Tempting Faith (Indigo Love Spectrum) (5 page)

“Brody’s,” Travis chimed in. “Uncle Brody says Al’s the best he’s got in the shop.”

“Good game today, Al,” Ritchie added. “Scenery’s not bad either.”

“I’d tackle that curly-headed Black Bear in a red hot second,” Leland said. He pointed a gloved finger at the cheerleader’s bench, where Faith was sipping a steaming beverage from an insulated Dorothy Black Bears bomber cup clutched in her mittened hands.

“Faith Wheeler,” Ritchie said, following up with a lascivious grunt. “Talk about hot cocoa. I wonder if she’ll be at any of the parties tonight.”

“Your dad would shoot you if he caught you with Justus Wheeler’s daughter,” Leland laughed.

“Justus Wheeler would shoot you if he caught you with Justus Wheeler’s daughter,” Travis retorted.

“Hey, Al,” Ritchie called, “is Faith Wheeler with anybody these days?”

With deliberate slowness, Alex took out another cigarette and lit it. By the time he’d taken his second draw on it, the college boys had figured out that he had no answer or just plain wasn’t going to answer.

“Dot’s a small town, Al,” Leland said. “Between the diner and the ding shop, you gotta know everybody’s business. Who’s Faith screwing? Jefferson Winslow?”

“I’ll bet she’s doin’ Hardy Ketchum,” Ritchie said. “He’s a senior, he’s always had game and he’s got a thing for black girls. Remember when he got busted last year, driving ninety miles an hour into Comfort to see that black girl at Stonewall High?”

“He got some comfort, all right!” Leland laughed. “I’ve got a thing for hot girls, and little Faith Wheeler’s all grown up and fine! I’m gonna talk to her after the game.”

Alex made a sound that was something between a laugh and a snort.

“Something funny to you, man?” Leland asked coolly.

“I’m just minding my own business,” Alex said through a long exhalation of smoke.

“Ignore him,” Ritchie said.

Leland lowered his voice, and muttered something to his friends, who laughed. “…loser…”

Up until that word reached his ears, Alex had been able to ignore them. “What did you say?” he asked, his eyes pinned on Leland.

“Nothing, man,” Travis said quickly. He put a hand on Leland’s shoulder. “Come on, guys, let’s show the Black Bears some support.”

Travis began clapping, and other spectators joined in, but Leland was still trying to win a staredown with Alex.

“I said you’re a loser, Al,” he taunted. “I thought you were rock bottom in high school, but you’re even more of a loser now. I’d kill myself if the highlight of my life was watching high school girls cheer at a football game.”

“Guys, it’s freezing out here,” Travis said, again putting his hand on Leland’s shoulder. “Let’s go back to my house and catch a game on television.”

Leland shook off Travis’s hand. “I was never scared of this stupid thug in high school and I’m not scared of him now.” Sneering at Alex, he said, “What are you doing for dinner today, Al? Gonna get drunk with your pa over a bowl of corn nuts at Buzzy’s Tavern? Or are you gonna be taking your ma to the vet’s office in Charleston to get stitched up, like last year?”

Ritchie snickered, pretending to hide it behind his hand.

“Quit it, Leland,” Travis urged. “We’re not in school anymore.”

Alex calmly ground out the butt of his cigarette under the heel of his heavy black boot. “I never beat your ass for you in school because I didn’t want to get expelled. You might want to listen to your buddy Travis, because he’s right. We’re not in school anymore.”

Leland laughed. Ritchie scooted a safe distance from him, no longer amused. Travis continued appealing to Leland, looking anxiously from his friend to Alex.

“I’m not scared of Alexander Brannon,” Leland announced, drawing the attention of their nearest bleacher mates. “What’re you gonna do, Al? If you lay a hand on me, I’ll have you arrested for assault.”

“Dang it, Leland, can we all just watch the game in peace?” Travis pleaded.

Throwing off Travis’s hand, Leland stood and approached Alex. Leaning over him, he jabbed a finger at Alex and ranted, “I’m not backing down from Al Brannon. What’s he gonna do in front of all these people? Nothing! A loser like—”

Leland’s fingertip brushed Alex’s forehead, and Alex heard nothing past that moment. The sudden rush of blood to his ears deafened him to Leland’s taunts, the roar of the crowd cheering Rafe’s latest touchdown pass and Travis’s attempts to pull Leland back.

