by Peggy Webb
The question burned through her, singeing her heart, and she almost told him the truth. Almost. “Why should I deny it? Miss Beulah heard the music. So did you.” She turned to Miss Beulah. “And by the way, it’s not sleazy music. I call it jazzy juba juke music.” She bounced out of her chair. “It’s the kind of music that adds pizzazz to life. Good day, all.”
She flounced out of the room with a brilliant demonstration of pizzazz.
“Martie, wait.” Paul’s entreaty fell on deaf ears.
“Well, I never.” Miss Beulah fanned herself with her fat hands. “It just makes my blood boil. Running a honky tonk, and brazen about it, too. Pure D brazen. Pizzazz, my foot. I call that twitching your tail. I said to Essie Mae the other day . . . Essie Mae, I said—”
“Excuse me, Miss Beulah,” Paul said, interrupting her endless flow of words.
He left Miss Beulah in the parlor, still talking. The screen door was vibrating on its hinges from Martie’s flamboyant exit. He flung it open and stepped into the October brightness. A flash of scarlet announced Martie’s retreat down the sidewalk. He started to follow and then hesitated. The wonderful thing that had been blossoming between them was squashed the minute Miss Beulah had opened her mouth about a honky tonk. Now was not the time to force the issue. And anyway, Miss Beulah was still in his parlor, probably still talking.
He sent a prayer winging upward for patience as he turned to walk back into the parsonage.
o0o
Martie’s blood roared in her ears as she marched down the sidewalk. She heard the screen door slam again and knew Paul was standing in the doorway. If he tried to follow her, she’d knock him in the dirt! Her sandals slapped angrily against the sidewalk. Well, why wasn’t he following her? It just proved her point: she was totally unsuitable for a minister. She knew it and he knew it. Why then did it make her so angry that he thought so? She was so mad that she could have jumped the cyclone fence flat-footed.
She barreled down the sidewalk, blind to nature’s stunning display of gold-dipped foliage. She rounded the corner of the block and raced up the street to her own house. Baby met her with a short, joyful bark, tail thumping madly.
“It’s all your fault,” Martie said sharply to her puzzled dog. For an instant Baby’s tail forgot to wag, but she recovered quickly and pranced off to worry the cat.
Martie stood in the middle of her yard. She was tempted to put her eye to a crack in the fence to see if Paul was still standing on the steps. It would serve him right. Honkytonk, indeed! Self-righteous hypocrite.
Her indignation made her feel noble for all of two seconds, and then she wilted. He had never accused her of anything. He had cast no stones. She had acted on impulse, as she always did. But this time it was different. She had the uneasy feeling that she had thrown away something precious.
Well, darned the luck, anyway. She marched to the pile of tattered flowers and gave them a vicious kick. She would never look at another marigold as long as she lived.
CHAPTER TWO
Martie woke up with two furry faces peering down at her. Baby and her archenemy, the gray-blue Siamese cat, were on opposite sides of the bed trying to get their mistress to come down to the kitchen for breakfast.
“Shoo, you two hellions.” She swatted playfully at her pets. “I jazzed until midnight. Go away and let a girl get her beauty rest.” She closed her eyes and rolled over. Baby grabbed the white eyelet comforter and dragged it off the bed. “Doggone it, Baby,” Martie grumbled. “I’m going to put you in the cellar.”
Baby’s tail thumped on the polished wooden floor and her tongue lolled out happily.
Martie stretched her arms above her head and yawned luxuriously. She wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing. Even in the dead of winter, she slept with nothing on. The morning sun gilded her skin and made a halo of her tumbled hair. She sprang from the bed humming, stepped into a pink silk teddy, and pulled a gaily embroidered Mexican wedding dress over her head. Tying her hair back with a pink ribbon, she bounded down the stairs to her kitchen.
The large, airy room was awash with October sunshine pouring through a row of ceiling-to-floor windows overlooking her backyard. Martie smiled at a pair of sparrows giving themselves a dust bath in her freshly weeded flower bed. Then she spotted the pile of wilted marigolds, and her smile vanished.
