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“Not quite.” Phoebe shaded her own eyes as Frances Bird leaped into explanation.
“Oh, yes. But we didn’t sleep in boxes. We stayed at a motel one night. With tiny pink soaps. Soooo pretty. I kept one.” Frances Bird batted her eyelashes again, smiled, and kept talking like the River Jordan, rolling right on down to eternity.
Phoebe yearned to sink through boards of the porch into a quiet, cool oblivion where Murphy Jones’s too-observant gray eyes couldn’t note her every twitch and flinch. Although easygoing, Murphy had never been a fool. Not likely he’d become one since she’d last had a conversation with him. This homecoming, if that’s what it was, was not going well.
“We got fired. and we got debts, and—”
“Enough, Frances Bird.” The hint of steel in Phoebe’s voice finally silenced her chatty daughter. Lifting her chin, Phoebe held his gaze. “Well, Murphy, are you going to keep us standing outside for the rest of the night?”
He rubbed his chin with his knuckles thoughtfully. “Seems to me, Phoebe, you’re sittin’, not standin’.” His drawl curled into the deepening blue twilight of the heat.
“Murphy’s right, Mama.” Frances Bird tugged the hem of Phoebe’s shorts. “We’re sitting.”
She stood up. “Fine. Now I’m standing. Everybody happy?” Turning her back, she marched up the stairs to the swing, anger crackling down her spine with every mud-caked step. This was worse than she’d anticipated.
More humiliating.
She was tired, worried sick, and Murphy was only going to torment her, tease her, and drive her crazy the way he had when they were young. She’d never understood her reaction to him, or his to her, but she was in no mood today to sit or stand for it. Sherman had marched on Atlanta and burned it to the ground and maybe she was burning her bridges with a vengeance, but at the moment she couldn’t care less if she left nothing but ashes in her wake.
And knowing his cool gray eyes were watching her every movement perversely fueled her temper.
She grabbed one of the battered suitcases and swung to face her daughter. “Bird, we’re on our way. Say nice to have met you to Murphy.” Wishing she’d pasted on that red lipstick after all, she stomped off the porch.
“Mama!” The frantic tug at Phoebe’s shorts didn’t stop her march down the steps. But Bird’s anxious whisper, a whisper that was loud enough to hear from five feet away, halted Phoebe with one foot dangling in mid-air. “We got no place to go. You said.”
“Come on into the house.” Murphy’s sigh echoed her earlier ones. Like chickenpox, sighing was apparently contagious. “Looks like that talk you mentioned can’t wait.” Metal jangled on the ring at his belt loop as he unclipped a key. The look he cast Frances Bird was shrewd. “Anyway, the kid must be hungry.”
“Very hungry.” With a lightning-fast mood change, Frances Bird smiled winsomely at him. “You got Jell-O? I like Jell-O. Red. With peaches.”
“No red Jell-O.” Murphy unlocked the door and flung it open. “Bananas okay?”
“I can make do.” Bird dipped under his outstretched arm and into the dim interior of the house. “Mama says it’s a skill us McAllisters got.”
In the spirit of making do, Phoebe planted both feet firmly on the bottom step and reminded herself that she couldn’t afford pride. Not today. Not tonight. Anger drained away, making room for the poisonous dread she’d been living with for weeks now. She met Murphy’s guarded eyes and took a breath.
His wide hand rested on the door as he waited for Phoebe to follow her daughter. “Come into my parlor,” he said, and the ironic edge to his low, slow words did nothing to settle the ping-pong bounce of her stomach.
“I know how that story ends,” she muttered, dipping, like Phoebe, beneath his arm.
“Of course you do. You’re a smart woman. And an educated one.” The polite bend of his head toward her was even more unsettling as he shut the door quietly behind her. “But you came in anyway, didn’t you, Miss Phoebe Fly?”
“Ms. Fly, please.” She sent him a sweet smile as she scanned the room filled with cardboard boxes. Maybe she couldn’t afford pride, but by heaven, she didn’t have to let him know exactly how much the beggar maid she was. She trailed a finger along a dusty stack of boxes labeled CDs. “Love what you’ve done with your place. I guess the minimalist approach has a certain...charm to it, Murphy, but you’ve been here two years.”
He was so close behind her that his boots bumped against her heels, and she could swear his breath fluttered the hair at her neck. “Kept track, did you?”
“Same address on your Christmas cards the last couple of years.” Hiding her dismay, she wandered through a maze of boxes toward the kitchen that she’d seen earlier through the windows. “No furniture?”
“Got a bed.” His teeth flashed in a lazy smile. “Maybe I can’t afford anything else.”
