Heart of Dixie

by Tami Hoag

“I’d look like a Marine,” Jake said, sputtering. “Does she?”

  Dixie smacked him again with her pillow as he doubled over laughing. She narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re just mean, that’s what you are. Here my poor cousin is, living in fear of rejection from the man she loves and you’re just sittin’ here laughin’ like a big old donkey!”

  “I’m sorry,” Jake said, gasping for air. He schooled his features into a look that was as close to contrition as he could get under the circumstances. “Really, honey, I’m sorry. It’s just…a pretty odd story, you have to admit.”

  “It’s a tragedy, is what it is,” Dixie said glumly. She could only wonder how many other women were sitting around the world miserable because they couldn’t get themselves to look like Devon Stafford.

  Jake nodded slowly, sobering as he took in Dixie’s expression, and thought about things she’d said over the past few days. He saw the whole picture with more clarity than Dixie could have realized. Tyler Holt was one of the many who had cast Devon Stafford in the role of the perfect woman, and Dixie, who so disliked the idea of the perfect image, blamed herself for what had happened. Through means he could only guess at she had once transformed herself into an icon of glamour. Her cousin Delia hadn’t achieved that elusive goal, had in fact made things worse, and Dixie, who welcomed strays and misfits with open arms, had welcomed her cousin.

  “So, she needed a place to hide out and you, my sweet little softhearted Dixie, took her in,” he said softly, trailing a forefinger down the slope of her nose.

  Dixie scowled, not comfortable with the implied idea that she was a kind of saint. She was trying to be a decent sort of person, that was all, trying to right a few wrongs.

  “Well, shoot,” she said. “The poor homely little thing needed someone to look out for her. You ought to see her with her wig off. She looks like she just escaped from a prison camp.”

  Jake lovingly brushed the tangle of bangs back from her eyes, his heart warming. “She can’t look any worse than that one-eyed cat of yours.”

  “No, I don’t suppose she does,” Dixie admitted with a chuckle.

  He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and leaned down to kiss her lips and the tip of her nose. Dixie snuggled against him, burrowing her head into the hollow of his shoulder and wrapping her arms around him.

  “It just about breaks my heart,” she murmured sadly. “Dee knocks herself out to please Tyler. She ought to trust that man to love her no matter what. If he only loves her for her hair or her figure, then what kind of love is that? If that’s the way he is, he isn’t worth all the heartache. I wish she could see that. I wish…”

  She let her wish trail off into nothingness and squeezed her eyes shut against a sudden wave of regret and misery. She wished so many things. She wished she’d never gone to Hollywood, that she’d never become so single-minded in her pursuit of fame that she had lost her perspective. She wished people had more sense than to think platinum-blond hair and a tiny waist could make them happy. She wished she could have made Dee see that before she’d turned herself bald. And she wished most of all that she could have made Jeanne see it before it had been too late.

  “Hey.” Jake tipped her chin up and stared down at the torment in her expression and felt something inside him tear in two. “It’s not your fault, honey.”

  He wished he could tell her how much he meant it, but he couldn’t tell her he knew she had been Devon Stafford. He couldn’t tell her that the pieces of the mystery were finally starting to make sense, that he was beginning to have an idea of why she had left stardom behind. All he could do was hold her close and try to convince her by sheer strength of will.

  Dixie mustered a smile for him, calling on talents she made little use of these days. “I didn’t mean what I said about you being mean. You’re about the sweetest man I know. Letting Eldon take care of your Porsche and letting Sylvie make such a fuss over you.”

  “I like Sylvie,” he admitted. “I like all your friends.”

  She cocked an eyebrow. “Even Eldon?”

  “Well…I’ll reserve judgment on Eldon until I see what he does to my baby.”

  Dixie chuckled and hugged him. “You’re a pretty decent fella for a California city boy. And so romantic, climbing up the side of my house like Zorro.”

  Jake made a face. “Next time I’m coming to the front door with flowers like any normal besotted man.”

