Small Town Girl

by Rice, Patricia

She had coffee brewing and Charlie’s newly-washed Fiestaware collection stacked all over the counter by the time Flint returned. He carried boxes heavy enough for two forklifts and efficiently stacked them in the pantry without dropping one. Jo sighed in regret over all those rippling muscles she shouldn’t touch.

  After storing the delivery and breaking out the Krispy-Kremes to stack in the counter case, Flint gazed over the array of plates she’d set out. “Having a party?”

  “They’re Fiestaware,” she said proudly. “They’re real popular now, and I bet these are the genuine things, not the cheap ones from the discount store. I looked them up at the library when I was in Asheville, and we have some of the old colors. I had this idea—we could paint the café in tangerine and persimmon and juniper and line shelves with the plates. Sit some in the front window. Tourists would come in and want to buy them. We could serve them coffee in the cups.”

  “Tangerine?” He looked as if he’d swallowed the persimmon. “I don’t think so. You think these things are worth money?”

  “Maybe turquoise and cobalt then?” she asked hopefully. “The place is so gloomy and dull. Bright colors would attract kids, but I guess blues…”

  He shook his head. “I like the place like it is. Just because I agreed to a purple pig doesn’t mean you can change everything. But if those plates are worth something, I could fix up a shelf in the window maybe.”

  That was a start, she supposed. She traced the tip of her finger lovingly over one of the colorful coffee cups. “And serve coffee in them maybe?”

  “They need saucers. Twice the washing.” He poured coffee into the plain white restaurant mug and leaned back against the counter to sip it.

  Jo could feel the heat of his gaze burn straight through her clothes, but she was practicing focus this morning. Men seldom turned down her ideas, but Flint probably had lots of women throwing themselves at his feet. She apparently had to appeal to his pockets if she wanted to win this one. She kinda liked the idea that he couldn’t be swayed by sex.

  Before he asked about the cost of the platter she’d broken, Jo switched the subject. “Why did you ask about Randy yesterday?”

  “Randy?” He had to change mental gears for that one. “RJ? I’d forgotten we used to call him Randy when we were kids.”

  She poured herself some coffee and leaned her hip against the stove, far enough away from him that she could keep her mind on the subject and not how it had felt to be held in those big brown arms. If she wanted to learn more, she had to keep this low key even if she had the urge to fling a plate every time she heard RJ Ratfink’s name. “You knew him when he was a kid?”

  Flint set down his cup and headed toward the door to switch the CLOSED sign to OPEN. “He was a few years younger than me, but he lived next door until my family moved away when I was ten. We bumped into each other regularly on the circuit.”

  That meant he could probably tell her all about the two-timin’ bastard’s escapades. As if he heard her thought, Flint avoided her proximity by straightening chairs. In those cowboy boots, he looked almost too tall for the room.

  “How do you know him?” he asked with an edge in his voice.

  “He used to play with the Buzzards,” she replied, keeping it casual. She could see George Bob opening his office across the street. She’d have to be quick.

  “Yeah? I didn’t know that. When he came up to Nashville, I helped him get a few jobs.” He stacked a few misplaced chairs and held them over his head to carry them to the back where they belonged.

  Jo sighed in regret again. He looked good in jeans. “I heard about his recording contract.” She moved the ugly white mugs to the closed cabinet to make room for the pretty cups in the glass display cabinet and tried to look disinterested. She didn’t know why she ought to be interested in RJ’s doings, except he seemed to make Flint real uneasy.

  When she didn’t throw a tantrum or drop anything, Flint returned to top off his cup. “Yeah. That’s why I asked about him. Is he a real good friend of yours?”

  “When Nashville called, he walked out on the Buzzards and left them stranded. I don’t reckon he has a lot of friends here right now.”

  His hard expression eased a little. “Well, that’s the music business. His manager and the record company probably made that decision.”

  She nodded knowledgeably. “The Buzzards weren’t pretty enough.”

  “Right.” Flint straightened his shoulders as if to steel himself and produced a multi-folded scrap of paper from his wallet. “You wouldn’t happen to know if any of the band wrote this, do you?”

