Beneath Southern Skies Page 4

  Nate wasn’t an entertainer in the common sense of the word, but he was just as much a celebrity as Pamela Mayes was. As a reporter at a well-respected news station, he had established what would’ve ended up being a respectable, if not mundane, career for himself. But as a freelance investigative journalist, he had found a way not only to entertain people, but also to make them think. If his stories were informative, sometimes hard to swallow and often gut-wrenching, the photos that he took, the magic that he created from behind the lens, were absolutely awe-inspiring and even more so. He took the pictures that others turned away from and made you look at them. It hadn’t taken the powers that be long to notice that special something that he possessed, and along with notoriety had come wealth and a different kind of fame. On top of that, he was mouthwateringly sexy.

  Linking him with Pamela Mayes and being able to substantiate the link with the kind of factual evidence that Tressie could’ve provided would have ignited her career. And then writing a no-holds-barred follow-up exposé about the life and times of the infamous Pamela Mayes, about everything that happened before and after her relationship with Nate Woodberry, would’ve shot Tressie’s career straight into orbit.

  But she had missed the boat and now it was too late.

  The trauma of burying her twin sister, the only biological family that Pam ever had, had already been written about in a biography that had sold millions of copies while Tressie had been too afraid to defy Nate’s order of silence. Pam had been involved in other scandals since then, and now that she was happily married and fairly domesticated, she was busy trying to build a legacy that she could be proud of. These days she was working hard to downplay her penchant for negative media attention and bring her philanthropic efforts to the forefront.

  So Tressie would never get to write about what had to have been an intense connection between Nate and Pam. They had been lovers—she was sure of it, though she didn’t have a scrap of proof. Nate would never admit to it and Pam wasn’t exactly in a position to be completely forthcoming, but there it was just the same.

  As if reading her thoughts, Nate’s lips moved closer and hovered less than a breath away from hers. “I can see that you are listening,” he whispered, “so I’ll make this quick. To answer your question, sugar—no, I’m not the king of your comings and goings. No man in his right mind would want that responsibility. But for the next little while, let’s just say that I’m the king of Mercy, Georgia, and as the king, I’m giving you a royal decree. If you came here to stick your pointy little nose into the eminent domain situation here in Mercy and make a mockery of it, forget about it. These people need help, but they don’t need your kind of help. Understood?”

  No, but...whatever. “Um, yeah, I guess so.”

  “Good. Do you need me to help you pack?”

  “N-no.” Especially since she wasn’t planning on going anywhere.

  “Then we understand each other.”

  “Perfectly.”

  “Good. So I’ll see myself out.”

  “Please do.”

  Silly man, Tressie thought as she watched Nate disappear down the stairs. Now that he had piqued her curiosity, did he really think she was going to just pack up and leave without finding out what was going on?

  She breathed a sigh of relief when she heard the door slam and then raced downstairs to the front door to double lock it behind him. Back upstairs, she went into her old bedroom and peeked out the window at him from behind the blinds. The Navigator burned rubber backing out of the driveway and taking off down the street. Once it was out of sight, she dropped her towel and slipped into a pair of shorts and a fresh tank top.

  Then she powered up her laptop and went on a searching expedition. An eminent domain situation in Mercy, Georgia? What the hell?

  * * *

  The Navigator couldn’t carry Nate away from Tressie’s house fast enough. Pushing the bulky machine well beyond posted speed limits, he drove back the way he had come by rote, his thoughts churning at warp speed despite the fact that his body was exhausted. Before he had discovered that Tressie was back in town, all he had wanted to do was get to his mother’s house as quickly as possible, take a long, hot shower and crawl into bed. Now all he could think about was seeing Tressie naked, and suddenly the prospect of getting into an empty bed didn’t seem quite so satisfying.

  He hadn’t been intimate with a woman in several months, almost a year by his own self-imposed-celibacy calculations, and he was feeling deprived of it right now more than ever. When he was on assignment, the story always took precedence. Women, as much as he loved them, were a luxury that he couldn’t afford to indulge in. The slightest distraction on location could cost him his life, so he had long since learned to channel all his energy in the only direction that mattered—time and place, and getting in and out alive.

  The press liked to paint a picture of him that was far from the reality of his everyday life. For every woman that he’d ever actually established some sort of relationship with, there were at least ten more that they had erroneously linked him to. If he let them tell it, he spent most of his time seducing unsuspecting women and breaking their hearts. But the exact opposite was actually closer to the truth. When he wasn’t on location, he spent most of his time locked away in his darkroom, which was precisely why none of the relationships that he had taken time out of his busy schedule to cultivate had ever actually moved past the dating stage.

  He was married to his work.

  But he wasn’t working now and, with images of Tressie’s water-streaked breasts etched into his brain, his body was acutely aware of exactly how long it’d been since he had been close enough to a woman to do anything more than breathe in her scent. Not that he was the least bit interested in Tressie Valentine, he reminded himself as he executed a left turn that balanced the Navigator on two wheels, because he wasn’t. Still, he couldn’t help wondering how he’d never noticed that she was so damn sexy.

