Billy Ray lowered himself to his desk chair and turned it sideways so he could stretch out his legs. It had taken a week before he could sit comfortably at all, but now, two weeks after the beating, his bruises were fading. Yesterday he had discarded the sling Garth had given him to immobilize his shoulder.
“What do you want first? The morning’s faxes, the mail or the phone messages?” Fran had followed him to his desk; now she stood over him like a mother who was determined to make her teenage son clean his room.
“Give me the most important of each.”
“We’re still not caught up. Next time you get beat up, do it on vacation.”
“Good idea. Next time I’ll ask for a rain check.”
Her voice didn’t soften, but her expression did. “You look a little better today.”
“No place to go but up.”
“I’d like to wring that Doug Fletcher’s neck. If he wanted to, he could find out who did this!”
But, of course, Doug didn’t want to find out. Billy Ray had limped into Doug’s office the morning after the attack, only to find Doug unavailable to him. Doug had taken three days to get around to talking to him, and nothing good had come from their conversation.
Doug hadn’t bothered to ask Billy Ray how he was doing. He’d sat at his desk with his feet propped high, and he’d shrugged after listening to Billy Ray’s account.
“If you didn’t see anybody, I can’t help you much. We didn’t get any leads worth following from evidence at the scene. Most likely somebody was looking for cash or parts to sell, and you got in the way. But I’m sending a patrol by the garage a couple of times a night for a week. That ought to keep vandals away.” Doug didn’t look at Billy Ray as he delivered that message. He looked just past Billy Ray’s injured shoulder.
Billy Ray wasn’t quite speechless with anger. “It went beyond vandalism, Doug, and you damned well know it! Somebody beat me but good. And they did it because I’m involved with Carolina Grayson.”
“Why are you involved with that woman, Billy Ray? Back in high school she threw you over ‘cause you weren’t worth a plugged nickel to her. She’ll do it again the minute she doesn’t need you anymore. Now, I’m not saying what happened to you had anything to do with that. I’m not saying that at all. But I am telling you, friend to friend, that you’d be a whole hell of a lot better off without her.”
“Friend? What kind of friend, Doug? It’s been three days since the attack, and you’re just getting around to an interview.”
“Joel told me you didn’t see anybody that night. I was busy trying to figure out who might have done it.”
“You were busy losing the trail.” Billy Ray lowered his voice and advanced on the desk. “You were busy letting Judge Whittier Grayson tell you when to piss and when to grin, you lowlife Judas!”
Doug got to his feet. “Get out of my office, or you’ll wish you hadn’t come in the first place!”
And because, and only because, there was no reason to stay, Billy Ray had left.
He hadn’t heard from Doug again, but he hadn’t expected to. Doug had declared his allegiances.
Now Billy Ray looked down at the papers covering his desk and grimaced. “If Carolina calls, or my grandfather, put them through. Otherwise, hold all my calls. I’m going to try to make some headway.”
Fran left, and an hour passed. He was just taking a break when his intercom buzzed. “Carolina’s here. Do you want me to send her in?”
Billy Ray got to his feet as Carolina opened the door.
“Billy…” She smiled with her lips, but her eyes were sad. Something had happened. Something more than just seeing him bruised and battered.
“Close the door.”
She did. He came around his desk and perched on the edge. “What’s going on?”
“You want the good news first?” Before he could answer, she went on. “Sure you do. Because once I tell you the bad, the good’s going to get lost.”
“Let’s hear it, then.” He held out his hands.
She took them in her own, but she didn’t move closer. “I got the job.”
“Carolina…” He pulled her between his legs until they were face-to-face. He smiled at her. She had applied for half a dozen jobs in town, but he knew she was talking about the job at Wilton Mills. “I’m so glad. That’s wonderful. When do you start?”
“I go in next week to fill out forms and have the company nurse do a physical. I can take the rest of the week to settle the kids into their day-care classes. Then I start the following week.”
“When did you find out?”
“Just about fifteen minutes before I got these.” She dropped his hands and reached inside the purse slung over her shoulder. She presented him with a sheaf of legal documents.
He scanned them. As expected, the Graysons were petitioning the court for custody of their grandchildren.
