Only You

by Peg Sutherland

  Harper ducked her head to hide the tears that welled up with the knowledge that she loved this woman the way you were supposed to love family. And that she was loved back.

  “So, are you going to listen to your old Floretha or keep acting like you know it all yourself?”

  Shrugging, Harper said, “I promise, I’m not doing anything wrong.”

  “You can be as innocent as that passel of new kittens out in the barn, girl. But if your pa comes down on that boy because you won’t stay away from him, the fault is yours and that’s that.”

  TRENT CAME OUT of the makeshift shower to find Nigel sitting in the single chair in his one-room cabin. The old man leaned against the wall, boot heels hooked on the cross brace of the chair, dusty hat on his knee.

  Surprised and a little apprehensive at Nigel’s appearance, Trent gave his hair a quick swipe, then wrapped the towel around his waist. “Anything wrong?”

  The old man studied him for a moment. “Guess you’re not having much luck finding a room in town.”

  Trent went about dressing so he wouldn’t have to look Nigel directly in the eye. He liked the old man who was serving as foreman until Sam Weddington found somebody else. Nigel was fair, but it was also clear he didn’t like being the man in charge. Trent felt the niggling concern that he’d taken advantage of that by failing to look for a room. But it suited Trent’s purpose to stay here. As long as nobody pushed, he planned to stay.

  “Sorry, Nigel. Guess I forgot.”

  “I’d be right grateful if you’d put your mind to it.”

  “I will.”

  Come to think of it, maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. Now might be just the time to make himself a little less available.

  Guilt tainted his satisfaction. Trent cast it aside. Harper was using him, wasn’t she? Where was it written he had to be the noble one here?

  He pulled a clean T-shirt over his head and sat on the bed to pull on his boots. Trent stood and tucked his shirt into his jeans, then reached for the watch on the unpainted nightstand. He had forty-five minutes. Nigel still hadn’t moved.

  “I been thinking, son. Maybe I forgot to mention this when you first showed up.”

  Trent’s uneasiness grew.

  “About Miss Harper—”

  “You told me.”

  “I did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s good. I wouldn’t want you gettin’ yourself in dutch just because I’m a mite forgetful from time to time.” Nigel eased the front feet of the ladderback chair to the wooden floor and slowly rose to his feet. “Yep, you’re a damn hard worker. Want to make sure you stick around awhile, you know.”

  “Thanks, Nigel.”

  He followed the old man to the door, his mouth dry, wishing he could fool himself into thinking Nigel didn’t remember warning him. But Nigel remembered. And that meant Nigel had his suspicions.

  He felt uneasy, too, because he wondered what had happened between Harper and that foreman, Red Jannik. Trent hated to admit it, but the idea of her flirting—or worse—with this faceless man gave him a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He had to remind himself that, no matter how vulnerable or how lonely she seemed to him, she was still nothing but a spoiled rich kid. A user.

  But remembering that was so damn hard, especially when he saw how hungry she seemed for somebody’s attention, affection, approval.

  He had to speed to get to the park in the next county on time, and he liked the feeling of wind rushing through the open windows, the slight shimmy in his old car when the speedometer inched past seventy and the feeling he was pushing everything to the limit.

  Like this thing with Harper.

  He was ten minutes late and she was waiting for him, impatiently pacing up and down the bank of the oversize pond everybody called Foxtail Lake. The color was high in her cheeks, and her legs, in cutoff jeans, were already golden, even this early in the spring. Her slight pout disappeared the minute she looked up and saw his car.

  “I thought maybe you changed your mind,” she said, so young—and apparently so trusting of him—that despite her tough veneer she didn’t know any better than to let him see her uncertainty.

  There it was again, that voice deep inside him that said she didn’t deserve to be dragged into his problems. Because he would hurt her. He knew that. That was the plan, to wreak as much havoc as possible in the lives of the rich. And wasn’t Harper one of the rich?

  Then why was he starting to think a better idea would be to find a way to protect her?

  “Changed my mind? About a picnic with Mandy?” he said. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  She laughed and linked arms with him. He liked the way her soft curves snuggled so easily against his body. He liked her warmth. He liked the way she leaped from girlish to guileful with no warning. He liked the three pale freckles dusted along her right cheekbone, just below her eye. And he liked her straight, even teeth, because he liked imagining her in the braces she must have worn a few years back. He didn’t want to like so much about her, but he did.

  “You know you’re the only one who gets away with calling me that,” she said, her coy mask almost entirely gone. She plopped onto the blanket she’d spread on the creek bank and he dropped beside her, admiring the taut swell of her hip.

  “How’d I get so lucky?”

  “Must be those wicked blue eyes.”

  “Wicked? My mother always says I have the eyes of an angel.”

  Wistfulness flashed through her eyes for an instant, then vanished. She began drawing things out of an enormous basket, like a child setting the table for an imaginary tea party. Trent’s emotions rioted as he watched her. In so many ways, she was that child, from the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and iced chocolate cookies she’d brought for their picnic to the unabashed delight in her dimpled smile as she chattered about preparing everything herself.

