Down Home Carolina Christmas

by Pamela Browning

  Before the main course arrived, so did the director of Dangerous. Jules Trout was a morose little man who engaged Whip in a long discussion about camera angles. While this was going on, Luke sat grinning at Carrie across the table, and she wondered if he suspected that Tiffany had revealed his subterfuge.

  Tiffany seemed uninterested in talking to Ali, Becky, Ham or any of the others. “My real name’s Daisy Maria Zillendorf,” she confided to Carrie between nibbles on her salad. “Since my mother intended for me to be in show business, you’d expect she’d have named me something more starlike. Tori, for instance. Or Reese.”

  “Daisy’s a lovely name,” Carrie said.

  Tiffany lifted her shoulders and let them fall in an expression of disinterest. “Oh well, Tiffany’s the name my manager chose for me, and I changed it legally,” she said.

  “Well,” Carrie said, unable to imagine changing her name, at least her given ones. “I was named Carolina Rose after my father’s two favorite things, his home state and the flowers growing in the fields near his house. I guess it’s a good thing he didn’t hunt, or I’d be named something a whole lot worse, like Remington Duck.”

  Luke, across the table, exploded into laughter.

  “You’re not supposed to be listening,” Tiffany chided. “This is girlfriend talk.”

  “What should I do—cover my ears?” Luke said, and Carrie, secretly amused, forced herself to focus on her T-bone.

  Tiffany’s cell phone rang. “Sorry, I’ve got to answer this one. It’s from Peyton,” she said, and she hurried off to accept the call in private.

  Becky went with her, and while Whip was drawn into a hush-hush conversation with Ali about Tiffany’s supposed weight problem, Luke leaned closer to Carrie.

  “I’m trying to help Tiff by bolstering her self-confidence. You’re doing a good job by acting interested in her, so thanks. She tends to eat too much when she’s unhappy.”

  “I really am interested in her,” Carrie said.

  “Sometimes Tiffany latches on to someone who can keep her anchored to reality when she’s on location. I’ve worked with her once before, and I was the one she chose to be her friend. This time, it’s you.”

  “I, um, well, I guess I’m flattered,” Carrie said, at a loss. It wasn’t as if she and Tiffany had much in common.

  Tiffany returned, her cheeks flushed with pleasure. “I hate being separated from my fiancé,” she confided to Carrie, who until then hadn’t known that the two were engaged.

  “We’ll go on hiatus in a month or so, and you and Peyton can get together then,” Whip pointed out.

  “Maybe he’ll even fly me to Paris,” Tiffany said wistfully. “To walk beside the Seine and kiss at the top of the Eiffel Tower.”

  Carrie must have seemed startled at the casual mention of rushing off to somewhere so exotic. “Peyton is the heir to the Kirk Hotel fortune,” Tiffany informed her blithely. “He has oodles of money. I haven’t announced my engagement yet—we’re keeping it to ourselves. For now, we’re what they call an item.”

  Carrie mulled this over, realizing that somewhere along the line she’d stopped feeling out of her element. Tiffany’s ruminations about her diet and her fiancé had convinced her that despite having fame and a lot more money than most, these were ordinary people with ordinary concerns, never mind that half the world knew who they were. Or thought they knew.

  Out of sensitivity for Tiffany’s diet, Carrie skipped dessert, though she almost weakened when the waiter delivered a scrumptious chocolate gâteau to a nearby table. No one else ordered dessert, either, though, and after Whip paid the check, they trooped outside, collecting awestruck glances from patrons who recognized Luke and Tiffany and whispered behind their hands as their party passed. Tiffany made a fuss about everyone’s staying and waiting for the car with her, saying that some fan could accost her—and Ham the bodyguard conspicuously placed his body between hers and a cluster of patrons congregated under the portico.

  In the meantime, Luke stayed close to Carrie, and she found that it was difficult to be angry with him. A couple of times, he tried to make her laugh, but she only managed a smile. She knew she’d have to speak to him about his subterfuge in picking her up, and she wasn’t looking forward to it.

