Beneath Southern Skies

by Terra Little

  Tressie smothered a giggle when Janice shot Moira a sidelong glance and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “I don’t think I’ve ever been inside of your house before, Miss Moira. It’s beautiful,” she said, looking around the spotless state-of-the-art kitchen admiringly. She seated herself in the chair across the table from Moira and folded her hands in her lap.

  “Thank you. Once, I thought I would fill it with lots and lots of children, but it never happened. I had to settle for filling it with my husbands’ children, instead. I had three husbands and three stepchildren, so that worked for a time, but after they were all grown, it was just me again. Do you have children, Tressie?”

  “Ah...no,” Tressie said and laughed. “I don’t think I’m ready for them just yet. There’s still so much that I want to do before I take on that challenge.”

  “Time waits for no one, dear. I’m living proof of that.” She reached for the tall glass that Janice set in front of her as soon as it hit the table, and took a sip of iced tea. “You live in New York, right? I think I remember Juanita mentioning something about you working for a newspaper there.”

  Tressie sipped her own iced tea while she formulated a response. “I did work for a newspaper there, but I don’t anymore. We...uh...decided to part ways. But I do still live in New York.”

  “So you’re unemployed right now?”

  “I’m on hiatus.”

  “Same thing,” Moira pronounced with a flippant wave of her hand. “Ah, here’s lunch, thank God.” They sat back as Janice set out linen-wrapped silverware, a basket of steaming rolls and a butter dish, and then slid heaping plates of cold pasta salad tossed with grilled tenderloin strips in front of them. When she had moved away again, Moira unwrapped her silverware and shook out her napkin, settling it on her lap. “My stepson is in newspapers, too. You two should meet. You’ve heard of Miles Dixon?”

  Tressie nearly dropped her fork. Had she heard of Miles Dixon? The question should’ve been, who hadn’t heard of Miles Dixon? The fact that he had been the one to write the first and, as far as she knew, only authorized biography of Pamela Mayes was well-known, but it was also pretty much irrelevant in light of the fact that he was even more well-known as a media-industry powerhouse. Tressie had long since lost count of the number of newspapers and magazine publishing houses that Miles Dixon either owned outright or owned shares in around the world. Unfortunately, the Inquisitor wasn’t one of them, so the man probably had no idea that she existed. With Moira’s help, though, maybe one day soon he would.

  She hoped she wasn’t gushing when she said, “Yes, I’ve heard of him and I’d love to meet him.”

  “Good, then we’ll have to arrange it. I’ve been meaning to call him, anyway. It occurs to me that he’s due for a visit and the timing of things here couldn’t be more perfect. Putting him and Nathaniel together right now and seeing what they can come up with between them ought to be interesting, don’t you think?”

  “It certainly can’t hurt,” Tressie agreed as she buttered a roll. “To tell you the truth, Moira, I’ve been thinking about the piece that Nate and I have been working on and—”

  “It won’t be enough, as I said earlier,” Moira cut in, and Tressie sighed with relief at having been rescued from saying it herself. “We need to do more and quickly.”

  “I think you might be right. Even if the story goes viral, which I’m sure it will with Nate’s name and his contacts backing it, there’s still no guarantee that it will sway the state one way or the other. I think we need to do something that’s really going to make an impression on them, something that celebrates the town’s heritage and makes them understand how important this place is to the people who live here at the same time. Our story is meant to do that, but if we can do more, it would help a lot.”

  Moira bit into a roll and chewed thoughtfully. “Then we’ll have to make sure that whatever we do will complement the article, and ensure further success.”

  * * *

  So this was what it was like, Nate thought as he paced the floor in front of the picture window in his living room. This was what it was like to watch and wait for a woman. In all his damn near forty years, he’d never been reduced to this kind of nonsense. And now that he had, he couldn’t say that he cared for it even a little bit.