  Then there was the part of her that tempted him despite himself, the part of her that was all plump hothouse bud, restless to burst into full bloom and petulant at being forced to wait a moment longer. Amanda Harper Weddington was an endearing woman-child, and fully as dangerous as that implied. Just looking at her made his blood pound, made his fingers ache to brush the cookie crumbs from the corner of her mouth. She licked them off herself with a knowing flick of her pink tongue. She captured his gaze with hers as she finished the cookie.

  “Does your mother like you a lot?” she asked, lying back amid the bread crumbs and the pile of cookies that had spilled out of a paper bag.

  “Of course she does,” he replied automatically, realizing only when he saw her expression that his answer wasn’t necessarily true for everyone.

  “Tell me about your parents,” she said, groping at her side for one of the cookies.

  A part of him wanted to tell her there was no father, not since Donald Trent walked out after supper a dozen years earlier and never made it home. But he didn’t like to talk about that. “That’s old news.”

  “But you still love them, don’t you?” She licked the icing off her cookie, but this time only the little girl in her made an appearance. “Even though you ran away.”

  “I didn’t run away.”

  “Then tell me why you left” Her request was delivered with the dimple she seemed to know precisely when to produce. She propped up on one elbow and looked at him so eagerly that he thought he might just tell her.

  “I won’t tell,” she said softly. “Not even Annie Kate.”

  All he knew about her was that she was spoiled and self-centered and immature and probably sexually precocious. But he believed her when she said she wouldn’t tell. He believed Harper Weddington was honest, and he supposed that made him a fool.

  The way his mother had been a fool, believing Farrell Landen all those years.

  “I left because…” He thought of the dozens of reasons that had tied him in knots for months, and wondered which ones to tell her. He chose the reason that was at the center of all the other reasons. �
��Because I couldn’t stand watching some man make a fool of her.”

  She didn’t say anything, and Trent found himself longing to spill out the hurts he had bottled up.

  “We were broke after my old man ditched us,” he said. “Mom went to work at the big house.”

  “The big house?”

  The question in her voice drew a bitter smile. “Yeah. The big house that belonged to the big man around town. Farrell Landen. Owner of the tobacco farm and all the people who worked there.”

  “Like Sam.” The edge in her voice matched the sharp feelings in his heart.

  “Yeah. Like Sam.” He rolled over on his stomach and began picking at the grass. Their shoulders touched. “He told her all kind of lies. And she believed him. And—”

  He couldn’t say it. As many times as he’d heard the other kids snicker about it and use it to tear his guts out, he couldn’t voice the truth himself. Trent had learned early to resent the rich man who seemed to own the very souls of the people who worked for him. But that resentment grew when he learned from his buddies, at the age of ten, that rich Farrell Landen also owned the heart of Carlene Trent.

  “They were lovers,” Harper said, leaning into him.

  A bark of bitter laughter escaped him. “That’s nicer than anything anybody back home ever said.”

  “People are mean. Especially when they get a chance to take a shot at the people who have all the stuff they think they want.”

  Trent looked at her, aware that she spoke from her own experience.

  “I can understand that,” she went on. “People like Sam, they just do what they want. They don’t think much about other people.”

  “She always said he would marry her. That he would divorce his wife and make her the queen of that big old house she cleaned every day.”

  “But it was a lie,” Harper said.

  “Yeah. I knew that a long time before Mom did.”

  He turned to Harper, studied her profile with its upturned nose and the chin that was just sharp enough to remind everyone that Harper Weddington would have her way.

  “Sam is just like that,” she said. “He told me for years that if I studied hard and got good grades I could have all my friends over for a big sleep-over birthday party. But every year he always had some reason why I couldn’t. Then I figured it out. It was just because he didn’t want the people who worked for him sending their grubby little brats up to sleep in his big, fancy house.”

  Something opened in Trent’s heart when he realized that a rich kid like Harper could end up feeling just as left out as he’d always felt.

  “He did it to Mother, too,” Harper said, her voice low. “Whatever she wanted, he ran over it like a bulldozer. She wanted to work for the Kennedy campaign, but he told her to stick to church work. She wanted to volunteer at the hospital, but he told her it wouldn’t look right. One day she just quit wanting anything.”

  She looked at him over her shoulder, and he could see in her eyes that she had already learned what it had taken his mother a half-dozen years to discover. When it comes to rich men, their promises are meaningless and their affection comes with strings attached.

  He rolled over and pulled her close. Her soft curls whispered like silk against his chin and cheek; her breasts were soft and heavy against his chest. They lay like that a long time. He listened to her breathe, felt her heart against his ribs, her thigh curved intimately around his thigh. And he marveled that this young woman who had grown up in the kind of big house he had always hated had learned to hate it, and all it stood for, as much as he did.

  He wanted to save her from it. Just like he wanted to save his mother.

  “I’m going to go back there one day,” he said at last. “I’m going to work hard and get rich and I’m going to buy that bastard’s big house and throw him out of it. Then I’m going to move my mother in and set her up like a queen.”

