Magnolia Moon
Page 31
“It’s not that heavy.” She smiled up at him. “Thank you. For everything.”
“It is truly my pleasure.” He bent his head and brushed a kiss against her cheek. “Welcome to the Callahan family, chère.”
She waited until he’d climbed back into the boat and disappeared around the corner. She was definitely on her own now. There’d be no turning back.
She took the cell phone from her purse and dialed the number she knew by heart.
“Hi,” she said when Nate’s familiar deep voice answered on the first ring. “I’m calling about the sheriff’s job. If it’s still open, I’ve just arrived in town—well, actually, I’m here at the dock—and I’d like to schedule a personal interview.”
The door flew open. Regan thought her heart was going to sprout wings and fly when she saw Nate standing there, illuminated in the moonlight.
“I’m also looking for a place to live,” she continued into the phone, “so I’d appreciate any suggestions Blue Bayou’s mayor and best contractor might have.”
He was coming toward her on long, purposeful strides as she walked toward him. “Of course, since I’ve given away all my inheritance and the parish budget can’t afford to pay me nearly what I was making back in L.A., I’m willing to take a signing bonus. I was thinking along the lines of season tickets to the Buccaneers’ home games—I hear the team has a new sophomore player this year who’s a phenom.”
They were only a few feet apart.
“This is Regan calling.”
She flipped the phone closed and wondered how on earth she could she have stayed away from this man for so long. A wealth of love was gleaming in his eyes as she went up on her toes, twined her arms around his neck, and lifted her lips to his.
“And I’ll always love you.”
Pocket Books
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Firefly Falls
JoAnn Ross
Available in paperback September 2003
fromPocket Books
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Firefly Falls….
It was dusk—too late for sunset, too early for stars. Ian MacKenzie had expected at least another hour of daylight, but night was coming fast to the Smoky Mountains. Making matters worse was the storm blowing in from the west. Slate gray clouds rolled across the ancient rounded mountaintops; thunder rumbled ominously in the distance.
Before being talked into this damn fool scheme, he’d been on his way to Monte Carlo, where he’d planned to spend the next month sailing and romancing supermodels and princesses.
Instead, he’d come to this remote mountain borderland between North Carolina and Tennessee to catch a thief. The plan was to reclaim his family’s property by stealing it back, if necessary. Then, his duty done, his conscience cleansed, he was heading to Monaco to begin making up for six long months of enforced celibacy.
The sky darkened like a black shawl settling over the mountains. The dashboard thermometer revealed that the temperature outside the rental car was plummeting. Ominous drops of rain began spattering against the windshield.
“This is insane.” He’d been telling himself that ever since he’d landed in New York from Edinburgh. From there he’d switched flights to Reagan National in D.C., after which he’d climbed aboard a commuter jet to Asheville, North Carolina, where he’d rented a car for the final leg of his journey.
The Hertz agent had told him Highland Falls was approximately sixty miles from Asheville. “As the crow flies,” he belatedly remembered her saying as he’d handed over his credit card. “It’s a bit longer by road.” That was proving to be a vast understatement, and unfortunately he was no crow.
The wind picked up and the rain began to slant. He hadn’t passed another car for at least an hour and it had been nearly that long since he’d seen the last of the small cemeteries, with their worn gravestones grown over with rambling honeysuckle and blackberry briars, or the weathered cabins which, rather than take advantage of hilltop views, tended to be tucked into the more protective, fog-shrouded hollows.
Beginning to suspect that he’d taken the wrong fork ten miles back, Ian considered turning around. The problem with that idea was that he’d undoubtedly end up getting mired in the mud.
“You didn’t come all this way to give up because of a little squall.” He was a Scot, after all, accustomed to miserable weather.
Thunder, once faint, now threatening, shook the tree-covered mountain and rumbled from ridge to ridge; soup-thick fog reflected the yellow beam of his headlights. Which was why Ian didn’t see, until it was too late, the creek that had overflowed its banks. Clenching his jaw, he plowed ahead.
His relief on getting through the torrent rushing across the narrow road was short-lived, as he heard the engine cough, then shudder to a stop.
“Damn.” He slammed his fist against the steering wheel. “Damn Duncan MacDougall’s black heart.” Ian twisted the key in the ignition. Nothing. “And damn the bloody Stewart clan, every bloody last one of them.”
Forcing himself to wait a full thirty seconds—during which time he also damned the ridiculous rock-hard Highland mindset that had allowed the feud between the Stewarts and his mother’s branch of the MacDougalls to continue across continents for seven hundred years—he tried again.
Still nothing.
Rain streamed down the windshield in blinding sheets as he turned on the dome light and studied the map. If it was at all accurate, he was approximately a mile from his destination. “Not even a decent jog.”
Giving the car one last chance to redeem itself, he tried the ignition one more time. When the attempt proved futile, he jammed the keys into his jacket pocket, grabbed his duffel bag from the backseat, and began marching up the road, cursing into the wind.
