Seducing Savannah

by Gina Wilkins

  Ernestine nodded toward the folded newspaper lying on the kitchen table. “You might want to take a look at that.”

  Reluctantly, suspecting that she wasn’t going to like what she saw, Savannah picked up that afternoon’s edition of the small, weekly Campbellville Courier.

  Someone had taken a photograph of Savannah, Kit, and Miranda all sitting together at the ballpark. They looked like a very cozy group, all of them smiling and relaxed. They looked like a family, Savannah couldn’t help thinking.

  The copy beneath the photograph explained that “bestselling novelist and Academy-Award-winning screenwriter” Christopher Pace had been in town doing research for his next book. The article added that Pace was spending a great deal of time with the Mc-Bride family, who had apparently invited him to utilize their town for his research.

  “I don’t know why you seem so upset,” Savannah told her mother, laying the paper back down. “There’s nothing of particular interest in that article.”

  “You like having your picture splashed all over the paper, do you? Having people gawk at you?”

  “You, more than anyone, should know exactly how much I dislike that,” Savannah replied. “But there’s really nothing we can do about it at this point, is there?”

  “I don’t trust him, Savannah. And if you had the sense God gave a goose, you wouldn’t, either. The two of you are as different as night and day. He’s going to hurt you. Doesn’t he remind you of…?

  “Kit is nothing like Vince, Mother,” Savannah interrupted sharply.

  Ernestine only looked at her. “I didn’t have to say the name, did I? You’d already thought of it.”

  “He isn’t like him,” Savannah repeated, wanting very badly to convince herself as well as her mother.

  It wasn’t a particularly pleasant evening. The telephone rang incessantly. Miranda gloated because so many of her friends had seen the photograph of her sitting next to Kit. Michael sulked because Savannah wouldn’t allow him to talk to his buddies. And Ernestine simply sat in silence and looked worried.

  The final straw was when Miranda called Savannah to the phone.

  “I don’t know who it is,” she said. “Some guy. Could you hurry, Mom? I’m expecting another call.”

  “You’ve spent about enough time on the telephone this evening,” Savannah replied, and took the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Ms. McBride? This is Carl Burger from the Universal News. I was a college roommate of Fred Justice, who’s now a reporter for the Campbellville Courier.”

  The Universal News was a particularly unsavory tabloid that Savannah had seen while standing in line at the grocery store. “I’m sorry, I have nothing to say to you,” she said.

  “Just a couple of quick questions, ma’am. I understand you’re a close friend of Christopher Pace. Is it true that he’s just signed a new, multimillion-dollar deal with a major studio for the film rights to his latest book? I’ve heard this will make him the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood history. Can you confirm that?”

  “No, I’m afraid I can’t. Goodbye, Mr. Burger.”

  The man was still talking when Savannah hung up. She immediately snapped on the answering machine.

  Kit called at ten, just after the twins had headed upstairs for bed.

  “Savannah?” he said through the answering machine speaker. “Hi, it’s Kit. Call me when you get in, okay? The number is—”

  Savannah lifted the receiver. “I’m here, Kit”

  “Oh. Hi. Screening calls?”

  “Yes. I didn’t particularly want to answer questions about your newest Hollywood deal.”

  There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line before Kit asked, “Who’s been asking you about my new deal?”

  “Some guy named Burger. He’s a reporter for—”

  “The Universal News,” Kit finished with her. “He’s a major pest. How did he find out about you?”

  “Apparently, he has a friend on the staff of the Campbellville Courier. A friend who seemed to think I would have something of interest to tell.”

  “Or sell,” Kit added grimly. “What did you say to him?”

  “Only that I had nothing to say to him.”

  “I’m sorry, Savannah. I really didn’t expect this so soon.”

  She mulled over his wording for a moment. “But you did expect it eventually.”

  “Yes. I knew there would be some passing interest in our relationship, particularly now, with this new deal pending. I told you, I’m the flavor of the month. Until someone more entertaining comes along—and that could be tomorrow or next week or next month or whenever—the tabs are going to try to find juicy tidbits to report on me.”

