Beneath Southern Skies

by Terra Little

  The problem, he thought as he switched on his Kindle e-reader device, slipped his glasses on and relaxed back in his seat as far as possible, was that he was getting old. While Pam had definitely been in her element, putting on impromptu performances and talking nonstop to just about every industry person that crossed her path, he’d spent most of his time ensconced in a corner of whatever room they happened to be in, nursing a drink and fending off the advances of scantily clad women who made it clear that they didn’t often hear the word no. He hadn’t exactly been bored, but he’d been damn close to it. The spontaneous getaway had been a nice little distraction, but he would’ve been lying if he’d said that he wasn’t glad it was over.

  By contrast, Pam was still on fire. Her twenty-city concert tour had sold out at every stop. On top of that, she was pumped up about an upcoming greatest-hits album and a Recording Artists for Rwanda CD that she and ten other artists were due to begin compiling in the fall. His surprise visit, she said, had topped off what had been a string of wonderful news, and she hadn’t wasted any time showing him how happy she was to see him. He’d lost count of the number of times that she had hopped into his lap, burrowed into him for a hug and had to be gently but firmly ejected. Her behavior was nothing new and he’d never minded it before, but this time was different.

  This time there was Tressie....

  “Penny for your thoughts,” she said again quietly. Most of the other passengers in the first-class section of their flight were asleep. She had slept for most of the morning and well into the afternoon, so she was wide-awake and ready to talk his ears off.

  “Right now they’re not even worth that much,” he admitted with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I was just thinking that it’ll be nice to get back to Mercy. After keeping up with you for the past week, I’m in serious need of some R & R.”

  Pam’s sparkling green eyes widened as she put a dainty hand to her chest as if to say, Who, moi? “You can’t possibly be suggesting that it’s my fault you’re exhausted, Nate.” A teasing glint lit her eyes and belied her offended tone. “If you recall, no one held a gun to your head.”

  No, he silently agreed, no one had held a gun to his head. He could’ve excused himself and gone back to his hotel suite at any time, but he hadn’t wanted to leave Pam to her own devices for too long. There was nothing he could do when they were thousands of miles apart, which was most of the time, but he did what he could to save her from herself whenever they were together. He was well aware that she was a grown woman, but she’d been a walking time bomb for as long as he’d known her, which was forever. Good decision-making, especially when she’d been drinking, definitely wasn’t one of her strong suits.

  “You’re right,” he said, chuckling. “I should’ve known when enough was enough and conceded defeat. I guess I was under the mistaken impression that I could still keep up with you.” He glanced at the lighted screen on his Kindle and secretly gave up on the possibility of getting any reading done. Besides the fact that Pam seemed determined to soak up every ounce of his attention, his mind wasn’t on the latest New York Times bestseller.

  Call her back, a little voice in his head suggested.

  Later, he silently responded. Right now he needed time to think about what he would say when he did speak to Tressie again. She was upset—it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out—but he wasn’t quite clear on why. And he never would be, he decided as he reclined his seat back and took off his glasses, if he didn’t hurry up and figure out a way to silence Pam.

  Hoping that she would eventually wind down, sort of like the Energizer Bunny, he slipped a sleep mask over his eyes and let his mind wander back to Mercy.

  * * *

  “What do you mean she’s gone?” Nate asked for the third time.

  Clearly exasperated, Moira pulled her robe tighter around herself and retied the belt at her waist. “For the third time, Nathaniel, Tressie left, going back to New York earlier this evening. I imagine she’s there by now,” she said, padding over to the stove in bright pink house slippers that matched her robe. “Now, would you like some warm milk or not?”

  “No.” Warm milk was the last thing, next to having his tongue cut out with blunt-tipped scissors, that he wanted. He had been poised to walk right back out the door after helping Pam drag a month’s worth of luggage into Moira’s foyer. Itching to be done with the farewells and small talk so he could make his way to Tressie, he had barely rolled the last bag to a stop when he’d asked Moira about her. And he had practically jumped down the woman’s throat when she’d told him that Tressie was gone. Feeling bad for the way he had snapped at her, he took a breath for patience and tried again. “Listen, I apologize for biting your head off. I’m just...surprised. I didn’t know she was leaving so soon.”

  “It was kind of sudden,” Moira said as she walked back over to the table and poured steaming milk into two mugs. “I was hoping that she would help me finish plans for the town fair, so her leaving took me by surprise, too. But Miles is here and the three of you are helping me, so it all worked out.” She took a seat at the table across from where Pam was sitting and patted the seat next to her. “Come and sit. Are you sure you don’t want some warm milk?”

  “Ah...no, no, thank you.” His feet were already pointed in the direction of the rear veranda doors. “I, uh, should get home and get settled myself. I’ll, uh, see you two in the morning.” With a distracted wave, he was off. “P, I’ll bring your rental back in the morning.”

  Unlike Pam, he had learned the art of packing light years ago. When he parked Pam’s rental car in the driveway at his mother’s house, the only thing requiring his attention was a rolling duffel and his carry-on. He grabbed those on the fly and took the porch steps two at a time, hoping that Moira had been mistaken and Tressie was somehow here. Inside, he dropped his luggage on the floor by the door and nudged it shut with his foot.

