Beneath Southern Skies

But just to be on the safe side, she took a full step back from him before throwing one of the stones he’d mentioned. “You know, it’s funny that you mention me not having a life, when you’re the one who’s dedicated his entire life to chasing after another man’s woman. Where’s the dignity in that, Nate, huh?”

He went stone still and his eyes narrowed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said quietly.

Shut up, Tressie. Shut up now. “Oh, of course you do. I was here back then, too, remember? You were so in love with Pamela Mayes that you couldn’t see straight. Always trailing behind her and her boyfriend, hoping she would throw you a scrap of attention whenever she happened to look around and notice you there. But she never did, did she? What was his name? The boy she chose over you? Oh, that’s right. Chad Greene. Your best friend. Some friend you are.”

“Watch yourself, Tressie.”

“It was a sordid little story for a while there, and isn’t it a shame that I didn’t get to tell it.”

“You didn’t need to tell it. It was none of your business.”

“Whatever,” Tressie snapped, flapping a dismissive hand at him. “Like I said, it was five years ago. I kept up my end of the deal, so what do you want with me now?” The deal. Just thinking about it put a sour taste in her mouth.

When he had shown up at her office at the Inquisitor, some obviously delusional part of her mind had actually thought that he was there to invite her out to lunch or, even better, dinner. True, they didn’t exactly run in the same journalistic circles, but they had just run into each other in Mercy, when she had gone home for Ma’Dear’s funeral, and the vibe between them had been good. At least she’d thought so. Apparently her radar for gauging a man’s interest was seriously out of order, because not only couldn’t he have been less interested in taking her out to dinner, but he’d been on the verge of shaking her silly.

Accusations had been hurled and the shouting had been almost unbearable, and that was just on his part. For her part, she’d barely been able to get a word in. By the time he had calmed down long enough to issue a parting ultimatum, she’d been in tears. Drop the story, he’d said, or get ready for the world to know who she really was. It would’ve been a career-ending move, and no matter how badly she wanted to write columns that would bring the public to its knees, she couldn’t risk it.

And he’d known that.

Bastard.

“I want you not to make me take you to the mat again,” Nate said ominously. “Because you know I will.”

“For what?” Disbelief had her rearing back and staring up at him as if he was crazy, which very likely could’ve been the case. Studies had shown that some of the most attractive men in history had been quietly, secretly insane, and Nate Woodberry was way beyond attractive. He was tall and wrapped from head to toe in the kind of muscle that couldn’t be earned in a gym, and his smile, whenever he was moved to reveal it, which wasn’t very often it seemed, was just lopsided enough, just devilish enough to conjure up images of all kinds of X-rated deeds. His hair, when it wasn’t secured at the nape of his neck in a roguish ponytail, was an inky black curtain that draped his shoulders and hung down his back in silky waves. And when they weren’t narrowed to slits, his hazel eyes were sleepy-looking, as if he had just rolled out of bed. Any woman with a pulse would be tempted to roll him right back into bed upon first sight of him. Love didn’t immediately come to mind when you set eyes on him, but pure and simple lust damn sure did.

Quite frankly, he was a spectacular-looking man, which meant that the odds of his being completely off his rocker were greater than most. And here she was, naked except for a wash-worn towel and all alone with him in a nearly soundproof house. The way things were going, he could snap any second now, and what could she do? Beat him off with a towel that was probably just as old as she was?

“You know what?” Tressie said, mentally switching gears and frantically shooing him out of her way. “Forget I asked. I can’t deal with you right now, so I think it’s time for you to go.” She was surprised when he actually stepped aside, but she wasn’t about to waste a second of precious time thanking him. As soon as the way was clear, she made a beeline for the open door and the hallway on the other side of it. The bedroom she was using was directly across from the bathroom. Gripping her towel and walking fast, she headed toward it, praying every step of the way.

Walking just as fast behind her, Nate cuffed her arm and brought her skipping back to him two steps shy of her goal. “Just a second, sugar. I want to make sure we’re clear on something before you go back into hiding.” He dipped his head and put his face in her face. “Are you listening?”

Momentarily thrown off balance by the sheer impact of him, Tressie couldn’t find her voice. Good lord, the man was even more gorgeous up close. Some other part of her brain, some irrational, hypersexual part, wondered what he would do if she closed the inch separating his lips from hers and sucked his bottom lip into her mouth. Just curious, she’d say when he asked her what the hell she thought she was doing. Did he taste as good as he looked? Inquiring, sexually deprived minds suddenly wanted to know.

Pamela Mayes would know, she thought as her stricken gaze made its way down to the lips in question. Nate had been romantically linked to hundreds of high-profile women over the years, and somehow none of them had ever managed to drag him down the aisle. Whenever the topic of his lingering bachelorhood had come up in any of the personal interviews that he sometimes came out of seclusion and granted, he’d always rattled off some nonsense about not having found the right woman yet. But Tressie knew better. He had found the right woman years ago and let her slip through his fingers. All the other women that he’d romanced had just been extremely well-endowed, picture-perfect substitutes.

That information alone would’ve guaranteed sales in the hundreds of thousands if she’d been allowed to write even a fraction of the story.

Pamela Mayes was a country girl turned megasuperstar. She had turned her humble beginnings as an orphan here in Mercy, Georgia, into platinum records and multiple Grammy awards, stints on reality TV shows and, just this past year, a series of designer fragrances and a new makeup line. She was a household name, having been compared to legendary songbirds such as Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey when it came to vocal style and ability, and hottie newcomer celebrities like Jennifer Lopez and Kim Kardashian when it came to the scandal factor. As a result, the public loved her and the media dogged her every move.

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.”

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