  Soon Tiffany’s driver appeared with the limo. “Thanks again, Carrie,” she said warmly. “I’m so, so grateful.”

  “We all are,” Whip said as Tiffany kissed Carrie on both cheeks.

  Carrie smiled, embarrassed, and then Tiffany and everyone else got in the limo. Tiffany waved out the tinted back window as they drove away.

  By that time, the valet had brought Luke’s car around. As soon as they were alone, Carrie lit into him.

  “You didn’t tell me the truth about why you came to get me, Luke,” she said. “Tiffany wasn’t going to be late picking me up.” She focused accusing eyes on his profile.

  “I wanted to see you,” he said. “You aren’t exactly the easiest person to get to know.”

  “I’m not supposed to be,” she retorted heatedly. “I’m not a movie star, and you and I have nothing in common. Nothing at all.”

  “Maybe we don’t,” Luke said quietly. “But I’d like to.”

  The silence stretched out as soybean fields and tumbledown tobacco barns on either side of the highway whipped by. Finally Luke spoke, placing his hand on hers, and that made her resolve crumble. “I’ve met a beautiful woman who appreciates a fine car and who isn’t intent on adding me to her chain of conquests. I sense a compatibility between us, Carrie Rose Smith.”

  Helplessly she thought about this for a moment and in the end decided not to deny it. “You don’t have to explain, Luke. I’ve felt it, too.”

  “I detected the chemistry right away,” he said.

  “Chemistry isn’t enough.” But it might come close.

  “Oh, there’s more. There’s lots more,” he said with great conviction.

  Like dizziness accompanied by a huge helping of desire. “Um, what are we going to do about it?” she asked, though she immediately began to worry that her tone was too arch. She kept facing front but slid a glance out of the corner of her eye.

  He smiled, flashing his dimple and putting her at ease. “We’ll figure it out.”

  Before she could reply, she heard a rumble of thunder from the direction of Yewville. It was, at this point, perhaps the only thing that could have distracted her attention from Luke Mason.

  “That sounds ominous,” she said, shifting in her seat to peer ahead. “I hope it’s not raining.”

  “I thought we were in a drought,” Luke said.

  “We are, but the last thing the home place needs is rain.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “A leaky roof,” she said uneasily. “I’ve known about it for a while but have put off getting it repaired. Can you speed up, Luke? I’d better get home.”

  He obliged, whipping the car around curves as raindrops spattered. Within minutes, they were driving in a downpour. Water sluiced across the road and Luke slowed the car to a crawl.

  “This may have been the worst of it,” Carrie said hopefully as the storm began to diminish. “Maybe it hasn’t even started raining at my house.”

  “It’s worse up ahead,” Luke said, and he was right. The trip that should have taken them less than half an hour stretched out to forty-five minutes with rain drumming on the roof of the car and even a few hailstones falling, which Luke should have been more nervous about, considering how much it would cost to smooth dings out of a Ferrari. Carrie voiced her concern, but he only laughed and said that what mattered was staying safe.

  When they arrived at her place, it was still pouring, and Luke edged the car as close to the front of the house as he could without running over her impatiens. Carrie got out first and dashed onto the porch, fumbling for her key. Luke was close behind her and helped her to open the door when the key kept slipping out of her damp hands.

  Inside she ran to the back porch. Th
ere water was streaming in much harder than last time. She shouted to Luke to get her a bigger pot than the one now overflowing onto a hand-braided rug that Miss Alma had made.

  “Is it okay to use this oval enamel roasting pan?” he hollered back as he rummaged in the pie safe near the kitchen table.

  “Sure,” she said, and he brought it to her before hurrying to the keeping room, where she told him he’d find a bag of rags. A pink sticky note was floating along in a current of water headed for the door, and she stooped to snatch it up and read it:

  Carrie,

  Call me ASAP after you get home. I mean it!

  It was signed “Love, Dixie.” Carrie immediately crumpled it and tossed it on the kitchen counter.

  Luke shrugged out of his blazer and dropped to his hands and knees to mop up water. That was when the lights flickered and died.