  He stopped in front of the window and peeked out the blinds for the hundredth time, grunting impatiently when he didn’t see anything or anyone on the street. Where the hell was she? Almost twelve hours had passed since they’d parted ways after breakfast at Hayden’s Diner early this morning, and she’d been missing in action ever since. She wasn’t answering her cell phone, she hadn’t called him and she hadn’t responded to any of the fifteen text messages that he’d sent her. In a few hours it would be dark out and, among other things, he was starving.

  Eyeing the rolled-up blanket, candles and crystal candleholders sitting in the middle of the floor—the last of the items to be added to the picnic basket that he’d packed earlier—he went back to the window and peeked again. Still no sign of her.

  He was debating whether or not to go looking for her when his cell phone rang. Thinking that it was her, hoping that it was her, he went to his bedroom and snatched it up from the nightstand without bothering to check the caller ID. “Where the hell are you?”

  “Um...I’m sorry, maybe I’ve dialed the wrong number.”

  Recognizing Julia’s voice immediately, Nate sat on the side of the bed and threaded his fingers through his hair. He took a breath for patience while he searched for a reasonably friendly tone. “Sorry, Julia. I thought you were someone else.”

  “Clearly,” Julia drawled, a hint of laughter in her voice. “Is this a bad time?”

  Hell, yes, it’s a bad time. I’m in the middle of driving myself insane, wondering when and if a woman that I shouldn’t even be involved with in the first place is coming to meet me tonight. I don’t much care about anything else right now.

  Aloud, he said, “It’s never a bad time for you, sugar. What’s on your mind?”

  “Your itinerary, for starters. Beasley over at CNN was able to move some things around and get you in for a twenty-minute interview this Friday.”

  As preoccupied as he was, it took a few seconds for Julia’s words to sink in. “Friday, as in tomorrow?”

  “I know it’s last-minute, but he wanted you on the Friday-night around-the-nation segment with one or the other of those Gumbel brothers, and since they’re also doing a segment on New Orleans almost a decade after Katrina, the timing is right. And...”

  She was silent for an excruciatingly long time while she shuffled through papers and typed on her keyboard. All Nate could think about was lemon-pepper fried chicken and potato salad—which he had won the right to browbeat Jasper Holmes into making for him after a particularly nerve-racking chess game today—and the fruit bowls that he planned to hand-feed Tressie from, and the slightly tart, slightly sweet white wine that he hoped Tressie would drink enough of to let him lick every ounce of the fruit dip off her gorgeous breasts.

  And speaking of her gorgeous breasts, where the hell was she?

  “And...” he prompted Julia when the silence stretched on.

  “Oh, sorry,” she said, laughing. “I was just double-checking your itinerary. What was I saying? Oh, now I remember. I was saying that the Friday-night segment actually works out great for you, because I’ve also scheduled you for prerecorded interviews with Barbara Walters—that’s Friday afternoon—and Diane Sawyer—that’s Saturday morning. I’m still waiting to hear back from Anderson Cooper’s camp, but these engagements should keep you busy in the meantime and get the ball rolling.”

  He opened his mouth to speak just as the sound of the front door opening and closing reached his ears.

  “I’ve booked you a seat in first class on a flight out of Atlanta first thing in the morning, and I ma
naged to get you your usual suite at the Plaza,” Julia went on. “You should land in New York by ten and have a few hours to relax before they send a driver to fetch you. Is your fax machine on?”

  Every atom in his body was poised to hear the sound of footsteps. Hearing none, he stood and took the phone with him to the living room. “I’m sorry, what?” he said when he realized that Julia had just asked him a question.

  “I asked you if your fax machine was turned on.”

  He turned the corner into the living room and stopped short. “Uh...yeah, it’s...” There she was. He forgot all about being hungry for food and wondered if she would let him suck on her lips instead.

  “All right, I’ll fax your itinerary over to you now.”

  “Fine, just...fine.” He hung up in the middle of whatever Julia was saying and dropped his phone somewhere in the vicinity of the blanket on the floor. “I’ve been calling you all day,” he said as he advanced on Tressie. “Where the hell have you been?” Wherever she’d been, she looked great. Her skin was still glowing from the sun, as if it had been kissed all over by light, and her hair was slightly windblown. Instead of one of her signature sundresses, she wore a colorful sarong-style miniskirt, a sleeveless denim shirt that she had knotted above her belly button, and matching espadrilles on her feet. As usual, she managed to look effortlessly put together.

