Table of Contents
Cover Page
Excerpt
About the Authors
Books by Peg Sutherland
Title Page
Part One: Spring
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Part Two: Autumn
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Epilogue
Copyright
“But it’s not his baby, Floretha. I just know it’s…Red Jannik’s.”
Trent’s heart stopped at Harper’s words. Every rose-colored dream he’d had the past week died.
“Oh, lordy, child, how on earth did you get things into such a state?” The housekeeper’s mournful voice broke through Trent’s rage.
“That’s a real good question, Harper,” he said.
He heard the sharp intake of her breath. “Trent, no—”
“Save it,” he snapped. The last time he’d felt this crushed, this betrayed, this much the damned fool, had been the day Freddie Benton told him what his mother really did with Farrell Landen up at the big house. That day he’d felt murder in his heart. And he felt it now, too. He wheeled and stalked out of the house, ignoring Harper’s tortured voice as she called after him.
Harper rose to her feet and walked toward the door. She had to explain. She reached the parking area behind the barns in time to see the cloud of dust left behind as Trent’s Chevy roared toward the lane. She ran after it, calling his name, mindless of the dust on her new graduation dress.
The dress that was to have been her wedding dress.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Leigh Greenwood is an award-winning historical author, perhaps best known for his highly acclaimed Seven Brides series. Only You is his first contemporary romance. Leigh, who is involved with the Romance Writers of America, was also a teacher and musician for several years. He was born in North Carolina, where he still resides with his wife, Anne, and one of his three children. Anne and Leigh are no strangers to long-term romance, having recently celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary.
Peg Sutherland is also an award-winning author and has been writing for Superromance for the past seven years. Her critically acclaimed books have made her one of our most popular authors. In an interesting twist, in Only You Peg has written the historical parts of the story. Like Leigh, Peg is also involved with the RWA. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband, Mike.
Books by Peg Sutherland
HARLEQUIN SUPERROMANCE
673—DOUBLE WEDDING RING (3 WEDDINGS & A SECRET)
675—ADDY’S ANGELS (3 WEDDINGS & A SECRET)
679—QUEEN OF THE DIXIE DRIVE-IN (3 WEDDINGS & A SECRET)
734—AMY (SISTERS Trilogy)
Don’t miss any of our special offers. Write to us at the following address for information on our newest releases.
Harlequin Reader Service
U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269
Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3
ONLY YOU
Leigh Greenwood & Peg Sutherland
PART ONE: SPRING
CHAPTER ONE
Collins, South Carolina, 1968
HARPER WEDDINGTON wasn’t his type. But she was exactly what he was looking for. Trent knew that the first time he saw her.
Fender backed up to a fire hydrant on Broad Street, he sprawled in the front seat of his bondo-and-rust-colored ’61 Chevy with its cracked vinyl seat and dangling left headlight. With part of the twenty-dollar bill in his back jeans pocket—his last folding money—he’d bought a soft drink and a bag of hot, greasy fries at the drugstore lunch counter. He was wondering whether he could make his fortune in Collins, South Carolina, when a black-and-white police car purred to a stop beside him.
Frowning, Trent took a long swallow of his drink and watched over the rim of the paper cup as the local cop approached. The cop wore that same distrustful expression Trent inspired in everyone over the age of thirty.
“Howdy,” Trent drawled.
The cop nodded, but barely. “See your license.”
It wasn’t a question and Trent didn’t like orders. But he studied his opponent and the patrol car that blocked his retreat. Anchoring his cup between his thighs, he slipped two fingers into his back pocket. He took his time opening the denim wallet his mother had bought him for Christmas, then let the license dangle from his fingertips.
The representative of Collins’s official welcoming committee studied the photo, then studied Trent’s face. “Gordon Elliott Trent, outta Whitlaw, South Carolina. You a long way from home, son.”
“Yep.”
“You got business here in Collins?”
Measuring his reply, Trent took another swallow of the watered-down soft drink while the officer peered into the back seat at the windblown pile of jeans and T-shirts.
“I reckon I’m looking for work,” Trent said.
The officer clicked Trent’s license against his knuckles. “Not many employment opportunities in front of a fire hydrant, son.”
Trent feigned an innocent gaze. “Am I parked illegally, Officer? Now that sure was careless of me.”
“Maybe it’d be better if you went elsewhere for…”
The roar of a souped-up engine muffled the officer’s words. A candy-apple red convertible had careened into the middle of Broad Street and paused beside the black-and-white. Psychedelic rock polluted the air. The ragtop was crammed full of teenage boys who had trouble stamped all over their smirking faces. Hoods, Trent’s mom would call them.
But the only passenger Trent noticed was the driver.
She knocked a hole in his gut, that’s how beautiful she was. Her jet-black curls were cropped short in a style that was nothing like the stiff flip every small-town beauty queen in South Carolina was wearing this year. Her skin was like white china at the big house where Trent’s mom worked, touched by spots of color high on her cheeks and a bow of dark red on her lips, also unlike the death-mask pink most girls were copying out of fashion magazines.
