anything to drink? You look like you could use a good muscle relaxant.”

  “Gus, you don’t have to—”

  “Don’t waste energy arguing. Now, march! Hup- two,hup-two!”

  He watched her collect a grizzling Jessie and tried not to be affected by the way her shoulders sagged, by the shadows under her eyes. He had an idea she might have gotten up a few times during the night. Sleeping in the same room with a fussy baby, it would be hard not to.

  He wished now he’d never confronted her with those damned pictures and demanded to know what kind of a game she was playing.

  Wished he’d never even found the things.

  Furthermore, that jerk, Basil, had no right to dump his kid off on a woman who’d just been through a mugging, had her hand busted, been forced to spend a night in a motel with a stranger, and then had to drive herself all the way home. Gus would never dream of imposing on his own sis ter the way this Basil guy did Mariah. Sure, Angel might do a little mending for him whenever he stopped off in Durham for a visit. She even cooked him the occasional meal, but he always took care to return the favor. Hell, he’d practically rebuilt her whole house!

  What had this Basil guy ever done for Mariah, besides leave her here to wither away in the wilderness, at the mercy of any smooth-talking tractor salesman who happened by? Was that any way to treat a lady?

  Hell, no, it wasn’t! Stacking dishes haphazardly in the sink, Gus ran scalding water over them and made up his mind that tomorrow he was going to locate a locksmith and have every lock in her house changed. Next he would find an appliance store and buy her a dishwashing machine. And a dryer, while he was at it. A woman like Mariah, whether or not she ever returned to modeling, had no business holed up here in the swamp, with the nearest neighbor a bee-keeping old hermit who lived almost a mile down the road.