She whirled around the kitchen, filling pet dishes, mixing a banana and yogurt shake, and trying not to think about a certain too handsome minister who lived across the fence. But she thought about him anyway. She thought about the lock of black hair that needed pushing off his forehead. She thought about his quicksilver eyes that crinkled at the corners when he smiled. Most of all she thought about his voice, that wonderful baritone voice full of trumpets and hallelujahs and little boy laughter.
The first thing she was going to do this morning was get rid of that mountain of marigolds. She should have done it yesterday after that business about the honky tonk. She guessed that she’d hoped they would disappear overnight all by themselves, just float off on a Pontotoc breeze, never to be seen again.
Leaving her yogurt shake half-finished, she marched to her backyard, intent on destroying the evidence of her ill-fated meeting with Paul Donovan. She thought of burying them and then discarded that idea. If she put them in a hole, Baby would just dig them up again. In the end she decided to rake them into a pile with the leaves and burn them. Somehow burning seemed appropriate, a cauterizing of memories.
“Need any help?”
She spun around at the sound of the well remembered voice. She’d been so intent on her work that she hadn’t heard Paul Donovan approach. Leaning casually on her rake, she tried to act as if her heart weren’t doing a rumba inside her chest.
“Well, well. If it isn’t the Reverend Paul Donovan? What are you doing in my yard so early in the morning? Crusading against honky tonks?”
His smile didn’t waver; he had already made up his mind that today he would clear the air with Martie. “Actually,” he replied, “I’ve come for my socks.”
“Are you also accusing me of being a sock thief?” she asked.
“Do your eyes always turn the color of pansies when your dander is up?”
The remark pleased her so much that she almost forgot she was mad. She firmly quashed the urge to laugh and thought how hard it was to be mad at a man whose smile rivaled the sun.
“Wouldn’t your dander be up if I had come into your yard, unannounced, and demanded that you hand over my socks?”
Paul chuckled. “I see your point. Let’s start over, shall we?” He could hardly take his eyes off her. It wasn’t just the unusual hair and the brightly colored dress, he decided. It was that remarkable spirit bubbling inside her that drew him like a magnet. “The parsonage dryer is on the blink,” he said. “While your pet was gathering my flowers, she apparently decided to retrieve my purple socks, too. They’re missing from the clothesline.”
“Purple socks! You wear purple socks?” The laughter that had been quivering just beneath the surface exploded. Martie never did anything halfway. Now she threw back her head and roared with uninhibited delight. A man who wore purple socks couldn’t be all correct stuffiness and stodgy convention, she thought.
“They break the monotony,” Paul explained. “Anyhow, I don’t dare not wear them. My formidable Aunt Agnes gave them to me last Christmas.”
“I’m afraid you’ll just have to face up to Aunt Agnes, Reverend Donovan,” replied Martie, her eyes still sparkling with mirth. She was having a hard time remembering that the man in her backyard was off limits, and calling him Reverend helped . . . but not much. “I don’t have your socks.”
“Call me Paul, and it’s okay about the socks. They were just a good excuse to come over and talk. There are some misunderstandings that we need straighten out.”
“About the honky tonk?” she asked.
Her laughter vanished as she remembered the way he had looked yesterday when Miss Beulah had named her house as the
source of sin and disgrace. Well, she certainly didn’t run a honky-tonk, but that was not to say that she hadn’t been in a few. And enjoyed it, too. One of the best times of her life was her stint as a singer with Booty Matthews’s country and western band. They had started in El Paso and rattled all over the Southwest in his souped-up camper, performing in one-horse towns and eating canned pork and beans on tin plates under the stars.
