SANDRA HILL
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Fever by Sandra Hill
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Author’s Note
To my Aunt Catherine Conklin, who passed away last year:
Oh, the Christmas memories she brings to mind.
Angel hair on the tree, children’s laughter, delicious scents
from her warm kitchen, but most of all, love.
I will always miss you, Aunt Catherine, but especially at
Christmas.
“Oh, my gawd! It’s George Strait.”
“Where? Where? Ooh, ooh! I swear, Mabel, I’m so excited I’m gonna pee my pants.”
Clayton Jessup III, was about to enter his hotel suite when he heard the high-pitched squeals of the two blue-haired ladies in matching neon pink ELVIS LIVES sweatshirts.
He glanced over his shoulder to see who was generating so much excitement and saw no one. Uh-oh! In an instant, he realized that they thought he was the George person…probably some Memphis celebrity. Even worse, they were pep-stepping briskly toward him with huge smiles plastered across their expectant faces and autograph books drawn and at the ready.
“Open the damn door,” he snarled at the wizened old bellhop, whose liver-spotted hands were fumbling with the key.
“I’m tryin’, I’m tryin’. You don’t wanna get caught by any of these country music fanatics. Last week over on Beale Street, they tore off every bit of a construction worker’s clothes for souvenirs, right down to his BVDs, just ’cause they thought he was Billy Dean.”
“Who the hell is Billy Dean?”
“You’re kidding, right?” the bellhop said, casting him a sideways once-over of disbelief.
Clay grabbed the key out of the bellhop’s hand and inserted it himself. Just before the women were ready to pounce, gushing, “Oooh, George. Yoo-hoo!” the door swung open and they escaped. Leaning against the closed door, he exhaled with a loud whoosh of relief.
He heard one of the women say, “Mabel, I don’t think that was George. He wasn’t wearing a cowboy hat, and George never goes anywhere without his trademark wide-brimmed cowboy hat.”
“Maybe you’re right, Mildred,” Mabel said.
“Besides, he was too skinny to be George. He looked more like that Richard Gere.”
Richard Gere? Me? Mildred needs a new set of bifocals.
“Richard Gere,” Mabel swooned. “Hmmm. Is it possible…? Nah. That guy was taller and leaner than Richard Gere. Besides, Richard Gere is more likely to be off in Tibet with the Dolly Lay-ma, not in Memphis.”
“At least we saw Elvis’s ghost at Graceland today.”
Their voices were fading now, so Clay knew they were walking away.
Dropping his briefcase to the floor, he opened his closed eyes…and almost had a heart attack. “What is this?” he asked the bellhop.
“The Roustabout Suite,” the bellhop said proudly, shifting from foot to foot with excitement. The dingbat looked absolutely ridiculous in his old-fashioned red bellhop outfit, complete with a pillbox hat. “It’s the best one in the Original Heartbreak Hotel, next to the Viva Las Vegas and the Blue Hawaii suites, of course. Families with children love it.”
“I do not have children,” Clay gritted out.
“Aaahh, that’s too bad. Some folks think the spirit of Elvis lives in this hotel. Seen ’im myself a time or two. Maybe if you pray to the Elvis spirit, he’ll intercede with the good Lord to rev up your sperm count. Or if the problem is with the little lady, you could…uh, why is your face turnin’ purple?”
“I do not have children. I am not married. Mind your own damn business.”
“Oops!” the bellhop said, ducking his head sheepishly. “Sometimes I talk a mite too much, but I’m a firm believer in Southern hospitality. Yep. Better to be friendly and take a chance than…” The fool blathered on endlessly without a care for whether Clay was listening or not. Really, he should be home in a rocking chair, instead of parading around a hotel like an organ grinder’s monkey. Another “to do” item to add to his itinerary: check the hotel’s retirement policy.
Clay turned his back on the rambling old man…and groaned inwardly as he recognized that his view from this angle wasn’t any better. The Roustabout Suite. Hell!
The split-level suite had a miniature merry-go-round in the sitting room. As the carousel horses circled, a pipe organ blasted out carnival music. A cotton candy machine was set up in one corner, and the blasted thing actually worked, if the sickly sweet odor was any indication. Candy apples lay on the bar counter beside a Slurpee dispenser in the small kitchenette. The walls were papered with movie posters from the Elvis movie Roustabout, and the bed was an enlarged version of a tunnel-of-love car. On the bedside table were a clown lamp and a clock in the shape of a Ferris wheel. Up and down went the clown’s blinking eyes. Round and round went the clock’s illuminated dial. Mixed in with this eclectic collection were quality pieces of furniture, no doubt from the original hotel furnishings.
If Clay didn’t have a headache already, this room would surely give him the mother of all migraines. “You can’t seriously think I’d stay in this…this three-ring circus.”
“Well, it was the best we could do on such short notice,” the bellhop said, clearly affronted.
“Hee-haw! Hee-haw! Baaaa! Baaaa! Hee-haw!”
For a moment Clay lowered his head, not sure he wanted to know what those sounds were coming from outside. Walking briskly across the room, he glanced out the second-floor window…then did an amazed double take.
“Oh! Aren’t they cute?” the bellhop commented behind him.
“Humph!” Clay grumbled in disagreement. Pulling his electronic pocket organizer from his suit, he clicked to the Memphis directory, where he typed in his observations, punctuated by several more “Humphs.” It was a word that seemed to slip out of his mouth a lot lately…a word his father had used all the time. Am I turning into a negative, stuffy version of my father now? Is that what I’ve come to?
“Hee-haw! Hee-haw! Baaaa! Baaaa! Hee-haw!”
“Oh, good Lord!” The headache that had been building all day finally exploded behind his eyes—a headache the size of his bizarre “inheritance” he’d come to Tennessee to investigate. Raking his fingers through his close-clipped hair, he gazed incredulously at the scene unfolding on the vacant lot below…a property that he now happened to own, along with this corny hotel. Neither was his idea of good fortune.
“Hee-haw! Hee-haw! Baaaa! Baaaa! Hee-haw!”
“What the hell is going on?” he asked the bellhop, who was now standing in the walk-in closet hanging Clay’s garment bag.
“A live Nativity scene.”
“Humph!” Clay arched a brow skeptically. It didn’t resemble any Nativity scene he’d ever witnessed.
“Did you say humbug?” the bellhop inquired.