  “Oh, great,” Carrie said. She felt her way to the pantry and scooped up a couple of flashlights, switching one on as she sloshed in Luke’s direction. The light flickered on too late to prevent her from stumbling over his outstretched leg, but she caught herself before she fell on top of him. She handed him a flashlight.

  “I’d better check the attic,” she said, rushing upstairs. Her flashlight beam revealed that more leaks had developed and existing ones had burgeoned into a flood.

  Carrie, worried about Dixie’s silk dress and, unwilling for it to be ruined by the water, slipped out of it and flung it over a dressmaker’s dummy in a corner. She grabbed a robe from one of the many boxes of old clothes and shrugged into it, then wrapped the tie around her waist, before getting to work cleaning up the water advancing across the floor. The last thing she needed was rainwater seeping through to the ceilings below.

  Luke burst into the attic. “Something furry bit me. I thought you’d want to know.” He trained the light on a rivulet of blood running down his instep.

  She stopped what she was doing and looked at it. “That must have been Killer,” she said.

  “The name does not encourage me,” he said ominously.

  Carrie hastened to explain. “Killer’s a rabbit with a powerful one-two kick. He was probably scared and latched on to your ankle in the dark. I’m sorry, Luke. He has an aggression problem. He’s into toes in particular.”

  “Got any Band-Aids?”

  “In the medicine cabinet in the upstairs hall bath. You’ll find a tube of antibiotic cream next to the box.”

  “A killer rabbit,” Luke mumbled as he clattered down the stairs. “Who ever heard of such a thing?”

  “He didn’t mean to hurt you,” Carrie called apologetically.

  When Luke returned sporting a Band-Aid, she tossed him a towel. “Here. If you don’t mind, put this in the dormer. I don’t want the bottom of that old trunk to get wet.” He did as she requested, nudging the towel around with his uninjured foot so that it would soak up maximum water.

  “I’ve got to empty these pots,” she said over her shoulder, seizing one and starting for the upstairs bathroom, water sloshing over the rim as she walked. “You can use any of those old clothes to wipe up.”

  “There’s so much water that I’m not making much progress,” Luke said after casting a doubtful eye at all the containers. Some were brimming over, and droplets spattered out of the others as water dripped in.

  “I appreciate whatever you can do,” she said.

  Downstairs, where she went to get more pots, Killer perched on the kitchen counter, munching on the outer leaves of a head of cabbage. “Get down,” she told him. “As if I don’t have enough trouble…”

  Killer kept munching until she scooped him up and set him on the floor. “How’d you get up there, anyway?” she asked, answering her own question when she spotted the kitchen chair that Luke must have moved over to the counter when rummaging in the old pie safe where he’d found the roasting pan.

  Carrie moved the chair. “You stay on the floor, where you belong,” she told the rabbit, but he scooted under the table. She figured he was just biding his time until he could emerge and chew on something interesting, like an electrical cord.

  When she returned to the attic for the next pot, Luke had spread out the clothes from the box in which she’d found the robe. “These should sop up a lot of rain. Do you mind if I use that old chamber pot to wring water into?” he asked.

  “No, go on,” Carrie told him on her way out. The chamber pot had belonged to some long-ago relative and had been stored in the attic ever since she could remember. She and Dixie had played with it as children, Dixie wearing it as a helmet during a memorable joust. That had cracked Granddaddy up when he caught them at it.

  They continued mopping up with rags, wringing them out in any available container, and emptying the pots, with Carrie running downstairs every now and then to deal with the leak on the porch. Finally the rain let up, becoming a drizzle and then stopping altogether around the time that the attic light came back on. When the streams of water dwindled to a mere trickle and the thunder subsided in the distance, Carrie collapsed on the Victorian settee, sending a gray plume of dust mushrooming upward.

  “Oh, Luke, I’m sorry you had to get involved in this mess, but I’m mighty glad you’re here,” she said gratefully.

  His white shirt was stained with water and dirt, and he’d rolled his pants up almost to the knee. “I hope we’ve staved off inside damage,” he said, looking around in the gloom of the attic before sitting beside her. “I don’t want anything to happen to this beautiful old house.”