  “Wow.” Harper’s soft whisper fluttered against the hollow of his neck. “I wish I could go with you.”

  Trent’s heart lurched. He wanted to tell her right then, but something held him back. He wanted to tell her she could go, because she was going to make all his big dreams possible. Because that was the plan, to marry money. Then he could buy his mother all the respectability she’d never had. Sticking it to some rich muckety-muck in the process just made the plan more appealing.

  Especially now that the one he would stick it to was Sam Weddington. Wouldn’t that mean Trent was paying the old man back for everything he’d ever done to hurt his daughter, as well? Wouldn’t it?

  Ignoring the doubt gnawing at his conscience, Trent touched his fingers to Harper’s chin. Her lips parted as he lowered his lips to hers. He kissed her gently and was surprised to find her response so shy and tentative. She wasn’t the hellion she liked to pretend she was. Her kiss was innocent and trusting, and it tore at Trent’s heart.

  When he stopped it was because he knew it would be too easy to keep going. Later, he told himself. Soon. But not quite yet.

  Yes, Harper Weddington would be easy to lure into bed. And in a small town like Collins, a rich man like Sam Weddington would be willing to do anything to avoid a scandal involving his only daughter. Even embrace the ne’er-do-well who’d knocked up his heir.

  Trent touched the soft, firm slope of Harper’s upper arm and squelched the uneasiness in his chest.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HARPER CAUGHT a spring cold that left her feeling tired and dragged out, but she told herself that was only because it kept her from seeing Trent for two whole days.

  On the third day, she could barely sit through her classes for wanting to see him. As soon as the final bell rang at the end of seventh period, she broke every speed limit in Collins delivering Annie Kate to her front door.

  “You’re going to see him, aren’t you?” Annie Kate said, gathering her books up from the floorboard of the car so slowly Harper thought she might just scream.

  “Well, what do you think, slowpoke?”

  “I think you’re asking for trouble. Harper, what if you end up ruining your life just to get back at your father? This is—”

  “This is different.” Harper thrummed her fingers on the steering wheel.

  “Different?” Annie Kate sounded dubious. “How is it different? He’s just another guy who’s passing through, working for your father, and he’s got one thing on his mind, just like—”

  “That’s not true! Trent is kind and sweet and he really cares about me.”

  Annie Kate rolled her eyes. “I know what he cares about,” she said, opening the car door and stepping to the curb. “But I can’t say, because ladies don’t talk that way.”

  Harper laughed, relieved to be rid of her friend. She popped the car in gear, said, “Ladies don’t have any fun, either,” and peeled away from the curb. Annie Kate called after her, but the rumble of the car engine and the blare of music from the eight-track player drowned out her words.

  Harper roared back down Broad Street to the other side of town. She wouldn’t be going home early today.

  Trent had moved, but it hadn’t taken her long to wheedle out of one of the other hands where he had gone. He was renting a room in one of the identical cottages that backed up to Weddington Textiles. Two generations ago, the cottages had belonged to the company, and they were still called the mill village by everyone in town. Harper had never been inside one of the mill cottages. But she planned to be there today when Trent got home from his day at the farm.

  Ten houses lined up on each side of the long block, and Harper selected the third one on the left. The clapboard was more gray than white, she noticed, and the rain gutter sagged forlornly in the middle. She tried the front door and wasn’t surprised to find it unlocked. Not many people in Collins locked their doors; not many had much worth taking, especially here on Spindle Court.

  The house smelled funny, kind of stale and musty. What little furniture the living room held was either faded with the years or coated with a
film of dust She peered into each bedroom, hoping for some sign one of them belonged to Trent. One was a disaster area of rumpled clothes, and Harper decided Trent hadn’t been here long enough to create such havoc. In the second, a pair of jeans the size of South America was looped over a straight-back chair, dripping dry onto the bare wooden floor.

  Harper entered the third room and closed the door behind her. A cardboard box sat on the end of the narrow bed, filled with a jumble of jeans and T-shirts. A comb and toothbrush were on the bedside table, half hidden behind a black-and-white photograph in a cheap metal frame. Harper picked it up. The woman in the photograph was pretty, but her eyes and her smile, even her limp curly hair, looked tired. The little boy on her knee had an impish grin, and he looked as if he were ready to burst after sitting still long enough to have his picture snapped.

  Harper traced her finger over the glass.

  Seeing the little boy smile out at her gave Harper the sensation that she was being drawn even closer to the man. And since Saturday, she had felt entirely too close already—yet not nearly close enough.

  Harper placed the frame back on the nightstand, then moved the suitcase to the floor and lay back on the bed to wait. She wondered, as she lay there, what it would be like to have nothing more to your name than a car, a few pairs of jeans, a toothbrush and a photograph of your mother. She tried putting herself in Trent’s place and began to wonder how he kept from despairing.

  By the time she heard Trent’s car rumble up, she was dozing. She didn’t bother to sit up or straighten her skirt or smooth her hair. She lay there with her eyes closed and listened for his footstep on the bare floor, waited for him to close the bedroom door behind him.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he said softly.