by Luanne Jones
“I know.”
“You…you know?”
“I know you’re not impressed with me.”
“I didn’t exactly say…”
“You’ve gone out of your way more than once to make sure I know it.” He held his open hand up. He tried not to grin at her, but he couldn’t hold it back.
She pressed her lips together and looked away.
“That’s the reason I can’t say no to this project. I wanted to say no, believe me. I tried to say no.” He reached toward her.
She flinched.
He raised his hands to show his innocent intentions.
Her face clouded but she didn’t stop him.
Reaching behind her head, he began to unwind Rita’s hair slowly, meticulously from the gold and rhinestones. “For anyone else I would say no.”
She shifted to keep some space between their bodies. “You don’t have to—”
“But I do have to, Rita.” He freed the crown. For a minute, he turned it this way and that, studying how it glittered in the light of the cramped kitchen’s window.
“My Dixie Belle Duchess crown. I only put it on my head because…” She took it from him and shot Jillie and Cozette a scathing glare.
“I think I understand.” He didn’t. Not really. But then, he didn’t really give a damn about the crown or why she had it on. “So, when can we talk about my suggestions for redoing the restaurant?”
“When pigs fly.”
“I…I beg your pardon?”
She set the crown on the table and cocked her head. Her rat’s nest of a hairdo fell forward. Then, seemingly oblivious of the fact that she looked like a walking laundry pile, she gave him a look so sweet he wouldn’t need sugar in his tea for a month. “Not that I don’t appreciate the offer. I mean a man of your repute and your obvious”—she cleared her throat— “talent, willing to fritter away a few hours—”
“Days. In fact, it will probably take a few days just to come up with the rough ideas for what needs doing.”
“…of your precious time on a person like me—”
“You mean a person I respect and want to help?”
“…and place like mine, well, I should certainly feel grateful, right?”
“I don’t know about grateful, Rita. I feel like mostly we make our own way in this life. If we see an opportunity to make that way better, we should grab it.”
“So, you think I’d be foolish not to grab this opportunity?”
“Actually, I was thinking about me.”
Her deep brown eyes opened wide. “You think I should grab you?”
Jillie and Cozette hooted like frat boys at a kegger.
Rita shot them a look that neither shut them up nor left any question that they would pay later for their part in this. Her newly cooled gaze targeted him again. “Maybe this would work better if you simply explained your thinking, Mr. West.”
“What’s to explain, Rita?” He used her given name to try to shame her into dropping the mister business. “I was thinking of myself.”
“Yourself?”
“Some people believe I am always thinking of myself. You know like the self-involved bastard I can be.”
She had the decency to wince at that, but just fleetingly.
“That is what you called me that day you told me off, right? A self-involved bastard?”
She folded her arms. “An immature, irresponsible, self-loving donkey-headed bastard.”
He nodded. “How kind of you to have remembered.”
“No bother.”
“So, didn’t it ever occur to you that an ‘immature’ and so on bastard would not be so quick to give his time away if he didn’t think he’d get something out of it?”
“I see.”
“I don’t think you do.”
“Oh?” Her lips remained rounded after the whispered syllable faded away.
“No.” He adjusted his sunglasses at the temple. “This is something I just have to do, Rita.”
“Remodeling my place is just something you have to do?”
“Yes.”
“Have to do?” Her voice came out soft as a shared confidence. “The only thing you have to do, Wild Billy—”
“Will.”
“Is get the hell out of my apartment.”
He glanced behind him, then leaned just one shoulder against the fridge, careful not to bother the photos and school papers stuck on it. “But you invited me so cordially to stay for breakfast.”
“Now, I’m inviting you, cordially, to eat dirt and die.”
“Eat dirt and die?” He stroked his chin like he had to contemplate her G-rated version. “Now see, you didn’t tell me Jillie would be cooking.”
Cozette’s squawk of a laugh again reminded him that they were not alone.
“Very funny,” Jillie muttered from her seat on the couch across the room.
“Yes, you are a very funny man.” Rita turned away from him and in a single step stood facing the sink. “Why don’t you take your act on the road?”
The less she wanted him around, the less likely she became to ask him now—or ever—for help, the more determined he became to change her mind. “Why don’t I stay here and help you get the meal on the table?”
“Why don’t you”—she turned in time to press the bowl she’d taken from the counter right into his midsection—“bite me?”
“Maybe I will.” He set the bowl aside, then leaned in close so that no one but Rita could hear him whisper, “After breakfast.”
Miracle of miracles, he’d left her without a single smart-ass comeback. If she were any other women, he would have taken advantage of that one instant of vulnerability to kiss her senseless.
She stepped away and put her back to her friends. “I won’t abide your pity, Will.”
“My pity?” She had his respect. His gratitude. His sudden, astounding desire to take her in his arms and kiss her until neither of them could stand. But pity? He lowered his head and his voice to further exclude the others. “You haven’t got it.”
“I’m not ready,” she whispered.
He brushed his thumb along the neckline of the hospital gown. “Then get ready.”