  Dixie turned to face him, coming up on her knees on the mattress. She let the sheet fall away from her, her attention solely on Jake.

  “Are you besotted? Really?” she asked, serious and so hopeful it scared her.

  “You better believe it, lady,” he said, stroking her short thick hair.

  “I want to,” Dixie whispered. “Oh, I surely do want to.”

  “Need some convincing, do you?”

  Jake slid down, pulling her with him. He rolled her beneath him and distracted her by nuzzling her breasts while his hands swept the bedclothes, searching. He raised his head, grinning, a wicked gleam in his eyes, and dangled two little foil-wrapped packages over her nose. “Polka dots or paisley?”

  Dixie lay awake, listening to the rain pelt the window and Jake’s peaceful breathing. She cuddled against him, her head pressed to his shoulder, one leg twined with his. Her arm had long since fallen asleep, but she couldn’t bring herself to move away from him. He was so warm and solid. She wanted to cling to him as if he were a rock in a windstorm. Then again, the whirlwind swirling inside her was caused by him. How could he be both storm and shelter?

  He was the last man she should have fallen for—demanding, perfectionistic, everything she had run away from. But he was also the only man she could have fallen for—sweet, strong, honest. She wanted to trust him with her life, with her secrets, but she was afraid to.

  It was too soon. Everything had happened so fast. She hadn’t even been thinking about romance. The quiet calming routine of her life here had lulled her into forgetting about things like magnetism and chemistry. Then Jake had burst in, sending all kinds of ripples across the calm waters of her existence. Her instincts told her to trust him, to let go, to love him, but her instincts had been wrong before.

  Pictures of her days in Hollywood flashed across her memory like old vacation slides. Pictures of people she’d known, people she’d trusted, people who had turned out to have been looking out only for their own benefit. She remembered vividly her last conversation with her agent, a man she had trusted implicitly.

  He had been in the process of negotiating a new contract for her with the producers of Wylde Time. They had been squawking about the twelve pounds she’d gained when she had quit smoking during the show’s hiatus, saying it would look like twenty-five on film. They wanted the weight off before production began on the new season’s shows, but she had balked at the idea, partly out of stubbornness, partly because she had begun to see that she had been virtually starving herself. Her health had begun to suffer from the unbalanced diet and the brutal workout schedule. She had been hospitalized briefly for exhaustion at the end of the previous season. A doctor had even warned her that dire things lay in her future if she went on as she had been doing. But the only thing the people around her had cared about was that she look like the same Devon Stafford who had already made them millions. It didn’t matter to them that she felt better or that she thought the extra weight looked fine on her.

  “I don’t care what you have to do,” her agent had said, his voice gravelly and low, his dark eyes burning with anger and the shadows of fear.

  “Starve yourself, take up smoking again for crying out loud. Lose the fat, babe, or we’re out big bucks here. Do you understand me?”

  She had understood all too well. In that moment she had looked at Al Altobelli and seen him for exactly what he was. He wasn’t her friend. He wasn’t her father. He was a man who had picked her stage name for her by closing his eyes and pointing to two dots on a map of England. He was a man who sold her to the highest bid
der and pocketed ten percent. That was his business. She was just business, a name on a marquee, a face on a glossy poster.

  Hell, it wasn’t even her real face. It was a skeleton of her face, painted and polished, lips pumped full of saline and protein, eyes turned luminous green by the magic of optic science. Precious little of Devon Stafford was the real Dee Ann Montrose, the girl who had grown up with the nickname Dixie back in the hills of North Carolina. The accent had been schooled out of her speech, her body had been honed down to the bone. The long platinum locks that men the world over dreamed about were mostly extensions, woven in and colored icy blond by a man named Eco.

  All of it had come rushing home as she’d stood there watching Al rant, only half-listening as he’d thrust an article about an all-broccoli diet in her face and screamed at her to do something.

  That was when the disillusionment had begun. It had come full circle in a cemetery as she’d stood alone watching strangers lower Jeanne Parmantel into a cold, black grave. No one else had bothered to come. No one else had cared, because who was Jeanne Parmantel, anyway? Just another little nobody who hadn’t quite been good enough or thin enough or sexy enough. She hadn’t been Devon Stafford. She hadn’t been anybody.

