Sunny Chandler's Return

by Sandra Brown

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve.”

  Sunny sat up, grabbing the top of her bikini in the process. Her heart was in her throat. Bright yellow dots exploded against a field of black in front of her eyes. She had sat up too fast and didn’t immediately regain her vision or her equilibrium. When she did, she muttered a curse.

  Ty Beaumont was hauling himself onto her dock and securing his small fishing boat to one of the piles.

  “You’re the one with a lot of nerve, Mr. Beaumont. You scared me half to death!”

  “Sorry.” His grin said otherwise. “Were you asleep?”

  “I must have dozed off.”

  “Didn’t you hear my motor?”

  “I thought it was a bug.”

  “A bug?”

  “A dragonfly.”

  He looked at her warily. “How long have you been out in this sun?”

  “Forget it,” Sunny said, and uttered a long-suffering sigh.

  She couldn’t lie back down. It was bad enough having to look up at him from a sitting position. She stubbornly refused to secure the neck strap of her bikini. The bra was snug and stretchy enough to stay up by itself. She wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of seeing her rattled. Groping for and tying the straps would make her look like a flustered old maid in the company of her first gentleman caller. Well, she wasn’t an old maid. And he sure as hell wasn’t a gentleman.

  He plopped down on the bare deck beside her. “Won’t you have a seat?” she asked sweetly.

  He merely grinned again. “Thanks.”

  To give herself something to do besides stare into his mirrored sunglasses and wonder what part of her exposed body he was looking at, she took off her own sunglasses and unnecessarily cleaned the tinted lenses with a corner of her towel. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was fishing on the lake and just happened to see you sprawled out here, lying half naked. That’s why I said you’ve got a lot of nerve. You were issuing an open invitation to any pervert on the lake to come over here and take a gander, possibly do you bodily harm.”

  “I’ve been sunbathing on this pier practically all my life, and no one has ever bothered me before. In fact, you can’t even see this dock from the open lake. You have to come into the cove. And as far as I know, there’s never been a pervert on Latham Lake...until now.”

  His laughter was deep and richly masculine. “Well, I’ve admitted to being interested in your body, but I wouldn’t do anything too perverted.” He paused for several beats. “Unless you like it that way.”

  Sunny got the impression that he winked behind his sunglasses. She hastily began tossing things into her canvas beach bag. Paperback book. Sun visor. Transistor radio. Deciding to leave her towel where it was for the present, she stood up and began stalking barefoot across the planks.

  “Where’re you going?”

  His arm shot out. Sunny gasped. His hard fingers encircled one of her ankles. He didn’t make her stumble, but he effectively stopped her in her tracks just the same.

  “Indoors. I prefer sunbathing in private. Beyond that, I don’t want to swap sexual innuendos with you, Mr. Beaumont.”

  “Chicken?”

  “No!”

  “Then come back.”

  It was a challenge Sunny had to accept. But she would have agreed to anything just to get his strong fingers from around her ankle. The contact was shooting alarming sensations up her leg and into her thigh. She worked her ankle from his firm grip and sat back down on the towel, her expression mutinous.

  “I was only being neighborly.” She glanced at him with patent disbelief. “I was,” he said defensively. “I was only trying to make you feel welcome.”

  “I don’t need the welcome mat rolled out. I grew up here, remember?”

  “Then by comparison that makes me the newcomer. You should be nice to me.”

  She trapped a smile just before it broke across her lips. Give this man an inch and he’d take endless miles. He needed no encouragement, not even a simple smile. Sunny only wished his charm was easier to ward off.

  He was dressed in cutoffs and a faded sleeveless shirt, which was opened almost to his waist. She couldn’t help but notice that his chest was muscled and matted with crinkly, sweat-curly, dark blond hair. He had nice legs, too, if you liked hard, well-shaped muscles, tanned skin, and sun-gilded body hair. He wasn’t wearing any socks with his tennis shoes. And he had on a bill cap.

