Ain't She Sweet?

  Lights shone from inside the house. Sugar Beth tried to tell herself the uneasiness in her stomach came from lack of a decent meal, but she knew better. Before she’d gone into town, she’d tried to boost her confidence with a tight candy pink T-shirt showing a few inches of belly, a pair of low-riding, straight-legged jeans that hugged her long-stemmed legs, and black stilettos that took her nearly to six feet. She’d topped the outfit with a copycat black motorcycle jacket and the pea-size fake diamond studs she’d bought to replace the ones she’d hocked. But the outfit wasn’t doing a thing to boost her morale now, and as she crossed the porch of her old home, her heels tapped out a dismal reminder of what she’d lost. Sugar Beth Carey…doesn’t live here…anymore.

  She set her shoulders, lifted her chin, and punched the bell, but instead of the familiar seven-note chime, she heard a jarring, two-tone gong. What right did anyone have to replace the chimes at Frenchman’s Bride?

  The door opened. A man stood there. Tall. Imperious. It had been fifteen years, but she knew who he was even before he spoke.

  “Hello, Sugar Beth.”

  “Shaking, eh?” said that hateful voice. “I shan’t beat you if you behave yourself.”

  GEORGETTE HEYER, Devil’s Cub

  CHAPTER TWO

  She swallowed hard and spoke around a croak. “Mr. Byrne?”

  His thin, unsmiling lips barely moved. “That’s right. It’s Mr. Byrne.”

  She tried to catch her breath. Tallulah hadn’t told her he was the one who’d bought Frenchman’s Bride, but she’d only passed on the news she’d wanted Sugar Beth to hear. The years fell away. Twenty-two. That’s how old he’d been when she’d destroyed his career, barely more than a kid.

  He’d looked so odd in those days with his Ichabod Crane body—too tall, too thin, his hair too long, nose too big, everything about him too eccentric for a small Southern town—appearance, accent, attitude. Naturally, the girls had been dazzled. He’d always dressed in black, most of it threadbare, with silk scarves looping his neck, some fringed, one a muted paisley, another so long it came to his hips. He’d used phrases like bloody awful and don’t muck about, and, just once, feeling a bit dicky, are we?

  The first week of school they’d spotted him using a tortoiseshell cigarette holder. When he’d overheard some of the boys whispering that he looked like a queer, he’d gazed down his long nose at them and said he regarded that as a compliment, since so many of the world’s great men had been homosexual. “Alas,” he’d told them, “I’ve been sentenced to a life of mundane heterosexuality. I can only hope a few of you will be more fortunate.”

  That had brought ’em out for the old parent-teacher conference.

  But the young schoolteacher she remembered was a pale harbinger of the imposing man who stood before her. Byrne was still odd, but in a far more unsettling way. His ungainly body had become hard-muscled and athletic. Although he was lean, he was no longer skinny, and he’d finally grown into his face, even that honker of a nose, while the cheekbones that had once looked gaunt now seemed patrician.

  Sugar Beth knew the smell of money, and it clung to him like smoke. When she’d last seen him, his hair had fallen to his shoulders. Now it was just as thick, but cut in a movie star’s short, dramatic rumple. Whether an expensive salon product or good health had produced its dark sheen was hard to tell, but one thing was certain. He hadn’t gotten a haircut like that in Parrish, Mississippi.

  He wore a ribbed turtleneck with Armani written all over it and black wool trousers that had a thin gold pinstripe. Not only had Ichabod Crane grown up, but he’d also gone to grooming school, then bought out the place and turned it into an international franchise.

  She hardly ever had to look up at any man, especially not when she was wearing dominatrix heels, but she was looking up now. Into the same haughty jade eyes she remembered. All her old resentment came rushing back. “Nobody told me you were here.”

  “Indeed? How amusing.” He hadn’t lost his British accent, although she knew accents could be manipulated. Her own, for example, could go North or South, depending on circumstances. “Do come in.” He stepped back and invited her into her own home.

