by Hope Ramsay
Besides, what was the point of hanging on so tight, knowing down deep that Dash was in love with someone else? Savannah couldn’t compete with Hettie. She was the kind of woman who knew that a gift of five hundred thousand dollars was suspicious. If Hettie had been in charge of the theater renovation, she never would have hired John Rodgers. Hettie probably could have gotten financing on the merits of her business plan, instead of the kind of charity Dash had given out.
Savannah had been so stupid and naive about the theater. Mom was right. She was at her best when she stayed in the kitchen.
“Honey, it’s going to be okay. Don’t be mad at him,” Hettie said.
“I’m not.” She wiped the tears from her cheeks and straightened her shoulders.
Then she turned toward Hettie. “You know, you should quit screwing around and make a play for Bill. Y’all belong together.”
Hettie’s eyes widened. “What? I can’t cook.”
Savannah shrugged. “He doesn’t need a cook. He needs someone to keep him pointed in the right direction. And you could do that with your eyes closed. I wish I was like that. I really do.”
Hettie hurried up the walk to the front door of the Christ Church rectory house. The brick rambler, set back under a canopy of Carolina pines, was more suited to a family than the bachelor Reverend Ellis. Pine needles and cones made a soft russet carpet on the front lawn and perfumed the night air.
She pushed the bell, knowing it was far too late to be visiting. Coming here, after the scene at the book club, was insane, in fact.
And yet it wasn’t. Something had snapped inside Hettie the minute Savannah had told her to make a play for Bill. A strange sense of peace came over her. As if all the puzzle pieces suddenly fit together.
The discussion of the book this evening pointed in this direction. She had been an observer of her own life for a long, long time.
Even when Jimmy had been alive, she’d felt disconnected from herself. But something had started to change a couple of years ago, when Sarah Rhodes made her remember what it felt like to be a girl, when her faith in the simple things hadn’t become so jaded and eroded.
She’d changed. And the more she stopped hanging back in her life, the better her life got. And now there was just one thing she’d been procrastinating over. The one thing she’d kept telling herself that she didn’t want.
But which she wanted more than anything.
She wanted what Savannah and Dash had. Savannah might be angry right now about the truth, but Hettie was glad she’d spilled it. Savannah and Dash needed to figure out that they had something really great going on.
So great, in fact, that Savannah was finally going to help Dash move on. And it was time for Hettie to move on, too.
Bill opened the door, and Hettie’s pulse rate kicked up a notch. His hair was curled over his forehead, his serious, deep-set blue eyes full of concern. He was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and without all that clerical garb he looked like a man.
A very handsome man.
The man who made her heart sing whenever he turned his gaze on her.
“Hettie?” Bill said. “What’s the matter?” A frown wrinkled his brow.
“Do you remember that time last spring when we were cleaning up Golfing for God and you told me that we were friends?”
His lips twitched. “Of course I do.”
“Well,” she said on a puff of air as her mouth got cottony.
“Well, what?”
“I don’t want to be your friend,” she whispered.
He blinked. “What?”
“I don’t want to be your friend. I know I can’t cook worth a lick, but I would like to be…” She couldn’t say the word. It was absurd. She wanted to be his lover. But he was an Episcopalian priest. Priests did not take lovers.
She stared down at his naked toes. He must have noticed the direction of her stare because he wiggled them.
She looked up. He had a half smile on his face, and the lines at the corner of his eyes softened his gaze. She’d seen him look at her like that a million times. And it always made her heart race. It had done that even before Jimmy had been murdered.
“I… I…” Darn it, what was she supposed to say now?
Bill stepped out onto the landing. He caressed her cheek. His hand warm and tender. “Yes?” he said, his eyebrow arching.
“Oh, yes,” she whispered as she placed her hand on his. She closed her eyes.
And the next thing she knew, Bill had drawn her up into an embrace. She drank him in like a sacrament. “I know it’s wrong, but I don’t want to be friends anymore.”