  Sunny associated bill caps with baseball players and rednecks with “Honk if you’re horny” bumper stickers on their muddy pickup trucks. Neither type appealed to her. But Ty Beaumont under a bill cap wasn’t bad at all. Perhaps because of his blond hair curling around the sides of it, and the way he wore it low on his brow right above his opaque sunglasses. When he smiled, his teeth shone whitely in his bronzed face.

  His shirt clung damply. There were beads of perspiration trickling down his neck and making sodden points out of strands of his hair. Sunny rarely saw a man sweating. The men she came into contact with were usually inside air-conditioned buildings. They were dressed in business suits and ties. They always had on socks.

  Beaumont was a shock to her system, that was all. The scent of sweat and sunshine and lake water on a man was new to her.

  That was the only way she could account for her accelerated pulse and the fact that the bottom had fallen out of her stomach. She wanted to run just as fast as she could back into the security of her cabin. But she couldn’t retreat without losing face. So, she would stay and be “nice” to him if it killed her.

  “Catch anything?” she asked, nodding down toward the boat.

  He leaned back, stretching his long legs out and propping himself up on one elbow. “Not yet.”

  His simple answer vibrated with undertones that made Sunny uncomfortably aware of just how skimpy her bikini was. It was the color of cayenne and set off her golden coloring to full advantage. She wished she had brought along the jungle print sarong that went with it. A cover-up hadn’t seemed necessary when she left the cabin. Now she longed for one. A T-shirt, a robe, a bear rug, anything to shield her from Ty Beaumont’s gaze. She couldn’t see it behind his glasses, but she could feel it moving over her, resting on places that felt abnormally warm.

  “It’s hot today,” she said briskly.

  “And getting hotter.”

  “Almost too hot to fish.” Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. Her father was a fisherman. In the summertime he went out early in the morning, while it was still relatively cool and the lake was shrouded with mist. He never went out in his fishing boat in the heat of the day. An accusation was forming in her mind, but he spoke before she had a chance to.

  “I bet you love the heat.”

  “I do,” Sunny admitted. “How did you know?”

  “You’re a very sensuous woman.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Lots of things. I watched you yesterday at the party.”

  He crossed his legs more comfortably. At least the readjustment made him more comfortable. It unnerved Sunny considerably. She swallowed hard as she glanced down at the impressive bulge between his thighs. The aged denim cutoffs had conformed to the shape of his body years ago. They kept no secrets.

  “I noticed your ankle bracelet right away.” He reached out and, with his index finger, followed the slender gold chain around her ankle. “There’s not another woman in Latham Green who wears an ankle bracelet.”

  “Have you personally verified that statistic?”

  “An educated guess,” he said, taking no offense at her mild rebuke. “It’s not a piece of jewelry that the majority of women wear. Only women with intensely passionate natures.”

  She jerked her foot away from his hand. “That’s crazy.” Sunny wished that her voice had more impetus behind it and didn’t sound so breathy. “I bought it because I like it. I think it’s pretty.”

  “You bought it for yourself?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

 
“A man didn’t give it to you?”

  “No.”

  “That’s a damn shame.”

  “Why?”

  “Installing it would have made for one helluva private party.” He grinned broadly.

  “Look, Mr. Beaumont, I don’t know what my former friend George told you about me—”

  “Oh, he told me plenty, but I formed my own opinions.”

  “In the ten minutes that we were together?”

  “Before we even met,” he said easily. “Did you realize that you mouthed the words to every song the band played last night?”

  Sunny was about to argue when she decided that denying it was pointless. Singing along with the radio was a habit of hers. “I like music.”

  “And food. I’ve already told you that your mouth does more for a strawberry than shortcake and whipped cream.”

  “You make eating a strawberry sound lewd.”

  “It bordered on it,” he said softly.

  Sunny had no effective comeback prepared and decided that if such were the case, it would be more prudent to say nothing. Even when she was at her most acerbic, he seemed to be ready with a glib rejoinder.

