by Jan Freed
Her insides melted. God, this was going to be hard. “I look like Apple Annie and you know it, but thanks. Would you mind carrying an ice chest to the car for me?”
“Of course not.”
“It’s in the kitchen.” She stepped aside and he swept past, smelling of breezy cologne and looking virile in khaki shorts, navy crewneck shirt and canvas boat shoes.
With a brief but interested glance around her neat apartment—she’d met him at the restaurant the other night—he hefted the chest and turned back around. She tried not to stare at his bunched biceps and flat belly as he crossed the threshold, but he was an exceptionally handsome man in the prime of his life, and she was human. Her gaze fed hungrily on his lean body all the way to the Jaguar.
Once inside, he faced her with a smile. “Okay, how do I get there?”
Two days ago she’d come up with the plan to invite him along on her monthly trek to the old Denton homestead a short drive from town. She rattled off directions now and sank into butter-soft leather with a defeated sigh.
Ironically John was in high spirits. “This would be a great day to be out on the lake. Hot. Sunny. Good stiff breeze. Do you like to sail?”
“I’ve never been sailing.”
“Then you haven’t lived. There’s nothing more exhilarating in the world than skimming over the water with the wind in your face. I keep a catamaran at Lake Conroe.” “How nice for you.”
His hands on the wheel tightened, then relaxed. “Yes, it is. I take her out every chance I get, which isn’t often enough. Maybe on your next day off we could drive up together.”
Idle talk, as if they had a lifetime of adventures ahead of them, instead of only two-hour business meetings once a month. If he didn’t fire her, that is.
“It’s not that far,” he continued as if she’d responded. “A bottle of wine, a beautiful sunset and you on my boat—” he heaved an exaggerated sigh “—I’d be one happy man.”
The knife in her heart twisted. “Stop.”
His startled glance turned grim. “Stop what?”
Her misery and pent-up frustration spilled out.
“This fantasy. These invitations. Why are you pursuing me, John? Boredom, defiance of convention—why?” She turned her head.
“Do you really think so little of me?”
Impossible as it seemed, he sounded wounded. She bit back her passionate protest and felt his probing gaze.
“My God, you doubt yourself, don’t you? But that’s ridiculous. I’ve been looking all my life for a woman like you.”
She rolled her eyes. “Now that’s ridiculous.”
“Dammit, Mary Lou, you’re being the worst kind of reverse snob! My wife cared more about how many times she made the best-dressed list than she did about me. That’s what money and social standing can do to ordinary human beings.”
As if she didn’t know exactly. She would’ve laughed if her vocal cords had been functioning.
His knuckles whitened on the wheel. “If it hadn’t been for my daughter, I would’ve bailed out long ago. Maria would’ve fought me for custody out of pure spite, and I couldn’t put Beth through that.”
What would he think about a mother who hadn’t seen her daughter in thirty years? The answer had her shifting on the leather seat.
“But what about later?” Mary Lou managed. “Say, when Beth was in high school.”
“By that time I was married to my business concerns. Beth was the one who talked me into getting a divorce, actually. When she left for college, she wanted to know that I had a chance for happiness, that I wouldn’t bury myself even deeper in work than I had before. So I asked her mother for my freedom and paid a considerable fortune to gain it.” His tanned jaw clenched once. Twice.
She waited, knowing there was more.
“Let me tell you something about freedom, Mary Lou. The media are full of statistics about the unbalanced ratio of single women to eligible men. But no one ever talks about the pit-bull aggressiveness of these same poor women in pursuit of a financially successful man.
“I went from flattered to disgusted within two months. The thing was, nothing I said or did seemed to affect their attitude. Nice or not, as long as I could still offer security I was a valuable commodity. It really shook my self-confidence.”
John Chandler, insecure? But he had the world at his feet.
He cast her a hooded look. “And then I bought a struggling truck-stop business and hired a beautiful completely disinterested woman to manage it for me.”
