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She was like Bruce Lee with a pair of nunchakus. Daryl from The Walking Dead with a bow and arrow. Phone sex operators throughout the land should all cower in fear when LaDawn broke out the flyswatter.
It was really just an audio prop for her BDSM clients to hear over the phone, but she fooled them into believing it was a flogger every time. For her birthday, they’d collectively had a real flyswatter bronzed with her name on it, which she proudly displayed in her office on her desk.
Dixie rolled her eyes at Em. “First off, not a chance we’d let you go this alone. There’s nothing like some love and coddlin’ when you’re so sick. Second, you hush, Em. I’m not saying that at all, and you know it. I love our Marybell—even today, nose redder than a tube of crimson lipstick and eyes drippin’ from behind that mask like a leaky faucet.”
Marybell took the tea with a grateful sigh, still keeping her eyes semiaverted over the rim of the china. “I think what Dixie’s saying is, I’m not Caine’s type.”
That was okay, too. She was no one’s type, and that was just as well. Buried in small-town Georgia, she’d never have to worry about the temptation of finding someone whose type she was.
There were few available men in town, anyway, but the men here liked women who wore pretty dresses, the proper-height heel for the appropriate time of day and subtle makeup. Their hair was always long and flowing, or up and smooth. It wasn’t riding a colored line along the tops of their heads, and they certainly weren’t wearing clunky black work boots and leopard-skin leggings slashed as if a knife had been taken to them.
LaDawn sat down on the chest, scooting the Crock-Pot to the side, tilting Marybell’s chin upward to look her in the eye. Well, as much as her cooling gel eye mask allowed, anyway.
Her heart stopped cold for a moment, her fingers trembling on the handle of the teacup. Caught. She was caught. They knew who she was and her safe, quiet, if not terribly exciting life would be over.
That clawing anxiety, usually reserved for late-night insomnia and mentally backtracking every move she made, pushed its way to lodge in her raw throat.
LaDawn’s lips, the color purple meant to match her nails, turned into a smile. She plucked at a strand of Marybell’s now drying, shoulder-length hair “As I live and breathe. You’re a natural blonde, aren’t you? How do you get all that red-and-green gunk in your hair every day? You know, I’d hate you if it wasn’t for Brugsby’s Drugstore and Miss Clairol.”
Marybell gulped before she forced a smile, praying she could stare LaDawn down without looking away. “It’s a spray. It washes out easy. And you’d love me any ol’ way, LaDawn. Who’d bring you those frosty pink doughnuts and coffee from Madge’s on the night shift, if not for me? Not even Doc Johnson does that. I’m forever your girl.”
LaDawn’s eye grew critical, though it still twinkled beneath her purple eye shadow and glittery gold eyeliner. “And when did you stop shavin’ half your eyebrow off? Next thing you know, you’ll be pluckin’ ’em into a fine arch like the rest of us ninnies. Why, if this keeps up, you might even wear a dress. Now, wouldn’t that be somethin’? Our Marybell in anything other than ripped-up or spotted with some kind of animal-print britches?” She chuckled deep and rich.
Conformity. Blessed be.
Em rubbed Marybell’s arm and smiled before pulling her frozen fingers into her hand and warming them. “Never you mind LaDawn and her teasin’. I think you’re hair’s pretty as a picture. All that natural curl leaves me with ugly envy in my heart. I don’t know why you hide it behind black eye shadow and all those colors and hair gel. It looks like it takes an awful lot of work to get it to stand up straight like someone scared the life outta you, but I don’t give a fig either way. I like the way you stare society and all its preconceived notions right down, look ’em square in the eye, and dare ’em to say anything. I like it especially when you do it to Louella Palmer. It always makes me giggle till I swear I’m gonna wet myself when her eyes are forced to give you the look of disdain and you growl and snap your teeth at her.”
Rage against the machine.
Marybell squeezed Em’s hand. Her snarling at Louella Palmer, the most hateful woman she’d ever encountered, was all part of the act to keep everyone she didn’t allow into her circle at bay.