“No, I didn’t say humbug,” he snapped, making a mental note to add an observation in the hotel file of his pocket organizer about the attitude of the staff. What does the imbecile think I am? A crotchety old man out of a Dickens novel? Hell, I’m only thirty years old. I’m not crotchety. My father was crotchety. I’m not. “I said ‘humph.’ That’s an expression that denotes…Oh, never mind.”
He peered outside again. The bellhop was right. Five men, one woman, a baby, a donkey, and two sheep were setting up shop in a scene reminiscent of a Monty Python parody, or a bad “Saturday Night Live” skit. The only thing missing was a camel or two.
Please, God. No camels, Clay prayed quickly, just in case. He wasn’t sure how many more shocks he could take today.
The trip this morning from his home in Princeton had been uneventful. He’d managed to clear a backlog of paperwork while his driver transported him in the smooth-riding, oversize Mercedes sedan to Newark Airport. He’d been thinking about ditching the gas guzzler ever since his father died six months ago, but now he had second thoughts. The first-class, airline accommodations had been quiet, too, and conducive to work.
The nightmare had begun once he entered the Memphis International Airport terminal. Every refined, well-bred cell in his body had been assaulted by the raucous sounds of tasteless music and by the even more tasteless souvenirs of every conceivable Elvis item in the world…everything from “Barbie Loves Elvis” dolls to “authentic” plastic miniflasks of Elvis sweat.
The worst was to come, however.
When Clay had arrived at the hotel to investigate the last of his sizable inheritance, consisting mostly of blue-chip stocks and bonds, he’d found the Original Heartbreak Hotel. How could his father…a conservative Wall Street investment banker, longtime supporter of the symphony, connoisseur of old master paintings…have bought a hotel named Heartbreak Hotel? And why, for God’s sake? More important, why had he kept it a secret since its purchase thirty-one years ago?
But that was beside the point now. His most immediate problem was the yahoos setting up camp outside. He hesitated to ask the impertinent bellhop another question, which was ridiculous. He was in essence his employee. “Who are they?”
The bellhop ambled over next to him. “The Fallons.”
“Are they entertainers?”
The bellhop laughed. “Nah. They’re dairy farmers.”
Dairy farmers? Don’t ask. You’ll get another stupid nonanswer. “Well, they’re trespassing on my property. Tell the management when you go down to the lobby to evict them immediately.”
“Now, now, sir, don’t be actin’ hastily. They’re just poor orphans tryin’ to make a living, and—”
“Orphans? They’re a little old to be orphans,” he scoffed.
“—and besides, it was my idea.”
“Your idea?” Clay snorted. Really, he felt as if he’d fallen down some garden hole and landed on another planet.
“Yep. Last week, Annie Fallon was sittin’ in the Hound Dog Café, havin’ a cup of coffee, lookin’ fer all the world like she lost her best friend. She just came from the monthly Holstein Association meeting across the street. You know what Holsteins are, dontcha?”
“Of course I do,” he said with a sniff. They’re cows, aren’t they?
“Turns out Annie and her five brothers are in dire financial straits,” the bellhop rambled on, “and it occurred to me, and I tol’ her so, too, that with five brothers and a new baby…her brother Chet’s girlfriend dropped their sweet little boy in his lap, so to speak…well, they had just enough folks fer a Nativity scene, it bein’ Christmas and all. I can’t figure how the idea came to me. Like a miracle, it was…an idea straight out of heaven, if ya ask me.” The old man took a deep, wheezy breath, then concluded, “You wouldn’t begrudge them a little enterprise like this, wouldja, especially at Christmastime?”
Clay didn’t believe in Christmas, never had, but that was none of this yokel’s business. “I don’t care if it’s the Fourth of July. Those…those squatters had better be gone by the time I get down there, or someone is going to pay. Look at them,” he said, sputtering with outrage. “Bad enough they’re planting themselves on private land, but they have the nerve to act as if they own the damn place.” Hauling wooden frames off a pickup truck, they were now erecting a three-sided shed, then strewing about the ground hay from two bales.
That wasn’t the worst part, though. All of the characters were made up as Elvis versions—What else!—of the Nativity figures, complete with fluffed-up hair and sideburns.
The three wise men were tall, lean men in their late teens or early twenties wearing long satin robes in jewel-tone colors, covered by short shoulder capes with high stand-up collars. Their garish attire was adorned with enough sequins and glitter to do the tackiest Vegas sideshow proud. They moved efficiently about their jobs in well-worn leather cowboy boots, except for the shepherd in duct-taped sneakers. Belts with huge buckles, like rodeo cowboys usually wore, tucked in their trim waists.
The shepherd, about thirteen years old, wore a knee-high, one-piece sheepskin affair, also belted with a shiny clasp the size of a hubcap. Even the sleeping baby, placed carefully in a rough manger, had its hair slicked up into an Elvis curl, artfully arranged over its forehead.
Joseph was a glowering man in his mid-twenties, wearing a gem-studded burlap gown, a rope belt with the requisite buckle, and scruffy boots. Since he kept checking the infant every couple of minutes, Clay assumed he must be the father.
“Hee-haw! Hee-haw! Baaaa! Baaaa! Hee-haw!”
Clay’s attention was diverted to an animal trailer, parked behind the pickup truck, where one of the wise men was leading the braying donkey and two sheep, none of which appeared happy to participate in the blessed event. In fact, the donkey dug in its hooves stubbornly—Do donkeys have hooves?—as the now-cursing wise man yanked on the lead rope. The donkey got in the last word by marking the site with a spray of urine, barely missing the boot of the Wise Man who danced away at the last moment. The sheep deposited their own Nativity gifts.
Clay would have laughed if he weren’t so angry.
Then he noticed the woman.
Lordy, did he notice the woman!
A peculiar heat swept over him then, burning his face, raising hairs on the back of his neck and forearms, even along his thighs and calves, lodging smack-dab in his gut, and lower. How odd! It must be anger, he concluded, because he sure as hell wasn’t attracted to the woman. Not by a Wall Street long shot!
