The Dixie Belle's Guide to Love (11 page)

“The thing is, I came here to
do
something good.”

“Help me make plans for the remodeling.”

“Yes. But I also thought I’d
get
something good. I didn’t know I would
give
something good—or that maybe you’d take it.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“Long time ago you took me to task because you thought I should be more like you—to stick by people, to invest myself in them.”

“I still think that.”

“Ah, but you also have learned to let go. Today when you told me to go back to Memphis I knew a little bit of me had been left with you.”

“We took precautions against that happening, remember?”

“Make a joke, Rita, but you know what I mean. These last few days together, they’ve changed you as much as they changed me.”

“Have they changed you, Will? Really?”

He didn’t answer, and that was answer enough.

“Maybe I can let you go because that’s the only way I can get my life back. Did you ever think of that?”

He started to shake his head, then stopped and just went on gazing into her eyes.

She slid her hand down his cheek until only her fingertips rested on his jaw. “You have thrown things out of kilter since you showed up in my kitchen that morning. Now it’s time to set them right again.”

“I hate the idea of leaving you here to deal with the meddlers, busybodies—and people betting on when you’ll up and start acting like your mother—on your own.”

She wanted to believe he meant it. If he did, then he had changed. He had made a connection and felt responsible. She did not dare think it would make him long to settle in and put down roots, but she couldn’t help hoping it would make walking away a little harder this time. And next time…

Next time it would be another woman, another bed where he hesitated and perhaps finally decided to stay.

“Never you mind what folks will say. They’ve always been generous with pieces of their minds.”

“That certainly explains a lot of the half-witted behavior around here.”

“Besides, all things considered, my status in town may well rise a notch or two.”

“How so?”

“Did you hear that our Rita got herself bedded
by a certain handsome gentleman caller from Memphis?” She put on a nasal twang, animating her gestures to play up her performance.

He chuckled, just barely.

“None other than
you know who
. She said he’d come to town to take some measurements and give her a ‘consultation.’” She made the quotation marks in the air though no one in Hellon would have used the affectation. They’d prefer instead to hit each syllable of the word hard, eyebrows arched and lips pinched white to convey any underlying—and unsympathetic—meaning. “I’ll tell you what—reckon that ain’t
all
he did.”

He laughed outright.

She touched his chin. “I could survive that I think.”

“You ought to flaunt it. Have some fun with it. Show them you don’t give a Yankee dime about their gossip.”

“What? You mean put a plaque on this spot? Local hero slept here?”

“Slept?” He nuzzled her neck. “That hardly tells the tale. I did a hell of a lot more than that.”

“I’m not writing
everything
you did here on a plaque.” She pulled away. “I wouldn’t even know how to begin to describe some of it!”

“You would need a lot of damn big words, maybe even have to make some up.”

“Are you flattering yourself?”

“Am I?” He commanded her gaze to meet his.

Meeting his eyes, she recalled his every touch,
kiss, the warmth and wit and the very wildness of him.

She swore she felt a blush work over the length of her whole nude body. “No.”

“Besides, why limit your marketing possibilities to this one space? I also used the rest room.”

“Maybe we could rename that the William West Junior Memorial Reading Room.”

“You can, but you’d be honoring my grandfather, then, not me. I’m a third.”

“Shame you’re not a fifth, we’d keep a liquor bottle behind the cash register with your picture on it.”

“Given my reputation around here folks’d just think it was a saloon keeper’s version of the face on the milk carton.”

“How about I come up with a whole new menu to commemorate our night together? Start with eggs—over easy, of course.”

“You kidding?” He sat fully up. “There was nothing easy about what happened here last night.”

“For the lunch special how about fried chicken on a bed…of mashed potatoes.”

“Kinky, but I like it.”

“Nothing but breasts and thighs—”

“Goddess thighs.”

“Goddess thighs,” she amended without making eye contact.

“And for dessert?” He ran one finger along the edge of the sheet just above the swell of her breasts.

She put her thumbnail between her teeth and smiled. “We never did get around to indulging, did we?”

The sheets rustled and he stretched his long legs out, “Speak for yourself, I felt entirely indulged.”

“It does beat the bejeebers out of cake for a late-night treat any day.” Rita rolled onto her stomach and laid her cheek on Will’s chest, where she felt more than heard him chuckle in response.

“Do people still say ‘it rocked my world’?”