That smile had drawn the girls of their youth to him effortlessly. Murphy’d never had to work at collecting a string of shiny-haired, long-legged girls to him. Like bees swarming to the scent of flower honey, they merely appeared on the porch, beside his car, everywhere.
“No sofa. No TV. No chairs.” Bewildered, she shook her head.
“Maybe I don’t need much more. I’m a simple man, simple tastes.” His smile widened until it lit up the gray depths of his eyes, sunlight flashing on bayou water, turning her knees to mush.
With an effort, she herded her thoughts together and forcibly drove memories back into the past where they belonged.
“Don’t be irritating,” she said. “Anyway, I can’t believe you’re too broke for furniture.” Bending her head back, she examined the high ceilings, the crown moldings, and the heart of pine floors. Why on earth had he allowed this beautiful house to stay in such disarray for so long? “Murphy,” she said as patiently as if she were talking to Frances Bird in a snit, “I know how much these old houses cost. And this one’s in terrific condition.”
“Did the work myself.”
“Of course you did. But you’re living like a man who’s ready to pack up and hit the highway at a second’s notice. You haven’t even unpacked, have you?” Not bothering to wait for his answer, she sashayed through the wide arched doors into the kitchen and stopped so suddenly that he bumped slam up against her backside. “Oh, Murphy, this is beautiful,” she whispered as she saw the light-oak pot rack suspended from the vaulted ceiling. Hanging above a work counter, the copper-bottomed pans blazed with light. “It’s like the one—”
“In your folks’ home.” He stepped back, taking with him the comfort of his body against hers, leaving her desolate in a way she couldn’t explain. But the kitchen, and Murphy next to her—the rightness of that moment overwhelmed her.
“Your home, too.” She wouldn’t cry. But the pots shone so brightly and familiarly, and she hadn’t felt at home anywhere for so long. “Always your home, Murphy.”
“Your parents were good people.” He turned away from her and went to the industrial-sized refrigerator. “They gave me a...” he paused, his obvious discomfort painful to her.
“They gave you a home, Murphy. They loved you.” She couldn’t keep talking about her parents, about the past. Tears would make it impossible for her to do what she had to. “Mama and Pops loved you. You know that.”
“Here, kid.” He handed Frances Bird a black-skinned banana from the freezer.
“Cold.” She poked it dubiously and frowned. “Why do you put your bananas in your freezer?”
Murphy scratched his chin, ran a finger under the edge of his bandanna. “Because they were going bad?”
“Okay.” Frances Bird smushed the pulp out and into her mouth with a finger. “I like this.” She beamed a wide, smeary smile. Dragging a stool up to the table in the middle of the room, she said, “And you can call me Bird.”
“All right,” Murphy said slowly, his voice whiskey-warm and smooth.
With Murphy’s attention on Bird, Phoebe brushed the tears away from her eyes. Her gaze lingered on the table where Bird sat contentedly mashing frozen banana between her fingers.
Then, like an arrow piercing her, leaving her heart aching, Phoebe realized why the kitchen felt so familiar. “You have the old table from home. From the kitchen,” she murmured, her palm sliding across the smooth-grained walnut surface. She touched the vertical dent where she’d slammed down the turkey roaster in an argument with Murphy one Thanksgiving. If you could call it an argument when the other person stayed as calm and controlled as Murphy always did. She traced the dent again. “You kept it.”
“Pretty,” Frances Bird crooned, running her hand from one end of the table to the other, banana pulp streaking behind her small hand. “Pretty, pretty.”
Murphy’s palm lay on the table across from Phoebe’s, his fingertips stroking the wood as if he were unaware of his lingering touch against the grain.
“I needed a table. Your folks gave this one to me when they bought the new one. The chairs weren’t salvageable.”
“Oh.” She looked at the two painted ladder-back chairs lined up against the wall.
“I’m surprised you recognized the table. I refinished it.”
She swallowed. “I recognized it.” Oh, she couldn’t, wouldn’t, cry. Pain and yearning clamping around her heart, she swallowed again, looking blindly around the room that was like home.
Murphy didn’t want to see the glitter in Phoebe’s eyes. She had no right to go all teary-eyed on him over this damned table. It couldn’t mean anything to her.
She’d shaken the dust from home and town from her heels, diploma in hand, and, as far as he knew, never looked back. It had taken him hours to scrape off the crackled varnish and sand the table, to find the truth of the walnut. Every dusty, sweaty moment of sanding and stripping and scraping had been a pleasure. Compared to that, Phoebe’s tears didn’t mean diddly. That was a truth he needed to remember, too. He shrugged. “Just a piece of wood, that’s all,” he said, but his palm hesitated on the waxed surface.
