Carolina Girl (26 page)

Before her father could jump all over Cissy’s
declaration, Rory spouted the question that had been killing her for hours.
“Yeah, it will cover the mortgage, but then it won’t cover the
future. We’ll be lucky to break even. What the dickens did you spend it
on, Ciss?”

And then, seeing her sister’s anguished expression,
understanding dawned. With horror, Rory sank onto the nearest chair. “On
us?” she whispered. Thoughts racing, she remembered the little surprises,
the gifts at Christmas she and Mandy hadn’t dared hoped to receive, the
unexpected pair of athletic shoes they needed for gym. “My prom dress,
that’s how you did it! And the gift baskets during finals and...”

Feeling guilty as hell now, Rory grabbed Clay’s glass
of lemonade and took a deep drink, searching her spinning mind for the
impossible. “But why do we owe the bank for things that old? We just
opened the equity account.”

“I didn’t know about equity loans until you took
that one out for Mandy’s braces.” A note of defiance entered
Cissy’s voice, and her fists clenched against the green upholstery.
“The bank said we could pay off the finance company and the credit cards,
and keep the loan payment lower and the interest could be deducted from taxes.
I thought it was a good thing.”

“It was my loan at the finance company,” Jake
said gruffly. “I borrowed against the bike a ways back, and then again
for the pickup. And every time you said I owed on the taxes, I had to borrow
for that. The interest ate me up, and I never could get the balance
paid.”

“I got the credit cards back when Mandy was
born,” Cissy murmured tiredly. “Even her baby food cost a fortune.
And there was that time I was laid off and had no insurance and she got sick.
You were too young to pay attention to bills back then.”

A huge lump formed in Rory’s throat. “You mean
you’ve been paying the minimum payment on credit cards for
fifteen
years
? While continuing to charge on them?”

“Stupid, huh? But Mandy needed all kinds of things my
paycheck wouldn’t cover, so I kept at it. And when I reached the card
limit, they’d raise it for me. Or I’d get a new card. Once I
borrowed from the finance company to pay them all off and swore never to use
them again, but I did. It all kind of snowballed after a while.”

Fifteen years of “miscellaneous” expenses,
doubled and tripled by exorbitant credit card interest. The Girl Scout uniforms
and the “special” birthday gifts that Rory had longed for with all
her girlish heart and never expected to receive. The same for Mandy. Cissy had
spent fifteen years lugging that burden, knowing the money would never be
there, but determined to give her sister and daughter the things she’d
never had.

Tears rose in her eyes again, but Rory choked them back. It
was useless to tell Cissy that they were better off not buying prom dresses and
gym shoes than to mire themselves in debt. As a teenager, she probably
wouldn’t have agreed. And Cissy had been a teenager, too, one who had
taken great pride in providing the things their mother used to provide.

Cissy wouldn’t care that each item charged ended up
costing double or triple the bargain prices she’d scrupulously hunted
down. She’d done it out of love, and Rory couldn’t argue with that.

Fighting tears, she sat down beside her sister and hugged
her. “I can’t believe you never told me. You let me buy a stupid
car when you were covered up in bills. I ought to shake you until your teeth
rattle.”

“Oh, I charged those, too,” Cissy added with a
watery half giggle. “Root canals and caps.”

It wasn’t funny, but Rory laughed out loud.
“Let’s tell the bank to repossess them!”

That struck Cissy as so hilarious that she began to laugh
until tears streamed down her face. Rory joined in, and nearly doubled up with
mirth when her father and Clay stared at them as if they’d gone berserk.

“Here, Jeff, take my teeth,” Cissy howled.
“They should be worth a few thousand. And the prom dresses! You can have
them, too.”

“The shoes! Let’s give him the shoes. And if
it’s timber he wants from our yard, we can deliver firewood to his
door.” Rory rolled on the cushions with glee imagining the impeccable
Jeff Spencer faced with a semi load of burned, stinking pine trunks on the
bank’s pristine marble steps.

“We could hose down the two of them,” Clay said
thoughtfully in the other room. “Maybe we should haul them outside
first.”