  Well, I’ll be damned, he thought as he pulled out his cell phone and pressed a button. No phone call, no note, no nothing. Just—bam!—gone. What the hell?

  Nate glanced at his watch as the phone rang on the other end. It was half after two in the morning and Tressie had to be in bed, but the longer he held the phone and listened to it ring, the higher his blood pressure inched. Ring number one and he was curious. By ring number five, he was ready to go through the phone. At the end of the ninth ring, when the voice mail picked up and her cheery voice invited him to leave a brief message and a call-back number, he disconnected the call and cursed under his breath.

  So it was like that? She had just breezed into town, talked her way into his work flow and into his bed, and then breezed right back out, without bothering to say goodbye? Who did that? And why? True, he and Tressie hadn’t exactly discussed what it was that they were doing, but to his way of thinking, whatever it was, it was significant enough to warrant more than a disappearing act. If she hadn’t wanted to continue seeing him, fine. If she was ready to move on, fine. No problem. But she could’ve at least given him the courtesy of saying something to him before she vanished. At the very least, a phone call would’ve been nice.

  Almost as soon as the thought formed, Nate came up short and frowned at his own reasoning. His male ego was a little bruised, he could admit that, but he was a reasonable man—most of the time, anyway. He’d had many affairs over the years and they had all ended one way or another, some amicably, some less than amicably, depending on the personalities involved. This situation with Tressie was no different. It had to end sometime, and one of them would’ve had to end it. Pretty soon he would be packing up and heading back home to Seattle himself, so she had just beaten him to the inevitable.

  That was what he was pissed about, Nate told himself as he stripped naked and stepped into the shower. She had beaten him to the punch.

  That was all.

  An hour later, as he finished setting
up his darkroom, switched on the red light and shut off the overhead light, he convinced himself that Tressie’s leaving was for the best. She had simply saved him the trouble of having to break things off with her when the time came.

  But, he thought snidely, she still could’ve called him.

  * * *

  He hadn’t called.

  Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He had called once, the day after she’d left. But he hadn’t bothered to leave a message and he hadn’t called again since. And then she had called him back and the call had gone straight to voice mail, which meant that he was either out of service range or he had turned it off. She hadn’t left a message.

  And he hadn’t tried to call again.

  Now she knew why, Tressie thought as she stared at the computer screen in front of her. Images of Nate and Pam locked in one embrace after another were all over the internet. The one that showed Pam curled up in Nate’s lap on an airplane was her personal favorite. They looked cozy...comfortable...as if they belonged together. The reporter in Tressie wondered how Pam’s husband factored into the lovebirds’ situation and how he felt about his wife and his supposed best friend’s relationship. But the scorned woman in her couldn’t have cared less about anyone’s feelings but her own.

  She was hurt.

  She was disappointed.

  She was—

  The intercom on her desk buzzed. “Miss Valentine, the editorial meeting starts in five minutes, in the conference room.”

  Busy. She was busy. Too busy to waste time pining over a man who obviously hadn’t wasted any time pining over her. She’d been back in New York for more than two weeks and he hadn’t called, texted or emailed her once. She glanced at the slim gold watch on her wrist, then reached across her desk and pressed a button. “Thank you, Anita. I’m on my way.”

  As far as trade-offs went, she mused on her way down a long, plushly carpeted corridor lined with framed reprints of some of the magazine’s most memorable spreads, a twentieth-floor office with a nice view of the Avenue of the Americas, an excellent six-figure salary and her very own assistant, all bundled into one neat, lucrative package, wasn’t a bad deal. Not if the only other choice was a package filled with love triangles, emotional unavailability and great sex. A six-figure salary topped great sex any day, so she had definitely gotten the sweeter end of the deal.

  In her head, that was a foregone conclusion. Now if only she could convince her heart...

  * * *

  To hell with her.

  Every time Nate rolled over in the middle of the night, gritting his teeth and reaching for a painfully engorged and throbbing erection, that was the one and only thought that crossed his mind.

  To hell with her.

  Each and every time that he was at Moira’s house and Moira mentioned anything that could even so much as loosely be affiliated with Tressie having been in Mercy, he wanted to say it out loud. But it never failed that Moira would start talking about the archaeological dig—about how nice the students had been, what an adventure the whole experience was and about how sad she’d been to see everyone go—and ruin the moment for him.

  Every single time he heard the story, which had been something like fifteen times now, and she ended it by tossing in that silly little tidbit about how one of the maids finding a pair of pink-lace panties down by the creek had started it all, he went back to thinking it.

  To hell with her.

  Two weeks had passed and she’d only called him once. He’d missed the call and had quickly dialed into his voice mail, hoping that she’d left him something there, but she hadn’t. So he hadn’t bothered to call her back. He figured that whatever she’d wanted couldn’t have been that important to begin with.

  They didn’t have a damn thing to say to each other at this point, especially since she obviously hadn’t thought enough of him to at least share the news with him that she was now working for the Manhattan Style Report. Along with everything else, he’d had to hear that from Moira, too, which had really pissed him off.