“No.” Her voice was low and husky with those tears. Mirroring his own motion, her hand moved slowly against the shining surface. “Not just a piece of wood. Memories.” Her eyelashes fluttered, lifted, and for a moment he saw the tear-sparkle of her eyes.
“Piece of furniture. Needed repairing. That’s all.”
She turned toward him, almost as if she wanted to say something else, and her cheek caught the last ray of light from outside. He couldn’t look away from the play of light against her skin.
Her face was as smooth, as glossy as the table’s finish, as tempting to his touch. He’d learned the truth of that old wood, and he’d learned the truth of Phoebe. Like a butterfly, bright, fragile, she drifted here, there. Everywhere. As useless to expect that butterfly to last through the winter as to expect Phoebe Chapman McAllister to stay in Manatee Creek, to put down roots.
He lifted his hand carefully, his fingertips tingling as if he’d run them down a bare wire. Odd thoughts, this notion of Phoebe settling down, putting down roots. Tucking his palms under his armpits, he glanced at her with a scowl.
Her damp shirt clung to her like primer on drywall, every curve and bump outlined by the tangerine-colored, see-through cotton. He cleared his throat. He didn’t need to be thinking about Phoebe’s bumps and curves and how she looked like a juicy orange, all damp and glistening, waiting to be peeled. He tugged the bandanna from his head, wiped his hands and jammed the scarf into his pocket. “You and Frances Bird are wet. Y‘all want to get into some dry clothes?”
“I’m Bird. I told you already. Not Frances Bird.” Sitting on the stool she’d hauled to the table, Phoebe’s daughter beamed up at him. “Unless you’re real, real mad at me. Then everybody calls me Frances Bird.” She patty-caked her banana-coated hands together. Bits of pulp spurted onto the floor. “But I will not ever, ever, make you mad at me and I will stay out of your way while we are living with you and not be a bother at all and I will clear the table and pick up after myself. Okey doke?” She slapped her hands together for emphasis.
Banana shot onto his chin, dripped to his clean floor.
“Frances Bird. Get a paper towel.” Phoebe’s voice was stiff, but he heard the anxiety in it.
“See? I told you how it is. Now Mama’s mad at me.” Bird wrinkled her nose and sighed heavily.
He thought he heard Phoebe sigh too as he said, “Don’t bother, I’m fine. I’ll clean up later. After your mama and I have our conversation.”
“Right.” The quick look Phoebe threw her daughter carried a message he couldn’t quite decipher. Warning, sure. But something else there, too. The little girl settled back onto the stool, her brown eyes as big as paint-can lids. Phoebe shifted her feet, plucked at the drying fabric of her shorts where it stuck to her thighs. But she didn’t say anything more even as her daughter wiggled on the stool.
Wiping his chin thoughtfully with the tail of his shirt, he examined Phoebe, seeing now the disturbing details he’d missed earlier.
Like the purple circles under her eyes, the tiny lines at their corners. Like the strain in her posture. Familiar but different, this Phoebe. He didn’t quite know what to make of her, but he reckoned sooner or later she’d let him know what she wanted.
And sure as God made little green apples, Phoebe wanted something from him.
Her face was tense and her full bottom lip thinned with exasperation, but her eyes softened as she looked at her daughter. “Ah, Bird, sugar. I told you Murphy and I have to talk. We’ve landed on his doorstep without warning, I haven’t had a chance to explain and—”
“And we’re going to stay with him.” The stool went in one direction, Bird in another, as she clambered down. “You said Murphy won’t mind.”
Phoebe was going to have her hands full in a few years with that little dickens. Maybe he’d let the heart-to-heart with Phoebe wait a bit. Murphy let his shirttail fall. No rush to find out exactly what she had in mind. Yeah, she and her daughter were turning his evening upside down, but Bird tickled his funny bone, he was hungry, and he was mighty curious to see how Phoebe was going to try and soften him up. No reason he couldn’t let her play out her hand.
Taking his time, he smoothed his shirt down, and gave her a big grin.
Phoebe squinted at him.
“Taken to wearing glasses since I last saw you?”
She scowled, brown eyes darkening. “No, but I’m wondering why you’re smiling like the devil’s own son. You make me nervous when you smile like that, Murphy.”
“Do I, Phoebe? How...fascinatin’. Never known you to be the nervous type before.” He took a step toward her and noticed with interest that she didn’t move an inch, but her scowl sharpened as he tugged at the edge of her almost-dry shirt, let the back of his knuckle graze lightly against the heat of her belly.