  “You selected food from the buffet very carefully. Food with eye appeal. Everything you put on your plate was...pretty.” He smiled as though “pretty” was a word he didn’t use frequently. “Except for the oyster, of course, and you only took that because Mrs. Morris was annoying you.”

  Sunny’s mouth formed a small o. Just how long had he watched her? But more startling than the time involved was his accurate perception of her. She felt exposed and vulnerable. “You should have become a window peeper.”

  “How do you know I’m not?” At her stunned expression, he laughed. “Relax. I’m not that subtle. Nor that masochistic. If I’m interested in a woman, I want to do more than peep at her from the bushes. I want to touch.”

  He picked up her plastic bottle of suntan oil and poured a drop into his palm. He sniffed it. “Smells like a drink from Trader Vic’s bar.”

  “That’s why I bought it.”

  “I’m not surprised. Several times last night I saw you smelling the flowers.”

  He was rubbing the oil between his palms. The slow, rotating motion of his large hands was getting to Sunny. She blinked rapidly to stave off the trance she felt stealing over her like a fog. “I like perfume.” She noticed suddenly that she was very thirsty. Her tongue was sticking to the roof of her mouth. “I love anything perfumed. Flowers, suntan oil, anything.”

  “Have you ever been into that perfumery in New Orleans?”

  “The one on Royal?”

  “I forget exactly. Somewhere in the French Quarter.” He was rubbing his thumbs along the tips of his fingers, coating them with the slick oil. “I spent an entertaining hour in there once, selecting perfume.”

  “For whom?” She’d been watching the movement of his fingers too long. Their wanton enjoyment of the suntan oil had made her drowsy. The question popped out before she realized she’d spoken it. When she did, she snapped back to attention.

  “My mother.”

  “I should have guessed.”

  His smile was lazy. “I didn’t realize until then that fragrance is a science.”

  “The formulas are carefully guarded.”

  “I don’t mean how it’s made.” He sat up straight and leaned close. “I was talking about the science of applying it.”

  Sunny wished he would take off his glasses. It was disconcerting to talk to her own image in their mirrored lenses. But now, when he granted her unspoken wish and removed them, she wanted him to replace them immediately. His eyes were much more unsettling than the opaque sunglasses.

  “I always thought it was correct for a woman to dab perfume behind her ears and on her wrists.”

  “It is,” Sunny said gruffly.

  “Yes, but it evaporates more quickly there. Perfume should either be applied with cotton or sprayed on. I didn’t know until I visited the shop that putting it on with a finger taints what is left in the bottle.”

  “It has something to do with one’s own body acid, I believe.”

  “And this lady explained to me that to get the maximum benefit of any fragrance, where it blends with a woman’s body heat and emanates the scent every time she moves, she should apply it to—”

  “I’ve really got to go in.”

  “—her hair...her breasts...her stomach...her... thighs.”

  His eyes touched each spot as he spoke the particular word. On the last word, his eyes stayed in the vicinity of Sunny’s lap. “Tell me, Sunny, being the sensuous woman you are, have you ever applied perfume to your”—his gaze moved up with agonizing slowness— “hair?”

  For a moment she could say nothing. A bead of sweat rivered down between her breasts. A matching one rolled down Ty’s throat. The insects buzzed lullingly. The faint breeze whispered through the feathery branches of the cypresses, but everything else was still, especially the stare that Sunny shared with Ty Beaumont.

  “I think I’d really better go in now,” she said at last. “I might get burned.” She didn’t mean it as a double entendre and hoped he didn’t take it that way. It was difficult to tell exactly what his half smile meant.

  “George told me quite a story about you.”

  She hated him for bringing her past into their conversation. At the same time she thanked him. It served to yank her out of the muzzy state his deep voice had induced while talking about perfume and its application. Was she nuts? Why hadn’t she gotten up and gone in? Maybe she had been in the sun too long.

  “Was it true, Sunny?”

