Something to Talk About

Louella, beautiful and blonde, pristine in a winter-white cowl neck dress and deep burgundy knit shrug, coupled with knee-high, brown leather boots, wiggled her fingers at Em. “Hi, Em! How’s tricks—I mean, Trixie?” Lesta-Sue Arnold and Annabelle Pruitt giggled on cue like all good gang members do when their head gangster tugged on their puppet strings.

If there were ever a day, today would be the one, when slugging Louella Palmer right in her perky nose was highest on her bucket list. Her reference to Em’s ex-husband, Clifton, and his cross-dresser name, Trixie, had everyone in town turning around.

Always look your demons square in the eye, Emmaline Amos—then lift your chin and show ’em all your secrets. You get there before they do, there’s nothing they can touch if you’ve already touched it.

Sage advice from Dixie the ex-demon.

Em lifted her chin, securing her dark sunglasses on her nose to fight the effects of the glaring sun and the stares of everyone around them, waiting to see if she would react.

She chanted in her mind, Be Dixie. Be one with the Dixie. “Oh, he’s right fine, Louella. How’s that rhinoplasty you’ve got scheduled comin’ along?” she called back, stopping just feet from the white steel table they’d gathered ’round like it was a cauldron and they were witches, mixing a brew.

She smiled with innocence at the group, eyeing each one of them, then setting her sights on Louella, still recovering from her crack about the bump she currently had on her nose, courtesy of tanglin’ with Dixie. “Silly me. How insensitive to make mention of it when it’s clear you still haven’t even made the appointment.”

Em didn’t wait to see their faces. Pivoting on her heel, she breezed off, catching the low cackle of Dixie’s future mother-in-law, Jo-Lynne Donovan, from the corner of the café. Jo-Lynne flashed her a quick thumbs-up and a warm smile before returning to her steaming coffee, making Em instantly regret her unkind comment.

Just because Louella Palmer had come precariously close to ruining her life in Plum Orchard, had turned her children into the subject of cruel jokes at school, was no reason for her to take pleasure in cheers from the crowd. That would make her as bad, if not worse, than Louella Palmer.

But she shot a conspiratorial smile back at Jo-Lynne anyway; because today, Louella’s gruesome was something she just couldn’t cotton on top of her minihangover.

Head down to fight the yellow beast of the sun in the sky, Em went straight for the hardware store’s door, stopping just shy of entering when she sensed a presence, a large, warm, almost-imposing presence.

Her eyes flew upward, locking gazes with an intense pair of light brown eyes surrounded by a thick fringe of lashes. The sun glazed them for a moment, turning them a deep, glimmering whiskey.

It was him.

Her cheeks went hot.

The him she’d spent far too many hours daydreaming about since they’d first made eye contact over two months ago. Him laughing, his perfectly straight white teeth flashing when he smiled at her. Him, gruff and darkly beautiful, his thickly roped arms wrapped around her waist, securing her to his side.

Him when he leaned in low and took her mouth, letting his tongue rasp along hers and kissing her like her lips were the very reason he breathed.

And yes, even him naked, with every corded muscle that made up his smooth planes and rigid lines hovering above her, hard against her belly, her legs tight around his waist as he thrust into...

Her heart stopped pumping, the unquenchable heat in her veins threatening to set her limbs on fire.

His square jaw was almost too square, too hard and unforgiving until it shifted when his lips turned up in a smile of inquiry, leaving Em holding her breath.

Apparently, “him” didn’t recognize her. Disappointment flared in the pit of her belly. To be fair, her hair was a little longer now, and she did have dark sunglasses and a hat on.

Somehow, in her daydreams, when they saw each other again, he would’ve known her if he was blind.

Em’s stomach clenched and released then contracted into a tight fist again when he cocked his dark head in the direction of the interior of the hardware store as if to say, “Ladies first.” He patiently held the door, his squared fingers covered in Band-Aids, scratches and hangnails.

The cool breeze blew another swift gust, carrying with it his scent, crisp and clean—like Irish Spring and fresh creek water. The way he smelled made perfect sense to Em. A man like him, hard and raw, sinful from head to toe, didn’t need expensive cologne as a final touch to his rough perfection.