Her traitorous heart soared. She forced herself to look away so she could think straight. “I was a challenge to you after those other women, that’s all.”
“No, you were a breath of fresh air. Warm. Unpretentious. Listening to me—really listening—as if I were a man, instead of a bank account. You honestly didn’t seem impressed with my money or anything beyond how I treated you and the staff.”
She didn’t know what to say. Fortunately something about the landscape penetrated her dazed thoughts. “The county road to my place is coming up,” she warned.
John slowed the car, then turned right at her direction. A red dirt road ribboned ahead, bounded on both sides by a barbed-wire fence and rolling green fields dotted with live oaks.
“It’s beautiful land, Mary Lou.”
“Yes.” But it wasn’t hers. She dreaded the moment he saw the Denton homestead.
John drove slowly down the unpaved road, the Jaguar’s tires kicking up red clouds of dust and quartz gravel. Something thunked on the car’s low underbelly and made him wince.
“We should’ve taken my car,” Mary Lou said on a moan.
The fact that he didn’t argue increased her misery. Three miles and nine flinches later, a sagging aluminum gate appeared on the right.
“Slow down—that’s the entrance. Wait a minute and I’ll unlock the gate.”
Wondering why she’d ever thought this was a good idea, she was out of the Jaguar before it stopped rolling. The bicycle chain and padlock should clue him in that security wasn’t too critical. She set the combination to Catherine’s birth date, numbers Mary Lou would never forget, then unwrapped the chain and opened the gate.
Hopping back into the car, she pointed at two ruts in the parched yellow grass leading up a hill to a stand of oaks. “That’ll take us to the house. I’ve cleared the broken beer bottles and such as best I could. But stay in the ruts to be safe.”
To his credit, he didn’t hesitate to drive onward. She stared dully out the window at the passing scrub brush, prickly pear and trash trees choking out whatever grass had once survived. Her daddy used to make a token effort to clear the acreage during his infrequent dry spells. But with both her parents dead going on seven years, nature had a stranglehold on the land that Mary Lou had neither the time nor money to fight.
The Jaguar jounced through the ruts, topped the hill and stopped. A cluster of live oaks spread majestic branches over the weather-beaten shack she’d lived in for eighteen years.
“Welcome to the Denton homestead,” she said woodenly.
Unable to bear his silence, she got out of the car and walked toward the sagging front porch. Mr. Jenkins at the hardware store had given Mama six gallons of paint when Mary Lou was about ten. Someone hadn’t liked the color once it was mixed up. Mary Lou had thought it was beautiful.
She stopped and studied the aqua blue dandruff speckling the silver wood. The tin roof had long since rusted through in patches. Every windowpane had been used for target practice by kids sighting in their rifles. To the right of the house, set back a discreet distance, a small structure leaned on the verge of collapse.
Footsteps crunched behind her and she hugged her stomach. “Until I started school, I thought everyone had an outhouse. The teacher had to show me how to flush the toilet and use the faucets. Her face…” Mary Lou would never forget the mingled pity and morbid fascination on that woman’s face. It was an expression she saw often in the following years. “Her face made
me feel ashamed, and I didn’t know why. But I learned soon enough that I was white trash.”
Turning, she looked up into John’s grave eyes. “It was worse when I found out Daddy had sold off a farmhouse and nine hundred acres chunk by chunk to buy his booze. Mama finally put her foot down when all that was left was this old sharecropper’s shack. That was before she gave up and started drinking, too.”
“Poor baby…”
“That’s right, I was poor—dirt poor—but I was smart, too. I studied the way people talked and ate and dressed, and copied the things I thought would make me fit in. By the time I got to high school, my drama teacher couldn’t believe I hadn’t taken private acting lessons. I never told her that, in a way, I had.” The bittersweet memory led to thoughts of New York, and Lawrence. And the divorce trial records easily obtained by anyone wishing to investigate her past.
