Holly

  One of his thumbs slid inside her, moving in and out in a slow, sensual way. “We lived so far away from other houses that the school bus and the mailman refused to drive to us. We didn’t have TV until I was nine. I spent my days outside, fishing for the family. I was the best fisherman. I—”

  “No more,” Holly said, putting her hand on his cheek. “I don’t want to hear anymore. Let’s just—” She was going to say “enjoy the moment,” but what he was doing made her stop talking—and thinking.

  He had sunk to his knees and buried his face between her legs. She’d given oral sex before but had never received it. At the first touch of his tongue, her eyes widened in astonishment. In the next second, she closed her eyes and opened her legs. If he hadn’t been holding her upright, she would have slid to the floor.

  Just when Holly was sure she could stand no more, Nick lifted her, put her legs about his waist, and set her down on his erect maleness.

  She pulled him to her, digging her nails into his back, pulling him closer and closer, wanting more and more of him. Her legs tightened, her shoulders braced against the shower wall.

  When Holly came, she screamed, and Nick held her to keep her from falling. For minutes, he held her tightly against him, not letting her fall.

  “You okay?” he asked after a while.

  “I thought I was going to die.”

  She could feel him smile against her neck. “First orgasm?” he asked.

  “Of course not!” she said, life returning to her limbs. “I’ve had a million orgasms. One for each of your cousins.”

  She could feel his stomach muscles moving as he chuckled, and Holly was offended. “Look, Trucker Man, just because you grew up sleeping six to a bed doesn’t mean you know all about life and love and sex, while we know nothing.”

  Still smiling, he moved away from her, soaped his hands and began to wash her, but this time it wasn’t sensual, it was “business.” In the same businesslike manner, she soaped her hands and began to wash him.

  “Who is ‘we’?” he asked.

  “I just meant—” Breaking off, she looked up at him. He had the most infuriating smile on his face, a smirk of such superiority that she wanted to wipe it off. “Your betters!” she said. “You know, those of us who give up our lives to keep the world together.”

  “Oh?” he said, turning her around and soaping her back. “I found you in a pit in an old house, naked, cold, and hungry. Were you planning to give up your life for that old house?”

  “Not me,” she said. “I meant people like my father. He—” She paused a moment as he ran his hands over her breasts.

  “He what?” Nick asked huskily.

  She was determined to wipe the smirk off his face. “My father flies all over the world, from one crisis to another. He has no life of his own. The phone never stops ringing. He—”

  “So he sent you away to boarding schools to be raised by strangers,” Nick said.

  “Don’t you dare say anything against my father! He was—is—You know, that’s very distracting.” He was massaging her breasts.

  “My dad played ball with us. My uncle taught me how to ride a motorcycle. We all went to church together every Sunday.” He pulled back from her, his hands on her hips. “Miss Latham, I said your sister was a snob, but so are you.”

  At that, he turned off the water and got out of the shower, leaving Holly sputtering behind him.

  She stepped out, grabbing a towel from beside the door. He was drying himself. “I am not a snob! I get along with everyone. I can talk to people from all walks of life. I can—”

  “You think that all of us out here are hungering for your life? You think that every man who grew up in a house with fewer than four bathrooms is dying to marry some over-educated, lonely, uptight, suppressed girl like you? No, Miss Latham, we are not.”

  He tossed his wet towel onto the countertop and walked, naked, out of the room.

  Blinking, Holly stood there, the towel draped around her, and stared at the doorway. Over-educated? Lonely? Uptight? Suppressed? That’s not how she saw herself.

  Wrapping the towel around her body, she left the room. He was dressed in clean jeans and a shirt, barefoot, and rummaging inside a chest of drawers.

  She tried to regain her dignity, but that wasn’t easy since she was wearing only a towel and her wet hair was clinging to her face. “I think you misunderstand me,” she said to his back. “I don’t think that you—or people who have been raised as you have—are dying to marry people like me, but I do think that…” She couldn’t think how to phrase what she meant to say—if she even knew what she wanted to say, that is.

  He pulled some clothes from a drawer and looked at her. “You think we’re all dying for your money, that we’d do anything on earth to get away from the fear of next month’s electric bill. You think we all dream of getting our hands on some rich girl so we can leave our nasty little working-class lives behind.” He moved toward her until they were nearly nose-to-nose. “I already know enough about your life, Miss Latham, to know I wouldn’t have it on a bet. You know what my family has an abundance of? Love, that’s what. When my sister got married, she didn’t have some designer fly down from New York. My mother made her dress, and there was love in every stitch. Can your fancy designer top that?”

  “No,” Holly said softly. He was right, of course. But she had always been told that people who had less money than her family did were “less fortunate.” She’d heard horror stories from her stepmother about her life with her first husband. He’d been faithless and what money he did earn, he spent on liquor.

  Maybe because of the stories of the people close to her, she’d been unfair, she thought. Maybe…

  “Put those on,” Nick said, thrusting clothes into her arms. “They’re Leon’s, but maybe they’ll fit you.”

  Silently, Holly put the clothes on. They were blue jeans and a worn short-sleeve shirt. She had clean, but damp, underpants, no bra, no socks, no shoes.

