The Dixie Virgin Chronicles: Janet (Book 2)

by Peggy Webb

  “It’s parked two rows back, is it? Waiting for you?”

  Her only reply was a dignified lifting of her chin as she began to walk up the aisle. Dignity quickly went flying out the door. In the press of the crowd she was forced into full body contact with Dan. He took immediate advantage by sliding one arm discreetly down her hips and pulling her backward so that she was intimately aware of every stunning inch of him. His strong thighs brushed against the back of her legs and his broad chest fairly enveloped her back.

  Her breathing became short. It was merely physical, she told herself. The overreaction of an uptight, too busy physician who had saved her Virginia for the man who would give her love, marriage and a baby carriage, in that order.

  She was relieved when they reached the double doors at the back of the auditorium. Every time she was around this man she lost control. At their next skirmish she would definitely be in charge.

  Already laying her battle plans, she turned to him. “Goodbye, Dan. It was lovely seeing you at the ballet.”

  Chuckling, he took her arm and escorted her down the steps. “Where is your car parked?”

  “Thank you, but I don’t need an escort to my car.”

  Paying her no mind, he guided her through the doors and toward the parking lot. “I won’t have any trouble finding it. That Corvette can’t be too hard to spot.”

  “Is this male-dominance obsession of yours typical of all coaches, or is it merely a personal quirk?”

  “As you’ve probably discovered, I’m not all coaches.”

  “Touche. I’ll concede the victory.” She pointed into the darkness in the general direction of west. “I think my car’s over there.”

  “You think! Dr. Hall, have you any idea what can happen to women alone in the dark?”

  “Are you planning another demonstration?”

  “Now that’s an idea worthy of consideration.” Dan stopped in a deserted corner of the parking lot her aging red Corvette and a metallic-blue Firebird. Putting one finger under Janet’s chin, he lifted her face to his. Her quick intake of breath pleased him. It seemed the doctor wasn’t immune to coaches after all.

  The moonlight was reflected in her diamond hair clasp and shot silvery shafts across her skin. He felt an intense urge to kiss her, but he didn’t want to carry his charade that far. She might get the idea that he was actually falling for her. And of course he was not.

  But he was softening a little. That skin! He skimmed his index finger across her cheek.

  She held her breath. What was happening to her control lately? Maybe she needed a break. One as far away from Tupelo and Dan Albany as possible.

  She steeled herself against his touch and looked straight into his eyes. “Shall I pucker up, Coach?”

  His smile crinkled his eyes at the corners. “Not yet, Doc. I’m saving the big guns for later.”

  “I suppose you’re waiting for me to ask what the big guns are?”

  “No. I plan to surprise you.”

  “You know what they say about surprises, Coach?”

  “Tell me, Doc. What do they say?”

  “Surprises can sometimes backfire.”

  “That will never happen to me.”

  “You’re immune to the caprices of life?”

  “No. But I’m always prepared.”

  Janet laughed. She was going to have the time of her life proving just how unprepared he was.

  “Well, Coach, since it seems you’re going to deprive me of a good-night kiss, why don’t you open my car door like an old-fashioned gentleman? I need to go home to bed.”

  “Is that an invitation, Doc?” He leaned down to open the car door.

  She slid into the driver’s seat and put the key into the ignition. The engine hummed to life. Smiling up at him, she fired one last shot.

  “Do you need one, Coach?”

  She pulled her door shut before he had time to reply. It was a grand exit, worthy of generals, kings, queens and movie idols. She started chuckling as she backed out of the parking space. Dan might have won the skirmish in the auditorium, but she had vanquished him in the parking lot.

  As she eased her car out of the lot, she spared one last glance at Dan in the rearview mirror. He was standing with his feet planted wide and his head thrown back, laughing. He didn’t look like a defeated man. On the contrary, he looked like a man who was thoroughly enjoying himself.

  She tapped her fingernails on the steering wheel and started whistling. Land, she hadn’t whistled since she was twelve years old. Suddenly, she found herself thinking about her mother’s homemade cookies and wondering whatever became of the recipe.