She adjusted her straw hat the better to see John’s eyes. “Don’t you understand? The Mary Lou Denton you know is an act. This—” she gestured at the squalid surroundings “—is who I am. What I am. Sooner or later your family and friends would find out, John.”
He reached up and gently removed her hat, then cupped her face between his hands. “Who cares?”
Who cares? “I do. And so do you, deep down. God, the tabloids would have a field day if they got wind of your dating a woman like me.”
“An intelligent, beautiful—”
“Truck-stop manager, who also happens to be your employee, who also happens to come from the lowest rung of society.”
“Mary Lou, sweetheart—” he firmed his hold, his expression so tender her chest ached “—all that means is that you were smart enough, tough enough and courageous enough to rise above what life handed you. If anything, I admire you more now than before.” His eyes darkened subtly. “All that counts is how we feel about each other. All that matters is this.”
He lowered his head and took her mouth in a searing, possessive kiss. His tongue found hers and he groaned, the sound so rich with masculine satisfaction it stirred her deeply. She moved closer, threading her fingers through his beautiful hair, loving its silky texture.
Their bodies bumped, shifted, melded intimately. His hands splayed over her hips and pulled, showing her his desire more clearly than words. Her moan seemed to excite him more, and the kiss intensified. She was burning, flaming…
Mary Lou flung her head back and gasped for air. “Stop.”
His lips were on her throat. “Not until you agree to have dinner with me again,” he murmured against her skin.
Her laugh was half sob. “I can’t.”
He trailed soft kisses below her ear, over her drowsing eyelids, down her cheek. “You can,” he whispered fiercely, claiming her mouth once more.
A long time later, she did.
”…SO WHICH would you prefer, darling?”
Catherine had no idea. Her attention had wandered five minutes ago, an all-too-common occurrence in the week since Joe had kissed her neck—and one of the reasons she’d asked Carl over tonight.
“Umm…whichever you prefer.” She peeked across the living-room sofa to gauge his response.
Wearing Italian loafers, baggy wheat-colored trousers and a black silk T-shirt, he looked like a model for GQ. An extremely irritated model.
“You look very handsome tonight,” she added, hoping to distract him with his favorite subject.
Surprisingly, his frown only deepened. He propped his empty wineglass on one thigh and tapped the crystal rim with his index finger. The fine gold hairs on the back of his manicured fingers glinted in the lamplight.
It was a nice hand, she told herself. A perfectly good hand, even if his fingers were…well, stubby. At least, they were short compared to—
“Catherine!”
Her gaze shot up to meet his. “Yes, Carl?”
He tap-tap-tapped his glass.
She smiled weakly. “Would you like a refill on your wine?”
“I’d like you to answer my question.” His gray eyes were frosty.
Never again would she make fun of game-show contestants. “Could you repeat the question please?”
He shook his head in righteous disgust. “I asked if you prefer to honeymoon in Acapulco or St. Martin, but obviously you have something more important on your mind. Care to tell me about it?”
Well, you see, darling, another man made me want to tear his clothes off recently, and I was wondering if you could top that.
Stalling, she sipped her white wine and remembered Charlotte Wilson’s earlier phone call. “If you must know, Carl,” Catherine said now, “I’m upset about our engagement party.” She matched Carl frown for frown. “I thought you and I had agreed it should be an intimate, casual affair.”
“We did. So what’s the problem?”
“The problem is your mother mailed out almost two hundred invitations to a cocktail party yesterday.”
The tension seeped out of his perfect features. “Is that all you’ve been worried about?”
“All? Think of the expense! Not to mention the planning and logistics of serving that many people in a private home.” And the increased chances of someone recognizing Joe’s true identity.
Carl set his glass on the cherry coffee table, placed her own beside it and took both her hands in his. “Between the two of them, my parents have a huge circle of friends and business associates. And since you refuse to let them help with the wedding costs—” he placed two fingers against her parting lips “—don’t argue, I’m not opening that can of worms again. I’m simply pointing out that this is their only chance to show you off to people who might not be invited to the wedding.”
