Southern Comforts (18 page)

“No, not Roxanne.”

“Oh.”

He knew she was dying to ask, understood pride was standing in her way, and decided to help her out. “I promised a friend we'd go out and drown some worms.”

“You're going to drown worms?”

She looked so appalled by that idea, Cash laughed. “Fishing, city girl. We're going fishing on the river. See if we can hook a few catfish.”

“That sounds nice.” She wondered if the friend was tall, blond and buxom.

“You don't have to clean them. But Jamie likes getting out on the boat.”

“Who wouldn't.” Obviously blond. Platinum, no doubt. With big southern hair tailor-made for a beauty queen tiara. And she'd undoubtedly have a perfect figure, the kind made for swimsuit competitions and Playboy auditions. Chelsea envisioned a Miss April clone lounging on the deck of Cash's boat in an itsy-bitsy bikini. “It's a lovely boat.”

He'd lost her. Cash could feel her retreating mentally from the conversation and wondered what he'd said wrong.

“How about I take a rain check,” he suggested. “Tell you what, if we catch enough fish, I'll treat you to my own recipe for fried catfish. I hate to brag, but even Jamie swears it's the second best in Georgia.”

“I suppose Jamie makes the first best?” she asked acidly as her rebellious mind conjured up the blonde wearing high heels, a towering chef hat perched atop her platinum bouffant, and a frilly apron over her swimsuit while cooking up a mess of fried catfish for her talent competition.

“Actually, his mom owns Catfish Charlie's. She holds the title for the best catfish in the state.”

“
His
mom?” Chelsea stared up at him. “Jamie's a man?”

“An eleven-year-old boy.”

“A boy.”

Cash grinned when he heard the obvious relief mixed in with her surprise. “You were jealous.”

“Don't be silly.” She tossed her head and lied through her teeth. “I was not.”

“You were.” Rocking forward on the balls of his feet, he placed a quick light kiss against her tightly set lips. “And
I gotta tell you, Irish, it makes me feel damn good. Since I've been jealous of the worm for years.”

“You were? Why?”

“Because he had you, of course.”

She'd half expected him to mention Nelson's wealth, or family ties. His admission came as a surprise and a pleasure. “That's a sweet thing to say.”

“It's the truth. As for Jamie, his dad Charlie and I were fishing buddies back when we were in high school. He died a couple years ago, and Sharleen's been working her tail off, like a retriever during quail season, struggling to keep the business afloat by herself and trying to keep an eye on a growing boy.

“When Jamie got caught shooting out windows with his BB gun on a bunch of tract houses under construction last fall, I stepped in and took him under my wing.”

“That's very nice of you.”

Cash shrugged. “To tell the truth, it started out as a favor to an old friend. Then I realized that I'm the one getting the benefits from the deal. Jamie's one terrific kid.” He smiled. “Maybe one of these days you can come over and the three of us can go out on the boat. Make a day of it.”

“I'd like that.”

It was the truth. And although she didn't realize it now, later Chelsea would look back on this conversation and realize this was the moment when she'd fallen in love with Cash.

A
lthough her head was splitting and her stomach felt as if giant condors had taken up residence in it, as she rode out to Belle Terre with Roxanne, Dorothy and Jo, Chelsea decided that was a small price to pay for yesterday's indulgence.

Workmen crawled all over the plantation house, like industrious worker ants on a hill. Painters were sandblasting years and layers of paint from the brick exterior; at one end of the house, a scaffolding was being erected in order to repair the chimneys.

“Fortunately, the inspection didn't reveal any major structural flaws,” Roxanne said. “My contractor, Mr. McBride, assured me that all we need is a little mortar mix.”

She went on to describe, in more detail than Chelsea could have possibly wanted to know, the upcoming chimney repairs.

“And voilà,” Roxanne waved her hand toward the chimney stacks as she finished up the lengthy explanation, “the chimney is as good as new.

“Better, even, since Cash suggested raising the height of
all the chimneys another eighteen inches to improve the draw. He assures me that will prevent a recurrence of all those dark smoke stains on the ceilings.”

“You certainly know a lot about construction, Roxanne,” Jo chirped.

“I didn't when I started this project,” Roxanne said as she bestowed her patented public smile on the camera lens. “In fact, I always thought flashing was something dirty old men wearing raincoats did to shock people. Then Cash explained it's the metal seam connecting the roof of the house to the walls and chimneys. He's been a wonderful teacher,” she enthused. “And so incredibly patient.”

Her gaze drifted across the dead lawn to the porch, where Cash appeared to be engaged in a technical discussion over a set of blueprints with a large man Roxanne had introduced as the contractor, Mac McBride. Both men were wearing work clothes and blue hard hats.

“I don't believe I could manage all this without him.”

“You certainly seem to be taking a hands-on approach to all this,” Jo prompted.

“If you're going to go to all the trouble to restore a wonderful old home like Belle Terre,” Roxanne said, playing to the camera again, “it's important to be on-site every day. Because no matter how carefully you plan, there are always surprises. Unfortunately, more bad than good.