Marybell lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I have a gift. Some people paint. I snarl. If I didn’t have my hair gelled up like I’d been scared half to death, she wouldn’t be afraid of me. Louella fears what she doesn’t understand. Besides, you just like when I growl at her because it keeps her too busy tanglin’ with me to hatch another plot against you and Dixie,” she quipped, accepting the dose of thick emerald-green cold medicine LaDawn handed her, chugging it down like a shot of tequila.
“You’re a wingman for the ages, MB. No doubt,” Dixie assured with her familiar warmth, rubbing her arms and shivering. “So explain to me why it’s so cold in here? Surely this isn’t on purpose, is it?” Dixie’s brow creased, her pretty face lining with concern. “Are you conserving heat for budgetary reasons? I won’t have it with it being so cold out and you ragin’ with flu, Marybell. A raise—I’ll give you a raise,” she offered, pushing through her purse to find her phone and make a note of it. “Em, turn up that heat while I let Nella know, would you?”
Dixie in a nutshell. Generous, funny, gorgeous and loyal to the core. Plum Orchard legend had it back in high school she was once feared for her horrible pranks.
Yet she’d come home just a few months ago, emotionally broken and cash poor only to turn around and win, in what the folks of Plum Orchard called the “phone sex games,” the entirety of the company Marybell worked for.
Since then, Dixie’d redeemed herself for the most part with nearly everyone who’d once held a grudge against her—well, everyone except the snotty Magnolias, the group of women who considered themselves the backbone of fine Southern breeding and ran Plum Orchard as if they were the mob.
Though, the people of Plum Orchard still didn’t love that not only did she own a phone sex company, but she consorted with her employees on a regular basis. Some of them still made no bones about sayin’ so.
Oddly, those same people who frowned upon her and the wicked women of Call Girls sure didn’t mind Dixie and her fiancé, Caine Donovan, funneling their alleged ill-gotten gains into town functions and fund-raisers for the elementary school.
Either way, Marybell didn’t give a hoot about the things Dixie had once done when she was just a teenager. Not a one of these set-in-their-ways folk were above making mistakes. Small towns had a way of holding a grudge the likes of which she’d never seen.
But Marybell had liked Dixie from the moment she’d been assigned by Cat as her guide to the world of the phone sex industry. Dixie had risen above ridicule and cruel attacks, and she’d defended the women of Call Girls right in front of God and man. Now, several months later, Marybell liked her even more.
And she didn’t want to lose Dixie, or any of them, on the chance they might recognize her. Knowing who she really was would create an invasion the likes of which Plum Orchard had never seen. But it wouldn’t just invade her life; it would invade the women’s lives. Women she’d come to care a great deal for, and she’d die before she let that happen.
Her gut tightened with the fear of loss in that way it always did—uncomfortable, choking her from the inside out. The fear that almost never entirely went away—even after all this time.
Always. It was always with her. Sometimes the panic muted, became a dull roar, but it never truly left. It hovered around the fringes of her life, poking at her like an animal in a cage, reminding her.
Em’s voice interrupted her private misery. She stood over the thermostat, studying it. “It says it’s eighty-five degrees in here, Dixie, but that can’t be right.” Em had a gift for most things DIY. Except anything electrical, as evidenced by the enormous hole Jax Hawthorne had in his backyard gazebo when she’d decided it would be pretty to put in a paddle fan with a light.
“It’s broken,” Marybell croaked, her nose itchy and raw. “And put your bags of money away, Dixie Davis,” she teased on a cough. “I don’t need a raise. You pay me just fine, thank you. I just forgot to ask Miss Carter to fix it with the warm spell we had not long ago. Leave it be, Dixie. I’ll have it taken care of when I’m better.”
She loved the basement apartment she’d rented from Blanche Carter. This apartment was the first place she’d called home in four years. It harbored all the things she’d lovingly collected when she finally decided it was safe to stay in Landon’s, and then Dixie’s, employ. But it was mighty cold in the winter.
Dixie planted her hands on her hips. “I can’t, in good conscience, leave you here to freeze to death. Blanche is in Atlanta till Tuesday and the weatherman said it’s going to be down in the thirties this weekend. With you so sick, it’ll just make it worse. I won’t have it.”