  “We won’t find out until tomorrow or so if the water’s made it through the ceilings. Thanks, Luke. I couldn’t have managed without you.” She smiled at him, liking the way his hair curled slightly when damp.

  He spotted the red dress she’d thrown over the dummy and grinned. “I’ve resorted to many ways to get a woman’s clothes off, but this has never happened before,” he quipped.

  A flush started low on her throat and worked its way to her face. This reminded her that the robe she wore gaped at the neckline, and she hastily pulled the robe closed.

  “I wish you hadn’t done that,” he said.

  Her pulse kicked up a notch. She unsuccessfully willed it to stop. “How about something to eat? Something to drink?” she suggested in desperation, knowing that it was in her best interest to avoid a pass, which she was pretty sure this was. She supposed that it had been ill advised of her to take off her dress. It had also been stupid to offer food when they’d recently finished eating a huge dinner, but she was grasping at straws here.

  Luke placed a restraining hand on her arm, and magically his touch seemed to engender heat on her skin, like a sunburn or reckless exposure to a heat lamp. “I’m not hungry,” he said. “At least, not for the usual.”

  The heat spread lower and much too fast. Carrie stared at Luke through the silvery dust motes swimming in the pale light from the one ceiling fixture. Her breathing almost stopped, and she forced herself to concentrate on getting enough air.

  “Luke, I—”

  He caressed her shoulder through the robe, ran a forefinger across a runnel of rainwater that had spattered across her cheek. “We’ve been talking all evening, and the best thing to do right now is be quiet,” he said practically.

  Considering the lack of air in the attic, he might have something there. She shut her mouth, listening to the gurgle of the rain in the gutters, the drip of water into the pots under the leaks. Listening to the beat of her heart, which was too loud by far.

  “I hadn’t planned for anything to happen between us tonight. But this—” he gestured at their surroundings “—is where we are right now. And maybe it’s okay.”

  Carrie shook her head. It was all she could think to do with his head moving closer to hers and his eyes so intent upon her face.

  “Is that a no?” he asked. “Or something else?”

  “It’s—it’s not a no,” she said, the words snagging on her tonsils. At the moment there was nothing she wanted so much as Luke’s l
ips on hers, their bodies pressed together. That was crazy and not a good idea at all, but it suddenly seemed so right.

  “Oh, Carrie,” Luke said in the most heartfelt way imaginable. “Come here.” He opened his arms, and obligingly she fell into them. As if she knew she belonged, as if she’d planned it all along.

  His arms, so strong and so welcoming, wrapped around her, and for a long time he held her close. He didn’t move and neither did she. She didn’t want to break the spell that bound them, and she liked being hugged by him, as opposed to being kissed by him. Hugging, she reasoned when she was capable of thought at all, should happen first. They’d kissed before they’d even known how it felt to hold each other.

  “Have you ever just gone at this in an abandoned sort of way?” Luke asked, his breath tickling her ear. “Have you ever really let yourself go and enjoyed it?”

  She chose not to answer, only turned her face more tightly into his shirt. When she opened her eyes, she saw an attractive whorl of chest hair and quickly shut them again. She’d always preferred a hairy-chested man, and Luke did not disappoint.

  She wasn’t sure how long it was before she lifted her lips for Luke’s kiss. It seemed like forever, but also like the merest instant. When his lips closed over hers, feeling just as she remembered them from the kiss behind the refreshment stand, her arms went up around his shoulders, drawing him close. His shirt was damp against her chest where the robe fell apart, and she adjusted her sitting position to provide maximum contact.

  He kissed her for a long time, and after a while she fell back on the settee so that it was easy to pull him on top of her, which is what she desperately wanted by this time. She ran her hands inside his shirt, easing the damp fabric away from his skin and, almost without thinking about it, off his shoulders. At the point where predictably the shirt dipped to the floor, he was working on her bra. Carrie was glad it wasn’t a Wonderbra, no matter what Dixie and Joyanne said. It seemed unfair to lure a man with deep cleavage when he’d soon enough discover that it was nothing more than an illusion created by foam rubber and underwire.