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

by Dixie Browning

  Gus pulled the rabbit-print spread up over her back, lingered another moment, then eased back out into the hall.

  The sound of a muffled curse had him instantly flattening his body against the wall. He wasn’t a gun-toting man, but at a time like this he wouldn’t have minded the reassuring feel of a chunk of cold steel in his hands.’ He had a woman and a child to protect. And while he was pretty good with his fists, if there happened to be more than a couple of them, and if they happened to be armed, he just might find himself slightly overmatched.

  There were at least two of them. They were in the living room. The lights were still off, but one of them had a penlight. From the noise they were making, he figured one of them was going through the drawers on the small chest that served as an end table. The other was over near the bookcase.

  “Watch that footstool, Eddie. I nearly broke my neck fallin’ over it,” one of them said.

  “Cripes, there ain’t nothing in here but junk, ” another one muttered.

  Junk, Gus thought wryly, that was piled, stacked and heaped out of reach of an extremely mobile eight- month-old baby. Jessie’s taste for bric-a-brac was notorious.

  “There’s the woman. She weren’t half bad, y’know.”

  “Too skinny. Me, I like more meat on my women.”

  Gus felt a sick lu rch in his belly and a film of cold sweat on his brow. He would kill them with his bare hands.

  “Hell, there ain’t nothin’ in here worth takin’! If you ain’t up to no action, go out to the car. Me, I ain’t leaving without a taste o’ them skin an’ bones. I’ll warm ‘er up, and if there’s anything left when I git finished, you kin have it. But, man, we come all this way, an’ I ain’t walkin’ outta here without some-thin’!”

  Over my dead body!

  Gus swore. The sound carried.

  “What was that?”

  “Turn on a damn light, Buck!”

  “What, an’ have ever’ neighbor in the woods comin’ down on us?”

  “There ain’t no neighbors, dammit! This place is stuck so far out in the woods, don’t nobody but muskrats even know where it’s at! Now come on, the bitch was carry in’ near ‘bout five hunnert bucks! You wuz the one said there’d be plenny more where that come from, so le’s find it an’ get the hell outta here!”

  Gus eased back into the kitchen. There on the shelf by the back door was Mariah’s toolbox. He had teased her about the contents, but he wasn’t laughing now. The short section of conduit she used as a lever for loosening outside valves just might, in the dark, pass for the barrel of a gun.

  If he’d known he was going to be facing down a couple of scumbags, he would have armed himself with something a lot more lethal than a length of galvanized pipe. Like maybe his power nailer. A few rounds from that should do the trick.

  They were arguing so fiercely Gus was able to move into position without being heard. With the wall at his back, he said quietly, “Now, then…you guys want to put your hands on your head and turn around real slow? I’d sure appreciate your cooperation.”

  The reaction was ludicrous, to put it mildly. One of them dropped whatever he’d had in his hands—Gus thought it might’ve bee n the ceramic dogwood box Mariah had transferred from the coffee table to the top bookshelf, well out of Jessie’s reach—at least until she figured out how to climb. On its way down, it struck the handle of a small plastic lawnmower with bells on the wheels, then hit the floor and broke with a loud crash.

  Calmly, Gus cut through a stream of gutter profanity. “I don’t want to have to shoot you guys, because you’re out of season, and I don’t have a license. On the other hand, I guess it’s always open season on vermin.”

  He congratulated himself on sounding laid-back. He wasn’t. His blood pressure was fit to blow a gasket. His mouth tasted like gunmetal. All he could think of was that Jessie and Mariah were sleeping just afew feet down the hall.

  Wrong.

  “What is it, Gus?” Mariah whispered, startling him so that he nearly dropped his weapon.

  “Nothing I can’t handle, Ri, go back to bed.”

  “I thought I heard Jessie. Wait a minute, I’ll turn on a light so—”

  He caught her hand and squeezed hard. He thought it was her left hand. He hoped so. “No problem, honey, go on back to bed. If Jessie wakes up, he’s going to want to get involved, and you know Jessie. The guy never did have much self-control.”