She was tall—at least five-foot-nine—and skinny as a rail. He could see that, even under her plain blue, ankle-length gown…well, as plain as it could be with its overabundant studding of pearls. In tune with her outrageous ensemble, she sported the biggest hair he’d ever seen outside a fifties-movie retrospective. The long brunette strands had been teased and arranged into an enormous bowl shape that flipped up on the ends— probably in imitation of Elvis’s wife. What was her name? Patricia? Phyllis? No. Priscilla, that was it. She must have depleted the entire ozone layer over Tennessee to hold that monstrosity in place. Even from this distance he could see that her eyelids were covered with a tawdry plastering of blue eyeshadow and weighted down with false eyelashes, à la Tammie Faye Baker. Madonna she was not…neither the heavenly one, nor the rock star with the cone-shaped bra.
Still, a strange heat pulsed through his body as he gazed at her.
Does she realize how ridiculous she looks?
Does she care?
Do I care?
Damn straight I do! he answered himself as the woman, leader of the motley biblical crew, waved her hands dictatorially, wagged her forefinger, and steered the others into their places. Within minutes, they posed statuelike in a Memphis version of the Nativity scene. The only one unfrozen was the shepherd, whose clear, adolescent voice rang out clearly with “O, Holy Night.”
Already tourists passing by were pausing, oohing and ahhing, and dropping coins and paper money into the iron kettle set in the front. It was only noon, but it was clear to Clay that by the end of the day this group was going to make a bundle.
“Not on my property!” Clay vowed, grabbing his overcoat and making for the door. At the last minute, he paused and handed the clearly disapproving bellhop a five-dollar bill.
For some reason, the scowling man made him feel like…well, Scrooge…and he hadn’t even said “Humph!” again. It was absurd to feel guilty. He was a businessman…an investment banker specializing in venture capital. He had every right to make a business decision.
“Thank you for your ser vice,” he said coolly. “I’m sure I’ll be seeing you again during my stay here in Memphis.” Clay intended to remain only long enough to complete arrangements for the razing of the hotel and the erection of a strip mall on this site and the adjoining property. He expected to complete his work here before the holidays and catch the Christmas Eve shuttle back to New Jersey on Thursday. Not that he had any particular plans that demanded a swift return to Princeton. On the contrary. There was no one waiting for him in his big empty mansion, except for Doris and George Benson, the longtime cook/house keeper and gardener/driver. No Christmas parties he would mind missing. No personal relationships that would suffer in his absence.
Clay blinked with surprise at his out-of-character, maudlin musings. This hokey Elvis-mania that pervaded Memphis must be invading his brain, like a virus. The Elvis virus. Ha, ha, ha!
The bellhop’s eyes bored into him, then softened, as if seeing his thoughts.
Clay didn’t like the uncomfortable feeling he got under the bellhop’s intense stare.
“You really plannin’ on kicking the Fallons off your property? At Christmastime?” the bellhop inquired in a condemning tone of voice.
“Damn straight.”
“Even the iciest heart can be melted.”
Now what the hell does that mean? “Yeah, well, it’s going to take a monumental fever in my case, because I have plans for that property.” This is the craziest conversation in the world. Why am I even talking to this kook?
“You know what they say about the best-laid plans?”
“Am I supposed to understand that?” Shut up, Jessup. Just ignore him.
“Sometimes God sticks out his big toe and trips us humans. You might just be in for a big stumble.”
God? Big toe? The man is nuts. “Lock up on your way out,” Clay advised, opening the hallway door. Time to put a stop to this nonsense…the bellhop, the hotel, the Nativity scene, the whole freakin’ mess.
But damned if the impertinent old fart didn’t begin humming “Fever” as Clay closed the door behind him, thus getting in the last word.
“This is the dumbest damn thing you’ve ever conned us into, Annie.”
“Tsk-tsk,” Annie told her brother Chet in stiff-lipped sotto voce. “We’re supposed to be statues. No talking. Furthermore, St. Joseph should not be swearing.”
A flush crept up the face of her oldest brother, who was handsome even with the exaggerated Elvis hairdo. Chet was the kind of guy who would probably make a young girl’s heart stop even if he were bald.
Good looks aside, her heart went out to Chet. He was twenty-five, only three years younger than she, and so very solemn for his age. Well, he had good reason, she supposed. He’d certainly never hesitated over taking responsibility for raising his baby, Jason, when his girlfriend Emmy Lou abandoned the infant to his care a month ago. Even before that, he’d tried hard to be the man of the family ever since their parents had died in a car accident ten years ago, changing overnight from a carefree teenager to a weary adult.
Well, they’d all changed with that tragedy. No use dwelling on what couldn’t be helped.
“There’s no one around now,” Chet pointed out defensively.
That was true. It was lunch hour and a Sunday, so only a few people had straggled by thus far. But tourist sidewalk traffic past their panorama on Blues Street, just off the famous Beale Street, should pick up soon. Yesterday, their first day trying out this enterprise, had brought in an amazing $700 in tips between eleven A.M. and five P.M. Annie was hoping that in the five days remaining before Christmas they would be able to earn another $3500, enough to save the farm, so to speak.
“I feel like an absolute fool,” Chet grumbled.
“Me, too,” her other four brothers concurred with a unified groan.
“Wayne keeps trying to bite my butt,” Johnny added. “I swear he’s the meanest donkey in the entire world. Pure one-hundred-proof jackass, if you ask me.”
“He is not mean,” Jerry Lee argued. The only one Wayne could abide was Jerry Lee, who’d bred him for a 4-H project five years ago. “Wayne senses that you don’t like him, and he’s trying to get your attention.”
“By biting my butt?”
Everyone laughed at that.
“I had a girl once who bit my butt—” Roy started to say.
Annie gasped. “Roy Fallon! If you say one more word, I swear I’ll soap your mouth out when we get home. I don’t care if you are twenty-two years old.”
Everyone laughed some more. Except for Annie.
“Your sheep keep nuzzling this fleece outfit you made me wear,” Johnny continued to gripe. He directed his complaint now at Annie. “I think they think I’m one of their cousins.”
Ethel and Lucy were Annie’s pets. She’d won them when they were only baby lambs in a grange raffle two years ago.
“Stop your whining, boys,” she snapped. “Do you think I’m enjoying myself? My scalp itches. My skin is probably breaking out in zits like a popcorn machine. I’m surely straining some muscles in my eyelids with these false eyelashes. And I’m just praying that the barn roof doesn’t cave in before we earn enough money for its repair. Or that the price of milk doesn’t drop again. Or that we’ll be able to afford this semester at vet school for Roy. And—”
“Don’t blame this sideshow on me,” Roy chimed in. “It’s not my fault the government cut the student-aid program.”