  “I don’t particularly like being a ‘juicy tidbit.”

  “I didn’t expect you to,” he replied wryly. “I was hoping you’d have time to prepare before it happened.”

  Savannah wasn’t sure she would ever have enough time to prepare for that kind of exposure.

  “It’s okay, love. We’ll find a way to deal with this.”

  She couldn’t decide whether to concentrate more on his words or on the endearment. This was the second time he’d called her “love.” Was that just something he said to the women in his life—or did he mean it?

  “You’ve had more experience with this sort of thing than I have,” she said finally. “’What can I expect? Are you famous enough that I’m going to have photographers staking out my house hoping to catch a glimpse of you here?”

  “I wouldn’t think so,” he said slowly, though he didn’t sound quite certain enough to please Savannah. “I’m not really a photo celebrity. The bounty-hunter photographers don’t shadow me the way they do actor and singers. Right now, they’re more interested in the details of my new movie deal. They smell money.”

  Savannah didn’t even want to know how much money was involved in the new deal. Kit’s fame was intimidating enough. His fortune might petrify her.

  “I can’t help worrying about it,” she told him. “It’s not just my own distaste for publicity. I have to protect my children. Can you understand that?”

  “Sweetheart, I’ve known from the night I arrived in Campbellville and saw you with your kids that they would always come first with you. As far as I’m concerned, that’s only something else to admire about you. We won’t let them be hurt.”

  He spoke so confidently, as if it would be easy to make sure Michael and Miranda were protected from any unpleasantness. From disappointment and embarrassment, from heartache and disillusion.

  Savannah wished she could believe it was that simple.

  Kit seemed to think the subject was settled. “I called to tell you that I should be able to get back there on Friday. Are you free Friday evening?”

  Torn between the urgings of her mind and her heart, Savannah fought a brief internal battle before saying, “Yes. I’m free.”

  “Great Let’s take the “family out to dinner. Someplace nice. Your mother, too, of course.”

  ‘Trying to soften her up?” Savannah asked dryly.

  “Yeah. Think an expensive dinner will help?”

  “It couldn’t hurt She usually likes that sort of thing.”

  “Then we’ll give it a shot”

  While part of her dreaded the public attention the outing would surely cause, Savannah knew that she had to find out exactly what to expect if she and Kit had a chance of making this unlikely relationship work.

  “I miss you, Savannah.”

  They’d been apart just under twenty-four hours. Hardly enough time for him to miss her. And yet she missed him so badly she ached. It was so much easier when she was with him, when doubts and fears evaporated in the heat of his gleaming dark eyes.

  “I’ll call you again tomorrow, okay? And let me know if that so-called reporter makes a nuisance of himself. I’ll do what I can to get rid of him for you.”

  “Thank you, but I can take care of myself, Kit.”

  She thought she heard a very
faint sigh.

  “I have no doubt about that,” he said. “Good night, love.”

  “Good night.”

  She hung up slowly, and stood for a long, unmoving moment wondering what in the world she’d gotten herself—and her family—into when she’d placed her hand in Kit’s for that first dance.

  WHEN THE TELEPHONE rang late Wednesday evening, Savannah snatched it up, expecting it to be Kit. Each time he called, she was certain he would tell her he wouldn’t be there Friday after all, that something more important had come up. The children would be so disappointed, she thought. And so, of course, would she.

  How could he have become so important to them in such a short time?

  She answered the phone in her bedroom, where she wouldn’t have to risk her mother overhearing her end of the conversation. “Hello?”

  “Is this the glamorous, jet-setting, star-dating Savannah McBride?”

  Savannah groaned loudly and flopped to the edge of her bed. “I should have known I’d get a call like this from you.”

  Her younger cousin Emily laughed. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist You’ve got all of Honoria in a twitter. Are you really dating the rich, famous, gorgeous Christopher Pace?”

