Wild Midnight (19 page)

He gave her a gentle push out of the bed. When she turned around he had pulled the sheet up to his chest. “Just go out,” he said, “don’t turn on the light. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
 

Fifteen minutes later he had showered and slipped on his jeans and boots. He stood with his lean body propped against the partition that separated the tiny kitchen from the dining area as Rachel boiled a pan of water for instant coffee, his shirt on the back of the kitchen chair. She could not take her eyes from the flat sectioned planes of his muscled belly and tanned, golden skin. The set of his narrow hips joined long legs at a point where a very noticeable bulge in the front of tight-cut faded jeans testified to his masculinity.
 

“I love a woman who can make a pot of good, homemade coffee,” he teased her dryly. But he was watching her just as closely.
 

“I drink tea.” She was so tired now her hand was unsteady. How much sleep had she had? Three or four hours at the most? It was almost five o’clock. “I just happened to have this jar of instant.” Rachel stared down into the glass container where the brown grains were stuck together in a solid mass. “It must be pretty stale.”
 

“It’ll do. You have beautiful legs,” he murmured as she handed him the cup. “I’ve been looking at them under that thing you’re wearing.” She stared at him uncomprehendingly, and his golden eyes glinted in amusement. “I keep looking for some little flaw to mar all that perfection. Heavy ankles, knock knees, and there’s nothing.”
 

“You’re teasing me,” she said.
 

The heavy sexuality that brought them together still hung in the air.
 

“You need to be teased,” he said over the rim of the cup. “I’m no damned Quaker.”
 

She stared at him. “No, you’re certainly not.” Her body was still tired from his lovemaking, and she wanted to sleep in his arms.
 

“I’ll go in a minute,” he said in a low voice.
 

Rachel leaned against the kitchen counter, her hands pressed to its plastic top. This was a bad hour; her tired mind nagged at her. And she felt guilty. She said abruptly, “Your cousin, D’Arcy, is in love with you.”
 

He was perfectly still. “If she is,” he said finally, “she hasn’t said anything to me about it.”
 

But she
is,
she wanted to yell at him. Why else would D’Arcy go back and forth to Draytonville, talk about nothing else but Beau Tillson? When she turned he was still holding the cup of coffee to his mouth, eyes narrowed.
 

“She’s at your house now, waiting for you.” She met those jaguar eyes calmly. “She drove me back from Charleston.”
 

“I don’t know a damned thing about it.”
 

“But she ... are you—”
 

“No.”
 

Nothing more than that. From the expression on his face, she knew he spoke the truth. But somehow that made it worse.
 

“Darla Jean,” he said carefully. “Not D’Arcy. And I told you it’s over with Darla Jean. I kicked her out.”
 

“She’s unhappy,” Rachel said in a miserable voice.
 

“I can’t do anything about that. D’Arcy doesn’t bother me and I don’t bother her.” His eyes glittered coldly. “Do you want to know about Darla Jean? Is that’s what’s bothering you?”
 

“No.” She turned her back to him and fumbled to put a tea bag in her waiting cup.
 

“Fair enough.” He used the same soft, controlled voice. “And I won’t ask about your husband.”
 

Rachel whirled to him, startled. “But I don’t mind telling you.” She wasn’t trying to hide Dan Brinton from him and didn’t want him to think she was. “He was a doctor, just finishing his residency. We were going to Africa to work together, it was his dream.” Eyes unfocused, remembering, she stared at a spot above his light-streaked head. “He hated working twenty-four hour shifts on call, he said it was just to test the resident’s endurance and no good for the patients. One night he came home from the hospital and he had ... he had...” She heard her voice stumbling over the words. “He collapsed at the table just as I was putting dinner in front of him. It had been waiting for hours. Chili, Dan loved it.” She heard herself trying to laugh. “Homemade chili, and it was almost dried out. He said, ‘Ah, this looks good,’ and it didn’t, it was horrible, but he wanted me to feel better. And then he ... he fell sidewise in his chair and fell on the floor. He had a stroke. It was impossible, that’s what everyone said at the funeral. He was only twenty-eight.”
 

She waited for the echo of pain that always came when she thought of how Dan had died. “He was kind and good and gentle. We went together all the time we were in high school, then in college. We always knew we would get married.”
 

She stopped, seeing the look on his face.
 

He slammed his empty cup down on the kitchen counter.
 

He didn’t touch her but he towered over her, face stony, palpably menacing. “I didn’t ask you to tell me this, did I?”
 

She didn’t really hear him. There was an odd emptiness where the pain for Dan should have been. It was not that she had forgotten her husband, it was just that the pain was gone. All that was left was a sweetness, a small hollow ache.
 

“What?” she whispered.
 

“Goddamn you.” His voice was full of fury. “Stop thinking about him.”
 

She stared at him, busy with what she was feeling. She couldn’t bring herself to explain, she was still reeling with the shock of it. She put her cup down on the counter beside his. “It’s late,” she murmured.
 

He was still staring at her. A span of time, it must have been only moments, stretched on, broken by the faint creaking of the eaves of the old house and by the dawn wind rustling through the trees.
 

Finally he said with deadly softness, “You didn’t sign the agreement I gave you.”
 

She thought about it a moment, faintly surprised. “No. And we have to do something about the road. But we need an agreement that doesn’t involve money.”
 

“My thoughts exactly.”
 

“You agree?” she asked, startled.
 

He kept watching her face. “Your crowd can have limited use of the road.” He paused, deliberately. “In return, I get what I want.”
 

“What you want?” she whispered.
 

The corners of his mouth turned down. “What I told you.
 