  The old pain tore through Dixie like a knife and she tightened her hold on Jake as tears squeezed past the barrier of her lashes. She clung to him as the storm buffeted her inside. She ached to tell him. She ached to have him hold her and rock her as she poured out her heart and her sorrow and all the guilt. But she was afraid. Deep down inside, in the innermost sacred room in her heart, she was afraid. She wanted so badly for him to love Dixie La Fontaine, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him she had once been Devon Stafford.

  Jake turned toward her, saying nothing, giving no indication that he was awake. Without a word he hugged Dixie close and pressed a kiss in her hair. She hung on to him and cried, struggling to keep silent, to mask the ragged breathing and still the shaking of her shoulders. She was trying not to wake him, he knew. Whatever terrible pain was tormenting her was too personal to share.

  It tore at him to hear her cry, to know she was suffering alone. His vibrant, perky Dixie with her bright eyes and sunny smile was crying in the night, hurting. Anger burned through him. He would have cheerfully strangled anyone who made Dixie cry. She was so sweet, so loyal, so good at heart, how could anyone be so callous as to hurt her?

  Maybe no one had, he reflected, cooling his overheated protective instincts, calling on his brain to do a little of the work that had made his pseudonym famous. Perhaps the person who had hurt Dixie had been Devon Stafford. Maybe it was Devon Stafford she had run away from. Perhaps she simply had no longer been able to reconcile the image with the woman she really was.

  But why would that make her cry as if she’d lost her last best friend in the world? If she had come here to make peace with herself, why was she lying in agony in his arms?

  He wanted her to tell him. He wanted her to call to him now and confide in him here in the dark of her cluttered room with the rain driving against the house in sheets. He wanted to comfort her. He wanted to understand her. He wanted her to trust him enough to share her tears and the pain that wrung them from her. And it hurt him that she would share her body with him but not her soul.

  He was falling in love. Real love. Sweet, tender love. This wasn’t one of his mutual attractions that had led to a reasonable relationship with rules and bounds. There wasn’t anything reasonable about the way he was feeling as he held Dixie and listened to her fight against her tears. This was love. He wanted her to give him everything she was, everything she had been. He wanted her to turn to him for protection and the shelter of his strength.

  But she was crying in the night. Alone.

  He couldn’t take it. He really couldn’t. He had been an officer in the Marines, trained to withstand enemy interrogation, toughened to resist torture, but the sound of Dixie’s muffled, choked-back sobs was cutting him to ribbons. Pride be damned. He didn’t care if she wouldn’t tell him why. He just couldn’t bear to let her go on any longer. He would rather have had the soles of his feet whipped than listen to Dixie try to smother the sound of her inner pain another second.

  He brushed her hair back, wetting it with the tears he caught on his fingers, slicking the dark mass back from the delicate oval of her face. He pressed soft kisses to her eyelids, brushing his lower lip against the damp length of her lashes. He sipped the salty tears that trailed down the ripe curve of her cheek and met her swollen, trembling lips with a gentle kiss.

  “Don’t cry, baby,” he murmured. “Don’t cry.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dixie whispered, aching with misery.

  She hadn’t wanted to disturb Jake’s sleep and she certainly hadn’t meant for him to catch her crying. She braced herself for his questions. Of course he would ask. She’d never known a man as inquisitive as Jake. He was always trying to see inside things, wondering what made people tick, asking little questions and looking for answers that went beyond the obvious. She’d chided him more than once for not looking beyond the surface, but she’d been wrong about him. She’d sat next to him at Sylvie’s and watched and listened as he gathered bits of information about everyone there and ran them all through that logical brain of his, trying to put the pieces together. He’d done the same with her. Certainly now he would have more than enough reason to go looking for answers, answers she wasn’t prepared to give.

