Only You

by Peg Sutherland

  “Don’t expect you’ll be here long, anyway,” said the leather-faced farmhand who had introduced himself as Nigel. “Sam don’t like the hands livin’ on the place anymore, so we’ve all got rooms in town. Expect you’ll find somebody in the gang to bunk with before long.”

  “Sure.” But Trent had no intention of looking too hard.

  Nigel was passing him the key and offering to help him bring things in from his car when voices drifted in the open front door of the one-room cabin. Nigel froze and so did Trent.

  “I don’t know who told you that ugly old story, but it’s just plain mean of you to believe it,” grumbled the sweet, petulant voice of Miss Harper Weddington.

  Trent hadn’t been able to get her off his mind since laying eyes on her the afternoon before. With her so vivid in his memory, his plan had crystalized quickly. He could see it all unfolding, and it was perfect.

  This one’s for you, Mama, he thought.

  The next voice thrust itself into Trent’s reverie like the grunt of a bulldozer upending concrete and gravel. “Missy, I’ve got the jar right here. Came right out from under the seat of your car. So don’t think you can sweet-talk your way out of this one.”

  Her laughter trilled through the spring air. Trent felt himself stir at the sound.

  “Oh, Daddy, anybody could have put that there. One of your farmhands probably did it just to set you off.”

  Where her voice had warmed Trent it now sent a chill through him, hardening his heart and his jaw. No matter how sweet the voice, no matter how soft the skin, he couldn’t forget she was from the big house. And he knew what the people from the big house were like.

  Trent couldn’t afford to forget that he had a purpose here: to make them pay for all the times people like them had dumped on people like him and his mother.

  They were gone now, their voices fading as they passed. Nigel cleared his throat and dropped the key to the cottage into Trent’s palm. Once through the screen door, they paused again, both of them watching the barrel-chested man and young woman as she swished off. From the neck down, she was as stunning as she had been from the neck up the day before. Not tall, but all curves in a pair of tight jeans and a skimpy halter top. Trent felt the chill in him melt at the sight of her.

  “That’s the young miss of the house,” Nigel said. “Miss Harper. You’d best stay away from her. That’s how we lost our last foreman. Mr. Sam don’t cotton to the hands messing around with Miss Harper.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  ANNIE KATE THUMBED through a picture book of sex techniques called the Kama Sutra that her cousin from San Francisco had sent.

  “This is what all the hippies are doing.” Leaning against one of the beams in the loft of the barn, Annie Kate pointed to an illustration that Harper felt certain was anatomically impossible. “Exploring their freedom.”

  Harper propped her chin on her fists and stared out the window. She wasn’t interested in the explicit illustrations that so intrigued her friend. They made her feel queasy, but she was too cool to say so. “Big deal. Like you have to be in San Francisco to have free love.”

  “Well, if you have free love in Collins, every horny boy in town will know about it in forty-eight hours,” Annie Kate retorted. “You can ask Rowena Kudrow about that.”

  Harper used to look down on Rowena Kudrow, the way all the other girls at Collins Senior High did. Sometimes, these days, Harper felt less inclined to judge Rowena. But she was too cool to say that, too.

  “I’ve only got three more months in this hick town, anyway,” she said instead.

  Annie Kate slid across the bare wooden floor, closer to the narrow window overlooking a freshly tilled garden plot. “You’re really going to do it? Run away?”

  Harper frowned at her best friend. “It’s not running away if you’re grown. It’s splitting.”

  “And you’re not even scared, are you?”

  “Scared? Why should I be?” She hadn’t been afraid until recently. Harper had always figured she could handle anything. Now she wondered.

  “How will you support yourself? Where will you live? Will you have to find a job and—” Annie Kate leaned closer to the window and pushed her wirerimmed glasses higher on her long, sharp nose. “Who is that?”

  That was what Harper had been waiting for, lying here staring out the loft window.