  The atmosphere between them had changed. Nick moved to the other side of the garage where she couldn’t see him, but she could feel his anger. Was it all at me? she wondered. Maybe he’d been snubbed before by someone like her. Someone like me, she thought with a grimace.

  She stopped buttoning the shirt and smiled. She’d gone from thinking about “people like him” to “someone like me.”

  “Are you ready to go?” he asked, staring at her. His eyes were dark, his jaw set. With his unshaven whiskers, he looked like a pirate. Not exactly a turnoff.

  “Go?” she said, then, “Oh.” He was taking her back to her parents’ rented house. It was daylight and he was finished with her.

  She rolled up the cuffs of the trousers and padded after him, neither of them saying a word all the way to the car. Then, to Holly’s surprise, at the end of the drive he turned left, not right. He was going toward his side of the lake, not hers.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked.

  He gave her a look of surprise as he reached to the backseat and handed her her sandals. “To get your boots out of the pit, and I thought that if you wanted to see the old houses around here we might ask the owners’ permission. You don’t have to trespass, do you? It’s not some deep-seated need of yours, is it?”

  Leaning back against the door, she looked at him hard. Had all his anger been an act? “You have a streak of unlikability in you, you know that?”

  “ ‘Unlikability.’ Did you make that word up? You know how it is with us poor, uneducated rednecks. You have to talk slow. Simple words.”

  “Is that so? What was it you said to me that first night? You were trying to get over the ‘injustice of the accusation’? Now, I ask you, is that proper redneck talk?”

  He stopped the car under the tree Holly had parked under last night. “Don’t fall in love with me, Latham,” he said, opening the door and getting out.

  “Fat chance,” she said as she got out, too. “For your information, my heart is already taken.” r />
  He opened the back of the Mini and removed a thick rope. “As long as your body is available…” he said, giving her a lascivious wink as he started up the hill.

  At that remark, Holly thought of remaining in the car. Or maybe she should strip off and swim across the lake to her parents’ house. Smiling, she thought of the shock of the neighbors if she emerged naked from the water, then walked into the ambassador’s house. The next second Holly imagined the tabloid headlines.

  “Are you waiting for me to carry you? Again?” Nick asked from above her.

  “So when do you get horny and start being nice to me again?” Holly snapped.

  Seriously, Nick looked at his watch. “About thirty-two minutes. Can you wait that long?”

  Holly had to work to keep from laughing, but she kept her face straight. “Make it twenty-eight minutes,” she said, deadpan.

  “Deal. Now get your cute little rear end up here. If I get trapped in that pit, you have to go for help.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and started up the hill behind him.

  “Good attitude.”

  “That does it. Next time you’re on top and you do all the work.”

  “Same ol’, same ol’.”

  She’d reached him so she smacked him on the shoulder. His arm flashed out and he pulled her to him and kissed her deeply. When he moved his mouth away, he looked into her eyes and smiled. “Stop worrying so much. Don’t worry about me; don’t worry about you. Seize the moment. Enjoy. Let tomorrow take care of itself. Okay?”

  Nodding, she smiled back at him, and just when he looked as though he was going to kiss her again, she said, “Do you think there really are any pre–Revolutionary War houses up here?”

  He released her, but he was smiling. “You’re obsessed, aren’t you?”

  “Completely.” She was following him cautiously, stepping on the weeds he’d smashed flat. Wearing sandals where she knew there were poisonous snakes didn’t exactly relax her. “You should have brought a ladder,” she called after him.

  Nick held up the rope as though that were an answer. And it was, for he’d then proceeded to knot the rope and use it to climb into the pit to retrieve her boots. He also retrieved the rope she’d made out of her clothes so she at last had a bra to wear.

  “Ready?” he said when they were finished at the house.

  “For what?”

  “To see your houses.”

  “Yes,” she answered, then took the hand he held out to her and followed him down the hill to the car.

  Chapter Four

  IT WAS 8:00 P.M. AND HOLLY WAS EATING AN enormous plate of pasta in a spicy tomato sauce that she and Nick had made together. She was very tired, hadn’t been to bed since two nights ago, but she didn’t know when she’d ever felt better. She and Nick had had a wonderful day!

  He was new to the community, but he fit in with the people. They seemed to feel that he was one of them. He chatted easily with everyone they met, and always seemed to know what to say to whom.

  For the most part, Holly had felt awkward and hadn’t known what to say. “Could I please see the falling-down old house behind your mobile home?” didn’t cut it. Years ago, when she was just starting out, clipboard in hand, she’d knocked on doors and asked. The reactions had been varied, but pretty much all had been negative.

  But when she was with Nick, doors were thrown open in welcome. During the entire day she didn’t think he ever once asked anyone directly to be allowed to enter an old structure on their property. He’d introduced himself as being “a guest of Leon and Carl Basham” and gone from there. He chatted and made comments about their houses and their gardens, and before long he and Holly were being escorted around the place—including a trip through the old houses and barns.

  At two they’d gone back to Leon’s barn and made sandwiches.