Em’s heart finally struck up the band again, and began to boom in time with her head. Her fingers clutched the strap of the purse slung over her shoulder. Words, as they always did with a man, especially this man, failed her.

A bump from behind jolted her forward, making her aware she was staring. “Gawking, honey,” Dixie whispered in her ear. “Stop gawking and say, ‘hello, divine man. Need a screw for your screwdriver?’”

Em did everything she could to keep from gasping at Dixie’s suggestive words, nudging her in the ribs before sending the man a cool smile and whisking past him into the hardware store, Dixie in tow.

She headed straight for the farthest aisle from the door, almost running into Nanette Pruitt and Essie Guthrie without even acknowledging them, refusing to stop until she was as far away from that man as possible.

Dixie’s ankle boots clacked behind Em, skidding to a halt when she rounded the corner and hid behind a pallet of two-by-fours.

Em grabbed Dixie by her arm and pulled her close, scrunching her eyes shut. All that rapid forward motion left her stomach sketchy at best.

Dixie fought to catch her own breath in a harsh wheeze, before asking, “Why did we just run all the way across Lucky’s like we were runnin’ from a band of Magnolias with lit torches?”

The stomp of work boots as Lucky’s employees loaded and unloaded pallets of heavy wood made her wince, but it was the stench of turpentine and furniture polish that was almost her undoing. She took a gulp of air, thanking whoever was in charge of the universe the moment passed.

Dixie smoothed Em’s hair off her shoulder, giving it a gentle tug. “One more time. Why did we run all the way to the back of the store when what you need is in the front?”

“Because that’s him!” Em wheezed back, pressing her fingers to her queasy stomach and tugging her knit beret farther down her forehead.

Dixie snickered, unwrapping the turquoise scarf from her neck. “I know it’s him, Em. I remember. I was in the square that night when the two of you all but consummated your mad lust just lookin’ at each other. If you’d stared at each other much longer? Total combustion. Poof.” She gestured an explosion with her fingers and a grin full of mischief.

Em groaned out her misery in both ailment and bad memory. One of the worst nights of her life had included the best ten seconds of her life. One long searing gaze over picnic blankets and children’s heads was really all it had been. Yet, there had been more bad that night than good.

“Didn’t you once say you heard Louella call him Jax? What a gorgeous name. You’d better make haste before Annabelle Pruitt lures him to her house for her special fudge candy pops. Or the seal-the-deal cherry crumb pie,” Dixie teased.

But Em was back in the square—locked in the memory of all the horrible stares, the gasps of shock when Clifton’s secret was revealed. “I don’t want to think about that night ever again, Dixie.”

Dixie scoffed, lifting Em’s sunglasses to gaze directly into her eyes. “Stop clinging to a bad memory, Em. It’s over. Everyone knows Clifton cross-dresses now. So what? If anyone should hate the memory of that night, it should be me. Or have you forgotten you thought I was the one who’d gossiped about Clifton’s secret to someone and that ‘someone’ told Louella, who accidentally on purpose included the picture of him at the Founders’ Day slide show all dressed up in his Trixie LeMieux gown?”

Em’s lips thinned, snapping her back to reality and the sounds of a busy Saturday at Lucky’s. “We’re not far from the nail aisle, Miss Dixie. Do you want to buy some to seal my coffin all right and proper?”

Dixie snorted a chuckle, scanning the surrounding area and lowering her voice. “Hah! I’ll just borrow some of yours.”

Oh. That night. She’d said so many unforgivable things to Dixie, it left her with an actual physical pain when she remembered them. “I’ve apologized for that night. Over and over, might I remind you?”

Dixie’s smile was full of warmth and sympathy. “Which is sort of my point, silly. You don’t need to apologize anymore because it’s over, Em, long ago. And might I remind you, just before all those bad memories happened, you made a good one, too. A really, hot, longingly, deliciously good one. One that involves that enormous man dipped in delicious all the way up to his eyeballs. Whose name is Jax, in case you needed remindin’.”

Fear and humiliation rooted her to the spot, refusing to allow her to move an inch. Her thighs ached from sitting on her haunches, but she’d rather sit on them all day than have that man recognize her.

“So, are you going to go see if you can recapture that magical moment in the square—or are your eyes too bloodshot?”

“I’m not reliving anything. He saw everything that night. Everything, Dixie.”

