“Ashlyn,” she muttered.
He raised his eyebrows and laughed. “Sweetheart, did you just get busted?” He planted a quick kiss on her lips and crossed the room to swing the door open.
Haylie clutched the pillow to her chest and winced as her toes dug into the carpet.
Ashlyn was dressed for their morning run, color coordinated down to the pink tape that held her crisp white bandage in place. Her eyes widened in surprise at Blake, but she gracefully held her tongue.
He returned to plant another brief parting kiss on Haylie’s lips and hurried out the door. “I’ll call you tonight.” He grinned over his shoulder, his perfectly toned derriere shifted shamelessly beneath the denim of his jeans and his arms flew up in a brazen indication of a touchdown.
“I take it you need a minute?” Ashlyn’s gaze darted to the pillow and a smile played on her lips.
Without a word, Haylie turned on her heel and sent Ashlyn into howls of laughter as she retreated to her room, swinging her naked butt in an exaggerated strut that could teach Blake Sheridan a thing or two about celebrating in the end zone.
Chapter 4
Haylie passed between the pedestal-seated lions outside Ho Palace and entered the gaudy gold and red interior. The aroma of Chinese food and the chill of air conditioning assaulted her before the ornately carved doors had swung closed at her back.
In the dim lighting she spotted the Belles seated at a corner booth. Kara and Amanda sat at one side of the table and Ashlyn sat near the wall across from them. A round of drinks had already been ordered and a bottle of Tsingtao stood next to a frosted mug beside her place setting.
Haylie plopped down on the tufted red vinyl and picked up the beer, forgoing the mug for the first chug. Tonight she needed the alcohol as much as she had needed Blake in the wee hours of the morning.
“You hate Chinese,” Kara said, in her usual habit of refusing to pussyfoot around anything. To her credit, that’s what made her morning radio show number one in Arbitron ratings from Pensacola to Mobile. “You’re forever refusing to meet us here,” Kara continued. “So either you’re starving and desperate for company, or you’re avoiding a certain attorney who wants to spend more time with you tonight.”
Haylie shot Ashlyn a look.
“I haven’t said a word.” Ashlyn raised her fist with her index finger and pinky hooked into horns—the Belles’ equivalent to a pinky swear.
“She didn’t rat you out,” Kara confirmed. “I saw Blake at the courthouse today after I paid my speeding ticket.”
Haylie chugged the rest of her beer and set the bottle down. “Don’t you think it’s a little weird that after eight years of living in the same area we’re all just starting to bump into him now?”
“I’ve run into him before,” Kara admitted.
Amanda averted her eyes and began studying the gold foil wallpaper in earnest.
“You too?” Haylie waited for Amanda to peel her eyes off the gaudy wall.
“A few times,” she said, reaching for her mug.
Haylie turned to Ashlyn.
Ashlyn hesitated and flipped her smooth caramel hair over her shoulder. “Here and there. We don’t exactly live in a sprawling metropolis.”
“So I’m the only one who hasn’t ‘bumped’ into him before now and none of you bothered to tell me you’d seen him?”
“We didn’t think you’d want us bringing him up after what happened between the two of you.” Amanda’s voice was tender, her expression apologetic.
Kara set her beer down. “Does anyone really know what happened?” She practically glared at Haylie. “You’ve given us squat for details, made us swear we’d never so much as bring his name up, and now you’re sleeping with him again.”
“Who told you that?” Haylie whipped around to face Ashlyn.
“Not me.”
“I could tell by the grin on his face when he was talking about you today,” Kara said.
Haylie signaled to the waiter to bring another round. “What did he say?” She blew a hot breath into the Freon chilled air. “Not that I care.”
Kara drained her mug. “He thinks you’ve got your hands full with Grady. And that you’re still hotter than Hades.”
“He said that?”
“Not in so many words, but I swear he was undressing you in his mind the whole time we were talking.”
“What did you tell him?” Haylie braced herself. Anything could have come out of Kara’s mouth, and plenty probably had.