“What’s wrong about that?” he murmured against her ear.
She pulled back just enough so she could look him in the eye. “Because what I want is not nice.”
“No?” His mouth was curling at the corners. “I think it must be very nice. Would you like to come in? I could read you the Song of Solomon.”
“Uh, that would be nice, but I want more than that. Am I’m crazy to want it, Bill? Just tell me that I’m crazy, and I’ll go.”
“Well, if you want it that bad, Hettie, we could always run off to Georgia together.”
She straightened as if she’d been hit by a Taser. “Uh, did you just suggest that we should run off to Georgia to get married?”
“Yeah, I did. You can get married there without a waiting period. If you want to get married in South Carolina, we’ll have to wait three days. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been waiting on you for a long time.”
“You’ve been what?”
He shrugged. “Well, I knew I couldn’t just walk through the front door of your big house and get down on one knee. You weren’t ready for that. I had to wait until you were ready.”
“Then why did you have dinner with every single cook in Allenberg County?”
“Because I knew it would bother you?”
“But you proposed to Savannah.”
“Yes, in public, where I knew she would turn me down.”
“You knew she would turn you down?”
“Of course I did. I had Miriam Randall as my co-conspirator. She guaranteed it. She even gave me pointers on how to annoy Savannah. It was pretty simple, actually. I just turned into a grumpy old minister whenever her son was around.”
Hettie’s mouth dropped open. “No, you didn’t. Miriam didn’t.”
“Yes, she did. She told me that Savannah belonged to someone else.”
Hettie started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“Savannah and Dash are having one hell of an affair. I saw them at the country club kissing one another. Do you think you having dinner over there made Dash jealous?”
Bill smiled. And then he swooped in with a kiss that was way too sexy to belong to a man of God.
Not to mention the fact that his hands got busy touching her in a way that was truly sinful. And they were standing right on his front stoop in front of any neighbor, including Lillian Bray, who might have a mind to look in this direction.
Which was kind of exciting, actually. The notion of getting caught kissing Bill Ellis was a definite turn-on.
A while later (who was counting minutes?), Bill disengaged. “Hettie, I think we should go to Georgia.” His voice sounded a little gruff.
“Uh, don’t you think that would be—”
He pressed his fingers on her lips. “Yes, it would raise all kinds of gossip, but I don’t care. I’m tired of waiting. Let’s go.”
“But—”
One of his eyebrows arched. “You have doubts?”
Hettie looked up at him, her heart pounding, her body singing. “No. I don’t.” And saying the words removed the silly barrier she’d erected around herself for years.
“I’ve always done the proper thing. I’ve always done what everybody expected me to do.”
“Me too.”
“But I don’t want to be like that anymore. I don’t want to be an observer in my own life. I want to jump
into it with both feet.”
“Me too.”
She smiled. “Let’s run away to Georgia.”
Savannah’s Thursday morning was almost as nightmarish as Wednesday evening. She got up way early to avoid Dash at the bathroom door. She drove Todd to school on the early side. Then she headed to the Kountry Kitchen for a cup of coffee.
T-Bone Carter and his waitress, Ricki Wilson, made a good cup of coffee. Maybe not as good as the coffee she made at home, but it would do. She was hiding out here, in plain sight.
She didn’t dare go home and face Dash again. She was angry and guilty and devastated. She didn’t even know where her heart lay anymore. She didn’t want to leave Last Chance, but she couldn’t stay. She sat there, toting up pros and cons on the back of a napkin. And the checkmarks in the columns didn’t help her any.
If she stayed, she would have to take more money from Dash, at the same time that her ex-in-laws were smearing his reputation. It was impossible. Even if her heart wasn’t mixed up in it.
“Oh, my God, Savannah, I’ve been trying to call you all morning.” Rocky came bustling into the café and slid into the facing seat. “You won’t believe what’s happened.”