“I don’t mean my clothes. I am not ready inside of me. I have to give this some thought.”
“What’s to think about? You want to renovate the restaurant, don’t you?”
“I have to. It’s all I have after Pernel’s latest escapade. I can’t keep on paying Lacey Marie’s tuition if I don’t have income. I can’t sell the business in the shape it’s in now.”
“You want to sell the Palace?”
“I don’t know what I want. I do know that I have to get the Palace up and running and turning a profit again before I can even consider what to do next.”
“You don’t have a lot of money to spare.”
“I have my share of our savings and money from the sale of the house. I think I could get a business loan if I wanted to sink myself in debt up to my earlobes for this place.”
“Or you can accept my help for nothing. I can find friends in the business to give you a discount so deep you’ll hear an echo when you open the bill.”
“Either way, I’ll be beholden to someone, won’t I?”
“The devil you know or the devil you don’t know.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Which are you?”
He laughed. “Of all the people in this mudhole town, you are one of the very few I can say does know me, Rita.”
“Me?” She put her hand just below her throat.
“You saw right through me from the git-go.”
“Well, maybe not from the git-go.” The corners of her lips lifted, just slightly.
He had no idea such a subtle gesture could wrap itself around a man’s heart with the warmth of a long-overdue welcome home. He smiled back at her. “At least you know what you’re getting when you deal with me.”
“I can’t just throw caution to the wind and let myself get swept up in
this.” She reached past him and touched a photo on the fridge.
He craned his neck to check out the picture of Rita standing next to a lovely young girl wearing a Hellon High maroon cap and gown. Her daughter, he decided. He thought of the child in the graveyard he’d come to remember today and the familiar hurt flooded his chest again.
“I am not sure of what I want to do, yet.” She ran her fingertip over the young girl’s cheek.
“That’s too bad because I need a decision today.” He knew he had to push her for her own good—and for his.
She looked from the photo to his face. She pressed her lips tightly shut and started to shake her head.
At last after all this time standing in her home, he slowly slid his sunglasses off, trusting that she would understand and accept what she saw in his eyes. “Tell me what you want to do, Rita.”
Her hand went to her mouth. She blinked. She looked down, then met his gaze again. “Nothing really seems about what I want anymore. It’s come down to a case of ready or not I have to do something, hasn’t it?”
He supposed he nodded, though he was so lost in her eyes he couldn’t have sworn he’d done that.
“I have to do this. We have to do it, don’t we?”
“Do what?” His voice hardly made a sound. Clearing his throat, he went on. “Breakfast or letting me come in for a few days as a consultant on the renovation?”
“Both, I guess.”
“Can I get a rain check on that breakfast?”
“Um, yes, I…uh, I don’t see why not.”
“I’m in kind of a rush to get back to Memphis.” Across the room Jillie stood up. He sucked in a quick breath and slid his glasses back on. “Well, not so much of a rush as I don’t really want to hang around, not today.”
She nodded.
“But let me clear my schedule and I’ll be back in a few days and we’ll get down to it. Deal?” He held his hand out to her.
She stared at it for only a moment before she raised her gaze to his face and surrendered the most sincere but skeptical smile he’d ever seen. “Deal.”
Chapter 3
EVERY DIXIE BELLE AGREES:
When a Southern woman tells you she is not going to tell you what to do that is precisely what she has in mind.
“The key word I want you to keep in mind is simplicity.” Rita stood in the center of the Palace’s serving floor. She’d had roughly forty-eight hours to adjust to the fact that Wild Billy would be in her life—or at least in her place of business—to help her sort things out.
She’d spent two days since she’d agreed to his help steeling herself to tell him thanks but no thanks. But as soon as he showed up to begin work, those words failed her. “I want this handled with a minimum of fuss and bother.”
“The floor has to be ripped up.” Will paced off a few steps, his head bent. “No getting around that.”
“Nothing complicated.”
“The place needs light, too. Maybe a second picture window in that wall left of the door.”
“Only the very essential improvements, nothing drastic. A couple coats of paint here, a half dozen new fixtures there.”
“One well-placed sledgehammer.”
“Sledgehammer?”
He pantomimed breaking through the front wall.
She could not help but notice the play of his muscles, the ease with which he moved his body.
He spread his arms to gauge the size of the could-be window.
Rita fought off a sigh of pure satisfaction at the sight of him practicing his craft.
He scratched under his chin, then ran his thumb over his lower lip, his gaze trained on the wall in front of him.
How comfortable he appeared with himself and his work. Strong. That described him. And capable, she decided without needing proof of it. But not rigid or overbearing. The man looked…
He stood on the bench of one of the booths and spread both his hands over the rough, red bricks.
He looked…like a grown-up! A big, sexy—without even being aware of his sexiness—all-American male.
“I think somebody took a sledgehammer to my head.” She pressed her cool fingertips to her temples but kept her veiled watch on the man making plans for her livelihood.
Folks around town often said Will belonged in the movies. If Rita were to cast Billy West in a role, it would be as the darkly sexy outcast who lived by his own set of rules and no visible sense of honor.
