by Maddie James
With an attitude.
She took a good look. Nice tan. Pale blue, long-sleeved polo shirt with a narrow navy stripe, navy Dockers. Very dark brown hair, straight, and a little mullet-ish in the back, dark chocolate eyes, extremely handsome rectangular kind of face. A neatly trimmed goatee. Lips….
“Yes. Right. Good to meet you, Mr. McClain.” Still making an effort at the smile, but with more difficulty, Midnight shook Martin McClain’s hand firmly—and as briefly as possible.
Immediately, she put both of her hands into the back pockets of her designer low-rise jeans. Her intention was to have her hands out of the way. She didn’t want to touch him again, even by accident. Touching a man was not something she was ready to do, and that included a simple handshake. Martin McClain’s gaze drifted to her snug white T-shirt, which now, with her arms in that awkward pose, seemed too snug. Too sexy. She took her hands out of the pockets and crossed her arms over her chest, and immediately realized a drop of blood from the pin-wound had stained the shirt.
“Oh, great!” She stomped her black ankle boot on the pavement.
“Your…um, your shirt is bleeding,” he said, his eyes flicking to the red spot, then quickly away toward the street.
She looked up at him. From her five foot eight plus three-inch stiletto heels, it was still up. He was probably six foot two or three, she guessed. Tall, dark, handsome.
And just an idiot man. Your shirt is bleeding?
“Mr. McClain, is this the building? Can we go inside? Is the water turned on?” As she asked the questions, she scooped up her designer handbag and walked across the sidewalk from her car to the large oak-and-glass front door of her new building. The first building of any sort she had ever owned.
He followed, taking several rings of keys from his right front pants pocket. “Here we go,” he said, holding the one marked “M. Shelby” out to her. She extended her open hand and he dropped the keys into it. Heavy. It felt good.
“It’s the large brass one there for the front door.”
Midnight inserted it and the lock turned easily. She stepped inside, followed by the realtor, who reached behind her—too close—and flipped on the light switch. Large, round, moss-green glass globes suspended by pewter colored rods from a twelve-foot forest green tin ceiling filled the room with subtle light. It was a large, amazing room, full of nostalgia and potential.
Martin walked quickly behind the bar just a few feet to the left of the entry door, and turned on the faucet. Here was a good sign: no rumbling pipes, just immediate water.
“Great, thank you,” Midnight said, checking the water temperature. “But I’ll have to take off my shirt. Otherwise I’ll need to get into the sink myself, I guess. I hadn’t thought.” She turned off the water, tossed her handbag onto the walnut bar top and strode outside, pulling her car keys from her front jeans pocket as she walked. In a moment, she was back with a long-sleeve black T-shirt, and found the women’s bathroom at the back where she changed. She ran cold water over the area till the spot was gone.
Then she headed to the front of the building again, her stilettos making a gratifying no-nonsense sound on the hardwood floor.
“Nothing like making a lasting first impression. I don’t usually bleed from just a handshake.”
“You… What?” He looked down at his own hands, searching for a way he might have punctured her finger.
“Just kidding. I stuck it on a pin as you walked up. But not kidding about the first impression.” She looked up and around her at the bar. “Like this place. When I saw the virtual tour on your website, I knew I had to have it. Absolutely gorgeous.”
“It is a special place. Lots of history, lots of memories here. It’s a shame the family doesn’t want to keep it. I hate to see them sell out.”
“Especially to a newcomer, I’ll bet.”
“I didn’t say that.” There was that frown again, the two vertical lines between his dark brows marring an otherwise perfect face.
“No, you didn’t say it. Not in so many words. But of course, you’d rather someone local had purchased it and decided to continue the bar business as it always was. Right?” Men were so predictable. As long as you didn’t mess with their sports teams, their bars, or their underwear drawers, pretty much anything else was fair game.
Martin McClain heaved a heavy sigh, much as she had seen his son do a few minutes earlier. Except this sigh strained the front of his golf shirt a bit, in an interesting sort of way.
