by Luanne Jones
She raised her chin. “Am I off base?”
“More like out of line.”
“Me?” She smiled her best innocent smile. “The girl who always keeps things in the middle?”
He smiled back. “Just goes to prove that you have what it takes to fly in the face of other people’s expectations.”
“It proves I’m foolish enough to spit into the wind.”
“I can’t walk away until I know you can do either one of those things, or both, but that you do them because you want to, not because it’s the path of least resistance.”
“Then grab those walking papers, pal, because this lady of quality won’t spit anywhere.”
“What about flying in the face of expectations?”
“I’m afraid to fly.”
“You’re afraid of too damn many things, Rita.”
“Right now I’m afraid this conversation is over.”
“You can stop talking to me, but that won’t change things.”
“What things?”
“That I can’t leave until I know you won’t let the people you care about pout, cajole, bully, or bad-mouth you into not going after your…not-so-plain dreams.”
“Why?”
“Let’s just say I have a debt to pay.”
Payback. Yes, it certainly felt like that was the principle at work. “What exactly are you saying, Will?”
“That I’m staying in town until we get these renovations under way and you have the foundation to move on with your life, wherever you want it to go, whatever you want to do with it.”
“Staying? At your mothers’?”
“I’m willing to make some sacrifice for all this, darling, but not human sacrifice.” He pushed away from the table and took a long, steady look around the room. “How ’bout I bring in a rollaway and bunk in the restaurant?”
“How ’bout I put a red light outside and open this up as Fat Rita’s Pleasure Palace?”
“If you don’t mind the gossip it would stir up, I sure don’t.”
“I don’t give a flying fig about gossip.”
“But you said…”
“I said I didn’t want the talk to start around town.”
“What talk?”
“Where all the people who have watched over and wagged their tongues about me for all these years start spreading the word that Rita has finally started acting like her mama.” She put her hand to her temple and shut her eyes. “I would rather not give them the satisfaction, if you don’t mind.”
“Then, if I promise to park in the church lot and come through the back door under cover of darkness, will you let me stay here?”
She could see how that could work. She still didn’t fully understand why he would want to go to such lengths on her behalf. But if he could do it without anyone knowing…
Of course she’d know. Will, sleeping under her roof. She’d know down to the very deepest fiber of her being. She could feel the sweet tension winding tighter and tighter in her even now. But she would never try to act on those feelings.
Cozette was wrong. This was not about sex. And Will was wrong. It was not about flying in the face of anyone’s expectations or standing up to people who meddled in her life. This was about showing herself she was not her mother. In a situation like this, in any situation that came along after that damned tornado, Tammy Stark wouldn’t have given a rip what the other person wanted or needed, would she?
Well, Rita did not go any way the wind carried her, and she would never abandon the people she cared about on a whim. Will had come to help her out of that personal sense of honor of his. Nothing more. There was no reason for him not to stay here if that’s what he needed to do.
“You can come and go without anyone seeing you?”
He grinned.
She felt his satisfaction down to the pit of her stomach. She folded her arms. But this was not about sex. “I thought you said you didn’t want to spend a single night in Hellon.”
“But I won’t be.” He stood.
She tipped her head back and wet her lips. This was about her acting as the Anti-Tammy. “You won’t?”
“No.”
Not about sex. “You won’t be staying?”
“I won’t be single.” He moved in close enough that his breath tickled her ear as he whispered, “I’ll be with you.”
“Oh.” Okay, it was about sex. Heart-stopping, mind-blowing, I-didn’t-know-my-body-could-still-do-that, sex. Not between her and Will tonight under this roof, of course, but in her dreams night after night from now on…
“Great.” He straightened away from her and stepped back. “Meantime, we’ve got lots of daylight left. What do you think? Shall we get to it?”
“It?”
“Yeah, it. Work. I came here to work on the renovation, remember?”
“How could I forget?” She raised her hands and smiled like an idiot. “Let’s get to it.”
He nodded, then turned to gather his tools to get back to the real job at hand.
Rita stood there, admiring the view for a last few moments before she sighed and headed into the kitchen. Someday, somehow she would repay her friends for stepping in when they did. She just wasn’t sure right now if that payment would come as a reward for giving her a breath of fresh air or a retaliation for thrusting her into the heart of an irresistible whirlwind.
Chapter 7
WHAT EVERY DIXIE BELLE NEEDS:
an if-you-don’t-pamper-yourself-who-will? gift.
“Think you’ve taken enough precautions against being seen around town with me?” Will looked down on Rita as she slid into a low-slung child’s swing.
“Let’s see. I forced your sister to drive us over to the next county, made her buy us each a Rainbow Snowball Bliss while you and I cowered in the car outside Angel’s Shaved Ice Shack. Then insisted she drive us to the playground behind this elementary school at least a dozen miles from anyone we know. I think we might be safe.”
“Go long, and I’ll throw you the bullet.” The tallest of a mutt pack of skinny young boys called out as he cocked his arm, then hurled a football into the air.