Living in Last Chance, Savannah was ready to believe anything. What other town had a putt-putt on the outskirts of town called Golfing for God? “What?”
“Hettie and Bill have run off together.”
A full-body adrenaline rush pushed through her. She got hot and then cold from her scalp to her toes. But she wasn’t surprised, she was pleased. In a deeply spiritual way that she couldn’t quite explain.
“Yeah, I know, I’m flabbergasted. Hettie. And Bill? I mean, your aunt said he should be looking for a cook, right?”
“No. That’s not what she said. She said he should be looking for a woman who knew how to live on a minister’s salary. To tell you the truth, the advice she gave Bill sounded a whole lot like the advice that Lady Catherine gives to Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice. Which I gather Aunt Miriam has read so many times that she’s practically memorized it, which is odd because her memory is definitely slipping.”
“You aren’t even surprised, are you?”
“No, I’m not.”
Rocky frowned. “What’s the matter? You look like you cried yourself to sleep. Don’t tell me you’re sorry that you let Bill go.”
Savannah shook her head. “No, it’s not that.”
Rocky straightened in her chair. “Oh, crap, I didn’t think about what this means to you until right this minute. I’m so sorry. I guess Dash isn’t all that enthused about helping you now that Hettie has run off with Bill.” Rocky reached out and patted Savannah’s hand. “Look, there are other sources of money. Forget about Dash.”
Oh, if only it were that easy.
Just then the door opened, and Savannah’s terrible day went right to hell.
“There you are. I’ve been looking all over town for you,” Greg said as he headed toward Savannah’s booth. Boy, her ex had put on weight since the last time she’d seen him. He looked pale and puffy. When she was nineteen, he’d been twenty, and at his trim football-playing weight. He’d been a big man on campus, a terrific dancer, pretty good in the sack, and the son of wealthy parents.
He had been the perfect bait for a girl like her. When they’d hooked up, being with him made her feel important, smart, special.
And all that lasted about three years.
He was sweating hard as he stood by the booth glaring at Rocky.
“Lady Woolham, this is my ex-husband Greg White, Greg, meet Lady Woolham.”
“Lady Woolham?” He cast his gaze over Rocky’s new pink Angel Development, Inc., T-shirt and her obviously worn blue jeans. Her Ladyship was slumming today.
“Well,” Rocky said, “I reckon I’ll be getting along. Don’t you worry, now, Savannah, things will look better tomorrow.” It was amazing the way Rocky, and every other female in Last Chance, had a way of channeling Scarlett O’Hara when things fell apart.
Greg slipped into the facing seat. He pulled a couple of napkins out of the dispenser and blotted the sweat from his red face. He looked like a heart attack waiting to happen, which was pitiful seeing as he was only thirty-two.
“You have to come back to Baltimore,” Greg said without preamble.
She glanced down at the columns and checkmarks on her napkin. “I have to?” she asked, suddenly angry.
He cocked his head. “We have a visitation agreement. I get to see Todd every other weekend. Are you going to send him on a plane every week?”
Oh, wow, he was bringing out the artillery. “Do you want to see him every week? Because I seem to recall months of you calling up and canceling visitation week after week, and then you stopped calling at all. And then you stopped paying child support. I never told your mother that, you know.”
“You have to come back.”
“Yeah, or your mother is going to smear Dash Randall from one side of the state to the other. And I’ll bet she has enough money to undertake a public relations campaign that would put him on CNN every night.”
Greg smiled. It made her stomach crawl. “That’s right. And you don’t want that. To be honest, babe, neither do I. And think about what that would do to Todd. So coming back to Baltimore is the smart thing all the way around.”
She let go of a big sigh. She’d been coming up with this conclusion all on her own. Even if it would break Todd’s heart to leave Champ behind, she couldn’t stand in the way of Todd having a chance to be with his father. She knew how it felt to have an absent father. She would have given anything to spend time with Dad. Even now. Even knowing he was a jerk who didn’t really care.
