by Peggy Webb
He didn’t know what to say. All he was offering her was a night’s lodging. Surely that meager gift didn’t make her feel like a princess. Was she expecting more? Was her innocence all an act?
What had he done? He pulled caution around him like a cloak. “I’ll see you at eight,” he said, already striding toward the door.
She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the closed door. That Reeve Lawrence was the oddest man she’d ever met. Sometimes he acted all friendly, just like the customers who came to Pets and Paws on a Saturday morning, and other times he was as stiff as an old turkey, waiting for the ax at Thanksgiving. Land, he was a complicated man.
She ran her hands over the coverlet and sighed.
“Oh, Lord, a woman could get used to this.” She kicked off her one shoe and curled her toes into the plush carpet. Then she kicked off the other shoe and danced around the room.
Suddenly she stopped in front of the full-length mirror. Her pink dress with the flowers on one shoulder didn’t look all that special beside her luxurious surroundings. She was in a different world, and she knew it. Her hands clenched into fists at her sides.
“Belinda Stubaker, don’t you dare go making a fool of yourself over Reeve Lawrence. Besides,” she added, tipping up her chin, “you don’t need another man to straighten out.”
Chapter Two
From: Catherine
To: Belinda, Molly, Bea, Janet, Clemmie, Joanna
Re: What’s Going On?
Belinda, sweetie? Where are you?
Xoxo
Catherine
From: Belinda
To: Catherine, Janet, Bea, Clemmie, Molly, Joanna
Re: A Fairytale
You’re not going to believe this! I’m staying in a mansion in Tupelo with a nice man named Reeve Lawrence. I met him this afternoon when I stopped to buy something to wet my whistle at his little kids’ lemonade stand. He has a dead wife, and the saddest, saddest look I’ve ever seen. I wish you could see this bed! It’s like something out of a fairy tale.
Xoxox
Belinda
From: Janet
To: Belinda, Catherine, Bea, Clemmie, Molly, Joanna
Re: Fairytale, my ass
You’re staying with a man you don’t know? In his bedroom!!! Get out of there now! I’ll skip classes tomorrow, drive up to Tupelo and bring you back to Jackson with me. My apartment’s cramped, but there’s room for you.
Janet
From:Bea
To: Janet, Belinda, Catherine, Molly, Joanna, Clemmie
Re: No Three Fire Alarm
Good lord, Janet. Just chill. Belinda’s got better sense than to shack up with a stranger. Right, Belinda?
Bea
From: Clemmie
To: Belinda, Janet, Catherine, Molly, Joanna, Bea
Re: Oh Dear
I do wish you’d come to Peppertown. Where in Tupelo? I can be there in twenty minutes.
Clemmie
From: Joanna
To: Belinda, Bea, Molly, Janet, Clemmie, Catherine
Re: Tell All
Oh, this is too delicious! Send details!!!
Joanna
From: Molly
To: Belinda, Bea, Joanna, Janet, Clemmie, Catherine
Re: Daddy will know
I’m calling Daddy. He knows everybody in Tupelo. He’ll find out if this Reeve Lawrence is an ax murderer. I hope not! He sounds romantic!
Molly
Belinda turned off her computer. She might not know much but one thing was sure: Reeve Lawrence was no ax murderer. The only thing she had to worry about was getting clean for dinner.
She went into the fancy bathroom and she picked a bottle of bath oil. “Attar of Roses,” the label read. She didn’t know what “attar” was, but she knew about roses. She uncapped the bottle and held it to her nose. It smelled heavenly.
She closed her eyes, imagining herself floating in the big sunken tub, surrounded by rose-smelling bubbles. She couldn’t think of anything more romantic. Wait till she told Joanna and Molly!
Sighing softly, she recapped the bottle and set it carefully back on the shelf. Someday she was going to buy herself some bath oil. She’d start with “Attar of Roses” and work her way through the flower garden—honeysuckle, violet, gardenia, daffodil and hyacinth. She might even get some that smelled like spring. She’d have a different fragrance for every day of the week.