“We knew.” He handed the papers back to her. “Now the fight’s out in the open.”
“I’m scared.”
“You don’t have to be. We’ll win.”
“Will we?”
“We’re going to pull out all the stops.” He took her hands again. “Look, I’ve been thinking about something. Hear me out.”
“What’s that?”
“I want to give the Graysons visiting rights in the meantime. Now that they’ve begun this thing, they’ll petition Judge Sawyer to let them visit, anyway. If you fight, it will make you look bad. If you let them visit without dragging it through the court, you’ll be in a position of strength. We’ll have them sign a document promising they’ll abide by your terms. Time, place, frequency. If they don’t sign, that will make them look like they don’t want to cooperate.”
“I don’t want the kids in the middle of this.”
He squeezed her hands. “They already are. I’m trying to make sure they aren’t torn apart in the tug-of-war.”
She didn’t look convinced, but she nodded. “I trust your judgment.”
He pulled her hands to his chest, cupping them against his tie. “Why don’t you let them take the children late Wednesday, from say, four to seven?”
“The judge won’t even be home until six or so.”
He grinned. “That occurred to me.”
“You think this will appease them?”
“It’s a start. But if you have any reason not to let the children go, anything you haven’t told me before, now’s the time. Will they be safe?”
She nodded reluctantly. “Safe, but not happy.”
“You’ll have to prepare them well.”
She sighed and nodded again.
He didn’t say anything else. Carolina had waited on him hand and foot during his recovery, but they hadn’t been this close since the day he had kissed her.
“I’m proud of you.” He brought her hands to his lips and kissed them. “You’ll get through this.”
“Billy…”
He smiled at her with his eyes.
“Does it hurt when I touch you now?”
“We could see.”
She slid her arms around his waist, but she didn’t squeeze. “What will I do Wednesday? I’ll go crazy.”
“Have an early dinner with me.”
“The last time I tried to have dinner with you, somebody beat you senseless.”
“Come to my house after you drop off the children.”
She leaned forward and gently kissed his lips. The kiss was achingly sweet, and much too short. She stepped away. “Maggie has the children over at the drugstore. I have to go.”
“Guess what?”
She smiled. “What?”
“That didn’t hurt.”
She touched his cheek tenderly.
Kitten didn’t want to see her grandparents. She liked Maggie’s house better. Maggie’s house smelled like blackberry pie, like jasmine flowers and the cool, wide hallways of the old town library, where Kitten went for story hour. At Maggie’s house her bedroom was painted as red as the hibiscus in Maggie’s yard. Maggie took Kitten to pick hibiscus each morning, along with the other flowers that grew in her garden.
The flowers reminded Kitten of Billy Ray’s house, where flowers grew as wild as weeds. She missed Billy Ray’s house and Three Legs the cat. Billy Ray had promised her she could see Three Legs soon, and she wanted to go there real bad.
But she didn’t want to go to her grandparents’ house.
“Kitten, are you listening?”
Kitten faced her mother. Her mother was wearing a yellow sundress with little purple flowers scattered like polka dots all over it. Her mother was pretty when she smiled, but even now, with a frown on her face, she still looked nice. “I don’t want to go!” Kitten bit her bottom lip.
“Kitten, it’s only for a little while. I promise. We have a piece of paper that says they can’t make you stay. I know that’s what’s worrying you.”
Kitten didn’t think a piece of paper could make her grandfather do anything. Once, in Sunday School, her teacher had asked what God looked like, and Kitten had said her grandfather. The teacher hadn’t seemed surprised.
But God was supposed to be good, and Kitten didn’t think her grandfather was. Not really. He made people do things. He punished people, the way God had punished people by sending a flood to cover the earth. But she didn’t think he loved people, the way God was supposed to love everybody.
She didn’t think he loved her.
“I don’t want to go!” She stopped biting her lip. She stuck it out instead.
“Well, you’re going to. And this will be easier on Chris if you cooperate. I’ll take you there, and I’ll pick you up. Billy Ray will come with me to get you afterward. Please?”
Kitten knew that when her mother got that certain look on her face, nothing anyone could do would change her mind. That happened more and more now. Since they had come to live at Maggie’s house, her mother seemed very sure about a lot of things.