  He could almost hear the wheels spinning in her head.

  Jessie—a guy?

  “Back up, honey.” Backup! Make ‘em think we’ve got backup! “That is, go back into the kitchen and call the sheriff, will you? Looks like we caught us a couple of rats in our trap.”

  She was a quick study, he’d hand her that. In less than two minutes she had the law on the way. “Here, you hold the gun while I tie these jerks up. Careful now, the safety’s off. Don’t even breathe on that trigger.”

  Gus handed her the short length of pipe. Leaning close to her ear, he whispered, “Play along.”

  Then he moved swiftly to the kitchen, located a coil of leftover clothesline and grabbed a butcher knife out of the drawer. On his way back, he heard certain indications that Jessie wanted in on the act.

  Oboy.

  Some forty-five minutes later Gus heard the sheriff’s car stop at the end of the dirt road, then take a left into town. The guy had been a little too curious about who he was and what he was doing there with Mariah in the middle of the night, but he’d kept his mouth shut.

  Gus just hoped he would go on keeping it shut. Small towns were bad about gossip, even in this day and age, when the only rule was, there weren’t any rules.

  Slowly he began the process of coming down off an adrenaline high. His stomach growled, and he recognized the beginnings of a headache. He told himself that the good news was that the creeps who had snatched Mariah’s purse and would’ve snatched a hell of a lot more, were in custody. And that she had her house keys back, even if her money was long gone.

  The bad news was, it was raining again.

  “We might as well have breakfast.” Mariah leaned against the doorframe. She was wearing a yellow-flowered cotton bathrobe that had seen better days. On her, it looked like a million bucks. She had brushed her hair into a semblance of order, but she still didn’t look ready to face another day.

  Gus wondered if he was responsible for those shad ows under her eyes. All things considered, they hadn’t bad a whole lot of rest.

  “Jessie’s too wide awake to go back to sleep now,” she said. “I changed her and gave her a bottle, but it’s not going to buy much more time, I’m afraid. If you’re hungry, you’d better get on with breakfast.”

  He figured they’d been up for a couple of hours. It seemed like a lot longer than that. So far they’d avoided so much as a meeting of the eyes, much less any mention of what had happened between them a few hours ago.

  Much less what it all meant.

  Tension hung so heavy in the air Gus could almost taste it. That stubborn jaw of hers was all squared up for trouble. He watched her come to attention—chin up, back straight—just as if he hadn’t intimately explored every vertebra in that long, elegant spine of hers.

  As if she regretted what they’d done last night.

  As if she wanted him out of there.

  Gus fully intended to leave, but first he had a few things to say. He’d never been the type to sleep and run, and he wasn’t about to start now. Besides which, being kicked out of any woman’s life wasn’t exactly his favorite way to start a day.

  “Cereal will do for me,” he said gruffly, avoiding her eyes by the simple expedient of rummaging in the silverware drawer.

  “Fine. Then while you’re eating, I’ll shower and get Jessie up.”

  “Fine.”

  Dammit, she didn’t have to act like they were still strangers! What had happened last night might not have signaled orange blossoms, in-laws—the whole damn long-term bit—but it had meant something.
r />   At least, it had to him.

  Gus put the coffee on to brew. He poured Honey-Nut Crunch in a bowl, sliced a banana on top, ladled a couple of spoonfuls of sugar on top of that, and wet it down with milk.

  After Lisa, he should have known better. Another model, for cripe’s sake! He should’ve known better!

  To think he’d almost convinced himself that this one was different. He could have sworn that any woman who could cook pork chops and corn bread, collards and sweet potatoes the way she could—any woman who professed to like gardening, even if she wasn’t much good at it—had to be more than just another pretty face.

  He should’ve known better, Gus thought bitterly as he scraped the last few grains of wet sugar from the bottom of his bowl.

  So. He would say what he had to say to her, and then he would head for the hills. He sure as hell wasn’t going to hang around where he wasn’t welcome.

  But first he was going to ram home a few words of wisdom.

  Wisdom? Like what?