  That caught her by surprise. Jo stopped stacking plates to stare at the scrap. It looked like one of the invoice envelopes she usually scribbled on. She was afraid if she took it, it might self-destruct. Or she might.

  A sunbeam through the newly cleaned plate glass window struck Flint square on his bronzed cheekbone, and she had to admit he had the deepest, most honest eyes she’d ever seen on a lying, conniving music man. That high brow of his gave him an earnest, intellectual look that appealed to her, and the jut of his square chin begged for her to lean over and suck his sculpted lips.

  And she knew better than to believe the image or give in to the urge.

  “Why do you want to know?” she asked, without taking the scrap. Her hands were sweaty with anticipation. Despite the peculiarity of the conversation, Jo thought that had more to do with kissing than any expectation of what Flint was about to say.

  “I composed the tunes for the lyrics RJ gave me, but later, I found that rhyme from one of his songs in his car. It’s not his handwriting.” He hesitated, then plunged on. “I have some reason not to trust him, so when he sold his album based on the songs we wrote together, that scrap made me nervous.”

  “We wrote?” She was trying hard to follow this while watching a kaleidoscope of pain, confusion, and anger in Flint’s flashing eyes. He looked as volatile as she felt. “Randy’s been using some of the band’s material on the circuit,” she said carefully.

  Which was why he was such a sneaking low-down thief, using their songs to make his career and not paying the band—or her—a dime, and then forgetting their existence when he cut a deal. Just thinking about it made her want to reach for a shotgun—and then Jo’s brain did a quick backtrack. “Wait a minute. You composed the music?”

  Taking a seat on the far side of the counter, Flint visibly braced himself. “The tunes he was playing sucked, but the audience loved the lyrics. I was staying home at the time, so I put the words to better music.”

  “The words? To Randy’s songs?” She really couldn’t believe where he was going with this. She’d written the only original lyrics Randy ever sang. Like Randy said, it was all crappola, but it was good for a laugh to warm up the audience, right?

  She must have been playing cool real well because Flint relaxed.

  “Yeah, some of them were kind of cute. ‘Let’s all join together, and summon stormy weather, and when the skies fall, we’ll bring them to their knees, and make the ratfinks crawl’. Silly, but he could change the subject from politics to business, if he liked. Audiences love thinking they can bring the fat cats to their knees and make them crawl.”

  Sipping his coffee, Flint was getting into his subject. Jo was a damned good listener. He hadn’t had an opportunity to talk music in a while, and he was feeling deprived. He’d had a roaring good time creating the upbeat on those verses. It had matched his vengeful mood at the time and washed away some of the bitterness of his divorce.

  “Silly?” Joella asked silkily, taking the scrap from his hand.

  Still sailing on one of his favorite topics, Flint didn’t hear the torpedo coming. “Yeah, some of them. Once I added the bass to the chorus of that one, the audience really got into it, pounding their bottles on the table and singing along when we tried them out in a few bars. The lyrics have the kind of passion that sells. The album’s bound to go gold.” He might hate the man behind it, but he was damned proud of the
music.

  “How nice for Randy.” Glaring at the envelope as if it had turned into a spider, Joella dropped it on the counter and started polishing one of the hideous rainbow dishes she’d been raving about earlier.

  Since she was being more rational than yesterday, Flint got a little bolder. Maybe he ought to talk to the Buzzards first, but he’d been a little startled to discover the potential source of the rhyme so easily. That chorus was the cornerstone on which the first release was laid. Maybe Joella really was an angel in disguise and could break it to the guys in a manner that wouldn’t get his pants sued off. He prayed they’d only written the one line on the envelope.

  “Yeah, well, the thing is,” Flint said slowly, looking for a cautious way to word his problem, “RJ told me he wrote all the lyrics. He’s been singing them around the country for years, so I didn’t doubt him. I’d helped him out when he needed it, so he helped me out by letting me compose. I’d been doing it for the Barn Boys, but I quit the group when I quit traveling.” Flint heard the front door open and knew the morning rush was about to start, so he hurried. “But right after RJ and I copyrighted the songs and our manager sold them, I found that scrap and asked him about it. He swore it was just a line a friend back home had jotted down. I kinda wanted to make sure everything was on the level.”