“Since when does Wild Billy West care what people say?” He went silent. Not simply grew quiet like he’d gone pensive or something but silent—dead silent—at the mention of his old nickname. His whole body stiffened up tighter than a drum. She wasn’t even sure he took a breath for two, three, maybe five whole seconds.

“Doesn’t matter anyway.” Her words rushed out to fill the vacuum his tension created. “Rocked world or not, it’s morning. Time to set everything back the way it was and go on with our lives the way they ought to go on.”

“Like nothing ever happened.” Some would say a man like Will did not have the capacity to sound wistful. But that’s what Rita heard in his barely audible response.

“Maybe more like something happened, but now it’s passed, like…like a…”

“Like a tornado?”

“Like a sweet dream that ends when morning comes. You still have the memory of it, but—”

“The dream was never real. What we had was real, Rita.”

“And I’ll have the muscle aches for days and days to prove it.” She propped herself up on one elbow. “And a faraway look in my eyes and a secretive smile no one can quite explain.”

He pushed the feather pillow into a lump and leaned back against it. The sheet, glaring white against his dark skin, slid down to his belly, then lower still. He made no move to catch it.

She had a twinge of regret when it did not slither completely off the bed.

He sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “Technically, this night’s not over until we get up.”

“Then it must be over.” She raked her fingers through the black coils of hair on his chest, while her gaze wandered to a more southerly point on his wonderful, masculine body. “Because you, sir, are definitely
up
.”

“Up and rarin’ to go, girl.” His movements under the sheets confirmed his boast. “What do you say, Rita? One more for the road? Want to try to reheat some of last night’s passion?”

“Reheat? You make it sound like leftovers.”

“Some things are just plain better the second time.”

“Yes, but we’ve had our second helpings, and our thirds. I’d hate to see us make gluttons of ourselves.”

“Not me.” He nibbled her neck. “In fact I was thinking…”

“You should never think while aroused, Will.”
She turned her head so he could kiss the tender spot under her ear.

“Why not?”

“It’s like waiting an hour after you eat to go in swimming. You try using your brains while in this condition, you might just give yourself a cramp.”

“What a way to go.”

“Go any old way you please, but please, just go.” She inched away slowly.

“Rita, I never intended for there to be any bitterness between us.”

She brushed her knuckle along his chin. “I’m not bitter. I’m…just ready to get back to my life. It was great fun while it lasted.”

“But it couldn’t last, could it?” He said it more to himself than to her outright.

She let it go without further comment.

It took a contortion or two, but she managed to hold the sheet in place both above her breasts and above her behind. Delicately as a charm-school valedictorian balancing a book on her head, she leaned over the edge of the bed to reach for her nightgown. She stretched, ever mindful of her modesty but could not quite get her fingers on the pool of satiny fabric.

“Rita?” The jouncing of the mattress told her Will had started reaching for his boxers. “You might want to get after covering up real quick here.”

It flashed through her thoughts that she could just give the bedcover one firm yank and wrap up in it instead, like lovers in the soap operas always
did. That would save her having to wear something that had spent the night on the Palace floor. It would also spare her the mortification of wriggling into her gown in broad daylight with her never-going-to-happen-again lover looking on.

And leave Will lying there in his naked glory. Good gravy, how would she ever keep up the pretense of dignified detachment
then
?

She gripped the sheet more tightly in one fist and strained to grasp the gown.

“Rita!” His urgency made her look his way.

She narrowed her eyes. He had his shorts on his body and his eyes on the door. “Man, once you admit something is over, you just can’t get away fast enough, can you?”

He leaned over her, his face close. “And you’ve anchored yourself so firmly in one spot emotionally as well as physically you can’t understand there is a time to hang on and a time to let it go. A time for standing and arguing and a time for shutting up and hauling ass.”

“Yeah, I think I recall that quote from Sunday school class.”

“Good thing, cause here’s one of your playmates come to take you to church.”

“My…?” She spun around just as Cozette cut off the engine of her truck parked squarely in front of the Palace. “I am so stupid. How could I let this happen?”

“You are not stupid, but you are naked, and you’d better correct that damn quick.”

She snatched up her gown and tossed it over her head, arms flailing to find the right holes.

“Do that on your way upstairs. I’ll hold her off down here. I won’t open the door for her until I hear your footsteps overhead.”

“Open the door for her?” The gown smashed down her nose. She had to give an extra jerk to yank it down into place. “You’ll never get the chance.”

“Why not?”

“She has a key.”

“Why?”

“You know, you leave a key with one friend just in case?”

