Southern Comforts (28 page)

“Besides,” she argued, “this is a small town. I don't want everyone talking about us.”

Cash refrained from pointing out that everyone in Raintree was already talking about them. The uptown New York heiress and the sharecropper's kid who made good was a reverse Cinderella story that was proving downright irresistible. And although it frustrated the hell out of him that she
refused to move into his house where he could keep her safe, Cash was somewhat reassured by Jeb's promise to watch out for her. And a visit to the sheriff had resulted in a call to Arizona, to Waggoner's parole officer. With any luck, Waggoner—who unsurprisingly had failed to find another job—would be on his way back to the pen any day.

A few days after George Waggoner's aborted attempt to assault her, Chelsea remembered something he'd said to Cash during their brief confrontation. At the time she'd been too frightened for it to sink in. But now that it had, Chelsea found the idea of such a horrible man working directly for Roxanne more than a little curious.

“He's a cousin to an old secretary,” Roxanne revealed when Chelsea asked her about it. “Cash told me what happened, Chelsea, and had I known the man was so dangerous, I certainly never would have hired him. I am so sorry you had to experience such a distasteful scene.”

It had been a lot more than distasteful, but Chelsea didn't argue. Nor did she press Roxanne, despite the fact that the answer was too pat. Almost, she considered, rehearsed.

One thing this trip had proven, she mused as she entered the courthouse that anchored Raintree's town square, was that her mother was right about one thing. She was
definitely
her father's daughter, she thought proudly as she managed to convince the young, green clerk on duty that, being a journalist, she was entitled access to public records. Surprisingly, the computer age had reached Raintree.

A rush of excitement forked through Chelsea when George Waggoner's name appeared on the screen. This must have been how her father had felt while tracking down a hot story, she thought, enjoying the idea of sharing an experience with the larger-than-life man she'd adored. Chelsea was not all that surprised when a long list of arrests flashed by. Petty theft, drunk and disorderly, and various other
crimes all going back to Waggoner's early teens. It crossed her mind that Cash could have turned out the same way; after all, he certainly hadn't gotten an easier start in life. The difference, she decided, was that deep down inside, where it counted, Cash possessed a strong core of integrity.

And yet, she considered, taking in the record of a marriage license, someone must have found Waggoner reasonably acceptable at some time in his life.

“Cora Mae Padgett,” Chelsea murmured out loud, writing the name down in the notebook she'd pulled from her duffel bag. “Athens, Georgia.”

Unfortunately, the Athens phone directory did not list any Padgetts or Waggoners. She should just let it drop, she told herself. She had enough on her plate at the moment, trying to write two books while exploring her new and exciting relationship with Cash. After all, whoever the horrible man had married had nothing to do with her. Or Roxanne's biography.

No. That wasn't really true. Because every instinct Chelsea possessed told her that Roxanne was hiding something about her ties to George Waggoner. Her mind focused on what, if anything, that could be as she left the courthouse, Chelsea failed to see the person sitting at a picnic table beneath a tree in the courthouse park, watching her with unblinking intensity.

Wanting to reduce her dependence on Dorothy, who seemed to be growing more tense with each passing day, Chelsea had rented a car after her return from New York. It allowed her to come and go as she pleased, and also to periodically escape from Roxanne, who was definitely beginning to lose the aura of calm Chelsea had grown accustomed to.

There were more and more instances of her screaming at workmen and ill-treating Dorothy. She even slapped Jo for
not stopping her camera during one such outburst. As if realizing such behavior was definitely beyond the pale, she backtracked quickly.

“I'm sorry, dear,” she said, stroking the reddened hand-print with her fingertips. “I don't know what got into me. It's been such a stressful day.”

“Don't worry, Roxanne.” The filmmaker managed a slight smile although her voice did not possess its usually perky tone. “We all have bad days. No harm done.”

But as she turned away and began changing lenses on the camera, Chelsea noticed a brittle sheen in Jo's dark eyes.

Later that afternoon, Chelsea drove out to Rebel's Ridge to have dinner with Cash. Although his car was parked in front of the house, he didn't answer when she knocked at the door. Curious, she went around back, where she saw him in the distance, whacking away at one of the tabby slave cottages with a sledgehammer.