  “With Moira. I went to see how the dig was going and—”

  He tried not to snatch at her, but she still landed against his chest breathlessly, staring up at him as if he’d lost his mind. And maybe he had, he thought as he licked his way inside her mouth quickly and possessively. The instant her lips parted, he sank his tongue in her mouth as far as possible and instantly took the kiss into deep and wet territory. His hands went to the bare skin around her waist and squeezed, while his mouth devoured hers greedily.

  Check yourself, Nate, he told himself. Keep this up and you’ll swallow her whole. Still, he kept kissing her until he’d had his fill. Breaking the kiss slowly, he stared down into her wide eyes and saw his own wide-eyed, stunned gaze mirrored there.

  So, okay, maybe he was a little insane.

  Clearly taken by surprise, Tressie took a step back from him, steadied herself and ran her fingers through her hair. “I ended up staying for lunch with Moira, and after that we sat on the back veranda and talked. My phone was off,” she said by way of explanation. “I didn’t turn it back on until after I’d left Moira. I came right over when I saw that you’d called—”

  “About a hundred times,” Nate supplied, suddenly feeling more than a little ridiculous.

  “Something like that.” Her smile was slightly coy as she tried to scoot around him. “I thought there might’ve been a fire here or some other life-or-death emergency.”

  “Very funny.” She stepped around him only to look up and find him right there, in her face and ready to grab her up and kiss her senseless again, a quiet admission on the tip of his tongue. “I missed you.”

  Apparently, it was exactly the right thing to say. The teasing glint in her eyes disappeared and Tressie softened visibly all over. “Oh,” she breathed, running her palms up and down his chest slowly and looking everywhere but at him. He’d never seen a woman look so beautiful when she blushed. “I missed you a little, too.”

  Her eyes flickered up to his long enough for him to see what was on her mind—lovemaking, deep and wet kisses, skin on skin, friction and heat—before she looked away again. He sucked in a sharp breath, felt his penis stir in his pants and dipped his head in search of her mouth again. “Just a little?”

  “Well, maybe a little more than just a little bit.” He was less than an inch away from laying another kiss on her when she suddenly noticed the items stacked on the floor. She reared back and leaned sideways to get a better look. “What’s all this?”

  “The makings of a picnic,” he said, sniffing at the lavender-scented skin of her neck.

  “Oooh,” she cooed, “I love picnics.”

  He bit into her earlobe lightly, right next to the diamond stud there. “I thought you might, which is why I planned one for today.”

  “So what are we waiting on? Where’s the food?”

  Now it was his turn to step back and stare at her. “Don’t you think it’s a little dark out in Truman’s Field for a picnic, sugar?”

  “So? We’ll have a picnic right here.” Suddenly excited, Tressie kicked off her shoes and hopped around the room like a child. “You go get the food. Wait, you do have food, don’t you?”

  “Of course, but—”

  “Good. You go get it and I’ll set up everything in here. This is one time when the absence of furniture is a plus.” She looked up from shaking out the blanket and saw that he was still standing there, watching her. “What are you waiting for, Nate? Go on.” She went back to hopping around excitedly. “I love picnics.”

  In the few minutes that it took him to rescue the picnic basket from the refrigerator and bring it into the living room, she had spread out the blanket, set up the candles in the candleholders and lit them. All that was left to do was dim the lights, which he took care of before he kicked off his leather sandals and joined her on the blanket.

  “All we’re missing now is some music to set the mood,” Tressie said, watching Nate unpack the wine and begin unscrewing the cork.

  “I was hoping,” he said as he filled a wineglass and handed it to her, “that we could make some music of our own.” His eyes flickered up to hers and held. “After I feed you, of course, because you will definitely need your strength to hit the high notes that I have planned for you, sugar.”