  When she got home, she raced to her computer and emailed her friends.

  From: Janet

  To: Belinda, Bea, Clemmie, Catherine, Joanna, Molly

  Re: In a fix

  I can’t believe this! I’m always the first one to caution about diseases and remembering who we are. But Dan Albany has me so confused, I’m thinking about baking cookies, for God’s sake. And since I’m confessing, I might as well go all the way. At the ballet tonight I sat there like a drooling teenager and let him run his sock feet up my leg! What’s more I liked it!

  Help! I’m coming undone!

  Janet

  From: Molly

  To: Janet, Belinda, Bea, Clemmie, Catherine, Joanna

  Re: NOT in a fix

  You’re not coming undone! You’re falling in LOVE!!! I’m so excited!

  Molly

  From: Joanna

  To: Janet, Belinda, Bea, Clemmie, Catherine, Molly

  Re: LOVE

  OH MY!!! Molly’s right! YAY! If you’re wondering how I would know, I get my best information from the romance novels I read while the nuns aren’t looking.

  Joanna

  From: Belinda

  To: Janet, Molly, Joanna, Clemmie, Bea, Catherine

  Re: Confirming

  Coming undone is the first symptom. Reeve and I will be home next week. Janet, let’s get together and talk about love and marriage. I’ll tell you everything except the best part.

  Belinda

  From: Clemmie

  To: Janet, Belinda, Bea, Molly, Joanna, Catherine

  Re: Cookies

  There’s nothing wrong with baking. I’ve attached a good recipe for peanut butter cookies, a favorite among my boarders. Janet, baking would be a great way for you to forget about that hospital. You work too hard. Just kick off your shoes, get in the kitchen and forget about everything except having a good warm cookie with a glass of milk.

  Clemmie

  From: Catherine

  To: Janet, Clemmie, Belinda, Bea, Molly, Joanna

  Re: Delicious

  Sounds DELICIOUS! Both the cookie recipe and the man! Oh, Janet, honey, don’t let this one get away!

  Catherine

  From: Bea

  To: Janet, Clemmie, Belinda, Catherine, Molly, Joanna

  Re: Having It All

  Now, you listen here, Janet. You are an independent woman through and through. And don’t you forget it! But the thing that sets the Dixie Virgins apart is that we know we’re good enough, smart enough and courageous enough to have it all! Now, go save the world at the hospital, then put some nice rose scented oil on Virginia and save it for Dan Albany!

  Bea

  From: Janet

  To: Bea, Molly, Joanna, Clemmie, Joanna, Catherine

  Re: Good lord!

  I don’t have any rose scented oil.

  Janet

  She was smiling when she closed her laptop. Furthermore, she was wondering where she might buy some oil. Not rose. She preferred jasmine.

  Chapter Five

  Dan always enjoyed Sundays. There was something wonderfully uplifting about the faces of a churchgoing crowd. From his vantage point in the choir loft, he looked out over the audience. The sanctuary was nearly full. He grinned at his sister and her family. They took up an entire pew—Betty June, her husband Ron, seven-year-old Peter, six-year-old Merry and t
he three-year-old twins, Butch and Samuel. And Betty June was pregnant again. She’d always said she planned to have her own basketball team, and from the looks of things, she was well on her way.

  He gave her a big wink, then turned his attention back to the service. The organ music started, and the choir director took up his baton. Amazing Grace was his favorite song. And he sang louder than anybody, exuberantly off-key. Sometimes he hit a note and sometimes he didn’t. But nobody seemed to mind. He was grateful to be in a group of people who loved him just the way he was.

  Right in the middle of “how sweet the sound” he began to ponder the concept of love. The love of friends. That was easy to figure out. Friends seemed to always be around when you needed them, much like candy bars when you were hungry for chocolate. Romantic love. Now that was a different thing. He supposed it was anyway. He didn’t have any experience. At least not yet.

