Ain’t She Sweet?

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 classic 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 decent 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?”

“Of course.”

“We all thought you were a pansy.”

“Did you now?”

“And stuck-up.”

“I was. Still am, for that matter. I take pride in it.”

She wondered if he was married. If not, the single women of Parrish must be lining up at the door with coconut cakes and casseroles. She moved toward the fireplace and tried to look assertive. “I’m sure it’s just entertaining the knickers off you to block my driveway, but the fun’s gone on long enough.”

“As it happens, I’m still enjoying myself.”

He didn’t look as though he knew how to enjoy anything, except maybe conquering India. As she gazed at his immaculately tailored clothes, she wondered who’d done the dirty work of setting the posts in concrete on such short notice. “Don’t you think it might be embarrassing when I call the police?”

“Not at all. It’s my land.”

“And I thought you were such an authority on Parrish. My father deeded the carriage house to my aunt in the 1950s.”

“The house, yes. But not the driveway. That’s still part of Frenchman’s Bride.”

She snapped upright. “That’s not true.”

“I have an exceptionally fine lawyer, and he pays attention to things like property boundaries.” He rose from the chair. “You’re more than welcome to look at the survey yourself. I’ll send over a copy.”

Could her father have been that stupid? Of course he could have. Griffin Carey had been meticulous when it came to matters involving his window factory but notoriously lax regarding home and family. How careful could a man be who kept his wife and his mistress in the same town?

“What do you want, Mr. Byrne? Obviously not my apology, so you might as well spell it out.”

“Why, retribution, of course. What did you think I wanted?”

His softly spoken words sent a shiver down her spine. She resisted a longing glance toward the glass of scotch he’d just set down, but she hadn’t had a drink in nearly five years, and she wasn’t starting up again tonight. “Well, now, isn’t this going to be all kinds of entertaining. Exactly where do you expect me to park?”

“I couldn’t care less. Maybe one of your old friends will help you out.”

This was the perfect moment to throw a temper tantrum, but she’d forgotten how. Instead, she sauntered toward him, putting a little sway in her hips even though her bones felt a hundred years old. “See now, here’s where you’re not thinking straight. I’ve already lost three husbands and one set of parents, so if you want real retribution, you’ll have to dig deeper than a measly driveway.”

“Playing the pity card, are we?”

That’s exactly what it had sounded like, and she wanted to bite her tongue. Instead, she flipped up the collar of her jacket and headed for the door. “Fuck you, Mr. Byrne. And fuck your pity.”

She’d barely taken three steps before she caught a whiff of expensive cologne. Her heart bumped against her ribs as he caught her arm and spun her around.

“How about this for retribution, then?”

The cold, hard expression on his face reminded her of Darren Tharp’s right before he’d smacked her to kingdom come, but Colin Byrne had another kind of violence in mind. Before she could react, his dark head swooped, and he covered her mouth in a brutal, punishing kiss.

Kisses… So many of them. Her adoring mother’s cheek-smooches. Aunt Tallulah’s pursed dry-lipped ones. Those sex-drenched teenage kisses with Ryan. Darren had been a main-event man and a lousy kisser. Then there’d been Cy’s sloppy drunken kisses and her own gin-soaked ones in response. After that, the kisses of a string of men she barely remembered, except that all of them had tasted like despair. Salvation had arrived in the form of Emmett’s kisses, ones of kindness, need, fear, and, at the end, resignation.

The last kiss she’d received had come from his daughter, Delilah, who’d thrown her arms around Sugar Beth’s neck and left a wet track on her cheek. I love you more than anybody in the whole world, my Sugar Beth.

All those kisses, and she couldn’t remember a single one that had felt like this. Cold. Calculated. Designed to humiliate.

Byrne took his time administering justice. He cradled her jaw, not hurting, but forcing her mouth open just enough so he could attack with his tongue. She didn’t respond, didn’t fight him.

He didn’t care.

She wasn’t surprised when his hand went to her breast. She even expected it.

Another clinical exploration, as if no real person lived under her skin, merely flesh and bone without a soul.

He held her breast in one of his big hands and rubbed the slope with his thumb. As he brushed her nipple, a pang of longing pierced her. Not desire-she was too empty for that, and this was about revenge, not sex. Instead, she experienced a bone-deep longing for simple kindness, an ironic wish for someone who’d doled it out so sparingly herself.