“Nah, they get like this every once in a while. Beats
tears all to pieces. Get used to it. They cook something fierce when they get
done.”

Fascinated, Clay accepted that. He and his brothers probably
would have pummeled each other to death over subjects only half as explosive as
years of unpaid debts. Diane had thought only of herself and had grabbed the
money and run when she’d seen the company going down in the market crash.

Aurora and her sister thought of each other first. Clay
guessed it was their upbringing, and he glanced at their father drinking
coffee, a bit of egg still stuck in his beard. The old man didn’t seem
involved, but it had been his support that had kept the girls together and at
home. He’d provided the example of unselfishness they’d needed to
shape their lives.

Clay wondered how he would stack up in the father role. And
then he wondered why he wondered.

Luckily Aurora recovered some of her senses and returned to
the kitchen before he had to work that one out. As promised, she headed
straight for the refrigerator. He hadn’t bought groceries yet, and
he’d better get on it. Their garden had been wiped out.

He was starting to feel much too at home here.

“You gonna tell us what prize you won?” Jake
drawled laconically, as if he hadn’t been chewing on that piece of
information for the last half hour.

Clay noticed with interest that Aurora looked at him instead
of her father while she worded her reply.

“I won’t know anything for certain until Monday,
when I see the lawyer,” she said cautiously.

Clay had a feeling this had something to do with the unexpected
“windfall” she’d mentioned. “Want me to leave?
I’m almost done here. If it’s a family thing, I can go.”

He discovered he was waiting anxiously for her reply.

“It’s not a family thing.” Jake snorted.
“It’s a woman thing. They don’t trust men.”

Clay processed that while watching Aurora for her reaction.

“For good reason, I might add.” Aurora rummaged
in a cabinet and smacked a bowl down on the counter. “But this is kind of
big and we don’t like raising hopes until we know for certain.”

She didn’t even hesitate at including him in the
discussion. Clay studiously returned to repairing the saw so he didn’t
intrude.

“You really won something?” Jake whooped with
delight. “The lottery? Did you get a lottery ticket? How much? A
thousand? That could make a nice down payment on a truck.”

“The BMW insurance will buy a new truck.” Using
a crutch, Cissy hobbled back to see what Rory was doing. “This will do a
lot more.”

Openmouthed, Jake waited, his expectation sweeping away any
lingering gloom. Unable to resist the suppressed excitement in the
sisters’ voices, Clay leaned his chair back on two legs, watching with
amusement as they exchanged glances and led the old man along. From their
cat-in-cream expressions, he’d think they’d won a million dollars
or something.

“Aurora was planning on paying off the mortgage until
Jeff told her how much. So it’s got to be more like five or ten
thousand,” Clay calculated aloud for Jake’s benefit. “Does
the lottery pay that well?”

“Not often, unless they drove over to Georgia,”
Jake said in awe. “Five, Rora? Did you win five thousand?”

Cissy grinned and began breaking eggs into a bowl.
“Rora says I can have a red F150 extended cab with a moonroof and
pinstriping.”

“Hot damn!” Jake surged to his feet. “Them
things’ll set you back more than ten. Are you crazy? We can pick up a
junker for a few thou and use the rest to pay bills.” He stopped on his
way to the patio door, hesitated, and all the joy fled his face. “But you
said the bank wants their money. That and the insurance ain’t even gonna
dent the balance.”

“It will if we have a million dollars,” Rory
said calmly, unwrapping chocolate squares and dropping them into a pot of
butter.

A moment’s reverent silence followed her announcement.

Then Jake let out a war whoop, Clay brought his chair legs
crashing back to the floor, and Cissy laughed aloud at their astonishment.

“A million? You ain’t pulling my bad leg, are
you?” Jake recovered his senses and looked from one daughter to the
other.

“Well, after taxes, we’ll be lucky if it’s
six or seven hundred thousand,” Rory said with a shrug.

Muttering Biblical epithets, or maybe praises, Jake
collapsed in his chair again, shaking his shaggy head in disbelief.
“Where the hell did you win that much? And why ain’t anyone heard
about it?”

