Wild Midnight (8 page)

She knew she needed to immerse herself in it now, to distract her from thinking about what had happened with Beaumont Tillson that morning.
 

The author, Dr. Lorenzo Turner, had come to the southern coast on a WPA grant during the Depression to make a study of the speech of the descendants of slaves. According to Dr. Turner, the Gullah dialect was a mix of the seventeenth century English settlers and remnants of the slaves’ African languages. The professor had corresponded with fellow academics at universities in cities in Africa, and they helped him identify many words the Gullah speakers used: words such as
demo,
a Mandingo word meaning to hunt;
fere,
Yoruba for trumpet;
kosi,
Kikongo for lion. No African language had survived intact in the New World, Dr. Turner found. But in the area from the Pee Dee to the Ashepoo rivers, bits and pieces of no less than thirty-one African languages survived.
 

The book on the Gullah dialect had truly absorbed her, for when the telephone rang again, Rachel was startled.
 

“Good time to catch up on paperwork when it rains,” Jim Claxton said in his amiable drawl. “I figured you were doing the same. How’s it going? How was the meeting with Tillson and the lawyer about the field road?”
 

Rachel stifled a groan. She was not used to small town life. It seemed, from the way the news had traveled, the whole of DeRenne County was interested in her meeting with Beaumont Tillson. As briefly as she could she told the county agent what she’d told Til Coffee. There was a pause, and then Jim Claxton casually asked if she might like to see a movie that evening. Rachel’s smile faded.
 

“It’s what people around here do when it rains,” he said, his voice softly persuasive. “Can’t get anything else done in a farming community when the fields are flooded, so might as well enjoy it. How about a John Travolta movie that’s playing up here at the mall?”
 

Rachel didn’t know how to answer him. Jim Claxton was certainly attractive in his big, easygoing way; she didn’t know why his invitation dismayed her, but it did. Then she told herself quickly that it would certainly complicate things if people thought she was dating the county agent. But she’d love to get out, she thought, staring past the kitchen alcove to the front room window, where the wind was driving the storm clouds before it. The thought of a movie at one of the theaters in the new shopping mall at the county seat sounded wildly exciting after weeks in Draytonville.
 

She’d better not, she decided reluctantly. Sooner or later she was going to have to return to the co-op’s accounts and bring them up to date; the deadline for reporting how they’d spent their grant money was coming up fast. She had to say no.
 

“Some other time then.” He sounded disappointed. “You’ll let me ask you again, won’t you? You don’t happen to like country music, do you? Next month they’re going to have a bluegrass festival up in Columbia. It’s a long drive, but I figure it would be worth it—if I had somebody along to keep me company,” he ended significantly.
 

“Yes, well, maybe,” Rachel murmured, then ended the conversation.
 

She’d heard that his wife had divorced him, leaving him with two small children. He was probably as lonely as she, she thought, but knew she wasn’t ready yet to begin dating, if that was what one could call it. Nor was she sure she ever would be.
 

The light was fading as treetops trapped the rays of the setting sun, and she turned on the ancient bridge lamp at the side of the couch, wishing the little house were a cosier place to spend the evening. She took up her book again.
 

When the Carolina coasts had been opened up in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the first settlements were dark and fearsome places, fever-ridden, snake-infested, sparsely-populated, and maddeningly lonely. The early white settlers were a hardy sort, hellbent on making their fortunes and, the ambitious ones hoped, founding hereditary empires. The forests were cleared for cultivation only by tremendous effort, and for this purpose slaves were imported from the West Indies and Africa. But a few rainy spells could bring on a quick jungle growth that could wipe out all that had been gained. The hoe and ax wielded by laboring black men and women took a toll. Many planters lost slaves in great numbers from disease, exposure, and overwork before they learned to take care of their “black property.” But there were fortunes to be had in the river bottoms and malarial marshes of the first plantations. By the early part of the last century the coast country had absorbed some 100,000 black slaves from Africa, and from Charleston to the Florida line there were about twenty black families to every white one.
 

Along the Carolina coasts the Gullah speakers practiced strange ceremonies called “conjur,” which were related to the
gris-gris
of New Orleans and the voodoo of the Caribbean. And conjur was full of ghosts—from “hags,” that sat on chests and sucked the breath out of bodies, to “glow fires” and the restless dead, corpses who refused to stay buried and raced the mourners home from a funeral, sitting down by the fire to “get warm,” and refusing to leave.
 

Rachel suddenly felt the hair rising and prickling on the back of her neck, and quickly closed her book. Mr. Wesley’s belief in hants was more convincing now. She loosened her hair from its thick braid and started for the shower, vowing to try not to think about the co-op’s problems for the rest of the day, if she could manage it.
 

She’d just belted her old terry-cloth bathrobe and gone into the kitchen to put some soup on to heat when she heard pounding on the front door. The door bell was broken, one of the many things that needed to be fixed, she reminded herself, and she was going to have to pay some attention to it soon. She hoped it wasn’t Jim Claxton at her door, stopping by on his way home to persuade her to go to the movie with him after all. Scooping back her wet hair with one hand, she hurried into the living room.
 

She threw open her front door to a gust of wind and darkness. The tall figure of a man in a yellow rain slicker stepped in and kicked the door shut behind him with a booted foot before she could open her mouth to protest. He shouldered his way past her into the living room.
 

Beaumont Tillson stood with his back to her as he threw off the hood of the slicker, swiveling his head to look around. With stony disdain he surveyed the shabby room with its sagging sofa, worn plastic tile flooring, the table set for Rachel’s canned-soup supper.
 

