Free Falling (10 page)

Mac lowered his head, his lips tempting hers.
His warm breath tantalizing her mouth. This will never work! She
screamed silently. Electricity zipped through her when his firm
lips brushed hers. She jerked back before he swept her into that
whirlwind of sensation.

“I’ll get your jacket.” Free spun around and
propelled herself in the direction of the bathroom. She dropped the
towel and grabbed his jacket. She had to get him out of here before
she did something truly stupid. Somehow he had regained his own
control during her brief absence. He accepted the jacket and
hurried toward the front door. Free followed, still dizzy from the
close encounter of the too intense kind.

Once outside on the porch, he paused and
turned back to her. “I almost forgot. We had to do some
rescheduling. Demolition of the Chenille Street project had been
moved up to next Monday.”

Free felt her eyes go round in disbelief. He
couldn’t do that! She rubbed at the frown creasing her forehead. Of
course he could do it, she reminded herself. Mac was the boss.

Sarge!
She had to get word to
Sarge.

“Is that a problem?” he asked when she made
no response.

“No,” she lied. “Lance and I will adjust our
schedules.”

He nodded. “Good.” Without looking at her
again, he strode away.

Good, he’s said. Free could think of a great
many ways to describe that announcement, but
good
wasn’t one
of them.

Chapter Five

At half past nine on Tuesday night, Free
paced her crowded parlor waiting for Alex’s return. From his
position against the doorjamb, Lance cracked his knuckles,
punctuating the murmuring from the Chenille Street Preservation
Committee. Free shot Lance an annoyed look. He shrugged and ran a
hand over his close-cropped hair. Free felt immediately contrite
for taking her frustration out on Lance, but tension had frazzled
her nerves.

Sarge and two of his friends were huddled
with the group. Their perpetual murmuring and frequent glances at
her added to Free’s escalating uneasiness.

She desperately hoped she was doing the right
thing. The way she saw it, Mac hadn’t really left her much choice.
His revelation last evening that he intended to move up the
demolition date by more than a month had put things under a serious
time crunch. Since the Chenille Street residents wanted so fiercely
to save at least one house, Free had assumed that they had control
of the situation, but historical status had been denied.

Mac could tear down the house and build a
new, modern structure at will. Why wouldn’t he work with what was
already there? The house was structurally sound, and plenty large
enough to turn into medical offices. He could renovate the grand
old home into a state-of- the-art clinic while maintaining the
neighborhood’s antebellum atmosphere.

But no. Mac wanted to destroy the past one
house at a time. Free shuddered. If only she could make him feel
just a little of her love for history, for life in general. Hadn’t
the man ever heard of stopping to smell the roses?

What was she thinking? Mac didn’t seem to
care much about the here and now. Why on earth would she expect him
to have any attachment to the past? The man seemed to be rootless,
and maybe even heartless.

She shook her head. She wouldn’t believe
that. Instantly she chastised herself. Why not believe it? Just
because the man was sexy didn’t mean he had a heart in that sense
of the word. She tossed her hair over her shoulders and retraced
her path across the room. None of this felt right.

“I’ve got it!” Alex announced as she breezed
in, all eyes focused on her willowy form as she strode toward
Free.

Free moistened her lips and drew in a deep
breath. “Will it provide us with the right opportunity?”

“Do bears sh—”

“Alex!” Emily exclaimed from amid the group
of preservationists. She glowered at Alex in a spiritually superior
manner. “These are respectable people,” she said primly, as if her
housemates weren’t.

Alex rolled her eyes and sighed. She crossed
her arms over her chest and focused on Free. “McFerrin has a
meeting with the investors for the Chenille Street project on
Friday at ten a.m.” She surveyed the assembled group much the way
she would a jury, pausing for added emphasis, and then continued.
“I thought I noticed his name on Jake’s calendar, so I checked to
be sure. The meeting will be held in the executive conference room
on the sixth floor across the hall from Mac’s office.”

“Okay.” Free met Alex’s triumphant gaze with
more than a little uncertainty. “Do you have a plan?”

