by Karen Young
“God knows. They’re not in my mother’s office. I’ve looked. Maybe the attic. I don’t know. But I can’t see Pearce or my mother keeping them anyway, not the way Dad did. I used to get a kick out of reading that stuff. He had an accountant keeping the books, but he still entered important events in his journal like all Whitakers before him, births and deaths of the field hands, marriages, divorces, baptisms. He was very paternal. He’d lend money at no interest and enter it in the journal. I can remember talking to him about it once when I looked at the books and found half of them never paid the money back. When I asked, he said it wouldn’t hurt the company to carry a little debt.”
She shifted on the stool and hooked both feet on a mid-level rung. “It’s a stretch for me to believe your mother or Pearce have continued that practice,” she remarked.
“Tell me. Considering everything I’m hearing that they’ve done since Dad died, it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve gone back to collect those old debts.” With his palms in his back pockets, he turned to face her. “The journals were full of trivia for any particular year—crop yields, weather conditions, rainfall, the first frost, the first freeze. If a year was plagued by drought or was too wet, it was right there. You could page back to any year and find the last infestation of boll weevils, or any factor influencing the quality of the cotton, good or bad. And in any situation Dad could fall back on written accounts in the Whitaker journals going back a hundred and fifty years.”
“Do you think that information is being kept on a computer now?”
“Births, deaths, marriages and divorces, no,” Buck said, straddling the bench again. “Anything affecting the crop, yeah. First thing I did when my mother let me in her office was open up her computer. Belle Pointe is divided into sections and I need to know the status of each on any particular day or stage of planting.” With one foot on the bench, he wrapped both arms around his knee. “Next, I’ll get into the books, but so far I haven’t had time.”
“Do you think she’ll be comfortable with that?”
“She has no choice now.”
Anne believed he was genuinely concerned about putting right the dishonorable things he’d discovered, but it was difficult to believe that he was willing to pay the price to follow through. Change took time. Which would mean giving up baseball. Even when faced with a career-threatening accident, the loss of their baby and his marriage on the rocks, Buck had clung to his belief that baseball was his life.
“You’re thinking I can’t do it, aren’t you?”
“You can’t, Buck, not without serious commitment which will threaten your goal to return to baseball,” she told him.
“Yeah, I know.” He gave her his crooked smile. “Easier to pitch a no-hitter against the Yankees than to make changes at Belle Pointe, right?”
“When you’re in St. Louis and the problems are here in Tallulah? Yeah.”
When he shifted his gaze to the window again, his smile had faded. “Problem is, nothing will ever change at Belle Pointe as long as my mother and Pearce are in sole control.”
“I think that’s pretty obvious,” she said.
He stood for a long time, simply studying the scene from the window. Finally, he gave a deep sigh. “Maybe it’s time I stepped up to the plate.”
The idea was so appealing that she was almost afraid to say the obvious. She slipped off the stool and bent to pick up the bottle of water on the floor. “Say you do decide to take a hand in changing things. And say you actually do succeed, what happens when it’s time to go back to baseball next season?”
“The answer’s obvious, isn’t it? I would have to choose.”
He reached over and took the bottle from her, set it on the window ledge and caught her hand. “C’mon, let’s go out on the porch. The sun is setting and the view of the river will blow you away. Plus, I’m not done yet.”
There were several chairs on the porch, but he led her to the old-fashioned swing suspended on a rusty chain. “Don’t worry,” he told her as she looked askance at the chain, “it looks in worse shape than it is. Humidity from the river is hell on anything that’s outside and this swing has been hanging here since I was a kid.”
“On the same chain?” she asked uneasily, as he brushed at a few leaves on the seat.
He chuckled, wanting her relaxed. The next few minutes were crucial in his plan. “No, it just looks as ancient as the original. I meant to replace it last week. Trouble is, I keep forgetting to stop at the hardware store.” With gentle pressure on her shoulders, he urged her to sit on the swing. She looked surprised when he didn’t take a seat beside her, but then turned her gaze to the horizon where the sun was setting.