“I thought you gave a key to Jillie. She was the one let me in that first day.”

“Okay, so both Cozie and Jillie have keys, they are both my friends and—”

“And Pernel.”

“Pernel what?”

“Has a key.” He wouldn’t if she’d gotten around to changing the locks as she promised, but she decided not to confess that to Will.

“He did used to own this place, you know.”

“And I suppose your daughter has one too?”

“So?” She bent her head forward and tried to finger-comb some life back into the morning-head mop.

“So when are you going to wake up and realize that you, Miss thinks-she-has-every-detail-of-her-life-locked-down-safely-under-her-sway that you
don’t even have control over who comes into your home and when?”

“That could be, but I do have control over who
goes
.” She shoved at his shoulder and turned away.

“Fine.” The mattress shifted as he dragged the sheet from her hips and got up, leaving Rita cold both inside and out.

He’d been too harsh with her. Spoken out of turn. The guilt of it weighed on him but not too heavily. He’d been trained in handling guilt, after all, by the masters—his mama, his sister, and the woman they both liked to refer to as his former “common—and, sugar, I do mean
common
—law wife.”

So he did not feel any great compulsion to look back to see if Rita was shooting daggers at him with her eyes. He tugged on the jeans he’d left on a nearby chair and put on his T-shirt as he made his way to the front door. “You going to run upstairs or just face your nosy friend as God made you?”

“I’ve got my gown on and I’m getting my robe,” she called out, her bare feet slapping lightly over the floor as she dashed into the kitchen.

Will had his hand on the door handle before
Cozette could fit the key into the lock. He held the bolt in place and cocked his head to peer around the image of the pig on the glass. “Morning, Miss Cozie. We’re not open for business, much less breakfast, you know.”

“Oh, for land’s sake, you big bonehead, let go of that lock and let her in.” The hospital gown flapped behind Rita like a cape as she rushed to start the coffee brewing in the machine behind the lunch counter.

“I didn’t come for breakfast.” Cozette folded her arms over an array of shell-and-stone necklaces that hung low on her chest.

“We aren’t open for lunch either. Maybe if you’d call ahead you’d have saved yourself the trip in from Hippie Valley.”

“I was already here.” She nudged at the door’s kickplate with her thick-soled sandal. “I didn’t come from the farm, smart-ass. That’s why I’m here right now.”

“You’re here because you were already here. The drive in from town isn’t the only trip you’ve taken today, is it?”

“Rita, are you in there?” She pressed her face to the window. The clash of her long yellow vest, her formless green dress, and the print scarf tied around her waist almost hurt his eyes.

Rita, whose own getup left much to be desired—much, much to be desired from his vantage point—did not even try to tie her pitiful robe shut. She just came charging from behind the counter toward them. “Just open the door.”

He motioned to her to cover up better, all the while still buying time with Cozie. “Awful early for a social call. Is Rita expecting you?”

“And you had the nerve to lecture me about letting just anyone stick their noses in my business.” Quick as a flash, Rita nudged him aside with her hip. “I do have some say over who comes into my home, and you have no call to try to keep anyone out.”

“You don’t understand.” He kept himself between Rita and her curious caller. “You—”

Cozie beat on the door with the heel of her hand. “I didn’t come to see Rita. I came to talk to you, Will.”

“Me?” He finally stepped back from the door.

“Him?” Rita pushed past, undid the lock and threw open the door. “Why would you come over here at this hour of the morning to talk to Will? You hardly know him.”

“Not as well as you do, it would appear.” Cozie jerked the sides of Rita’s hospital gown together with the decisiveness of a crook closing his hideout curtains.

“Me? I don’t
know
the man! He’s only here to give me some suggestions on the Palace overhaul. Nothing else. Nothing at all. I hope you believe that, Cozette.”

“I do, sugar. I believe anything you tell me.” She tied the neck strings of the improvised robe into a bow. “But before you run that line by anyone else, you might want to make sure you don’t have your nightgown on backwards and your
boobies about to burst forth like dawn on the mountains.”

“My…” She flattened her hand to her chest and shut her eyes.

“I tried to warn you.”

“Bet that’s not all you tried.” Cozie lurched a bit to one side to take a peek at the disheveled rollaway. Being a big woman, she did not have to move much.

Will could not have blocked her view short of leaping in the air, nor could he have distracted her determined gaze, he decided, with anything shy of full-frontal nudity. “You said you came by at this unholy hour to see me?”

