Sweet Home Carolina

by Rice, Patricia

  Expertly balancing on one crutch, Jacques tugged up his trousers, and decisively snapped the fly closed. He had despised Amy’s looking on him with pity on the drive to the hospital. He didn’t know what it was about her sad eyes and infrequent smiles that crawled under his skin, but now that he was back on his feet, he could return to business. If business included making the CEO’s ex-wife smile, it just added a spice to the deal.

  That he wanted to banish the sadness and protect her from any recurrence was a purely primal instinct any male would feel for a pretty, girl-next-door like Amy. He had lots of instincts. That didn’t mean he had to follow them.

  “To Northfork, my comrades,” he called, swinging his crutches into the suite. “It is time to get down to business.”

  Five

  “The quilt is beautiful, Mama.” Amy stood back to admire the complex design of blues, yellows, and greens of the abstract flower garden her mother had created.

  Marie Sanderson was a tough mountain woman, a hard-living single mother who’d worked in the mill most of her life — until Evan had laid her off. Amy and her mother had old issues, but they had spent these last years since Amy’s marriage and return to the mountains resolving them.

  Mature enough now to recognize the difficulties her mother had faced raising two young daughters on no education after their father had abandoned them, Amy had forgiven Marie for their neglected childhood. It was a precarious basis for a relationship, but better than the combative one they’d had before she’d left for college.

  Telling her mother of her decision to accept the offer on the house, especially when she couldn’t promise to keep the kids in Northfork, could tilt their relationship back to rocky.

  She dreaded giving up the dream of someday remodeling the cottage and earning an income from a B and B so they could stay here.

  Riding on a high of unjustified optimism, she’d asked her real estate agent to write up an offer on the cottage, separate from the town’s mill bid. She didn’t know if the Saint-Etienne bid was still a possibility or if Jacques had left town. She was betting on hope — against all odds.

  “That quilt didn’t turn out too bad,” Marie Sanderson acknowledged, settling carefully into her recliner. “Reckon it will pay for a turkey come Thanksgiving.”

  “You ought to charge twice as much for an original design. Jo’s music friends can afford it.”

  “Nobody would pay that much for a bunch of scraps.” Marie brushed off the suggestion. “Most were pieces left from those bolts Evan threw out.”

  Amy recognized some of the quilt pieces as from the tapestries the mill had been experimenting with before it went bankrupt. After redecorating the Stardust, her mother and friends had begun recycling the remainders as quilts for extra income. “You deserve a decent hourly wage plus the value of your creativity,” Amy argued.

  Marie lifted a weary hand. “I don’t want to scare off the customers. I gave them a price, and I’ll stick with it. That’s how I was raised.”

  If her mother’s old four-room mill house had any electronics, Amy would have short-circuited them with the steam building inside her. Exasperated and unable to yell at her mother, she began folding up the quilt. “Next time, ask more,” she said quietly, knowing full well her suggestion fell on deaf ears.

  At the sound of car tires on the gravel road, Amy wandered to the window. The phone rang, and she heard her mother’s side of the conversation.

  “She’s still here. You want to talk with her?”

  Amy sent a questioning look, and her mother mouthed, “Jo.”

  The black Hummer cruising past the overgrown azaleas on the drive said it all without further need of explanation. Amy groaned aloud. There went all her hopes that Jacques had given up and gone back to Paris.

  He hasn’t left. She ought to be annoyed. Frustrated. Instead, her pulse suddenly raced like a schoolgirl’s. Did she never learn? Good-looking men who used people weren’t good for her.

  “You were supposed to show some city slicker the mill?” her mother asked, hanging up the phone.

  The driver stepping out of the Hummer was six feet tall and bulky. Not Jacques. Amy couldn’t control a little quiver of disappointment. She blamed it on her admiration for a man who could act so swiftly and competently to save a child not his own. He’d been a real-life superhero.