Barefoot, she padded back to her suitcase and took out a washcloth and a towel. They weren’t plush like the ones hanging in that fancy bathroom, but they were hers. She rummaged around some more, looking for her soap. It was nowhere to be found.
She guessed she’d have to use some of Reeve Lawrence’s soap. Maybe he wouldn’t mind; and she’d be very particular, using just enough to get clean but not enough to be wasteful.
After her bath she dressed for dinner, then sat on the edge of the velvet love seat, pleating the folds of her skirt between her hands and waiting for Reeve’s knock on the door.
She nearly jumped out of her skin when the knock came. She quickly composed herself, then walked toward the door.
Just remember, she said to herself, you’re not Belinda Stubaker anymore. You’re Belinda Diamond and Belinda Diamond is somebody.
Belinda pressed her hands flat on her stomach to still the butterflies dancing there, and then she flung open the door. Reeve Lawrence was standing in the hallway looking like something out of the movies. He nearly took her breath away.
He was dressed up, too, wearing a white shirt that set off his tanned skin and a jacket of raw silk. She knew, for she had once worked in a fabric store.
All at once she was glad she had worn her fanciest dress—the black rayon with red sequins on the shoulders. The skirt flared around her legs when she walked, showing her pantyhose to good advantage. She was proud of them. They had rhinestone hearts marching down the sides, and they sparkled when she walked. They had been a bargain, too. She’d found them on the marked-down table at a discount store. There was no telling what else she could have found if she’d had the time. But that was back when she was working at Pets and Paws, and she’d been on her lunch hour.
“Good evening.” She held her hand out in a formal gesture, the way she’d seen it done in the movies she loved to watch late Saturday nights on the small screen TV in her apartment.
He took her hand just like one of the Hollywood heroes. Goose bumps prickled her arms. Oh, she was going to love Tupelo, Mississippi! Already she was off to a roaring start.
His eyes were crinkled at the corners and his mouth was quirked up when he let go her hand. It was such a friendly look she suddenly felt giddy.
“Look, I dressed for the occasion.” She stepped back and twirled around, laughing. When she stopped twirling she could tell by the expression on his face that he’d noticed the rhinestone anklet on her left leg. His eyes were twinkling.
“I can see that you did.”
“I added the anklet for a touch of glamour.” She twirled again. “What do you think?”
What Reeve was thinking wouldn’t do to tell. He’d never seen such an outrageous costume. On any other woman, it would have looked cheap and tacky. But on Belinda Diamond it looked just right, as if she were meant to sparkle from head to toe.
“Well?” Belinda prompted him.
“The anklet definitely adds a lively touch.”
“I just knew you’d like it.” She came toward him, smiling, and he offered her his arm. Instead of taking it, she slid her hand into his.
Reeve was caught off guard. Her hand was slim and fragile, almost boneless. She laced her fingers with his and smiled up at him in a totally artless way. He felt as if a warm breeze were blowing across him. And then he felt guilty. Sunny was the only woman he’d ever loved: the only woman he would ever love. He wasn’t about to mistake his feelings for Belinda for anything except what they were—a certain kind of friendliness for a guileless stranger.
He decided to hold on to her hand a while l
onger—at least until they had reached the dining room—then he would graciously let her go. In the meantime, he saw no harm in giving in to the pleasant warmth that spread through him.
“I have a confession to make,” Belinda said as they descended the stairs.
“You aren’t going to tell me you’re a cat burglar in disguise, are you?”
“This is serious.” Belinda caught her lower lip between her teeth as she looked up at him.
“I’ll be serious, then.” He bent over her, giving her his full attention. The minute he did so, he knew it was a mistake. There was something magnetic about her face that made him want to lean closer and closer. Her skin was soft, her bow-shaped lips intriguing and inviting. But it was her eyes that held him under a spell. He leaned just a bit closer, but she wet her lips with her tongue, Reeve straightened up as if he’d been punched in the middle.
