“Maybe so, but if she’s responsible for what happened to Em, what’s the right thing to do, Cat? Stay here so she can cause more damage just so I can say I didn’t let Louella Palmer beat me?”
Cat’s expression was grim. “I see your point, but—”
Dixie shook her head, moving toward the hallway leading to her office. “No buts. Em’s children’s suffering is absolutely not an option. Now, no more of this sad talk. Send some of those LaDawn calls my way, so I can leave y’all proud.” She padded down the hallway.
As she passed LaDawn’s office, she taunted good-naturedly, “Look out, LaDawn! Mistress Taboo’s in the house, and she’s gonna turn your floggers inside out!”
LaDawn’s cackle filled her ears, making Dixie’s heart clench. “You go on, Vanilla. Do me proud now—show ’em you da man!”
* * *
Headset in place, Dixie gathered her personal belongings from her desk, taking a last glimpse of the picture of her and Landon. She traced his beaming smile with her fingertip, and wondered what he’d have to say about this mess. “Well, now look, would you? A fine mess you’ve made, pal. I hope you’re happy up there, you big pain in my ass,” she said fondly.
The realization that Landon had done this—the challenge between her and Caine for his company, the text messages—all of it—had been about bringing her home.
Sanjeev’s words, You were meant to be here said with such conviction had been the final clue. He knew what Landon’s motives were. He had all along.
Even in death, Landon had been trying to save her. He knew coming home, confronting her past, tying up all of the ugly loose ends she’d left dangling was what she’d need to finally move forward.
She might not have known she was ready to come home, though. So he’d invented a reason that would keep her here longer than just attending his funeral.
He’d known familiar places and treasured faces would comfort her at a time when her entire world was upside down. Someday, she’d like to know how he’d known what was really going on with her life in Chicago.
He just hadn’t counted on the unforeseeable.
Her earpiece rang again, making her sit up straighter. Taking over for LaDawn meant she’d better be on her toes. It took her mind off leaving, off the possibility that she’d never see Caine again. “This is Mistress Taboo. Are you worthy?”
“Mistress Taboo, it’s real fine to hear your voice.”
Walker. His deep, rumbly voice made her heart begin that excited thrum. Then it took a nosedive.
In all her mad preparation to leave, she hadn’t given thought to what she’d say to the list of clients she’d managed to accrue—or if she’d say anything at all. But Walker probably wouldn’t be too disappointed by her hanging up her phone-sex hat. He didn’t really call for advice.
Why did Walker call? “Walker—it’s nice to hear your voice, too.”
“You don’t sound like yourself tonight, Mistress Taboo. Why’s that?”
How uncanny he should sense that when she was so focused on sounding normal. “I think I’m catching a cold.” It was as good of an excuse as any.
“My mama always used to say, some milk boiled with onions and pepper in it’ll cure all your ills.”
Where had she heard that before? “Ugh. I think I’ll stick to over-the-counter stuff.”
“So how’ve you been, Mistress Taboo? What’s new in your world since we last talked?”
“Well, I do have a little bit of news, and you’re the first client I’m sharing it with.”
“I’m all sorts of honored.”
“I’m leaving Call Girls.” Her heart squeezed at the admission.
Walker’s pause was long before he cleared his throat and asked, “Better prospects somewhere else?”
Sure. Some might call the fast food industry a better prospect. “I don’t know if you’d call it better, but it’s better all round, better for me.” Better for Em and her boys. She would miss Em so much.
“For you? You’ve got me frettin’ now, Mistress Taboo. Does it have to do with what we talked about the last time?”
There was no twirling her hair or flushed cheeks over his supposed concern this time, just a dead weight in the pit of her stomach. “How is it we’re always talking about me?”
“Because I’d bet my last dime you’re prettier. Prettier wins the spotlight. Plus, if you’re leaving Call Girls, who’s it hurtin’? We won’t talk to each other after tonight.” His soothing voice somehow managed to lull her anxiety.
He was right. What difference would it make if she told him the truth? She relented, her reluctance to share ebbing away. “My past has come back to haunt me in ways I not only deserve, but it’s also come back to haunt others, too. It’s affected someone who’s...” She stumbled. “She’s very important to me. If I go back to Chicago, I’m hoping it’ll all die down, and she’ll be able to have some peace.”
“So this isn’t about the former fiancé you talked about? I’m confused.”
It would always be about Caine, wouldn’t it? “It’s about him, and my friend, one who was reluctant to befriend me after the pranks I played on her in high school. It’s about everyone, I guess,” she said with stark honesty. “I guess the point here is I come from a place where everybody knows everybody, a small town that can be very judgmental and set in its ways. The things I did here, the people I hurt, well...they don’t forget. And I don’t blame them. But a recent incident reminded me of something. I’ll always be the usual suspect for everything that goes wrong. No matter how I go about redeeming myself, the first bad thing that happens, everyone’s going to look to me.”
“Do you want to share this latest incident?” he asked tentatively with what sounded like genuine concern.