Curious, she walked across the field to him. “Hi,” she called out.

Cash turned toward her. “Hi, yourself.” He lowered the heavy sledgehammer. “I wasn't expecting you for another couple of hours.”

He'd taken his shirt off, and just looking at his hard mahogany chest glistening with perspiration made her knees go weak.

“Roxanne was stressed out. I decided discretion was the better part of valor. At least today.”

“She's seemed uptight these days,” he agreed. “But that's to be expected. Restoration is always stressful. Even the inimitable Diva of Domesticity is probably finding it more trouble than she'd thought when she bought the place and envisioned balls and wisteria-draped verandas.”

“That's probably all it is,” Chelsea agreed absently,
studying his work. The little house had been reduced to a pile of stone around the foundation. “What are you doing?”

“Knocking down a house.”

“I can see that. But why?”

His answering shrug was nonchalant, but watching him closely, Chelsea thought she saw a shadow move across his eyes. “It's a long story.”

“Most stories are down here, I've found.”

He smiled at that. “It's not that big a deal.” It was his turn to study the efforts of an afternoon's intense physical labor. “It's awfully hot out here. Why don't you go on up to the house, have a glass of iced tea or wine, and I'll be with you as soon as I finish up here.”

“Will you tell me what's bothering you?”

“What makes you think anything's bothering me?”

“Are you saying I'm imagining it?”

“Let's talk about it later. After I clean up.”

“Fine.” She went up on her toes and kissed him. A tender, heartfelt kiss meant to assure him that there was nothing he could ever say to her that would change her feelings for him.

Cash watched her walk away. He admired her long legs, clad in a pair of white jeans, and enjoyed the feminine sway of her hips. Her hair shone in the slanting afternoon sun, making it look as if she were wearing a brushed copper halo. She was still the most desirable woman he'd ever seen. And she was his.

“Amazing,” he murmured. Then, shaking his head at the idea of the offspring of a bootlegger's daughter and a sharecropper wooing—and winning!—the Deb of the Year, he went back to work, destroying the last physical reminder of his early life in Raintree.

It was several hours before they got around to talking. After Cash returned to the house and showered, they spent
a long, leisurely time making love as dusk soothed a skyline fevered by heat. Afterward, they ate a light supper of cold fried chicken and cole slaw from Catfish Charlie's.

Then, much, much later, they were sitting out on the veranda, side by side, on the green glider.

“I can't ever remember being as happy as I've been these past weeks in Raintree,” Chelsea murmured, as she listened to the croak of the frogs along the banks of the river, the lonely hoot of an owl in a moss-draped oak.

“You don't miss the big city life?”

She laughed at that. “Although I never thought I'd hear myself saying it, I don't miss Manhattan at all.” She thought about how she'd found the empty bottle of antacids in her bag earlier today, realized she hadn't reached for it for a week, and sighed happily.

“Perhaps it's another one of those things I inherited from my father, but I've always been Irish enough to believe in fate. And although it doesn't make any logical sense, I feel as if Raintree is a bit like Brigadoon—a secret, hidden-away place, waiting all these years for me to find it.”

She could not have said anything that could have pleased him more. Cash smiled. “I always believed that if you really wanted something, all you had to do was work harder than the people trying to keep you from getting it. I never believed in fate. Until recently.”

“What changed your mind?”

“You showing up in Raintree.”

It was her turn to smile. “That's exactly what you were supposed to say.”

They swung quietly for a time. Chelsea stared up at the sky and felt closer to the huge white moon and the dazzling, diamond-bright stars than the life she'd left behind.

“You promised to tell me what you were doing knocking down that house,” she reminded him softly.

She felt him tense. Then relax. Heard his exhaled breath. “I guess you could say I was exorcising the last old ghosts.”

“I don't understand.” She turned toward him, able to see the way his jaw had turned as rigid as granite. Then she remembered something he'd said the first day she'd come to Rebel's Ridge. “Those were sharecropper houses.”

“That's right.”

She thought about how his father had died. “You lived there.”

“Until we got evicted.”

Chelsea closed her eyes, pained by the mental picture of Cash as a young boy, struggling to assure his newly widowed mother that he could take care of her. Take care of them both. At an age when boys she'd grown up with were going off to pricey, privileged summer camps.

