She mowed Blanche’s lawn so she wouldn’t have to pay an unreliable teenager, and Blanche acknowledged that by leaving her cold pitchers of lemonade on the front stoop.
She understood why Blanche kept her distance. As far as the Mags were concerned, she was consorting with a member of Team Sin. Marybell couldn’t afford to rock the boat, and having a man over would surely rock the boat.
“Don’t you worry about Blanche. She loves me.”
Rules. They needed rules. “No funny business?”
He wiggled a dark eyebrow, the lines around his eyes crinkling upward. “Define funny.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Just awesome conversation.”
Blowing out a breath, she decided she had two choices. One, let him keep chasing her until he ran out of steam. Apparently he had a lot of steam. He also had a lot of sex appeal. If he kept hanging around, she didn’t know how long she could resist him, and resist she must.
Two, let him have this date and blow his mind with as much leather, makeup and mayhem as she could rustle up. “Fine. When?”
“Tomorrow night. You’re off then, right?”
How did he know what her days off were?
“Em,” he said, answering her silent question. “I asked very casually.”
“The way you told them you kissed me. Was that casual?”
“It was a heat-of-the-moment confession. It’ll never happen again.”
“Swear?”
“Pinky-swear.”
“Okay, tomorrow, my house, eight o’clock. You cook, we talk, I remain unimpressed, you clean up, you go home. For good.”
“Done deal.”
She stuck her free hand out to shake on it.
Tag grabbed it and used it to pull her close, clamping his lips to hers with a brief-but-searing kiss. His lips...she could get lost in his lips, warm, firm yet soft.
Just as her fingers were about to curl into his jacket, just as she was about to sink into all that muscle, someone whistled, reminding her where they were. Marybell dragged her mouth from his, taking a step backward, outwardly hanging on to everything she had to keep from letting him see how rattled his kisses made her. “The deal didn’t include kissing.”
“We Hawthornes seal all our deals with kisses. It’s the Hawthorne family way. Do the Lymans do it differently?”
She wanted to be mad at him for catching her off guard, for practically shouting to the world what was going on between them.
But he was so doggone cute with her blue metallic lipstick smeared all over his lips she didn’t have the heart. “An addendum to our deal.”
He sipped his coffee and nodded, the long column of his throat working as he swallowed.
“No kissing.”
“You’re a fun stomper for sure, Marybell Lyman.”
“Deal?”
“Deal.” He tipped an imaginary hat at her. “See you tomorrow at eight.”
On impulse, she pulled a tissue from her pocket and stood on tiptoe. “You have a little something ri-i-ight there,” she teased, flattening her hand and dabbing at his mouth. She grabbed his fingers and put the crumpled tissue with smears of blue lipstick in his palm. “See you at eight.”
Marybell hid her smile until she turned around, but the grin spread as she made her way across the square.
And then she remembered, she had to make this the worst date of his life.
That wiped the grin right off her face.
Six
“Are you payin’ attention, Taggart Hawthorne, or are you daydreamin’ about Marybell?” Em poked him in the ribs with an elbow and laughed.
“Uncle Tag?”
The mention of Marybell made Tag instantly fish for the tissue he’d stuffed in the pocket of his jeans and remember the smirk on her face when she’d wiped his mouth.
“Uncle Tag!” Maizy yanked on the edge of his hoodie.
His eyes finally found focus. He stared down at his niece, her fiery hair a red glow in the last remnants of afternoon sun streaming through the kitchen windows. “Yes, Miss A-Maizy?”
“You’re not listening to Em, and she says if you burn the lasagna, it’ll be your own fault. I bet Miss Marybell doesn’t like burned lasagna. If you like her, you better pay attention, because that’s what makes you not selfish. When you pay attention to what other people like.”
He swiped a finger down her cute nose. “Sorry. I was distracted.” With thoughts of Marybell. All of his thoughts since she’d turned him down cold on the phone had been of Marybell. Why? Why couldn’t he get her out of his head? “So, where were we?”