The cold medicine was beginning to work its magic, leaving her too exhausted to fend Dixie’s mothering off.
Suddenly Em was digging in her purse, too, pulling out her phone, her beautiful blue eyes lit up by the face of her phone. “Oh, I know! I’ll call Jax’s brother—he’s a licensed electrician. He’ll come take a look. If he can’t do it today, then you’re comin’ home with me until he can, MB. Hear me? Or maybe with Dixie. Sanjeev’ll take fine care of you.”
The cold meds LaDawn had given her began to affect her train of thought. Was it irony she could pound down a half bottle of vodka shots with the best of them and not feel a thing, but give her a cold remedy meant to help you sleep, and she was a goner?
Words became hazy, her fear of exposure growing dull. She realized her head was falling back to the couch, yet she had no energy to stop it. Hands comforted her, moved over her to lift her feet up on the couch. Dishes clanged in faraway tones and then someone with warm fingers brushed her hair from her face, pressing a heating pad to her chest and dropping a kiss on her burning forehead just before she succumbed to the quiet of her stuffy head.
Though she did remember to do one thing before she allowed her drug-induced haze to take over. It was as important to her as her “people shield” and had become almost a superstition of sorts. Or maybe it was just a stinkin’ crutch.
That’s probably what a therapist would say. Be it crutch, superstition, good-luck charm, whatever, no matter where Marybell Lyman was, who she was with, before she laid her head on a pillow and closed her eyes, she said a quick prayer just in case the universe really was one big ball of positive thinking. It was the prayer she said every night before she went to sleep.
Thank you for all these wonderful blessings, for food to eat, for my friends and for my job.
But please, please don’t take them away.
Two (#ud1e22c0a-4216-524a-b0b5-be1f303da6e6)
More banging on her door. Loud. Obnoxious. Heavy-handed.
Gravy sakes, could a sick woman just be left to die in splotchy, ugly red runny-nosed peace?
Not if Emmaline Amos and Dixie Davis are your friends, Marybell. With friendship came a certain amount of invasion of privacy, she’d learned. Still, she was going to kill them for waking her again, and just when she’d found a bit of sleep without the threat of coughing her left lung to implosion.
Muddled and fuzzy, Marybell sat upright, her head pulsing its angry protest, making her reach for another tissue. The last time she’d looked at the clock while the girls were still here, it was five in the afternoon. She’d slept for three solid hours.
Pulling herself to a standing position, she shivered as she left behind the warmth of the heating pad and made her way to the front door, jamming her hands into the deep pockets of her favorite, albeit ratty, flannel bathrobe.
She began to open it with a moment’s hesitation, warding off another coughing spell. Then she caught hold of her runaway fears, forcing herself to rationalize through the thick haze of cold meds. Clearly, her friends hadn’t made the connection to her past, and they’d already seen her. So seeing her twice without her makeup and hair gel wouldn’t change anything. What was done was done.
Still, Marybell kept her eyes averted—in hindsight, she’d wish her tongue had done the same. She yanked open the door, her eyelids at half-mast. “You know, you three are like havin’ really annoying sisters. Maybe akin to the stepsisters in Cinderella, only nicer and with smaller feet,” she grumbled, sneezing into her tissue. “How will I ever nab the prince if you pair of mother hens won’t let me rest? Would you have me search for my Prince Charming lookin’ like this?”
A delicious man with hair the color of a dark, exotic wood, worn just long enough to brush the collar of his black sweatshirt, partially covered by the navy-blue knit hat he wore, smiled a smile surely carved with the tool of a god. “Wow. Prince Charming’s a lot of pressure, don’t you think?”
Her breathing stalled while her heart crashed against her ribs and her eyes swiftly hit the floor.
“Are you Marybell Lyman?” he prompted, rough and chocolaty rich, cocking his head in question.
Oh, no. Heaven, no.
She knew that voice. That voice had been in the Call Girls office on more than one occasion as of late. The voice that was always looking for his brother, Jax, who’d created some security software for Dixie and Caine, specifically designed for Call Girls. The voice that belonged to this man—an unconventionally delicious man.
