Just a Little Bit Guilty

by Deborah Smith

  Cheers rose around them as Jake bounded around her desk to kiss her.

  “TILT YOUR HEAD back, girl.”

  Vivian had trouble complying. She lay on her stomach, and Jake lay beside her with one long, naked leg hooked over her. He gently guided her head off the pillow, curled his head just-so, and kissed her. When he finished, she kept her eyes closed and smiled at him.

  “Those eyes better stay shut,” he whispered firmly.

  One of her black brows twitched in surprise, but she pressed her lids tightly together. He trailed something up the center of her curving throat, something that was small and square and smooth.

  It tickled her chin, her lips, the tip of her nose.

  “Look,” he murmured.

  A tiny, beautifully carved wooden box sat on his open palm. “How pretty! It must have taken you forever.”

  “I’ve been workin’ on it since right after I met you.”

  “I love it.” He set it in her cupped hands, and she turned it this way and that, admiring the workmanship.

  He snorted. “Well, open it.”

  She slowly pushed the lid up. Inside was a diamond ring.

  Vivian curled it and the box inside her hands, burrowed her fists to her chest, and mumbled raggedly into the pillow. “Mine. All mine. Mine.”

  “Yep, the ring is yours.”

  She lifted her head and gazed at him adoringly. “Forget the ring. You. Mine. All mine.” She hesitated. “But the engagement ring’s not shabby, either.”

  Laughing, he took her left hand and slid the ring into place.

  “It’s beautiful,” she sighed. “Bella.”

  “Viv, you’re not lookin’ at the ring, you’re lookin’ at me.”

  “Hush up,” she purred in a Tuna Creek drawl.

  Epilogue

  SPRING WAS LOVELY in the countryside north of Atlanta, and a few azaleas remained in bloom even though May was nearly over. Huge oaks surrounded the big Coltrane farmhouse, their limbs reaching curious fingers to stroke the clapboard siding and the windows of the upstairs bedrooms.

  Vivian smiled and propped her bare feet on the front porch rail. The late afternoon sun peered under the sloping roof of the porch and, finding her agreeable, caressed her until she went to sleep.

  Thirty minutes later, Jake crossed the grassy yard, dirty and contentedly tired from a long day’s work, whistling under his breath. Chester and Phoebe stopped at the edge of the porch behind him, their wet tongues tasting the air as they were trying to figure out why he just stood there smiling at her. They snuffled his hand, and he shushed them.

  Hearing Andy call them from one of the cabins hidden on the other side of a forested hill, they loped away. Andy, Fayra, Ray and Roberto had made the move to the farm comfortably.

  Jake took his boots off and tiptoed up the porch steps. He bent over Vivian. “You’re not gettin’ the beans snapped that way,” he whispered in her ear. She stirred and brushed at him as if she were shooing a gnat. He smiled wickedly. “I’ll let you be this time, ’cause it’s Saturday, and you had a tough week at court.” She made a small sound of half-awake thanks.

  “I love you, Tough Stuff.”

  She grinned up at him sleepily. “Now, that’s worth waking up to hear.”

  He brushed the end of her tilted nose with his knuckle. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, cleaned up.”

  “Need help?” Vivian asked as he disappeared indoors. Far on the other side of the screen door, the phone rang. She frowned in mild dismay. “Your tired body has just gotten a reprieve from being ravished.”

  “Oh, but I’m a repeat offender,” Jake told her, holding the door as she hurried past him. “I’ll probably do somethin’ that I deserve bein’ ravished for later on.”

  “I hope so.” She planted a moving kiss on his cheek then trotted toward the phone.

  Another thirty minutes passed before she ambled back to the porch, where a temptingly washed Jake now sat in the big rocking chair next to hers. He mimicked her earlier position, his denim-clad legs out in front of him, his bare feet crossed on the porch rail, his hands splayed over the white cotton T-shirt that left nothing of his muscled torso to the imagination.

  “That was Callender,” Vivian told him excitedly. “She’s doing a lot better. The divorce was final this week, and she just got a job with the San Diego municipal court. She sounded . . . not thrilled, but content.”

  “Contentment will do,” Jake said.