  “That depends on what he told you, doesn’t it?” she demanded sharply.

  “He said you were one of the prettiest girls in school.”

  Sunny glanced away. “I guess I was well liked.”

  “Is that why you came back to Latham Green after four years of college?”

  “My parents still lived here.”

  “Then. But not now.”

  “No, not now.”

  “Not since you marched out of the Baptist church and left your bridegroom standing at the altar.”

  Sunny glared at him. “Well, that answers my question. I see that George was talkative.”

  “Can you blame him? That’s quite a story. I don’t recall ever hearing about another bride who, when asked, ‘Will you...’ et cetera, said, ‘No, I don’t believe I will,’ and turned on her heel and marched down the aisle and out of the church, leaving everybody, the bridegroom included, flabbergasted.”

  Sunny’s cheeks were fiery and it had nothing to do with the slight sunburn she was getting. Memories overwhelmed her. Like quagmires in the nearby swamp, they had been concealed, waiting for her to slip and fall into them so they could suck her under and smother her.

  “That took a lot of guts,” Ty said, watching her closely.

  She had thought he might laugh at her or joke about the bizarre way she had halted her wedding ceremony. Instead he looked almost commiserative. Well, she appreciated his not making fun of her, but she sure as hell didn’t need his pity.

  “I couldn’t marry him.”

  “I don’t think I could, either. If I were a woman, that is. Don Jenkins is as dry and crusty as yesterday’s toast. He would never have satisfied a sensuous woman like you. He wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  Scooting on his bottom, Ty moved closer to her. “It just seems to me that you would have known that before the preacher posed that all-important question. I mean, there you were in your long, white lace wedding dress.”

  “It was ecru,” she corrected absently. Lost in memory, she picked at the frayed hem of her beach towel.

  “From what George told me, everybody in town was there.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why’d you do it, Sunny?”

  Memories and lethargy were swept away by a sudden clarity. Her head snapped up. Her eyes were glowing like hot coals. “None of your damn business, Mr. Bea
umont.”

  A laugh started as a low rumble deep in his chest. “And apparently nobody else’s, either. To this day no one has figured it out. There’s been speculation, of course.”

  “I’m sure there has been.”

  “Like a baby.”

  “What?” Sunny’s breath rushed out. She had to drag it back before she could add, “They think I was pregnant?”

  “According to George, that was everybody’s first guess. You left because you couldn’t bear the shame.”

  “Latham Green isn’t that far behind the times. Lots of girls have been pregnant on their wedding day.”

  “But the babies belonged to the men they were marrying.”

  Sunny only stared at him in speechless amazement. “You mean everybody thought...” She couldn’t even verbalize the scandalous idea.

  Ty shrugged. “It was mentioned that the baby belonged to someone besides Don.”

  Disgusted with the fertile imaginations of small-town minds, Sunny said, “There was no baby, for heaven’s sake. Don’s or anyone else’s.”

  “I didn’t think so. No stretch marks.” Before she could prepare herself for it, he ran his finger over the taut skin of her lower abdomen. “Naturally I’d have to see your breasts to be positive.”

  Sunny retreated beyond his reach. “I’ve never had a baby,” she ground out.

  He poked the air with his index finger. “Now that was everyone’s second theory. You were supposed to have a baby, but you didn’t.”

  “An abortion?” Sunny, horrified by the thought, could barely breathe the word. “Everybody figured that I ran off to New Orleans to get an abortion?” She covered her face with her hands. “No wonder my parents had to leave.” After a moment, she flung her head back and glared up at Ty. “Tell me the rest of it. What else do they say?”

  “It gets real nasty from here.”

  “I want to know. Fran never would tell me what everybody said about me after I left. Tell me.” He seemed reluctant. “Tell me,” she repeated stubbornly.

  He drew a deep breath. “Some thought you might have been on drugs.”

  “Ridiculous. What else?”

  “VD was a consideration, but thought highly unlikely. Some thought you might like girls better than boys.”