“Oh, Roy, don’t get your sideburns in a dither,” she said, already regretting her sharp words.
“Or get your duck’s-ass hairdo in a backwind,” Hank taunted.
Annie shot Hank a scowl, and continued, “No one’s to blame, Roy. Our problems have been piling up for a long time.”
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing. If anyone from school comes by, I’m outta here, barn roof or no barn roof,” Jerry Lee asserted. At fifteen, peer approval was critical, and dressing up as an Elvis wise man probably didn’t score many points with the cheerleading squad.
“You’re just worried that Sally Sue Sorenson will see you,” Hank teased.
“Am not,” Jerry Lee argued, despite his red face.
“Shhhh,” Annie cautioned.
A group of tourists approached, and Annie’s family froze into their respective parts. Johnny, her youngest brother—God bless him—broke loose with an absolutely angelic version of “Silent Night.” He must have inherited his singing talent from their parents, who’d been unsuccessful Grand Ole Opry wanna-bes. The rest of them could barely carry a tune.
In appreciation, the group, which included a man, a woman, and three young children, waited through the entire song, then dropped a five-dollar bill into the kettle, while several couples following in their wake donated a bunch of dollar bills each, along with some change. Thank God for the Christmas spirit.
After they passed by, Roy picked up on their interrupted conversation. “Actually, Jerry Lee, don’t be too quick to discount the appeal of this Elvis stuff. Being an Elvis look-alike could be a real chick magnet for some babes.”
“You’ve been hanging around barns too long,” Jerry Lee scoffed, but there was a note of uncertainty in his voice. Roy was a first-year vet student and graduate of Memphis State. Jerry Lee wasn’t totally sure his big brother, at twenty-two, hadn’t picked up a few bits of male-female wisdom.
“He’s bullshittin’ you,” Hank interjected with a laugh, ignoring the glare Annie flashed his way for the coarse language. Hank was a high school senior, a football player, and the self-proclaimed stud of the family.
Jerry Lee gave Roy a dirty look for his ill advice. Obviously, Hank ranked as the better “chick” expert.
“What do you think, Annie?” Roy asked, chuckling at Jerry Lee’s gullibility.
“How would I know what attracts women? I haven’t had a date in two years. Then it was with Frankie Wilks, the milk-tank driver.”
“And he resembles the back end of a hound dog more than Elvis,” Hank remarked with a hoot of laughter at his own joke.
“That was unkind, Hank,” Annie chastised, “just because he’s a little…hairy.”
They all made snorting sounds of ridicule.
Frankie Wilks had a bushy beard and mustache and a huge mop of frizzy hair. Masses of hair covered his forearms and even peeked out at the neck of his milk company uniform. Hirsute would be an understatement.
“You could go out with guys if you wanted to,” Chet offered softly. “You don’t have to give up your life for us or the farm. It was different when we were younger, but—”
“Uh-oh!” Roy said.
Everyone stopped talking and stiffened to attention.
A man was stomping down the sidewalk toward them, having emerged from the hotel entrance. He wore a conservative black business suit, so finely cut it must have been custom-made, with a snow white shirt and a dark-striped tie, spit-shined wing-tip shoes, and a black cashmere overcoat that probably cost as much as a new barn roof.
He was a taller, leaner version of Richard Gere, with the same short-clipped dark hair. He would have been heart-stoppingly handsome if it weren’t for the frown lines that seemed to be etched permanently about his flaming eyes and tight-set mouth. How could a man so young be so disagreeable in appearance?
Despite his demeanor, Annie felt a strange heat rush through her just gazing at him. It was embarrassment, of course. What woman enjoyed looking like a tart in front of a gorgeous man?
Unfortunately, Annie suspected that the flame in his eyes was directed toward them. And she had a pretty good idea who he was, too. Clayton Jessup III, the new owner of the Original Heartbreak Hotel and the vacant lot where they had set up their Nativity scene.
The kindly couple who managed the hotel, David and Marion Bloom, had given them permission for the Nativity scene when Annie had asked several days ago. “After all, the lot has been vacant for more than thirty years,” Marion had remarked. “It’s about time someone made use of it.”
But when Annie and Chet had stopped in the hotel a short time ago, where David and Marion had also been nice enough to let them use an anteroom for changing Jason, they soon realized that everyone at the hotel was in an uproar. The new owner had arrived, unannounced, and he intended to raze the site and erect a strip shopping mall. As if Memphis needed another mall!
Didn’t the man recognize the sentimental value of the hotel and this lot? No, she guessed, a man like him wouldn’t. Money would be his bottom line.
Just before Mr. Jessup got to them, some tourists paused and listened with “oohs” and “ahhs” of appreciation, dropping more paper money and change into their kettle. The boys stood rock still, but Annie saw the gleam of interest in their eyes at a petite blonde in gray wool slacks and a cardigan over a peach-colored turtleneck who stood staring at them for a long time. There was a hopeless sag to her shoulders until Hank winked at her, and she burst out with a little laugh.
Drawing the sides of his overcoat back, and planting his hands on slim hips, Mr. Jessup glared at them, his lips curling with disdain upon getting a close-up view of their attire. At least he had the courtesy to wait till the tourists passed by before snarling, “What the hell are you doing on my property?”
The baby’s eyes shot open, and he began to whimper at the harsh voice.
“We have permission,” Chet said, his voice as frosty as Mr. Jessup’s as he leaned over and soothed his child. “Hush, now. Back to sleep, son,” he crooned, rocking the manger slightly.
Annie tried to explain, “Mr. and Mrs. Bloom told us it would be all right. We’ll only be here for a few days, and—”
He put up a hand to halt her words. “You won’t be here for even a few more hours.” He peered down at his watch— probably one of those Rolex things, equal in value to the mortgage on their farm—and grated, “You have exactly fifteen minutes to vacate these premises, or I’ll have the police evict you forcibly. So stop fluttering those ridiculous eyelashes at me.”
“I was not fluttering.”
“Hey, it’s not necessary to yell at our sister,” Roy yelled. He, Hank, Jerry Lee, and Johnny were coming up behind Annie to form a protective flank. Chet had taken Jason out of the manger and was holding him to his shoulder, as if Mr. Jessup might do the infant bodily harm.