  She wanted to give him the finger and tell him to go to hell. But running was another of life’s luxuries she could no longer afford, right along with throwing hissy fits and maxing out her credit cards. The contempt that tightened the corners of his thin lips told her he understood exactly how much his invitation stung. Knowing he expected her to stomp off gave her the determination to set her shoulders and step over the threshold…into Frenchman’s Bride.

  He’d ruined it. She saw that right away. Another beautiful Southern home ravished by a foreign marauder.

  The rounded shape of the entrance hall and its sweeping curl of staircase remained the same, but he’d destroyed Diddie’s romantic pastels by painting the curved walls a dark espresso brown and the old oak moldings chalk white. A jarring abstract hung in place of the painting that had once dominated the space, which had been a life-size portrait of herself at age five, exquisitely dressed in white lace and pink ribbons as she curled at her beautiful mother’s fashionably shod feet. Diddie had insisted the artist add a white toy poodle to the painting, even though they didn’t have a poodle, or any dog, despite Sugar Beth’s pleas. But her mother said she wouldn’t have anything in the house that licked its private parts, or licked anybody else’s for that matter.

  White marble inset with bands of taupe had replaced the worn hardwood floors. The antique chests were gone, along with a gilded Marie Antoinette mirror and a pair of gold brocade chairs. Now, a gleaming black baby grand piano dominated the space. A baby grand in the entrance hall of Frenchman’s Bride…Sugar Beth’s grandmother with her avant-garde tastes might have enjoyed the oddity, but Diddie was surely doing belly flips in her grave.

  “My, my…” Sugar Beth’s accent headed deeper south, the way it did when she’d been put at a disadvantage. “And haven’t you just put your own stamp on things?”

  “I do what amuses me.” He regarded her with the arrogance of a nobleman forced to speak to the scullery maid, but she deserved his hostility, and no matter how much he still raised her hackles, it was time to face the music. Long past time.

  “I wrote you a letter of apology,” she said.

  “Did you now?” He couldn’t have looked more disinterested.

  “It came back. Return to sender.”

  “You don’t say.”

  He intended to keep her cooling her heels in the entrance hall. She didn’t deserve any better, but she wouldn’t grovel, so she struck a compromise between what she owed him and what she owed herself. “Too little, too late, I realize that. But what the hell? Repentance is repentance.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I don’t have much to repent.”

  “Then pay attention to one who’s been there and done that. Sometimes, Mr. Byrne, a simple ‘I’m sorry’ is the best a person can do.”

  “And sometimes the best isn’t good enough, is it?”

  He didn’t intend to offer his forgiveness, no surprise there. At the same time, her apology hadn’t exactly sounded heartfelt, and since he deserved heartfelt, her integrity demanded that she do better. But not here, not standing in the foyer like a servant.

  “Would you mind if I look around?” She didn’t wait for permission but swept past him into the living room.

  “By all means.” His drawl dripped with sarcasm.

  The taupe walls matched the marble inlays in the floor, while the deep-seated leather chairs and streamlined sofa repeated the dark brown of the foyer. A symmetrically arranged group of four sepia photographs of marble busts hung over the fireplace, which wasn’t the fireplace she remembered. The old oak mantel with its assorted scorch marks from the times Diddie had forgotten to open the flue had been replaced by a massive neoclassic mantel with a heavy cornice and carved pediment reminiscent of a Greek temple. In another home, she would have loved the bold juxtaposition of clas
sic and modern, but not at Frenchman’s Bride.

  She turned to see him framed in the doorway, his posture reflecting the perfect arrogance of a man accustomed to being in control. He was only four years older than she, which would make him thirty-seven. When he’d been her teacher, those four years had formed an unbridgeable chasm, but now they were nothing. She remembered how romantic the Seawillows used to think he was, but Sugar Beth had refused to have a crush on someone who so stubbornly resisted her flirtatious overtures.