  Like, I almost made a mistake, Mariah?

  Like, I almost thought we had something going for, us. Thought I could fit into your life and you could fit into mine, and together, we might even make us a few little Jessies of our own?

  Yeah. Right. As if any woman who moved in the glitzy world all models seemed to prefer would be interested in giving it all up to settle down in a cabin in the mountains with a red-neck carpenter who, for the past couple of decades, had made a fine art of avoiding commitment.

  Gus washed his dishes and left them in the drainer. The bathroom was empty, so he showered quickly, packed his toothbrush, then gathered up the rest of his gear and crammed it into his duffel bag. He’d never been one for long goodbyes. Say what needed saying and hit the road, that was his motto.

  From the room down the hall he could hear Jessie’s chortling, which meant Mariah was getting her dressed, which usually included a fair amount of nose and neck tickling and some belly nuzzling.

  He was going to miss that young’un. Miss her real bad. Miss her almost as much as he was going to miss her Aunt Ri.

  Hell, he was even going to miss Muddy Landing.

  The phone rang and Mariah yelled out and asked him to get it. Gus figured it was the sheriff’s office, wanting one of them to come down and give a statement. They’d both done enough talking last night, but to be official, maybe it needed to be done in an official setting.

  “Brady residence,” he growled.

  Hesitation. And then, “Who’s this?” an unfamiliar masculine voice demanded.

  “Who wants to know?” Gus was in no mood to play guessing games.

  “This is Basil Brady. I was calling Mariah. Is she, uh, is she around? ”

  At 6:27a.m. ? Where the hell else would she be?

  Gus could hear unspoken questions sizzling like a live wire. Good. Let the bastard twist in the wind for a few minutes. He deserved it for taking his sister away from her work and dumping his problems into her lap without even asking if it was convenient.

  Even though the problem had turned out to be Jessie, who was worth any amount of inconvenience. “She’s getting Jessie dressed. Hang on, I’ll call her.”

  While Mariah talked to her brother, Gus took his gear out to the truck. She was still talking when he came back inside, and so he borrowed her tape measure—a tape measure, for crying out loud! In a toolbox!

  He measured the place where a dryer would go, and then measured the space between the kitchen sink and the refrigerator for a dishwasher.

  And then he stood in the back doorway and watched as a gentle rain beat down on the marsh grass along the river. The river that was not even a real river, but a creek.

  Some things, he thought, were not what they appeared to be. Some were. The trick was in knowing the difference.

  “Basil and Myrtiss are coming for Jessie,” Mariah said, pausing in the opposite doorway. “They’re between Brunswick and Darien, headed this way.”

  “Patched up all their differences, huh?” He didn’t give a sweet damn in hell about Basil and Myrtiss and their marital woes, but if she wanted to draw it out, he’d play along.

  “Myrtiss was upset because Basil was spending too much time working and not enough with her and the baby, and she needed more help but didn’t know how to get his attention.”

  Gus closed the back door and leaned against it. “Evidently she found a way.”

  Mariah shrugged. “They’re awfully young. Myrtiss is only twenty-two.”

  “At twenty-two you were, what? The assistant manager of Shatley’s feed and seed? With a houseful of kids, I guess y ou didn’t need any help.”

  “Myrtiss is different. She was the youngest in her family.”

  “Right. And you were the eldest.” Gus was beginning to get the picture. “I made coffee.”

  The pot was right there in plain sight.

  Her fingers pinched creases in the sash of her robe. “I see you’re all packed.”

  It was Gus’s turn to shrug. Why was it he couldn’t just come right out and demand a few answers?

  Such as whether or not last night had meant more to her than just a great lay.

  Such as whether or not she could turn her back on the glamorous kind of life she led as a model and be content as the wife of a small-time building contractor. Because she couldn’t have both. He couldn’t share her. No way would he be able to handle having every dude on three continents lusting after a picture of his wife in a skimpy bathing suit leaning up against a palm tree.

  Showing off clothes for a bunch of ladies—that would be different. But these days models did a lot more than just parade down a runway in some ladies’ department store.

