by Cait London
“Anna Belle missed you. You should have come back more often. It broke her heart when you divorced Tucker. She was never that close to your mother, though she loved her. Your mother always was a bit uppity and your father…well, Billy Walker had a temper. It was just as well you married Tucker when you were caught at the Last Inn Motel.”
Carly leveled a stare at Sally Jo. She wanted everyone in Toad Hollow to know that she wasn’t giving up her grandmother’s house without a fight. “I love that house. It holds dear memories for me,” Carly said. “Tucker has no business in it. Whatever he did to get Anna Belle to sell to him, instead of saving it for me, probably wasn’t—”
“Tucker wouldn’t take advantage of Anna Belle, Carly, and you know it. He kept that place up—”
“Ah. For a reason. To get himself into her good graces.”
With a long sigh, Sally Jo collected her tips, slid them into her pocket, and stood. “What a crock of you-know-what. The guy deserves a break, a house and a wife. You’re not getting my sympathy, or anyone else’s.”
“He’s not sweet, you know, Sally Jo.”
Sally Jo laughed knowingly. “Sometimes ‘sweet’ isn’t what a woman wants.”
“I am going to get my grandmother’s house back.”
“Then you’re going to have to go over Tucker to get it.”
“Then I will.”
Tucker groaned silently when he saw Carly’s rental car parked in his driveway. He leaped off the back of Arlo’s truck as it slowed, slid on his T-shirt and unbuckled his tool belt, holding it in his hand. At six o’clock in the evening, he was tired, sweaty and needing a break from everyone who cautiously watched him for some reaction to Carly’s threat. He stood looking at the woman leaning against her car, the dying dappled sunlight burnishing her sun-streaked hair. Her arms crossed as she stared at him.
“Go on home now and tell your parents that nothing is going to happen,” he quietly ordered Betty and Ross Wilson’s two little boys. The boys had laid their bicycles down on Mrs. Blackstone’s lawn directly across the street from his house. They were watching intently, no doubt hoping to see Carly in action, making good on her earlier threat of murder. Tucker knew they were half hoping for real blood and crime-scene tape and being interrogated until they sweated beneath the hot lights and got nervous and spilled their guts. The boys knew Carly Walker Redford’s reputation from their parents—that she was capable of stirring up a real mess. Now they were ready to watch Tucker bravely go to his gory death.
“Don’t let her kill you, Tucker. I like fishing with you,” Tanner said unevenly.
“Me, too,” Gavin added as they mounted their bikes and soared down the street to make their report to Betty and Ross who had grown up with Carly and Tucker.
Tucker waved to Mrs. Storm and with a bracing sigh, prepared to deal with his ex-wife. “You’ll want the things Anna Belle left for you, I guess. Come on in.”
Carly still looked stunned, shadows beneath those light brown eyes, and in her hand was a small bouquet of Anna Belle’s budding roses—it looked uncomfortably like the florist’s version she had carried when they were married in church. The petals had quivered, reflecting the fear in her face and in her body later that night—until she discovered that Ramona had gotten to him first.
Carly wasn’t that sweet girl any longer. In their chance meetings through the years, she’d wrapped her high-nose city ways around her. She’d made it clear that she disdained her ex-husband, who had never wanted anything but to live peacefully and work and grow old in Toad Hollow.
Tucker opened the front door and entered the house, turning to bow and sweep his hand in front of him, beckoning her to enter.
Carly eased around him, just as she always did when they chanced to meet in too-close areas. She stood in the middle of her grandmother’s living room, looking slowly around to the things that were Anna Belle’s. Carly noted the changes Tucker had made—like the big-screen television set and the big, comfortable leather recliner and sofa, where his pillow and blanket marked his restless night.
“When I came home to visit Anna Belle, I really didn’t go anywhere else. I just wanted to stay here and be with her, to enjoy the peace of this house and work in the yard,” Carly said softly. “Everyone in town thinks that I’m stuck-up now.”