She put a hand over her heart. “Oh, my, it’s gorgeous.”
Only a sliver of the sun remained, a brilliant orange crescent sinking fast in a pink-and-purple sky. As night fell, the cries of a flock of birds echoed faintly, flying high over trees on the levee that stood in stark black silhouette. In spite of the fact that Buck had watched the same sunset every evening since moving to the lodge, it felt good to share it with Anne.
“See, didn’t I tell you the sunset would blow you away?”
Still looking at the stunning color display, she smiled. “You lied. There are two reasons why you like it out here, not just one,” she said. “True, it’s so isolated nobody asks for your autograph, but you’re also treated to this fabulous sunset every evening.”
But his gaze was on Anne, not the sunset. Holding the swing still, he waited until she looked up into his face. “Do you still believe that I don’t care that we lost our baby, Anne?”
When she took so long considering her answer, Buck held his breath. For weeks, she’d been brooding over the baby and everything else she didn’t like about being married to him. Now that he was asking straight out, was she going to tell him that she couldn’t forgive him? That she’d made up her mind to cut him out of her life?
“I don’t know what I believe, Buck. I don’t know the person you are here in Tallulah. It seems every day I uncover some new piece of you I never saw or suspected. I’m still trying to figure who the real Buck Whitaker is.”
While he still held the chain, she touched her foot to the floor and gave herself a tiny push, setting the swing in gentle motion. “As for not caring about losing the baby, I never believed that about you, Buck. You’re not so heartless that you’d be untouched by the loss of a baby, any baby.”
“Do you really mean that?” He felt cautious relief.
“Let me finish. But your reaction when I told you was…is…still hard for me to forgive. Instead of grieving over what we lost, you got all hung up in the way I became pregnant. That seemed irrelevant to me at the time, unimportant.”
Now was not the time to argue whether she was right or wrong in what she did. He knew not to go there again…yet. Maybe never. “I just wish I could live that moment over again when you told me you were pregnant, Anne. I swear to God, I do. That mistake is up there on my list with the time Case Carlton died on my watch.”
“You were so furious. Then when we got in the car—”
“I was in an unholy rage, yeah. I’ll never know if the miscarriage was my fault or not. I’m just so thankful I didn’t lose you as well as the baby. It’s understandable that you couldn’t stand the sight of me after it happened.”
She looked quickly down at her hands so that he had only a second to see that her eyes had filled with tears. “You probably won’t understand this—” her voice rose in a tight whisper “—but I had lost my baby! I was numb. I didn’t feel anything except grief and despair. Nothing else mattered.”
“If I’d been killed would you have cared?”
“The truth? No, not at that moment.”
Buck was stunned by how much it hurt that he’d dropped off the radar screen of her heart. His fingers gripped the chain so tight that the links cut into his palms. Holding his breath, he finally managed to ask, “Does it matter now?”
She wipe
d at her tears with the tips of her fingers and gave a little sniff. “Oh, Buck, of course it matters now,” she said almost briskly. “I didn’t stop loving you. I just stopped feeling. It hurt too much.”
He let go the chain and sat down beside her. Whether she pushed him off the swing on his butt or not, he was going to put his arms around his wife. He was aching to feel her snug up against his body. He was hungry for the taste and smell of her. But as he reached for her, she began to cry.
“I’m so sorry, Anne. You’ve got to forgive me.”
“I wanted that baby so much, Buck!” Her shoulders were shaking with the depth of her despair. “I wanted to die with him.”
He pulled her into his arms and held her fast, resting his chin on the top of her head. His chest was full of a need to comfort her, to ease her pain, when all he was capable of was murmuring a few meaningless words. He wanted to take her sadness into himself and find a way for them to start over. Most of all, he wanted to give her another baby. He was shocked at the sheer force of his need to fill her with his seed, and yet with fear that he’d waited too long to come to his senses—and it was now too late.