  Janet popped into his mind. He could see her as clearly as if she were sitting on the front pew, exactly the way she had looked last night, her hair pulled back, her skin glowing, her face rapt as she listened to the music. What was she doing right this minute? Was she in church somewhere singing this very same song? Or did she sing at all? He hoped so. Even if she didn’t sing, he hoped she hummed. There was something about a woman who hummed that simply got next to a man. Not that he wanted her to get next to him. Except temporarily, of course. Long enough to prove his point.

  Grinning broadly, he picked up the singing where he had left off. It was not until he’d completed a robust rendition of “When we’ve been there ten thousand years,” that he realized everybody else was singing “Thro’ many dangers, toils and snares.”

  Betty June lifted her eyebrows at him.

  o0o

  A few blocks away, Janet was having trouble following the sermon. She turned her attention to her surroundings. There was no more beautiful sanctuary in town, than that of the church on Jefferson Street. Of course, that little touch of blue in the stained-glass window reminded her of Dan Albany’s eyes. And she’d never before noticed the minister’s hair. It was wild and untamed, different from Dan’s only in color.

  Where was he right now? Was he in some great old church sitting in the front pew? She instinctively knew that he would never sit in the back. That wasn’t his style.

  Suddenly she felt a nudge on her shoulder.

  Mr. Jed, who always sat on her right, leaned over and whispered to her, “Janet.”

  She jerked her attention back to the service. Good grief. Everybody in church was standing for the benediction. The service was practically over, and she’d hardly even noticed the beginning. Feeling a little chagrined, she stood up for the end. It was the least she could do.

  o0o

  Dan had barely shucked himself out of his sport coat and Sunday tie when he heard a clamor at his front door. From the volume of the racket it had to be either an invasion of Halloween trick-or-treaters lost since last October, or the arrival of Betty June and her brood.

  It was Betty June. She came bustling through the door before Dan could get it completely open, talking every breath.

  “You might as well not hem and haw around the bush. I saw the way you were acting at church today—Butch, get off that hall tree before you fall and kill yourself. Like somebody who had a seatful of firecrackers and didn’t know where to find the water bucket—Merry, if you jerk on my skirt one more time you’re going to pull it plumb in two.” She swept through his hallway like the leader of a parade, trailing husband and children and mixing metaphors for all she was worth.

  Dan plucked Butch off the hall tree, swung him onto his shoulders for a piggyback ride and took little Samuel by the hand. “It’s ‘beat around the bush,’ Betty June.”

  The correction was lost on his sister; she had already gone on to bigger and better things. “Ron, honey, would you get me a glass of water? Thank you, sweetheart.” She settled into the rocking chair right on top of Janet Hall’s green silk scarf. “I declare, a woman in my condition feels just like a rolling stone that grass won’t grow under—Peter, if you turn that bookcase over on yourself, I won’t be responsible. I declare—” She stopped talking suddenly, noticing the green silk scarf that was trailing down the side of the chair. Lifting one hip, she pulled it out and rubbed it between her fingers.

  Even from his chair on the opposite side of the fireplace, Dan caught a lingering whiff of jasmine.

  “Dan, when did you start wearing silk scarves and perfume?”

  He chuckled. “The scarf belongs to Janet Hall.”

  “Dr. Janet Hall?”

  “Yes.”

  Smiling, Betty June folded the scarf neatly into a small square and laid it on the table beside her chair. “I had to take Peter to the Emergency Room – when was that, hon?” She didn’t even wait her son to reply. “Anyway, Dr. Hall was the one who saw her. My lord, she a fine pediatrician. Beautiful, too. Well, my goodness...” She gave Dan a big grin. “I’m just as happy as a jaybird about all this.”

  “About what?”

  “You know... you and Dr. Hall... I wonder if I’ll still have to call her Dr. Hall.”

  Dan leaned back in his chair and laughed. Betty June could take six eggs and make an omelet big enough to feed everybody in town.

  “Betty June, when we get ready for the wedding we’ll let you plan it.”

  “Are you teasing me?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Oh dear, I guess I’ve jumped over the gun again.”

  “That’s ‘jumped the gun’—or ‘jumped over the haystack.’“

  “Why would anybody want to jump over a haystack?”