  So...to hell with her.

  It wasn’t as if he didn’t have his own things to do. As much as he loved spending time with Pam and watching the precarious but friendly relationship between her and Moira develop, he knew that the time for him to part ways with Mercy, Georgia, had arrived. Julia, his publicist, was beside herself, worrying over the ridiculous notion that he’d had a mental breakdown in Mercy and was never going to leave. And that little voice in the back of his head, telling him that it was time for a new, more challenging and even riskier assignment, was getting louder and louder. For a while, Tressie had been enough of a distraction, but now that she wasn’t a factor anymore, his adrenaline level was begging for a serious boost, the kind that fair planning couldn’t even begin to provide.

  He left the women to it and retreated to his darkroom to work on some of the projects that he had put on hold when the eminent domain crisis in Mercy had come up. There were rolls and rolls of film to sort through and catalog, and then he’d begin the arduous task of developing them. More than enough work to keep him occupied for at least the next week. That was how long Julia had said it would take her to finalize the arrangements for his next assignment, which he was hoping would take him to the edge of the earth and dare him to fall off. His instructions to Julia had been explicit. The riskier, the better.

  He’d taken enough pictures of frolicking children and old men playing checkers to last a lifetime. It was time to get back in the trenches. Time, he thought as he switched off the red light and opened the darkroom door to the daylight pouring in, to finally get his mind right. Or to at least try. Holding up a still-dripping image of Tressie peeking out at him from behind a hundred-year-old oak tree, wearing a secret smile and absolutely nothing else, he wondered if that was even possible.

  “You shot her.”

  Startled but not particularly surprised to find Pam curled up on his basement steps like a cat, Nate smiled absently at the picture she made. “I thought you and Moira were supposed to be working on the schedule of events for the fair?” he said.

  “We were, but then Jasper showed up and all hell broke loose. When I snuck out, they were still arguing over whether or not to have the food catered. Jasper wants to barbecue, and Moira wants cold cuts and fruit spreads.” Pam uncurled herself from the step she’d been wrapped around and got to her feet. She brushed off the seat of her denim shorts and slid past him into the depths of the darkroom. A corkboard hanging on the back wall caught her attention and she walked toward it slowly. “You shot her,” she said again. Her tone was slightly accusatory, as if she suspected that he had committed some sort of crime but didn’t quite know what the crime was.

  She eyed the evidence at length, tipping her head first in one direction and then another, checking out his work from different perspectives. In a few of the shots, Tressie stared back at her, smiling in some and looking either serious or distracted in others. In the majority of the shots, though, it was clear that she’d been unaware that her picture was being taken.

  Nate knew the exact moment that Pam recognized the shots for what they were. Walking up behind her, he rested his chin on the top of her head and slid his arms around her waist. She leaned back into him and sighed. “You used to take pictures of me all the time,” she said quietly. “I mean, like, all the time. You remember?”

  “Every second of it, P.” He dipped his head and gently pressed his lips to her hair. “Do you remember?”

  “How could I forget? Those were some of the best times of my life. We were young and impulsive and—”

  He found her hands with his own and threaded their fingers together. “Don’t forget inconsiderate and selfish,” he added.

  “No one got hurt.”

  “True,” he admitted aloud and sent up a silent thank-you. He had made his peace years ago with the fact tha
t he and Pam had crossed a line in their relationship, hovered there together in a clandestine space for a time and then retraced their steps. Time and distance had allowed him to work through the guilt he had felt and put it behind him, but the photos that he had taken of Pam over the years were, and would always be, not-so-subtle reminders of the places they had been and the things they had done.

  “It was good,” Pam said.

  “Damn good.”

  Nodding, she sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “These are good shots. She’s prettier than I remember.”

  Now it was his turn to nod. He couldn’t think of a damn thing to say, so he didn’t say anything.

  “Damn, Nate. Either you’re deliberately playing dumb with me or else you really have been in Mercy too long.” She untangled her fingers from his and turned to look up at him curiously. “Why didn’t you tell me you were in love with her?”

  For the second time in as many minutes, Nate was at a loss for words. He stared down at Pam as if she had just spoken to him in a foreign language that he’d never heard before. Surely she was joking, he thought as he searched her eyes. She had to be. She stared right back at him, holding his gaze for long seconds and then finally shaking her head sadly. Having looked her fill, she proceeded to throw her head back and howl with laughter.

  “You idiot,” Pam blurted out when she could talk. She reached up and took his face in her hands. “You had no idea, did you?”

  “I was starting to.”

  “So what are you going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted quietly.

  Chapter 10

  A soft knock on Tressie’s office door interrupted the silence. Distracted by the article draft that she was in the process of proofreading, she responded without bothering to look up. She figured that it was probably Anita, her assistant, bringing her the travel itinerary that she had been arranging for her review and approval. “Come in, Anita,” she called out. On cue, the door opened and then closed. “You can just leave the itinerary in my in-box, and I’ll take a look at it as soon as I’m done proofing this article.”