“It's funny,” she murmured.

“What?” His voice sounded rusty, even to his own ears.

“That we both seem to have been on a journey of discovery. A discovery of forgotten parts of ourselves.”

“And you believe those individual roads led us here? To Raintree?”

“Yes.” She framed his frowning face between her hands and pressed her smiling lips against his. “Isn't fate a wonderful thing?”

As he drew her into his arms, Cash didn't answer. Not in words. In fact, her blissful statement was the last thing either of them were to say for a very long time.

A
lthough Chelsea's days were spent with an increasingly temperamental Roxanne, evenings were reserved for Cash. They'd have dinner. Then make love. Then she'd work on Roxanne's biography, while he worked on the blueprints for an upcoming project he'd signed to do in Savannah. Then they'd make love again. And although progress on her novel had slowed again, she would not have traded a million pages of brilliance for this time with Cash.

Besides, she told herself one morning when she'd reluctantly left Cash's bed to write down a pivotal scene that had been teasing at her mind during her sleep, she was getting so much characterization for her prima donna movie star from Roxanne, that if it took a little longer to finish the Hollywood murder mystery than she'd hoped, her experience in Raintree was definitely worth it. The only problem, she'd explained to Cash, was that approximately fifty pages from what she'd hoped would be the end of the book, the ambitious agent she'd planned to be the murderer was refusing to cooperate.

“I'll just have to find another killer,” she said. “Lord
knows, with an entire cast of characters who have reason to hate her, that shouldn't be so difficult.”

“Once again, life imitates art,” he drawled, making her laugh as he reminded them both of Roxanne.

Despite Roxanne's increasingly frequent temper tantrums, Chelsea was pleased with the progress on the autobiography. Although it would never win a Pulitzer prize, it was turning out to be a bright and breezy read Roxanne's fans would hopefully enjoy. And, of course, it was filled with all sorts of projects and recipes that Roxanne made look so easy, but Chelsea secretly thought would drive the average woman—like herself—up a wall.

Belle Terre was beginning to show real promise. The wiring and the plumbing had been completed, the walls replastered, new interior drywall installed, and the windows re-glazed. The millwork Cash had bought in New York proved even more wonderful than promised, and provided a historically accurate touch.

A muralist from Atlanta had been hired to paint antebellum scenes on the walls of the dining room and ballroom. When Roxanne's artistic vision clashed with the young man's who, despite an impressive portfolio, seemed determined to depict important war battles complete with battlefield casualties, she fired him and found another, more agreeable—and commercial—artist to depict romantic garden and plantation scenes.

“Isn't this better?” she asked Chelsea as they studied the new art.

“It's certainly more restful than the battleground scenes,” Chelsea said. Although it wasn't often she found herself siding with the style expert, she'd had to agree that viewing the bodies of all those dead soldiers clad in Union blue and Rebel gray depicted on the dining room wall would have been bound to dull guests' appetites.

“Much more restful,” Roxanne agreed. “Let me show you what Annie's sketched in for the upstairs bedroom.” She smiled as she gestured for Chelsea to precede her up the stairs. “It's a recreation of Belle Terre's original gardens and it should be lovely. Even if it
is
costing an arm and a leg.”

Part of that cost, Chelsea knew, was because the artist, Annie Longview, a willowy, pale, blond girl given to wearing New Age crystals and long flowing skirts emblazoned with moons and stars, had insisted that the ghostly vibes of the poor dead grieving bride-to-be made it too depressing to work. Once Roxanne had offered to tack on ten percent to the original bid, Annie had apparently been miraculously cured of her artistic ghost-caused block.

Chelsea was almost to the first landing when the wood beneath her sneakers suddenly gave way. She reached out, grabbing for the banister, which broke from the weight put on it. The last thing she heard, as she went tumbling into space, was Roxanne's startled cry.

 

“Are you certain you're all right?” It was the umpteenth time Cash had asked that question. “Positive,” Chelsea assured him for the umpteenth time.

“You could have been killed.” His expression was grim. His eyes bleak.

“Nonsense. I only fell a few feet.”

“Nearly five.”