Kitten tried again. “They’ll make me be polite.”
“Being polite is important. Please remember your manners.”
Kitten rolled her eyes. “They won’t let me forget.”
“I’ll get Chris up from his nap, then we’ll go.” Carolina left Kitten’s room. Kitten knew she had little choice but to follow.
In the car, she sat with her arms crossed and her lip down to her chin, but her mother didn’t waver.
“You don’t love me!” Kitten said at last. “Or you wouldn’t make me go!”
“I love you. You still have to go.”
When they pulled up in front of her grandparents’ house, Kitten considered a struggle. But already she could feel herself turning into the little girl her grandparents wanted her to be. That little girl seemed like a stranger. That little girl always had to color in the lines and speak softly. That little girl ate everything on her plate and sipped her drink without slurping.
Kitten hated that little girl.
Her mother looked determined, but not one bit happy. Still, she got out of the car and came around to open Kitten’s door before she reached for Chris in the car seat.
She set Chris on the ground and took his hand before she spoke again. “Kitten, try to be on your good behavior. But you’re allowed to be yourself. You don’t have to pretend to be somebody else.”
Kitten frowned. She was surprised her mother knew about the other little girl, the good one who wasn’t really Kitten at all.
She looked up and saw her grandmother waiting, arms crossed over her chest just the way Kitten’s were. Her grandmother was smiling, but she didn’t look happy. She never played with Kitten or Chris. She just told them what to do. Kitten didn’t think that her grandmother really loved her, either.
“If I’m me, she’s not going to be happy,” Kitten warned.
Carolina squatted in front of her so that she could look straight into her eyes. “Nobody can make you something you aren’t, not unless you let them. Do you understand?”
Kitten wasn’t sure.
“You don’t have to be somebody else to make people love you. Because then they don’t love you. They love somebody you aren’t.”
Kitten nodded, because in a funny way, that made sense to her.
“You’re a wonderful little girl. And I love you very much just the way you are. Remember that, sweetheart. No matter what.” Carolina got to her feet and turned to face her mother-in-law.
Kitten slipped her hand inside her mother’s and walked up the sidewalk.
Billy Ray had planned to be home by the time Carolina got there, but a long-distance telephone call kept him at the office later than he’d expected. When he arrived, Carolina’s car was already parked in front of his house, but she was nowhere in sight.
“Carolina?”
“I’m over here.”
He faced the direction her voice had come from, but no one was in sight. “Send up a signal,” he called. “I can’t see you.”
“Left at the camellias, right at the azaleas.” She appeared behind a thicket of overgrown shrubbery in his father’s garden.
He picked his way through the tangle of vegetation, along what had once been a path. Carolina had made a home for herself right in the center of it with a basket of rusting garden tools from the barn.
She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Mind?” He was puzzled. “Are you kidding? But what are you trying to do?”
“I’m going to restore the Garden of Eden.”
“I believe you might need the Lord’s help for that.”
Her face had been painfully serious, but her expression lightened. She nearly smiled. “I don’t think He’ll mind. I’m just pulling a few weeds.”
He didn’t touch her. She didn’t look like a woman who wanted to be touched. “Why?”
“Therapy. I just want to set something to rights. And I can’t tell you how good it feels to jerk weeds out of the ground and banish them to the compost pile.”
“Honey, I don’t have a compost pile.”
“You will by the time I’m finished. A big sucker of a compost pile. Barn-sized.”
“Um…Are you going to leave a plant or two?”
“You’ll love it.” She cocked her head. “Tell me you don’t mind?”
Mind? Did he mind Carolina using his front garden as a pressure valve for more stress than anyone deserved? Did he mind Carolina at his house, pursuing a project that could take years? Decades?
“You do whatever you want, any time you want to. My neighbor up the road wants to bushhog the whole thing and plant corn.”
She slapped her hands on her hips. “He’ll have to answer to me!”
“My daddy used to come out here every night when he wasn’t off drinking. I’d find him on his hands and knees talking to the plants. The garden was always more than he could handle, but I think it kept him from taking his own life.” He shook his head. “Taking it all at once, anyway.”
“He must have been quite a man. He had a vision. I can see it, even if he never quite achieved what he wanted here.”
