He stopped at a country store he’d been coming to all his life and used the pay phone to call Vermont once more.
“No.” Adam sounded grumpy. “She called around noon and told me not to worry.”
“Any idea where she is?”
“On your trail, buddy. Anything more specific than that, no.”
Harlan closed his eyes, feeling dizzy and miserable. “If it’s any consolation, she won’t find me. No one will.”
“Harlan...”
“You know I’m not going to tell you any more than that. I made a mistake in coming to Vermont, Adam. I recognize that. Now I’ll do what I have to do to keep that mistake from hurting any of you.”
“You’re just as stubborn as Beth is.”
“That isn’t a compliment, is it?”
“No. But if you need help, you know where I am.”
A STATE TROOPER rousted Beth on her way after she’d dozed for a couple of hours at a rest stop in southern Virginia. It was a warm, fragrant night, reminiscent of so many she’d spent in the south. Giving in to hunger and exhaustion, she bought a coffee and two candy bars at an all-night truck stop and cranked up the Rover as fast as she dared. A dinnertime phone call to Julian had netted her nothing beyond growls about getting her butt and his Rover back to Vermont, pronto. Adam’s anger, too, had reached a point beyond words. From here on out, Beth would communicate with her brothers through an intermediary—but not Char. Her best friend had turned into a hopeless romantic since her marriage to Adam.
“If you two don’t get each other killed,” she’d said, referring to Beth and Harlan, “or kill each other, you’re going to realize you’re two peas in a pod.”
Char was dead wrong, and Beth had told her so. “I’d rather chew sawdust than have anything to do with Harlan Rockwood.”
‘Then why are you chasing all over the countryside after him?”
“I want my car back.”
Char had the nerve to laugh. “By the way, where are you? I know you’ve been stonewalling your brothers, but you can talk to me.”
“So you can rat on me and they can send out a posse? No way.”
“Thanks a lot, Beth. I thought we were friends.”
“We are, but I’m also your husband’s sister. Trust me, Char. Even if you tried to keep my whereabouts a secret, Adam would guess you were holding back on him, and there’d be hell to pay. I’m not going to put you or me in that position. This is my problem. I’ll handle it.”
“Well,” Char had said, sounding both exasperated and amused, “have fun.”
Fun! But a certain peace of mind had descended upon her as she traveled south. She felt surprisingly at ease and in control. At least she had gained a degree of confidence in her mission.
She knew where Harlan was.
There was no question in her mi ad that she would catch up with him, get her car back and prove to him—and especially to herself—that he couldn’t twist her around his finger any longer.
She was free of Harlan Rockwood, and she was going to prove it.
Coffee County, TENNESSEE. In a rolling valley at the end of the Appalachian chain, it boasted some of the most scenic and untouched country in the south. It wasn’t a watering hole for the glitzy crowd, but Harlan had never worried about being fashionable. He’d always come to Coffee County to fish and relax, and more recently to be alone. There were memories here of good times, of stupid mistakes, of a woman he had loved and lost.
He arrived at his rustic two-room cabin at noon and immediately collapsed onto the brass bed, not waking until suppertime. He welcomed the quiet. At last he could think. He had Danny at the country store deliver him a mountain of provisions. Danny minded his own business and expected others to mind theirs. He kept a loaded shotgun behind his cash register and had no patience with nosy strangers, especially from north of the Mason-Dixon line. He was eighty-three; his granddaddy had fought in the Civil War. The only Yankee he’d ever met he liked all right was Elizabeth Stiles, and that was because she could shoot better than he did. “Good woman to have on your side in a fight,” he had allowed.
A hellish one to have on the other side, Harlan had discovered. He had thought better of telling Danny he and Beth were divorced.
After a long shower in the bathroom he’d installed in a shed behind the cabin, Harlan put on shorts and a well-worn shirt and fixed himself a plate of sliced tomatoes from Danny’s garden, fried white corn and country ham—a traditional Tennessee meal that reminded him of who he was. He sat on the porch and watched the sunset as he sipped gin and tonic and pondered his next move.
Should he take the coward’s way out?
A phone call was all it would require. Do as the men who’d knocked him around had said and everything would be all right. He could return at once to a normal life. Beth would be safe. He expected she would be regardless of what he did. She knew nothing, after all, but he still wasn’t free of that last, nagging doubt that maybe she was on his trail, after all.
I give in.
That was all he had to say. Three little words. He and the woman he had inadvertently dragged into this mess would be safe.
The men who had blackened h: s eyes and bruised his body would win.
So would the man who had ordered the thrashing.
Harlan chewed on an ice cube, listened to the crickets and thought. If anything happened to Beth, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself. Putting himself in danger had been a deliberate choice on his part, even if the danger was more than he’d bargained for. It was a consequence of his own actions, something he accepted. Did he have a right to make that choice for Beth?
How could he live with himself if he abrogated every principle by which he operated?
Perhaps there was another way.
He started to throw the rest of his ice over the rail into the brush alongside his cabin, but stopped in mid-movement. He heard the snap of a twig underfoot and the crunch of gravel.
