Coming Home to You (11 page)

H
E AWOKE DISORIENTED
from a vivid dream. He sat up slowly, wondering where he’d been and how much he’d drunk to make him feel so bad. Images flashed in his brain but refused to stay long enough to capture. He remembered a woman. Sweet-smelling. An incredible mouth.

Mouth
. That word stuck with him for some reason. He couldn’t remember kissing her on the mouth or kissing her at all, only wanting to—badly. Something about her mouth, about the woman, was important. The answer teased him, then moved out of his reach.

Pulling the sheet away from his body, he looked down and swore. A quick glance at the other side of the bed was more comforting. He was buck naked and had a wound on his ribs he couldn’t remember getting, but at least he was alone.

He tried to shake the dullness from his mind and concentrate on the woman’s face. Her eyes had been green and her hair…brown. Or maybe red. It had been long. He was sure of only that, but the rest of it…her features…her name…continued to elude him.

He remembered her hair spread out across the pillow beside him, but had that really happened or was it part of the dream? He wasn’t sure.

He yawned and ran a hand through his own hair.
The front was oily and plastered to his head. At the crown it stood up as it did every morning like the backward feathers on a Frizzle chicken. He needed a shower to clear his brain and get rid of the cloying smell of sweat that cloaked his aching body. Only he wasn’t sure where the shower was, where
he
was.

He moved to get out of the bed and understood finally why he felt so awful. He was hurt. The pain shot through his leg from ankle to groin. He examined the bruise on his thigh. The leg was grossly swollen. Looking at it made him remember small pieces of the night before. The injury involved animals, but that made no sense. And it had something to do with the woman whose face he couldn’t recall, which made even less sense.

The woman. His thoughts kept coming back to her, her laugh, her smell. Lavender, he thought the fragrance was. For reasons he couldn’t explain, the memories were frightening, as well as pleasant. She posed some threat to him, this woman.

Confusing. Too much for his brain to sort out at the moment.

A gentle knock at the door had him scrambling to cover himself. He dragged the sheet to his waist as a head popped around the door.
Her
head. The woman who haunted him.

“I’m glad to see you finally decided to wake up. I was getting worried.”

When he didn’t speak she opened the door wider and came in. The shirt she wore had to be his. The tail hung to her knees and the short sleeves fell below her elbows. Her legs were bare below the shirt, leaving him to wonder what she had on under it. Her hair
flowed in waves over her shoulders and a becoming blush marked her cheeks.

From the look of her, they’d had sex. From the instant reaction of his body to her presence in the room, the sex had been good. Damn good. Too bad he couldn’t remember it.

She’d stopped inside the doorway, obviously waiting for him to say something.

“Bret?”

His memory came rushing back to assault him, and the pain was worse than the kick of the horse. He knew now where he was. And he knew why the lovely woman in front of him filled him with both lust and dread.

“Are you okay?”

Several seconds passed before he could answer. “Yeah,” he managed to croak out, surprised he could find his voice at all. “Just a little out of it.”

She gave him a sympathetic smile, one corner of her mouth rising higher than the other. “Maybe you’ll feel better once you’ve had something to eat and you clean up. Are you okay to take a shower?”

“I think so.”

“Let me know when you’re through and I’ll bring you some food.”

When she’d gone, he fell back on the bed with a groan, putting his forearm over his eyes. Kathryn Morgan. Here! In his house!

And walking around half-naked.

He didn’t have to lift up the sheet again to know he was fully aroused.
Hell!

A
SMELL EMBRACED HIM
when he finished his shower and hobbled into the hall. This smell he dearly loved,
but it had never filled the air in this house in all the years he’d lived here—bacon frying.

He made his way to the kitchen as fast as the crutches would allow. The sight that met him made him stop abruptly. Kate was standing at the stove with her back to him, swishing her hips from side to side to a classic Fleetwood Mac song on the radio. She had a fork in her hand that she banged in rhythm on the old iron skillet.

She bent over to check something in the oven and the shirt eased up the backs of her thighs.