One who made her tremble in her zebra-striped leggings and work boots. One she’d avoided purposely for several months now—even with her Mohawk and trimmings in place.
A man from her past she’d only vaguely known socially, but who would most certainly know her sans her “people shield.”
And hate her for the knowing.
But she had her eye mask. Everything was okay. Her hands self-consciously flew to her face to find her eye mask was no longer there.
Oh, gravy.
Think fast, Marybell Lyman, or all your carefully built walls, all your beloved friends, job and possessions will come crashin’ around your ears.
* * *
As the woman who answered the door made a stumbling, wobbly break for another room, Taggart Hawthorne stood awkwardly at her door, tool belt in hand, remembering only that Em had told him this Marybell Lyman’s protests weren’t an option. She was sick, it was cold out and her heat was broken. Take no prisoners—Em’s exact words.
Which, if you considered her current relationship with his brother, Jax, didn’t surprise him. Em was a warrior disguised in pretty dresses and flowery perfume. Her lipstick was really a magic wand that made you do things you wouldn’t normally do, and her sweet nature bent you to her will without ever realizing you’d been manipulated by flirty eyelashes and pretty words.
Yet she’d become a part of not just his brother’s and his niece Maizy’s world, but his universe, too. And when Em demanded, he listened, largely because he respected the hell out of her.
Tag leaned against the door frame, savoring the smell of chicken soup, tea and Vicks as he assessed the view of this woman’s small but nicely decorated living room.
A thickly cushioned couch in soft ivory, littered from one end to the other with overstuffed pillows in gold and a light turquoise, sat in disarray. What was it with a woman and some fancy pillows?
It was as if the damn things made everything okay. That must be it, because every woman he’d encountered so far always had a mess o’ pillows—little Maizy included.
Though he had to admire her choice in the chest she’d chosen to use as a coffee table. The surface was scarred, battered from years of use, holding a simple, darkly stained bowl of colored balls. It was sturdy, the lines of it clean and squarely crisp, the color a deep walnut, streaked with hints of red and antique white.
If he had a place of his own, and he wasn’t sponging off his brother, Jax, till he got back on his feet, he’d definitely put his feet up on something like that—every night with a plate of hot wings and a football game.
Perusing the walls, where abstract rectangles of ivory, red and that same turquoise she seemed so fond of, streaked the canvases, reminding him of somewhere warm. Somewhere the sun shone all the time and you sat in the sand with a bottle of Corona while salty waves rolled over your toes and buttery-rayed days turned to purple-hued nights.
There was a big square rug in the center of the bleached white barn-wood floor, woven in the same willowy color of her couch.
So this was the apartment of a phone sex operator? Huh. Truth time. He’d been expecting all manner of paraphernalia. In fact, he’d been damn curious when he thought about running into her tools of the trade.
Yet not a hint of a shelf with hooks where rows of worn floggers and masks in black and red might hang. No fuzzy handcuffs tossed carelessly over a doorknob, and there certainly weren’t any leather catsuits.
Obviously, the job did not define the lady.
It didn’t bother him in the least that Em ran a phone sex company. True, when Em had hired him to fix some faulty wiring at Call Girls, it had made him a little uncomfortable to hear the women talking to their clients through the walls of one office or another. Especially LaDawn. Damn, that woman could make somethin’ out of nothing.
But the discomfort had nothing to do with disapproval and everything to do with the fact that even he had to admit, their breathy sighs and softly moaned words turned him on a little.
Still, he just couldn’t connect with the notion. It was a false connection. Once the operator hung up the phone, she was creating another relationship just like the one she’d had with the caller before. He couldn’t submerse himself enough—or maybe his imagination just wasn’t vivid enough to get past the idea. Of course, Em didn’t do the dirty-talkin’, either. This woman, according to Em, did.
Either way, he’d stick with one-on-one, messy, down-in-the-mud, flaws-and-all, human connections.