Dixie shook her head at Walker’s “no pressure here” inquiry even as she cringed with the memory of last night. “Not on your life. I will tell you, it made the Rapture look like a church social. Suffice it to say, it was ugly, and it devastated someone I really love in front of a bunch of people. It hurt members of her family, too. That’s the worst part of this.”
What would it be like for Clifton Junior and Gareth at school come Monday? Children could be so incredibly cruel. She couldn’t bear the idea that everyone would be laughing and teasing them. Especially as fine a line as Clifton Junior was walking.
“Any idea who might have done this?”
Dixie tried to pinpoint something, anything from her conversation with Louella that was even a small hint she’d been involved, but she couldn’t think of anything other than the boys and Em. “There’s only one person I can think of. And if it was her, this person, she would have done it to hurt me. I can’t live with that. I won’t allow it.”
“Still don’t see what that has to do with your ex-fiancé.”
“Basically, it’s just another nail in my coffin. When he hears about what happened, I’ll be the first person he suspects talked out of turn and spilled my friend’s secret, because I’m the only other person alive who knew about it.” The more she said that out loud, the harder the time she was having processing who could’ve found out about Clifton. Certainly no one from Plum Orchard frequented a place where they held a cross-dressing pageant.
Or did they?
“So he’s pretty judgmental.”
She leaned back in the chair, a visual of Caine’s handsome face, smiling up at her, floating before her eyes. “No,” she whispered into the phone, the true ache of longing strong and harsh. “He’s not judgmental. I used to think he was, but now I realize, he just lives his life to a pretty high standard. He’s an amazing person. The kind of person who expects everyone else to be as honest and decent as he is. And he should expect that, but it’s damn hard to live up to when you know you’re bound to make more mistakes. Perfect and I are about as far apart as they
get.”
“Do you really think he expects perfection from you? That’s rather unrealistic.”
“No. Maybe I’m not saying this right. I just mean that he deserves a woman who’s as amazing as he is. I think if something like this happens again, he’ll always suspect me first—even if he doesn’t say it out loud. Who wouldn’t? My past, our past, will always get in the way of him trusting me fully. Is that any way for two people to live? Him always waiting for the hammer to drop? Me always unsure if he completely trusts me. He deserves better, so much better. But I deserve better, too.” As she said the words, Dixie nodded her head with conviction. She did deserve that. She’d earned it.
“So clean-slate mentality?”
Wouldn’t that be a relief? She shrugged her shoulders, pushing the mouse on her desk back and forth. “I guess I’d like a clean slate. I’d like to start over with people who know me as I am now, who aren’t tainted by the things I’ve done to hurt them.”
“So answer me this, why did you do all those things to people?”
She dropped her head to her hand. “I’ve learned a lot about myself since I’ve been back, and one of those things was sort of coming to terms with my relationship with my mother. She wasn’t an easy woman to please. She’s...all about appearances and how much money she has in her bank account. So I stopped trying to please her and went out of my way to do everything in my power to displease her. I guess I rebelled. Big. It’s certainly no excuse, but I think I manipulated and lied and forced people to give me what I needed because she didn’t.”
“That’s pretty honest. So what brought about this huge change in your life?”
Dixie closed her eyes and swallowed. She’d never confessed this to anyone. Not even Landon—because it was a pain that might have dulled, but it would never really leave. It would always taint her soul. It would always ache when she least expected it.
“What do you have to lose by sharing, Mistress Taboo? If this is our last phone call, let’s go out with a bang, huh?” he coaxed.
“Someone did to me what I’d done to countless others.” There. She’d said it. She hated it, but she’d done it.
“Like?”
“Used me and discarded me.”
The raspy breath Walker took almost hurt her ear. “How?” he said, his question tight and clipped, striking Dixie as an odd reaction to someone he hardly knew.
“It’s so cliché,” she half joked. But wasn’t that always the way life paid you back—in the way of a cliché you should’ve seen coming from a mile off?
“Tell me anyway. Pretend I’m someone else if it makes you feel comfortable.”
Now that the floodgates were open, there was no stopping her. No stopping the guilt and anguish that ate her up from the moment she woke, until the moment she put her head on her pillow. She hid it with jokes, but it was always there.
It was the truth she’d wanted to share with Caine. So he understood she’d not just changed—she’d had a complete soul makeover. From the deepest part of her, her core had experienced a shift. There’d been plenty of dark during that shift, but then there’d been light. And it was that light she looked for whenever she began to falter.
“When I left home and went back to Chicago after my engagement ended, I was angry and bitter, sort of in an ‘I’ll show you’ head-on disaster way. It’s stupid, I know, but I acted out as if the person I was hoping to hurt with my behavior would actually see it or hear about it. I wanted him to think I’d gone right on living like he was just a bump in the road.”
“The ex-fiancé again.”
“Yes. He was my target. Anyway, I behaved badly. God. So badly.” She closed her eyes to stave off the memories of how badly. “I stayed out all night. Drank too much, ignored my duties at my restaurant. You know the drill.”
“I’m familiar with it.”
“I became involved with a man, a rich man. It started out as me using him much in the way I did everyone who had something I wanted. He had a nice car, a nice credit card. All the stuff mean girls like me live for. So we became involved....”