“For now. But I have my eye on those kids.” Rita made a big production of scoping out the ragtag huddle of shirtless boys. “Somebody in there probably has a neighbor with a cousin whose daddy used to date a girl whose old gran plays gin with your mother.”
Will chuckled. “Plays gin or drinks it?”
“People know people.” Rita nodded with an air of wisdom that seemed at least two parts tongue in cheek. “And people talk.”
“I don’t know why you went to all this trouble.” Jillie sat pigeon-toed in the swing, next to Rita, shoes dragging in the soft dirt. “You could walk through the heart of Hellon naked, but if you had Will along no one would so much as notice you.”
“I have put on a few pounds, but I doubt if I’d totally obliterate anyone walking beside me from view.” He gave Rita a wink to include her in his fun.
“You don’t. But your reputation does. You’re the golden boy. You’re Rhett Butler, Troy Aikman, and Elvis all rolled into one.”
“That many people?” He patted his stomach. “I must have put on even more weight than I thought.”
“You can joke, but you know it’s true.” Candor more than anger colored his sister’s words.
“And I hate every minute of it.” He responded in kind.
“Oh, yeah. I see how much you hate Mama doting on your every move and word.”
“Apart from Daddy and her social standing, Mama never doted on anyone or anything in her entire life.”
“Least of all me.” His sister looked all of about five years old again, sitting in that swing with tears in her eyes.
“Then why do you stay with her?” he asked, his own voice tight and faint.
She laid her head against the swing’s thick, tarnished chain.
“Where would she go?” Rita set her cup aside and smoothed her hand down Jillie’s curved back.
�
��Anywhere.” Damn he hated to see her like this. Hated it most because Jillie brought it all on herself with her thoughtless choices. He couldn’t fix it, and she wouldn’t.
In that way she was much like Rita. That thought only turned his anger up a notch. Jillie didn’t just hurt herself by her actions and attitudes, and she didn’t even seem to see that. “Maybe she could move in with her lover…”
“Will, stop,” Rita hissed.
“And his wife.” He clenched his jaw.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” The chains clanked and clattered as Rita leapt up from the swing. “This is your only sister.”
Jillie held her hand up. “It’s all right, Rita. I had that coming. I hope you’ll both be glad to learn, too, that it’s over.”
“What’s over?”
“You and Paul?” Rita brushed back the heavy curls that hid Jillie’s profile. “When? What happened?”
“He lied to me.”
“Oh, an adulterer who is also a liar. What are the chances?”
“Paul is not an adulterer, Will. Neither am I, for that matter.”
“But you said…”
“I said relationships are impossible. Borrowing from the thinking that all the good men at our age are either gay or married, I said I might have to start dating the married ones.”
Will crumpled his empty cup and eyed the trash can. “And lo and behold right about the time you announced this you met an adorable professor who just happened to be…”
“Single.”
“What?” Will froze with the balled-up paper in his fingers.
“He told me he was separated—actually. But there’s no wife at all.”
Rita bent down, trying to force Jillie to make eye contact. “Why would he do that?”
“I might have…I think I…I shot my mouth off about my theories.”
“You told him how disenchanted you’d become with his sex?”
“In detail. Well, I didn’t tell him exactly.” She huffed out a sigh. “I got to class early that first night and started yakking with the other women. The whole class was women. Most thought extension college courses might be a good place to meet men.”
“You met one there.” He threw the paper ball into the can.
“One who came in the room in time to hear me proclaim I had no interest in any man who hadn’t already proven he could make that walk down the aisle.”
“So he told you he was married?”
“Separated. It wasn’t a bad idea from his end—he said it gave him the chance to go out with me with a built-in escape route should I prove as hard and jaded as I sounded that first night.”
Any smart-mouthed response died on Will’s lips when he saw the genuine pain in his baby sister’s eyes.
Thuds and grunts from the boys roughhousing on the flat grassy play yard filled the silence around them.
“He swears he never intended to let me keep thinking that for so long but after a while he wondered if the truth would scare me off. He said he wanted to be sure I cared for him enough before he ratted himself out.”
“‘Rat’ being the operative word,” Rita grumbled.
“For which one of them?” Will sniffed.
Rita folded her arms. “Do you have to be ugly about this?”
“How is it ugly to point out that she took up with this guy thinking he was legally married?” He spoke softly but did not hide his contempt entirely. For once he wanted to hear his sister take responsibility for her thoughtlessness. Not blame her mother, or him, or men in general.
“We went out. That’s all. Museums in Memphis, dinners, visiting some clubs on Beale Street. I never slept with him. And he wasn’t legally married.”
“You didn’t know that.” Cruel to be kind. He’d never grasped that concept until this moment. He could not back off and excuse himself from caring how Jillie worked through her pain and problem. That was Rita’s influence for certain. So he pressed on. “When you found out the man was single that’s when you broke it off with him.”
“I broke it off with him because he lied to me.”
“Any married man seeing another woman on the side is going to be lying to somebody, Jillie.”