  Vivian settled beside him in the other rocker. For a moment they watched cows trail across the rolling green pasture in front of the house. The cows were gentle black and white Holsteins, and she was learning not to be afraid of them. Moo-na Lisa made a brown-and-white oddity in the herd.

  Jake reached over, snaked his fingers around her rocker’s arm, and nonchalantly slid Vivian and forty pounds of chair closer to him.

  “Why, Pa,” she preened, “I didn’t know you still cared.”

  “Yeah, Ma, I still think you’re the prettiest heifer in the barn.”

  Vivian tugged his T-shirt out of his jeans, slipped a hand underneath and tickled his stomach. “You say that to all the cows.”

  “Hold on, now.” Jake stood up and pulled her up with him, then trapped her hands against his chest. “With bad behavior like that, you’ll never get parole.”

  “Good,” she answered.

  And kissed him.

  Also by Deborah Smith from Bell Bridge Books

  Sweet Hush

  By Deborah Smith

  Available in print, ebook and audio

  Excerpt

  AFTER I DROVE past the public areas of Sweet Hush Farm I entered the orchards, and everything of the outside world disappeared behind me. Even the quality of the light deepened, as if I were being drawn down a well. The trees crowded so close that the leafy tips of a limb, weighted with apples, knocked on my window. Let us in. You can’t win in a fight against the All-American fruit.

  The road narrowed to a single car-width of gravel lined with golden flowers of some kind, and the mountains threw afternoon shadows across my car, changing the light even more and warping my perspective and sense of time. I tunneled through lifetimes and apple trees. This is a wormhole in the universe, I thought. I’ll come out in some other dimension.

  Maybe I did. The orchards opened up and suddenly I stopped at a weathered gate and fences with split-rail crosspieces. Not worth a damn for keeping anything or anyone in, or out. But pretty. Beyond the gate, up a rise of lawn and terraces outlined in mossy stone walls overflowing with browning flower beds and shaded by big oaks going red, sat the big, handsome house with a red peaked roof and gray stone chimneys, a broad veranda draped in vines, and a front door of dark, carved wood and stained glass. Apples were carved on the newel posts of the front steps. Apples were carved in the door. Apples glowed red in its stained glass panels.

  Apples, everywhere.

  Three Secret Service agents came down a walkway of old stone hooded by snowball bushes big enough to hide behind. The place was a picturesque minefield of security risks. I got out the car and nodded to the agents. They looked like solid, clean-cut family men—the Services’ typical choice. None of them knew me on sight, and each kept one hand near their gun holsters as they walked my way. I had that effect on family men.

  “Stop right there,” one called. “Do you have business at the house?”

  I nodded, looking past them. I spotted an old barn and some other outbuildings beyond the woods, a glimpse of small pasture, and more orchards behind it all—hell, orchards from there to forever, an army of apple trees, bending and rising with the valley floor. A wave of apples. I was surrounded. I laid a hand on the locked gate as the agents reached it. “I’m Jakobek,” I said, and pulled my credentials from the pocket of old khakis. An agent took the open
wallet and studied it. His and the others expressions’ changed to relief, or at least recognition. “Lt. Colonel. Sorry to stop you.” They’d been told to expect me. Be careful what you wish for.

  “No problem,” I said.

  “Lt. Colonel,” a woman called. Lucille Olson strode down the stone path and out of the shadows of the subversive shrubs. Al and Edwina had asked me what I thought of her before she was put in charge of Eddie’s protection. I looked at her records, looked at her training, then went to her and asked one question: “Why would you risk your life to protect Eddie’s?”

  She looked me straight in the eye. “Because when I was growing up in Minnesota my sister was raped and murdered by a stalker. I can only deal with that memory by making sure it doesn’t happen to someone else. I have to believe I can make a difference.”

  I told Al and Edwina they could trust her with Eddie’s life. She’d never allow herself to let Eddie down. I understood the mentality.

  “Agent Olson, where’s Eddie?”

  “In the house, sir.” She unlocked the gate. “Upstairs. Sleeping all day. She’s had stomach flu, nausea. Nothing serious, although I tried to persuade her to let me call a doctor. No go. Davis Thackery is sitting with her. Can’t pry him away. I’m glad you’re here.”

