Talk Dirty to Me

by Dakota Cassidy

  Walker sighed, the phone close to his lips. “I think it is for tonight, Mistress Taboo. A man’s gotta work to pay those phone-sex operator bills.”

  Her giggle echoed in the dark bedroom. “Well, all right then, Walker. I hope we can talk again soon.”

  “Me, too, Mistress Taboo. Me, too.”

  Walker hung up then, leaving Dixie to sink lower in her chair, resting her head against the back of it. In the deep velvet of 3:00 a.m., she gazed out the window into the inky early morning in the direction of Caine’s window at the big house and wondered what he’d say if he knew what had happened to her in Chicago—what she couldn’t bring herself to tell Walker.

  Or anyone.

  With a yawn, she prepared to leave, stretching before gathering her purse, and that’s when she saw the shiny gleam of an object at the end of her desk, buried under her sticky notes.

  Dixie scooped them up, dumping them in a completely incorrect pile in an effort to clear the mounting debris.

  Her heart skipped a beat when she identified the shiny object.

  A brand-new iPod touch.

  As she was marveling over Caine’s decency for replacing the iPod he’d drowned when he’d been so angry with her, her phone vibrated.

  She dug in her purse, pulling it out and sliding her finger over the screen.

  Darling Dixie—I’m sorry I haven’t told you I love you lately. This being dead thing is a real bitch when it comes to communication. But who loves you more than his spleen even from all the way up here? Me. J

  Dixie couldn’t help but laugh, even as the yearning to talk with Landon one last time, to hear him say those words rather than just read them, stole her breath.

  She held the phone close to her chest and smiled at his picture on her desk. “I miss you, you intrusive pain in my derriere,” she whispered.

  So, so much.

  Thirteen

  “You do know I’d rather be dipped in batter and fried than be here right now, don’t you, Em?” She spread her arms wide to indicate the square in the middle of town where so many familiar faces milled about, exchanging handshakes and idle chitchat.

  “You do know that there are people just linin’ up at the mere thought, don’t you, Dixie?”

  Dixie rolled her eyes at her. “Of course, I do. That’s why I don’t want to be here. Fried isn’t a color I wear well.”

  Em burst out laughing, her mood lighter than Dixie had seen it in almost two weeks, and she was working hard to keep from spoiling it with her own sour disposition. “Wasn’t it you who said to face your enemies?”

  “Whoever said anyone should take advice from me?”

  “Apparently the men who call Mistress Taboo seem to think they should. Did you see the end of the week report for your numbers? They were incredible, Ms. Davis! Your calls are up by thirty-eight percent. Of course, I say that with absolutely no bias on your behalf—being the impartial mediator that I am. But the way this is going, I think that ornery LaDawn’s gonna have to take lessons from you soon.”

  “Or kill me in my sleep.” Yes, sir. Her numbers for calls logged were way up. So far up, she was working sometimes an extra two hours on her six-hour shifts, and her mountain of sticky notes was going to need a desk of its own soon. It was exhausting and exhilarating. More importantly, it was working, and in only two weeks’ time since she’d instituted her new plan.

  “Stop that now. Don’t be so melodramatic. She was just teasing you.”

  Dixie muffled a snort with her hand. “Have you ever known LaDawn to just joke? Wasn’t it her who said she’d run off all the other ‘companionators’ on her old block in Atlanta by threatening to pick them off one by one with a sawed-off shotgun her granddaddy left her in his will?”

  Em’s eyes twinkled sapphire blue under the strands of lights hung to perfection from tree to tree in the square. “You know, she’s a little like you minus the violent tendencies, don’t you think? All manipulatin’ a situation to her advantage.”

  “She’s a little like a serial killer.”

  Em licked her finger and swiped at the corner of Dixie’s mouth. “You have lipstick on your face. Oh! Speaking of, look who’s over in the corner, chatting up Ray Johnson.”

  Dixie kept her fear on the inside, and stared straight ahead. “LaDawn?”

  Em clapped her hands excitedly as if it was Christmas morning. “Yep! And Marybell, too. I’m so glad they agreed to come.”