The volume of the music came down.
“Afternoon, Officer Monk,” she said, her voice a sugary, taunting drawl that grabbed Trent by the crotch and throttled him breathless. “Did you realize by any chance that you are obstructing traffic here on Broad Street?”
All the boys in the convertible laughed, and Trent hated each and every one of them.
“You run along, Miss Harper. This here is official business.”
She peered at Trent then, pursing her lips until a dimple appeared in her right cheek. “He looks dangerous to me, Officer Monk. I’d lock him up if it were me.”
Then the laughter rolled over Trent again, the music cranked up and she vanished in a V-8 rumble. She wasn’t his type—Trent leaned toward the sweet, freckled type who were so darned easy to lead astray—but he knew exactly what the quickening of his pulse meant.
“Who was that?” he asked without meaning to, without stopping to think that his arrogant smirk had disappeared.
“That’s Miss Harper Weddington, son. ‘Bout the only one in town likely to be more trouble than you.”
Weddington. Trent barely listened as Officer Monk lectured him about illegal parking and told him that Collins had no place f
or him. Trent murmured, “Yessir,” and pulled away from the curb while Monk watched in silent satisfaction. But the cogs in Trent’s mind whirred noisily, spinning fantasies about Miss Harper Weddington.
He’d seen the sign on his way into town, a massive wooden sign over the entrance to a long, winding drive, all of it bordered by an immaculate white picket fence, leading to a house that couldn’t be seen from the highway. Weddington Farms, the sign had read. He’d seen the name once again after he passed the town limit sign, this time etched in the massive granite marker directly across from the row of shops along Broad Street. Weddington Textiles.
Yes, Miss Harper Weddington, with her candy-apple convertible and half the town named after her, was exactly what Trent was looking for.
HARPER KNEW IT WAS half-past dinner when she wheeled to a stop behind the house, spitting gravel and dust on the farmhands gathered by the paddock fence. She had a moment of unease until she remembered she wouldn’t be seeing Red Jannik. He was gone; her daddy had seen to that.
Probably the only thing Sam had ever done that pleased her was running off Red Jannik.
She killed the engine, ran her fingers through her tangled curls and stepped out of the car. She paused by the hood, waiting to capture the attention of all her daddy’s hired hands. When she had it, she smiled and wiggled the tips of her fingers at them. “Hey, boys!”
Some of them called back. Some of them grinned. Some of them, who knew what had happened to Red Jannik and didn’t want it happening to them, ignored her.
Harper laughed and marched toward the house, letting her hips sway more than was decent. Her smile faded as soon as her back was to them.
Her heart wasn’t in that particular little game any longer. But she’d been acting as long as she could remember. What was a little more? Just enough to see her through to graduation. Then she was out of here. Collins, South Carolina, could kiss her fanny goodbye.
Floretha looked up, shook her head in disapproval but didn’t speak when Harper walked through the kitchen. Harper stopped and leaned her hip against the big wooden table and plucked a slice of peeled apple from the bowl Floretha was working over. The tiny woman’s dark head was sprinkled with gray, although she wasn’t yet forty.
“Apple cobbler?” Harper popped the apple into her mouth.
“Apple muffins for breakfast.” The woman’s velvet voice had the hard edge she reserved for new kitchen help and the bad child she’d had a hand in raising. “Which you wouldn’t be getting into if you weren’t late for supper.”
“Dinner,” Harper corrected her, studying the brown chapped fingers of the older woman. “You know Leandra would be mortified to hear you talking about supper. ‘They eat suppah in the trailah pahks.’”
Harper giggled at her exaggerated imitation of her mother, but Floretha gave no sign of amusement. “You show a little respect, child.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Harper said, all hint of mockery banished from her voice. “Guess I might as well get it over with.”
“Reckon you might as well.”
On her way out of the kitchen, Harper gave the big-as-a-minute servant a hug and drew a deep breath before shoving open the door to the butler’s pantry. She stood in the narrow passageway, surrounded by shelves of silver serving trays and crystal candy dishes, and listened for voices in the dining room. Silence.
That won’t last long, she thought.
She looked down at the amount of leg showing below her miniskirt, at the rib-knit top clinging to her generous curves, and knew she would not be considered dressed for dinner. She also knew that anyone who came close enough would get a whiff of corn liquor on her breath—a touch she’d added by design. All but the single swallow she’d taken was still in the mason jar beneath the seat of her car.
Ready or not…
She tossed out her smile as she sashayed into the dining room and took her seat. “Mother. Daddy.”
Her first thought as she took them in was how pathetically predictable they were. But she supposed the same could be said of her. Predictably outrageous.