Alex’s eyes narrowed, adding to Free’s
tension. She turned back to the group when she spoke. “If you’re
serious about putting a stop to the demolition, then you may have
only one opportunity and that’s at the meeting on Friday. If you
can convince his investors that your plan is better than the one
McFerrin Enterprises is offering, you might have a chance.”

“And how do we get into this meeting without
getting thrown out of the building first?” Free shifted restlessly.
She had a very bad feeling about what Alex might have in mind.

Alex smiled, one of those sharkish,
barely-a-cut-above-sinister kinds of smiles. “We’ll need a
distraction.” She turned to Mr. Towery, who was hovering over the
coffee table he had pulled his chair next to. “Mr. Towery, are your
plans in order?”

The elderly man tapped the blueprints spread
out on the table and nodded. “All I need are cost projections.”

Alex nodded. “I have a friend who’s in
construction. I’ll ask him to crunch those numbers with you.” She
scanned the group once more, then braced her hands on her hips with
a dramatic flourish. “What makes sense to you or looks like the
right thing to do won’t be enough. You have to present a
cost-effective plan that will appeal to the needs of these people,
i.e., will it be profitable?”

Free watched as Alex moved to Mr. Towery’s
side. She hoped he could deal with the pressure—after all, he was
eighty-five. During the 1940s, Towery had been considered one of
the southeast’s most prominent architects, and today he lived in
one of the lovely antebellum homes on Chenille Street. From the
moment the plans to build a new medical center in his neighborhood
had been announced, Towery had worked with the Historical Society
as well as with McFerrin Enterprises to try and come up with a
feasible alternative that would leave the ambiance of the street
intact. But his efforts thus far had been futile.

Free frowned as the full impact of Alex’s
response to her question hit her. “What do you mean we’ll need a
distraction?”

Alex straightened from her perusal of
Towery’s work. “Mac and Jake will be in that meeting. We won’t be
able to accomplish anything while those two are in there.” She
re-crossed her arms and seemed to consider the problem for a time.
“I can distract Jake,” she announced, leveling her gaze on Free’s.
“But you’ll have to take care of Mac. Once we have those two out of
the way, Mr. Towery and company” she waved her upturned palm to
indicate the assembled group “will take over.”

Free tensed. She liked the sound of this less
and less. “And just how am I supposed to distract him?”

Alex’s knowing smile made Free cringe. “Oh,
we’ll think of something, sweetie.” She tapped her forearm with one
long, perfectly manicured nail. “I have a feeling that where you’re
concerned, Mac the Magnolia Murderer is easily distracted.”

~*~

Free slumped on the cushioned window seat and
stared out at the steady drizzle. Its sweet, cleaning scent drifted
into the room, and mingled with the lingering smells of freshly
baked chocolate cake. Chocolate relaxed her, and right now she
desperately needed to relax. After an evening of conspiracy against
her unsuspecting neighbor, she felt stressed to the max.

She sighed in an effort to release some of
the tension and watched the occasional fat raindrop splat against
the window ledge. The rain would be a tremendous relief to farmers
and gardeners alike, but it only added to her depressed mood. This
entire scheme to save the Chenille Street house had put her in an
awkward position. Free had committed herself to preserving as much
of the past as possible, but her main concern was always for the
people. And in this instance the people wanted the house to remain.
But Mac had his own agenda…and investors he had to answer to.

What a mess. She felt torn. Part of her
yearned to make this right, but part of her wanted nothing to do
with anything that might hurt Mac.

If only he hadn’t moved next door to her. She
would never have known him, would never have come to care about
him. Free stilled. Did she care about Mac?

Yes. She did. She couldn’t help herself.

The old grandfather clock counted the hour as
midnight. Oscar lifted his head from his post under the kitchen
table and peered at Free with big sad eyes. She chuckled, the sound
lost to the low, rhythmic pulse of the music wafting from the
radio.

Why did life have to be so unsettling
sometimes? She had thought that hers had reached an even keel these
days. After years of struggling to survive, the last four had been
happy. Except for Thomas’s death, of course.