  I walked through the open gate, already moving swiftly up the path toward the house. “Be ready to go when I come back with Eddie. Have a doctor waiting at the airport. I don’t expect this to take long.”

  “I don’t think you understand . . .” She hurried alongside me. “Eddie’s not that easily persuaded right now.”

  “She’ll listen to me. Is Hush Thackery here? I want to talk to her, first. A little protocol. You do the introductions.”

  “Well, actually, she’s . . . we have a situation . . . she’s in that barn over there, but I’m not sure what—”

  “Y’all have to help me find my Gruncle and get the bee smoker!” a small voice cried. A tiny, dark-haired girl in jeans and a Barbie shirt bounded down the hill, clambering over the stone rims of terraced flower beds, a mound of wavy hair dancing as she hit level ground, her face streaked with tears. With that radar kids have for me, she headed straight my way, snared my hand, and tugged. “Excuse me, sir, but I need a ride to the front barns to get Gruncle Thackery and tell him to bring the bee smoker! My Aunt Hush is covered in a whole swarm of yellow jackets!” She held up a red, swollen forefinger. “Look what happened to me! I got stung by just one of them!”

  Aunt Hush. Covered. Swarm. Bees. Stung. Those were the words I heard. I bent down to the kid, gripping her small hand carefully. “What’s your Aunt Hush doing right now?”

  “Waiting for help! Hurry! They’re all over her!” She pointed toward a barn roof peeking above distant tree tops. “Over there!”

  “I’ll take care of her.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  I scooped my hands under her armpits, picked her up, turned, and handed her bodily to one of the men. “Find Gruncle, whoever that is. I’ll go to the barn.”

  The agent looked toward Lucille. She nodded. “Tom, Hernando, you stay here.” Then, to me, “I’ll go get her son. And call an ambulance.” Lucille bolted for the house, pulling a cell phone from her pants pocket.

  I ran up the terraces, jumping fieldstone borders, then climbing through late-blooming azaleas, low jungles of lavender mums, and the sharp, browning fronds of summer irises. I reached the oak trees and sprinted beneath their red-tinged limbs, heading for the weathered barn beyond the small pasture. Through a dark opening at the barn’s side I heard no screams and saw nothing but filtered shafts of afternoon sunlight. But I had a mental image of Hush Thackery being stung to death in some freak accident that would turn this peculiar day into a nightmare.

  WHEN I WAS just a tiny girl, a few years before my father died while digging up blackberry briars in the orchards, he took me and Mama over to Dalyrimple to see the Fourth of July parade, courtesy of the Chocinaw County VFW, a borrowed color guard from the ROTC unit at North Georgia College, and the Chocinaw County High School Band, playing loud and slightly off-key Sousa marches. The town was as old as the gray bricks of the courthouse, shaded by hickory trees that would thump a child on the head in the autumn with nuts as hard as opinions.

  Farlo Dalyrimple’s dachshunds slept safely in the lazy streets, looking like furry sausages who moved only when someone honked at them. Ancient Ulaine Dalyrimple Baggett, who taught music for free to the poor mountain kids, including me, kept the town’s slow tempo from the front porch of her grandson’s hardware store. In the late 1960’s, Dalyrimple was Mayberry.

  We sat on the edge of the store’s porch, Mama on the left side of Mrs. Baggett’s rocker, Daddy and me on the right side. Mrs. Baggett sang May the Circle Be Unbroken in a low alto, and I harmonized with her. As we sang and watched the parade, fat bumblebees began to bumble over to me from Mrs. Baggett’s rose bushes. I didn’t yet know I had sugar skin, but I wasn’t afraid of the bees, having already learned that most never stung me.

  One by one the bumblebees settled on my hair and face, while Daddy, Mama, and Mrs. Baggett watched the parade, unaware. Suddenly Mrs. Baggett stopped singing and said in her calm, crackling old voice, “John Albert McGillen, your child’s sung the bees in for a landing.”

  Daddy and Mama swiveled quickly to look at me. I sat there, as calm as a calf chewing its cud, with several dozen tubby bees clinging to my face and hair. Mama said not one word but reached for a pair of small American flags Mrs. Baggett had stuck in a flower pot full of geraniums. “Excuse me, Mrs. Baggett, but I’m going to use your flags to shoo these bumbles off Hush.”

