by Diana Palmer
Tish smiled unconsciously, gazing down on the growing metropolis that had sprung from the major economic base of agriculture. Ashton was an old city with its roots in the Confederacy and its veneer of progress spread thin over prejudices that ran deep.
Like all southern cities, it had that sultry atmosphere of leisure and courtesy that endeared it to the natives while annoying the hell out of impatient northern tourists. The surrounding countryside was an artist’s vision of green perfection, from gently thrusting hillside to groves of pecan and oak trees nestled between new industry and old architecture.
Churches lined the wide, heavily traveled streets. They were predominately Baptist and rabidly outspoken every time the liquor referendum was revived. Republicans were rumored to live in the community, but the Democrats beat them so bloody at the polls that most of them were reluctant to admit their political affiliation. Troublemakers were dealt with quickly and efficiently, and not always by law enforcement personnel. In fact, Sheriff Blakely—who had been sheriff for so long few locals could remember when he wasn’t—had been known to run the State Patrol and FBI agents out of his jurisdiction when they interfered with his authority. Creek County had a formidable reputation for taking care of its own, in spite of state government.
Tish smiled, lost in her musings. With all its faults and vices, this was home country—Georgia. The beginning and end of her world, whether she wanted it that way or not. In this pocket of the largest state east of the Mississippi River, she could trace her ancestry back almost a hundred and fifty years—generations of farmers…
The word was enough to turn her thoughts black. Farming. Her father, that horrible inhuman scream…
“No!” The word broke from her involuntarily.
“What is it, baby?” Russell asked quickly, glancing at her with concern.
She drew a sharp breath, banishing the memory again. “Nothing. Nothing at all.” She leaned back against the seat and let her eyelids fall.
He set the plane down in a perfect three-point landing on the private airstrip at Currie Hall, and her heart began to race wildly as she caught a glimpse of the house, far in the distance, half-hidden in the green curtain of towering oaks and pecan trees.
Beyond the airstrip, the fields were covered with green growth that had to be peanuts or soybeans, she knew by their proximity to the ground. But they weren’t the dark green they should have been, and she looked up at Russell with a question in her eyes.
“Drought,” he said, answering it as he answered most of her unasked questions, as if he could sometimes read her mind. “It’s been a long hot spell, and I’ve had to replant most of the corn. To make matters worse, the armyworms came this month. We’re going to take a hell of a licking financially before I straighten this mess out. It’s causing problems with the cattle too,” he added, shutting down the engine with a sharp jerk of his lean fingers. “We won’t have enough silage for the winter, and that means more money for feed this year. It’s the same over most of the state. A hell of a bad year.”
“You’ll sell off most of the cattle, I guess?” she asked absently.
He nodded. “Either that or try to feed them, and we’ll lose our shirts either way.” He eyed her curiously. “You haven’t forgotten as much as I’d thought, even though you’ve been buried in concrete for two years. I’d almost believe you’ve been reading the market bulletins.”
“Baker sent me a subscription to the local paper,” she said smugly. “I even know about the corn fungus that’s poisoning the crop for cattle.”
“God!” he exclaimed with reluctant admiration. “You’ll make some farmer a wife, yet.”
She glowered at him, “I told you years ago I’d never marry a farmer,” she reminded him. “I’d rather die than be buried in the country for the rest of my life.”
His eyes narrowed on her face. “If you were a few years older, I might change your mind about that. When are you going to stop burying your head in the sand? You can’t run away, baby.”
“What am I running from?” she asked, her full lips tightening as she glared up at him.
“The past, your childhood—me,” he added with a strange half-smile.
The look in his eyes knocked the breath out of her. She opened the door of the plane and stepped down onto the hot pavement, sweeping her hair back with a restless hand.
The jeep was sitting on the edge of the strip where he’d left it and she started toward it. When he got there with her suitcases, she was waiting for him in the front seat. She eyed the thin layer of dust on the seat with distaste.
“I can remember a little girl who didn’t mind dust,” he remarked as he got in under the wheel.
“I’m not a little girl anymore,” she returned, crossing her legs as she began to feel the smothering fury of the sun.