  Sam had hired him two days ago, and so far Harper hadn’t been able to find out a thing about him. Nigel said his name was Trent. “That’s all any of us need to know,” the older-than-dirt farmhand had said when pressed for more details.

  Harper wasn’t even sure why she pretended an interest in him. He was just another grubby farmhand. He probably had bad teeth and worse manners, just like the rest of them. But she had always chased after them and flaunted it under Sam’s nose. It wouldn’t do to change her game a few months away from total freedom.

  Trent had taken off his shirt and hung it over the low rail fence bordering the garden. His faded jeans hugged narrow hips, and his smooth chest was already slick with sweat. His hair was dark with perspiration, kinked into tight, damp curls. He hefted a shovel and began to work manure into the sandy earth.

  “He might have bad teeth,” Annie Kate said, having heard her friend’s judgment of her father’s farmhands many times, “but there’s not much else about him that’s bad.”

  “He’s probably stupid,” Harper said. “Why else would he be working on a farm?”

  “Like Alex DeLong’s a genius,” Annie Kate retorted.

  “I don’t like Alex DeLong, either.” She did like the steady rhythm of the new farmhand’s labor, however. The muscles along his sun-browned back and his upper arms bunched and swelled in exactly the same way at exactly the same pace, over and over again. Watching him soothed her, made her feel calmer than she could ever remember feeling. She envied his being a man. Harper had always suspected things would have been different between her and her father if she had been born male. Besides, men could do whatever they wanted and nobody harped at them.

  Annie Kate was still going on about that DeLong nitwit. “But you hang out with him,” she said.

  Harper gave her friend her most withering look, the one she usually reserved for her mother’s back. Annie Kate and Harper had been best friends since elementary school, and Annie Kate knew perfectly well why Harper hung out with hoods like Alex DeLong.

  All her life, Harper had rebelled against being the daughter of Collins’s most prominent family. Even as a child, Harper had mostly wanted to run wild with all the little boys in town when they skinnydipped in the creek or gigged frogs.

  Worse, even, than being simply rich had been the fact that the Weddingtons were also the town’s main employer. To some minds—especially Sam Weddington’s—that gave Sam power over most everyone in Collins.

  And that further set Harper apart from her playmates.

  Harper hated her father for making her different. But even more, she hated him for making the mistake of thinking she was one of the people in town he could control.

  Harper had been showing him all her life that she had no intention of dancing to his tune. Toying with the town bad boys was just one way of doing that. But right now, she was more interested in the way the new farmhand stopped to rub his palms along the denim covering his thighs. She grabbed the pulley cord dangling overhead and swung her legs out the narrow hayloft window.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Going down to introduce myself.”

  “Harper! Are you crazy?”

  Harper shoved off and went spiraling out and down.

  “I thought you said you didn’t want anything else to do with people like Red Jannik!” Annie Kate called out the window as Harper’s feet touched the ground.

  Harper smiled up. “Well, we don’t know that he is until we check, now do we?”

  “Harper, you’ re crazy!”

  “And that’s what you like most about me, isn’t it?”

  Annie Kate stared dow
n at her, then tugged on the pulley rope to return it to the loft. “I’m coming down the ladder,” she announced primly.

  Harper started toward the lone man in the garden. She could hear a muffled grunt signaling his exertion each time he tossed a shovelful of manure from the truck onto the garden plot. Drawing closer, she saw the way his burnished skin glistened in the soft spring sunlight, the way perspiration trickled along the valley of his spine and collected in a dark V at the waist of his low-slung jeans.

  She had started out with a taunt in the back of her mind, but the words momentarily stalled, stuck in her dry, tight throat.

  He must have sensed her presence, for he suddenly stopped and looked down from the truck bed. He leaned on his shovel and drawled, “You must be the boss man’s little girl.”

  Stung, Harper found her tongue quickly. She raised her chin. “That’s right. And I suppose that makes you the new manure shoveler?”

  He chuckled. “I hear there’s a ton of it around here.”