“Furthermore, those animals had better not have done any damage,” Mr. Jessup continued, and proceeded to walk toward the shed where Wayne was hee-hawing and the sheep were bleating, as if sensing some disaster in progress.
“No! Don’t!” they all shouted in warning.
Too late.
Mr. Jessup slipped on a pile of sheep dung. Righting himself, he noticed Wayne’s back leg shoot out. To avoid the kick, he spun on his ankle. Annie could almost hear the tendons tearing as his ankle twisted. His expensive shoes, now soiled, went out from under him, and the man went down hard, on his back, with his head hitting a small rock with an ominous crack.
“I’m going to sue your eyelashes off,” Mr. Jessup said on a moan, just before he passed out.
He was drunk…as a skunk.
Well, not actually drunk. More like under the influence of painkillers. But the effect was the same. Three sheets to the Memphis wind.
“Oh, I wish I was not in the land of Dixie,” Mr. Jessup belted out. He’d been singing nonstop for the past five minutes.
Annie and the emergency room intern exchanged a look.
Annie tried to get him to lie down on the table. “Mr. Jessup, you really should settle—”
“Call me Clay.” He flashed her a lopsided grin, accompanied by the most amazing, utterly adorable dimples. Then he resumed his rendition of “Dixie” with a stanza ending, “…strange folks there are not forgoooootten.”
Geez!
“I wish I’d bought that t-shirt I saw at the airport.” Mr. Jessup…rather, Clay…stopped singing for a moment to inject that seemingly irrelevant thought. “It said, ‘Elvis Is Dead, And I’m Not Feelin’ So Good Myself.’ Ha, ha, ha!”
“He’s having a rather…um, strange allergic reaction. Or perhaps I just gave him a little too much Darvon,” the young doctor mumbled, casting a sheepish glance toward the other busy cubicles to see if any of his colleagues had overheard.
“No kidding, Ben Casey!” Annie remarked. Clay was now leading an orchestra in his own version of “Flight of the Bumble bee.” She didn’t think Rimsky-Korsakov had actual buzzing sounds in his original opera containing that music.
“You have biiiiig hair,” he observed to Annie then, cocking his head this way and that to get just the right angle in studying its huge contours. “Does it hurt?”
“No.”
“Does your boyfriend like it?”
“I don’t have a boyfriend.”
He nodded his head, as if that was a given. “A man couldn’t get close enough to kiss you. Or other things,” he noted, jiggling his eyebrows at her.
The man was going to hate himself tomorrow if he remembered any of this.
Annie was already hating herself…because, for some reason, the word kiss coming from his lips—who knew they would be so full and sensual when not pressed together into a thin line of disapproval?—prompted all kinds of erotic images to flicker in her underused libido. She pressed a palm to her forehead. “Boy, is it hot in here!”
“I’ll second that. I’m burning up.” Clay twisted his head from side to side, massaging the nape of his neck with one hand. Then, before she could protest, he loosened the string tie at the back of his shoulders and let his hospital gown slide to the floor. He wore nothing but a pair of boring white boxer shorts.
Boring, hell! He was sexy as sin.
Annie’s mouth gaped open, and her temperature shot up another notch or two at all that skin. And muscle. And dark, silky hair.
Funny how hair on Frankie Wilks seemed repulsive. But with this man, she had to practically hold her hand back for fear she’d run her fingertips through his chest hairs. Or forearm hairs. Or—lordy, lordy—thigh hairs.
How could a man so stodgy and mean be so primitively attractive? She’d gotten to know just how stodgy and mean he could be on the ride over here. And how did a man who presumably worked at a desk all day long maintain such a flat, muscle-planed stomach?
Startled, she clicked her jaw shut.
“It’s not warm in here,” the doctor pointed out, intruding into her thoughts. Thank God! “Perhaps you both have a fever. But, no, I checked your temperature, Mr. Jessup. It’s normal.”
Normal? There’s nothing normal about the steam heat rising in this room.
Clay glared at Annie accusingly. Was he going to blame her for a fever, too? To her horror, he broke out with the husky, intimate lyrics, “You give me fever.” He was staring at her the whole time.
Oh, mercy! Who would have thought he even knew an Elvis lyric? It had probably seeped into his unconscious over the years through some sort of Muzak osmosis.
“The medication will wear off in a couple of hours,” the doctor was saying. “After that, we’ll switch to Tylenol with codeine. Considering his reaction, I would suggest you give him only half a tablet.”
“Me? Me?” Hey, I’ve got to get back to the Nativity scene. Without my supervision, who knows what my brothers are doing? Probably a Macarena version of “Away In a Manger.” I wouldn’t put it past Roy and Hank to be flirting with passersby, too.
The doctor finished wrapping Clay’s sprained ankle tightly and took on what he’d probably practiced in front of a mirror as a serious medical demeanor. “The goose egg on the back of your head is just a hard knock, but you should be watched closely for the next twenty-four hours. I don’t like the way you reacted to the Darvon. Do you have family nearby to keep an eye on you?”
“I have no family,” Clay declared woefully.
He’s not married. Annie did a mental high-five, though why, she couldn’t imagine. Her heart would have gone out to the man at that poignant comment if it weren’t for the fact that he was back to glowering at her. She tried to understand why he directed all his hostility toward her. No doubt it stemmed from the fact that he’d been really angry about the accident and blamed it all on her family. “You and your crazy brothers are going to pay,” he’d informed her repeatedly on the drive to the hospital, during the long wait in the emergency room, throughout the examination, right up until the painkillers had performed their miraculous transformation. Good thing she’d talked her brothers into manning the Nativity scene, minus a Blessed Virgin, till she returned. They would have belted Clay for his surliness!
She was hoping he’d meant the threat figuratively. She was hoping it had only been the pain speaking. She was hoping God listened to the prayers of Blessed Mother impersonators.
They couldn’t afford a new barn roof and a lawsuit.
“Well, then, perhaps we should admit you,” the doctor told him. “At least overnight…for observation.”
“I’m going back to my hotel room,” Clay argued, shimmying forward to get off the examining table and stand. In the process, his boxers rode high, giving Annie an eyeful, from the side, of a tight buttock.
And her temperature cranked up another notch.
Who knew? Who could have guessed?