  “Please say you reminded them this wasn’t a place to drum up new business? I’m all for advertising, but I think if some of the women in town got wind of LaDawn’s magic flogger, they’d hog-tie her and leave her on the train tracks.”

  “Of course I did, Dixie. You don’t think I’d let them go into something like this without tactfully suggesting they leave their sexy apparatus at home, do you?”

  Dixie shook off the bad feeling she’d had all night since, at Em’s insistence, agreeing to attend the annual Plum Orchard Autumn gathering and potluck. Em didn’t know the Mags the way she did. She didn’t know what they were truly capable of when they wanted to hurt someone. Her giving nature, the generosity she granted everyone, would be her downfall.

  Inviting the Call Girls was a kind, Em-like gesture. Her hope to integrate the operators she’d come to refer to as close acquaintances into Plum Orchard was naive at best, disastrous at worst.

  Em’s blind eyes and deaf ears clearly only heard the gossip everyone spread about Dixie. The Call Girls operators had been the subject of more than one overheard conversation, and the conversations were never about welcoming them into the fold with open arms and a basket of freshly picked peaches.

  They were more along the lines of scripture, damnation, and “how-to” videos on performing exorcisms.

  “Are you having those misgivings again?” Em asked.

  “I’m having many things.”

  “Don’t be so cynical, Dixie. Louella said it was a wonderful idea to invite the girls. And this is a perfect opportunity for them to get to know everyone. It has to be hard to get out and meet folk when you work the graveyard shift.”

  “Harder still to get out and meet people when you sell sex over the phone in the graveyard,” Dixie quipped.

  “I know the town isn’t in love with the idea of Call Girls being here, Dixie, especially the Senior Mags. But Landon did everything right. Trust that. He got all the permits he needed from the county and the state. He knew his stuff, and he made sure Hank Cotton did, too. So they all might as well get used to it and make nice, because there isn’t much anyone can do about it.”

  Except make the women of Call Girls feel so uncomfortable and out of place, they’d give a Mag their personal gas money to run them out of town.

  Em’s hopeful face, brighter than it had been since Dixie returned, was fading, pulling her up short. She rubbed Em’s arm. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Ignore my sour mood. I’m just tired and cranky from all those calls I’ve been takin.’ I’m sure everything will be fine.”

  Em nodded her agreement with a happy smile. “I know it will. You’ll see.”

  Dixie didn’t want to blast Em’s Mr. Rogers moment on the off chance Louella and the Mags would mind their manners. Yet the possibility existed they were merely laying the groundwork to humiliate the Call Girls for having the nerve to think a phone-sex operation was acceptable in Plum Orchard.

  Dixie tugged on the bow at Em’s waist. “But hold that thought, and just walk to the other side of this equation with me, okay? Wasn’t Louella also the one who thought it was a wonderful idea to jump into bed with Caine two point two seconds after we broke up?”

  Em wrinkled her nose. “Still don’t believe it, and two very different things, Dixie. Now, before you ruin a perfectly good reason to wear that beautiful black dress, let’s go have some punch and enjoy a ni
ce night out.”

  “Punch. That sounds good. Let’s have lots of punch with lots of alcohol.” Dixie followed behind Em, pushing their way through the crowded grass of the square. She admired the Kelly-green dress Emmaline chose for tonight; soft and flirty, it covered only one of her shoulders, and brought out every good feature she possessed.

  Judging by the appreciative glances of some of Plum Orchard’s most decidedly un-bachelors, they admired Em’s dress, and what was filling it, too. If only Em knew how beautiful she really was, inside and out, she wouldn’t be single long, Dixie mused.

  Pulling her up the stairs of the whitewashed gazebo, Dixie momentarily flashed back to the night of her engagement party. The air had smelled the same then—the end-of-summer heat easing to welcome in the crisp scent of falling leaves and fireplaces burning fat pine logs.

  Then she sucked in a breath of air to fend off the horrible images that always followed that happy memory. The fire she’d started by knocking over the candles that matched her wedding colors while she’d raged.

  The screaming.