“Well, what do you think?”
Lily Stewart glanced up from the uncooperative computer, which had already crashed three times tonight, and took in the redhead twirling in a blaze of glitter. “I don’t believe I’ve seen so many sequins since you dragged me to that Elvis impersonator convention in Memphis.” The scarlet sweater was studded with red sequins and crystal beads, and the short red leather skirt displayed firm, stocking-clad thighs. “You’re certainly showing a lot of leg tonight.”
“If you’ve got it, flaunt it.” Ruby rings blazed, diamonds flashed as the fifty-something former chorus girl fluffed her cloud of firecracker-bright hair that was several shades brighter than Lily’s own strawberry blond. “I’m not tryin’ to be subtle, baby doll. Ian MacKenzie is showing up tonight with his video cameras, and you know what I always say: Too much—”
“Is never enough,” Lily completed the motto she’d heard innumerable times while growing up. Zelda Stewart was part Auntie Mame, part Dolly Parton. She was also the closest thing to a mother Lily, who adored her aunt, had ever known. “I never have understood how you manage to walk in those ice-pick heels.”
Lily had been seven years old when she’d broken her ankle by falling off a skyscraper-high pair of her aunt’s gold platform sandals while playing dress-up with her sisters. That was when she’d realized she’d probably never be the glamorous type.
“Practice, my darling niece, practice.” Zelda performed another spin Lily suspected even Cindy Crawford wouldn’t have been able to pull off on the end of a runway. “So, when is this Scotsman who’s going to save our collective butts due to arrive?”
“I don’t know. He’s already late.” Since confirming that his plane had landed at the Asheville airport more than three hours ago, Lily had begun to worry he’d been delayed by the storm.
Even worse, was the possibility he’d taken a wrong turn and gotten lost. She’d grown up on tales of people who’d disappeared in these mountains, never to be seen again. Wouldn’t that start the annual Highland games off on a good note?
She could just see the tabloid headlines now: Oscar-winning documentary director disappears deep in Deliverance country. “And I don’t think he’s coming here to save anyone’
s butt.”
Actually, Lily hadn’t been able to figure out why the filmmaker was gracing Highland Falls with his famous presence. Unlike everyone else in her family, she wasn’t certain Ian MacKenzie’s out-of-the-blue announcement that he was considering documenting the town’s Highland games was a good thing. His work, while admittedly technically brilliant, showed a dark and pessimistic view of the world that always left her feeling depressed.
“It’s just as the cards predicted,” Zelda claimed. “We desperately needed a savior. So the gods sent us MacKenzie.”
Lily, who didn’t share her aunt’s faith in the well-worn deck of Tarot cards, didn’t respond as she rebooted the computer.
“Did you see the piece Biography did on him last week?”
“I caught a bit of it.”
Liar. She’d been riveted to the screen for the entire hour. Of course, her only interest had been in discovering whatever scraps of information she could about the notoriously reclusive director. She’d barely noticed, and then only in passing, how sexy his butt had looked in those faded jeans with the ripped-out knees, which she doubted had been meant as a fashion statement.
Zelda sighed. “Such a tragic past the poor man’s suffered. No wonder he’s chosen to document the dark side of life. My first thought, when I saw that clip of him walking in the fog on the moors, was that if he hadn’t made a name for himself with his documentaries, he’d be a natural to play the role of Heathcliff in a remake of Wuthering Heights. Not only is he gorgeous, in a dangerous, ‘gone to the dark side of hell and lived to tell about it’ way, he’s going to put us on the map.”
“Highland Falls is already on the map.”
“You’d need a magnifying glass to find us. But this Highland hunk is going to change that.”
Lily opened her mouth to warn Zelda, yet again, that Ian MacKenzie might not be the miracle man everyone was touting him to be, when the thick, towering front door burst open. One look at the very wet male silhouetted by a bright flash of lightning revealed that Zelda had at least nailed the dangerous part.
His lean, rangy body, shock of black hair glistening with raindrops, strong, firm jaw, broad shoulders, and long legs made her think more of an ancient warrior wielding a claymore in the midst of battle than an emotionally wounded Heathcliff pining after a lost love. Or perhaps, Lily considered as her imagination took flight, he might be better cast as the Christopher Lee character in a Dracula reprise.
Dressed head to toe in black, with the storm raging behind him and the wind howling like a banshee, Ian MacKenzie could easily have been a creature of the night.
All those photographs and video clips on Biography hadn’t done him justice. His lived-in face was all planes and hollows, decidedly masculine, but starkly beautiful in a way Lily, who’d spent twenty-nine years plagued by the description of being the “perky” one of the three Stewart sisters, found eminently unfair.
Her assessing gaze locked with eyes that were swirling shades of gray as stormy as a winter sea. As she was unwillingly pulled into those fathomless depths, Lily dearly hoped that the violence depicted in his films wasn’t echoed in this scowling Scotsman—who certainly didn’t look like anyone’s savior.