  “He said that? A friend?”

  Joella sounded so perfectly calm that the purple plate flying past Flint’s ear caught him off guard. Stunned, he watched as her tanned arm reached across a stack of plates for a pink saucer. “If the line isn’t his, I’m trying to find that friend and make it right!” he yelled, ducking as the saucer blew over his head and ricocheted off a tin lamp with noisy accuracy.

  “I wrote all Randy’s songs, damn the lazy lying low-down conniving— My mama needs that money.”

  A yellow cup whizzed straight at him and Flint dropped just in time to save his scalp. More cups, saucers, and plates flew in accompaniment to each pejorative and with increasing strength as she built up steam. Hunkered down behind the counter, Flint caught a glimpse of George Bob fleeing out the front door, and his rage boiled up and threatened to spill over. This was his career on the line.

  “All RJ’s songs?” he yelled. A growing terror built behind the dam of rage.

  Jo broke into a wild, high-pitched chorus of “He’s my man, and I’m proud to know it. He’s my man, so I knew he’d blow it…”

  Except RJ had changed the personal pronoun and said woman instead of man. The line came from the first song they’d done, and she was singing it to the tune RJ had used before Flint had fixed it. No wonder it had sounded rotten. The meter was all off for a man.

  Flint listened in horror as Jo switched into a medley of every song on the recording, punctuating each change of verse with another plate. She was winging them like Frisbees now, keeping time to the beat with the crash of crockery. And his terror swelled his rage right to the brink and over.

  “If you break any more of those damned plates, I’ll fire you!” he yelled, rising from behind the counter with his fingers gripping the Formica so hard they ought to leave dents. Pain shot through his crippled left hand, but it aided and abetted the rage.

  “You can’t fire me,” she shouted back, flinging an orange teapot into the coffee machine. “I’ll own this place before I’m through with you and Randy RJ Ratfink Peters!”

  Seven

  Joella wrote RJ’s lyrics? The blonde bombshell? His waitress? Did hell have an opening right here on earth just for him? All the lyrics?

  A plate bigger than Flint’s head flew past his nose and bounced off a photograph of the town from the early nineteen-hundreds. The frame crashed to the floor, cracking the glass, reminding him that they were wrecking his current source of income. His fury reached explosive proportions.

  Flint shoved so hard on the counter that he lifted it straight off the rotten floor. Foaming at the lousiness of the construction as well as every other damned faulty thing in his life, he slammed the counter back down with a force so strong that it rattled the remaining dishes in the cabinet just as Joella reached for a second load of ammunition.

  She jumped and stared at him in shock. Now that she was disarmed, Flint vaulted over the now-loose counter, trapped her arms at her sides, and lifted her off her feet. She wore a midriff revealing cutoff shirt beneath her apron this morning, and his hands hit warm flesh—kicking-and-screaming and not melting-with-lust flesh.

  “I don’t owe you a damned thing,” he roared, dragging her from the plates.

  She was all ripe curves and smooth skin in his arms, but she didn’t give him time to appreciate what he held. She aimed a kick at his shin. He couldn’t dodge that, and he staggered as he carried her to his office and flung her down in his tattered office chair.

  “Sit!” he commanded.

  To his amazement, she did. Except within seconds, she’d crumpled into a ball and started sobbing as if her heart would break.

  Every sniffle became a wail of anguish in Flint’s ears. His own wounds over RJ’s treachery were too raw to tolerate. Everything he’d worked for these last years, his reputation and his talent and his career and the future he’d hoped to own for his sons—all were in imminent danger of disintegrating before his eyes.

  He wanted to collapse and cry with her, but men weren’t supposed to cry. Instead, he stalked the tiny strip of open floor, holding the raw wound in his gut closed, praying Jo pulled herself together before he went berserk.