  Essie Guthrie’s updo singed to a crispy frizz.

  The rain that had made a tsunami look like a mere shower.

  The buffet table, lined with assorted dishes brought by everyone in town was the same, too. The only difference was all the food was on the table, not splattered all over the floor after being trampled by three hundred people all vying to get out of the rain and under the safety of the gazebo.

  Glasses of plum wine, Herbert Fox’s specialty, sat on a far table in the corner, glistening with the deep purple liquid. Dixie grabbed a much-needed glass for both her and Em while scanning the familiar faces of the crowd and the people she’d grown up with.

  Some were older; some were in the next stages of their lives. All of them, whether they felt the same way about her, were welcome sights to Dixie’s homesick eyes. She stood in the back of the gazebo against the rail, absorbing her surroundings, inhaling the smell of Essie’s homemade corn bread and Jeter Orwell’s mother’s fruit salad surprise.

  Dixie sipped her wine, wistfully watching couples gather in the center of the square where a dance floor had been laid.

  The first notes of one of her favorite songs, “We Danced,” by Brad Paisley, filled the air, a slow intimate song about finding everlasting love on a barroom floor. She swayed with it, closing her eyes with a smile. A hundred years ago, she and Caine had danced to this tune at an old bar they’d frequented during their engagement.

  The memory transported her right back to the dusty hardwood floor littered with peanut shells and hay and the odor of stale beer and sweat. Caine’s hard chest beneath his old college T-shirt, pressed to her cheek, his chin resting on the top of her head.

  The smell of his aftershave tingled her nose, his cowboy boots occasionally scraping her ballet slippers. The heat of their bodies flush with one another’s, their hands clasped together at their sides, oblivious to everyone else as they swayed.

  “I see you decided to venture out into the pack of hungry she-wolves tonight? What gives, Dixie-Cup. You lonely for a public lickin’?” Caine asked from behind her. And while his tone was light, she wasn’t up for his kind of lickin’, one he’d surely lavish happily.

  Her eyes popped open when he positioned himself behind her, placing his hands on her shoulders. She stiffened, then shrugged him off. It took every ounce of her will not to fall back against his hard chest in search of shelter.

  No more touching. No more kisses that set her soul on fire. “I’m just enjoyin’ a nice evening in a hometown I’ve missed more than I thought I did. You do the same, Caine. Oh, and thank you for replacing my iPod,” she replied, attempting to skedaddle away from him without looking him in the eye.

  Caine caught her arm, pulling her back to his side. “Wait, Dixie. Please.”

  The harsh grit in his tone left her helpless to deny him. That and his muscled goodness dressed in an ice-blue fitted shirt, blue jeans, and the very same cowboy boots he’d worn when they’d danced at Junior’s—all so acutely male, it physically hurt.

  Her legs trembled while she silently damned him. She’d never been so aware of any other man as she was Caine, and it infuriated her.

  Lashing out at him was the only thing keeping her from begging him to take her back. “Is there something you’d like to point out to me that you haven’t yet? Have we moved on from my character flaws list already? That was fast.”

  He took the glasses of wine from her hand and set them on the table. Cupping her chin, he ran his thumb over her lower lip, one that trembled in response. “Stop, and just listen to me, okay?”

  Caine’s eyes reflected something she’d never seen, rooting her to the spot. Sure, she was used to anger, amusement at her expense, lust even, but this—this softer, almost gentle gaze? That she didn’t understand—or maybe it was just that she hadn’t seen it in a long time.

  He hitched his jaw to the big maple where a park bench sat beneath its sprawling limbs and thick leaves. “C’mon. Let’s go sit.”

  Sit? To ensure she was an easy hit? Uh-uh. This was just another trick to get her back for finagling her way out of phone sex.

  Since the Call Girls’ weekly meeting, he’d had plenty of time to plot her payback—or at the very least, work up a good simmer. “What’s this about, Caine? Are you angry that my numbers beat your numbers this week?” She looked at her wristwatch, tapping the face of it with a fingernail. “Or is it time to call me a cheat again? Can’t you just tell me what horrible offence I’ve perpetrated right here? You know, in front of everyone? You’re so good at that. You want a microphone, too? Let’s ask Louella if we can borrow hers.”

