The Novels of Nora Roberts, Volume 2

by Nora Roberts

  Clever of him, she decided. He was a clever man. But it wasn’t going to work.

  She was ready for him now, and her mind was set. There was no temper or embarrassment to blur her senses. She’d walk outside when he pulled up. In that way she’d block him from coming inside and having any opportunity to confuse the issue again. She’d make her tidy speech, wish him well, then go back inside and close the door.

  And stay where it was safe.

  The plan put her at ease again, in control again. So when she heard him drive up, she gave a little sigh of relief. Everything was about to be put back in order again.

  Then she stepped out, saw his face.

  He sat in the pretty convertible, his streaked mass of hair already windblown, his hands resting on the wheel. He gave her an easy smile, but behind it she saw anger and frustration. Most of all she saw bitter unhappiness.

  No maneuver he could have devised, no plan he could have calculated, could have hit her weakness more effectively.

  “That’s one of the things I like best about you, Tory. You’re prompt.” He got out, started to round the hood to open the passenger door.

  She didn’t touch him. The connection tended to become too close with physical contact. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Wrong?” He glanced down, started to make light of it, then the shield went up. He stepped back, went around to his own side as she climbed in. “Do you just crack open a mind and take a peek at what’s inside?”

  Her head snapped back, as one would from a blow. Then she folded her hands in her lap. It was better this way. It would have happened eventually anyway, she reminded herself. Better to get it over with quick and early.

  “No. That would be rude.”

  He laughed, dropped back behind the wheel. “Oh, I see. There’s an etiquette to mind reading.”

  “I don’t read minds.” She gripped her fingers together—taut wires, white at the stress points. She let out a breath to relieve the pressure in her chest, and stared straight ahead. “It’s more a reading of feelings. I’ve learned to block it out, as it’s not pleasant, whatever you might think, to have other people’s emotions pounding at you. It’s fairly easy to filter it, but now and again, if I’m not paying attention, something, particularly strong emotions, slide through. I apologize for intruding on your privacy.”

  He said nothing for a moment, just sat with his head back and his eyes closed. “No, I’m sorry. That was nasty. I’m feeling nasty, as you picked up on. I guess I needed to take a swipe at somebody, and you were elected.”

  “I understand that it’s uncomfortable to be with someone you can’t trust. Someone you feel can and will take advantage of your own thoughts and feelings, use them to control you or hurt you or direct your life. That’s one of the reasons I tried to explain to you why I’m not good at relationships, why I don’t want to be involved in one. It’s perfectly understandable to have questions and doubts, and for those questions and doubts to lead to resentment and distrust.”

  She fell silent, used the silence to gear herself up for the rest.

  “That,” Cade said mildly, “is an amazing pile of bullshit. Mind if I ask whose words you just put in my mouth?”

  “They were your own words.” She shifted, leaning on her own crutch of bitterness to face him. “I am what I am and I can’t change it. I know how to cope and how to get by. I don’t want or expect anyone to stand with me. I don’t need anyone to. I’ve learned to accept my life just the way it is, and I don’t give a damn if you or anyone else doesn’t.”

  “You’d better watch out for gopher holes, Tory. That’s a very high horse you’re sitting on.” When she reached for the door handle, he just lifted an eyebrow. “Coward.”

  Her fingers tightened on it, then released. “Bastard.”

  “That’s right, I was, for taking out a piss-poor mood on you. I was told tonight that sorries are just excuses for bad behavior, but I’m sorry anyway. You, however, are dumping opinions on me that I haven’t expressed and don’t have. I can’t give them to you, as I haven’t finished making them yet. When something’s important, I like to take the time to study on it. You seem to be important.”

  He leaned over. Instinctively she pressed back into the seat. “You know, that’s something that irritates me right down to the bone.” Calmly, he drew her seat belt over, hooked it. “And it’s a challenge at the same time. You see, I’m just bound and determined to keep touching you, to keep getting closer until you stop pulling back.”

