Wild Child Page 3

  Outside the window, a bird flew across a sky so blue it made her eyes hurt.

  She was here to write about the night her mother killed her father in self-defense.

  It wasn’t quite as dramatic as murder, but it was far more accurate.

  I’ll go with that.

  She went down to the front desk, now manned by a young man with slick black hair. There was a small indention in his nose, a hole pierced for a nose ring. Nose rings were undoubtedly verboten at this job.

  The boy caught sight of her and started to beam, nearly levitating with his sudden uncontrollable excitement. Some days she felt like she was the pied piper of the pierced teenage masses. The poster child for adolescent rebellion in all its forms.

  You wrote the damn book on it, she thought. What did you expect?

  None of it, was the answer. Not a single part of her life had gone at all as she’d expected, and the last two years had been so surreal, she hardly recognized herself or her place in this world.

  “Gwen said you were here,” he said as she stepped up to the desk, situated just beneath the wide, curving staircase. “I didn’t believe her.”

  Monica, a new woman after the nap and some in-room coffee, managed a bright smile. “Here I am.”

  “Can I,” the boy lifted his phone, “take your picture?”

  “Here’s the thing,” she said glancing at his name tag, “Jay. Let’s say you take that picture and I know you mean me no harm, but you’re excited and you put that on your Facebook page. Maybe you tweet it. And the next thing I know, there are assholes with cameras leaping out of bushes.” She winced for effect, and Jay was already putting the camera down. Most people just needed the domino effect explained to them. How one picture could bring down her whole world. “I came here—”

  “To write about the murder.” Monica didn’t correct him; it seemed like too much effort. “I know. Gwen said. My dad was at The Pour House that night, with my uncle and a bunch of his friends. I bet you could talk to him. I bet you could talk to all of them!”

  “That’s great, Jay,” she lied. It wasn’t great. The thought made her nauseous. But the reality was, talking to people who’d been there that night was exactly what she needed to do. In her last book, Wild Child, she’d just opened a vein and bled all over the page, but she was only six the night of the shooting. And her memories were hazy, most of them willingly buried. She was going to have to talk to some people who remembered the event better than she did.

  And she had no doubt this town was going to love that. If there was one universal in this world, it was humanity’s love of scandal and suffering.

  “And I’ll keep that in mind, but I came down to see if there were any messages. If anyone called.”

  “No calls. But here.” Jay held out another folded piece of stationery. Notes. She was passing notes with a man named Jackson Davies.

  Sometimes her life seemed weird even to her.

  Dinner will be at six, the note said. Please join me for a cocktail at five.

  His address was written at the bottom.

  Thank you, I’ll see you at five, she wrote, folded the note, and handed it to Jay. Who, solemnly as if she’d handed him the Treaty of Versailles, took it from her, setting it on the edge of the desk.

  “I’ll have someone run this over to him,” he said, confirming that yes, she’d slipped down a rabbit hole and gone back in time.

  Monica thanked him and left, wondering what she was going to wear.

  And what she would do with the damn dog.

  A half hour later, the doorbell rang, a gong that echoed through the house. Jackson sprinted down the stairs and slid across the foyer to check his look in the mirror over the buffet in the dining room. He patted down his hair and straightened his tie. It had been a drama picking out that tie, but in the end he’d gone for the yellow. Suddenly he wished he’d picked the blue.

  For a moment, feeling strange and disjointed, he wished he could slip out the back. Across the garden to the fields past the trees. He’d just keep walking. Across the border into Mississippi. He’d change his name. Change his whole story. Get blind drunk, have sex with a woman he didn’t know. Start a fight.

  He’d never been in a fight. Wasn’t that weird? Most men had been in a fight by the time they were twenty-nine, right? He was totally missing out.

  The doorbell gonged again.

  Right. Real life. Dinner and the salvation of Bishop, Arkansas.

  He stepped into the hallway and through the warped glass of the windows framing the door he saw a thin figure, wearing a skirt. A woman. Interesting. And she was alone, it would seem.

  Marianne, their housekeeper, had made way too much food.

  He opened the door. “Welcome—”

  The words died on his lips. It was a beautiful woman—more than beautiful, actually. She was erotic in her black skirt with the red belt and the green blouse that hugged her waist and her lush breasts, inviting his eyes and hands to do the same. It was a trick some women knew, how to stay totally covered, but utterly suggestive all the same. He loved that trick, highly approved of that trick. She wore red shoes, high heels with peekaboo toes.

  He approved of the shoes, too.

  Jackson didn’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about all the sex he wasn’t having in this town that expected him to be father figure and monk, rolled into one. It would send him over the edge if he did. But looking at this woman, and the bright pink of her toenail polish, he was painfully, tragically aware of all the sex he wasn’t having.

  Her black hair was thick, nearly blue it was so dark, and in the humidity the curls were teasing her chin and the corners of her eyes. Something tickled in the back of his head. Some memory. Those purple eyes were familiar … very familiar.

  “Monica Appleby?” His famous graciousness fled the scene. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Her heavy black eyebrows practically hit her hairline and her mouth fell open, revealing the tips of white teeth. The fact that he found her teeth erotic only proved how distressing his sex life was. “You invited me.”