The large parrot who had been silent for a month fastened his beady eyes on Tucker. Then Livingston’s iridescent green head turned slowly toward Carly. His rough parrot-language took Tucker a moment translate. “Awk! Awk! Carly. Carly. Carly. My girl, Carly. I love Carly…so does Tucker.”
The bird’s loud coarse voice startled Tucker, who had tried hours to get the parrot to speak. And now, the first time Livingston said anything, it was a fact that Tucker had buried long ago.
With an excited cry, Carly hurried to the big suspended cage by the window. Before Tucker could stop her, she’d opened the cage and reached for Livingston. She cuddled the parrot against her and Livingston’s beady eyes blamed Tucker for keeping Carly away.
“Every time I hold him, he unloads his cargo on my clothes.” Tucker turned from the tears shimmering in Carly’s eyes. “The last time I let him out, he flew all over—if that’s what you can call it—and banged over Anna Belle’s cacti in the sewing room. It took forever and a few scars to get the spines out of his feathers—and me. He’s got an evil temper and he hasn’t been talking.”
“He missed me,” she said unevenly, easing the bird up onto her shoulder. “Sweet bird,” she cooed to the parrot.
“Sweet bird. Sweet bird,” Livingston squawked with a parrot accent.
When Tucker had tried to put Livingston on his shoulder, the bird had refused. And he’d left droppings every time, physical evidence of his opinion of Tucker. Now he was nuzzling that dangerous beak in Carly’s streaked hair.
Tucker liked her hair better when it wasn’t so striped, but more of a natural sun-lightened color. He could feel himself sliding into a weak pool of emotions that he didn’t know how to handle—and it would be there in his weak-vulnerable bog that Carly would take advantage of him. “You’re not getting him. Friends kept him and took him to visit Anna Belle while she was in the retirement home. But she felt he’d live longer and healthier if he stayed here. She wanted some of the furniture to stay, too…like her bed. I promised I’d do my best to take care of it. Some of it went to your mother. Some of it goes to you, just like she said. Mostly the pictures and smaller stuff. They’re in your old room.”
“I…I was grieving so much that I forgot about you, Livingston. I’m sorry. I knew you were being cared for, and I didn’t have a place to keep you in Denver. I thought I’d wait until I moved apartments before collecting you.”
With Livingston perched on her shoulder, Carly walked slowly to her grandmother’s huge spool-leg dining room table, now cluttered with papers and a calculator. She ran her hand across the big antique buffet that once held Anna Belle’s favorite pictures—replaced by Tucker’s baseball, bowling and bass fishing trophies.
Carly moved through the rooms, her hand touching here and there, where Tucker had removed Anna Belle’s knickknacks. She passed into Anna Belle’s bedroom, now shed of its doilies and vanity and homey clutter, where the big four-poster was unmade and Tucker’s clothes were piled everywhere. “It used to be so beautiful, with her off-white chenille bedspread,” Carly said quietly.
“Tucker needs Carly,” Livingston squawked.
Tucker tensed and stuck his hands in his pockets. “That’s the first time I’ve heard that bird speak in a long time.”
Carly shook her head as if discarding the thought, and moved into the doorway of her old room. Boxes of Anna Belle’s things were stacked against the wall and on the floor and on the single four-poster bed and antique dresser. With her back to him, Carly placed her hand on the wooden pinecones of the bed’s posters and bowed her head. “There’s…just so…much. Her entire lifetime—and mine and Mom’s.”
Livingston hopped and turned arou
nd on her shoulder. His beady eyes condemned Tucker. “Bad boy…bad boy.”
Carly slid slowly to the braided rug on the floor and Livingston hopped onto the boxes on the bed. “Bad boy,” he said again, eyeing Tucker.
Tucker wished he hadn’t seen Carly reach into a box and lift out her old rag doll, bringing it to her chest and wrapping her arms around it. Sitting with her back to the bed, she began to rock.
Before Tucker realized he was moving, he had taken a step toward her. He’d held her when her pets had died and had helped her with their funeral rites. From childhood, they’d spent hours in that big oak in the backyard in perfect understanding, letting go of grief and sadness. At Anna Belle’s funeral, Carly had been in her mother’s arms, but now there was no one to comfort her—but him.