  “I’ve been seeing a man I met as Kit,” Savannah answered candidly, feeling free for the first time to be completely open. “If I had known when I met him that he was ‘the rich, famous, gorgeous Christopher Pace,’ I might well have run screaming in the opposite direction.”

  “What’s he like?”

  Savannah sighed. “Handsome. Funny. Charming. Romantic. A little spoiled, used to having his own way.”

  “He sounds fabulous.”

  “He is.”

  “So, why the worried tone?”

  “Why do you think? Because of who he is, of course.”

  “The rich, famous, gorgeous Christopher Pace,” Emily repeated.

  “Exactly.”

  “And you think—what? That you’re not good enough for him?”

  “It isn’t that,” Savannah assured her cousin, who sounded incensed at the very idea. “It’s just that we have so little in common. I’ve lived my whole life in tiny Southern towns. I’ve spent the past thirteen years quietly working and raising my children. I wouldn’t know how to behave at a glitzy Hollywood party, and I don’t particularly want to learn.”

  “You mean you’re honestly content to spend the rest of your life in Campbellville? Going to the same job every morning, coming home to the same routine every evening? Never doing anything the least bit exciting or adventurous?”

  The restlessness in Emily’s voice was something Savannah had never heard before. She couldn’t remember if it had been there when they’d been together less than three months ago, after the funeral of Emily’s father.

  “Emily? Is something wrong?”

  “No,” her cousin answered just a bit too shortly. “I’m fine. I just don’t think you should pass up what could be a wonderful opportunity just because you’ve hardly ever been out of Georgia. It’s not as if small town life has been all that great for either of us.”

  Emily had probably suffered most from the scandalmongers in Honoria, Savannah mused. Emily’s mother—her father’s second wife—had run off with the married son of a locally prominent family when Emily was just a toddler. And then, fifteen years ago—less than a month after Savannah, Tara and Emily had whimsically buried their “time capsule”—Emily’s adored, older half-brother, Lucas, had left town under suspicion of murder. There had never been enough evidence to formally charge him, but he had been tried and convicted in the beauty shops and living rooms of Honoria. Leaving the way he had, without explanation, had only served to further indict him, as far as the locals were concerned.

  Despite Emily’s steadfast belief in his innocence, Lucas McBride was remembered in his hometown as a man who’d gotten away with murder.

  It had been no big surprise to anyone when Savannah, with her reputation for being reckless and snooty, had turned up pregnant in her senior year of high school, or when half the football team claimed to have nailed her. Few had believed Savannah’s insistence that she had only been with one boy, Vince Hankins. He was a Hankins, after all, the son of a church deacon, a member of a long-respected family in Honoria.

  Savannah was a McBride.

  “You can’t blame everyone for the ugly rumors spread by some,” Savannah reminded Emily. “On the whole, I like living in a small town. It’s a safe place to raise my children, and in a real emergency, I know there are people I can turn to.”

  Despite their flaws and foibles, Savannah knew small town people. She understood them. She was one of them.

  Kit was not.

  “Well, I wouldn’t mind trying something different for a change,” Emily said resolutely. “And, someday, I just might.”

  They didn’t talk much longer. Emily encouraged Savannah to follow her heart where Kit was concerned, and not worry about what the neighbors said. Savannah suggested that Emily follow her own advice and pursue her own happiness.

  Without deliberately realizing what she was doing, Savannah found herself standing at her open closet after hanging up her phone. She pulled a shoe-box-sized plastic container from a back corner of the top shelf. And then she sat on the bed again and unsealed the lid, staring pensively inside at the bits of glitter and memorabilia that encapsulated her adolescence. And the letter she hadn’t had the courage to open when she and her cousins had dug up the chest

  Something made her turn the envelope over in her hand and pry it open. She winced at the sight of the cutesy, curlicued handwriting, the purple ink, which had faded to a sickly blue. And in arrogantly naive detail, she’d spelled out her view of her future. The fame. The adoring fans. The photographs in every fashion magazine. The leading roles in blockbuster films.