  But he didn’t ask. He kissed her. And whispered to her, murmuring words of comfort. His hands stroked her body, soothing her, easing the tension from her muscles, warming the chill that shook her from within.

  “Jake,” she said. “Make love to me. Please.”

  She heard the note of desperation in her voice and thought that surely now he would ask her. She’d never felt more vulnerable and he had to have sensed that. But he didn’t utter a word. He kissed her again, rolling over her with a slight shifting of his hips. He eased himself into her, giving her his heat, his strength.

  They had come together before in a blaze of passion and they had come together in playfulness. This time was different still. Sweeter, gentler, as tender as a new green bud in spring.

  Wanting only to comfort her, to transport her away from her pain, Jake was slow and careful, focusing his concentration on giving her pleasure. He stoked the fires gradually, his strokes smooth and measured.

  Dixie lay beneath him, too spent to do anything but hold on. She fastened her hands on his waist, her fingers pressing into the taut, flexing muscles of the small of his back. She closed her eyes, letting sensation sweep away her doubts and her pain. She concentrated on the feel of him inside her, and when fulfillment came, the last of her anguish subsided.

  Jake’s body shuddered with his release and he relaxed against Dixie. She murmured his name and kissed his ear, but when he turned his head to kiss her she was already asleep.

  His mind stirring with questions and feelings, he turned with her in his arms and settled in for the last hours of the night, still joined with her body, still longing to touch her soul.

  NINE

  DIXIE BEAMED UP at their waitress, Miss Divine Trulove. Miss Divine smiled back at her like a grandmother, small blue eyes twinkling. The sun streaming in the window across the room turned her puff of white hair into a halo around her head. She looked as if she had just stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

  “Good mornin’, Dixie love,” Miss Divine said loudly. She plucked her order pad and stubby pencil out of the pocket of her ruffled muslin apron and lifted them up under her slim nose.

  “Good mornin’, Miss Divine,” Dixie answered, matching the volume of the elderly lady’s voice. “I’ll have a great big piece of chocolate pecan pie with lots of whipped cream and a big glass of milk.”

  “For breakfast?” Jake sat across the table from her, looking shocked and disgusted.

  Miss Divine snatched his menu away and smacked him on the shoulder with it. “Our Dixie may have
whatever she likes for breakfast, Mr. Gannon,” she declared, scowling at him ferociously.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he mumbled, ducking his head in chagrin.

  “We don’t cotton much to strangers coming down here telling us what to do,” she said primly. Her voice was smooth with the polish of a true Southern lady, but a blade of steel ran through it as strong as any general’s sword. She straightened the small silk bow at the throat of her dainty flowered dress, her stern eye still on Jake, waiting for a response.

  “No, ma’am,” he said.

  Miss Divine sniffed and sighed in apparent satisfaction with his reply. She turned the page of her green order pad, wetting the tip of her pencil with the very end of her tongue and poising it exactly four inches from her face. “Now, Mr. Gannon, what would you like for breakfast this fine mornin’?”

  “Orange juice, whole wheat toast and a bowl of cornflakes with strawberries, please.”

  “Peach slices,” she corrected him. “The strawberries are a might soft today. Besides all those little strawberry seeds aren’t good for your gallbladder.”

  Jake blinked at her.

  She wrote the order with painstaking care, as if someone were going to judge her penmanship. As she tucked the pad in the pocket of her apron she gave Jake a nod. “And I’ll bring you some eggs and bacon and hashed browns. A man needs to keep up his strength. And some grits too. They’re good for your constitution. And you will eat it all or else I will know the reason why.”

  Dixie giggled at the look on Jake’s face as their feisty, eighty-five-year-old hostess made her way back toward the kitchen, her orthopedic shoes scuffing against the old yellow linoleum.

  “Miss Divine was once the dean of a school for incorrigible boys. She’ll take a switch to you if you don’t mind your manners.”

  Jake scowled at her. “She wants me to eat like a lumberjack and she lets you order pie for breakfast. Chocolate pecan pie for breakfast! Do you have any idea of the amount of fat and sugar in something like that?”