She felt his eyes on her in a patient yet intense gaze. “God, don’t I know it?” he murmured deeply.
Nervously, her eyes crawled sideways to meet that searching gaze, and a shudder of excitement ran through her.
Abruptly Russell turned away and started the engine. “Oh, hell, let’s get out of here. The damned sun’s frying me,” he growled, and the jeep shot forward.
“How’s Baker, Russell?” she asked as they drove down the long, yellow dust road to the farm, where sleek horses grazed in the once-green meadows, their spotted flanks proclaiming them to be Appaloosas.
“Healing,” he said. “Slowly,” he added with a glimmer of a smile. “Mindy’s keeping him away from horses in West Palm Beach, but it’ll be hell driving him away from the stables when he comes home.”
“When will that be?”
“Christmas, of course. That’s why you’re here,” he added, leaning over to crush out his finished cigarette in the ashtray. “I can’t manage the farm and Eileen at the same time with harvest staring me in the face.
“Is that all?” she asked curiously.
He glowered at her. “No, that’s not all. There’s a boy.”
Her eyebrows went up and she grinned mischievously. “Oh, glory, I’ve always wanted to be a professional chaperone! Next to bathing pigs for a living, it’s what I love best.”
He chuckled, shaking his head as he pulled into the driveway. “Damned brat, how have I done without you?”
She tossed her long hair. “Poorly, Mr. Currie, poorly,” she said, turning her attention to the wide expanse of land with its fringes of trees far on the horizon. Looming up ahead was the towering white house, its square columns and pure lines as elegant as the stately oaks and pecan trees surrounding it. Mattie was waiting on the long, spacious porch when Russell pulled up at the steps. Tish ran into the old woman’s thin, wiry arms with a cry of pleasure.
The slender little black woman held her tight, bending her gray head over Tish’s shoulder. “Lordy, I’d forgot how pretty you are, sugar cane,” she laughed. “It’s good to have you home again!”
“It’s good to be home again,” she murmured, her eyes searching the porch and finding the same swing she sat in as a child, the big rocker where Russell used to hold her and rock her late in the evening as the family sat here.
Joby came through the door. He looked a little more stooped in his walk than before but was still proud, even in his advancing age. Grinning from ear to ear, he took Tish’s outstretched hand and held it warmly between both of his.
“Welcome home, Miss Tish,” he said. “It sho’ will be good to have you here. Miss Eileen don’t make enough noise to liven this old place up.”
“I wouldn’t take bets, if I were you,” Russell said darkly. “Two more hours of that hard rock last night, and I’d have pulled the fuse box. Damned tape player could wake the dead.”
“She’s only seventeen, Russell,” Tish protested.
“That’s the same thing Baker used to tell me about you, and I didn’t buy it then either, did I?” he taunted.
She glowered up at him, noticing the dark tan that gave him a vaguely foreign look, the whipcord slimnes
s that hallmarked a body as tough as leather, the broad shoulders and hard chest that once pillowed a little girl’s head. A sensuous aura of masculinity cloaked him, and suddenly she felt like running.
“You’re a tyrant, you know,” she told him, hiding her fear in antagonism.
“And you’re a little insurrectionist,” he said with a slow, lazy smile. His eyes, narrowed to slits, glittered down at her. “Exercising your claws on me, kitten?”
“Must you patronize me, Russell?” she shot back.
“You better call over at Miss Nan’s,” Mattie said quickly, stepping between them, “and tell Eileen you’re here. In all the excitement, I just plain forget to tell you she wasn’t home.”
“I’ll surprise her instead,” Tish said. She glanced at Russell, who was standing quietly with a smoking cigarette in his hand, just watching her. “Can I borrow your car?” she asked.
“Hell, no.”
A tiny smile tugged at her lips. “I do wish you could just give me a straight answer,” she said.
Once he would have smiled at that, but his face was as smooth as glass. The only expression was in his narrowed eyes, and it made her ankles melt.
“Flirting gets you nothing from me,” he said grimly, “or doesn’t your memory stretch that far?”