“Do you want me to stay and help?”
“Honestly? No. I’d like to be alone.”
He understood perfectly. “Good, then I’ll make dinner.”
“Please, don’t go to much trouble. I’m not really very hungry.”
“I promise.”
She flashed him a grateful smile; then she lowered herself to the blanket she’d spread to protect her dress and returned to pulling weeds.
Half an hour later she appeared at his front door, hot and bedraggled, but still incredibly lovely. “Can I come in?”
“You’d better believe it.” He swung open the screen door, and she brushed past him, the hem of her skirt tickling his knees provocatively. “Doing better?”
“There aren’t enough weeds in the world to cure what’s wrong with me, but that helped.” She headed straight for the downstairs bathroom. “I’m going to freshen up, then I’ll help with supper.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s almost finished.”
“I’m impressed.”
“You haven’t seen it yet.”
She gave him the first real smile of the day.
Back in the kitchen, he put the finishing touches on their omelet and slid it under the broiler to brown. Then he ladled fruit cocktail into bowls and popped the handle on the toaster.
By the time Carolina joined him, the meal was on the table.
“This looks great.” She brought the coffeepot to the table, as casually as if they’d been fixing meals together forever. “Cream but no sugar, right?”
He felt a surge of warmth that she’d noticed. Sometimes the small details were the ones that seemed most important. The unconscious intimacies. The unspoken affirmations.
He watched her pour. “And you take toast with no butter. Only a little jam,” he said.
She set the pot on the table. “That’s Gloria’s doing. She’s conscientious, if nothing else. When I lived with the Graysons, she made sure I never had to wrestle with demon fat grams.”
“I’ll bet she didn’t serve omelets.”
“I wonder what the children will have for supper tonight? She’ll let them have a little fat, of course. She understands they need it. But she’ll be certain it’s carefully measured. Champ couldn’t control his diet after he left home. I guess he was making up for all the things his mother never let him have—” She bit off the last word. “I don’t want to talk about Champ or Gloria. I’m sorry.”
“They’re on your mind tonight. Understandably.”
“Kitten didn’t want to go.” Carolina looked up from her plate. She still hadn’t taken a bite. “I had to force her, Billy. When she’s with them, she has to be someone she’s not. The pressure’s too much.”
“Kids can handle a lot of pressure. And at the evening’s end, she comes home to you.”
“For how long?”
He put his napkin back beside his plate and rose. Then he circled the table and held out his arms. “Come here.”
She was against his chest in seconds. “I’m sorry!”
He stroked her hair. It was fine and soft under his fingertips, and even though he was there to comfort her, something altogether male and sexual engaged inside him. “It’s all right. If you need to cry, cry.”
“I need to scream!”
“You can do that, too. Just give me a chance to plug my ears.”
“You’re so good to me!”
He wanted that to be enough, but it wasn’t. He wanted to believe he was a better man than he was, because being needed by Carolina was more than he’d ever expected. But his body was coming to life against hers. In a moment his reaction would be no secret.
He moved away and held her at arm’s length, as if he needed to see her face. “Being good to you is no hardship.”
“Do you know what bothers me?”
He told himself to be patient, that she needed a friend tonight. “What?”
“That I’ve found you again, but our time together revolves around my situation.” She said the words forcefully, as if she was expelling them from deep inside her.
“Your situation is very complicated.”
“Billy, I don’t want the custody issue to be all there is between us. But that’s the way it is. You’ve been beaten within an inch of your life. You’ve lost your best friend. Your practice is going to suffer—we both know the judge will see to that. I’m just somebody who’s making your life harder. I’m a burden, when I want to be more.”
His heart was beating faster. He told himself that Carolina was so badly in need of support that she was interpreting her own gratitude as something else.
He spoke slowly, carefully. “You’re not a burden. I want to help you. As for the rest of it, we can take everything a step at a time.” He was being reasonable, responsible. He was taking care of her, the way he had always taken care of the people in his life.
He wanted to sweep her into his arms and kiss away everything that lay between them.
“I’ve taken my whole life one step at a time, playing by everybody else’s rules. Do you know where that’s gotten me? One step closer to nowhere!” She shook off his hands, a gentle but uncompromising flick of her shoulders. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me tonight. You’re going to start believing everything the Gray sons say about me.”