  “Did you see anything interesting?” Nick had asked after they’d made love. All morning he’d taken every opportunity to touch her. At the first of his unexpected, intimate caresses she’d squealed out loud and Nick had made excuses for her. Two hours later, they were standing behind a window, chatting with the owner, while Nick’s hand caressed the back of her thighs. Other than the bead of sweat on her forehead, Holly had shown no change in expression.

  However, by the time they broke for lunch, both of them were at a fever pitch of excitement. Once inside Leon’s garage, they charged at each other, tearing clothes off each other’s bodies in a frenzy, with their lips glued together all the while. They made love on the cold, hard concrete floor, Holly’s head jammed against the tire of The Truck.

  Afterward, they’d showered, made enormous sandwiches, and Nick asked her about what she’d seen.

  “Nothing particularly old; nothing unique, which is a shame because the buildings probably won’t be saved.”

  “No rescuing preservation society?”

  “No,” she said. “There’s no Belle Chere here.” As soon as she said the name she wished she hadn’t. Perhaps Nick wouldn’t notice.

  “I see,” Nick said, refilling her glass with lemonade. “And is he the one who’s taken your heart?”

  His odd question was so right on that she choked and coughed, unable to breathe for what seemed like minutes. When she could speak she said, “Of course not. Belle Chere is a place, not a person.”

  “Maybe to the world, but when you say the name, you caress it. You roll it around on your tongue and taste it. Is it sweet? Salty? Sour? Bitter? Or is it all of those things?”

  Holly couldn’t keep from smiling. Whatever else he was, he was perceptive to the point of wizardry. “All of them,” she said, then filled her mouth with a bite of sandwich so she could say no more.

  “You know that thing I did with my tongue this morning in the shower?” He glanced downward. “That thing you liked so much?”

  Mouth full, she nodded.

  “Talk or it won’t happen again.”

  She swallowed. “Didn’t the Geneva convention declare that particular torture to be unfair in war?”

  “Before my time. Who and what is Belle Chere?”

  Holly had to take a few breaths while she decided what to tell him. For too many years she’d not allowed herself to talk about either Lorrie or his plantation. But perhaps if she told about the place and left out the man it would be all right.

  “Belle Chere has been blessed by poverty,” she began, and once she started she couldn’t stop. She went on to tell him how the house had been built by Lorrie’s very rich English ancestors in 1735. He’d been a younger son so his older brother had inherited the family mansion in England. In an attempt to re-create the opulence of his childhood home, he’d spared no expense when he built Belle Chere in the American colonies. Every room had been paneled; every piece of plaster work had been shaped or frescoed.

  For years Belle Chere had been a gentleman’s estate, used for breeding racehorses, but in the 1820s the four thousand acres of parkland had been cleared for farmland. It was the heyday of slavery and Belle Chere had been made into a plantation. Outbuildings of dairy, icehouse, smokehouse, office, and slave quarters had been erected. Six acres had been planted in symmetrical box-bordered pleasure gardens and orchards.

  Belle Chere had managed to escape Sherman’s torch at the end of the Civil War and the owners had retreated to their house and gardens, trying to preserve what they had. Over the years they sold off most of the land, until there were only a hundred and thirty acres left.

  “They used what money they had to maintain, never to renovate,” Holly said.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “When a house is lived in for generations, people add to it and tear down parts that they don’t like. They change a house constantly. They add electricity to the old kitchen, cut in a few more windows, tear out the fireplace to build a barbeque, then they decide they’re sick of the old building so they run a bulldozer over it and put up some prefab monstrosity.”

  “But I take it that they didn’
t do that at Belle Chere.”

  “No. It was in the same family for centuries, and there was always at least one family member who truly loved it so he or she did what they could to preserve Belle Chere as it was. They kept the outbuildings from falling to the ground, and they preserved the gardens. They kept the hedges alive enough to see where the parterres had been. They couldn’t afford to fill the beds with thousands of bulbs and the roses died, but at least they didn’t plow the decorative gardens under and plant beans.”

  “Preservation,” Nick said. “Status quo.”

  “Yes. Today Belle Chere is run-down and, maybe to the uninitiated, it looks bad, but it’s the purest, most untouched plantation site in America.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “You want it. But how much do you want it?”

  “How much do I want Belle Chere?” she asked, smiling. “It’s not for sale. I told you that it’s been owned by the same family since it was built. Can you imagine that?”

  “Aren’t there some houses in Virginia on the James River that are still owned by the people who built them?”

  She looked at him sharply. “How do you know that?”

  “I worked there for a few summers. Repairing roofs and general carpentry.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Yes, a family named Montgomery owns those houses, but they’re very rich and they maintain the houses perfectly. Belle Chere is…”

  “A fixer-upper. Something you could get your lovely little hands on and renovate.”

  She smiled in answer.

  “So where would you get the money?”

  “From—” she said, then took a drink. She’d almost said, “From Hollander Tools,” but she’d caught herself. Through the glass wall she could see into the garage. The distinctively written name of Hollander seemed to be on every surface. “Donations,” she said at last. “Lots of very wealthy people donate to restore old buildings.”