Crouching, he ignored the pain of his bruises and reached for the iron-handled poker he kept on the porch by the door, a prop of country life. It was the hour after dusk, when the shadows and sounds of the mountains were at their most mysterious. It would be easy, with the approaching night and his own frayed nerves, to mistake a rodent for an intruder.
“Whoa—yuck, I hate snakes!”
The disgust in the voice. Harlan gripped the poker hard, so he wouldn’t start punching the nearest wall in frustration and bruise his hands as well.
There was no mistaking Beth Stiles when she was on a tear.
“Slither off into the woods where you belong,” she muttered. ‘Though it doesn’t surprise me to have a snake hanging out at this place. You guys know one of your own when you see one, don’t you?”
Harlan leaned over the rail as Beth emerged from the brush, her hair all over the place and her skin un-naturally pale in the failing light. “You’d rather take on a grizzly bear than a harmless snake?”
“At least you can see a grizzly. A snake’s done bit you and gone before you’ve seen it.” She squinted up at him, then climbed the railing. In all the times she’d come to the cabin, Harlan couldn’t remember her using the stairs. She hoisted herself over and landed squarely in front of him. “Well, Harlan, didn’t you lead me on a merry chase?”
“Strangling you,” he said, “would be too easy.”
She nodded toward his poker. “Going to knock me on the head instead?”
His arms and fingers were so stiff that he almost had to pry the poker loose to set it down. The woman had always been impossible. Didn’t he remember? Bossy, stubborn, know-it-all—a glorious pain in the ass. Nostalgia was to blame for the romantic spin he’d put on their years together.
“Think I was someone else sneaking up on you?” She was gloating, as if she had a right to be there, which she didn’t. He’d let her know that soon enough, not that she’d care. “You should have known better. I’m the only person in the world who’d think to look for you here.”
“An unfortunate guess on your part,” he told her.
“No way I knew.”
He eyed her dubiously. She was dead serious. Of course. Beth was always serious about what she knew. “You’ll never change, Harlan. I realized that nine years ago when we split. You’re like a wounded dog. You always come here to lick your wounds.”
He subtly eased back against the porch wall, so she wouldn’t guess what was going on in his mind or in his body. The memory of a steamy, love-filled night enveloped him. He could hear himself as a younger man, telling his wife what this place meant to him, why he would never give it up. Aside from their sexual compatibility, love for this isolated cabin in the country was the main thing they had had in common. When their marriage broke up, he had regretted having shared this part of himself with her. He’d vowed never to take a woman with him to Coffee County again. And never had. Beth had very nearly spoiled it for him, and he wouldn’t risk that again.
Yet by coming here he had. His brain hadn’t been working right since Beth had reentered his life, even peripherally, through Char and Stubborn Yankee.
“So we’re both here.” His voice sounded raspy even to him, betraying his tortured emotions. “Let’s go inside away from the mosquitoes and decide what we’re going to do about it.”
He opened the screen door to let her go in first, then decided he’d better disclaim his actions immediately. “It’s my house, and I’m being polit¢’. I’d open the door for any of my guests.”
“That’s okay. I could hardly be mistaken for a damsel in distress tonight.”
That was true enough. She looked like hell. His hell, though, as personal and familiar to him as his cracked ribs and bruises. They could never really be strangers. Because of that, they could never really be friends, either. The past hung over them when they were together, worked on their hormones, whittled away all they had become in their near decade apart. He was twenty-two again and captivated by this opinionated, beautiful Yankee, who—to his mother’s dismay—had once shown an incompetent tree crew how to properly fell the dead elm in his parents’ front yard. “That,” Eleanor had told a neighbor about the woman in hard hat and leather chaps, wielding a chainsaw, “is my future daughter-in-law.”
Harlan was no longer twenty-two, and Beth wasn’t nineteen. She was thirty-four, he thirty-seven—both long past playing the kind of games they’d played with each other’s hearts and minds a decade ago. Even if they weren’t, this wasn’t the time. He’d make that obvious to her and send her packing.
Her arm brushed his as she whirled past him and made his skin tingle. She glanced back at him, her lashes black against the smoky blue of her eyes. Her expression was serious, yet also evoked the hell-raising teenager who had once swept into his life and out again.
“We’re doomed,” she said, her own voice a little hoarse.
Harlan didn’t dare touch her or smile. “I know.”
Being back in Coffee County, Beth fast discovered, wasn’t like old times at all.
The cabin hadn’t changed. There was the same wedding-ring quilt thrown over the same brass bed, the same sturdy pine trestle table, the same mismatched depression-ware. Still no curtains, still no cabinets. Dishes, pots and pans and canned food were all haphazardly arranged on open shelves, as they had been when Beth had first come to Coffee County fifteen years ago. Even the hooked rug in front of the stone fireplace was the same. They had bought it at a country fair one summer.
Yet if the cabin itself hadn’t changed, everything else had—Harlan and herself, for certain. In the fading light of the humid August night she remembered who they had been. Kids, really, filled with unrealistic visions of the future, and even more unrealistic visions of their lives and of each other. Ahh, the past, Beth thought, unexpectedly saddened by her memories, not because of the wasted years with Harlan—she’d had to learn about men somehow—but because she felt so tired thinking about the dreams and plans she’d had at twenty.