  He started the engine, tossed an arm over the seat, let his gaze rest on hers before he backed the car up the lane. “You can chalk it up to pride and ego, if you like. I don’t mind a bit.”

  He swung onto the road, punched the gas. “I’ve never hit a woman.” He said it conversationally, but she heard the viciously controlled anger beneath. “I won’t start with you. I’d like to have my hands on you. I damn well intend to have them on you eventually. But I won’t hurt you.”

  “I don’t think every man uses his fists on women.” She looked out the window, gathering her composure the way she gathered bricks for her wall. “I worked that, and several other issues, out in therapy.”

  “Good.” He said it simply. “Then I won’t have to worry every move I make comes off as a threat to you. I don’t mind making you nervous, but I do mind scaring you.”

  “If I were afraid of you, I wouldn’t be here.” The wind flowed over her face, through her hair. “I’m not a pushover, Cade, or anyone’s doormat. Not anymore.”

  He waited a beat. “If you were, I wouldn’t want you here.”

  She turned her head just a little, studied him with a sidelong glance. “That was a very smart thing to say. Maybe the best thing that could be said. Even better, I believe you mean it.”

  “I’m one of those peculiar creatures who tries to mean what they say.”

  “I believe that, too.” She took a deep breath. “I wasn’t going to come tonight. I was going to walk out of the house, tell you I wasn’t coming, explain how things were going to be. And here I am.”

  “You felt sorry for me.” He shot her a glance. “That was your first mistake.”

  She gave a short laugh. “I suppose. Where are we going?”

  “No place special.”

  “Good.” She settled back, surprised at how quickly, how easily she relaxed. “That’s a fine spot.”

  He drove farther than he’d intended, choosing back roads at random, but always winding his way east. Toward the sea. The sun dipped lower behind them, shooting streaks of red across the sky that seemed to bleed down into the fields, pour through the stands of trees, drip into the snaking curve of the river.

  He let her choose the music, and though Mozart blasted out rather than the rock he would have selected, it seemed to suit the oncoming twilight.

  He found a little waterside restaurant, well south of the crowds that flocked to Myrtle Beach. It was warm enough to sit outside, at a little table where a squat white candle sputtered in a glass globe and the conversation around them was muted under the steady rise and slap of the surf.

  On the beach children chased the bug-eyed sand crabs into their holes or threw bread crumbs into the air for the crying gulls. A group of young people thrashed in the surf and sent out the squeals and shouts that were caught between mating calls and childhood.

  In a sky still deep blue with the last gasp of day, the first star winked to life and shone like a single diamond.

  The tension and temper of the day melted out of her mind.

  She didn’t think she was hungry. Her appetite was never particularly keen. But she poked at her salad while he began to tell her of his work.

  “When you feel your eyes begin to glaze over, just stop me.”

  “I don’t bore that easy. And I know something about organic cotton. The gift shop where I worked in Charleston sold organic cotton shirts. We got them from California. They were pricey, but sold well for us.”

  “Give me th
e name of the shop. Lavelle Cotton started manufacturing organic last year. I can guarantee we’ll beat the price from California. That’s part of what I haven’t been able to get across as well as I’d like. Growing organically, after you’re established, competes head-on with chemical methods. And the product commands a premium in the marketplace.”

  “Which equals more profit.”

  “Exactly.” He buttered a roll, passed it to her. “People listen to profit more than they listen to environmental concerns. I can talk about pesticide drift, the effect on wildlife and edge species—”

  “Edge species?”

  “Quail and other birds that nest in the grass along the fields. Hunters shoot the quail, eat the quail, and consume the pesticide. Then there’s insecticide. Sure they kill off the pests, but they also kill off the good bugs, infect birds, reduce the food chain. A chick eats a dead or dying insect after spraying, then the chick’s infected. It’s a cycle you can’t break until you try another method.”

  Odd, she thought, to realize she’d carried her father’s view of farming inside her, where nature was the enemy to be fought day after day, with the government running a close second.

  “You love it. Farming.”

  “Yes. Why wouldn’t I?”