All on a big screen. Clifton, larger than life, dressed better than Em would ever be capable of dressing herself. He’d heard, too, she was sure.

Who hadn’t heard her call Dixie a sorry excuse for a human being that night? Remembering those awful, ugly words, words Dixie had long ago forgiven her for, still made her feel sick with shame.

The frosty white icing on the cake? She’d run smack into him upon fleeing the square that evening, tears soaking her cheeks, her nylons ripped from tripping over a child’s bike in her mad dash to get away from the prying eyes of everyone attending the Founders’ Day celebration.

Em hadn’t seen him since that night when just before she’d humiliated herself in front of all of Plum Orchard, they’d shared a moment when their eyes met—a brief few seconds still suspended in her mind, and probably much bigger than it had truly been.

What was he doing back here anyway? He couldn’t have been here for the past two months. There was no way you could hide someone the size of him in Plum Orchard—droves of the town’s single women lining up outside wherever he rested his gorgeous, dark head wasn’t something you’d likely miss.

Sure as the day was long, a fresh man even remotely passable didn’t stand a chance in a place where a new face didn’t go unnoticed and the single women outnumbered the single men five to one.

Dixie sighed, finally sliding to sit entirely on the floor, crossing her legs. “Who cares what Jax saw? He probably doesn’t even remember anything but that across the crowded square thing you two were doing with your eyes. I saw him look at you, Em. That cancels everything else out. Why didn’t you just say hello to him out there to begin with? You can’t ever do lascivious things to his incredible body if you don’t at least say hello. Well, hold that thought. I guess technically, you could, but I think that classifies you in a category unbefitting a lady.”

Em slid down next to Dixie, letting her head rest against the ends of the wood with a weak sigh. “Stop being plum crazy. A man like that isn’t ever going to let a woman like me do anything to his incredible body.”

“Why the heck not?”

“Spoken like a woman who’s never doubted her incredibleness.” And why would Dixie doubt how gorgeous she was? She exuded confidence and this raw sexuality that oozed from her pores.

“Leave me out of this, and stop making excuses. So tell me again why a man like that wouldn’t let a woman like you have her way with him?”

“Because he’s just too much incredible. Incredible men look for incredible women.” At least, that’s the experience she’d had since they’d begun girls’ night. A man like that wouldn’t be interested in her. He’d want a woman who was dynamic, worldly and far more interesting than a woman who’d rather stay at home and bake apple pies while she sipped grape Kool-Aid from a wineglass, fancying herself a real academic because she read mystery novels by the dozen.

She was simple, in taste and in her way of life. He looked like he should drive an Aston Martin and call some elderly woman Miss Moneypenny. He might appear big and gruff, but there was a primal elegance to it—a Daniel Craig air about him that left her knees weak.

Dixie rose, holding out her hand to Em, who took it, moaning when the motion of merely rising unsettled her precarious stomach. “The not-hungover Dixie is going to tell hungover Em to stop being so maudlin and more important, stop talking about yourself like you’re not just as incredible. Because that’s just plain not true. Now,” she said, tucking her gloves inside the pockets of her sweater, “why are you here again? I forgot in light of the hunky man.”

“Tile. I need to pick out some new tile for my bathroom. But first, I need you to take a peek around that corner and be sure he’s gone. Please.” She pointed over her shoulder.

Please let him be gone, please let him be gone.

Dixie poked her head around the tall steel shelves, housing smaller cuts of wood. She gave Em the thumbs-up, holding out her arm to her.

Em hooked arms with Dixie, forcing her shaky legs to keep up. “I warned you you were headed for a hangover, didn’t I?”

“You bein’ the expert, and all,” she remarked dryly, using all her energy to focus on picking new ceramic tile for her bathroom. Since Clifton left, she found herself itching to change the things he’d once loved but she’d hated about their small house. Seeing as she was good with a band saw—or almost any saw—and Dixie had afforded her a generous paycheck, she could do it.

Dixie grinned. “Hangovers and a little sleepin’ around were my specialties. Don’t take from my résumé, Em. It messes with my street cred, lessening the value of all my hard work all those years. It hurts.”

Em giggled. “Stop chattering. It makes my head swim.”

Dixie rested her arm high on a rack holding row after row of colorful tile. “That’s because you’re hungover. A swimming head’s a sure sign.”