“What is this confession you have to make?” he asked, using his chairman-of-the-board voice.
“I used your soap.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Well... you see, I forgot to bring my soap, and so I used some of yours. Not a whole lot, mind you, not enough to get up a great big lather. But just enough to wash away the travel dirt. A body does get dirty traveling on a bus.”
“This is your big confession?”
“Yes.”
He was torn between laughter and aloofness. In the end he compromised. His mouth quirked into a smile, but he didn’t move closer to her. That was a mistake he wouldn’t make again.
“You can use anything you like. You’re my guest.”
“Including the bath oil?”
“Including the bath oil.”
“Well—” she thought of the Attar of Roses with a certain longing “—I don’t want to be pushy.”
“You can be as pushy as you like, Belinda. You’ll discover that I’m not a man who is easily pushed.”
“Will I?”
Her simple question brought him up short. Of course she couldn’t discover his strength nor his stubbornness nor anything else about him. She wouldn’t be around long enough. What was there about Belinda Diamond that made him forget who he was and who she was?
“If you were going to be here for any length of time, you might. But, of course, you’ll be looking for a place of your own tomorrow, and we probably won’t see each other again.”
“I don’t know so much about that.” She reached over and squeezed his arm. “I don’t like to let go of friends. Good friends are too hard to come by.”
He felt as if he’d stepped into a pool of honey and was getting in deeper every minute. For a man who handled multimillion-dollar business deals on a regular basis, he was making a complete fool of himself with one sweet simple woman.
“Hmm,” he said, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. Fortunately the dining room was just around the corner. “Well, here we are.”
The familiarity of the setting grounded him in reality once more. Standing underneath his sparkling chandelier, pouring wine from his Waterford crystal decanter, he was completely in charge once more.
“Would you like a glass of wine?”
“Oh, Lordy me, no. The last time I had wine I got so wobbly I nearly fell off my high-heeled shoes. I didn’t have all that much, either. Charlie said I must be allergic or something.”
Laughing at herself, Belinda glided around the dining room, running her hand over the carved backs of chairs, stopping to admire the paintings on the walls, tilting her head sideways and back to look up at the chandelier.
Reeve didn’t say anything immediately, but stood sipping his wine, watching her over the rim of his glass. With the lights sparkling down on her hair she looked like a long cool glass of lemonade. She was a tall woman, much taller than Sunny. With the right clothes and the right manners she would be elegant.
“Who is Charlie?” he asked. Not that it mattered, he told himself.
“Charlie Crocket. I met him at the Bull Pit up in St. Louis. He was wearing a cowboy hat about two sizes too big for his head, and he had the sweetest smile I’ve seen on a man. And Lordy, could he sweet-talk a woman.”
Reeve was liking Charlie Crocket less every minute. He supposed there were lots of men who could sweet-talk the gullible Belinda Diamond. Knowing he would never stoop to such tactics made him feel noble.
“What is the Bull Pit?”
“A dance hall. I was a cocktail waitress. You should have seen my costume—a little old skirt that barely covered my privates and a fringed bra about as big as a handkerchief. Charlie said I looked like a ripe plum, fixing to pop off the tree.”
Reeve nearly choked on his wine. “Indeed,” he said when he had regained his composure. “And what else did Charlie say?”
“Lots. But I never let him pick my plums, I can tell you that.”
“A woman of principle.”
“You bet your boots.”
Belinda lost interest in the subject and turned her inspection to the silver laid out in gleaming perfection on his table.
“Would you just look at that?” she said, lifting a fork. “It’s like something a king would use. I never knew why anybody would want such fancy stuff to eat with. Me? I had some china that came from the grocery store. Got it with coupons. It was right nice. Had little blue chickens running around the border.”