Speaking of messy, when Marybell finally reappeared, it was with the floppiest-brimmed hat he’d ever seen cover a woman of no more than five foot two. It was white with black polka dots, sporting a big, shiny pink bow around it. The brim was so big it fell over her eyes, masking almost every feature of her face but the tip of her cold-infested nose and her full, chapped lips. It would have swallowed her whole if she didn’t hold it in place.
“Fancy date?” he asked, unable to stop himself from noting how comical she looked in a moth-eaten bathrobe and summer hat, still trying to figure how she fit into the sparse but colorful landscape of her apartment.
She rocked back on her fuzzy black feet. Not amused, said her posture. “Not unless he wants the black plague.”
“So you kiss on the first date?” he asked, almost looking around to see whose mouth those suggestive words had come out of—and more important, why they had come out at all.
She clucked her tongue, her lips never changing their pursed disapproval. “Only if my date doesn’t mind some snot.”
Unfriendly fire, Captain. Man your battleships. “I’m Tag Hawthorne.” He offered his hand, noting it was cracked and calloused from working outside in Jax’s unheated barn.
She backed away, covering one foot with the other in the process. “I’m dying of the flu.”
“Is dying your first name or your last?” Beneath that wide brim of her ridiculous hat, he’d swear he saw her almost smirk. What was with the hat to begin with? Sure, she was sick, but no one could be that vain, could they?
“Why are you here?”
Tag paused. If he was reading her right, there was a whole lot of territorial in her. This is mine. Keep out. So he smiled, opting to reassure her. “Zombie outbreak.”
Her sigh crackled, wheezing from her chest as her fingers pulled a tissue from her bathrobe pocket and pressed it to her nose. “You’re no Daryl,” she replied, her voice, even congested and tight, so sweet it almost hurt his teeth. Fascinating.
“Really, who is?” he joked, still trying to figure out what it was about this woman that made him want not only to get a rise out of her, but to have her treat him with something more than an upturned nose of total disregard. He was all but pulling her pigtails for no reason other than to pull.
Maybe it was the hat. He damn well wanted to see what was under the hat.
Marybell tapped an impatient fingernail on the door she held on to as if it were the armor that helped her protect her castle. “So, you’re here why?”
She wasn’t biting. Not even a nibble. So he slapped on his serious face and played the Emmaline card while still trying to figure out how, in all the trips he’d made to Call Girls over the past few months, he’d missed seeing her. “Em sent me to fix your heat.”
She flapped a hand at him. A ringless hand. Interesting. There were plenty of unattached women in Plum Orchard, a thirsty crew, if you asked him. They’d shown up at Jax’s on more than several occasions with all sorts of casseroles and pies, but he’d never seen Marybell in the mix. “Not necessary. I can take care of it when I’m better.” She began to close the dungeon door on him.
Tag stuck his hand in it, shaking his head. “Uh, no. I mean, wait. That came out wrong. What I mean is, you do know Em, don’t you? I mean, you work with her, right?”
Still nothing but cool disdain and the scent of Vicks. “I do.”
“Well, try living with her. Or almost living with her. She doesn’t like the word no. If I don’t at least look at the problem, she’ll have my head. You don’t want carnage on your hands, do you?”
Her sigh was full of phlegm, making him wince in regret. He was teasing her while she was standing at the door with the raw wind nipping at her. Em wouldn’t like that, either. “Listen, you need to get inside out of the draft. If you get sicker, Em’ll have my head. Just let me take a look, okay? You can trust no one will read a story about you and your hacked-off limbs hanging in a smokehouse in the Plum Orchard Herald. I’m safe. Call Em and check, if you need to.”
Her chin lifted a little, still standoffish. “No, thank you. I’m fine.”
Patience. She just needed patience. He had time for that. “It’s going to be down in the thirties tonight, Marybell, and if I remember right, this apartment has concrete floors. Great in a hot Georgia summer, not so great in the winter with this recent cold snap. One quick look and then I’m out of your hair. Deal?” He smiled wide, hoping to sway her with his winning grin.
Yet as he held that grin for as long as his mouth would allow, Marybell clearly wasn’t affected in quite the way he’d hoped. In other words, letting him in had nothing to do with the magic of the Hawthorne charm.