  Of course, the possibility that he was half–out of his mind from lack of sex was a very real one. But he was pretty sure that he’d been thinking with the right head when he noticed that her bottom lip was slightly plumper than her top one and, therefore, begging to be sucked; that she had twin beauty marks—one centered perfectly above her top lip and the other in the center of her chin—and he’d thought about touching the tip of his tongue to them. That her breasts were beautifully tipped with what had looked to his suddenly dry mouth like large, ripe blackberries. Hadn’t he?

  Either way it was a moot point because Tressie Valentine had to be the last person on earth that he wanted to get involved with, even if it would’ve been just for the sake of hot, sweaty sex. For one thing, she talked too much and he had never been attracted to chatty women. And for another, he wasn’t inclined to deal with the kind of drama that she would undoubtedly introduce into his life. His hands were full enough as it was with the drama going on in Mercy, without adding another ingredient to the mix. Plus, if there was a God in heaven, the woman would be on the other side of the state line, headed back to New York, before nightfall.

  Pushing any and all thoughts of Tressie Valentine to the back of his mind, Nate pulled into his own driveway and shut off the Navigator. As he hauled his duffel into the house and took it with him into the only room in the house that was still furnished, he decided that if she wasn’t gone by the end of the day, he would track her down—again—and strangle the hell out of her.

  Chapter 3

  If there was one good thing about committing a crime in Mercy, Georgia, Tressie told herself as she raised a window at the back of Nate’s house and hiked up her sundress so she could climb inside, it was that people never locked their windows or doors. The rest of the world had moved on to high-tech alarm systems, vicious guard dogs and megawatt floodlights, but not Mercy. The crime rate here was next to nothing, which made it way too easy for people
like her to do exactly what she was doing—breaking and entering.

  At the last minute, she remembered that she was wearing stilettos and took them off before she tucked her miniflashlight between her teeth, boosted herself up on the window ledge and dove through the window like a cat. Inside, she landed as quietly as she could on her elbows and knees, and quickly scrambled to her feet. The kitchen was clear, as was the hallway beyond it and what she could see of the living room.

  She stood still for a second, listening to the sounds of the house and waiting for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. Somewhere a clock was ticking and the central air-conditioning unit was humming steadily, but otherwise not a creature seemed to be stirring. She knew that Nate was home, because the Navigator that he’d been driving earlier was parked in the driveway. Leaving her shoes on the floor by the window, she inched forward and crept deeper into the house on the tips of her toes.

  In the living room, she moved across the hardwood floor stealthily, being careful not to trip the built-in alarm in the center of the room. The slight dip in the wood there was invisible to the naked eye, but anyone who had ever come to Miss Merlene for a press-and-curl back in the day knew exactly where it was. At three o’clock in the afternoon, the loud squeal that it emitted was tolerable, but at three o’clock in the morning, it definitely wasn’t the kind of entrance that Tressie wanted to make. She breathed a silent sigh of relief when she made it to the other side of the room and then to the short hallway that led to the bedrooms without making a sound.

  After that, finding Nate was a piece of cake. She killed the flashlight and followed the dim glow of the night-light that he’d left on in the bathroom adjoining his bedroom. He was in bed, sleeping wildly with the bedspread kicked back and off him, a pillow bunched underneath his head and a sheet wound around his waist. One of his legs lay on top of the sheet and an arm hung off the side of the huge bed. Setting her flashlight on the nightstand, Tressie moved closer to the sleeping giant.

  “Nate,” she whispered. The steady rise and fall of his chest continued undisturbed. She tried again, a little louder this time. “Nate!” Still nothing. Carefully sidestepping his dangling arm, she leaned over him and slowly reached out. “Nate.”

  Even in sleep the man was a god. Long-limbed and artfully sculpted, he was like a carved, life-size sex toy, Tressie decided as her gaze wandered south and followed the trail of fine, dark hair that began at his navel and snaked down his abdomen until it disappeared beneath the sheet. She was tempted to touch him there, just to see if the hair was as soft and springy as it looked, but she settled for touching the warm, smooth skin on his shoulder instead.

  “Nate, wake up.” A deep, throaty groan was the only indication that he’d heard her.

  “Nate, wake up.” She shook him softly. “It’s me, Tressie. I need to talk to you. Wake up.” Several seconds passed before it finally occurred to her that he was nowhere near the waking point. As if she needed further convincing, he stirred just long enough to stretch languidly, push one hand up and underneath the pillow he was lying on, and then push the other one down and underneath the sheet pooled around his waist. Willing herself not to think about what he was possibly touching down there, she leaned over Nate and flattened a hand on his chest. “Dammit, Nate. Wake up, would you?”

  He twitched and she jumped. Then he settled back into sleep again, and she pressed a hand to her chest to steady her pounding heart. He twitched again and she held her breath, waiting. As it turned out, she didn’t have to wait long.

  “Oh, my God” was all she had the presence of mind to say when he sprang toward her like a cobra. The next thing she knew, she was airborne and screaming, once again, at the top of her lungs.