She arched her brow. “Come on, Carl, show me off? Why don’t we just include a copy of my family tree in a wedding announcement and save all this fuss and money?”
“It’s too late. The invitations have already gone out.”
She saw the moment he realized his mistake.
“Catherine, I didn’t—”
“It’s okay,” she interrupted, torn between laughter and sadness. “Your inheritance is safe. You’ve never lied to me about your reason for proposing, and honesty is more than many marriages start out with. But Carl—” she bit her lower lip, then plunged ahead “—we need to settle something before our engagement goes any farther.”
He pulled back, wariness evident in every taut line of his body. “That sounds ominous.”
“Ominous, no. Serious, yes.”
“Is it about starting a family?” He looked genuinely worried now. His inheritance depended on producing a grandchild.
“No. Well, sort of,” she amended.
“Is it about working after the children are born?”
“No.” Oh, damn. “Well, sort of.”
His brow smoothed. He flashed the smile that had raised $1,500 for Richmond College at a bachelor auction four months ago. The winning bidder had introduced Carl, her prize “dinner date,” to Catherine of the Connecticut Hamiltons—and the rest, as they say, was history.
“I’ve got it,” he said happily. “You’ve decided to call off our bet and stay home to raise the children.”
“No!” She reached for her glass of chardonnay and took a fortifying sip before turning to face him again. “It’s not about your inheritance, or the bet, or what you and I want individually. It’s about us, Carl, and the reality of our living together. Making children together.”
She could tell by his puzzled expression she would have to spell it out. “What if we’re not physically compatible? What if we can’t stand making love? To each other, I mean.”
She wasn’t a virgin. But she’d never responded to anyone—including her fiancé—as she had to Joe. So far Carl had shown no inclination to test their compatibility beyond kissing her good-night after their dates. Was she doomed to a passionless marriage? Suddenly she had to know.
Comprehension dawned on his face and, with it, a gentle smile. For the second time that evening he set her win
eglass on the coffee table and took both her hands in his.
“Catherine, darling, I didn’t realize you were such an innocent. There are things you can do, ways to please me…Well, when the time is right, I’ll show you what I mean and it’ll be fine. Really.”
“You’ll show me ways to please you,” she repeated.
“Of course I will. I’m not an oaf.” He squeezed her fingers. “Now, don’t waste another minute worrying about satisfying me in bed, is that understood?”
“Okay.” She jerked her hands from his grasp. “I’ll worry about you satisfying me. Because quite frankly, I’m not at all sure you can.”
His look of shock might have been funny another time. Right now it roused the grateful spinster in her to fury.
Catherine jumped up and strode back and forth in front of the large bay window. “Of all the selfish, insensitive, oafish remarks I have ever heard—and as Lawrence Hamilton’s daughter, I’ve heard plenty— your comments win the Pulitzer, Carl.”
She whirled toward the sofa and set her hands on her waist. “You’ll show me how to please you? I shouldn’t worry about satisfying you? Ha! I could reduce you to a quivering mass of begging testosterone if I put my mind to it. Because you know what, buster? I am sexy.”
The statement echoed in the silence. Her bravado faltered.
And suddenly Joe’s voice was in her head, making her believe the words, infusing her with sultry confidence as she walked forward. The sleeveless coral silk jumpsuit she wore clung to her figure in a way Carl apparently found fascinating. The spinster inside her grew bolder.
“My eyes are like aspen leaves in the wind,” she informed him in a chesty voice, batting her lashes for emphasis. “My skin—” she ran her fingertips from her wrist up her bare arm, then lifted a coy shoulder “—is as soft and smooth as Snow White’s.” No wait, you couldn’t feel a cartoon. “And…white satin,” she added, memory of a crooning description sending a shiver up her flesh. She reached the sofa and looked down into eyes that had warmed up considerably past frosty.