“But Cash called yesterday with news about another wonderful find. They discovered that the plaster wall between the parlor and the library had originally been made of brick. Cash suggested using the brick on the oven wall in the kitchen. Isn't that a wonderful idea?”

“Wonderful,” Jo and Chelsea agreed together. Dorothy, Chelsea noticed, remained grimly silent. As she'd been all morning. Since Roxanne's assistant could never be described as loquacious, Chelsea hadn't paid any attention to
the fact that she was even more quiet than usual this morning.

“Can we see it?” Jo asked.

“Of course.” Roxanne was leading the way up the front porch when Cash stepped in front of them.

“Good morning, ladies. Can I help you with something?”

“I was just going to check out the brick you called me about,” Roxanne said. “I'm so excited.”

“I think you'll find it worth getting excited about,” Cash said. “That's one of the pleasures of working on these old houses. You never know what you're going to find.” He handed them each a hard hat, putting Chelsea's on top of her head himself. The gesture drew a sharp, questioning look from Roxanne, but she refrained from saying anything.

The brick was, as promised, wonderful: red and pink and aged. Chelsea could easily imagine it adding an ambiance of warmth and comfort to the kitchen.

While Roxanne led Chelsea out back to show her where she had plans for an herb garden, Cash's attention drifted to one of the laborers who'd paused on his way to wheeling a load of debris to the huge Dumpster. He'd noticed that same man eyeing Chelsea when she'd climbed out of Roxanne's Mercedes. And although construction workers were infamous for ogling good-looking women, there was something about the man—even discounting his greasy hair that had been tied back into a ponytail with a leather thong and the tattoos decorating his beefy arms—that made Cash uneasy.

“Who is that guy, anyway?” he asked McBride.

The contractor's gaze followed Cash's. “Some ex-con. He's apparently just out of the pen, but I talked with his parole officer before I hired him, and he said the guy's done his time and wants a chance to rejoin society.”

So the tattoos were prison art. This knowledge did not make Cash feel a helluva lot better. “Do you believe that?”

McBride shrugged. “Don't much matter if I do or not. Since it wasn't my choice to hire him in the first place.”

Cash was surprised. Mac McBride was a fifth-generation contractor, whose family had gotten its business start rebuilding the South during Reconstruction. The McBrides had a reputation for being hardworking, honest, and unrelentingly independent. He couldn't imagine anyone forcing this man to do anything.

“Whose choice was it?”

“Miz Scarbrough's.”

“What?”

“The lady called me up, told me that there was this guy, kin of some old secretary, who needed a job. Said he knew his away around a construction site, so she thought mebee I could hire him. When I told her my carpentry crew was pretty much filled, she suggested I take him on as a laborer. And she'd pay his salary.”

“
Roxanne's
paying him?”

“He's no kin of mine,” McBride pointed out. “I sure as hell wasn't gonna have his pay comin' out of my profits. If the lady wants to carry him on her books, it's no skin off my nose. So long as he does what he's told and keeps out of trouble.”

“From the looks of him, that might be asking a lot.”

Another shrug. “Then he'll land his ass back in jail and I won't have to worry about him.”

It made sense. So far as it went. But as he watched the man continuing to watch Chelsea, Cash wished he could feel as unworried as Mac sounded.

As Chelsea followed Roxanne out to the garden site, she felt the man she'd first seen looking at her when she'd gotten out of the car staring at her again. There was something
about him that made her distinctly uneasy. Although she tried to ignore him, she couldn't quite resist sneaking a glance. When her gaze collided with his openly lascivious one, she quickly looked away. But not before she saw him lick his lips in a purposely obscene way that sent a frisson of icy fear up her spine.

After the inspection of Belle Terre, the women returned to Roxanne's house, where Chelsea watched Roxanne work. Chelsea had always considered herself a high-energy person. But Roxanne proved to be a whirlwind.

She began every day at five-thirty, working out in the gym she'd installed on the second floor of her home. By seven she'd showered, dressed and dictated a host of letters that would be typed into word processors and sent out by a staff of twelve secretaries working in Savannah. Then she'd make her morning inspection of the ongoing restoration.

Not that the drive out to the construction site was wasted. It seemed a constant stream of ideas would flow into her mind, at which time she'd stop her dictation to Dorothy in midsentence, instruct her assistant to make a note of the idea, then continue on as if the interruption had never occurred.

Back at the house, she ate lunch—a cup of nonfat cottage cheese and half an apple—at her desk, while she worked on more projects and kept in seeming constant touch with her publishers and the seventy-five employees in New York who kept the Roxanne Scarbrough machine running smoothly.

Midway through the afternoon, she took a thirty-minute swim. “The water relaxes me and helps me think,” she'd told an incredulous Chelsea. During the swim, Dorothy ran back and forth along the side of the pool, dutifully making more notes and fielding telephone calls on a cordless phone.