  “I didn’t think he would be back,” she admitted. “Louisa nearly crippled him, or Dot’s goose did, depending on how you look at it. I guess he’s sent his staff.”

  “Jo told them how to find you, then forgot to warn us. Some days, that girl puts her head on backwards.”

  “Jo is all heart and can’t say no. I’d better go. I’ll bring you up some pork roast and fried apples later.” She kissed her mother’s weathered brow, knowing she wouldn’t receive the same affection in return. Her mother wasn’t much good at expressing the softer emotions.

  Amy stepped out on the porch before the driver could knock.

  “Ms. Warren?” the older man asked, touching a hand to his billed cap.

  “I am. Mr. Saint-Etienne sent you?”

  “He’s waiting to see the mill, madam.”

  “Is he in the car?”

  “He is. I’ll be happy to give you a ride.”

  The tone of the driver’s voice held more interest than she expected from hired help. She cast him a quick look but could discern nothing from his blank expression. He had a bodybuilder’s stockiness and a nose that had been broken and not reset. She decided he was the same man who had stood guard at the hospital yesterday.

  “I’ll take my car. You can follow,” she told him.

  He looked pained, and considering the shine on his expensive vehicle and the dust of the drive, Amy could understand that. But he didn’t know how to locate the mill, and she did. And she was damned well keeping her distance from seductive eyes.

  She climbed into her driver’s seat without stopping at the Hummer. She was torn between wanting to hug Jacques’s neck for saving her daughter or kick his shins for wanting to steal the mill. She would maintain a businesslike distance. She couldn’t repay him in a thousand lifetimes for saving Louisa. So, she’d show her gratitude by being polite, and hope he went away. Soon.

  She tried not to stir up too much dust as she drove down her mother’s drive and the side streets through town, but the gravel entrance into the mill complex hadn’t been maintained. She winced at the potholes and hoped a Hummer had good springs to shield its injured passenger.

  Driving over a small metal bridge surrounded by pines and cedars, she then took the turn up to the main building. The complex of two-story, fifty-year-old brick buildings towered tall against the scenery of trees and mountain. Once upon a time, the mill had been the reason for Northfork’s existence. The spot had originally been chosen for the river as power for the mill wheel.

  Small cabins like the one her mother owned had been built by the mill company and rented to their workers. A number of them, like the mill manager’s cottage that she coveted, were still standing on the road up the mountain behind the complex.

  The newer mill buildings, built in the days of electricity, were built farther from the river, making them less prone to flooding, but they were no less haunted by the town’s — and her family’s — history. Amy remembered company picnics and turkeys at Christmas in the good years, union walkouts and living on grits in the bad years.

  She watched the Hummer’s driver hurry to help the occupant out. A pair of crutches appeared first, and she flinched, feeling responsible.

  Using the crutches instead of taking his driver’s hand, Jacques effortlessly swung out of the car. His assistant and the Asian cameraman climbed out on the other side.

  His injury hadn’t harmed his square jaw and flashing smile. When he turned provocative dark eyes her way, Amy nearly melted into a puddle of lust.

  She watched his powerful muscles bulge beneath his knit shirt when he used his arms to manipulate the crutches. He was so coordinated
she didn’t think he even noticed that he wasn’t walking with his legs, but with the strength of his arms. Instead, his dancing gaze pounced on her as if she were a delicious sex goddess presented for his satisfaction.

  The look sizzled any cold corner of her heart she might have left. The men around here had known her since childhood and treated her as part of the scenery. Jacques looked at her the way a man looked at a woman. She’d forgotten the power of it, and it rather alarmed her now. She didn’t want to be attracted to the enemy, even if for a brief moment he’d been a superhero.

  Waiting in front of the entrance, she stepped forward to greet him, trying to pretend he hadn’t tingled her in all the right places. Even with crutches, he was a head taller than she. “I had no idea your injury was so serious,” she said with concern. “Should you be out here? These old floors are worn and uneven.”