Em snickered. “We were at the part where you have to confess to Marybell that you can’t cook.”
He took the package of no-bake noodles from Em and shook them. “Of course I can cook. Or at least I’ll be able to after you show me how.”
Em wiped her hands on her apron and pulled Maizy in for a squeeze. “Would you go dig Gareth out for me, please, sugar? I just know your poor uncle Gage needs a break from all those questions he’s been askin’ lately.”
Maizy nodded and skipped out of the kitchen, making Tag smile. For the most part, Maizy had managed to accept Gareth and Clifton Junior with open arms. They’d all worried that Maizy, being an only child, would struggle with Jax and Em’s attention spread three ways. They’d worried that the boys, who’d only just adjusted to their father’s departure a year prior, would struggle, too.
But Maizy and both boys had rallied with a little help from Em, and that only made Tag respect her more. She was a damn good mother. “She really loves Gareth and Clifton Junior. I’m pretty impressed at how seamlessly you’ve managed to blend this bunch.”
Em stirred the sauce she’d shown him how to make in three easy steps. “Slow and steady wins the race. If Jax and I keep taking this one step at a time, eventually they won’t even remember a time they weren’t all together.”
He liked that. He liked that Jax and Em were so solid about their decision-making. He liked watching them becoming a family. He didn’t like the small pangs of envy he’d been feeling about it lately. He’d been so full of anger for so long that these new softer feelings still felt foreign.
“I hope you know that I take all of you into consideration, Tag. Not just Maizy, but you and Gage, too. I don’t ever want y’all to feel like we’re takin over. This was your home first.” Em still lived in her house with the boys, and Jax hadn’t popped the question yet, but Tag was guessing it wouldn’t be long. They were about as crazy about each other as he’d ever seen two people. He wanted that for his brother.
Lately, he wanted it for him, too. He couldn’t pinpoint when it had happened. He attributed some of it to Em’s presence, her influence, her silent-but-gentle demand he figure his shit out, and he was trying. Some of it he had locked down. The rest was slow going.
Tag dipped a spoon into the sauce and tested it. As always, it was amazing. Thank God for Em. “This wasn’t a home until you used the oven. As far as I’m concerned, if you keep cooking for us all, you can take over the world.”
Em pulled up a stool at the breakfast bar and patted the one next to her. “So, tell me where you stand. I’m guessin’ the other night went well? The bologna sandwiches?”
Tag slid onto the stool, pulling his cup of hot chocolate toward him. “It was a disaster. She hated every second she spent with me.” Still, he grinned. There was something there, and he wasn’t alone. She could fight it, or she could come along for the ride.
Em braced her head on her hand. “Couldn’t have been that bad. She’s lettin’ you, er, me, cook for her tonight.”
“She’s only doing that because she thinks it’ll make me go away. I told her she had to give me one more date before she shuts the door completely on dating me.”
“I don’t want to pry, and you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. You just say, ‘Em, mind your p’s and q’s,’ but you’ve been turned out by her. Why keep goin’ back for more?”
&nbs
p; He didn’t have the answer to that, either. He kept thinking, if she’d just let him hang out with her, the challenge of getting her to give him the time of day would dry up and blow away.
But when she’d agreed, and he knew full well she was intent on making him hate every second he spent with her tonight, it just made him smile harder. “I don’t know. I know it’s cliché, but there’s just something about Marybell. I like her. She’s got a sharp tongue. She’s also a mystery.” He wanted to see what was under all that makeup and hair—like he’d never wanted to see anything else in his life.
“What about Alison?”
The reference to his ex-fiancée made him bristle. Em knew all about his downward spiral and why he’d come to Plum Orchard. To pick up the pieces of his crapped-out life. “What about her?”
“Are you totally over her?”
His jaw went hard when he stared down Em. “I was totally over her the second she told me she was leaving me for a guy who still had a checking account.” Alison wasn’t the woman he’d thought she was, and he’d turned into a man he never thought he was capable of becoming because of that.