“A bottle cap from the soft drinks you bought for us,
and because I wanted a lawyer to set up a trust fund to include all of us
before we claimed it.”

Clay started doing sums in his head as Aurora’s family
exclaimed and argued and laughed over ever-increasingly improbable uses for the
money. Listening to them, just the basic necessities and outstanding debts
would be met after taxes, he calculated. The few hundred thousand left for
investment wouldn’t produce enough income for things like her
niece’s education and her father’s insurance and retirement. Now he
understood her tears over the phone call this morning. They were as much of
frustration as grief that she couldn’t do everything her family needed.

And then there was the small matter of the land around them
going for condos and tourist traps, destroying the turtle nests and the quaint
neighborhood and the home they loved. The picture became increasingly gloomy as
his natural cynicism kicked in.

“A million won’t be enough, will it?” Clay
asked into a sudden silence following Jake’s appeal to build a gas
station in front of his concrete-monument business.

Aurora rewarded him with a bleak smile before she shoved
whatever she’d been mixing into the oven. “If it’s real, it
will be enough to cover the bills. That’s far better than we could ever
have hoped or prayed for.”

But if the bank hadn’t called the loan, they might
have built Jake’s gas station and a future. Clay couldn’t believe
he was even thinking about gas stations out here.

He understood full well that something serviceable like a
minimart must have been Aurora’s hidden agenda, not hot dog or peach
stands. Providing the neighborhood with necessities and her family with the
income they desperately needed made sense, and much as he might want to, he
couldn’t argue with her logic.

Aurora needed a means of obtaining a fast return on her
money so she could build that minimart and a future. Inside his computer, he
had the means to produce what she needed. If they went together and sought
third-party investors, they could multiply that million into many within
months. He should know. He’d done it before.

“You need a solid investment with a fast
return,” Clay heard himself say. He knew better than to get involved, to
let others have any form of control over his hard work, but even as he cursed
his impulsive nature, he continued to fill the gap of their silence.
“You’d have to risk your winnings all in one place, but I know a
pretty sure thing if we don’t foul up.”

Clay knew he had their undivided attention, but he focused solely
on Aurora. He read the hope and skepticism in her beautiful eyes, and called
himself three kinds of fool for letting a night of fantastic sex turn him
inside out, but with a sigh of disgust at himself, he offered, “Bubbles
the Clown is mine.”

“This is insane. I can’t believe I’m doing
this. I
know
better than to trust sweet-talking men with their hands
out,” Rory muttered as Cleo’s pickup roared down the highway toward
Charleston with Clay behind the wheel. “And you don’t even talk sweet
that well.”

“Actions talk louder than words,” he answered
predictably. “We’re good together in bed. That ought to count for
something.”

“Oh, yeah,
count
on it,” she said
sarcastically, still mentally castigating herself. “I’ve had only
one night to base that conclusion on. Bed and money don’t walk hand in
hand with Bubbles the Clown.”

He chuckled, unfazed by her sudden panic. “The game is
called ‘Mysterious
.
’ It made a fortune as a PC-generated
game ten years ago. Jared and I share royalties, so I know the book version of
the script is still selling.”

“But the game isn’t,” she pointed out.
“You want me to invest in a game that no one buys.”

Clay waved away her objection. “While I was out in
L.A., I played with updating it to bring in a whole new generation of kids who
use Playstations instead of the computer. I’ve been wrangling to get the
rights back from the PC people but they want money.”

“And you really think a few hundred thousand dollars
will persuade them to part with the rights they robbed you of?”

She still had a hard time believing his story. Okay, she
believed an intelligent man like Clay could program computers. That
wasn’t too hard a stretch. And maybe a comic artist like Jared and a
computer genius might put their teenage heads together long enough to produce
the “Mysterious” script. But turning it into a computer game that
made millions pushed the limits of her credulity.

Clay was a
millionaire
? Or had been. Past tense.

She fully accepted the part about the software company
stealing the rights out from under their youthful idealism. She couldn’t
think of a lawyer good enough
now
to understand the industry contract.
Ten years ago—nope, they hadn’t stood a chance. Not if their family
hired a hundred New York lawyers.