“I told him you needed to get laid worse than anybody I know.”
“Thanks.” Haylie took the beer the waiter set in front of her and poured it into her mug.
“Tell me I’m wrong.” Kara mimicked Haylie’s actions with her own beer.
“As of two o’clock this morning when he came pounding on my door uninvited, you’re wrong.”
“Damn,” Amanda said, “he doesn’t hold back, does he?”
“Never has.” Haylie lifted the mug to her lips and savored the pale beer on her tongue. Cold and settling. Everything Blake Sheridan was not.
“I’ll have to give some of my male characters a little more of his gumption.” Amanda twirled a long fiery curl around her finger. “The readers will love to hate them.”
“Unless they’re like Haylie.” Kara laughed. “Then they’ll hate to love them.”
“Romance readers aren’t like Haylie,” Ashlyn countered, “they actually believe in happily ever after. Or want to anyway.”
“There’s no happily ever after with men like Blake.” Haylie started as the waiter set down a plate of orange beef in front of her. “You ordered for me?”
“We know what you like better than you do.” Kara waved her chopsticks over the steam of her dumplings and gave Haylie a pointed glare.
“Anything else for you ladies?” the waiter asked.
“Keep the beer coming.” Haylie raised her mug. “I’m going to need it.”
“Hold off on the beer,” Amanda said. “We’ve got some butt kicking to do.”
* * * *
“If this isn’t paranoia gone wild I don’t know what in the hell is.” Kara surveyed the crowd of women gathered in the muted blue and gray multi-purpose room of the Mandido Beach Methodist Church.
At the front of the room a man in a ghee with a black belt cinched around his waist fielded pre-class questions from a group of women who had backed him into a corner. Free self-defense classes had a surprising draw for an area with a relatively low personal crime rate. The gulf air seemed to mellow people out, even the criminals, but crime happens everywhere. And it never hurts to be prepared. Or so, Amanda had insisted when she told the Belles, without question, they’d all be joining her for the next three Wednesday nights to be instructed in manhandling the Asian way. It was little more than research for her latest novel, but what could it hurt? Exercise was exercise, and mixing it up a little from time to time kept a girl’s assets looking their best.
“I met with Marlie again today,” Amanda reported in a hushed tone. “I want every one of us to learn to kick some serious butt in here.”
“And men thought we were dangerous before.” Kara snickered.
Amanda lowered her voice. “If you could hear the things this woman tells me, I swear it would chill you to the bone. She’s our age, educated. She didn’t come from a messed up home or any of that typical crap you’d expect. There truly are monsters out there.”
“Do you really believe she was sold into the sex slave industry, or that such a thing even exists here in the States?” Ashlyn asked. “The story that came out in the Birmingham paper discredited most of what she claimed to have happened to her.”
“I believe her,” Amanda said. “Without a doubt.”
Haylie kept silent and lowered herself to the floor. The rest of the Belles followed and arranged themselves in an exclusive circle as they grabbed their ankles to stretch.
“So how did it happen?” Ashlyn pointed her toes and stretched her fingerti
ps toward them. “How did she get involved in the first place?”
Amanda rested her chin on her knees. “A man she met in a bar. She said he seemed nice, clean cut, gave her a business card that said he owned a computer software company that she’d heard of. Anybody would’ve trusted him.”
“Like Ted Bundy,” Kara said.
“She said she doesn’t know what he gave her, if he slipped it in her drink, or how he got it into her, but she woke up in an old Victorian on the outskirts of New Orleans. She learned fast if she didn’t do exactly what was expected of her, she’d be beaten to hell and back.”
“How long did she spend there?” Ashlyn asked.
“Year and a half,” Amanda pulled the balls of her feet enough to lift her heels off the floor. “She got pregnant. They took her for an abortion and she slipped out the back of the clinic and ran for her life.”
“There are plenty of women who prostitute without coercion.” Kara scooped her hair into a ponytail and whipped it into a knot at the base of her neck. Disbelief creased her brow. “Why would these assholes bother with kidnapping?”