  * * *

  Goddamned woman, Nate thought as he hauled her lithe and protesting little body across the bed and rolled with her. She was scrambling to get her bearings, but her flailing arms and legs were no match for the element of surprise. No doubt he had scared the hell out of her, but from where he was lying, turnabout was fair play. Waking up in the middle of the night to find someone lurking in the dark, standing over him with, as far as he was concerned, questionable intentions, hadn’t exactly done his heart any good, either.

  She landed on her back in the middle of the bed and he came down on top of her, thinking the entire time about shaking her until her teeth rattled. She was like a fly. The more you swatted at the damn thing, the more it kept buzzing around your head. But even flies got the hint after a while. What the hell was she still doing in Mercy?

  His hands found hers and clamped them to the mattress above her head before she could scratch his eyes out or worse, and his knee wedged its way between hers...just in case. She was still screaming her head off, but he wasn’t about to release one of her hands so that he could cover her mouth.

  “Would you please shut up?” Nate growled in Tressie’s ear. “You know damn well who I am and where you are.”

  As if someone had flipped a switch, Tressie fell silent. A second later, she giggled. “Of course I know it’s you. I snuck in here, remember?”

  “Which begs the obvious question—why?”

  Chest-to-chest and face-to-face, they stared at each other.

  “Because I thought it would add an air of mystery and suspense to the situation,” she quipped, still giggling. “Plus, it was fun, sort of like riding a roller coaster. And you know what? Something tells me that you would be one hell of a roller-coaster ride, Nate.”

  “And something tells me that you need to have your head checked.” Or maybe he was the one who needed his head checked. He had half a mind to throw her right back out the window that she had undoubtedly crawled through. The problem was the other half of his mind was wondering if the skin between her breasts, both of which were crushed between them like twin pillows at this very moment, smelled as good as the skin in the hollow of her neck did. Either too many forays into jungles and deserts were causing him to lose his mind, or she was some kind of witch doctor trying to cast a voodoo spell on him. When his penis perked up and started thinking with a mind of its own, he decided that it had to be the latter. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t call the police and have you hauled off to jail?”

  “Because it would be morning before they got here, and I don’t have that long to wait,” she said simply. As if she was just now realizing that he had her pinned down, she pulled at the viselike grip that he had on her hands and sighed when she couldn’t move them. “Listen, would you mind letting go of my hands? Believe it or not, I didn’t come here to wrestle with you.”

  “I learned a long time ago not to believe anything that comes out of your mouth,” he sniped. But he rolled off her anyway. He grabbed the sheet and took it with him when he sat up on the side of the bed, hoping like hell that the erection jutting from between his thighs would relax and go back to sleep. “What could you possibly want at three o’clock in the morning?” he asked, staring at the alarm clock on the bedside table.

  “I needed to talk to you.” He heard her scrambling around behind him on the bed. Then her bare legs swung over the side of the bed next to his. He stared at the muscles in her calves as though he had never seen any before. “I did some checking after you left and—”

  “Some checking?” His eyes changed direction and narrowed on her face. “Checking into what?”

  “The eminent domain situation here in Mercy,” she said as if he was a little mixed up in the head. “I didn’t find much, which really surprised me. These kinds of stories usually make good community-relations pieces. As a journalist, I—”

  He snorted.

  Rolling her eyes, Tressie continued as if she hadn’t heard the veiled insult. “As a journalist, the issue started me to thinking.”

  “This ought to be good,” Nate drawled, pushing up from the bed and dragging the sheet along with him to the bathroom. A quick, cold show
er was definitely in order. He rolled his eyes to the ceiling and stifled a groan when he heard Tressie following him. “Do you mind? I’m about to take a shower.”

  “Of course not. What’s a couple of showers between old friends?” she chirped cheerfully. “I’ll just come with you and talk loud so you can hear me over the water.”

  “I suppose this is payback for what happened earlier today,” he said as he dropped the sheet and stepped into the shower. To hell with it—if she refused to give him some privacy, then she deserved the consequences. His penis was still standing at semi-attention when he turned on the water and adjusted the spray, still bobbing proudly in the air when she glanced down at it and froze comically. It took a few seconds for her gaze to rise above his waist and find his, and when it did it was decidedly feline. “I’ve seen you and you’ve seen me. Now we’re even. Talk,” he barked and then closed the glass shower door in her shocked face.

  Luckily for her, Tressie recovered quickly. “Well, the way I see it, Mercy deserves a hell of a lot more media coverage than it’s gotten so far,” she began. “I had no idea that all this was going on down here. A couple of weeks ago, I got a letter from this company—”

  “Consolidated Investments,” he cut in.

  “How did you know?”

  “Lucky guess. Go on.” Through the glass he saw that she had made a seat for herself on top of the vanity and had crossed her legs Indian-style. Her sundress was pooled around her hips, and every glorious inch of her legs was on display. An image of those legs wrapped around his neck streaked through his mind before he could stop it, and all he could do in its wake was grin humorlessly. Was this what he had been reduced to? Lusting against his will after a woman that couldn’t have been less his type if she tried? She was curvy and voluptuous, and he had always preferred long and willowy. She was short, and tall was what usually caught his eye. She was energetic and bubbly, and laid-back was more his style. She giggled, and he had always liked the sound of a woman’s slow, smoky laugh.