Alex’s left fist was connecting with Leland’s jaw before Alex even knew what he was doing. His blow sent Leland hurtling over the back of the bleachers, and his momentum carried him after him, and both young men fell eight feet to the frozen ground. On his hands and knees, Leland tried to scramble away, but Alex grabbed his ankle and yanked him back, flipping him over. Straddling him, Alex let his fists speak for him, finally answering every taunt, jeer and joke that Leland and others like him had subjected him to from kindergarten right up to this moment. Every derogatory comment hurled at him about his mother, every nasty comment about his father, even the pity from people like Travis was answered with a blow to Leland’s head and face.

Oblivious to the people who had climbed the bleachers to watch the fight from above and those who had circled around them for an even closer look, Alex didn’t pause until he looked up and saw Faith at the front of the crowd.

A different kind of humiliation gripped him, and he sat back on his heels, his chest heaving. Leland wriggled away from him, his forearms and elbows still protecting his face.

“You had that coming, Leland, and you know it,” Travis admonished his friend. “Show’s over, folks. Did y’all come out for a game or a fight?”

His eyes fixed on Faith, Alex couldn’t move until the murmuring started. Voices, all of them so low he couldn’t identify their owners, overlapped and drove him to his feet.

“…such a shame…”

“His daddy has a short fuse, too…”

“…poor boy…”

“…white trash…”

Alex shouldered his way through the crowd and hurried to the parking lot.

“Wait!”

He recognized that voice, but he kept walking.

“Alex, wait!”

He hopped onto his Harley and turned the key in the ignition. The ferocious roar of the Harley’s rebuilt four-cylinder engine scared most people, but Faith showed no fear as she straddled the front wheel to stop him from leaving.

“Don’t you ever make me chase you again!” she shouted over the bike’s growl.

He tightened his hands on the handles, his only indication that he was leaving. With or without her. Faith understood him perfectly, because in the next instant she had mounted behind him. Once her hands had knotted themselves securely at his waist, he took off, the wheels of his bike spraying gravel behind him.

He drove with no destination in mind, and it was all he could do not to keep going until he hit Interstate 64. He had everything he needed right there with him, and there was nothing to stop him from heading west and driving until the road ran out.

His vision of escape vanished when Faith began to shiver behind him. His denim jeans and heavy leather jacket protected him from the wintry wind, but Faith was far more vulnerable. He couldn’t take her to his house, and he didn’t dare take her home, so Alex brought her to the one place he could call his favorite in Dorothy.

The Harley climbed Kayford Mountain only as high as the trails that had been cut by the heavy machinery used by the Lady Emiline Coal Company. Alex parked the bike in the shelter of the boulders that had been cleared after a recent blast on the mountainside. He took off his jacket and wrapped Faith in it. Her teeth stopped chattering the instant he zipped it up around her. The jacket was big on him, so it all but swallowed Faith.

Holding her hand, he helped her pick her way a bit higher on the mountain, to an area that hadn’t been deforested by her father’s strip mining operation. Most of the larger wildlife had been frightened off by previous explosions, but the smaller, friendlier animals could still be heard darting in and out of the underbrush. A white pine that had fallen because of weather or the concussion of a mining blast made a cozy bench for them, once Alex had brushed it free of leaves and smaller branches.

“You come here a lot, don’t you?” Faith asked as she sat crosslegged on the log.

“What gives you that idea?” he responded.

“There’s no moss growing on top of this log and the brush is flattened in front of it.”

“I like the way you notice things,” he said. He sat close to her, hoping to steal a little of her warmth.

“I noticed Leland Birch provoking you into a fight.” She pushed back the sleeve of his jacket so she could take his hand in hers. She turned it over, wincing at the sight of his bruised knuckles and the blood caked in their creases.

“Birch came off the worst for it.” Alex stared beyond the trees and onto the quiet town far below them. “Dorothy looks so much better from up here. I can see your pool.”

“It looks like an ice mint Jelly Belly.”

“Can I have that back?” he asked, indicating his hand with a tip of his chin.

“No.” Faith held his hand tighter, and he made no move to take it from her. “Why did you let Leland get under your skin? He’s a total ass.”

“He thinks he’s so much better than me,” Alex said.

“Do you think he is?”

“Hell, no.”

“Then if it isn’t true, who cares what he thinks?”