  She shook her head. “A great many people make a living doing things they don’t enjoy and have no real talent for. I was supposed to go on and work at the tool and dye factory after high school. I took business courses in secret rather than argue about it. So I suppose I know what it’s like to go against the grain to do what you want to do.”

  “How did you know what you wanted to do?”

  “I just wanted to be smart.” To escape, she thought, but steered the conversation back to him. “The organic method’s sensible, and certainly forward-thinking, but if you don’t spray, you’ve got weeds and disease and pests. You’ve got a sick crop.”

  “Cotton’s been cultivated over four thousand years. What do you think people did up until sixty, seventy years ago, before we started using aldicarb and methyl parathion and trifluralin?”

  It intrigued her, interested her, to see him getting worked up. To feel the passion for his work vibrating out of him. “They had slaves. And after that, field hands they could work obscene hours for slave wages. That’s just one of the reasons, in case you were wondering, why the South lost the War Between the States.”

  “We can discuss history another time.” He leaned forward, needing to make his point. “Organically grown cotton can and does use more hand labor, but it also makes use of natural resources. Animal manure, compost, instead of chemical fertilizers that can pollute groundwater. Cover crops to help control weeds and pests and add to revenue, and the basic soil conservation of rotation. Good bugs—ladybugs, mantis, and so on—to feed on the cotton pests instead of exposing farmworkers, neighbors, children to pesticide drift. We let the plants die naturally instead of using a defoliant.”

  He sat back as their entrées were served, topped off the wine in their glasses, but he was on a roll. “We keep up the process through the ginning. We clear the gin of residue from conventional cotton, that’s federal regulation. So when it’s sold, it’s pure, free of chemicals. Not everyone thinks that such a big deal for a shirt or your jockey shorts, but cotton’s seed as well as fiber. And cottonseed’s in a whole lot of prepared food. How much pesticide do you figure you’re taking in every time you eat a bag of potato chips.”

  “I don’t think I want to know.” But she remembered her father coming home, cursing the land. She remembered watching the crop dusters dropping their clouds, and how the filaments would linger and drift toward the house.

  She remembered the stench of it. And the burn in the air.

  “How did you get interested in the whole organic method?”

  “First year of college. I started reading about it and, well, the fact is, there was this girl.”

  “Ah.” Amused, Tory cut into her trout. “Now we see the picture form.”

  “Her name was Lorilinda Dorset, from Mill Valley, California. My tongue fell onto my toes the first time I saw her. A long, lanky brunette in tight jeans.”

  He gave a sigh at the memory, sweet with distance. “And a card-carrying member of PETA, Greenpeace, the Nature Conservancy, and God knows what all. So of course, to impress her, I read up on animal rights and natural farming and whatnot. Gave up meat for two months.”

  She lifted a brow at the steak on his plate. “Must have been love.”

  “For a few bright, shiny weeks it was. I let her drag me to a seminar on organic farming, and she let me get her out of those tight jeans.” His smile was slow and wicked. “Of course, eventually, my desperate need for a hamburger outweighed my devotion and Lorilinda turned in disgust from the carnivore.”

  “What else could she do?”

  “Exactly. But I kept thinking about what I’d heard in that seminar, and what I read in those books, and it made more and more sense to me. I saw how it could be done, and why it should be. So when Beaux Reves came to me, I started the long and not entirely without conflict process.”

  “Lorilinda would be proud.”

  “No, she’ll never forgive me for the cheeseburger. It was a serious breech of faith. For months afterward, I could barely choke one down over the guilt.”

  “Men are bastards.”

  “I know it.” He also knew that she might actually eat a full meal if he kept her mind engaged. “But forgiving that genetic flaw, how would you feel about being Progress’s exclusive outlet for Lavelle’s Green Cotton products?”

  “You want me to sell your shirts in my shop?” she asked, surprised.

  “Not necessarily shirts, if that doesn’t fit the ambiance. But linens? Tablecloths, napkins, that sort of thing.”