  She laughed along with him. His sparkling blue eyes made it hard to do anything else. They seemed to jump right out of his deeply tanned face. His smile revealed even, white teeth and emphasized his lean and chiseled features. His jaw was touched with a dusting of golden stubble. He didn’t look as old as most of the drifters who made their way through Weddington Farms. Barely out of his teens, she guessed. He looked like a smart-ass.

  She liked that.

  “I’m Harper,” she said, putting out her hand.

  He didn’t move a muscle for a moment, just stood there staring at her, a near grin still touching his lips. Then he stared down at his right hand, which was streaked with grime and sweat. He squatted in the truck bed, took her hand in his but didn’t let it go. He just held it, softly but firmly. His palm was hot, and she felt grit rubbing off onto her skin. She shivered as he released her but saw no hint that he had reacted to the touch at all. And if there was one thing Harper had already learned to calculate, it was her effect on men.

  “Trent,” he said, standing. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Harper.”

  She gave him her dimple; that always worked. She sensed that Annie Kate had walked up behind her. “What big dreams you must have, Mr. Trent, to have worked your way up to—” she gestured toward the truck “—all this.”

  Annie Kate groaned softly.

  “Yeah,” he said, hefting his shovel and giving nothing away. Those incredible eyes didn’t linger over her body; he obviously wasn’t struck dumb by the invitation in her big eyes. “Today rich people’s manure, tomorrow the stars.”

  He rammed the shovel into the manure again and put his foot on the back of the blade to sink it deeper.

  Annie Kate put a hand on Harper’s shoulder and whispered, “Come on, Harper. Leave him alone.”

  Harper ignored her friend.

  “Where are you from?” she asked, determined to end the conversation when she wanted and not because he was ready.

  He paused but didn’t look at her. “All over.”

  “I see. And I suppose you’ve left a string of broken hearts around the world.”

  “Now where would a young thing like you get ideas like that? I know that’s not what they’re teaching in school these days.”

  Harper felt herself bristle. Was it only her imagination or was this Trent fellow treating her like a child? “What brings you to Collins?”

  He tossed a shovelful dangerously close to her feet and said, “Well, I’m not here to baby-sit.”

  Pure, black fury clouded Harper’s vision for a moment. She heard Annie Kate’s snicker and wanted to kick the dirt right back into his face. She stood still and willed the moment to pass. When she knew she could keep her voice from quivering with suppressed anger, she said, “I’d watch myself if I were you, Trent. Sam’s been known to run men out of town when he doesn’t like the way they treat his daughter.”

  “That’s what I hear,” Trent said softly.

  EVEN IF SHE HAD BEEN old enough to legally enter the place, The Stallion would have been off-limits for someone with Harper Weddington’s pedigree. That’s why it was her favorite place to party when she had a foul mood to dispel.

  And that’s why she found herself sitting on a barstool at The Stallion the night after she met Trent.

  The Stallion was a hellhole of a dive just across the county line. A private club where almost anything you wanted could be bought and sold, it was grimier and smellier than any of the barns or sheds or compost heaps at Weddington Farms. It reeked of spilled beer and worse. Cigarette smoke hung in the air, and the country-music juke box could barely be heard over the buzz of belligerent voices and the sharp clack of billiard balls slamming against one another. The other women in the place favored bleached hair and black eyeliner.

  Harper loved it for the attention she generated and the sure knowledge that being discovered here would give both her parents a fit of apoplexy, whatever that might be.

  Tonight, she wanted to forget that Trent had treated her like somebody’s kid sister. That he had blown her off as if she didn’t matter.

  Doesn’t he know who I am? The inward cry of outrage had filled her head most of the day.

  She ordered a beer and let a man wearing denim and a gaudy turquoise belt buckle pay for it. She moved around the room, swinging her hips and running the tips of her fingers along the edge of the pool table to catch the eyes of those who were playing. She smiled at every man who had the gumption to approach her, successfully playing them off one another so that no one could get possessive.