  “You work for America Today?”

  “The TV show? No.”

  “Then what—” He stopped, suddenly realizing what must have happened. “There’s been a mix-up with the notes.”

  “If only there was a more reliable mode of communication.”

  He took her sarcasm in stride. “Good point.”

  For no good reason, he remembered the one time he’d seen Monica in person. Three days after the shooting. Jackson, at five, hadn’t been able to put into words the sick feeling in his stomach, watching Simone and Monica, beaten and bruised and terrified, get into their car and drive away, but he knew he had no business seeing that private moment. It was why he’d never watched that horrible reality show Simone and Monica had been a part of sixteen years ago. Or Simone’s more recent show. It was why he didn’t read Monica’s blockbuster book, Wild Child, that everyone else on the planet seemed to have had read last year.

  Looking at her now, at her beauty and poise, it was hard to believe she’d been that girl—so lost and scared. It was even harder to believe that she was here, at his home. Beautiful and erotic, a postcard from the outside world.

  Suddenly the night took on new dimension and he was thrilled that it wasn’t Dean Jennings on his porch.

  “Let’s try this again, shall we?” he asked. “I’m Jackson Davies.” He held out his hand and she laughed, though her tone was suspicious.

  “Monica Appleby.” When they shook hands, he found himself unwilling to let go of hers. She was soft, her palm warm in his hand. His blood began to pound through his veins.

  “A pleasure, Ms. Appleby.” He stepped to the side. “Perhaps I can better explain the problem with the notes over a cocktail.”

  For some reason his invitation made her frown, which set off a whole domino ripple effect in him. Women didn’t frown at him, as a rule. They smiled, and cooed. They ingratiated themselves with
their casseroles and secret spring wedding plans.

  “You’re awfully polite, aren’t you?” she asked. “Do they have a section in the Southern Manners Handbook about how to deal with guests when they weren’t who you were expecting?”

  “I haven’t looked at the handbook in years, but I imagine they do.” He smiled. “Does polite bother you?”

  “It does. People rarely mean what they say when they’re being polite. I find that they usually mean the opposite.”

  Jackson laughed, charmed and at the same time poised on the edge of himself, ready for anything. It was an intoxicating feeling. “You’re not wrong,” he said.

  She snorted and he loved it. So disrespectful that snort, so honest. He loved it so much that he acted on impulse, stuck his toe off the path he’d so carefully created for himself and this town. There was no room in his life for detours; it was win the contest, get his sister safely to school, and get the hell out of Bishop. That was the path.

  But when Monica Appleby showed up at a guy’s door, he would be an idiot to turn her away.

  He held out an arm, ushering her in.

  “Please. Join me for dinner.”

  It took her a second to respond; whatever her misgivings were, they were serious, which was intriguing on a whole different level. Jackson was a man people trusted. It was exciting to be unknown to her. Perhaps dangerous.

  “All right.” She stepped into his stale and stagnant home loaded with duty and years of respectability, and immediately it was new.

  As she walked by him, he caught the smell of something feminine and complicated.

  The delicious aroma of trouble.

  It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the interior. But once they did, she felt as if she’d stepped into someplace familiar. As lovely as the Peabody was, there was something very … staged about it. A beautiful girl who knew her appeal.

  But Jackson’s house, as grand in scale as the Peabody, was a home, filled with the lovely and worn things that made it one. It reminded her, not in layout or scope, but in detail and feel, of Jenna’s mom’s house outside Nashville, where Monica had spent the last two months with her dying friend.

  Growing up as she had, rootless and wandering, Monica had made a study of homes. And the difference between a house and a home wasn’t anything you could point at; it was a feeling. A sense of a group of lives lived together, in tandem and opposition, messy and sweet and complicated.

  She sighed, some of her tension dissipating.

  From the hallway, there were two doorways on either side of her. Through the door to her left, she glimpsed a deep couch, squishy embroidered pillows tossed in its corners like spare change. One of the pillows declared “Family is Forever.”

  Hmmmm … a promise, or a threat?

  Through the other door was a large walnut dining-room table, a bowl of humble pink tea roses at its center. A black dog, white around the muzzle, wandered through from the dining room into the hall. It brushed against her legs once, a warm hello, and then headed into the sitting room, where it sighed and flopped onto the hardwood floor in front of the couch. Its collar jangled as it settled.

  “We’re set up in the back,” Jackson said.

  His voice was masculine and low, the sound of dark chocolate with a hint of spice, of a California Syrah aged just right. It touched her spine, that voice, brushed across the nape of her neck, reminding her briefly that there was still pleasure in this world.

  Everything about Jackson seemed built for pleasure. For elegance. He was lean, but broad in all the right places. His linen jacket looked tailored to fit his shoulders and when he smiled at her, she couldn’t help but frown.

  It wasn’t just his looks; she’d had a surplus of hot men in her life. Her mother, after all, was Simone Appleby. Simone, before the reality show—probably what led to the reality show—had become notorious for dating famous men. Sports stars, rock stars, actors. The only things required from them were good looks and an increasing fan base.