“That’s the sickest part.” Amanda dropped her feet and leaned forward on her elbows. “The ones who pay to go to these places get off on the fact that the women aren’t there willingly.”
“So, it’s rape without the effort?” Ashlyn narrowed her eyes in disgust and brought her bandaged hand onto her lap.
“Some women manage to go along with what they’re told to do as a route of survival. The others get the customers who are into bondage. Either way, the rapists don’t get so much as a scratch to tip their wives off to anything.”
“Yeah, I’d like to see them expect a quiet surrender from me.” Kara flexed her sculpted quadriceps. “I don’t need a defense class to kick a jerk in the balls.”
Haylie closed her eyes and raised her arms over her head. The stretch felt good, releasing some of the tension between her shoulders. The conversation, on the other hand, was one she could live without. Amanda had nailed it. Monsters do exist, and the Alabama state prison system had recently become one monster lighter.
“You’re quiet tonight,” Ashlyn said. “Everything alright?”
She gave her friend a reassuring look. “Just a lot on my mind I guess, with the fundraisers and all.”
“Does that ‘all’ involve a hot attorney?” Amanda loved a budding romance. It didn’t matter if it was hers or someone else’s.
Haylie closed her eyes again and pretended to focus on her stretch. “No, it does not,” she answered as evenly as possible.
Kara reached over and slapped the top of Haylie’s foot. “There goes our ice water. You’d been celibate so long I was counting on you to become a nun and take mercy on the rest of us when we were burning in hell.”
“You’re in a church,” Ashlyn reminded her.
“Nothing God hasn’t heard before.”
The instructor called the class to order and the women helped one another to their feet. Haylie glanced at her friends. They knew less about her father than they knew about the reason she left Blake. She had hidden him well, but like every monster, Carl Monroe would show up when she least expected it. He would choose the time and the place to meet her again, and he would choose carefully. Just like he’d promised. She only hoped the Belles were nowhere around when he did.
Chapter 5
Pictures of animals, veterinary diagrams, and an old poster of Bob Barker begging people to spay or neuter their pets plastered the lobby walls of the Mandido Beach Animal Shelter. Ashlyn locked the doors, bolting them from the inside and led Haylie beyond the reception area to a corridor lined with kennels. The concrete floors had been freshly scrubbed and a motley array of south Alabama strays and discards barked and howled from their kennel runs.
“You need a dog,” Ashlyn said.
“Like I need a hole in the head.” Haylie peered in one run after another. Her heart filled with empathy. Some of the animals had the same pleading look in their eyes as the children she’d worked with over the years. Some were frightened. Some were resigned to their circumstance. Others were defiant, charging the wire doors and barking relentlessly as the two women passed by. None of them deserved to be without a home.
“Where’s the flea bag that bit you? Grady said you put him in quarantine.”
“Not here. Veterinary quarantine. The poor thing has a fractured leg and multiple minor injuries. He was in so much pain, it’s no wonder he came at me. But he’s on the mend. He’ll be released back to the shelter soon.”
Ashlyn would shelter Godzilla if she saw the “poor thing” wandering the streets without a collar and a home.
“So why did you come down here?” Ashlyn stepped out the back door and bolted it behind her. The gravel parking lot was empty of all but the spanking new Mercedes convertible her daddy had given her for her birthday and a dumpster overflowing with pet food bags and various cardboard boxes.
“You want me to be honest, or come up with a really good lie?” Haylie crunched through the gravel after her friend.
“Avoiding Blake?”
“Yeah. You up for having a drink somewhere?”
“We can drink him away for a couple of hours, or you can just tell him you’re not interested and he’ll probably go away on his own.” Ashlyn reached behind the driver’s seat and pulled out a pair of Jimmy Choo stilettos that she promptly changed out of her day shoes for.
“I tried that.”
“Before or after you slept with him.” Ashlyn stood a good four inches taller than she had been just minutes before.