His heart turned over as she threw her arms around him and sobbed, holding on tight. He whispered endearments in her ear, incoherent words of reassurance and regret and promise. She felt warm and small in his arms, soft and womanly. With his face buried in her hair, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes, going almost dizzy with the familiar scent of her. Unable to resist, he caught her chin and tipped her face up, ran his lips over her eyebrows, her lashes, her wet cheeks. He traced the shape of her jaw and chin and stopped at the corner of her mouth.
“Ah, it feels so good to be with you like this. God, you don’t know how much I’ve missed you.”
His kiss had the flavor of desperation and Anne responded with a broken cry that opened her mouth to the thrust of his tongue. His need was urgent, raw and primitive, clawing at him, reminding him how long he’d been without her. He was hard and throbbing in his jeans, aching for release, but not now, he told himself, even as he kissed a wild and wet trail down her throat telling himself to go slow. Still, his hands were everywhere, moving with a life of their own, snaking under her shirt, finding her breasts, caressing them until the nipples pebbled and she whimpered with the pleasure of it.
He broke the kiss then and stripped her shirt over her head and dispensed with her bra in a quick, deft flick of his fingers. As he inhaled the fragrance of her skin, he fastened on one breast and drew on the sweetness of her as though he could never get enough. All he wanted was to taste and touch and thrill and react. For a few precious minutes, he blanked out any thought but the sheer joy of loving Anne. She’d always been the one woman above all others who could steal away all reason and caution in him.
With her hands gripping his hair to hold him in place she made soft, urgent sounds, then dragged his mouth back to hers in a kiss that was as hungry as any he’d given. Moving strictly on male instinct, he broke the kiss and lifted her astride his thighs, thanking God and the angels that she wore a denim skirt and not pants. He swept a palm over her belly, felt the quiver of her muscles at his touch, then moved down and down until he was cupping the heart of her.
“Buck…” His name ended on a moan as his fingers plunged. With his face caught in her hands, she took his mouth in a kiss that was deep and carnal, as if she wanted to eat him alive. And then, at his touch to her special place, she threw her head back and fell blindly into a rocking, age-old rhythm. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he realized she was too close to going over the edge for him to stop and try to make it to his bed. He wanted to be in her when it happened, but it was too late as with a cry, she tumbled into a fierce, hard orgasm.
Time ticked away then while Anne lay replete and boneless in his arms. Mixed with the sound of their labored breathing was the nighttime racket of crickets and cicadas. Beneath his palm, the rate of her heartbeat was slowing, slowing as she came down. His lips moved in a lazy smile against her forehead, knowing the feeling, letting himself enjoy the gentle movement of the swing with his wife in his arms, all satisfied and submissive while somewhere near the porch rafters came the fluttering sound of an owl taking off to hunt. Buck still ached with the need to take his own satisfaction, but he could wait. For a few minutes, at least.
“That was nice, wasn’t it, babe?”
“Omigod,” she breathed.
“For starters.” With his hands on her bottom, he pressed her against his erection, closing his eyes with the pleasure-pain of it. Anticipating the night ahead of them. “We’ll go inside when you catch your breath, darlin’.”
A long pause. One, two, three… “No.”
Buck stopped the movement of the swing with his foot. “What?”
She pushed against his chest and made to scramble off his lap, but he stopped her with both hands clamped on her waist. “I’ve got to go now,” she said, not looking at him. “What did you do with my car keys?”
He caught her by the chin, forcing her eyes up to his. “You can have the keys to your car just as soon as you explain why we can’t go inside to my bedroom and finish what we just started. One of us…” He blew out a tortured breath and started again. “One of us is pretty frustrated right now.”
“I shouldn’t have let it happen,” she told him, sounding as if she were ready to cry again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for things to go so far.”
“You had plenty of time to stop before it did.”
“I know, I know.” As she felt for his hands at her waist to free herself, she put more force in her tone. “But I know what you had in mind to do, Buck. You planned for us to make love and not use any protection. You’re thinking everything will be fixed if I just get pregnant again.”