  She didn’t want any of them. She just wanted all of them to want her. But she was getting bored with the game, wondering where you went when The Stallion no longer gave you a charge. Then her answer walked through the door.

  Trent.

  SHE MIGHT AS WELL have been under a spotlight. She stood out that much in this crowd.

  Harper Weddington was the last person Trent had expected to see when he’d decided on a night at The Stallion to celebrate his employment. The Stallion was noisy and it was cheap, and company could be had here if it was company you needed to keep your head empty of unwelcome thoughts.

  Tonight most of his thoughts were about his mother, but they were good thoughts, for a change. He imagined setting things right for her, making men like Farrell Landen pay for robbing a good woman of her self-respect and dreams. Men like Sam Weddington, who was just another version of the Farrell Landens of the world.

  And he thought about Harper. Even before he walked in and saw her through the smoke, he’d been thinking of her. Yes, she was arrogant. Spoiled. Everything a rich girl was supposed to be. But she was also beautiful and sharp-tongued and spirited.

  If he possessed her, he would have all the revenge any man could ever want.’

  He meandered through the crowd, headed for the bar. He would make her come to him. That much, he knew.

  Trent knew about women. He’d spent most of his twenty years in a cramped rented duplex inhabited by his mama and her two single sisters. Every Friday night for as long as he could remember was Gals’ Night at the Trent home. Their friends poured in, bringing chips and soft drinks and pints of vodka, with boxes of permanent-wave solution or hair color or a magazine with the latest, hottest hairstyles guaranteed to disguise an oversize nose or make beady eyes look luminous.

  Trent had sprawled on his bed in his room those nights, sometimes reading his comic books but mostly eavesdropping on the talk of how foolish men were and all the mistakes they made and their downright cussedness.

  Trent knew about women. And he knew the only way to win a woman like Harper was to make himself unavailable. If she thought she couldn’t have him, she would move heaven and earth to get him.

  He ordered a beer and ignored the way his heart was thumping. He bought a vodka and grape juice for a woman who didn’t yet know that beehive hairdos and go-go boots were no longer all the rage, even in rural South Carolina. She brushed against him and he pretended to listen to her aspiratio
ns of putting an above-ground pool behind her mobile home.

  Then the air around him changed, suddenly felt charged the way it did sometimes when he knew it was his night at the poker table. She had found him.

  He kept his attention focused on his friend with the grape juice and vodka, waiting. He heard her voice over his right shoulder, clear and cultured and unlike anything else a body might hear at The Stallion. She ordered a beer.

  “Can I buy you another?” he asked his friend with dreams of a pool.

  “Sure, darlin’. Aren’t you the perfect gentleman?”

  He ordered the drink. It was then that Harper spoke. “You weren’t lying, I see.”

  He turned slightly in her direction. “About what?”

  She looked across him at the woman with the beehive. “You definitely aren’t baby-sitting.”

  He was grateful the noise level was so high that his companion couldn’t hear Harper’s veiled insult. “You shouldn’t be here, you know.”

  “Whyever not? Do you think I don’t know the score?”

  “I doubt if you even know which numbers to add up, Miss Harper,” he said, although the message in her violet eyes said otherwise. “Does your daddy know where you are?”

  She paid for her beer and took a sip. Trent thought he detected the barest wrinkling of her perfect, uptilted nose.

  “Why? Are you planning on telling him?”

  “Anybody here check your ID tonight, Miss Harper?”

  She flicked foam off her upper lip with the tip of her tongue. Trent felt sucker punched, walloped in the midsection by a teenage vixen who probably needed paddling worse than she needed kissing. He had to remind himself he was waiting for her to do all the seducing.

  “Everybody here knows I’m plenty old enough to do whatever I please,” she said in her low, soft voice.

  Then she raised her beer mug in salute, turned and walked the length of the bar. He watched her. He’d liked her in jeans this afternoon, but he had to admit miniskirts were made for legs like Harper Weddington’s. Walking slowly and provocatively, she settled on a stool at the end of the bar, directly in his line of vision.