“Ouch.” He groaned as his feet hit the floor. He staggered woozily and braced himself against the wall.
“You could stay at the farm with us for a few days,” Annie surprised herself by offering. The fever that had overcome her on first viewing this infuriating tyrant must have gone to her brain. “Aunt Liza can help care for you.…” While we’re in the city doing our Nativity scene. “It’ll be more comfortable than a hotel room.” And you wouldn’t see us on your property.
“That’s a good idea,” the doctor offered, obviously anxious to end this case and move on to the next cubicle.
“Okeydokey,” Clay slurred out, the time-release medication apparently kicking in again. He was leaning against the wall, bemusedly rubbing his fingertips across his lips, as if they felt numb. Then he idly scratched his stomach…his flat stomach…in an utterly male gesture his lordliness probably never indulged in back at the manor house.
Her heart practically stopped as the significance of his quick agreement sank in. Criminy! I’m bringing Donald Trump home with me. What possessed me to make such an offer? My brothers will kill me. But no. It really is a good idea. Get him on home turf where we can talk down his anger. Perhaps convince him to let us continue our Nativity scene the rest of the week. Take advantage of his weakened state. Heck, we might even persuade him to change his plans about razing the hotel.
On the other hand, Elvis might be alive and living in the refrigerator at Pizza Hut.
“A farm? I’ve never been on a real farm before.” A grin tugged at his frowning lips, and he winked at her. “Eeii, eeii, oh, Daisy Mae.”
Holy cow! The grin, combined with the sexy wink, kicked up the heat in her already feverish body still another notch. Even worse, the man appeared to have a sense of humor buried under all that starch. It just wasn’t fair. Annie didn’t stand a chance.
“Uh-oh.” His brow creased with sudden worry. “Do you have out houses? I don’t think I want to live on a farm if I have to use an out house.”
Live? Who said anything about “live”? We’re talking visit here. A day…two at the most. But Annie couldn’t help but smile at his silly concern.
“Hey, you’re not so bad-looking when you smile.” Clay cocked his head to one side, studying her.
“Thanks a bunch, your smoothness,” she retorted. “And, no, we don’t have out houses.”
“Do you have cows and horses and chickens and stuff?” he asked with a boyish enthusiasm he probably hadn’t exhibited in twenty-five years…if ever.
“Yep. Even a goat.”
“Oh, boy!” he said.
As the implications of her impetuous offer hit Annie— Mr. GQ Wall Street on their humble farm—she echoed his sentiment; Oh, boy!
“Did you ever make love in a hayloft?” he asked bluntly.
“No!” She lifted her chin indignantly, appalled that he would even ask her such an intimate question. Despite her indignation, though, unwelcome images flickered into Annie’s brain, and her fever flared into a full-blown inferno.
“Neither have I,” Clay noted, as he stared her straight in the eye and let loose with the slowest, sexiest grin she’d seen since Elvis died.
At the sign, SWEET HOLLOW FARM, Annie swerved the pickup truck off the highway and onto the washboard-rough dirt lane that meandered for a quarter mile up to the house.
Tears filled her eyes on viewing her property, as they often did when she’d been away, even if only for a few hours. She loved this land…the smell of its rich soil, the feel of the crisp breeze coming down from the Blue Ridge Mountains, the taste of its wholesome bounty. It had been a real struggle these past ten years, but she prided herself on not having sold off even one parcel from the 120-acre family legacy.
“Oh, darn!” she muttered when she hit one of the many potholes. The eight-year-old vehicle, with its virtually non ex is tent springs, went up in the air and down hard.
She worriedly contemplated her sleeping passenger, who groaned, then rubbed the back of his aching head. His eyelids drifted open slowly, and Annie could see the dis-orientation that hazed their deep blue depths. As his brain slowly cleared, he sat straighter and glanced at the pasture on the right, where sixty milk cows, bearing the traditional black-and-white markings of the Holstein breed, grazed contentedly, along with an equal number of heifers and a half dozen new calves.
“Holy hell!” Clay muttered. “Cows!”
Geez! You’d think they didn’t have dairy herds in New Jersey.
Slowly, he turned his head forward, taking in the clapboard farm house up ahead, which must be a stark contrast to his own Princeton home. She knew she was correct in her assessment when he murmured, “The Waltons! I’ve landed in John Boy Central.”
His slow survey continued, now to the left, where he flinched visibly on seeing her…still adorned in all her Priscilla/Madonna garishness.
His forehead furrowing with confusion, he loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his dress shirt. Then his fingers fluttered in an unconscious sweep down his body, hesitating for the briefest second over his groin.
Annie understood his bewilderment, even if he didn’t. For some reason, an odd heat—of an erotic nature, not the body-temperature type—was generated when they were in each other’s presence. She empathized with his consternation. Clayton Jessup III was a gorgeous hunk…when he wasn’t frowning, that was. He, on the other hand, would find it unbelievable that he could be attracted to a tasteless caricature of the Virgin Mary.
“Can you turn down the heat?” he asked testily.
“There is no heat. The thermostat broke last winter.”
“Humph!” he commented as he rolled down the window on his side. “Pee-yew!” He immediately rolled it back up. “How can you stand that smell?”
“What smell? Oh, you mean the cows.” She shrugged. “You get used to it after a while. Actually, I like the scent. It spells good country living to me.”
“Humph! It spells cow crap to me.”
Clay’s condescending attitude was starting to irk Annie. She had liked him a whole lot better when he was under the influence.
“Am I being kidnapped?” he inquired hesitantly.
“What?” Where did that insane idea come from? Oh, I see. His gaze was riveted now on his far left, where Chet’s hunting rifle rested in the gun rack above the bench seat. “Of course not.”
“Where am I?”
“Don’t you remember? You fell outside the hotel. I took you to the hospital emergency room. Oh, don’t look so alarmed. You just have a sprained ankle and a goose egg on your head. The doctor said you need special care for a day or two because of the reaction you had to the Darvon, and I offered to bring you out to the farm. We’re about a half hour outside Memphis.”
“I agreed to stay on a…farm?” His eyes, which were really quite beautiful—a deep blue framed by thick black lashes—went wide with disbelief.
“Yes,” she said in a voice stiff with affront.
“Why, for heaven’s sake?”
Yep, his superiority complex was annoying the heck out of her. “Maybe because you were under the influence of drugs.”