“I haven’t talked to him at all since he spent the night.”
“No mixed signals there. How many times has he called?”
“A few.” She tucked her hair behind her ear. “Maybe several.”
Ashlyn leaned against the open door of her car and gave Haylie a level look. “Maybe you don’t need me to tell you this, but Blake Sheridan doesn’t have to beg for dates. He’s obviously still seriously interested in you, but I wouldn’t expect him to keep up the chase indefinitely. A man’s gotta get tired after ten years.”
“He hasn’t been chasing me for ten years, or even ten days.”
“He hasn’t forgotten about you, anymore than you’ve forgotten about him. Just don’t do anything you’ll regret. I have it on pretty good authority Melanie Marshfield has her sights set on him.”
“Marshfield Chevrolet…” She switched into her commercial announcer’s voice. “The South’s Chevrolet Powerhouse?”
“The one and only, and trust me, Miss Melanie is used to getting exactly what and who she wants.”
“No doubt.” Haylie bit her lip and stared off into the dimming sky. “She can have him.”
“Why do you deny how much you’re attracted to that man? What in the world did he do to make you hate him so much?”
“He works to let criminals roam the streets.” Even as she said it Haylie knew she wasn’t being fair.
“Or to keep innocent people from sitting behind bars.” Ashlyn climbed into her car and the convertible’s top slid into its compartment behind the backseat. “He hadn’t even finished law school when you dumped him and banished him from any Belle conversation. So give me an excuse I might actually buy.”
“He bet me.” Haylie bit her lip so hard, she tasted blood. Her heart raced, and she instantly regretted the admission.
“He bet you what?”
“He bet me. I was the wager. And he lost.” The burden of shame she’d carried for a decade should have lifted off her shoulders, instead it hung on her like a weighted blanket. “I loved him. I trusted him. I don’t think I can do that again.”
“Maybe we should get that drink,” Ashlyn said. “Get in, I’ll drive.”
* * * *
Haylie kicked her high heels up on the rail of her patio. The warm breeze played in her hair and the scent of the gulf cradled her. Opening up to Ashlyn had been hard. Even tonight, in confession mode, her habit of guarding
everything close to her heart had prevented her from sharing the most essential details. She hadn’t admitted how serious her relationship with Blake had become before she broke it off. The Belles didn’t know he had proposed or why a stupid fraternity bet could rip her world apart.
She sipped a Tom Collins, made from the gin and mixer Blake had left at her house. The drink tasted the same as it had in his apartment near the Southern Miss campus so many years ago. On a Monday night. The date didn’t matter now. She wouldn’t be recording it in her scrapbook.
She’d made pizza, the only recipe she could follow back then. Their feet had been kicked up on the old footlocker he used for a coffee table and he leaned over to pour a refill from a pitcher of Tom Collins.
“You’re a lazy bartender,” she joked. “You’re supposed to make these by the glass.”
“I’m saving my energy for after I get you drunk.” He grinned, but his cocky smile wavered and a nervous twitch played at the corner of his mouth. So unlike him. “I love you,” he said.
“So you’ve said.” She eyed him playfully. “But I’m too smart to believe you.”
He set the pitcher down and pulled her hand into his lap. His fingers traced hers and she could swear she felt him tremble. “I’ve been thinking Tom Collins is a pretty decent guy. A good man.” He shifted on the sofa. “Maybe the best man.” He blew a nervous breath between them and dug something out of his pocket. “But I swear this is me talking, not the booze. Tom’s just giving me the nerve.” He lifted her hand and slid a ring on her finger, a stunning solitaire he later told her had belonged to his grandmother. “Marry me, Haylie.”
She had sat too stunned to utter a sound, her eyes as wide as Mobile Bay.
“I’m serious,” he said. “Say yes.”
Haylie jerked in her chair, jolted back to the present as the devil himself emerged from the shadows and into the soft glow of the patio light. His suit jacket and tie had been removed, and the top two buttons of his white shirt hung open.
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