It had seemed like more, Chelsea thought, but didn't say. “The doctor assured me that my ankle's only twisted.” She glanced down at the throbbing ankle in question, propped up on a pillow on Cash's couch.

“It could have been broken,” he muttered darkly. “You could have been killed.” More frustrated than she'd ever
seen him, he thrust his hands through his hair. “And it would have been all my fault, dammit.”

“That's ridiculous.”

“If those stairs were unstable, I should have known it. If the railing wasn't firm, I should have caught it.”

She thought about pointing out that he was the architect, not the contractor, and that people had been up and down those same stairs for weeks without mishap. Knowing that he wasn't in the mood to let himself off the hook, she tried a different tack.

“You're right. It
is
all your fault. I don't know why I didn't understand this before. I also realize now that my broken arm falling from the roof when I was five and trying to fly was your fault. And the leg I broke on the ski run in the Alps when I was sixteen, and then, of course—”

“Okay, okay. I get your drift.” He sat down beside her gingerly, as if afraid of causing her more pain.

“I won't break,” she said pointedly, putting her arms around him. He was still as stiff as a board. She covered his grimly set mouth with hers, her lips plucking teasingly at his as she tried to turn his mind to more pleasurable subjects.

And although it was not easy, Chelsea was nothing, if not persistent.

 

Jamie Johnson was beanpole thin, with short-cropped hair the color of lemon sherbet, a face covered with freckles and bright blue eyes that observed Chelsea with suspicion and jealousy when he discovered Cash had invited her to join them on their guy's day out.

Although the swelling in her ankle had gone down this morning, Cash had insisted she take the day off work. Roxanne had instantly concurred, suggesting that perhaps she'd be more comfortable in her own home while finishing up
the book. Since Chelsea had no intention of explaining that at the moment, she didn't exactly have a home—with Nelson still ensconced in her apartment—she had calmly assured Roxanne that she was quite comfortable at the inn.

Cash had already planned this fishing trip with Jamie a while ago, so Chelsea had had to lobby to come along until he'd finally caved in, allowing that so long as she stayed off her ankle, he supposed it wouldn't hurt.

Although she knew nothing of fishing, and had never so much as baited a hook, Chelsea was looking forward to the scenery, which Jo, who apparently had lived in Georgia for a time with her military father and housewife mother, assured her was something not to be missed.

“I've heard a lot about you,” Chelsea said as the trio drove down to the boat dock on the Okefenokee Swamp in the pickup truck Cash used to tow the boat trailer.

The boy's only response to her friendly comment was a shrug. His gaze was directed out the window at the passing scenery.

Chelsea tried again. “Cash said that you played on your school basketball team last year. I know a few people in the Nicks' office. Perhaps, someday you and Cash can come to New York and take in a game.”

Another shrug.

“Hey,” Cash said quietly, “Chelsea was talking to you, son.”

“I don't like the Nicks,” he mumbled.

“Of course you don't,” she said quickly. “I'll bet you're an Atlanta Hawks fan.”

“Yeah.”

His flat tone didn't encourage continued conversation, but refusing to give up, Chelsea tried again. “I don't know any Hawks players. But I did make friends with one of the Bulls
last year when we were playing golf together at a charity tournament in Phoenix.”

“Who was that?” Cash asked when Jamie stubbornly refused to.

Chelsea smiled her appreciation. Then sat back, let the pause linger a moment and proceeded to name drop. “Michael Jordan.”

That got the boy's immediately attention. When his head practically spun around, Chelsea knew she'd just earned points.

“You played golf with Michael Jordan?”

“And Charles Barkley,” she said.

Those blue eyes narrowed suspiciously. “But you're a girl.”

“True. And I'm a terrible golfer. But the guys were nice enough to give me a generous handicap. I had a great time. And even beat Barkley on strokes, but of course Sir Charles is a terrible golfer. Although he does tell great jokes,” she tacked on as an afterthought.

“I don't suppose you remember any of them,” Cash coaxed. Although his eyes were hidden behind his dark glasses, Chelsea could hear the humor in his voice.

“Actually, I do.”

For the next thirty minutes she told jokes and spun stories about her day on the links with the basketball greats. By the time they reached the dock and had backed the bass boat into the water, the formerly speechless Jamie had found his voice and was bombarding her with questions about his heroes.