  “No need,” Daddy said. Worn and lean, with dark auburn hair sliding back from his forehead like a retreating fire, he had the warmest smile of any man in the world, and a nature so quiet bees lit on him, too. He pulled a long-stemmed pipe from the breast pocket of his blue-checkered Sunday shirt, packed it with tobacco from a leather pouch in his trousers, lit it with a stick match he scratched on the inside of his leathery palm, and exhaled a slow breath of smoke over me.

  The bumblebees ambled away in duets and quartets of winged whirring. “Listen to them harmonize,” Mrs. Baggett said. “John Albert, you’re a wonder. You made the bees sing, too.”

  My heart swelled with the amazement of small miracles and the awe the luckiest children feel for a parent at least once in their lives. Daddy saved me. A permanent stamp of McGillen bee-magic already existed between my father and me, but that moment sealed it. He smiled at me then faced forward to watch the parade, again, while Mama exhaled with relief and re-planted Mrs. Baggett’s small flags in the geraniums.

  Mrs. Baggett, the last, grand keeper of Southern womanhood in the tradition of spiritual song, bent over the arm of her rocker and beckoned me with a finger as gnarled as the branch on my own Great Lady. When I edged close, she said softly, “Your Daddy’s a bee charmer, like you. Any man who can charm bees has a soul of special courage and mighty kindness. You remember that. Always be on the lookout for a bee-charming man. He has a special sort of music in his heart.”

  I put a hand to my own heart, and nodded. A small, rebel bumblebee returned and lit on my hand as I made that vow, overhearing it, so it could be told to bees the world over. But Mrs. Baggett died the next spring without further counsel to me, and Daddy a few years later, and then Davy came along, and my vow was broken.

  I had never found a bee-charming man.

  Until the day, that fall, when Nick Jakobek arrived.

  I HEARD THE running footsteps. That’s not Gruncle, I thought. And not Davis. Davis runs like a giraffe. Slow and gallumping. I turned my head carefully so as not to disturb the half-dozen yellow jackets that clung like pets to my cheeks and forehead and near the corners of my mouth. The barn’s side entrance made a tall, clean rectangle of gray logs framing the b
lue-pink afternoon light outside like a bright window in a dark room. Forced to sit still, I felt hypnotized by the contrast of light, the footsteps that couldn’t belong to my elderly Gruncle, and the slow thud of my own heart. Here and yon, a small yellow jacket lifted off my covered hands and wrists, seeking a new location on my skin, fitting himself in among his crowded brethren on the pew of my arms. Like a church choir caught in the spirit, they moved to their own rhythm. Mrs. Baggett would have been proud of them.

  The footsteps halted. The strong silhouette of a man suddenly loomed in the entranceway’s frame of light and trees. I saw his long legs spread slightly apart, his arms splay by his sides in readiness, all of him backlit against a coppery blur of the distant house oaks. The yellow jackets shifted ominously.

  He took a step forward. “Hold on, there,” I called in a low voice. “Be still or they’ll come after you.”

  “How badly are you hurt?” His voice was deep, calm, not Southern, but still. A good, strong voice. I wouldn’t forget it, or the way he asked that question.

  “I’m not hurt at all, thank you. I just have a talent for attracting bees.” I blew out gently as a small bee tickled my lower lip. It inched away. Chill bumps washed over my skin. The stranger moved forward, walking carefully for a tall man. I opened my mouth to warn him off again, but the words never came out. He stopped in a finger of sunlight.

  He looked down at me with a kind of wonder.

  And I looked up at him like a child in church.

  He had a stark and rugged face with no small share of wear and tear on it, a thick crown of hair more black than brown, and dark eyes that reduced the world to me. Only me. He raised a hand to his chest and slid his fingers into the breast pocket of a rumpled flannel shirt tucked into loose brown corduroys with scuffed hiking boots. He pulled a long cigar from the pocket, at the same time gracefully filching a silver lighter from a front pocket of his pants. I watched him flick the cigar’s cellophane wrapping aside and nip off the stogie’s puckered end with a quick tug of his teeth.