She blushed to her heels. Behind her, Mattie mumbled, “Here we go again,” and Joby headed for the kitchen.
“I wasn’t…” she protested.
“While you’re upstairs,” he went on relentlessly, his eyes sweeping to the exposed curve of her full breasts, “put on another blouse. That getup may be suitable for a resort beach, but you’re a long way from the ocean now.”
“Took the words right out of my mouth,” Mattie murmured, quickly heading out behind Joby when she caught the flash of fire in Tish’s wide gray eyes.
“Russell Currie, I won’t…!” she started.
“Shut up.” The words were very quietly spoken. He didn’t raise his voice. The look in his eyes was enough. She’d seen him stop fights between the field hands with it without ever saying a word.
“We’d better understand each other from the start,” he said quietly. “Playing is one thing, I enjoy it as much as you do. But flirting is something else. Save it for Tyler. I don’t want any repeats of last summer.”
Her lips trembled with suppressed fury. “Neither do I,” she said with as much cold dignity as she could muster, raising her chin proudly. “And I wasn’t flirting. You accused me of having a chip on my shoulder, but I think it’s the other way around, Russell.”
He took a long draw from the cigarette. “You just keep an eye on Eileen, baby girl, and save the come-get-me glances for boys your own age. You ought to know by now that it’s all or nothing with me—in everything.”
She straightened, turning away from him to the staircase. “I haven’t been home ten minutes, and you’re jumping to conclusions all over again,” she said icily. “All right, Russell, if it’s war, it’s war. I’ll keep out of your way.”
“Get your clothes changed. I’ll run you over to Nan’s.”
She froze with her back to him. “I’d rather…couldn’t Joby drive me?”
“Ten minutes,” he said, turning on his heel.
The trouble with arguing with Russell, she fumed while she exchanged her beachwear for a pair of white slacks and a high crew-neck patterned brown and white blouse, was that he wouldn’t argue. He said what he wanted to, ignored what anyone else said, and walked off. Flirting, he’d accused her of. Was it flirting to kid with him? She jerked a brush through her wavy hair enthusiastically. Her face was stony in the mirror. If she could only hold on until Frank came south, at least she’d have an ally. She paused and smiled. No, Nan and Eileen would do for now. She sighed. She had friends, after all.
He was waiting impatiently in the hall when she got downstairs, two minutes under the deadline. In the tailored brown denim jeans and khaki work shirt, he looked even taller, more imposing than the suit he had been wearing. He eyed her carelessly, his eyes shadowed by the brim of his ranch hat, which sat at a rakish angle over his jutting brow.
“Little sophisticate,” he chided, his eyes taking her in from the white Italian sandals to the white band that held her hair back. “Who are you trying to impress?”
The sarcasm in his deep, lazy voice flicked her like a silver-tipped whip.
“Not you, for a fact,” she returned, keeping her temper in check.
He only smiled, but there was no humor in it. “Let’s go.”
He put her in the jeep beside him and backed it out to the side of the garage.
She shifted uncomfortably, aware of the tracts of red dust that were going to cling to those crisp white slacks if she so much as breathed the wrong way.
“Want to change into something darker?” he asked.
“How about the Lincoln?” she returned sharply.
“I work, Miss Priss,” he replied. He pulled into the driveway and started down it with a jerk as he shifted the gear in the floorboard. His hand was dangerously near her leg, and she moved closer to the door. “The Lincoln looks a little showy to take digging post holes with me,” he finished without even a glance betraying that he’d seen her slide away.
She shrugged, turning her head to watch the rolling, soft swell of the land, green and sweet smelling in the afternoon breeze. They passed the Appaloosas again, and she grimaced when she saw them. That wild streak in Baker wouldn’t let him rest until he finished whatever he started, and that included breaking one stubborn Appaloosa stallion. It had caused him to have a heart attack, yet he was still restless to get back to his horses. He’d said as much to Tish over the phone.
Her eyes glanced at Russell, sitting easily in the seat with his hat cocked over one eye, his face impassive. That same wildness was in him, she thought, involuntarily studying the sharp masculine profile, her eyes lingering on the strong, brown hands on the steering wheel. Russell would break before he would let anything bend him—especially a woman.
