Beneath Southern Skies

скачать книгу бесплатно


“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.”