She looked at the Reverend Paul Donovan with his radiant smile and his lofty ideals. She was no fool. Although she had never done anything she was ashamed of, she knew that by his standards she was a tarnished woman. Furthermore, she wasn’t about to find out how long she could stand the strictures imposed by a relationship with a man of the cloth. She knew herself too well. She was a free spirit, a maverick; living by the rules would smother her. A small sigh of regret passed her lips. If only he weren’t so heart-tuggingly appealing. That lock of hair still needed brushing back from his forehead. It took all the willpower she possessed not to reach over and do it herself.
She hardened her heart. “Did you come on your own, Reverend, or did your church send you?”
He knew she was deliberately erecting a wall between them, and he was more determined than ever to crash through and get to know the woman on the other side. He also knew that she was using his title as a barrier between them, but he decided to let that go—for the moment.
“I’m not on a holy crusade, Martie,” he said, “but I think you would like me to be. Why?”
Paul’s forthrightness shocked and unnerved her. She realized that if she had expected to intimidate this man, she’d been mistaken. Instead, it was the other way around. She wished they had stuck to socks.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she lied. It was probably the only time in her life that she had ever felt the need to hide behind a lie.
“I think you do,” he said. “You’re putting stumbling blocks in our way.”
“There is no ‘our way,’ Reverend. There’s your way and mine.”
“And never the twain shall meet?”
“Precisely.”
He threw back his head and laughed in what she considered to be a very unpreacherlike manner. The laughter unnerved her even more than his penchant for total honesty.
“Why are you laughing?” she asked.
“I’m thinking what fun I’m going to have proving that you’re wrong.”
“You are the most forward minister I’ve ever met.”
“Lesson number one, Martie.” He quickly crossed the small space between them and took the rake from her hand. Letting it drop to the ground, he put one hand on her shoulder and one on her chin. Gently he tipped her face upward, forcing her to look directly into his eyes. “I’m not just a minister,” he murmured. “I’m a man. And don’t you forget that.”
She felt as if she’d been pulled into the center of a volcano. His eyes seared her face, his hand burned her chin, and the nearness of him blazed through her with a ferocity that made her knees weak. Not for one second since she’d met him had she forgotten that he was a man. Unconsciously her tongue flicked over her lips, and she wondered what he would think if he knew that she wanted to seduce him. Right now. This very minute. She wanted to wind herself around him, pull him down to the browning stubble of grass, and make love with him. In broad daylight she wanted to rip his clothes from his body and run her hands over those magnificent muscles and defy the likes of Miss Beulah Grady to peep through a hole in the fence and label it bad.
In the small eternity his hands were touching her, the thoughts reeled drunkenly through her mind, and she knew that she would have yielded to those impulses if he had not been a minister. So much for going by the rules. How long had she been in his company before her maverick nature had her flouting convention and wanting to do the socially unthinkable? All of ten minutes, she decided. No, she would never forget that he was a man. But she also would not forget that he was a minister.
Paul lowered his hands and shoved them deep into his pockets. He balled them into fists and strained against the fabric so hard that it was a wonder he didn’t rip holes in his jeans. He hoped that she had no idea how close she had come to being kissed. Don’t push too hard and too fast, he warned himself. Give her time to get used to the idea. Curb that impatience that’s been growing inside from the moment she fell from the oak tree into the marigold bed. She reminded him of foxfire, and he knew that foxfire glowed only for those who were patient enough to wait for the right moment.
“When I make a pastoral call, I’m usually invited in,” he said pointedly, deftly steering them away from treacherous shoals of dangerous conversation and even more dangerous passions.
“For a neighborly cup of tea?” The words tumbled out breathlessly. He was waving a white flag and she gladly accepted the truce.
“With a generous dollop of cream.”
“Will milk do? I never keep cream.” She led him into her kitchen and cleared the yogurt shake from the table.
“Since this is going to become a neighborly tradition, I’ll bring my own the next time.” He leaned back in an antique chair and stretched his long legs before him. “Or perhaps we can train your puppy to go through the hole in our fence and fetch the cream from my refrigerator.”
She put the water on to boil and joined him at the table. “I think Baby has done enough fetching to last a lifetime,” she said. “I’m really sorry about your socks.”