Alex chuckled. “I wish it was that easy to let go of stuff like that.”

“It is,” Faith assured him. “You think I don’t get crapped on? Every time Leland Birch calls me Brillo Head, or Bethany Brewer tells me that there are no black prima ballerinas, I just think about where I’ll be in ten years and where they’ll be. Leland will be running his dad’s used car lot, and he’ll probably have the same terrible comb over. Bethany will find a way to trap Travis Gates into marriage, and she’ll be living the soccer mom life with a frooty bigger than the mayor’s wife’s.”

“Where will you be, Faith?” Alex asked.

“Anywhere but here,” she answered wistfully. “I hate it here sometimes.”

“You’ve got it made, princess. You don’t have any problems you won’t outgrow.”

“I won’t ‘outgrow’ being black in an all-white town,” she said. “I can’t ‘outgrow’ being thought of as the spoiled rich girl.”

“Those aren’t real problems,” he said.

“They’re as real as yours.”

“You’ve got the whole world out there for you, Faith,” he said passionately. “I was born in this town, and I’m gonna die in this town. There are only two Brannon family traditions—alcoholism and dying in the mines. My dad’s got the alcoholism sewed up, so I guess I’ll end up dead in a mine like my granddaddy.”

“Then I guess you have to get outta Booger Hollow,” Faith said dryly.

Alex laughed, and the sound echoed off the trees. “You always know the right thing to say.”

“You have a nice laugh,” she told him. “It’s a shame you don’t do it more often.”

Rubbing his hands together to warm them, he shrugged. “Yeah, well, I don’t have much to laugh about most days.”

Faith unzipped his jacket and slipped out of it. “Put this back on,” she directed, handing it to him.

“I’m good,” he said, refusing it. “You’re only half dressed.”

“Just put it on,” she said.

He did so, and she switched position on the log, sitting with her back to him and scooting back until she was nestled between his legs and cradled against his chest. “We can both keep warm this way,” she said, pulling his arms around her.

“I’ll say,” he sighed, nuzzling her soft curls with his nose and chin.

“Let’s not go back,” Faith suggested. “We could just stay up here forever.”

“It might be a little noisy with your dad blasting the mountain away to get to the coal.”

“Don’t mention him,” she said. “You’ll ruin the fantasy. Did you ever read a book called
My Side of the Mountain
?”

“Didn’t catch that one.”

“It’s about a boy who spends a year living in a hollow hemlock tree in the Catskills,” Faith said. “Any hollow trees around here?”

“I think there’s an old pine stump somewhere nearby, but a family of raccoons has dibs on it.”

She playfully drove an elbow into his ribs. “Don’t make fun. It’s a good book, and I’m serious. I’d love to get away from Dorothy and start life somewhere new and exciting.”

“I’d settle for new,” he said.

“Take me with you.”

“Where?”

“When you leave, take me with you.”

“I wish I could.” He brought his legs to the top of the log, forming a cocoon of warmth around her with his body. “You don’t know how much I wish I could, Faith.”

* * *

“Zander, you’ve not heard a word we’ve said, have you?”

Olivia’s cool, calm inquiry gently pulled Zander from his warm memories of Faith Wheeler. “Forgive me,” he said quietly. “I was thinking.”

“I would ask what has you so completely absorbed, but I believe I already know,” Olivia said. “The very person we’ve been talking about for the past twenty minutes.”

“Faith just might expose me for a fraud,” Zander said.
And I wouldn’t blame her for one second.

“Don’t underestimate your publicist,” Olivia said. “There’s nothing I can’t spin. Alexander Brannon’s story is far better than Zander Baron’s.”

“I don’t ever want anyone to know who I really am!” he stated with a bit too much vehemence. “If it gets out, I’ll disappear again. For good.”

“There’s obviously more to your past than you’ve told us,” Brent said. “What are you hiding?”

“Your mother did a very thorough background check on me before I moved into your house,” Zander said. “You don’t have to worry about any skeletons falling out of any closets.”

Zander took his earlobe between his thumb and forefinger—the nervous mannerism
Entertainment Express
magazine recently credited with stealing the heart of every female moviegoer in America over the age of nine. The motion had no effect on Brent, other than letting him know that Zander wasn’t ready or willing to supply new revelations about his past as Alexander Brannon.

“There it is, then,” Olivia said lightly.