“Hush, and help me pick out some new tile, would you, please? I don’t want to waste a Saturday doing nothing while the boys are away.”

“Are you really going to tackle this project alone? It’s a lot of work. Why won’t you just let me pay someone to do it for you?” Dixie’s face had skeptical all over it.

“It’s called Em’s big, fat pride. If I let someone do it, I won’t have done it myself. There’s a certain sense of self-satisfaction in remodeling an entire house all on your own. It’s not like I don’t know my way around a wet saw, Dixie. I mean, I did spend the first months of my divorce watching nothing but the DIY channel and YouTube. It gives me something to do while the boys are off at Mama’s, or when Clifton finally gets around to bringing them to Atlanta for his visitation. It’s clean, hard work—and it’s good for the soul. But also because I don’t want these busybodies to start talkin’ and saying I’m just your person because of all that money you have now. So let’s be clear.” She raised her voice a decibel so there’d be no mistake about whether Emmaline Amos took handouts. “I don’t love you for your mountains of money.”

Dixie held up a blue ceramic square with a yellow sunflower on it for Em’s inspection. “Then why do you love me, Em?”

Em shook her head when she peeked at the tile by lifting her dark glasses. No sunflowers. “I love you because lovin’ you is like havin’ an in with the devil’s head playmate. I’m always guaranteed an invite to the exorcism.”

Her phone buzzed against her hip, cutting Dixie off. She dragged it out of her pocket, frowning when she saw it was Nella, Call Girls’ receptionist.

Em held the phone up to Dixie so she could see who was calling. “My work never ends, does it? Sure, let’s give Em a job, you said. Let’s give her a juicy paycheck to match, you said. Let’s give her a title like general manager to match her big paycheck. I should have known there’d be Saturday strings attached with you in charge, Dixie,” she joked, scrolling her phone’s screen. “Nella?”

“Let me start right out by apologizing.” She rushed her words together, her voice riddled with anxiety. “I confused my lines again, and crossed wires, or pressed the wrong button, or whatever it is you do when you do it wrong—I did it. I’m so sorry, Em! I’m still learnin’ the phones. I would never want to do anything to jeopardize the good fortune that’s come my way since you hired me.”

Em smiled into the phone, full of sympathy for Nella. She’d hired Nella three weeks ago on a recommendation from her cousin Flynn. She didn’t know the details about what initially brought Nella to Plum Orchard, and she made it her business not to ask why she always looked so sad when she thought no one was looking.

She only knew Nella’s circumstances had left her jobless, and she kept to herself, but her sweet face, enormous round green eyes and cute pixie haircut were a total contradiction to the way she handled parsing out good calls from bad like a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound linebacker. “Nella? It’s okay. Everyone makes mistakes. You’re new. It happens.”

Nella groaned into Em’s ear, a vibrating buzz like a dentist’s drill to her sensitive head. “I promise you, it won’t happen again. I heard all that yelling, and I just knew I had to apologize for causin’ trouble, but I couldn’t find you to do it by the time I had a free moment.”

That’s because by that time, she’d been flat out on her big bed, clothes still on, snoring and drooling. “Nella, please don’t fret a second longer. Everything’s fine. You made a simple mistake, and I took care of it. That poor little girl shouldn’t have had access to a number...” She trailed off when she caught sight of Dixie, jumping up and down, waving her arms.

Em furrowed her brow, cocking her head in question while Dixie danced around. “She said she found it on her daddy’s desk! I was horrified, and this poor, sweet angel—”

“It was damn well you,” a voice as deep and booming as a canyon accused, creating a hush in the chatter of gossipy conversation all around her from the patrons of Lucky’s.

Em whipped around just in time to see Dixie stood behind him. She threw her hands up in the air in obvious defeat, shooting Em a digusted roll of her eyes.

It was him. The him.

But he wasn’t looking down at her with the look of her two-month-old daydreams. The look that said he’d gobble her up whole and no one in the world compared to her.

No.

This him was glaring at her—lording over her as though she was personally responsible for the Civil War and global warming.

His thick, squared finger rose, pointing directly at her. “It was you on the phone last night with my daughter.”