  The money.

  She tossed the letter aside in disgust. “God, I was such a twit.”

  That materialistic young Savannah would have been thrilled at the prospect of an affair with “the rich, famous, gorgeous Christopher Pace.” She would have found his money as attractive as his beautiful face, his celebrity as seductive as his pirate’s smile.

  Yet none of those things were what had made the adult Savannah fall in love with him.

  She had fallen for a man who liked flowers and moonlight and romantic music. A man who was kind to her children, who played baseball and piano, who made love to her with a generosity and tenderness that she’d only fantasized about before.

  She’d never even seen him in that other world, she realized in dismay. He had friends, family, a home, a job—an entire life without her. That Christopher Pace was a stranger to her. How could she know if she would love him as much as she loved Kit?

  She returned the box to the closet shelf. An old maxim echoed annoyingly in her mind.

  Be careful what you wish for—you just might get it.

  11

  SAVANNAH CAME HOME from work Friday evening to find Kit already there, in her living room, her children competing eagerly for his attention. Ernestine was nowhere to be seen.

  The intense pleasure that flooded through Savannah when she saw Kit told her she hadn’t been even partially successful in getting her feelings for him under control. And to see him here with her children, waiting to welcome her home…well, that only strengthened the foolish longings she’d been fighting.

  “Hi, Mom. Look who’s here,” Miranda announced exuberantly. A thin gold chain that Savannah didn’t remember seeing before glittered on Miranda’s flailing wrist.

  “Hi—Mom,” Michael echoed, looking more content than he had in days as he cradled what looked suspiciously like a new baseball mitt in his hands.

  Apparently, Kit had brought gifts.

  While she was still dealing with that disturbing realization, Kit smiled broadly, crossed the room in three long strides and planted a firm, enthusiastic kiss right on her mouth. It was all Savannah could do not to grab him and kiss him back.
/>   She’d missed him so badly.

  “Hi, Mom,” Kip quipped when he drew back.

  Savannah’s cheeks flamed. She was aware that her children were staring at her, Michael with uncertainty, Miranda with delight. And she was torn between strangling Kit for embarrassing her in front of her children and dragging him off to a private location where she could kiss him exactly the way she wanted to.

  “Mom, look what Kit brought me,” Miranda said, rushing up to show off the tiny gold bracelet.

  “That’s…lovely,” Savannah said, determinedly pushing memories of moonlight lovemaking aside. The bracelet really was a pretty little piece, not too big or flashy, just right for a thirteen-year-old girl.

  “Check out this glove,” Michael said. The instantly recognizable scent of new leather preceded him as he approached to show off his own gift. “Cool, huh?”

  “Very nice.” Savannah glanced from her son to Kit and back again. “I hope you both thanked Kit for the gifts.”

  “They thanked me very nicely,” Kit assured her. “These kids could give lessons in good manners to a lot of the adults I deal with in L.A.”

  Both Michael and Miranda looked pleased by the praise.

  Savannah noted in approval that both her children were dressed to go out, as she’d instructed them to be when she got home. Miranda had on a black-andwhite gingham sundress, and Michael wore a bright, color-block shirt with navy chinos. A pair any mother could be proud of, she thought, admittedly biased.

  “Where’s Grandma?” she asked. “Is she getting ready for dinner?”

  The twins frowned. Kit’s smile dimmed.

  “She’s not here,” Michael said. “She went over to Mrs. O’Leary’s for dinner.”

  “She said she’d already made plans with Mrs. O’Leary and that she knew we wouldn’t mind if she didn’t go with us,” Miranda added.

  Ernestine hadn’t said a word to Savannah about having other plans for this evening. Apparently, she’d come up with the excuse sometime after Savannah had left for work this morning.

  Savannah was growing more frustrated all the time by her mother’s steadfast refusal to give Kit a chance. Savannah certainly had her own doubts about the wisdom of this relationship, but she wasn’t just rejecting it out of hand, as Ernestine had.