“Nice outfit,” he said, startling her. She shot upward and whirled, self-consciously yanking down the shirt.

“Do you always sneak up on people like that?”

“Only when they’re wearing my clothes and dancing in my kitchen.”

She glanced down at the shirt and grimaced. “I hope you don’t mind. My clothes had blood on them and smelled like horse. I washed them and hung them outside, but they aren’t quite dry yet.”

The back door was open and he could see the shorts, red top and two scraps of white skimpy underwear flapping in the breeze on his clothesline. If all her clothes were out there, then under that shirt she had on… His gaze went down her body and back to her face, which had suddenly taken on the color of a ripe plum.

“You really shouldn’t be walking around on that leg,” she said. “Go back to bed and I’ll bring you a tray.”

“I need to sit up awhile.”

“Okay, but if you’re going to stay in here, at least sit down so you won’t fall.”

Bret limped over to the table, putting his crutches under the chair, out of the way. A Mystic Waters song began to play on the radio on the counter, and he reached over and switched it off.

She watched him until he was seated, then turned back to the stove to slide something around in the pan he hoped really was bacon.

“Time for another pill,” she said. “Would you like some orange juice with it?”

“I’ll take one in a minute. I didn’t think I had any orange juice.”

“Aubrey was nice enough to run to the store this morning and pick up a few things. I knew you’d be hungry when you woke up since you didn’t eat last night. Do you want me to pour you some juice? We also have coffee and milk.”

“I’ll take coffee,” he said without hesitation. Bacon
and
decent coffee? And he was pretty certain she had biscuits in the oven. The woman was becoming more attractive by the minute.

She took the percolator from the counter and filled his cup. “I assumed you like it perked when I went looking for a coffeemaker and could only find this. Which reminds me, are you in the habit of keeping your dirty glasses under the sink?”

“I wasn’t expecting you to be here long enough to look under my sink. I was hiding them.”

“Oh,” she said, chuckling. “Well, I was afraid you’d get bugs, so I washed them and put them away.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“I didn’t mind. I needed something to keep me busy while I was waiting for you to wake up.”

He watched as she skillfully cracked eggs with one hand and stirred something on the stove with the other. Five minutes later she set a plate of food in front of him that rivaled anything served at the grill—bacon, scrambled eggs, grits and homemade biscuits with gravy.

When he’d eaten almost everything in sight, he leaned back in the chair, put his hands on his middle and groaned. By his best estimate, he’d eaten five eggs, at least eight pieces of bacon, and half a dozen biscuits. He’d washed it all down with three cups of coffee.

They sat for a while, sipping coffee in companionable silence, Bret thinking how strange it was to be doing so, given the events of the past forty-eight hours.

“Aubrey also went to the post office and got your mail.” She stood and got it from the counter, then began clearing the table. “If you’ll tell me what you’d like to eat, I’ll go to the store and get more groceries. And make of list of anything else you need done while I’m in town.”

“Look, just because you were there when I got hurt doesn’t mean you have to take care of me.”

She stopped clearing and sat back down. “I know, but it seems to me that it’s the ideal arrangement, since I’m in town for the next few days, anyway. I need something to keep me from getting bored, and you need someone to take care of you.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“But it’s silly for me to sit around in the motel
when I could come over here and work on my laptop just as easily. Plus, I can cook for you.”

“I don’t need you to cook for me, Morgan.”

“Judging by the look of your refrigerator and freezer, somebody should. Do you eat everything raw or d’you live off frozen microwave dinners?”

“I can cook okay.” It was a good thing Sallie couldn’t talk and dispute that.

“Hayes, I’m better than okay, I’m fabulous. I learned the basics from my grandmother who grew up in Mississippi, and I’ve even taken classes. So I can cook anything, including the home-style kinds of things you probably go for…like, oh, country-fried steak, barbecued pork, mashed potatoes with gravy, peas, turnip greens and cornbread made with buttermilk. Doesn’t that sound good?”

“No,” he said, but with little conviction, starting to fantasize about that country-fried steak.