  She had come entirely too close to being right. Stealing original music was a hanging offense in the industry. She could sue everyone from God on down. He’d have to mortgage the equity in the coffee shop just to pay the lawyers. He’d made the down payment with the advance from that album. Shit.

  Action, any action, was preferable to hearing her cry. Flint crouched down in front of Jo and offered all he could. “If you can prove you wrote those songs, I’ll help you find a good lawyer.”

  She nearly bowled him over with a wallop upside the head. He was a big man and had been in bar fights before and never been knocked down, but she’d turned him into a feather. Or fear had. He’d need two good lawyers—one to sue RJ and one to protect him from Joella. He couldn’t afford even a chickenshit lawyer these days.

  Deciding there was only one way of dealing with hysteria—his or hers, Flint lifted Joella from the chair and sat down, carrying her with him. Trapping her treacherous arms, he held her in his lap and hugged her against his chest so she couldn’t go anywhere. Apparently giving up the fight again after that slap, she broke into renewed sobs, and he rocked her like a baby.

  Somehow, holding a handful of sweet-smelling woman comforted his raging temper. Her soft hair brushed his jaw, and soft curves eased the tension in his chest. He unwound as her sobs diminished into hiccups, and he prayed rationality was returning.

  He just had to get past the smoothness of her bare waist beneath his hand. And her rounded bottom in a place that didn’t need any further stimulation.

  “Put me down, you big oaf.” Apparently recognizing what she was doing to him and deciding to quit crying, Jo attempted to elbow him, but Flint held her too close.

  “I’ve got a big deductible on my medical insurance. You’re paying the bills if you gut me,” he warned, trying not to give into the instinct to protect the vulnerable.

  “I damned well am not!” She squirmed and kicked, nearly maiming him in a sensitive area, reminding him that Joella was the last thing past vulnerable. “I’m hiring the nastiest lawyer in this entire country, and I’m cutting that ratfink’s throat, and you’d better let me out of here right now to do it.”

  Flint didn’t bother to mention that if the law went after one copyright holder, it went after both, and he was the other. He didn’t figure she was thinking business at the moment. If he could put aside his own rage for a second, he could understand hers. RJ had only ripped off Flint’s livelihood, but if he knew anything at all about music and life, RJ had gouged out Joella’s
heart and soul.

  “Hey, can we get a little coffee out here?” someone yelled from the shop.

  “You damned well know where the pot is Georgie,” she yelled back. Her elbow glanced off Flint’s ribs, but it wasn’t as hard a blow as earlier.

  “Joella, honey, are you all right?” inquired a woman’s soft voice from the doorway.

  Flint groaned and shoved Jo off his lap.

  She landed feet first, hands on hips. “I’m purely fine, Sally. Me and Flint here just had a little disagreement.”

  “That involved half the crockery in here?” George Bob came up behind Sally to look in. “It’s a good thing Charlie only stocks that cheap cutlery or it looks like she’d have carved you into beefsteak. Insurance won’t cover it.”

  “Go to hell, George. Sally, we’ll take the kids’ pig,” she informed her. “And if there are any others left over, we’ll find a place for them, too.”

  Flint watched as Jo stalked out of the office as if she owned the world. Or at least, his shop. She behaved as if she hadn’t been a mewling ball of tears just minutes ago. She still had tear stains on her cheeks, but he could hear her out there pouring coffee for all the usual customers, telling jokes and kicking broken plates around with a forced laugh.

  While he stood here with a hard-on that wouldn’t go away and a terror bigger than his heart could hold. He could lose his coffee shop.

  He could lose everything.

  Well, hell, he’d already lost just about everything, so what difference did the damned shop make anyway? His parents would never agree to let his sons live up here in rural poverty, so who cared? He’d go back to cheap hotel rooms and…

  Nope, he couldn’t do music either. No fingers to play chords.

  All right, then, he’d be a homeless bum. That took the stiffness right out of his groin and put it in his spine where it belonged.

  Grabbing a push broom from the closet with his good right hand, Flint joined Joella behind the counter. “This comes out of your pay,” he warned, not because he meant it but because he had to say something in front of a shop full of staring customers.