  His gaze immediately lost its predatory gleam, and he scowled at her insinuation that he was incapacitated in any way. “It is nothing, an old injury from my foolish youth. How is your daughter? Unharmed by the incident?”

  Just the low rumble of his voice was sufficient to shoot adrenaline straight to her racing heart. And his scowl only made him more human, damn him.

  “She’s learning how to walk in the house instead of running.” Trying to act as if she didn’t have the world’s most eligible bachelor at her back, Amy unlocked the steel doors to the office and pushed them open. A cold gust of musty air greeted them. “Humpty Dumpty will never be the same, though.”

  The driver chuckled and again offered his hand to help Jacques. “Humpty Dumpty had a great fall?”

  Jacques glowered and ignored the offered hand. “The king’s soldiers are notoriously lousy surgeons.” He swung into the tiled reception area to survey his surroundings.

  Did employees normally poke fun at employers? Amy wondered if she’d mistaken the driver’s relationship as she followed them in. The cameraman stayed outside to take pictures of the buildings.

  “Dot has plaster molds. Humpty will rise again,” she said, just to smooth over any riled waters. “It’s a pity surgeons can’t make new knees. Aren’t you supposed to keep knee injuries elevated?”

  “Always the little mother.” He sent her what might have been a look of approval, except it drifted past her to regard the unfurnished room with dismay. “Has the court already sold off the contents?” Without waiting for an answer, he swung through the empty reception area toward the office corridor.

  Just like Evan, business first. Amy shook off the instant’s warmth of his appreciation. She did not need anyone’s approval for being who she was — a mother, first and foremost. “The court sold off most of the inventory and office furniture to appease creditors.” Shivering in the unheated emptiness of tall ceilings and empty rooms, she hastened after him.

  “The original pattern cards?” he inquired, poking a crutch to open a door, checking an empty office, and moving on to the next.

  “Pattern cards? You mean the modules for the looms?”

  “No, no, the early American pattern cards Ezekial Jekel brought with him from New England.”

  “You’re talking a hundred and fifty years ago! The originals were probably hauled to the dump with the old buildings.” Amy frantically sought her memory of textile history class. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would want what were essentially the punch cards of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  “I have fabrics produced by these mills during the 1960s’ craze for Early American design,” he told her. “They compare extraordinarily well with the original eighteenth-century fabrics in museums. So the patterns must still have been around fifty years ago.”

  “If they haven’t been used in fifty years, I doubt anyone has seen them since.”

  Amy didn’t know if the muscles of his jaw tightened because he was in pain as he started up the stairs, or because of her reply. She wanted to yell at him for risking his neck climbing narrow stairs with crutches, but Jacques was an adult and not a child. His driver stoically followed behind him, hanging on to both banisters and bracing himself for a fall — although given Jacques’ solid muscle, she didn’t think anyone could stop him if he tumbled backward. “Why would you want those old cards anyway?”

  “Because the designs are historic and unavailable in any of today’s software.” He spoke each word with a swing of his crutches.

  She was exhausted just watching him, but he wasn’t even breathing heavily by the time they reached the second floor. “There’s a reason for that,” she pointed out.

  Jacques frowned at her from beneath a tumble of dark hair. So much for his charming façade. Here was the real man behind the rakish image. And he was still gorgeous.

  “The designs are complex and expensive,” he insisted stiffly. “That does not mean they should be forgotten.”

  “But Early American designs are ugly,” she retorted.

  “No, they aren’t. They are part of a revered tradition dating back to France and England in the 1600s. The varieties are as infinite as the tapestries that were being made in this plant just last year.” He spoke with pleasure on a subject of interest to him.

  Fabric design was an art form, and his knowledge and appreciation of that made him even more appealing. She liked a man who knew what he was doing. Not that she was interested, or anything.

  “You intend to produce historical reproductions?” Amy asked warily, working her mind around the possibility. That could work. She simply couldn’t figure out a market for the fabric.