That’s just an excuse, Tag. No one made you drink until you were stupid. You did that. It’s a choice.
She waved a finger under his nose. “Don’t you get snippy with me. Yes, I’m bein’ nosy, but I’m doin’ it because I’m lookin’ out for my friend.”
Tag rolled his shoulders. Alison wasn’t easy to talk about. He’d trusted her completely, so totally, he’d have handed everything he owned over to her without a blink of his eye.
They’d been together a long time—known each other all their lives—and then one day, she’d turned into someone he didn’t know. A liar, a cheat. She’d blindsided him and, worst of all, she’d left him questioning his judgment. How could he have been so deeply in love with someone and never know what she was capable of?
It only proved to him you never really knew anyone. You were always just scratching the surface.
Em gave him the eye. “So, Alison?”
“I’m definitely over her. Not sure I’ll ever be over the shock of finding out she was cheating on me. Of all the things she could’ve done to shock me, that was never even a consideration.”
Em smiled her sympathetic smile. “Fair enough, but I’m gonna tell you true about Marybell because I love her. She’s my friend. We’ve all thought somethin’ troubles her. Dixie’s been over and over all the letters and DVDs Landon left about Call Girls and each of our employees. She’s questioned Sanjeev until she’s blue in the face, but he didn’t leave a clue as to why he helped her, or what he helped her with. Maybe he just gave her a job because she applied.”
“Well, that makes the most sense,” Tag said. Yet he wasn’t sure he even believed it.
Em shook her head. “But knowing Landon and that enormous heart of his, I doubt it. Every one of the operators has a specific reason Landon hired ’em. But Marybell’s the only one who hasn’t said a word. We don’t push, because we don’t want her runnin’ scared. It’s hard enough in the PO with all the cruel things people say. I won’t have her feeling like we’re on her back, too.”
“But?”
The lines around Em’s crystal-clear blue eyes deepened. “But there’s something.” She punctuated that with a finger, like trying to place it on the invisible something. “Something we all handle with kid gloves even though we don’t know what it is. There’s a vulnerable side to Marybell that worries me greatly. It worries us all. I don’t know if it was man trouble or something else. But who up and moves to a small town where everyone will stare at you and sometimes openly berate you on purpose? She came here knowing what she was in for. Landon told all the girls what it would be like before he moved the company here. Who does that?”
He shrugged. “LaDawn?”
“Ha! Now, there’s what I mean when I say all of the operators are there for a reason. Landon wanted her off the streets of Atlanta. But LaDawn’s an open book. Once a lady of the evenin’, rescued by Landon. Not a lady of the evenin’ anymore. LaDawn hides nothing about her old life, and we like her just that way. But we don’t even know if Marybell has a family somewhere. Maybe someone she had a falling-out with? She’s been with Call Girls for quite a while and no mention of it. She never talks about high school or college or anything before she began working for Landon in Atlanta and then here in the PO. It’s like she didn’t exist before then.”
Curiouser and curiouser. “She did say she has no family. She was a foster kid all her life.”
Em looked almost hurt by that revelation, but her eyes held sympathy. “I had no idea. I’m a little hurt by that, in fact. I always feel like she doesn’t trust us. Sometimes I wanna shout, ‘There’s nothing you can tell us that will make us love you less.’”
“What makes you think she’s keeping secrets?” He’d love Em’s take on it because he felt much the same way. The way her words were short and stilted when he’d asked about her family. The way her body language changed from loose to stiff in just one question.
“I wish I knew what makes me think we girls don’t have her full trust. It’s just somethin’. Like when we’re all gabbin’ about men and talking about our past boyfriends or crushes, Marybell gets real quiet. That’s not to say all it could be is she’s very private. It’s just somethin’...”
“So, what’s your point here, Em?”