“I don’t take drugs.”
“You did today, buddy.”
“Take me back to the hotel.”
She let loose with a long sigh. “We’ve already been through this before. You need special care. Since you have no family, I volunteered—out of the goodness of my heart, I might add—and do I get any thanks? No, sirree.”
“Who said I have no family?”
“You did!”
“I…did…not!” His face flushed with embarrassment.
Geez, why would he be uncomfortable over revealing that he had no family? It only made him appear human. Ha! Maybe that was the key. He didn’t want to be human.
“I don’t discuss my personal life with…strangers.”
Bingo! “Well, you did this time.”
His eyelids fluttered with sleepiness even as he spoke. “What elsh did I saaaay?”
The little demons on the wrong side of Annie’s brain did a victory dance at Clay’s question. Here was the perfect opportunity for her to get even for his patronizing comments.
“Well, you did a lot of singing.”
His eyes shot open. “Me? In public?”
“Hmmm. Do you consider the emergency room a public place?”
“That’s impossible.”
“And, of course, there was your remark about haylofts…”
“Huh?”
Annie could see that the poor guy was fighting sleep. Still, she couldn’t keep herself from adding, “…and making love.”
“Making love in a hayloft? I said that?” Clay murmured skeptically. “With you? Humph! I couldn’t have been that much out of my mind.”
Before she could correct his misconception that he’d associated making love in a hayloft with her, his head fell back. Good thing, too, because Annie was about to give him a matching goose egg on his insulting noggin. “Did you say humbug?”
“No! Why does everyone think I’m a Scrooge?” he said drowsily, following with a lusty yawn.
“Maybe because you are.”
“I said humph,” he mumbled in his sleep. Then a small snore escaped from his parted lips.
“Humph you, you egotistical bozo.”
Clay awakened groggily from a deep sleep to find it was dark outside. He must have slept a good four hours or more.
For several moments, he didn’t move from his position on the high maple poster bed, where he lay on his stomach, presumably to protect the back of his aching head. He burrowed deeper beneath the warm cocoon of a homemade patchwork quilt and smiled to himself. So this is how it feels to be one of the Waltons.
By the light of a bedside hurricane lamp, he studied his surroundings. It was a cozy room, with its slanted dormer ceiling—hardly bigger than his walk-in closet at home. The only furniture, besides the bed, was a matching maple dresser and a blanket chest under the low double windows facing the front of the house. A well-worn easy chair of faded blue upholstery sat in one corner, flanked on one side by a floor lamp and on the other by a small sidetable on which sat a paperback book and a pile of magazines. A few photographs, which he couldn’t decipher from here, a high school pennant, and some cheaply framed prints of cows—What else!—adorned the pink rose–papered walls.
It had to belong to the Blessed Virgin bimbo who’d brought him here. Unless the collection of teddy bears on the chest and the toiletries on the bureau belonged to one of her brothers. Somehow, though, he didn’t think any of the strapping young men he’d seen in that wacky Nativity scene were gay farmers.
Clay should have felt outrage at finding himself in this predicament. Instead, a strange sense of well-being filled him, as if he’d been running a marathon for a long, long time, and finally he’d reached the finish line.
Slowly he came fully awake as the sounds of the house, which had been deathly quiet before, seeped into his consciousness. The slamming of a door. The clomp, clomp, clomp of boots on hardwood floors. Laughter and male voices. Water running. The never-ending blare of Elvis music, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog…” Good Lord! People have the nerve to call that caterwauling music. Humph!
The cry of a baby emerged from down the hall—from one of the other second-floor bedrooms, he presumed— mixed with the soft crooning voice of an adult male, a mixture of lullaby and words of comfort. “Shhh, Jason. You’ve had a long day. What a good boy you were! Just let me finish with this diaper; then you can have your bottle. Aaah, I know, I know. You’re sleepy.” Gradually, the crying died down to a slow whimper, then silence, except for the creak, creak, creak of a rocker.
From the deep recesses of Clay’s memory, an image emerged…flickering and ethereal. A woman sitting in a high-backed rocking chair, holding an infant in her tender embrace. He even imagined the scent of baby powder mixed with a flowery substance. Perfume? The woman was singing a sweet, silly song to the baby about a sandman coming with his bag of magic sleepytime dust.
A lump formed in Clay’s throat, and he could barely breathe.
Could it have been his mother…and him? No! His mother had left when he was barely one year old. It was impossible that he could recall something from that age. Wasn’t it?
With a snort of disgust, Clay tossed the quilt aside and sat up on the edge of the bed. He gritted his teeth to fight off the wooziness that accompanied waves of pain assaulting him from both the back of his head and his bandaged ankle. Once the worst of the pain passed, he took in the fact that he was clothed only in boxers. Had he undressed himself? No, it had been the woman, Annie Fallon, and her Aunt Liza, a wiry, more ancient version of the grandma on The Waltons. God, I’ve got a thing about the Waltons today. They’d helped him remove his clothing, then encouraged him to take half a pill before tucking him into the big bed.
In fact, Clay had a distinct recollection of the old buzzard eyeballing his near-nude body, cackling her appreciation, then telling Annie, “Not bad for a city slicker!”
He also had a distinct recollection of Annie’s response. “Don’t go there, Aunt Liza. He’s an egotistical bozo with ice in his veins and a Scrooge personality disorder.”
“Scrooge-smoodge. You could melt him down, sweetie. Might be a nifty idea for our Christmas good deed this year.”
Annie had giggled. “I can see it now. The Fallon family Christmas good deed, 1998: bring a Scrooge home for the holidays.”
I am not a Scrooge. Not, not, not! I’m not icy, either. In fact, I’m hot, hot, hot…at least when the Tennessee tart is around. Furthermore, nobody—especially not a bunch of hayseed farmers—had better make me their good deed. I am not a pity case.
Clay wanted nothing more than to be back home, where his life was orderly and sane. He was going to sue the pants off these crackpots, but he had more important things on his mind right now. An empty stomach—which rumbled at the delicious scents wafting up from downstairs—and a full bladder.