“No chance of that.”
“Just tell me this. Do you have any feelings for me? I know we’re friends, and I know you’re concerned. I even know that once upon a time you thought you loved me. But we were kids, Billy Ray. And we’re not kids anymore.”
“I don’t think either of us can talk accurately about feelings right now, Carolina.”
“Oh, I can. I want you. That’s one of those feelings that just can’t be denied. I look at you and I go all soft inside, like everything I am is melting and running together. Used to be I just wanted to be with you, that I felt whole when we were together, and I liked the way I felt when you kissed me. But that was a long time ago. And both of us are all grown up now, with grown-up needs.”
He could think of a thousand reasons to speak, but none of them was as compelling as his need to kiss her. Before her last words died away, she was crushed against his battered chest, held securely in his black-and-blue arms. Her lips were soft against his and as familiar as a daydream.
She broke away just long enough to speak. “Don’t do this because you think I need you.”
“Feel how much I need you,” he said, pressing his hips against hers and holding her tightly against him. “I’m not a saint, Carolina. I couldn’t make love to any woman as a public service.”
Her answer lay somewhere between a laugh and a moan. He had remembered how it felt to kiss her, but he had never felt her body squirming unsatisfied against his. Sensations burst inside him like skyrockets. He silenced the inner voice that pointed out she was a passionate woman starved for love, that no one had touched her this way for a very long time. It was enough that she trusted and desired him.
Well, nearly enough.
“Will dinner keep?” She kissed him again before he could answer. She slanted her lips a different way and moaned softly when his opened under them.
“I don’t care.” He ground out the words like the final prayer of a dying man. A lifetime of restraint dissolved around him. He could no more turn away from her than he could turn back time. This was inevitable, and had been since the kiss they had shared in his driveway.
He found the zipper at the back of her dress and inched it down. Under his palm her skin was warm and smooth, and it seemed to heat as he touched it. His fingertips grazed the side of her breast under a satin bra. He lifted the bra higher, releasing her breast, and felt the warm soft mound tighten under his hand.
Her breath caught. She found the buttons of his shirt, as if to hurry him along, jerking them out of the buttonholes. She continued to kiss him all the while, as if she couldn’t bear to end that intimacy. He had vague thoughts of sweeping her off her feet and carrying her upstairs, but he was still weak. And the bedroom seemed far away.
“I love your sofa.” She whispered the words, a veiled plea, against his lips.
He knew what she wanted. In its last incarnation, the blue velvet sofa might very well have suffered the same fate.
“Carolina, this is happening so fast….”
“It’s twelve years later than it should be.”
His hand closed around her breast, and he couldn’t be a good guy any longer. They were adults, and they wanted each other with a fierce hunger. They could deal with the results of this. They could work out anything.
The last button gave on his shirt. Her sundress slid down her arms and pooled on the floor at her feet. He reached for the clasp on her bra.
A knock at the front door rattled through the house.
Billy Ray closed his eyes, his breathing harsh and uneven. “Who in the hell?”
“Billy Ray? Are you in there?”
He recognized his grandfather’s voice. Apparently so did Carolina. She made a sound like glass crashing to the floor.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know—”
She had already moved away and was bending to retrieve and zip the dress. “You don’t have to tell me.
“I have to answer it.”
“Of course you do.”
“Maybe the Fates are trying to tell us something.” He jerked his shirt closed and buttoned it with one hand as he tucked it into his pants with the other.
“Sure. Maybe we’re supposed to wait another twelve years.”
He called to Joel. “Come on in. I’ll be right there.” Then he looked down at Carolina. “Are we going to listen to them?”
She lifted her chin resolutely. “I want you, Billy. I know you don’t trust it yet. Not completely. But I want you. And I’m not going to let anybody, not the Gray-sons, not the Fates, tell me what’s good for me! Never again. I’m a big girl. I know my own mind.”
“It wasn’t our minds talking just now, Carolina.”
“No, it was every part of me talking.” She touched his face. He was surprised to see that her eyes were filled with tears. “All of me, Billy. Please believe it.”