What I got last night. Whenever I want it.”
 

Rachel blinked. Then, like the delayed action of drops of acid slowly etching their way into her consciousness, it came to her. “You’re not serious.”
 

“The same way.” He was watching her closely. “Hot and willing. Just as I told you.”
 

Rachel began to redden, a deep painful color that beat in her cheeks and forehead. “That’s so crude. That’s not what you said.”
 

“You get the use of the road.” The lines from his nose to the corners of his mouth were grooved deeply, harshly. “I get you when I need you, in bed.”
 

Like a sleepwalker she saw him lower his hands, grip the soft flesh of her upper arms until it hurt. Then his mouth was on hers, punishing her, bruising her lips against her teeth. She was stunned by the savagery of his kiss. Her head was bent back so far that she felt her neck would break. When he let her go she staggered back against the kitchen counter, her groping hand overturning her cup of tea.
 

Beau Tillson picked up his shirt from the kitchen chair. “I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
 

Chapter Ten

The sun shone hotly as the slow turning of the low-country spring colored the brown wires of Virginia creeper with bright green buds and drew out the purplish orchidlike foliage of the swamp cabbage in the lush river bottoms. Migrating squadrons of ducks and Canada geese filled the vast salt marshes; when disturbed by a crabber or a fisherman’s boat they rose into the air with a thunderclap of thousands of wings. A fleet of trawlers from Beaufort seined the mouths of the Ashepoo River for the spring run of trout, their nets suspended from midship cranes like the folded wings of huge gray and white butterflies.
 

But in the co-op’s field the muddy furrows of a week’s downpour baked out slowly in the sun, the surface hardening to form a dark crust that broke into a shower of grayish sand when rubbed between the fingers. And as far as the eye could see, the rows of tomato seedlings lay in the dirt like dying green worms.
 

Rachel was stunned by the complete disaster. “You should have called me in Charleston,” was all she could say. “I did leave my telephone number.”
 

“T’wouldn’t have done no good,” Billy Yonge responded stoically.
 

With perpetually sad pale blue eyes the co-op’s chairman looked out from under the brim of a frayed straw western-style hat, one side held up to the crown with a piece of black electrician’s tape. His father, J. T., wore overalls and a baseball cap, his spare body bent in a slouch from years of hoeing field crops, his eyes the same faded, noncommittal shade as his son’s.
 

“Can’t nobody do any good, until this here field dries out some,” Billy went on. “You go in there with a tractor, the weight of it’ll tamp down that dirt like concrete. Have to have a gang plow to turn it then.”
 

His father nodded in agreement.
 

One couldn’t argue with the Yonge’s years of experience. Rachel supposed she understood why Billy Yonge hadn’t called her to tell her about the ruined crop while she was in Charleston. “No use worryin’ about something till you have to,” was the tenant farmer’s philosophy.
 

Not many of the cooperative’s members had showed up for the meeting in the tomato field. There were only the Yonges, Theo Turner—a tenant farmer who worked part time in a Western Auto store in Hazel Gardens—Uncle Wesley and some of his teenage grandsons, and as Rachel noticed with surprise, the elegant figure of Loretha Bulloch. The young black woman had come in a telephone company car with customer’s service representative written on the door below the familiar green bell. The beautiful woman D’Arcy Butler had described as the mother of Til Coffee’s son stood at the open door of the company automobile. She wore a beige polyester pants suit which fitted her slender, attention-getting figure perfectly, her mass of charcoal Afro curls framing an exquisite face. She was so lovely it was impossible to ignore her, but Loretha made no move to join the group. She stood watching from a distance, and even seemed impatient to leave.
 

Jim Claxton hadn’t showed up, either, much to Rachel’s disappointment. Few people seemed to want to face this disaster.
 

“It’s hard to get Claxton this time of year,” Billy Yonge tried to assure her when she mentioned his absence. “It’s planting season. Besides, this rain hit the whole county hard. They had washouts nearabout everywheres in the county.
 

Rachel stood helplessly with the handful of farmers as they surveyed the ruined field. A few bent over to examine the limp seedlings of the nearly dead tomato crop. The last of their grant money, she couldn’t help thinking. The only thing left now, the Yonges had assured her, was to replant or forget it. Replanting meant going to the bank for a loan.
 

“If’n you want to go back to tomatoes,” the chairman had said. “And that might not be such a good idea, since it’s getting so late in the season.”
 

Rachel tried not to look any more dismayed than she felt. As executive secretary she would be the one to approach the bank about financing. Inwardly she groaned. Her organizing skills were barely adequate, even she would admit that; her knowledge of agricultural financing was even shakier. She really needed Jim Claxton’s good advice.
 

“Whatever we do, the members will have to vote on it,” she said.
 

Billy Yonge shrugged. “Kinda hard to get people together for any kind of meeting when you lose a crop like this. It’s human nature to lose heart. But I guess you’re right. We better call a meeting this week. Same place?”
 

Rachel nodded. The Yonges had the only decent-sized farmhouse where they could meet. Their grant money had originally called for a storefront office for the cooperative in Draytonville, but the group had never had the fund-raising events to match the seed money, and now even that was gone.
 

The Yonges and Theo Turner started for their pickup trucks. After a moment’s hesitation Rachel turned toward the edge of the field where Loretha Bulloch stood by her company car, curious as to what brought this elegant young black woman to the scene of their disaster.
 

She managed a smile as she approached. “I’m Rachel Brinton,” she said, sticking out her hand. “I remember you helped plant the tomatoes.” She looked around at the drowned fields, managing a small smile. “We don’t seem to have much left.”