In a shady spot on the winding, sandy road, he suddenly pulled the jeep onto the flat shoulder under a bushy chinaberry tree and cut the engine. The sounds of machinery in the distance sawed into the quiet of the nearby forest, a quiet which usually was broken only by the intermittent chirp of crickets, the warble of songbirds. It was, Tish thought, impossibly far from the watery roar of the sea and the cry of gulls, so far from the sounds of freeway traffic and blaring horns and city noises. Involuntarily, she relaxed against the seat and closed her eyes with a smile.
“Country girl,” Russell said gently, his big hand brushing at a yellowjacket as it tried to land on her bare arm. “Fight it all you can, baby, but your heart’s here, just as much as mine is.”
She turned her head on the seat and met his teasing gaze. Remembering his dark, sudden anger, she couldn’t smile the hurt away. “Are you leading up to another lecture about fast city men and slow Southern girls and the advantages of life in the country?” she asked coolly. “You can’t seem to manage a civil word for me unless there’s a sermon tacked onto it.”
“Stop that.” He pushed the brim of his hat back and stared across the fields where bare-chested field hands were just beginning to slow down in the heat, ready for frosty cans of cold beer as they left the tractors in between the rows of hay they were raking and bunching into bales. The green and yellow tractors were colorful against the horizon.
“Don’t you ever get tired, Tish,” he asked harshly, “of pretending to be something you’re not?”
“I’m not pretending,” she returned icily, folding her arms across her chest as though she felt a chill.
“Aren’t you?” He turned in the seat, lighting a cigarette while he stared at her. He let out a stream of gray smoke. “Honest poverty is nothing to be ashamed of. Your father…”
“Please!” The word broke involuntarily from her lips, and she bowed her head, her teeth catching her lower lip, her eyes closed. “Please, don’t!”
&nbs
p; He sighed heavily. “My God, can’t you talk about it yet, after all these years? Bottling it up inside you…”
“Please!” she repeated huskily.
“All right, damn it, all right!” He scowled down at her, something restless and wild in the look his dark eyes gave her. “God, baby, don’t. Don’t suffer so.”
She shook back her hair and the tears, and lifted her face to the breeze. “Can we go? I want to see Eileen and Nan.”
“Does Tyler know the truth?” he growled suddenly. “Does he know what you crawled up from? Does he care?”
A tremor went through her. “You wouldn’t dare tell him…!” she cried, as if he’d hit her.
His face was impassive, but something flashed in his narrowed eyes. “You can’t run from yourself,” he said.
She wanted to hit him, to hurt him. “I remember, Russell, is that what you want?” she asked huskily, fighting tears. “I remember dresses made out of flour sacks, and shoes that were too big because they were so cheap; and the other kids laughing at me because I had nothing…nothing! But I did have my pride, and I never let them see how much it hurt!” Her eyes widened, aching, burning with the memory. “Even when you brought me here and put new clothes on me and bought me shoes that fit, it changed nothing! I was that sharecropper’s brat, and nobody wanted anything to do with me because I was white trash! Thank you, I remember it very well!”
“You remember all the wrong things,” he said quietly, his hand reaching out to brush one lone tear from her silky cheek. “I remember that you never shirked your chores, or told lies, or asked for anything. All those years, Tish, and you never asked for a single thing. Did you have so much?”
She looked into her lap. “I had you, Russell,” she whispered. “You were my best friend…then.”
“And now I’m your worst enemy, is that it?” He brushed back the hair from her temple.
“That’s it,” she replied stonily.
He drew his hand back and started the jeep.
Minutes later, the brakes squealed as Russell pulled up in front of the ancient Coleman home. Tish smiled at the familiar lines of the pre-Civil War architecture. It was white and had two stories and square columns. It was outrageously conventional, like Jace Coleman himself, with no frills or elegant carving on the woodwork. It was austerely simple in its lines and was practical right down to the front porch that ran the width of the house and held a porch swing and a smattering of old, but comfortable, rocking chairs and pots of flowers that bloomed every spring.