  She needed to get to that apology again, and this time she had to do it right, but the derision in his inspection of her, combined with the desecration of her home, got in the way. “Maybe I did you a favor. A teacher’s salary could never have bought all this. Congratulations on your book, by the way.”

  “You’ve read Whistle-stop?”

  The skeptical arch of that elegant eyebrow got her hackles up. “Gosh, I tried to. But there were all those big words.”

  “That’s right. You never liked to tax your brain with anything more challenging than a fashion magazine, did you?”

  “Hey, if somebody doesn’t read them, there’ll be a whole shitload of women walking around in plaid polyester, and then think how sorry everybody’ll be.” She widened her eyes. “Oops…Now you’re goin’ to give me a detention for vulgarity.”

  Time hadn’t done a thing to improve his sense of humor. “Detentions never worked with you, did they, Sugar Beth? Your mother wouldn’t permit them.”

  “Diddie sure did have opinions about what was right and wrong for me.” She tilted her head just enough so her hair fell away from her fake diamond studs. “Did you know she refused to let me compete for Miss Mississippi? She said I was sure to win, and she wouldn’t allow any daughter of hers within spitting distance of that tacky Atlantic City. We had a big fuss about it, but you know how Diddie was, once she made up her mind about something.”

  “Oh, yes, I remember.”

  Of course he did. Diddie was the one who’d gotten him fired. Which made it time to drop the bull and take another stab at those long overdue amends.

  “I am sorry. Really. What I did was inexcusable.” Meeting his eyes was a lot tougher than she wanted it to be, but this time she didn’t falter. “I told her I’d lied, but the damage was done by then, and you’d already left town.”

  “Odd. I don’t recall Mummy trying to track me down. It’s strange an intelligent woman never figured out how to ring me up and say that all was forgiven, that I hadn’t—how did she put it that day?—betrayed my position of authority by compromising her innocent daughter’s virtue?”

  The way he lingered over those last three words told her he knew exactly what she and Ryan Galantine had been doing in the backseat of her red Camaro. “No, she didn’t. And I didn’t have the guts to tell my father the truth.”

  Griffin had found out, though, when he’d dug through her mother’s papers a few months after she died, and discovered the letter of confession Sugar Beth had written. “You’ve got to admit, Daddy did all right by you. He practically took out an ad in the paper telling everybody I lied.”

  “Nearly a year had passed by then, hadn’t it? A bit late. I’d already been forced back to England.”

  She started to point out that he’d managed to return to the States—his book jacket said he was now an American citizen—but she’d only sound as though she was trying to defend herself. He uncoiled from the doorway and wandered over to a wall unit that held a wet bar. A wet bar in Diddie Carey’s living room…

  “Would you like a drink?” It wasn’t the invitation of a good host but the softly spoken gambit in a cat-and-mouse game.

  “I don’t drink anymore.”

  “Reformed?”

  “Hell, no. I just don’t drink.” She was on a roll, peggin’ the old laugh-meter. She was killing herself here.

  He poured out a few inches of what looked like a very expensive single malt scotch. She’d forgotten how large his hands were. She used to tell everybody who’d listen that he was the biggest sissy in town, but even then, those meat-hook hands had made her look like a liar. They still didn’t seem to belong to someone who’d recited sonnets from memory and occasionally tied back his hair with a piece of black velvet ribbon.

  One night a bunch of them had left school late and spotted him on the intramural field with a soccer ball. Soccer hadn’t caught on in Parrish, and they’d never seen anything like it. He’d bounced the ball from one knee to another, off a calf, a thigh, keeping it in the air until they lost count. Then he’d begun dribbling it down the field, running at full speed, the ball right between his feet. After that, the boys’ opinions of him had changed, and it wasn’t long before they’d invited him to join them at the basketball hoop.

  “Three husbands, Sugar Beth?” He curled those workingman’s fingers around a cut-glass tumbler. “Even for you, that seems a bit extreme.”