Although Chelsea was invited to stay for dinner, during
which Roxanne planned to go over the day's work with Cash, she begged off. With the unrelenting pace Roxanne had set all day, Chelsea hadn't had time to think about Cash. And what his reappearance in her life would mean.

After returning to Magnolia House, she ordered a glass of wine from the bartender in the small restaurant-lounge and took it to the sunroom, where she sat in a wicker chair and watched the purple shadows spreading over the formally designed garden that was in glorious full bloom.

“Good evening,” a familiar voice said behind her.

Chelsea turned and saw Jeb standing in the doorway. “Hi. I was just enjoying the sunset. And the garden. It's so peaceful.” And exactly what she needed after the last two days.

“There's a story about that garden.”

“Now why aren't I surprised at that?”

He chuckled. “We southerners do tend to like our stories, I suppose,” he agreed. “I wouldn't want to bore you.”

“On the contrary, I'd love to talk about something that didn't have to do with work.”

“I warned you Roxanne keeps a pretty fast pace.”

“A world-class marathoner couldn't keep up. So,” Chelsea continued putting her feet up on the wicker hassock and taking a sip of the crisp gold chardonnay, “tell me the garden story.”

He sat down in a wicker loveseat across from her. “When the South seceded from the Union, we Townelys owned Twin Oaks, a house in Savannah, and a second, larger plantation outside Atlanta. You can imagine what happened to that.”

“Sherman burned it.”

“The man sure was a mite careless with matches,” Jeb said good-naturedly. “In a way, we were lucky. Most of the family money was safe in English banks when the war broke
out, so it didn't end up bein' tied up in Confederate funds, like so many other people's.

“But the war went on a lot longer than anyone expected, and the expenses continued to grow, without any profits coming in, so we still fell on hard times when it ended.

“Although the Atlanta plantation house had been burned to the foundation, we sold off the land it had been sitting on, along with the Savannah house, to pay our debts. But that didn't leave us enough acreage to grow a decent crop. So, my great-great-granddaddy Townely leveled my great-great grandmother Emily's garden and planted cotton in the fields surrounding this house.

“Every spring, whenever he'd travel to England to do business with his bankers, Miz Emily would plant her flowers. Then, when he'd get back to Raintree, he'd till them under and replant his cotton. That battle of wills, I'm told, went on for nearly fifty years until he finally died of consumption during a particularly cold winter.”

“That's too bad.”

“He was an old man,” Jeb said with a shrug. “Nigh onto ninety when he passed. Well, everyone figured my great-great grandmother would have one heckuva garden, now that she didn't have him around to ruin things, but she surprised everyone by planting cotton.”

“Why?”

“Because cotton paid the bills,” he said simply.

“A practical woman, your great-great-grandmother,” Chelsea murmured.

“Most southern women are.”

“Ah yes, the steel magnolia stereotype.”

“I suppose most stereotypes possess a grain of truth, which is how they become stereotypes in the first place.”

“My family has always been proud of its roots,” she murmured, thinking of all the Lowells and Whitneys who'd
distinguished themselves over the generations. And, of course, she couldn't leave out Dylan Cassidy, who'd added his own successful branch to her already illustrious family tree. “But we certainly don't live our history like you all seem to do in Raintree.”

“We're big on tradition down here,” he admitted. “Take this house, for example. There have been Townelys living on this piece of land for more than 150 years. The house has been standing for nearly that long, and there haven't been all that many changes, although each generation has added the modern conveniences of the day—electricity, modern bathrooms, central heat.”

“And what did you add?”

“Air-conditioning and the media room. And, as you can see, I restored my great-great-grandmother's garden. Roxanne helped me, and working with old diaries, I think we were able to get it pretty much the way Emily would have wanted it.”

“That's a lovely idea.”

“It makes a nice retreat for guests, which keeps the inn full most of the time, which pays the taxes,” he said, proving that it was not just southern woman who could be practical. “I think Miz Emily would be proud to see it in all its glory.” He flashed her a sheepish grin. “But I'm not sure she'd be real wild about the big-screen TV that's takin' up her company parlor.”

He suddenly slapped his forehead. “I just remembered why I came looking for you in the first place,” he said in response to her questioning look. “I'll be right back.”

He left the sunroom, returning as promised within the minute with a bouquet of daffodils.

“That's so sweet of you. How did you know I love daffodils?” She dipped her head into the sunny gold blooms.

“Actually, the flowers aren't from me, though now I wish
I'd thought of it. They were delivered this afternoon. There's a card,” he said helpfully.

Vowing that no matter how much the bright yellow blooms lifted her spirits, if they were from Nelson, she was going to throw them away, Chelsea plucked the small white envelope from amidst the blooms.

“I remember you telling me they reminded you of sunshine,” someone had written in a bold masculine scrawl. “I thought you might need a ray or two today.” He'd signed it simply, Cash.

Chelsea had forgotten the day they'd seen the brave little yellow flowers poking their heads through the snow and marveled that Cash could have recalled her enthusiasm over the bright harbingers of spring.