“Did you love him?” His question sounded as if he’d asked it with a locked jaw.
Had she loved Mason? When she compared what she felt for Caine to how she’d felt about Mason, no. “No, it wasn’t like that. After a while, I even liked his companionship more than I liked his credit card. But I wouldn’t call what we shared love exactly. Though, arrogant ass that I was, I was sure he loved me. I was wrong, but at the time, I thought I held all the cards the way I always had.”
“So what happened?”
Her fingers trembled, clutching the edge of her desk until her knuckles were white. Just say it, Dixie. Say it. Own it.
The silence between them crackled with an expectant hum.
“Mistress Taboo?”
“I got pregnant.”
This time, the pause Walker made was painfully long. “You have a child?” he rasped into the phone.
Dixie closed her eyes, her throat threatening to close up. “No.” The word shot from her lips like a ball from a cannon. “No. I lost the baby. I miscarried three months into my pregnancy.” God, she didn’t know if she could do this. It was a mistake to share something so personal. The hurt returned like a hammer, pounding nails into her heart.
“Damn. I’m sorry. So damn sorry.”
His remorse sounded so genuine that she found herself reassuring him. “Don’t be. It was almost two and a half years ago now.” But sometimes, like now, it still felt like yesterday.
“If you say you deserved it because of your past, that it’s some kind of karma for all your wrongdoin’, I just might have to hunt you down and give you a good what-for. Don’t say that, Mistress Taboo. Just don’t.”
Walker’s insistent tone, his demand she not blame herself might have been cause for alarm had he been any other caller. Yet, Dixie only felt at ease. “I wouldn’t go that far. I did deserve what happened in the aftermath.”
“What could you have possibly done to deserve fallout after a miscarriage?”
“Well, for starters, the person I was involved with was married.”
She thought she heard him hiss until he asked, “Did you know?”
“Not until I was two months pregnant and I finally told him.” Thinking about Mason and that conversation now made her shudder. His suspicious disbelief. His cavalier dismissal of her tears. His final cruel words.
“So let me guess,” Walker said, harsh sarcasm riddling his words. “He offered to help get rid of it.”
Her disgust for Mason’s solution to the problem came out in the way of a repulsed snort. “Among other things. Not that it wasn’t a viable option, mind you. It was how he went about offering to dispose of his inconvenience. His callous disregard for how I felt about it. I’d planned to break it off with him anyway. I was foolish enough to believe I could raise the baby on my own, and in being honest with myself, I didn’t love him. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with him. But I did hope he’d want to be a father.”
“But he couldn’t because he was married.” The disgust in his voice rang true to Dixie’s ears.
“Right, and he made it clear he wanted to stay that way.”
“So he was just using you as a fling?”
That no longer made her angry. Nowadays, it just made her sad that he’d go right on hurting his wife the way he had countless others before her. “He sure was. That I couldn’t see the signs, that I never had a clue he was married, still blows me away. No one had ever done something like that to me. But Mason had me fooled for almost a year.”
“And?”
“I got into a car accident,” she said, almost choking on the words. A horrible, metal-screeching, tire-gnashing collision that was totally her fault.
“And lost the baby,” Walker res
ponded quietly.
“But not a scratch on me...” she almost sobbed. Saying those words years later still held the same amount of crushing disbelief they’d held the first time she’d said it to a roomful of doctors and nurses. “It was almost as if it never happened. I lived, but the baby—my baby died.”
When Walker spoke again, his voice was gruff. “I don’t know what to say.”
Now that she’d spoken the words that had haunted her to a total stranger, she couldn’t seem to stop spilling her guts. “When I woke up in the hospital and realized how much I’d wanted the baby, I also realized something else—something more important. This was what it felt like to be humiliated—used.”
“That son of a bitch.”
“But I also realized I had not a single friend to turn to for help with my recuperation. There was no one to talk to about the gut-wrenching ache in my empty stomach with the baby gone, or the huge hole in my heart. There was just me, and an agonizing pain that stole my will to get out of bed each day.”
“You really had no one?”
Dixie’s bark of laughter into the quiet room was sarcastic. “After the things I’d done? Who do you call when the person who’s always done the kickin’ is suddenly the kicked? The only real friend I’ve ever had was overseas in the Baltic, or on safari, or something, and I couldn’t call my mother. It would have infuriated her to find out I was pregnant with a married man’s child. The shame alone would have made her turn her back on me. Though,” she reflected derisively, “she probably wouldn’t have been surprised.”
Walker swallowed into the phone, his voice husky when he asked, “So what happened next?”
A smile rimmed her lips. Hope happened, hope and a hand to guide her to the path of self-forgiveness. “Mrs. Kowalski.”
“And she was?”
She reached for her cell phone and clicked on her gallery of pictures, scrolling to Agnes’s. The one of her holding up a bag of fresh peaches she’d scored at the farmer’s market in order to make Dixie a peach pie so she’d have something from home to comfort her. Her smiling face, round and wrinkled, made Dixie grin.
Talk Dirty to Me Page 30