  Why the devil didn’t I keep on going south?

  Mariah thought, He’s leaving. Anger seeped in to replace the sense of desolation that had settled over her when she’d seen his bed neatly spread, his closet empty, his truck pulled around in front of the house.

  It occurred to her that the only reason those two crooks had broken in last night was because Gus had moved both vehicles around back, out from under the dripping pine trees.

  Dear Lord, what if she’d been here alone with Jessie!

  “Gus, I haven’t thanked you yet—”

  He came away from the doorframe in one swift, sinuous motion, his mind still on what had happened between them in bed a few hours ago.“ Don’t. For crying out loud, Mariah, you don’t owe me any thanks.”

  “But if you hadn’t been here…well, I suppose I could’ve managed by myself, but I have to admit, you did come in handy.”

  He nearly strangled. “I came… in handy?”

  Mariah’s eyes narrowed. Gus’s widened. He was talking about the most fantastic sex he’d had in his entire life. What on earth wasshe talking about?

  “Well, at least it’s all over now, so we can both forget it.”

  Gus wanted to shake her until her ears rattled. He was seldom driven to violence—never with a woman. Before he’d met Mariah, that was. And it wasn’t violence he wanted to commit, it was lust.

  No, dammit, it was love!

  Barely containing his passion, he brushed past her and stalked down the hallway. With a sinking heart, Mariah followed the sound of his footsteps. In those battered Western boots, it was impossible not to. She heard Jessie’s warbled welcome. “Dus, Dus!” Jessie’s limited vocabulary had originally consisted of Mama, Daddy, Ri, no-no and doggy.

  Now it included Dus.

  Oh, Lord. Now everything was going to include Gus. Everything was going to remind her of him, and she didn’t know how she was going to stand it. Having him here had been a mistake. Making love to him had been a real blockbuster of a mistake!

  If only she’d been wearing her old gray sweats when she’d run into him instead of that new yellow linen outfit she’d bought at a big discount. If only she’d been wearing her glasses, those plastic-rimmed horrors she had hidden behind practically all her life until, in a fit of rebellion after Vance’s
defection, she had bought her first pair of contacts.

  Then Gus would have seen her the way she really was, and he would never have followed her to Muddy Landing, and after a while she would probably have forgotten all about him.

  Of course she would. And chickens would swim.

  Dammit, a woman needed to be loved for who she was, not for what she happened to look like! How could a love that was based on loo ks alone survive gray hair and wrinkles, jowls and veins and liver spots?

  The trouble was—and this was something she hadn’t dared admit, not even to herself—she was beginning to wonder just who the real Mariah was. Was she the woman who’d been so grateful for a little attention she’d ignored every shred of common sense she possessed?

  Or was she Vic’s creation? The creation he’d polished up and put on display for nearly a year?

  Which one was she? Neither? Both?

  Gus lifted Jessie out of her crib. He held her for a long time while she tugged at his beard and played with his bushy eyebrows. Evidently, whatever had ailed her no longer did. “Come on, possum, time to say goodbye,” he whispered.

  Mariah was waiting in the kitchen. She took the baby from his arms, plopped her in the high chair and handed her a cracker.

  Then she turned to Gus. “I don’t suppose you’ll call and let me know you got home safely,” she said, as though it was a foregone conclusion.

  “Do you want me to? “

  “To call?” She shrugged. “It’s up to you. Don’t bother if you’d rather not.”

  They were both dancing all around the subject foremost on their minds. They both knew it. Gus reached for her just as she bent to retrieve the cracker Jessie had thrown on the floor. His arms fell back to his sides. “Sure. I’ll give you a call. If you’re going to be here.”

  “Where else would I be?”

  “No telling,” he said, and tried to make it sound as if the answer wasn’t vitally important. “So, look…I’d better be shoving off, but if you ever need anything…That is, if you find out…” How the hell did a guy tell his lady that if she found herself pregnant—or even wanting to be—he’d burn up the highway getting back to her? “Mariah, if you ever need—”