  Her skin warmed even more in the candlelight, and an angelic smile curved her lips. “Well, then, you’d better make me a plate.”

  Later, after the picnic had moved from the living room to the bedroom and Nate had feasted on Tressie until they were both damp with perspiration and struggling to catch their breath, he collapsed on the bed beside her and flirted with the idea of drifting off to sleep. He’d lost count of the number of times that his eyes had rolled to the back of his head or his toes had curled so hard that he’d heard bones popping, and now his entire body was in a state of orgasmic shock.

  Could a grown man die from experiencing so many intense, mind-numbing, euphoria-inducing orgasms that it almost hurt to feel so good? He hadn’t had time to consider the question at any length before, but now he was seriously wondering if it was a real possibility.

  One thing was for damn sure, he thought as he summoned the strength to reach for the covers and pull them up over the both of them. She had pulled the old switcheroo on him, and he hadn’t seen it coming until it was too late to turn the tables back around on her. By then she was already riding him, fast and hard, and he couldn’t have denied himself the pleasure of feeling her hot, tight, spasming body bouncing up and down on his length, wrapped around him like a slick fist, if it had meant the difference between going to heaven or hell.

  At some point he had gotten his wish, and now he knew that sweet, creamy fruit dip was completely wasted on fruit. Not only had the stuff tasted incredible as a topping on Tressie’s tight nipples, but it had tasted even better as he was licking and sucking the last of it from her swollen, pulsing button. For his efforts, she had come long and hard, vibrating like a live wire and calling out his name, and then she’d fallen completely silent and gone completely still when he’d braced himself over her and driven every inch of his throbbing shaft into her over and over again.

  He hadn’t been expecting her to want more, to need more, but she had, and he’d had to dig deep to give it to her. He was searching for his breath and having trouble finding it, still inexplicably hard as steel when she climbed on top of him and took him in again. Her slippery walls milked him dry, until he had uttered a sound that was equivalent to waving a white flag, rolled her over to the mattress
and emptied himself into her for the third and final time.

  Any more and she would’ve killed him.

  And he would’ve gladly let her.

  “Oh, my God,” Tressie panted for what must have been the thousandth time since they had landed in bed. “I mean...wow.” She giggled throatily and reached out to run a hand down Nate’s back. “I can’t feel my legs,” she said, full-out laughing now, “and I need them to carry me to the shower. Unless you want to carry me...”

  “Not a chance,” Nate drawled, serious as a heart attack. He was having problems connecting with the nerves in his own legs at the moment. If he tried to carry her, they would both probably end up in traction, if, that is, one of them was able to crawl to a phone and call for help. “I need every ounce of my remaining strength to get to the shower myself, and then after that I need to pack. I won’t have time to do it in the morning.”

  Tressie’s head popped up off the pillow. “Pack? Where are you going?”

  “I thought I mentioned it to you.” Hadn’t he? “I’m leaving in the morning.”

  Chapter 8

  Was that her heart dropping to her stomach? No, no, it wasn’t. That was her heart jumping up into her throat.

  “No, you didn’t mention it.”

  “Oh.” He had the nerve to look genuinely puzzled. “I thought I did.”

  She watched him peel himself away from the bed and stroll into the bathroom as if what he had just said to her was no big deal. Which, she supposed, it really wasn’t. Unless you counted the fact that they had been seeing each other steadily for the past month or so and had been lovers for nearly as long. Was it unreasonable to expect him to share things with her every once in a while? Apparently so, if his nonchalant attitude was any indication. But what about the attitude that she suddenly had? Didn’t it count for something?

  Wait a minute. Maybe some objectivity was called for here. Yes, they were lovers, but neither of them had gone into the situation with any expectations. So why did she expect anything from him now? As far as summertime flings went, she had to admit that this one had been a scorcher, but that’s exactly what it was—a summertime fling. When it was over, he would go his way and she hers. She’d always understood that. But still, if this was his way of telling her that the affair had run its course, it left a hell of a lot to be desired.