As they cruised the slow-moving, sinuous waterways, Chelsea decided that Jo was definitely right about the scenery being spectacular. The swamp, with its draped cypress, vegetation-choked lakes, and pine islands was a world apart, and although at first it seemed deserted, she began to notice
that the rushes, cattails and sphagnum peat bogs fairly teemed with life.

Swallows swooped gracefully, picking insects off the water, white ibis and great blue herons waded along the banks, and a dazzling flock of huge gray sandhill cranes took off with loud, guttural cries as the boat passed by.

Lily pads were scattered over the dark water like flag-stones making up a garden path. Mallards streaked low over the lily pads, their honking cries echoing in the steamy stillness.

“This is so amazing.” Chelsea spoke quietly, as if she were in church. “I never realized a swamp could be so beautiful.”

Her wondrous gaze drank in the tupelo and cypress trees with their huge buttressed trunks, some a man would not be able to put his arms around. A natural garden, as lovely in its own way as the formal English garden planted by Jeb at Magnolia House, bloomed amidst the shadowed water. There were white and yellow water lilies and white clusters of floating hearts, the vine with silky gray seed plumes Cash told her was called old man's beard, the spiked neverwets and the hooded yellow pitcher plants.

A family of otters swam by, sleek bodied and graceful.

“It's the country's largest wooded swamp. Some guy in the 1890s got the great idea to drain it with canals, but he underestimated the project and gave up,” Cash said. “See that?”

She followed his gaze to a desolate-looking island of black and silvered stumps and trees. “It looks almost as if they've been burned, but surely that can't be? With all this water?”

“Drought causes the upper layer of the peat floor to dry out and burn,” he said. “Which is nature's way of keeping the Okefenokee a swamp, by burning off all the excess
brush and dried mulch, which opens it up again and creates more bogs and prairies.”

“The prairies shake if you try to walk on them,” Jamie piped up. “That's where it got its name. From the Indian name for Land of the Trembling Earth.”

“But if the ground is unstable, how do the islands support all those trees?”

“Ah,” Cash said, with a quick grin, “that's the magic of it.”

And it was magic, she decided, as the day passed. From time to time Cash would cut the electric trolling motor and he and Jamie would cast lines out into the bogs, reeling in catfish after catfish. Although they seemed quite proud of themselves, Chelsea privately thought the fish were the ugliest she'd ever seen.

“Isn't Chelsea going to get a turn?” Jamie asked late in the afternoon. The slanting sun had turned the water to a molten copper.

“Oh, I don't—”

“Good idea,” Cash said. He handed his rod to her. “I've already got it baited. Let's see how you do.”

“I've never fished in my life.”

“Then you've been missing one of life's great pleasures.”

“My dad always said that God doesn't deduct the time we spend fishing in this life,” Jamie said encouragingly. “Cash says that, too.”

“That's because I learned it from your dad,” Cash said. “Who was a very wise man. Now—” he turned his attention back to the lesson at hand “—put your hand here, and your thumb right there on the line, just so.” He stood behind her, his hands over hers. “Now, relax your wrist, that's a gal. I tell you, Chelsea, you are a natural-born fisherman.”

“Fisherwoman,” Jamie corrected.

“Right.” Cash leaned forward and brushed his lips against her earlobe as he murmured, “You are definitely all woman, Irish.

“Okay,” he said, returning his voice to its normal conversational tone, “now see that little pool over there?”

“The one with the enormous cypress in the middle of it?” It had to be at least thirty-five feet away.

“That's it. We're going to drop this worm right beside that old trunk.”

“I hate to ruin a perfect day arguing with you, Cash, but I think the chances of that are slim to none.”

“Now darlin', you just gotta have confidence in yourself. And trust me.”

“I do.” She looked up at him, the warmth in her eyes echoing her words. “But fishing and life are two different things.”

“Now that's where you're wrong. Fishing
is
life. The rest is just incidental. Ready?”

She took a deep breath. “All right. Let's get this humiliation over with.”

Amazingly, the line whizzed from the reel, the fat night crawler flew through the air, then landed with a satisfying plop exactly in the spot Cash had pointed out.