Reeve pictured Belinda dressed in her red high-heeled shoes and her sequined dress, sitting down to a modest meal served on cheap plates decorated with blue chickens. There was something comfortable and very homey about the picture. For a brief moment he felt nostalgic. He remembered a time when his own life had been simple—before he’d started his business, before he’d married Sunny Sinclair Wentworth.
He recalled his bachelor days, living in a two-room apartment, putting together deals on a mobile phone he’d bought at a discount store. It all seemed so long ago.
Belinda was inspecting the velvet draperies now, running her hands up and down their soft folds. She turned to him, smiling.
“One of these days I’m going to have me a house of my own. I’m going to put lace curtains in the windows and geraniums on the front porch, and in the evenings after work, I’m going to sit in a rocking chair at the window and watch the rest of the world scurrying by doing all the things people get in a hurry over. Me? I’ll be listening to the birds sing through the open window in the summertime, and in the winter I’ll listen to a little music on the radio.”
Against his will, Reeve was caught up in her vision. He could picture her in the rocking chair, feel her contentment. In the space of one evening, he’d learned more about Belinda Diamond than he knew about most women after six months. Besides that, he found himself wanting to know about her and interested in her background, her philosophies, her tastes in food and music.
With a start he realized that he was fascinated by her. It was a kind of subtle fascination that had sneaked up on him. And it was the dangerous variety, fed not by awareness of her as a woman, but by interest in her as a human being. He had neither time nor room for another person in his life.
He set his wineglass on a silver tray, then pulled out a chair for her. She looked at him with wise watchful eyes.
“You can sit here, Miss Diamond, on my right.” Miss Diamond, was it now? Belinda took the seat he offered and wondered what she had done wrong. Lordy, the possibilities were so endless it was mind-boggling. She’d never had dinner in such a fancy house. She’d never eaten off plates so delicate they looked like they would break if you put too many peas on them. What was more, she didn’t know how she was supposed to eat with two forks. One had always been enough for her. And three spoons. What in the world did you do with three spoons?
“Thank you,” she said as she slid into her seat. That was plain good manners, and she knew about manners. Her mother hadn’t been a Southerner for nothing. “This certainly is a big table just for two,” she added to fill the awkward silence between them.
“The children will be joining us.
”
“Oh.”
The seconds slowly crawled by, each one scratching along Belinda’s nerves. She fidgeted in her chair, wondering how women of means dealt with such moments as this, sitting in an elegant room with a handsome man. She guessed they’d talk about art or something, like Molly and Joanna. Well, she was no woman of means, but she had practically been born talking. She could talk to anybody about anything.
Suddenly she focused on the most dramatic piece of art in the room, the enormous portrait of a woman, hanging on the wall behind Reeve’s chair. She had been dying to ask him about it from the minute she’d seen it, and she guessed now was the right time, what with the conversation lagging till it was about to stall.
“That’s a beautiful woman. Is she somebody real?”
“Yes. She was my wife.”
At last she had a conversation started. Gazing at the portrait, she continued her winning tack.
“She sure was beautiful.”
“Many people said so.”
“You know, her hair looks kind of like mine. I guess you noticed.”
“I did.”
He wasn’t saying much, but at least he was talking. Belinda was grateful for that, though it did seem he ought to do a bit better. He was a man who could use a few lessons in the art of conversation.
“Just fancy that. I must have given you quite a turn coming up the street with hair like your dead wife’s.” There was a silence from Reeve’s end of the table. Keeping her eyes pinned on the portrait as if it were a beacon of hope, Belinda rattled on. “Was she tall like me?” No answer. “For a minute there I’ll bet you thought I was a ghost.” Deadly silence. “That is, if you believed in ghosts.”
The silence was so huge now that it roared in Belinda’s ears. She looked at Reeve and almost flinched. The expression on his face was thunderous, almost murderous.
Well, for goodness’ sake. She knew she wasn’t the most brilliant conversationalist in the world, but she hadn’t been that bad. She refused to back down from his stare.