  “Well.” Caught off-guard, she shifted gears to business. “I’d want to see some samples, of course. But as the product would be produced here in the state, it should fit in with my stock. We’ll need to discuss cost and supply and quality and style, of course. I’m keeping clear of assembly-line type products. I’m providing the unique, and celebrating South Carolina’s impressive variety of artists and craftsmen.”

  She paused to sip her wine and think. “Organic cotton linens,” she murmured. “From field to display to table, all within Georgetown County. That could be very appealing.”

  “Good.” He lifted his glass, tapped hers. “We’ll find a way to make it work for both of us. To make it all work,” he added.

  The evening was certainly ending on a much nicer note than it had begun. With a full moon riding overhead, and a lovely fog of wine in the brain. She hadn’t meant to drink, she did so rarely, but it had been so pleasant to sit by the water and sip at wine.

  So pleasant that she’d had two glasses instead of one, and was now comfortably sleepy. The car ran smooth and fast, and the wind that blew over her smelled of the approaching summer.

  It made her think of honeysuckle and overblown roses, the smell of tar melting in the sun and the lazy hum of bees courting the magnolia blossoms in the marsh.

  Wishing to God it’d get a little cooler now that the sun’d gone down. If a ride didn’t come along soon she could hook her thumb around, she’d end up walking all the way to the goddamn beach. ‘Course it was Marcie’s fault, the bitch, ditching her so she could go off and make it with that asshole Tim. Well, she didn’t give a flying fuck about Marcie, she’d hitch her way up to Myrtle Beach and have a fine time.

  All she needed was a fricking ride. Come on, sweetheart, stop the car! There you go. Hot damn.

  Tory reared up in the seat, eyes wide, sucking at air like a swimmer surfacing from a long, lung-bursting dive.

  “She got in the car. She tossed her pack in the back and got in the car.”

  “Tory?” Cade pulled to the side of the road, shifted to take her shoulders. “It’s all right. You just fell asleep for a minute.”

  “No.” She shoved at him, sick and desperate, and yanked at her s
eat belt. There were hands squeezing her heart so it beat in hitchy strikes. “No.” She wrenched open the door, leaped out, and began a stumbling run along the shoulder. “She’s hitchhiking, to the beach. He picked her up, back there, somewhere back there.”

  “Wait. Hold on.” He caught up with her, had to drag her around. “Honey, you’re shaking.”

  “He took her.” It was sliding into her head, images and shapes, sounds and scents. There was a burn in her throat, a smoker’s rasp from pulling deep on one too many cigarettes. “He took her, pulled off the road, pulled off and into the trees. And he hit her with something. She doesn’t see what it is, she only feels the pain, and she’s dazed. What’s happening? What’s the matter? She pushes at him, but he’s dragging her out of the car.”

  “Who?”

  She shook her head, fighting to find herself in the confusion, in the pain. In the terror. “That way. Just up that way.”

  “All right.” Her eyes were huge, unfocused, and her skin had gone clammy under his hands. “You want to walk up there a little ways?”

  “I have to. Leave me alone.”

  “No.” He wrapped an arm firmly around her. “That I won’t. We’ll walk. I’m right here. You can feel me right here.”

  “I don’t want this. I don’t want it.” But she began to walk. She opened herself, overriding her instinct for self-preservation. She didn’t struggle when the images shifted, solidified.

  The stars wheeled overhead, blindingly bright. Heat closed around her like a fist.

  “She wanted to go to the beach. She couldn’t get a ride. She was angry at her friend. Marcie. A friend named Marcie, they were supposed to drive together, spend the weekend. Now she’s going to hitchhike because, by God, she’s not going to let that stupid bitch ruin her trip. He comes along, and she’s happy. She’s tired and she’s thirsty, and he says he’s going all the way to Myrtle. It’s less than an hour by car.”

  She stopped, held up a hand. Her head lolled back, but her eyes stayed open. Wide open. “He gives you a bottle. Jack Black. Blackjack. You take a drink, a long one. To kill your thirst and because it’s so cool to be riding along and drinking whiskey.