And he just wasn’t that certain about himself now.
Tucker did what he always did years ago, when they were married and his emotions about Carly got tangled between love for a soul mate, frustration that a woman could bring and the ugliness of their marriage breaking apart—he walked out the front door, closing it behind him.
He was halfway down the walkway, headed for the safety of dark places, music, a good beer and steak, when he heard Carly’s command: “Tucker Redford, you are not running away from this. You get right back in here and tell me how it was that your name happens to be on the deed of my house.”
Well, that was a new one. In their two-year marriage of past arguments, she’d never opened that closed door—unless it was to throw his clothes and his baseball and fishing trophies out onto the front lawn. He stopped and stood still, his mind churning the reasons he should obey an ex-wife. Especially one who thought she had better things to do than to be married to him and raise the kids that now he might never be able to have….
Wait a minute…wait a minute. That house was his now, bought and paid, and Carly wasn’t his wife….
Maybe it was time to tear her out of his days and nights. Maybe it was cleansing time, so he could move on in life. It definitely was time for a face-off with the one woman who had damn near made him impotent.
But then, how would he know, since his want-to hadn’t matched his actual will-do in eleven years.
He turned slowly to the one woman who had given him both heaven and hell…. It was time to finish her off—or at least tell her off and give himself closure.
When Tucker narrowed those blue eyes and looked at her, Carly took a step backward into the safety of her grandmother’s house.
She tried to ignore that little quiver of fear as he began to walk slowly toward the house, never taking that piercing blue gaze from her. She’d never been afraid of Tucker, because he’d never hurt her—intentionally. There was that time he slid into home plate and knocked the catcher—that was her—into a roll. He’d gone pale at the sight of the bloody gravel-scratches on her arms and legs. It wasn’t until she’d reminded him that she’d hurt herself worse by roller-skating on the street, or climbing up trees or roofs, or falling in a blackberry patch, that his pained and guilty expression had eased.
At a tall, solid two-hundred pounds of muscle, the man walking up the stone walkway looked dangerous and unforgiving. He looked as if nothing could stop him.
Carly swallowed and gave Tucker room to enter the living room. He continued to pin her with those silvery-hot eyes and slowly closed the door behind him. This wasn’t the Tucker she’d known all her life, who had taught her how to swim in the river and catch crawdads and frogs. This wasn’t the young man who had gently introduced her into sex, playful and the other kind where she thought she had died and melted into a warm, damp, happy, limp noodle curled next to him.
On her shoulder, Livingston squawked, “Kiss…make up.”
At the end of their marriage, they were either arguing or making love that when finished, left them lying apart and thinking in the dark—without words between them.
This argument was going to be all heat and fire and fast, hurting words—without the make-up sex later.
“You might want to sit down for this one, Carly,” Tucker said. “But first put Livingston back in his cage and cover him. I don’t want to listen to you both.”
Carly’s hands trembled as she managed Livingston into his cage and placed him in darkness. Tucker’s voice was deep and cold and he’d just tossed his ballcap onto the table. In the cool shadows, he looked like someone else. He looked like a hard man with an unrelenting, stubble covered jaw.
It struck her then that she’d never seen Tucker with more than a shadow predicting stubble, because he’d always been careful to shave. He sank into a chair and began unlacing his workboots. He tugged them off, and each one hit the floor with a heavy thump. “You know what? This time, I’m not going anywhere. This is my house now.”
He stood abruptly and with a disdaining look down at her as he passed, moved into the kitchen. He washed his hands, reached into the refrigerator freezer, took out a handful of ice cubes and dropped them into a jar, adding lemonade from a pitcher. Clearly, Tucker was taking his time preparing an answer as he heated a skillet, added oil and breaded four pork chops. When they began to sizzle, he took a big bowl from the refrigerator and ladled out a huge pile of pasta salad onto a pie plate.
With her arms folded over her chest, Carly settled against the kitchen doorframe. “How long is it going to take—until you get yourself ready to answer me?”