“How about pork chops stuffed with mushrooms? Or pot roast with potatoes, carrots and onions? I’m great with breakfast dishes, too—pancakes, crepes, pecan waffles, blintzes. Don’t you want me to fix you some of those?”

“No,” he said again, but he wondered what kind of pancakes.

“My specialty is desserts—cakes, pies, brownies and different cookies. And, of course, I make a terrific homemade peach cobbler. It’s the best thing you ever put in your mouth.”

She shut up then and waited for him to protest a final time, but he didn’t because she’d gotten him with the peach cobbler, and they both knew it. Damn those gossiping waitresses at the grill.

“You don’t play fair,” he grumbled.

She smiled innocently. “Why, I have no idea what you mean.”

K
ATE SLID COOKIES
into the oven, set the timer and silently said a prayer of thanks to her grandmother for insisting she learn to cook.

Bret had gone back to bed after eating, giving her time to ride to the motel with Aubrey and pick up her car. She’d keep her room. Moving in with Bret—even temporarily—wouldn’t be appropriate, but he’d agreed she could spend the daylight hours at his house. At night she’d return to the motel to work and sleep.

She’d changed into slacks and a sleeveless top, checked to see if there were any messages and retrieved her computer, also stopping at the pharmacy to fill the prescription for pain medicine Bret needed but swore he didn’t.

His house was now clean and stocked with enough groceries to last a couple of weeks. A supply of bones in the refrigerator would distract Sallie and guarantee Kate safe passage to and from her car.

She turned down the flame on the beef stew she’d planned for his dinner, then went to the bedroom to check on him. He was sprawled on top of the sheet wearing nothing but cutoff sweatpants that he hadn’t even bothered to tie. They drooped precariously off his slim hips and outlined every curve and bulge.

Quietly she picked up the clothes he’d taken off last night and discarded on the chair. He probably couldn’t wear jeans until the swelling went down, but
these needed soaking to keep the bloodstains from setting.

Back in the kitchen she emptied his pants pockets. Wallet, comb, string, nails, pieces of hay. She put the hay in the trash and the other things on the counter. She dug into the small front pocket, and her fingers touched something little and plastic. No, not plastic, gelatin, she realized when she pulled out the gray-and-red capsule.

The medication the doctor had given Bret was on the table, and she opened the bottle and shook one of the capsules into her palm. Gray and red. The manufacturer’s name inscribed on both capsules was the same. This had to be the penicillin pill she’d given him last night and he’d said he’d taken. But why had he put it in his pocket and then lied about it?

She wrapped the pill in a paper towel and stuck it in her purse.

Bret slept for several hours. She passed the time by tidying up his house and browsing through the books in his living room. She was surprised to find two of her own—the biography on Tipper Gore and the one she’d written on the terrorist group Shining Path as an extension of her Pulitzer prize–winning newspaper articles.

She opened the doors to the lower shelves, expecting more books, and found stacks of video cassette tapes. The dates and cities on the labels, she realized suddenly, corresponded to major concerts of Mystic Waters.

Kate had some of the same tapes in her office, copied from film so she could play them on the VCR. Many were from her private collection. The others,
she and Marcus had spent countless hours searching for in the film archives of the universities where the band had performed, and in the holdings of independent filmmakers.

The band’s record company had videotapes of every performance, but Marianne Hayes Conner had issued an edict denying Kate access to her son’s work.

One label in particular caught her attention. Greensboro, 1991. She’d never watched this entire concert, only pieces of it in fifteen-second sound bites on the evening news. She popped the tape in the VCR and pushed Play.

A ripple of something powerful yet difficult to define moved through her as James appeared and his sweet clear voice filled the air.

Kate couldn’t see the audience, but she knew what it was experiencing. James didn’t just sing; James set emotion to music. He seemed to be able to look inside your soul, read what was there and then express your feelings in a way you never could.

At sixteen he’d put together a garage band with his childhood friend, Lenny Dean, and began playing clubs around Chattanooga and Nashville. At nineteen he released
Free Fall
. The eclectic little album used the best elements of rock, folk, blues and pop, and was so unique that it sold more than a million copies the first week.