“Don’t worry. I’m sure Aunt Agnes will give me some more. Purple socks are her stock in trade. Baby is an interesting name for a dog. How did you come to name her that?”
“I always use baby talk with my animals. When I got her, she was so small and cuddly that I addressed her as Baby. The name stuck.”
“That was before you moved to Pontotoc?”
“Yes. Baby was my going away gift from Booty Matthews. We were in Albuquerque at the time.”
“He must have been a good friend of yours, this Booty Matthews.” Paul almost held his breath, hoping she would not say that Booty Matthews was more than a friend.
“He was and still is. And he’s a darned good musician. I traveled with Booty a year, singing in his band.”
Martie stuck out her chin defiantly. He might as well know every detail of her tarnished past. Maybe then he would stay on his own side of the fence. She watched the struggle on his face as he tried to decide just what her relationship with Booty had been. It almost made her giggle. Booty was pushing sixty, had the voice and build of a grizzly bear and the personality of a pussycat. He had been a father to her that year, and it had been Booty who had noticed the restless stirrings in her and diagnosed them as a longing for roots.
“He’s partly the reason I came to Pontotoc.”
“I hope I can thank him someday.”
Martie was saved by the whistling of the teapot. The preacher was incorrigible, she decided. One minute she felt on safe ground with him, and the next she was spiraling into that volcano once more. It was almost as if—
“Ouch!” she cried as she sloshed water on her hand.
Paul had crossed the kitchen before she even knew that he’d left his chair. “Let me see that,” he said as he took her hand and gently rubbed the reddening spot.
The hot breath of the volcano spewed over her, and she tried to remove her hand from Paul’s. “I’m okay,” she said quickly. “Really. The water wasn’t that hot.”
He kept a firm grip on her hand as he reached into the refrigerator and got a piece of ice. “Sometimes these things can get nasty. Where’s your dish towel?” Numbly, Martie nodded in the direction of the towel holder. He deftly wrapped the ice and applied the cold compress to her hand. She tumbled over the edge of the fiery furnace, felt the molten heat pour through her body and settle in the apex of her thighs.
“Now isn’t that better?” His thumb traced shivery circles in her palm as he held the compress in place on the top of her hand.
She thought that the kitchen floor might be
even better than the grass in her backyard for a seduction. Oh, help. If she didn’t get out of this state of mind soon, she would start a scandal her first week in Pontotoc.
“Did they teach this bedside manner at seminary, Reverend?”
He kept the compress on her hand, but the erotic circling in her palm stopped.
“I learned first aid from my mother. I have six brothers and two sisters. One of us was always burned or bashed or bleeding. I think that’s why Theo became a doctor. It was pure self defense.” He still didn’t release her hand.
“And why did you become a minister?” It was more than an idle question. Suddenly Martie wanted very much to know why this man had chosen the ministry.
“To serve, Martie,” he said simply. “To serve God and my fellow man.”
The honest simplicity of his answer took her breath away. She forgot about her burn and his hand on hers.
“I don’t run a honky tonk,” she whispered.
“I never believed that you did.”
“I teach Jazzercise. That was the music Miss Beulah heard. I practice every evening. My ad will be in next week’s paper.”
Still holding her hand, Paul led her to the table and gently pushed her into a chair. “Now that the air is clear between us, let’s have that neighborly cup of tea,” he suggested. “You sit there and I’ll pour.”
Without protesting she acquiesced and watched him move about the kitchen. His movements were surprisingly graceful for such a big man. He brought the teacups to the table, and they talked of inconsequential things, of the weather in Pontotoc, of Saturday night auctions, and of small community doings. And beneath the surface of their conversation swirled seductions and volcanoes and heady carousel music.
Suddenly Paul asked her, “Do you like baseball?”
“I love it,” she replied enthusiastically. “Once when Dad and I were living in the south of Georgia, I played first base on a neighborhood team. There was nothing to do in that town except play ball and fight mosquitoes. They didn’t even have a movie theater. I’ve been a baseball fan ever since.”