He let her go and watched as she stood up and began to straighten her clothes. In spite of himself, he felt a surge of lust at the sight of her beautiful breasts as she fumbled with the clip of her bra. He ought to be so damn pissed off, he thought, that nothing about her turned him on. But it was just the opposite. Everything about her turned him on. He wanted her and he wanted to yell it loud enough that it would echo across the goddamn river into the next state. “Here, I’ll do it,” he growled.
He surged to his feet, shoved her hands away and fastened the clip as deftly as he’d unfastened it ten minutes before. “You got one thing right, babe, I’ll give you that,” he said, as she jerked the tail of her shirt down and began tucking it into her waistband. “I was going to make love to you. But if you’d said anything about protection, I would have whipped out a condom so fast your head would swim. As for impregnating you on the sly, I’m not the one in this family who’s that sneaky.”
She went still with the accuracy of his shot, then moved over to the edge of the porch and leaned her head against a column. Something about the way her shoulders drooped made him want to go over and gather her close and take some of her pain on himself, share it. But damn it, he was the injured party here, so he kept his feet planted flat on the floor.
“I’m all confused right now, Buck,” she said, speaking barely above a whisper. “I just need more time. Too much is happening. I don’t know where we’re headed. I don’t know you anymore. I’m sorry.”
“Maybe it’s you that you don’t know anymore,” Buck said.
“I’m going to try and find my birth parents,” she said.
“Huh? What?” He spread his hands, looking at her oddly. “Did I miss something here?”
She turned slightly and met his eyes. “You said I might not know who I was and you could be right. One of the things I did today at the library was to use the computer and look up Web sites that help adopted people find their birth parents.”
“Your parents are Franklin and Laura Marsh, the people who raised you. Who fed and clothed and educated you, Anne. They’re your parents.”
“I know and I love them, but I need to know this.”
He stood where he was another minute or two, s
truggling with a host of conflicting feelings. He couldn’t see what the issue of her biological parents had to do with why she couldn’t begin to fix what was wrong in their marriage. He damn sure couldn’t see why they couldn’t be together while she was working on it. Hell, he didn’t know why he was surprised. Women had a way of complicating everything.
In the end, he turned abruptly and walked to the door. “I’ll get the keys. They’re inside.”
“Thank you,” she murmured.
He’d dropped the keys in a bowl just inside the door. Now he swept them up angrily, turned and stepped back outside, resisting an impulse to toss them to her. Grimly silent and assuming she’d follow, he went down the porch steps, hardly noticing the pain in his knee until he got halfway to the bottom. “I need to show you how to operate the convertible top,” he said tersely, pausing for a minute to rub at his knee. “You can’t drive home at night with the top down.”
“Can’t I figure it out on my own? I can see your knee is hurting.”
“My knee is fine. You just don’t worry about my knee, okay?”
She shrugged. “Whatever, Buck.”
He was gritting his teeth in pain when he reached the car, but he shot her a look that dared her to mention it and yanked the door open. “Get in.”
She did as told and listened intently while he explained how to operate the mechanism that raised and lowered the convertible top.
“Any questions?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll see you around.” Without waiting for her response to that, he closed the car door with unnecessary force before she could and stalked back to the dreaded steps. He was at number thirteen before succumbing to a need to look back. The taillights of the Mercedes were barely visible through the trees, meaning she was almost to the main road. Swearing, he gave in to the necessity of resting his throbbing knee, sat down on the steps and buried his face in his hands.
Back in Tallulah, Beatrice lay in bed waiting for Franklin. She heard him close and lock the front door, then move to the den and click the remote to turn off the television. He watched very little TV—mostly PBS—but he never missed the nightly news at bedtime. A minute or so later, he was in the kitchen noisily dispensing ice from the refrigerator door into a glass and filling it with water, which would sit on his bedside table although, as far as she could tell, he hardly ever drank from it. Next, the sound of lights being snapped off and then his footsteps as he made his way to their bedroom.