These days her primary concern was getting hot water into her shack of a house, maintaining her running schedule, and pulling her weight at Mill Brook Post and Beam.
Or at least that had been the case until two days ago, when Jimmy Sessoms had called her Mrs. Rockwood and she’d discovered her ex-husband, not a rodent, in her attic. Now she was in Tennessee, dodging shadows of the past and hiding from old dreams.
Harlan poured her a glass of of iced tea and handed it to her. He didn’t sit down. Neither did she. She was too keyed up, too wired from the tension of not knowing if she’d find Harlan in Coffee County, and especially of not knowing if she was doing the right thing.
“We need to talk,” she said.
He nodded. “I know.”
“Adam—”
“Is ready to string us both up. I’ve talked to him,” Harlan admitted.
“How much does he know?”
“Everything you do.”
“Which is hardly anything,” Beth said without bitterness.
“For good reason.”
“Naturally. No need to get defensive.”
“I’m not.” He bit off his comment. She watched him squeeze his iced-tea glass. At least he looked better than he had the other night, when she’d had to peel him off her attic stairs. As she recalled, he’d always mended fast from his pummelings.
She drank her iced tea, continuing to watch him.
“You look beat.”
His drawl was as clipped as it ever got, and she knew her cool was getting to him. If she were throwing things at him, he’d be fine. He’d treated her shabbily and knew it. Here she was, demanding justice. It clearly galled him, knowing that this time she had the upper hand.
“Take a shower, if you want. It’s in the same place, plenty of towels.” He swallowed the last of his tea, his eyes never leaving her. “Guess you’ll have to stay the night. Suitcase in the car?”
“Just an overnight bag. I’ll get it.”
He gave her a long look, and she wondered if their shared past was troubling him, too. “Fine.”
Those damned eyes of his! Her composure was slipping away. She felt hot and sweaty and sore—and on the edge of arousal, from that one, long, appraising stare. Beth had hoped her attraction to Harlan would have subsided with time, but it had apparently only lain dormant, like a powerful volcano.
‘‘A shower probably would do me good. I won’t be long.” She stopped halfway to the door, turned, and thrust out one hand. “My car keys.”
“What for?”
“You’ll cut out on me while I’m in the shower, and I don’t particularly want to chase you across Coffee County buck-naked. Folks would talk.”
He smiled, moving toward her. “They’d just see your Vermont license plate and say that’s a Yankee for you.”
She was unmoved. “My keys.’
He fished into his shorts pocket and dangled the keys in front of her. She snatched them away, feeling breathless. It had been a long, long time since anyone had challenged her the way Harlan did. “I didn’t think you’d stay mad long enough to get this far,” he said nonchalantly. “I thought you’d cool off at least by Pennsylvania and head back home.” The spark went out of his eyes and the nonchalance vanished. “You should have, you know.”
“That’s what being around you does to me—destroys all my common sense. No wonder I can’t think.” She closed her fingers around her precious keys. “Ten minutes, tops. Be here when I get back.”
She had gotten all the way out to the back porch when he called softly, in his slowest, richest drawl, “I could always steal the keys out of yo
ur shower.”
“Try it, bub. See what it gets you.”
Being naked within a hundred miles of Harlan would have had a detrimental effect on her nerves. Now she was showering in the very stall where they had made love on a number of all too memorable occasions.
She’d hung both sets of car keys on the hot-water faucet. If Harlan was going to sneak off, he’d have to head out on foot. At least he’d be easier to track down. Half expecting his sinewy hand to reach in at any moment and grab her keys, she got on with her shower. Efficiency counted now.
Keeping the water cooler than she ordinarily would have, Beth soaped up her hair and body. Slowly, almost against her will, she felt herself begin to relax. She was here. She had found him. Her guess had been on target. Now she’d get her car back and have a chance to insist on answers—if she wanted them. For all his many faults, Harlan was no fool. He would understand that he’d either deal with her fairly, or she’d trail after him like a hound after a weasel.
She closed her eyes and cranked up the hot water just a little, feeling it pelt against her skin and tired, taut muscles. She had done the right thing in coming. She knew she had. If the memories of their past had assaulted her psyche, she had the strength, the balance and self-assurance to endure it.
She sighed contentedly at the feel of the hot water in her hair.
She sensed his presence, not wanting to open her eyes to find out whether she was right. When Harlan’s mouth closed over hers she knew she was right, but still didn’t open her eyes.
His mouth was on hers, hot and wet, as real as the past had ever been in a decade of dreams. His tongue was inside her mouth, exploring, tasting.
Hot hands on her breasts, cupping, smoothing.
She moaned. Surely she’d gone mad, but it was a delicious madness.
She heard him groan and whisper her name, but it had been a long, long two days, and she was beyond exhaustion. Reality or fantasy, she was entitled to this indulgence. She thrust her hands against the shower stall and pressed hard to maintain her balance, to stop herself from reaching out for his hard, sleek body. She didn’t want to grope in thin air, didn’t want the fantasy to end.
That Stubborn Yankee Page 6