She’d learned a lot about street fighting during her marriage to a stuntman, and she thought about biting him or bringing her knee up, but that wouldn’t be fair. He deserved his retribution.

He finally drew back, and the scent of the scotch he’d been drinking fell softly across her cheek. “You said I stuck my tongue in your mouth and felt your breast.” His jade eyes cut through her. “Isn’t that the lie you told your mother, Sugar Beth? Isn’t that how you chopped me up and sent me packing?”

“Exactly that way,” she said quietly.

He ran his thumb over her bottom lip. Coming from another man, it would have been a gesture of tenderness, but this was the mark of a conqueror. She owed him contrition, but all she had left these days was a little dignity, and she’d die before she let a single tear fall.

He lowered his arm. “Not a lie now.”

She reached deep down into the reservoir of strength that had almost, but not quite, run dry and somehow managed to dig up what she needed to lift her hand and touch his cheek. “All this time I’ve hated feeling like a liar. Thanks, Mr. Byrne. You’ve cleansed my soul.”

Colin felt her palm cool against his skin and realized she was getting the last word. The knowledge stunned him. This should have been his victory. Both of them knew it. Yet she was trying to snatch it away.

He gazed at the mouth he’d just crushed. She hadn’t tasted anything like he’d expected-not that he’d expected anything, since he hadn’t planned his attack. Still, he’d subconsciously braced himself for the slyness, the pettiness, the monstrous ego that had defined her. Who’s the fairest in the land? Me! Me! Me! Instead, he’d discovered something else-something gritty, determined, and insolent. At least the last was familiar.

She dropped her hand and pointed her index finger at him, a pistol straight through his self-respect. Just before she pulled the trigger, she flashed a wisdom-of-the-courtesans smile. “See you around, Mr. Byrne.”

Bang. And she was gone.

He stood there without moving. The scent of her-spice, sex, obstinacy-lingered in the air even after the front door shut. That ugly kiss should have put an end to it. Instead, it had started things up all over again.

At eighteen, she was the most beautiful creature anyone in Parrish had ever seen. Watching her saunter up the sidewalk to the front doors of Parrish High was watching sexual artistry in motion: those endless legs, the sway of her hips, bounce of her breasts, dazzle of her long blond hair.

The boys stumbled over themselves watching her while the music from their boom boxes played the sound track to her life. Billy Ocean pleading with her to get out of his dreams and into his car. Bon Jovi taking one look, then living on a prayer. Cutting Crew more than eager just to die in her arms tonight. Guns n’ Roses, Poison, Whitesnake-all the great hair bands-somehow she’d brought them to their knees and made them beg for the crumbs of her affection.

Sugar Beth was still beautiful. Those man-killer light blue eyes and perfectly symmetrical features would follow her to the grave, and that cloud of blond hair should be fanned out on a satin pillow in a Playboy spread. But the dewy freshness had disappeared. She’d looked older than thirty-three and tougher. She was thinner, too. He’d seen the tendons in the long sweep of her neck, and her wrists looked almost frail. But that dangerous sexuality hadn’t changed. At eighteen, it had been new and indiscriminate. Now it was well honed and much more lethal. The bloom might be off the rose, but the thorns had grown poison tips.

He retrieved his drink and settled in his chair, more depressed by their encounter than he wanted to be. As he gazed around at the luxurious house that his money had bought him, he remembered the sneers of his Irish bricklayer father when Colin had been forced to return to England after he’d been fired from his teaching job.

“Comin’ home in disgrace, are you, then? So much for you and your mum’s fancy ways, boyo. Now you’ll be doin’ honest work like the rest of us.”

For that alone, Colin would never forgive Sugar Beth Carey.

He lifted his glass, but even the taste of ten-year-old scotch couldn’t erase the single-minded defiance he’d seen in Sugar Beth’s eyes. Despite that assault he’d delivered in the disguise of a kiss, she still believed she had the upper hand. He set his glass aside and contemplated exactly how he would disabuse her of that notion.

“Have I done wrong? So many prim persons stared as though they could not believe their eyes!”

GEORGETTE HEYER, The Grand Sophy