  Monica had learned that good looks were a trap for the unwary.

  And she had become very, very wary.

  But still, even with handsome men, she could put forth the smile they expected.

  Not with this man. He was disconcerting with all his contradictions. His lovely light eyes were shadowed by stern eyebrows. His lips—the top one sculpted, the bottom one lush—were held in a firm line. His blond hair curved away from his face as if scared to droop over that long forehead.

  He managed to be both stern and beautiful.

  And the twinkle in his eyes was utterly boyish.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked in that voice that made her want to curl against it.

  “No.” She waved her hand, forced a smile. “Your house is lovely.”

  “It’s been in my family since before the Civil War.”

  “Oh, then it must have a name, right? All the good southern manors do.”

  He blushed slightly, and she laughed. “It does! Spill it.”

  “They … I mean, it’s always been called the Big House.”

  “That is astonishingly unimaginative.”

  “I agree.”

  She pointed toward the elegant wooden staircase that curved from the main floor up to a wide landing on the second. “Is Scarlett O’Hara going to make an appearance?”

  “There are some days I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Are you … do you live here alone?” she asked, half expecting a passel of blond children in seersucker to come charging from the shadows, a blond wife with perfect eyebrows she never had to wax to hang on his arm and call him darling.

  Jackson had to be some woman’s darling.

  Though perhaps he was too young for all of that. He didn’t look thirty.

  “With your parents?” she asked, imagining a Tennessee Williams scenario brought to life.

  “No, actually, my parents are dead. A car accident.”

  She blinked, stunned at the sudden revelation of such personal information from the polished man. He looked slightly stunned himself, as if he didn’t know where the words had come from.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  He tried to wave it away. “It’s okay. I’m not sure why I brought it up. It’s a long time ago, now.”

  Jenna used to do this thing when she was lying about the pain—she’d smile real wide as if everything were fine, but her whole body would stiffen as if braced for a punch. Jackson was doing the same thing, lying with his face, telling the truth with his body. However long ago it may have been, he was living with his parents’ death every day.

  Amazing, she thought—we have so much in common. “Would you like a drink? We’re all set up in the back.”

  “Sounds great,” she said, falling into step with him as they headed through the rest of the house, past a white tiled kitchen with aging appliances.

  The back garden was like a scene from a movie, or a magazine article about how to throw an elegant outdoor party.

  “It’s so beautiful,” she sighed. The lights, the slight flap of the linens on the table—it was all so inviting.

  “I’m glad you like it. Wine?” He dug a bottle of white wine from a bucket of ice and water, but she shook her head and pointed to the glass decanter of lemonade sweating in the humidity. “Lemonade would be great.”

  He seemed slightly surprised, but there was nothing she could do about that anymore.

  “So what was America Today coming over for?” she asked, accepting her lemonade. Her finger brushed his on the handoff, and something charged and slightly painful swirled through her. Awareness, sexual and sharp. She took a step back, her heel sinking into the grass. “Or do you often have morning shows over for dinner?”

  Jackson poured himself a glass of wine and she couldn’t help but watch him, the sharp line of his nose, the delicate lace of his outrageously long eyelashes. Why did men always get those kinds of eyelashes?

  “America Today and Maybream Crackers are hosting a competi
tion for small towns that have lost industry. Maybream will move their whole operation to the town that wins the contest. We’ve made the semifinals.”

  She blinked, eyes wide, a bunch of incredulous rude words springing to her lips, but she swallowed them. Clearly, her experience in this town was not the norm. This was a beloved home to lots of people; she’d be well served to remember that. “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you.” He inclined his head. “Though so far it just means we have a suitable factory. The hard part comes this week.”

  “You have to eat those cookies they make?”

  He laughed. “No. At least I hope not.”

  “They are gross.”

  “That is the consensus.”

  “So how did I get the invite and not them?”

  “I had left the invitation to dinner with the hotel staff and told them to pass it on to the producer and crew, who are supposed to arrive sometime in the next few days to film. And considering how few celebrities we get out here, Gwen must have thought you were involved in some way.”

  “‘Celebrity’ is a stretch.”

  “Your book has made you famous. I heard they were talking about making a movie—”

  A bee buzzed over her lemonade and she waved it away, feeling its wings momentarily against her fingers, a minor brush with danger. As close as she got these days. “There’s always talk.”

  “Still, from what I understand it’s a very popular book.”

  She eyed him shrewdly, delighting in the way he seemed so obtuse about the book, talking about it in the abstract. “Why do I get the sense you haven’t read it?”

  “Is it obvious?” He laughed, still gracious, and she wondered what it would take for him to drop his guard. As soon as the thought occurred to her, she was stunned by how badly she wanted to see that. He was flirting with her and he’d never read the book. Every man who flirted with her these days looked at her as if waiting for the show—the big sex rock-star show—which was probably why she didn’t flirt much anymore.

  “Afraid so—you haven’t asked me any questions about rock stars.”

  “You caught me. One of the few people left in the world who hasn’t read Wild Child.”