That hot silvery-blue gaze narrowed at her again. “Unless you want to be evicted on your rear end, I suggest you be quiet—if that’s possible. If there’s something a man can’t stand after a hard day’s work, it’s a yammering woman.”
“Is that why you never remarried? Because women talk?” She hadn’t meant the gibe to slide through her lips, but it did. She absolutely did not care about Tucker’s love life.
He showed his teeth, and it wasn’t a warm smile, as if he knew just how to get what he wanted from a woman without any rules.
In their short marriage, Tucker had always expected dinner to be on the table when he got home from his father’s construction business. He’d learned a few things evidently—or else some woman was filling his refrigerator and just hadn’t come over to cook dinner yet.
Carly pushed that idea away. Who cooked Tucker’s meals was of no importance to her.
“Take all the time you want,” she said when he continued to ignore her, browning and cooking the pork chops perfectly. They were golden and…and hers had always burned.
When Tucker shouldered past her with his two pork chops, Carly caught the eau de working man and the sensation of a big bristling male. This close, he seemed even bigger than she remembered, and she noted a tiny hair whorl escaping the neck of his T-shirt.
That unnerved her. She remembered waiting for the hair on Tucker’s chest to sprout with as much interest as she watched her own body develop. Tucker’s youthful body had always been sleek and smooth and hairless, but for a small patch.
At the barn today, there was a larger patch of hair that veed down his muscled stomach into his jeans.
While she was dealing with the mouthwatering changes in Tucker’s body—and the knowledge that she hadn’t had sex in eleven years—he turned on the big-screen television. He sat in a chair holding his pie plate of food and placed the jar of lemonade on a table beside him. Tucker watched the world news as if he’d forgotten she was there.
She’d forgotten how a working man could eat, diving into his food. The few men she had dated didn’t eat like it was their last meal.
She could outwait him any day, and she wasn’t going anywhere. Carly slipped off her sandals and settled into her grandmother’s little rocker, placing her feet over a stack of sporting magazines on the footstool. Stiles Advertising Agency had insured her skills to manage a short visit with an ex-husband. She had taken stress-management classes. She knew how to read body postures, and how to manage difficult people. As the vice president of Stiles Advertising Agency, she dealt with businessmen and male co-workers every
day and temperamental graphic artists and copywriters frustrated that their great American novel hadn’t sold. Sometimes there were little games before business could be completed, and she could play them to get what she wanted. She could manage Tucker Redford. If he needed to go through his little ceremony, that was fine with her.
Finished with his meal, Tucker stood and padded into the kitchen. She heard the dishes clink into the sink. At any moment, he would come back into the living room where she could unwind the mystery of the house sale and with that in hand, manage to get back her rightful property.
A minute later the shower sounded.
Carly stopped rocking and sat very still, her temper simmering. He was making her wait, and he knew exactly how she hated that.
She walked back through the house—that was rightfully hers—and paused at the bathroom door. She tested the doorknob and found it in the same condition as when they were married and arguing at Anna Belle’s house. Carly had locked herself in the bathroom and Tucker had left the house. Her grandmother had then replaced the knob with one that did not lock.
Carly took a deep breath. She could handle Tucker anywhere—and that included a tiny bathroom. Inside she looked at the steam-covered mirror, anywhere but at the shower curtain where Tucker’s tall body was moving.
“I’m waiting for an answer, Tucker,” she yelled as she closed the lid of the toilet and sat.
After a minute, she got up and flushed the bowl and sat down again. Perhaps a rush of icy water would start him talking.
After a brisk silence, Tucker began to sing. That low, soft, deep voice could always reach inside her and wrap her want-tos into a tiny hard knot that needed unraveling.
Carly hurriedly left the bathroom and went into her old room, determined to find the diary that told too much about her want-tos with Tucker Redford. Her grandmother had promised to keep it safe—somewhere. As Anna Belle’s memory faded, she couldn’t remember where she had put the diary, and Carly didn’t have the heart to press her.