Her gaze remained pointedly fixed on the bed in the background much longer than good manners would have allowed. When she did turn to him again she took on a air of a member of a royal court speaking to some raggedy dog hanging around the back door. “I came to tell you your mother is feeling poorly and asking for you to come.”

“How do you know that?” He scratched under his jaw. Cozette coughed. “I’ve sort of befriended Miss Peggy the last few…well, in recent…I go over to her house for coffee a couple mornings a week.”

“Why?”

“Does that matter?”

“I suppose not.” He crossed his arms. “Just never featured you as one of Miss Peggy’s ladies, Cozie.”

“Life is chock-full of surprises. You, of all people, should know that.”

“Not where my mother is concerned. She’s a one-trick pony putting on the same old act year after year. She’s only playing sick.” He’d seen her hold the whole family hostage with bouts of imaginary illnesses, headaches, and illusive pains no doctor could ever diagnose.

But she hadn’t tried it on Will in a very long time and with good reason. The last time anyone summoned him to a sickbed he’d gotten a call at work to come to the hospital where the baby had been born and lived for two months. He’d been unable to get away from the job in time. He had gotten there just as they were unhooking the tubes and machinery that had kept the tiny body alive. For his mother to use a phony illness to force him to pay heed to her wishes went too far. “What the hell is wrong with that woman, anyway?”

“It doesn’t matter what’s wrong with her.” Rita pushed at his back. “You have to go.”

“I couldn’t have put it better myself, Rita.” He glanced at her over his shoulder.

“Good.” She held her robe shut at the top.

“So I won’t.” He turned to Cozie. “It doesn’t matter what’s wrong with her, like Rita says, I have to go.”

“You can’t mean…” What Rita left unspoken told him she gathered his meaning completely.

He dipped his head to Cozette. “Tell Mother I have to go back to Memphis. I’ll call her when I get there.”

Rita gripped his arm. “But she’s your mother, you have to—”

“It’s her old nervous condition all flared up again…oh, and her sciatica.” Cozie put her hand to the low part of her back like that lent some authenticity to his mother’s complaint.

“See? It’s her nerves.” He gave Rita a slow, ornery grin. “If I go over there, I’ll only make things worse. God didn’t create the human being who could get on my mama’s nerves faster than me.”

“God may not have created one, but your parents sure did—Jillie is with her now.” Cozie made a sour face. “And she’s aggravating her something awful.”

“Jillie is aggravating Miss Peggy or Miss Peggy is aggravating Jillie?” Rita’s brow creased.

Cozie opened her mouth and looked up for a minute, then she sighed, her head shaking. “Six of one, half a dozen of the other.”

Rita clicked her tongue.

Cozie’s expression softened. She folded her hands and looked Will square in the eyes. “You really should come.”

“My mother, my sister, sciatica, and nerves?” He rubbed his chin. “We’d just need frogs and locusts to have the whole bag of biblical plagues.”

Rita did not crack a smile at his joke. “Why won’t you go over there and just see that she’s all right? Why is that so hard for you to do?”

Because he was a self-involved jackass; he wanted to throw her old opinion of him back at
her. Somehow, though, he doubted she would accept it as readily now as she would have before. At least, he hoped she wouldn’t. “Don’t you get it, Rita? She’s manipulating me.”

“She’s asking you.”

“It’s a ploy”

“It’s a plea.”

“For attention.”

“For time.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“No, not at all. At her age time becomes her most precious commodity.”

“She’s not
that
old.”

“How can you be so callous?”

“How can you be so gullible?” He strode toward the kitchen door. “There is nothing wrong with my mother. Well, nothing
physically
wrong.”

“You can’t just leave.”

He clenched his jaw. He did not want to say this to her. He did not mean it
for
her. But if he jumped every time his mother pulled some attention-getting stunt, his feet would never touch Tennessee topsoil again. “Can’t leave? Watch me.”

“I have no intention of watching you.” She folded her arms and stood there, her gaze locked on him.

Will could only grab up his keys and wallet and head for the ready escape of his car waiting down the way in the church lot.

“You said you’d changed.” Rita’s lip trembled. “That a little of what you admired about me had rubbed off on you.”

He stopped beside the lunch counter. Guilt twisted like a knife between his shoulder blades. It galled him all the more because he deserved it, and because it was delivered by the one person whose opinion really mattered to him. “Damn it, don’t blackmail me into giving into that blue-tint terrorist’s demands, Rita. If you did that, I could never…”

“Me? The person whose life is such a pathetic mess I can’t even manage it. What makes you think I’d even try to run roughshod over yours?”