She angled her chin at him, letting him know he was mighty close to some invisible line and daring him to step across it. “Stop this, Murphy. You’re irritating me. I told you not to.”
He let his knuckle slide once more against that velvet skin. “Did you now?”
“Back away, Murphy.” Brown eyes flared dark with temper and something else that made him lean into her, just that tiny bit closer, just to see what burned in those depths.
Phoebe had no idea how irritating he could be if he put his mind to it, and he was of a mind to irritate her, see what was behind her so-called spontaneous visit. Keeping his finger lightly wrapped in the brilliant cotton of her T-shirt, he asked, “So, you and Bird want to stay naturally air-conditioned or take a shower and change? Maybe stay for supper?”
“What are you up to, Murphy?”
He gave a tiny yank to the fabric. “Question is, sweetpea, what are you up to?”
This time he was positive he heard Phoebe sigh.
Chapter Two
The tickle of Murphy’s knuckles against her bare skin sent shivers down to Phoebe’s toes, and she inhaled with shock. She couldn’t help it, didn’t like it, didn’t want to reveal how much the mere touch of him affected her, but the brush of his hand on her skin was so unbearably welcome, so terrifyingly right, that she knew she’d made an enormous mistake in thinking she could live in Murphy’s house. Even for a week.
She couldn’t.
And then she shook her head, clearing the haze from her eyes, and looked, really looked at him.
With each tug of his finger in her shirt, her skin prickled and jumped, but she realized that his teasing smile was that of the boy she’d grown up with, not that of a man intent on flirting. Not the smile of a man with seduction on his mind.
Embarrassed to the roots of her hair at her foolishness—this was Murphy, for Pete’s sake—she smiled brightly, flipped her hair out of her eyes and told herself that she would manage somehow.
And she would keep a prudent, wary distance from Murphy Jones and his slow, easy grin that still turned her bones to pudding and her brain to mush. Heck, she could do that. She’d done it before. Now? It would be a snap, once she had a good night’s sleep. Heck, she had experience, age and desperation on her side.
She would control her own silly reaction to him.
And she could manage Murphy.
Of course she could, she thought dubiously as she saw the tiny movement at the corner of his mouth as she flipped her hair carelessly, her very carelessness a masterpiece of acting.
“Me? Up to something?” She whirled past him, plopped on a suitcase.
“Yeah, that’s the question.” His mouth twitched.
“Why, what a suspicious mind you have, Murphy.” She tossed him a grin, crossed her legs, and swung one leg up and down to the staccato rhythm pumping through her blood. “What with all your questions, a person might suspect you weren’t thrilled to have her drop in for company.” She slowed the gallop of her leg as his gaze followed its length, lingered along the top of her thigh, and moved on up to her face. It took all her effort not to yank at her suddenly too-short shorts.
“Don’t forget. I know you, Phoebe,” he said lightly. “And you’re hopping around like a kid crossing hot sand.”
“Don’t you forget you haven’t seen me in eight years. Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do.” She stood up so abruptly that the suitcase wobbled, thumped flat on the floor. Her heart was beating like a snare drum, and she was afraid she’d say the wrong thing and there wouldn’t be a chance to salvage what she could from this situation that bordered on the disastrous. “People change, Murphy.”
“Do they, sweetpea?” His face was shadowed by one of the pans hanging from the ceiling.
“Of course. It’s called growing up. Maturing,” she said, making her tone as light as soap bubbles. “We all go through it. Even me.” She whirled away toward the door to the hall. “Anyway, I’ll take you up on your offer of food and a change of clothes. Bird and I are bone-tired. A shower will be nice.” Even knowing she was babbling, she couldn’t stop the avalanche of words. “You have hot water, right? Hey, even a cold shower would be a treat after this heat. Golly gee, I don’t know when I’ve felt this grubby and sticky, and I know you’re ready for a shower after working in the sun all day, and Bird—”
“Phoebe. I have hot water.”
Murphy’s amused burr of a voice slid down her spine, silenced her. Oh, Lord, she was making such a fool of herself. She inhaled and scooted a suitcase toward Bird. “Open up, baby, and pick out your sleeping duds.” Flipping open her own suitcase, trying her best to ignore Murphy’s attentive gaze that was destroying her confidence with every tick of the clock, Phoebe crouched down and rummaged through carefully packed shorts and underwear. She finally grabbed blindly at the next piece of clothing that met her frantic fingers, something red and, she discovered too late, skimpy. With her best teddy clutched in her shaking fingers, she tried to shut her suitcase.