Three

Em’s eyes slid upward, scanning the length of him. This wasn’t her him. Her him wouldn’t have been the angry father from the phone last night. He also wouldn’t be an angry father with a phone number for a place like Call Girls.

She was certainly open to many things since she’d begun working for Call Girls—she would never judge a client, or at least she tried her best not to. But a man she’d turned into a knight in shining armor by virtue of one long glance, calling women for sex who were complete strangers?

“Nella?” She fought the squeak in her voice. “I’ll call you back.” Em slid the phone off and dropped it back into her pocket, taking in a deep breath before confronting him.

Arms crossed over his big chest, encased in a black sweatshirt with a plaid flannel jacket over it, he flared his nostrils. “You spoke to my daughter on the phone last night. I’d know your voice anywhere after you read me the first-grade teacher ‘how dare you’ riot act.”

Dixie was about to rush to her aid. Em knew it just by the sound of her heels clacking with a swift pitter-patter across the hardware store’s floor and the narrowing of her eyes. The angry narrow, not to be confused with the smolder narrow.

Em held up a hand to ward off Dixie, who came to stand at her side nonetheless. When it came to looking out for Call Girls, nothing could fluster her. Not even him.

She cleared her throat and adopted a businesslike tone. “I think we got off on the wrong foot last night. First, let me introduce myself—or reintroduce myself. I’m Emmaline Amos, general manager for Call Girls Inc.” She held out her hand.

He stared at it, his once-promising lips now a hard line.

Em straightened, sucking in her cheeks. Hoping to avoid a spectacle everyone in town would talk about until she made the next spectacle of herself. “Maybe we should discuss this outside?”

His face grew harder, if that was possible. “The hell. I’m fine with discussing it right here. Mind telling me how a six-year-old managed to get through to one of your operators?”

Em’s eyebrow rose. She bristled at the implication she was anything less than acutely aware of everything that went on at Call Girls. “Mind telling me how your six-year-old got her hands on a number like ours? She did say it was on your desk.”

He ran a hand over his jaw, already littered with stubble, or maybe it had remained littered with stubble because he hadn’t shaved.

His face, formerly known as hard and angry, went suddenly boggled and tame. He scratched his head. “Come to think of it, I have no idea how she got her hands on the number. I sent her straight to bed, and I didn’t have time to talk with her about it this morning. She made me tea, which distracted me because she’s dang cute when she makes me her special tea. That’s how I left her—having tea.”

Which would imply there was someone else looking after his little girl if he’d left her at the house, and still didn’t explain why he had a number for Call Girls. She struggled with how deeply that disappointed her and gave him her “aha” look, hoping her glare would reach him from behind her sunglasses.

It was the glare she gave her boys when they held the answer to their own question. “Then your number-one priority right now is to go focus on bein’ a better parent, and ask her. You obviously missed the chapter on putting things in high places where small children can’t reach them,” she condescended.

He grinned—suddenly, inexplicably. And it was magical. “I obviously did.”

Just like that, he wasn’t angry or yelling anymore. He was like Texas weather. Stormin’ and ragin’ one minute, sunny and blue-skied the next.

“So you—” he leaned in toward her and whispered “—manage a phone-sex company?”

Now that his accusatory tone and mad face were gone, Em’s words suddenly were, too. She swallowed hard, tongue-tied. When he said the words phone sex, her heart stopped again. It was husky and raspy like he’d taken a swig of whiskey and it had left him hoarse. His deep timbre vibrated up along her spine with soft fingers.

She understood exactly what he’d said, but somehow, his words had turned into the man of her daydreams asking her to have sex with him. Which couldn’t be right.

Her cheeks flushed.

Dixie pinched her arm and smiled at Em with encouragement. “She does manage a phone-sex company, and she’s amazing.”

Em nodded because it seemed like the right thing to do, not because she considered herself amazing. “I do.”

Now his eyebrow rose, dark and questioning. He made the shape of a phone with his fingers. “So, do you, you know, talk to...people—callers?” He seemed fascinated by the idea that he might have encountered a real live phone-sex operator out and about in the wilds of Plum Orchard, Georgia.

Em knew he was waiting for an answer, but she was mesmerized by the sharp planes of his face, the deep grooves on either side of his mouth, his dark hair, shaggy and curling around the collar of his jacket. And the pink barrette, dangling from a strand of it just behind his ear.