She noticed his sun-streaked hair was damp with rain as he lifted his head to stare at her. She watched wide-eyed as he flipped open the metal fasteners of the raincoat and pushed it back to prop his hands at lean hips. He wore a plaid shirt tightly fitted to his muscular upper body, and faded jeans that clung to his thighs and crotch like a second skin. Grooves of fatigue ran from his nose to the corners of his mouth, and his eyes were heavy-lidded. Yet Beaumont Tillson still exuded the same insolent, breath-catching handsomeness of the man in the expensive business suit in the lawyer’s office that morning.
 

“What do you want?” she cried. Instinctively she’d backed away from him, clutching her bathrobe at her throat with both hands.
 

“Want?” he said, his voice husky. “What do I
want
?” The gold-flecked stare moved slowly over her, traveling down the front of the robe to Rachel’s bare feet and up again. “I told you, we haven’t finished talking. You got in your damned car and drove off, remember?”
 

Dismayed that she was actually trembling, she dragged her gaze from the hard, sensuous line of Beau Tillson’s mouth, humiliated that the magnetism of the man held her like the stare of a cobra. Humiliated, too, that he knew his effect on her.
 

She wanted to step to the front door, fling it open and order him to get out, but she couldn’t. Hadn’t she just finished telling Til Coffee and Jim Claxton that it wasn’t in the best interests of the co-op to make an enemy of Beau Tillson? As casually as she could Rachel moved to the dining table, edging around it so it stood between her and him. Her clutch on the front of the bathrobe tightened.
 

“I can’t talk to you n-now.” She was startled at her slight stammer, betraying her nervousness. “Not alone in my house and at this hour. You’ll have to leave. Besides,” she added too quickly, “I promised Pembroke Screven I would let him handle this.”
 

“I’ll sit down a minute.” He scowled at the couch filled with books. “If I can find someplace to sit.”
 

“No, don’t sit!” Rachel cried. “You can’t stay! E—I have things to do. I—I have to dry my hair.”
 

The dark gold gaze rose to the top of her head and lingered. He shrugged. “I’ll wait.”
 

She saw him ease out of the yellow slicker and look around for a place to put it. His clothes were streaked with water, as though he had been working in the rain for hours. The separated strands of his hair fell against the collar of the denim jacket he wore. The sense of tawny, muscular grace and his lean body in jeans and shirt, was electrifying. While she stared she saw him pause, then lift his head to sniff the air.
 

“Something’s burning,” he told her.
 

The soup!
 

With a muffled cry, Rachel turned and ran for the kitchen. The back room was cold, and the sound of drumming rain was loud on the metal shed roof Her dinner, she saw with dismay, had reached a boil, overflowed, and drained down onto the stove’s electric element, filling the air with a powerful odor like burning garbage. Rachel put her free hand over her nose and mouth as she lifted the saucepan from the burner.
 

She jumped violently when Beau spoke, right behind her. “I don’t intend for your crowd to use that road, do you understand?”
 

The sound went through Rachel like knives. He couldn’t have said anything more infuriating at that particular moment, sneaking up on her like that. Her hand had trembled; some of the hot soup had splashed on the floor, just missing her bare feet.
 

She turned to him with sudden fury which a gentle upbringing had not quite subdued. She couldn’t have her house invaded by someone who wanted to bully her, couldn’t be caught in an old bathrobe with wet hair straggling over her shoulders like a witch. And she could not tolerate his attitude about the project that meant so much to her. “‘Get out of my way,” she said between clenched teeth.
 

She was fairly tall, but Beau Tillson towered over her in the small space. So close to him, she was suddenly aware of damp clothes, a faint, pungent sweatiness, and the unmistakable reek of beer. He’d been drinking! It made her even angrier.
 

“I’ve got a paper with me you can sign,” he told her, blocking her way. “It settles staying off my road for five hundred dollars, cash.”
 

“You said three hundred dollars.” It was a mistake to argue, but she couldn’t help herself. “What made you change your mind?”
 

He let his slitted look drop to the neck of the bathrobe, now that her hands were busy with the pan of steaming soup. Slowly, deliberately, he viewed the exposed white curves of the rise of her breasts. “It’s worth it,” he said huskily, “if that’s what it takes to get you people out of my hair.”
 

She couldn’t back away from him, the stove was right behind her. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to get by,” she managed. Her nerves were jangling; it took all her control not to scream at him. He was standing too close, his warm breath touching her face. The hot metal handle of the saucepan was burning through the pot holder. She tried to shift it into her other hand without success. All she wanted to do was get him out of her house, she thought desperately.
 

“You could use five hundred dollars.” The lidded eyes with their incredible long brush of black lashes did not lift from the front of her robe. “Then maybe you could afford to get a better place to live in than this dump.”
 

“Get out of my way,” Rachel repeated. Her whole body was trembling at his powerful closeness. She hated to let him see how it affected her.
 

“Think it over.” The look moved from the front of her robe to her parted lips. “I’ve got,” he said softly, his eyes studying her soft mouth, “plenty of time.”
 

“The living room,” Rachel told him hoarsely. “Go sit down in the living room.”
 

If he had known her, if he’d known how quickly her temper could explode in spite of her hatred of violence, he would have read the warning in her voice. Instead he said silkily, “Come on, I’ve got cattle in the river, I can’t stand here all night. Sign the paper and I’ll give you the money.”
 

Without lifting his eyes from her mouth, he reached into the pocket of his plaid shirt and with two fingers fished out a folded white envelope. His other hand reached for her.
 

With that movement something inside Rachel ripped apart.
 

Perhaps he only wanted to take the saucepan so that she could take the paper. But the memory of those same fingers around her throat only hours ago was still too frighteningly vivid. When his hand snaked out she reacted instinctively. With a small scream she lifted the pan and its contents of half-burned soup and flung it straight at him.