  Ron came back with the glass of water in time to hear the last snatch of Betty June’s sentence. “What’s this about a haystack? Has one of our children set it on fire?”

  “No. We’re just discussing my brother and his new girlfriend—Dr. Hall.”

  “Our Dr. Hall?”

  “One and the same.”

  “Well, congratulations, old man.” Ron sat down beside the fireplace, stretched out his long legs and began to rock. “There’s nothing like a good woman to keep a man happy. I should know.”

  “Congratulations are premature. The only thing Dr. Hall and I have in common is a big stray dog.”

  Betty June nodded and smiled in a maternal sort of way. “Ron, honey, why don’t you run downtown and get us a couple of large pizzas for lunch? And do you mind taking the kids? Dan and I have things to do.”

  After Ron and the children had gone, Dan turned to his sister. “What was that all about?”

  “Can I help it if I want to be alone with my brother once in a while?”

  “As you so often say, I smell a skunk in Denmark.”

  Betty June stood up and smoothed her skirt over her voluminous stomach. “Put a good, slow dance tune in the tape deck, Dan. I’m going to give you a dance lesson.”

  “You know I despise dancing.”

  “Nevertheless, you’re going to learn how. You never know when you might get the urge to ask a certain beautiful lady doctor out dancing.”

  Dan laughed. “Mama didn’t teach any of us subtlety, did she?”

  He selected a tape of haunting Gershwin tunes; then, with all the enthusiasm of a man being led to his execution, he held out his arms to his sister.

  o0o

  After Janet finished studying, she tried to decide how to spend the rest of her Sunday afternoon. There were several current fiction bestsellers she hadn’t yet had time to read. And there was a Sunday afternoon concert by the high-school chamber choir that would be wonderful. Then there was an excellent documentary on ETV—”DNA: Changing Life’s Genetic Blueprint.”

  Suddenly, she found herself at her computer pulling up Clemmie’s recipe. She rationalized her behavior by telling herself that she would invite Mr. Jed over for home-baked cookies. Then in order to make her rationale work, she had to whip her iPhone phone out of her pocket and call him to come over.

 
Within fifteen minutes he was seated in one of her kitchen chairs watching her assemble the ingredients for cookies.

  “This is a pleasant surprise. I didn’t know you could bake cookies, Janet.”

  “This is a first for me,” she admitted, starting to measure the flour. “An experiment, so to speak.”

  “I hope I come out better than some of those laboratory rats the doctors use.”

  Janet chuckled. “You don’t have to worry about a thing, Mr. Jed. The worst that can happen is that you’ll get a case of indigestion.” She cracked eggs, measured sugar and greased the cookie tin with a vengeance. Making cookies was going to be a breeze. She’d show that Dan Albany. Any old body could make cookies.

  While she and Mr. Jed talked, she got her first batch made and into the oven. When the buzzer went off fifteen minutes later, she took the cookies out. They were golden brown, perfectly round, perfectly beautiful cookies. She was proud of herself.

  She got two plates and two glasses of milk. “Nothing like home-baked cookies and a big glass of milk for a Sunday afternoon snack,” she chattered as Mr. Jed bit into one. “Eat up, Mr. Jed. There are plenty more where that one came from.”

  “I sincerely hope not.”

  Janet knew that Mr. Jed was plain spoken, but that was a little blunt, even coming from him. She took a bite of her own cookie and promptly had a choking fit. When she had herself back under control, she stood up, whisked their plates away and dumped the cookies into the garbage can.

  “I obviously omitted a vital ingredient. But one setback does not constitute failure. Right, Mr. Jed?”

  “I’m having the time of my life, Janet. I’ll stay here and be your guinea pig as long as you want to bake.”

  The second batch stuck to the cookie tin and came out in crumbs hardly big enough for the birds, and the third batch came out black as a pair of tuxedo pants and just about as tasty.

  Mr. Jed studied Janet as she started mixing the fourth batch.

  “I’ve never seen you this fired up about domestic chores. Any particular reason?”