“You’re missing the point, Will.” Rita’s warm hand fit flat against the knotted muscles between his shoulders. She stepped in close, creating a welcome buffer between him and his sister.
“See?” Jillie tossed her hair back. “Rita knows.”
“I know, but I doubt you do.” She bumped Jillie’s shoulder with her own. “You didn’t break up with Paul because of any lie. You broke up with him because of the truth.”
“I think I know why—”
“Paul saw the worst about you. He even went to great lengths to protect himself from the hurt he suspected you were capable of inflicting.”
“I thought you were on my side, Rita.”
“I am always on your side, honey. But never mistake that for always approving of what you’re up to.”
Will chuckled softly.
“You’d do well to remember that, too,” she said, with a sideways glance his way.
“Yes, ma’am.” He grinned.
“You broke up with that man because he got rid of the only impediment to you two furthering your relationship. What Paul did must have scared the life out of you.”
Her brow pinched above the bridge of her nose. “What did he do?”
“He loved you. Not just the idea of you or the you he thought he could make you over into. He really, really loved you, all of you. Now, didn’t he?”
Rita’s smile came slowly, but her eyes lit up all at once. “Must have scared her half out of her wits.”
He looked from Rita’s warm, encouraging eyes to Jillie, with her shoulders slumped and head bowed. “I can well imagine.”
“You can well imagine? Scared witless by somebody caring about you?” Rita rubbed her hand over her forehead like she had the mother of all migraines. “What is wrong with you two?”
“Anyone who knows our mother knows the answer to that.” He would have said it himself. He almost did. But now hearing the words wrung out between Jillie’s tight lips, Will cringed.
“Oh grow up, the two of you!” Rita took a couple of long strides away from them, then stopped and turned, her hands on her hips. “At least you have a mother around. At least you still have the home you grew up in. You have looks and talent and money and all those things lots of folks count as important.”
Jillie rubbed her upper arm. “Maybe those aren’t worth a whole hell of a lot if you don’t have someone to share—”
“You have each other!” She didn’t stomp her foot, but attitude accomplished the same thing. “And you have friends. Damn good friends. Better than you deserve on any given day of the week.”
“You’re right about that,” he muttered.
“That a snipe at me?” Jillie’s head jerked up.
“I swear, you two bucktoothed, backbiting mules have got so much and yet you appreciate so little.”
“I don’t know that that’s a fair characterization, Rita. I may be a mule, but there are things in this life I appreciate more than I have words to tell about.” Will stepped forward. “You, for instance.”
“I appreciate Rita, too.” Jillie turned from him to her old friend. “I do, Rita. Way more than I ever say.”
“I know. I never should have talked like that.” Rita put her hands to her cheeks and sighed. “It’s just that you two have both had so many opportunities to move beyond your upbringing and difficulties. I don’t understand what holds you back.”
“Listen to this.” Jillie jabbed her thumb in Rita’s direction, smiling a put-her-in-her-place but still sly smile. “A lecture on how we must start moving on from the woman famous for refusing to budge an inch.”
Before Rita could dig in for a really good comeback, the football the boys had been playing with came sailing in from the field and landed with a thud at Will’s feet.
“Hey, mister,
will you throw us the ball?”
He turned to Rita. “Do I dare interact with those boys without first finding out all about their neighbors, cousins, and gin-guzzling grannies?”
She bent down, picked up the ball, and pressed it into his hand. “I think we can risk it, this time.”
“Wow, Rita, those are words I never thought I’d hear coming out of your mouth.”
“See? I’m not as inflexible as y’all think I am. I have the ability to change, too.”
As he fired the ball off to the waiting boys, Will muttered under his breath, “Risk? Change? I’ll believe that when I see it, Rita.”
Rita tucked her hand under her cheek and stretched her legs between the cool bedsheets. She stared at the rhinestones of her tiara without seeing them in sharp detail. She let her gaze drift to the mirror. The dark but familiar trappings of her apartment reflected there held no interest for her. Her gaze fixed on the door leading to the staircase.
For two nights now she’d lain motionless in bed hour after hour hardly sleeping. Fearing that if she so much as got up and turned on the lights to read, he would hear her stirring overhead. Would that tip him off to the unsettling effect his presence had on her? She didn’t want to find out. The saying goes that knowledge is power, and she was not about to hand him any kind of power over her.
Of course she didn’t have to hand him a dadgummed thing. Any fool could see that he already had some kind of power over her, and Will was no fool. She managed a cheerless laugh at the way she’d deluded herself into thinking she’d stayed aloof. Oh, yeah, she was so cool and in control around the man. How could he ever suspect that just watching him across the room turned her to a mass of quivering jelly?
She sat slowly up in bed and fanned her hair off her face. Two days working around him. Two nights knowing he was sleeping on a rollaway just one flight of creaky stairs away.
If he was sleeping. She raised her head to peer out the window at the big summer moon, pale in the midnight sky. The sight spoke to her of solitude and distance. It left a cold sensation in the pit of her stomach.