“I never used the word ‘pathetic,’ Rita. I would never characterize anything about you that way.”

Behind the counter the coffeemaker sputtered, and the dark brew began to drip into the pot.

She met his gaze and acknowledged his roundabout compliment with a stiffened lower lip and a concise nod. “I’m only asking you to do what you said you would.”

“I always do what I say.” That’s why he was so very careful about making commitments—usually.

“Then stay.”

He should have known that would come back to bite him in the ass. The rules were that promises made while naked and/or lying down did not count. That’s the way things played among the people he knew. But this was Rita.

The aroma of rich, strong coffee filled the air.

“You said you could stay until the work on the Palace was done,” she said softly.

He had. He had said it plain and clear. She had
not asked him for something he had not already promised to give. She had not put expectations on him other than he live up to the bargain he’d made with her. Standing there fully dressed, looking at her, with her hair a sexy mess, her skin radiant, and her jaw slightly scraped from his whiskers, he did not regret the offer. “I never said I’d stay at my mother’s.”

“Sleep in your car for all I care, just live up to your word.”

“You can’t make me go see her.”

“I won’t have to.”

Damn it, she had him pegged—like an insect on a hatpin. “You are going to be the ruination of me, woman.”

“Well, to quote a famous local philosopher—what a way to go!”

“Well, well, well.” Cozie leaned back on the stairway door until it closed with a undeniable
clack
. She ran her hand down her braid, her chin tucked to her chest. “I’d ask what’s gotten into you, but I guess I already know the answer to that.”

“You don’t
know
anything.” Rita marched on through the kitchen.

“I live to learn.” Her footsteps pounded a trail behind Rita. “C’mon, girl, out with the juicy details.”

“There are no juicy details.”

“Liar, liar, pants—Oh my, look at that! You’re not wearing any pants—on fire!”

Rita spun around, almost going nose first into
Cozie’s low, ample bosom, which was decked with layers of hand-strung necklaces. “Cozie, if I didn’t love you so much, I’d give you a pinch that’d leave a mark.”

“Do it, then we could compare combat scars.” She reached out and brushed the pad of her thumb over Rita’s jaw, like a mama spit-cleaning a child. Only, thankfully, without the spit. “That the only place you have whisker burn?”

“This the only place you can be a pain in the rear?”

“You knew I was blunt-honest the day you befriended me, girl.”

“And I did it anyway. Must be some kind of emotional deficiency, the way I gather people into my life that only seem to make it harder.” She plunked down on the wobbly arm of the couch.

“You don’t mean that.” Cozie smoothed one hand over Rita’s hair.

“Not about you, I don’t.”

“But Will, now, he’s another story, isn’t he?”

“What ill wind blew him into my life I’ll never—” She jerked her head up.

“We only meant what was best for you. So, how was it?”

“What?”

“It.”

“It?” Maybe if she played it dense, Cozie would tire of the game and just go away.

“The best?”

She smiled before she could catch herself.

“Well, of course it was.” Gleeful. Only that
word described Cozie’s reaction. “You were only with the one and only Wild Billy—was it actually
wild
?”

“I’m not having this discussion.” Rita pushed up off the couch and started for the bedroom.

“Why not?”

“It’s too…personal. Besides, what went on here last night was moonlight and quicksilver, only a taste of heaven, not the kind of thing a person is meant to hang on to.”

“Why not?”

“Can’t you say anything else?” She settled at her dressing table, finding Cozie’s gaze in her mirror.

“Yeah, I can say that if it was me, I’d hang on with both hands and enjoy the ride while it lasts.”

“But that’s just it, Cozie, it won’t last.” The big pink faceted stone at the center of the Dixie Belle Duchess crown looked cloudy and dull in the morning light. “It can’t.”

“So? Make hay while the sun shines. Or should I say roll in the hay while the sun shines?”

“This is all your fault. Yours and Jillie’s. Yours mostly because Jillie only brought him around because she thought Will and I would both benefit.”

“Well, did you?”

“What?”

“Benefit?”

Rita sighed as she picked up her hairbrush. “Yes.”

“Did you benefit? Simultaneously? Multiple times? I hope he didn’t suffer from premature benefaction.”

“There is no such word and don’t look so smug.” She tore the brush through her tangled hair, ignoring the way it tugged her scalp. “You and that kind of talk is what put the idea in my mind to start with. You and your
‘this is about sex’
speech.”