  “One thing never changes about Parrish. Gossip’s still this town’s favorite pastime.” Cool air brushed her belly as she slipped her hands into the pockets of her black leather jacket and pushed it back. Her cropped candy pink T-shirt had the word Beast written in glitter script over her breasts. It was a little flashy, but it had been marked down to $5.99, and she could make just about anything look trendy. “I’d appreciate it if you’d get that chain off my driveway.”

  “Would you now?” He sank into one of the leather chairs without inviting her to do the same. “You have a wretched track record with husbands.”

  “You think?”

  “Word travels,” he drawled. “I believe I heard that husband number one was someone you met in college.”

  “Darren Tharp, all-American shortstop. He played for the Braves for a while.” She executed a nifty tomahawk chop.

  “Impressive.” He took a sip from his drink, the tumbler nearly swallowed by his palm, and regarded her over the rim of the glass. “I also heard he left you for another woman. Pity.”

  “Her name was Samantha. Unlike me, she managed to graduate from college, but it wasn’t her degree that attracted Darren. Turns out, she had a natural-born gift for fellatio.”

  The tumbler came to a stop halfway to his lips.

  She gave him her best Southern belle smile, the one that went from here to there without coming anyplace close to sincerity. With a few adjustments—and if Diddie hadn’t possessed such a hang-up about Atlantic City—that smile could have put something more impressive than a homecoming crown on her head. “I guess brains can only get a girl so far.”

  Byrne had no intention of letting her sidetrack him. “Apparently you took off to Hollywood with your settlement money.”

  “I earned every dollar of it.”

  “But you weren’t flooded with movie offers.”

  “And aren’t you just the sweetest thang, taking such an interest in me.”

  “Surely I heard this wrong. Your second husband was some kind of Hell’s Angel?”

  “That would have been more exciting, but I’m afraid Cy was just a stuntman for the movies. Extremely talented—right up to the day he killed himself trying to jump his bike from the Santa Monica pier onto the deck of a luxury yacht. It was a film about the evils of drug smuggling, so I tell myself he died for a good cause, not that I wasn’t smoking the occasional joint myself back then.”

  “And more than a few in high school, as I recall.”

  “A mistake, Your Honor. I thought they were just funny-smelling cigarettes.”

  He didn’t smile, but she hadn’t expected it from that granite-jawed face.

  She’d left Cy a few months before that fatal stunt. No girl on earth had a bigger talent for marrying cheating losers than she did. Emmett had been the exception, but then, he’d been seventy on their wedding day, and age begot wisdom.

  “After that, people seemed to lose track of you for a while,” he said.

  “I worked in the restaurant business. Very exclusive.”

  She’d started off as a hostess at a dec
ent L.A. restaurant but had gotten fired for mouthing off to a customer. Next she’d worked as a cocktail waitress. When she’d lost that job, she’d served up lasagna at a cheap Italian restaurant, then gone on to an even cheaper burger joint. She’d bottomed out the day she’d found herself studying a help-wanted ad for an escort service. More than anything else, that had made her realize it was long past time for her to grow up and take responsibility for her life.

  “Then you snagged Emmett Hooper.”

  “And you didn’t even need the Parrish grapevine to hear about that.” Her smile hid every drop of pain.

  “The newspapers were quite informative. And entertaining. A twenty-eight-year-old waitress becomes the trophy wife of a filthy rich seventy-year-old retired Texas oilman.”

  An oilman whose investments had gone belly-up even before he’d gotten sick. Emmett had been her dearest friend, her lover, and the person who’d helped her finish the job of growing up.

  Byrne tipped his drink toward her, looking like a bored, but very masculine, Gucci model. “My condolences on your loss.”

  The lump in her throat made it hard to come up with a smart-ass response, but she managed. “I appreciate your sympathy, but when you marry someone that old, you kind of know what’s coming.”

  She welcomed the contempt in those jade eyes. Contempt trumped pity any damn day. She watched him cross his legs, the movement an unsettling combination of feline grace and male strength. “We used to call you the Duke behind your back,” she said. “Did you know that?”