“Here’s my point. Marybell is an amazingly giving human being despite what I sense are trust issues, and if she’s here because she’s been hurt before, don’t you chase after her just for the chasin’. Mean it if you want it, Tag. This is the first time you’ve stepped out on that limb o’ yours after all your troubles these past couple of years, so you have to be careful, too. Go slow.”
He understood why Em was nosing around. She was doing what she always did: looking out for the women she considered family. “Slow and steady wins the race.”
“Right. And my lasagna. Now,” she said with a smile, hopping off the chair and pointing to the white ceramic pan she’d lined with her sauce, “let’s impress our girl.”
Tag followed her back to the stove, but his mind was racing with the things Marybell had chosen to tell him and not some of her closest friends.
That had to mean something, right?
* * *
Marybell fisted the pointy thatch of hair on her head and pulled it high when it began to slump. It was time to chop some more of it off if she hoped to keep this Mohawk up to standard.
Maybe she’d just shave it all off and give Plum Orchard something else to gawk at. She pressed a stray strand that had somehow managed to escape the wrath of her gel and hair spray back into place, then grabbed the can of red hair dye and sprayed it, deepening the color.
It would be so much easier if she were simply running a brush through it or clipping it up in a barrette. Sometimes, when she had time on her hands and she was at home alone, she re-created Dixie’s and Em’s hairstyles, just to see what it felt like to be what society dubbed the norm. She loved the long layers and beachy waves Dixie wore so often or when Em threw her dark locks up into what she called a messy updo.
But if she wanted to stay here, with the people she loved, she was going to look like this when she was sitting in a rocking chair at the Plum Orchard Senior Center. She was also going to have to pray her voice didn’t change with age in order to keep her job because it didn’t look as though she was ever going to do anything else but talk dirty.
Satisfied with her eerie reflection and the new heavy white foundation she’d ordered online that made her eyes look like two black holes in her head, she flipped the bathroom light off and padded to the living room, where she waited with a sinking feeling for Tag to arrive.
To set the mood for her “Freak Tag Out” mission, she flipped on some Marilyn Manson and lit the candles she had left over from Halloween. They were black and suited her mood.
She’d spent a solid afternoon trying to figure out what kept Tag
coming back for more, and she still had no answers. He was handsome and available, funny and smart, and he was chasing after the woman everyone called a freak. If he’d just go away, lusting for him from afar would be a picnic.
The ring of her doorbell had her wiping her sweaty palms on her zebra-striped leggings. She’d added extra studs to her eyebrow and thrown on as many pleather-studded items as she could find in order to ensure that she was at her freakiest.
Propping the door open, she grinned, knowing her black lipstick made her teeth look especially white. “How’s it goin’?”
But it didn’t phase Tag. He grinned, perfect, solid, smelling like tomato sauce and the outdoors, and held out a white pan—one that suspiciously looked like the pan Em brought to work when she made them all tater-tot hot dish. “I see you’ve dressed for the occasion.”
What did she have to do to freak him out—swallow a flaming sword? “I won’t apologize for likin’ pleather.” She curtsied.
That earned her another smile. “And studs,” he said, handing her a bowl and a loaf of bread wrapped in tinfoil. “I like them on you. I especially like the trouble you went to in the eyebrow section of your face. Really shiny. I like shiny, too.”
She took the bowl and loaf of bread without another word, walking to the kitchen, making sure her ugly green-and-black work boots made extra, unladylike noise.
Tag followed, dropping the pan on the counter. He let out a low whistle when he took a look around at the eerie glow she’d created with the candles. “Wow, are we sacrificing an animal tonight? You didn’t say it’d be that kind of date. If only I knew, I would have brought my chalice and my voodoo dolls.”
When she turned to face him, she had to cover the skip in her breathing and clear her throat. God. He was so roughly beautiful. Like one of those hand-carved wood statues with craggy edges and dark lines. “It’s okay. I gave up ritual sacrifice. It’s messy.”
“Okay, but just so you know, I’m open to new experiences.” Tag pulled his cap from his head and placed it alongside the white dish.
Talking After Midnight Page 8