“Welcome to Legend, Tennessee, Miz Shelby. No reason for you and me to start off badly. We got along fine on the phone, now, didn’t we?”
Midnight hated being patronized, and so many men did it without even thinking.
“We got along fine, the deal closed, and here I am, owning this big beautiful building on Main Street, and enjoying status as Legend’s newest citizen. Now, do you have that list for me?”
“List?”
Of course, his wife had been the helpful one all through the process. Betsy is the person she really needed to talk to. “The one I’ve been talking…”
Midnight’s question sank in.
“Oh, what Betsy was working on for you? Yeah. No. I mean, no, I didn’t get here with it. I left the dang thing on my desk. She told me… Well, of course Betsy’s always right. She said I’d forget it. We can go over to the office and get it right now, though. Just take a minute. My office is just a couple blocks from here.”
He headed out the front door and Midnight followed, the sound of her boots’ heels bouncing off the empty bar’s walls and ceiling. She quickly turned off lights and locked the door behind her. I’ll be back, and soon.
“Oh, and you’ll want to park your car in the back,” the realtor was saying when she turned away from the door. “There’s a garage. It’s small, but it should be big enough for a little tiny car like this. I’ll show you.”
“No need for that. I’ll be able to find the back of the building on my own. Now, let’s go to your office and pick up the list. Get in and I’ll drive.”
She saw the look. He didn’t ride while a woman drove. Dear Lord, give me strength. Midnight walked around and got in, started the powerful engine. She saw his eyebrows rise when he heard it. He opened the passenger door and folded his tall frame into the seat, then let the door close with a quiet click.
“Nice,” he said, looking at the tachometer and other instruments, resting his right arm on the door frame as she backed out of the parking space and into the sporadic traffic. “Very nice.”
He watched her pale, slender hands turn the wheel and shift gears like a pro. Her short, neatly filed nails shone with clear polish. Glittering on the index finger of her left hand was a single ring, diamond-and-emerald in a gold setting. Her porcelain skin was even more beautiful in the sunlight than it had been indoors, and her gleaming black hair shone almost blue. He’d never seen hair as black as hers, and recalled—even though she wasn’t looking his way now—that her eyes were black, too. Like those black holes in outer space, where things could get sucked in and disappear. Oh yeah, a man could get lost in those eyes. He’d have to be cautious.
Martin McClain was a simple man, “salt of the earth” as the saying went. But he was, after all, human and could appreciate the finer things in life. The exotic beauty sitting next to him was definitely one of the finest things to enter his world in a very long time. Not that he was interested in her. Absolutely not. He was done with women, and with the pain they could inflict. But he could enjoy looking. And he could spend a few seconds thinking about what those beautiful long-fingered hands could do. He inhaled the subtle feminine fragrance….
****
“Where is it?”
“What? Where’s what?” he asked.
“Your office.”
He gave her directions and they covered the short distance in a moment. Sooner than Midnight had expected, because all of a sudden he yelled, “This is it!” She immediately swerved into the narrow drive to the parking lot and sla
mmed on her brakes. The little voodoo doll shot out from under the passenger seat and rammed its pin into Martin McClain’s ankle.
“Yeeeow!” He reached down and picked up the doll; the pearl end of the pin was still stuck in the place where its hand would have been. A few pieces of stuffing fell out of the crotch onto Martin’s navy Dockers. “What. In. The. Hell.”
“Um. Is that a question?”
“Hell yes it’s a question! What is this thing that just stabbed me?”
Midnight rescued the doll, sweeping it out of his grasp as he shook it rather roughly.
“That would seem obvious. It’s a voodoo doll.”
“Oh yeah, right, of course. What was I thinking? Doesn’t everyone drive around with a voodoo doll under the car seat? Or at least every woman? And to think I was…” He climbed out of the car, slammed the door, stomped into the real estate office and slammed that door too.
And they say women are flighty.