She eyed the man who filled the empty room with just his presence and felt the knots in her stomach. Obviously he had some sense of honor, or he wouldn’t be here. Will wasn’t some central casting version of a rebel bad boy anymore. He was something far more dangerous. He was a real, flesh-and-blood, doing-the-right-thing-for-God-only-knew-what-reason, fully grown adult man. The way they are supposed to be, not like a cutout from a magazine or a dreamed-up character, but a real man.
Thinking that way about him only intimidated her even more. From her father’s immaturity to Pernel’s eccentricities, life had not prepared her to handle a real man—well, not to handle him, but to—
“That’s it, baby.” Will interrupted her thoughts. He stepped away from the booth and aimed another imagined swing at the dingy brick wall. “It’d be over before you knew what hit it.”
Rita liked the way his black hair curled against his tanned neck in stark contrast to his soft white shirt. He no longer had the long, lean lines of a young athlete, but that only heightened his appeal to her. If, she quickly corrected herself, a man like that could ever even remotely appeal to a smart, principled, down-to-earth woman like her.
“We can do this, Rita.” He faced her. “I know we can do it.”
“You think?” The driest whisper she’d ever heard came from her lips.
“I know we can, if you want to pursue it.”
“Pursue…it?”
“…don’t kid yourself, ladies, this is about sex. It’s about passion and tension and longing for something more. It’s about tearing everything down that doesn’t work any longer, about getting tired and sweaty and when it’s done about producing something worthwhile. It’s about rebirth and bursting through to the next level.” Cozette’s words came back to haunt her.
“Yeah, pursue it, follow through, go after it. What do you say?”
“Let’s do it!” She said it, all right. But danged if she had planned to say it, at least not with that much energy. “But let’s not get too carried away. Can’t we take it nice and easy? Do a few things and see how that goes then decide if it needs more work after that?”
“We’ll have to yank those out.” Will scratched something down on his already crowded legal pad, then pointed his pencil at the row of shabby booths in the back. “Yank ’em out and have ourselves a great big ole Tennessee bonfire.”
“Baby steps, that’s what’s in order here.” She pinched her thumb and finger together, but he did not even look her way.
“And while we’re at it let’s toss this lunch counter onto the flames as well.” He slammed his palm onto the worn surface.
Their half-empty glasses of iced tea shuddered at the impact.
He took a drink from his, then clunked it back down as he swept his gaze over the room. The air around them practically shimmered with his enthusiasm. “I bet I can come up with a working list of recommendations by nightfall. Tomorrow we can go over specifics and talk budget, and then I can get moving.”
“Don’t feel you need to hurry on my account.”
If he picked up on her sarcasm, it didn’t show as he settled down on a vinyl-covered stool at the counter. He fanned the pages of his notes a few times, his shoulders hunched forward and his back to her. “No need to drag my part in all this out. At this rate I can be back in Memphis in time for a late dinner at the Rendezvous.”
“Good. Hate for something as trivial as my uprooting and reordering my entire life to put a cramp in your plans for the weekend.”
He spun halfway around to look her way. “What?�
��
“Nothing.”
“Yeah, I thought it was nothing.” He grinned, more with his eyes than with his lips.
He had heard her. He just wanted the satisfaction of making her say something so ungrateful and rude to his smarmy, smug, drop-her-dead-where-she-stood handsome face.
“I think you actually like it when I say something meant to put you in your place, Mr. West.”
“Call me Will.” He took another slug of tea, which was mostly sugary dregs and melting ice. He cracked one of the round pieces of ice in his mouth and gave her a wink like they’d shared some naughty secret. “Especially when you’re saying something intended to put me in my place.”
What a truly twisted individual. Unless, of course, that was his way of showing her he knew the truth about himself. Could Wild Billy, at one time every inch the self-loving donkey-headed bastard she’d pegged him for, have changed?
“Anyway, you’ll probably be glad for me to get gone from here quick as I can, right?”
She shrugged, sort of. More like lifted her shoulders slightly and tipped her head and hummed a nonanswer answer.
“I know I’ll be glad to hit the road that much sooner.”
“Why?” She did not ask as a way of accusation. Though some part of her wanted to do just that—come right out and accuse the man of providing his family the emotional stability of a dust devil. “Why are you always so het-up to get out of Hellon?”
“Because it’s Hellon.”
“It’s also where your only family lives. Your mother isn’t getting any younger, you know.”
“As long as the grandest beauty salons and finest plastic surgeons in the region remain open for business, she ain’t getting any older either.”
“And what about Jillie?”
“She actually prefers to go up north for her beauty treatments.”
Glib. She should have known that’s how a man this shallow and self-involved would respond. He hadn’t changed. But he was right about one thing, she’d definitely be glad to get shed of him as quick as possible. “Never mind. Sorry I even brought it up.”
“Jillie is an adult, Rita. I don’t see how my hanging around Hellon until I’m stifled within an inch of my life with phony hero worship is going to have any effect on her.”