Leandra Harper Weddington, however, was predictable in a way that left everyone around her feeling frostbitten. Still lovely, Leandra looked every inch the society matron. Her choice in clothes leaned to cashmere twin sets and doublestrand pearls. She had recently asked her hairdresser to soften the color of her ebony hair— more suitable as forty approached. Her makeup was soft and her body starved to slender grace. A pillar of the community, she buried herself in charities and church committees.
Harper wondered, however, if anyone in all of Collins liked her mother. If so, she’d missed that particular rumor.
Then there was Sam. Big, ruddy Sam with the slash of a dimple angled across his right cheek. Sam, who had a smile for everybody but his daughter. Sam was so homely anybody who didn’t know how rich he was would wonder how he’d landed a beautiful wife like Leandra.
Sam couldn’t seem to get it through his head that his daughter couldn’t be controlled as easily as his lovely wife. He seemed to believe that his daughter, after seventeen years of being headstrong and disrespectful, would miraculously blossom into a sweet-tempered, easily led young debutante. A freshman at a fancy, deadly dull girl’s college in Atlanta.
“Well, missy,” Sam said before Harper could transfer a roll from the silver bread basket to her bread plate. “Can’t be bothered to get home in time for dinner, I see.”
Leandra passed the platter of stuffed pork chops.
“Sorry, Daddy.” Harper flashed the smile that no longer had the power to charm Sam Weddington, but at least he paid attention now. At least there were no more long, silent dinners when her voice seemed to startle both her parents, as if they had forgotten her existence.
No, when Harper reached her teens, she realized she had the power to capture her father’s attention. Leandra remained too cool to get down in the dirt with her daughter, but Sam was a scrapper.
Like his daughter.
“Sorry? That’s all you’ve got to say?” Sam sounded incensed. “Push me too far and I’ll take that fancy red car away. You’ll have to ride the school bus with the country riffraff. Then you’ll be home in time for dinner.”
Harper buttered her roll. She knew he wouldn’t take the car again, because he’d learned the last time that Harper would simply take to riding in jalopies with all the town’s most notorious whitetrash boys. Now, at least, they rode with her in style.
“I was at the library, Daddy,” she said, knowing he would realize she was lying. “And I got so caught up in…in the life of Karl Marx that I lost all track of time. I was thinking I might become a Communist when I grow up.”
Sam shook his fork at her. “Don’t mock me, girl.”
Harper could play the simpering little girl with Sam for only so long before she lost her temper.
“I’m not a child any longer,” she argued, digging the stuffing out of her chop and nudging it to one side on her plate. “I’ll be eighteen in a few months. Old enough to do whatever I please.” .
And what pleased her was to blow this joint. As soon as the stupid graduation exercise was over in May, she would hit the road. She had her savings and her car, and the only other thing she needed was a road map from Tolly’s Texaco on Broad Street. She might go to New York and become an actress. Or maybe to New Orleans and become a stripper—why not get paid for letting stupid men make fools of themselves?
Most of the time, though, she thought of San Francisco. There, she would find other people like her, people who were tired of the hypocrisy of grown-ups. The idea of being a flower child held great appeal for Harper. She just hoped everyone wouldn’t give up and go home before she got there.
The daydreams kept her going.
“When you’re eighteen,” Sam was saying, “you’ll go on up to Agnes Scott and get an education. And until then—”
“I’m not going to that stupid girl’s college and you can’t make me,” Harper said, realizing too late how much like
a ten-year-old she’d sounded.
“Amanda, stop provoking your father.” Leandra was the only one in the world who still refused to call Harper by her middle name. With everyone but her mother, Harper had almost lived down the first thirteen years of her life, when the world had known her as Mandy.
“Mother, who are you talking to?” she asked, trying to match her mother’s frigid tone and knowing she would never be that good.
Sam flung his linen napkin onto his plate. “That does it! Missy, I—”
Not to be outdone, Harper jumped up from the table before he could dismiss her like a child. “If you’ll both excuse me, I think I’ll retire for the evening.”
Then she sashayed out as provocatively as she had sashayed in, ignoring Sam’s outraged bellows. All the way up the winding staircase, she heard the heated rumble of Sam’s voice, followed by the empty silence that would be her mother’s aloof presence. She closed her bedroom door behind her, shutting them out, the way they had always shut her out.
She thought of calling Annie Kate. But sometimes Harper thought that even her best friend disapproved of the way Harper carried on around town. Sometimes Harper thought the only reason Annie Kate put up with her was because the Weddingtons were the richest people in town.
She thought of crawling into bed and crying herself to sleep, but Harper no longer believed that tears helped even a tiny little bit.
She thought of climbing out the window and going to the car for the jar of white lightning. But even corn liquor didn’t make things less ugly anymore.
TRENT POKED AROUND the musty room and figured it was no worse than the other places he’d stayed since he left home.
And it had the added benefit of being a few hundred feet behind the barn at Weddington Farms, which was just a few hundred feet behind the big house. A rush of excitement sang through Trent’s veins. His plan was off the ground.
Only You Page 1