  “Yes,” he said without explaining, before diving into a file cabinet, to root through it ruthlessly and efficiently.

  A germ of inspiration wiggled into Amy’s brain.

  If she found the patterns he wanted, patterns that were of no interest to her or the town, would he buy them and go away?

  Trying not to hope out loud, she spoke to the muscular expanse of his back. “We could spend weeks looking through all these buildings for those cards. I think we need to call some of the former employees and ask for their help.”

  Jacques stopped his search and looked at her with interest. “We can do that?”

  “If you pay them,” she replied with suppressed glee at the thought of the competition paying her unemployed friends to find some means of getting rid of him.

  Six

  “Give Pascal your keys. He can drive your car back to town. We must make lists of people who might help,” Jacques ordered, wishing he had a free hand to steer Amy into the Hummer before she fled. “Do you know which employees will be available to search?”

  Instead of looking satisfied, his tour guide had a deer-in-the-headlights look at his instant agreement to her suggestion, as if she were afraid he was about to run over her.

  Which he was, admittedly. But something about Amy made him want to reassure her. Stupid of him, he knew. She was a smart woman who could obviously take care of herself and everyone around her. Just because she was soft and curvy with big green heartbreaking eyes and a mouth so tender it demanded kissing didn’t mean she needed his help. He just had a need to smooth her path a little, sprinkle a few rose petals….

  See what she was like in bed. It had been a long time since the thrill of the chase had caught up with him. He had given up foxhunting as unfair to the poor animals, but a woman as intelligent as he was…that was quite another story.

  Switching a crutch to his other arm, he took Amy’s elbow and used her for a brace before she could escape. “We will just go back to the café. I will promise not to eat you.” Yet. That pouty under lip of hers was a tempting morsel he had to quit watching.

  “Where is the rest of your…staff?” she asked, giving her SUV a wistful look before reluctantly following him toward the Hummer.

  She was humoring him so he didn’t lose his balance, Jacques realized in amusement. He’d had so much experience with crutches, he could run a marathon on them, but if her nurturing soul needed to be useful, he could humor her in return. Only a macho j
erk would reject an opportunity to wrap an arm around soft shoulders and draw them closer so he could inhale her arousing scent. Jasmine?

  “This is my staff.” He gestured to Brigitte, Pascal, and Luigi. “The rest are Catarina’s entourage, as you call them. They have decided to spend the day at the spa.”

  She looked nervous as he pried her car keys from her and passed them to Pascal. Luigi closed the door on the back seat of the Hummer once she was inside, and she clung to the armrest, apparently prepared to leap out if Jacques looked at her wrong. He didn’t want her to be nervous with him.

  Once the car started, she released the door handle and knit her fingers together. The day was warm, and she was wearing a sleeveless woven silk shell of an almost olive hue to enhance her lovely eyes. He knew a little something about women’s clothing, and recognized the fabric of her ivory slacks as good quality, draping her admirable curves in a way that had him watching from the corner of his eye and imagining what she wore under them.

  He loved her scrap of shoe that barely caressed the top of her foot, exposing perfect toes with clear polish. She crossed her legs and bounced the sandal up and down, swinging the dangling heel and exposing shapely ankles. He wondered if she knew he was watching.

  “Brigitte, take notes,” he told his assistant in the front seat. “Now, Ms. Amy, who is most likely to know the location of the old pattern cards?”

  “Evan,” she muttered in response to his question.

  “Evan?” he asked, encouraging her.

  “My ex. It used to be his job to know the plant inside and out.” Her sandal bobbed faster. “He never mentioned any historic patterns.”

  “Add his name to the list,” he ordered Brigitte. “It won’t hurt to call him and ask.” He had second thoughts about that and consulted Amy. “Will it?”

  She shook her head. “It will make him feel important to be consulted, and he’ll brush you off if he doesn’t know the answer. We might have better luck getting an answer from his last secretary. Emily’s parents and grandparents all worked the mill at different times.”