  When Caine smiled, it wasn’t with malice or arrogance, it was easy and kind. And it was freaking her out by the second.

  “No tricks. Swear it on my old stack of Playboys.”

  The corner of her lips almost lifted. “You had Playboys?”

  “Stacks of ’em.”

  “And everyone calls you the golden boy? Why is it that if Dixie Davis is making the nasty on the phone she’s the town pariah, but if Caine Donovan does the same, he’s excused from the fire-and-brimstone speech because he wears a cape and saves drowning puppies?”

  Caine lifted his wide shoulders and grinned. “Stop exaggerating. I only saved a puppy. No plurals in there.”

  Yes, yes, yes. He really had saved Aida-Lynne Gorman’s puppy that’d wandered off from her backyard by jumping into the overflowing creek and swimming after it.

  Dixie rolled her eyes at him. “And on the day that you were born the angels got together, and decided to create a dream come true. I’ve heard it all—in a song, I think. Maybe I ought to let Kitty Palmer hear you invite a woman to discover how you Pirate her Caribbean in Johnny Depp’s voice? I hear you lay it on thick almost every night from my thin office walls. You get zero points for originality, mister, after you’ve used it three hundred times. And what is it with the Johnny Depp fixation? Does every woman want to talk to Depp?”

  “Depp’s pretty popular,” he said in Depp’s voice, following that with a crooked, endearing grin... Damn him.

  “That’s neither here nor there. The point is...” She frowned. “I forget what the point was.”

  Caine’s laughter, so genuine she was tempted to laugh with him, made her heart skip. “So come with me?”

  Caution being the better part of valor, Dixie cast suspicious eyes on him. “Okay, but one cross word and I’ll find a can of gasoline in Landon’s barn and set your pile of dirty women with big boobs in Technicolor on fire. It’ll be a blaze like Plum Orchard’s never seen. Trust that.”

  Pulling her behind him, Caine took her down the steps, crisscrossing their way through the crowd and across the square.

  For a moment, her hand in his, Caine leading them off somewhere, brought ba
ck a time when she would have followed him into the bowels of Hell if he’d just promise to be hers forever.

  “Sit.” He motioned to the bench directly across the street from Madge’s.

  Dixie looked around with suspicious eyes then swiped the bench with her hand and held it up under the lamppost’s light. “If you ruin this black dress, Caine, I’ll steal your credit card and order a hundred more. It’s the only one I have left from my old wardrobe in Chicago, and even if it’s a little tight after all the food Sanjeev lavishes on me, it’s still designer.”

  “I dunno, it doesn’t look too tight to me. You look really pretty tonight, Dixie.”

  Heat rose in her cheeks. “Take that back.”

  “I won’t because you do look pretty. Very pretty.”

  Her hands went to her hips. “Okay. I know you’ve got something up your sleeve, what is it?”

  He shoved the sleeves of his shirt upward over his arms. “No tricks up my sleeve.”

  Stubbornly, Dixie refused to sit. “I don’t trust you. I’ll stand.”

  “And that’s the root of our problem.”

  “We don’t have problems, Caine. We have catastrophes—tsunami-like issues of devastation.”

  “And we can’t have a relationship like that.”

  A relationship? Her throat went dry, making her wish she’d brought her wine with her. Did he want to...No. He wouldn’t be so cruel as to make her believe he wanted her back so he could... No. “What relationship are we talking about? We don’t have one unless antagonism is the basis for a relationship,” she croaked.

  “But we do, Dixie-Cup. We have a working one.”

  Hopes dashed appropriately, she hid her disappointment and gave him a questioning glance. “We never see each other during our shifts. You’re in one room, and I’m in another. Strategically planned, I’m sure, by Landon, in an effort to keep us from lopping each other’s heads off with industrial staple guns.”

  “We don’t have a relationship because we do just that—avoid the hell out of each other. Every time you hear me leave to grab a water or some coffee, if you’re in the hall, you run the other way.”