Midnight entered the office quietly. A pretty blonde looked around. She’d obviously been watching Martin stomp through the front office. Both women flinched a little as a door toward the back of the building slammed. A framed certificate fell off a wall near Midnight, shattering the glass as it hit the floor.
Midnight forced a tight smile. “Hi. I’m Midnight Shelby. Mr. McClain said he left a list here for me.”
Recognition lit the blonde’s pretty face. “Oh, hi! It’s good to meet you at last! I’m Betsy McClain.”
Well, of course she was Betsy. How could she be anyone else? She was the perfect picture of what a Betsy should look like. Curly golden-blonde hair outlined her head like a halo. She had big blue eyes, a round face with a little turned-up nose and a pretty mouth shaped like a red bow on a Christmas package.
The fact that she was Martin McClain’s Betsy was what made the introduction seem surreal. To be married to him, the woman must be a saint. The halo explained it all.
“Betsy! I’m so glad to meet you! I feel like we’re friends already.”
In the weeks since Midnight’s first discovery of Legend, the real estate agency, and her ideal building, she had spent a lot of time on the phone with McClain Realty. Most of that time was with Mrs. Betsy McClain, who’d been excited about helping Midnight start her new business. The Emporium would sell locally produced arts and crafts. The walnut bar would no longer serve alcohol, but rather, specialty coffees and teas. Midnight also hoped to have a lunch special each day. Although Legend was in a financial slump, with the new factory coming in, there was hope in the community that fortunes were changing for the better.
“Miz Shelby…”
“Please. Midnight.”
“All right. Then, can I ask about your name? I just think it’s so exotic. But with your black hair and eyes, I can see it really suits you.”
“Just what my parents thought when I was born. ‘Alabaster skin, hair like midnight.’ That’s the first line of the poem my mother wrote when I was a baby. She’s very artsy, my mother. Irish. My dad is artsy too, but he’s Navajo. Skin like Mother’s, hair like Dad’s. Not an artistic bone in my body, but I love arts and crafts. Which is how I got the idea for the shop. I’ll sell some of my parents’ work along with the local people’s.”
“I just think it’s so exciting!” She clasped her small hands together in joy. “And so does everybody else. I told you I’d call the people I could think of that do wood carving and painting and weaving and pottery and such. Well, there were so many, and of course, a lot of them are cousins of mine or my husband’s, and then they started telling other people. The list got longer every day. I kept it on the computer and kept adding to it, and today I printed the latest copy. And of course, Marty forgot to take it with him.” She rolled her eyes. “What would he do without me? I don’t think I’ll go back there,” she tipped her head toward the back of the office, “so let’s just print another copy.” She clicked a few computer keys, and paper started coming out of the nearby printer. Betsy stood up carefully, sort of waddled to the printer and retrieved the pages, stapled them together and handed them across the desk. She was an even more perfect picture of “Betsy” now. Midnight guessed her at just under five feet and extremely pregnant. What a cute little thing. And what a mismatch to Martin McClain.
“They start coming tomorrow at nine a.m.”
“They do?”
“Yes. Every half hour all day for the next three days. You’ll be busy.”
Midnight looked at the top sheet. First line: 9 a.m. Wednesday Augustine Abell
The whole sheet was filled, as were the rest of the sheaf. She would, indeed, be busy.
Chapter Two
Lilly Peach.
An odd choice for a new identity, she mused, but one she was determined to claim. The name, like the new town, had an innocent ring to it.
Legend.
Legend, Tennessee. A little corner of the world tucked in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, if the Chamber of Commerce pamphlet was accurate. Of course no town was innocent, just as no person over the age of twelve was innocent anymore.
She had learned that the hard way.
But the drive was just plain spectacular.
Bright, bold colors. Orange and rust, scarlet and plum, pink and yellow from time to time, and the sun shone on and through all those brilliantly dancing leaves sending beams of pure sunshine over the lush green grass. She wanted to concentrate on that, wallow in the sheer beauty of it, not the losses she had experienced or the horrors she had witnessed. Not anything about a past she was resolved to leave behind forever.