Free pulled her knees to her chest and rested
her chin on top of them. Thomas Styles had been so good to her. How
had she been lucky enough to find someone like him? Emily would
call it Divine intervention. All Free knew was that Thomas had come
along in the nick of time and managed to save her. To say she had
hit bottom would be an understatement. Thomas had given her a real
home and the chance she needed to have a real life.

Free had escaped foster care and gone out on
her own at the ripe old age of sixteen. She had worked at odd jobs,
some odder than others, everything from dog-sitting to being a
human billboard, to make her way. Never had she allowed anyone to
take care of her. You had to trust to do that, and Free hadn’t
trusted anyone. Between her pathetic excuse for a mother and half a
dozen common-law stepfathers, Free had learned early on not to
trust.

Unfortunately for her, she had been
blessed—or cursed, depending on the way you looked at it—with a big
heart. Even when things couldn’t have gotten worse for her, Free
wouldn’t turn away anyone in need. It was her one fatal flaw. She
would part with her last dime for a friend and champion the
underdog to her own detriment.

She had unwittingly stumbled into a life of
crime by the time Thomas had come along. She shuddered at the
unsavory memories. Twice she had been in the wrong place at the
wrong time, helping a friend in need, and gotten busted for
solicitation. Police weren’t interested in whether she was guilty
or not, only that she was with two known prostitutes. At least she
had been of legal age by then and hadn’t been thrown back into the
foster care system.

But she would never forget the hurt and
humiliation of being thrown into jail for something she hadn’t
done. And being treated like a lesser life form—that was the
worst.

The third time, when Free had taken a beating
intended for her friend, Liza, Phil Gerard had been the arresting
officer. It seemed Liza’s pimp didn’t like the idea of one of his
ladies getting pregnant. If Free hadn’t stepped in, Liza would have
certainly lost her baby after such a beating. Free had spent two
days in the hospital with a concussion as a result. That time when
she got arrested, it wasn’t for solicitation, it was for assault.
Liza’s pimp had pressed charges against Free! It still didn’t make
sense to her. One minor detail had proven satisfying, however. The
pimp had done time in the hospital as well, with a broken jaw and
cracked ribs. Free hadn’t wielded the baseball bat, Liza had, but
Free never told.

She shook off her bad memories. She had
survived. And after that Liza had gone straight and raised a
beautiful baby girl. Phil had taken Free under his wing and
introduced her to Thomas Styles, who became her court-appointed
attorney.

Thomas had given Free a new life. He taught
her to take the time to smell the roses. To appreciate life. That
appreciation and understanding of just how precious life really is
had changed everything for her. Most importantly, he taught her to
trust someone besides herself. She had trusted Thomas completely,
and he had given her everything he had to give.

Free released another beleaguered sigh. If
only she could teach that to Mac. But he had to want to change to
learn. And by all accounts Mac McFerrin had no desire to change. He
had no intention of trusting whatever heart he had to anyone or
anything but work.

The tempo of the music emanating from the FM
station shifted, and a sultry, jazzy tune throbbed from the
speakers. Free’s body reacted instantly. She felt herself swaying
subtly with the sensual rhythm. Her mind began to clear, allowing
the music inside, pushing away everything else.

She stood and stretched languidly. The music
tugged at her, teasing, inviting her to dance. She smiled. She
hadn’t danced in a very long time. Therapy. Dancing is good
therapy, that’s what Mrs. Lassiter had always said. Free smiled
again as she recalled the beautiful, precise moves the fragile old
lady had taught her. Loretta Lassiter had learned to dance in a
school in Paris.

Paris. Free probably wouldn’t ever make it to
Paris, but she could close her eyes and envision all the vivid
details her elderly neighbor had shared with her. And she could
forget. Right now she really wanted to forget. To forget Mac and
how he made her feel. To forget Alex’s plan.

Free closed her eyes and allowed the music to
move her, to take her away. Slowly her muscles relaxed and swayed
with every beat, every ebb and flow of the tempo. And then, all
else disappeared.