She leaned forward. “Greg, I will come back if you give me your solemn promise that you will see Todd every other weekend.”
He reached out with one of his ham hands and covered her fist. “I promise you. I know I’ve been a crappy father, but you really shook me up when you moved down here.”
His voice sounded shaky, and the look in his big brown eyes was deep and sincere. “I know I’ve screwed things up. I know I’m the reason the marriage didn’t work. And I’m sorry. I really am. You’re a wonderful woman. A great mother. An amazing cook. I miss your strudel. I miss Todd.”
She closed her eyes and sucked in a breath. It had been such a joy to cook for him. For three years, she’d been happy, until she’d discovered him in his office one day, with his pants down, bent over his assistant.
She couldn’t deny her son this relationship. Besides if Greg wanted to, he could haul her into court up in Maryland and insist that she make Todd available every other weekend. She had known that the day she left Baltimore for Uncle Harry’s funeral. In fact, one of the reasons she’d run away was in the hope that Greg would come to his senses and realize what he was about to lose.
She nodded her head and opened her eyes. “I’ll come back,” she said. “You want to go get Todd out of school and tell him the news?”
“Uh, well,” he said reaching into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. “I’ve got a plane to catch and not much time to spare.” He waved the ticket so she’d know he wasn’t lying.
“I’m working on a big case, and I don’t have time to drive back with you. But Mom says she’s happy to have you guys stay with her until you find a new apartment.”
Of course. Savannah might have argued with him right then, but she looked down at her marked-up napkin. There was no point in arguing. She was beaten. And maybe, just maybe, she could salvage something out of this disaster for Todd. If she could do that, then it would be okay. Because more than anything else, she wanted Todd to have a relationship with his dad.
“Okay,” she whispered. “We’ll drive up on Saturday. That gives me a few days to pack up and settle things here.”
“Great.” He slid out of the seat.
“But there’s one thing you have to do for me.”
“What?” He tensed.
“I need you to get your m
other to call off the South Carolina Social Services Department. I don’t want one word spoken about Dash Randall. Do you hear me?”
He relaxed and nodded, confirming her suspicion that Claire had trumped up that threat. “No problem. I’ll take care of it. It’s not an issue if you’re coming home.”
He turned and headed out of the café. She squeezed her eyes shut and thought about his parting words.
Baltimore wasn’t home anymore.
CHAPTER 20
Dash knew Savannah was avoiding him. She’d been up and out of the house before him. And she hadn’t even made coffee or a thermos. Now he was sitting in his office at Painted Corner Stables, trying to figure out what he should do next.
Because yesterday, when he’d held her in the kitchen, it had felt right. And he wanted to be the guy she leaned on like that. Not the guy she avoided. Or the guy she was having low-down, dirty sex with.
He loved her with all his heart. He just hadn’t told her yet. He needed to say the words. But he didn’t want her to react the way Hettie had all those years ago. He couldn’t stand that.
He was mulling over his options when Rocky deBracy strolled into his office. She wore a serious look on her face that didn’t exactly match her bright pink Angel Development T-shirt. “Dash, honey, I’ve got some bad news for you,” she said, sitting down in his single office chair.
His gut tightened. “Is Aunt Mim okay?”
She cocked her head. “Relax, it’s not Miriam, although I understand she’s not doing too well.”
“She’s doing right poorly. But if it’s not Miriam, then what? Another snafu at The Kismet?” He tensed. He wasn’t in the mood for bad news today.
“I’m going to say it quick, sort of like pulling off a Band-Aid.”
“Get on with it, honey.”
“Hettie and Bill have eloped. They went to Georgia last night, and I gather they spent their wedding night at a hotel in Augusta. Lillian Bray doesn’t know whether to be overjoyed or scandalized. I personally think this is going to shift the power balance in Last Chance. As the chair of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, Lillian is going to have to deal with Hettie on a daily basis. I mean, Hettie is now the minister’s wife.”