Of course she had thought that before back in Grayfield, Michigan, and before that, in Coconut Springs, Idaho. But this time she was going to stay on the down-low, keep to herself as much as possible, avoiding all hints of danger. She would open a small store in one of the many vacant downtown shops the realtor had suggested, being polite but not overly friendly.
She grinned to herself in the visor’s vanity mirror, still somewhat startled by her new reflection, amazed something as small as a nose-job could completely alter one’s appearance. It was a good look, one that eased the extremes of her ethnic heritage and should help her to fit in better in the country setting of middle-America. At least she hoped so.
More than anything she just wanted to blend in. Like the realtor, a Mr. Martin McClain. Though she hadn’t seen him yet, she could clearly picture him. With his musical country twang of a voice, he probably looked like Bo Duke or Luke Duke from the original Dukes of Hazzard TV show she’d watched on CD while waiting for clearance to move. Of course he could look like one of the lesser characters from that show, but that was okay too. He would blend in with his setting, and so would she.
And he’d been incredibly nice, something that was entirely different from the figuratively cold shoulder attitude of many in the big city. But of course he would be nice. He wanted to rent and sell her things. The shop. A house. He’d even mentioned land where she could own horses if she was of a mind. Of a mind. She’d loved that expression!
She had taken him up on the shop, one of many that fronted the bricked Main Street. There had been several available, he’d explained, as Legend was in the middle of a downtown revitalization project. She’d picked one from the town map he’d sent using eeny-meeny-miny-moe.
The store would be her excuse for moving to Legend, should anyone bother to ask. Besides, she had to make a living. The agency only gave her so much to get started on, though she’d been smarter this time. Having learned from past experience she emptied her savings before telling them she might have been compromised.
So she would have things to sell, or would have once she decided what it was she wanted to offer. She’d already used her degree to be a CPA, and a factory supervisor. Crunching numbers was supposed to have kept her hidden. It hadn’t. Working the drudgery of ten-hour shifts in the factory—a job she’d hated—might have, but after being caught up in the limelight of the battered man’s story, her handler, Polly Ch
apman, had assured her that Legend, Tennessee, was her best hope.
Polly came from Legend. Born and bred as she’d put it. She made Legend sound like paradise. Crimeless short of teenagers drag-racing on Saturday nights, caught and sent home to their parents by a sheriff who knew or was related to each one personally. The officer didn’t even need to carry a gun most of the time. More importantly, Polly assured her there was no safer place on earth for her, and then smiled a funny smile that left her wondering just what was so funny. She hadn’t asked. Just as she’d never asked anything more of the agency than to keep her alive.
Lilly exhaled heavily. She was tired of looking over her shoulder. Tired of running away from the past and toward the forever-unknown. Tired of being afraid that they would find her again and she would have to run again. Or worse, they would finally catch her and make her pay.
“No!”
Lilly closed her eyes for a second, and repeated the word, determined to believe she would somehow find freedom, safety. She didn’t have the ability to live in anger and fear all the time and she had no desire to learn. She would get to this oasis in the belly of the south and she would live, just as she had attempted twice before. Only this time she would succeed.
She just had to.
****
Relief and a sense of awe had Lilly cruising down Main Street five miles below the twenty-five mile an hour speed limit. The Chamber’s pamphlet hadn’t done the town justice. Not even close. She tried to take in everything at once, but there was just so much.
Apparently the town’s restoration had been underway for quite some time as only a couple of the shops had scaffolding. Gleaming plate glass windows and doors broke the continuous line of bricked buildings on either side of the wide Main Street. Along the white-sand concrete sidewalks sat large barrels of flowers in every imaginable color and pattern combination dancing happily in the late-afternoon breeze. Evenly spaced, like soldiers on guard, stood newly planted young trees, their tiny leaves changing for the season, their young trunks anchored with clear plastic coated steel cords against whatever Mother Nature sent their way.