First things first. Clay pulled on his suit pants gingerly, and made his way into the hall, using one crutch to avoid putting full weight on his injured ankle. Across the corridor, a boy of about thirteen—the one who’d been a shepherd in the Nativity scene—was propped against the pillows on one of the twin beds in the room, reading a biology book and writing in a class notebook. He wore jeans and a T-shirt that proclaimed, FARMERS HAVE LONG HOES. His hair was wet from a recent shower and no longer sported the high pouf on top or duck’s tail in the back. It was from a stereo at the side of his bed where the Elvis music was blasting.
When he noticed Clay in the doorway, the boy set his schoolbooks aside and turned down the volume. “You’re up. Finally.”
“Where’s the bathroom?”
“Gotta take a leak, huh?” the boy inquired. “My name’s Johnny,” he informed him cheerily. “You’re Clay, right? Annie says you’re gonna stay with us for a while. Cool. Do you like Elvis?” The boy never waited for answers to his questions, just chattered away as he led the way to the end of the hall.
By the time they got there, Clay was practically crossing his legs—not an easy feat when walking with a sprained ankle. Was there only one bathroom to serve more than a half dozen people? There were eight bathrooms in his home, and he was the sole inhabitant these days, except for Doris and George, and they lived over the old carriage house.
Clay soon found himself in the small bathroom with an old-fashioned claw-footed tub and porcelain pedestal sink. No shower stall here, just a showerhead and plastic curtain that hung from an oval aluminum rod, suspended from the ceiling and surrounding the tub on all sides. At least there was a toilet, Clay thought, releasing a long sigh of near-ecstasy after relieving himself.
He’d barely zipped up his pants when there was a knock on the door. “You decent?” a male voice called out.
Define decent. Hobbling around barefooted, decent? Wearing nothing but a knot on my head the size of a fist and a pair of wrinkled slacks, decent? Caught practically midleak, decent? Under the influence of drugs, decent? “Yeah, I’m decent.”
The door creaked open and the oldest brother, the father of the baby, stuck his head inside. He apparently hadn’t showered yet because he still had the Elvis hairdo, though the St. Joseph outfit was gone, in favor of jeans and a sweatshirt. “Hi. My name’s Chet. Annie told me to give you these.” He shoved a pair of jeans, a white undershirt, a blue plaid flannel shirt, socks, and raggedy sneakers at him. “You look about the same size as me.”
Clay took the items hesitantly. He was about to tell him that he wouldn’t need them, since he intended to go back to the hotel, ASAP. And call his lawyer. Before he could speak, though, the man—about twenty-five years old—asked with genuine concern, “How ya feelin’? Your body must feel like a bulldozer ran over it.”
“Do you mean your sister?”
Chet threw his head back and laughed. “Annie does have that effect sometimes, doesn’t she? No, I meant the boink to your head and your twisted ankle.”
Clay shrugged. “I’ll be all right.”
Just then Clay noticed the black satin bra hanging on the doorknob. The cups were full and feminine to the nth degree. He was pretty sure the wispy undergarment didn’t belong to Aunt Liza. Hmmm. It would seem the scarecrow Madonna was hiding something under her virginly robes.
“Hey, that’s my sister you’re having indecent thoughts about,” Chet protested, interrupting his reverie.
“I was not,” Clay lied, hoping his flushed face didn’t betray him.
“Yeah, right. Anyhow, dinner’s almost ready. Do you want me to bring a tray upstairs? Or can you make it downstairs?”
Clay debated briefly whether to eat here or wait till he got back to the hotel. The embarrassing rumble in his gut decided for him. Clay told him he’d be down shortly and went back to the bedroom to change clothes while Chet made use of the shower.
A short time later, he sat at the huge oak trestle table in the kitchen waiting for Annie to come in from the barn with two of her brothers, Roy, a twenty-two-year-old vet student, and Hank, a high school senior. They were completing the second milking of the day for the dairy herd. All this information was relayed by Aunt Liza. That was what the woman had demanded that he call her after he’d addressed her as “ma’am” one too many times.
Had he ever eaten dinner in a kitchen? He didn’t think so.
Did he have a personal acquaintance with anyone who had ever milked a cow? He was fairly certain he didn’t.
Aunt Liza wore an apron that fit over her shoulders and hung to her knees, where flesh-colored support hose bagged conspicuously under her house dress. She hustled about the commercial-size stove off to one side of the kitchen. Sitting on benches that lined both sides of the table, chatting amiably with him as if it were perfectly normal for him to be there, were Chet, Johnny, whom he had already met, and Jerry Lee, a fifteen-year-old. This family bred kids like rabbits, apparently. The baby was up in his crib, down for the night, Chet said hopefully.
A radio sitting on a counter was set on a twenty-four-hour country music station. Surprise, surprise.
“Do you people honestly like that music?” Clay asked. It was probably a rude question to ask when he was in someone else’s home, but he really would like to understand the attraction this crap held for the masses.
“Yeah,” Chet, Jerry Lee, Johnny, and Aunt Liza said as one.
“But it’s so…so hokey,” Clay argued. “Listen to that one. ‘I Changed Her Oil, She Changed My Life.’”
They all laughed.
“That’s just it. Country music makes you feel good. You could be in a funky mood, and it makes you smile.” Jerry Lee thought about what he’d said for a moment, then chuckled. “One of my favorites is ‘She Got the Ring, I Got the Finger.’”
“Jerry Lee Fallon, I told you about using such vulgarities in this house,” Aunt Liza admonished. Then she chuckled, too. “I’m partial to ‘You Done Tore Out My Heart and Stomped that Sucker Flat.’”
“I like ‘I Would Have Wrote You a Letter but I Couldn’t Spell Yuck,’” Johnny said.
“Well, the all-time best one,” Chet offered, “is ‘Get Your Tongue Outta My Mouth ’Cause I’m Kissing You Good-Bye.’”
Some of the other titles tossed out then by one Fallon family member after another were: “How Can I Miss You if You Won’t Go Away,” “I’ve Been Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart,” “If I Can’t Be Number One in Your Life, Then Number Two on You,” “You Can’t Have Your Cake and Edith Too,” and the one they all agreed was best, “I Shaved My Legs for This?”
Despite himself, Clay found himself laughing with the whole crazy bunch.
Just then, the back door could be heard opening into a mudroom. Voices rang out with teasing banter.
“You’d better not have mooned any passersby, Hank. That’s all we need is a police citation on top of everything else,” Annie was chastising her brother.
“I didn’t say he mooned the girl,” another male said. It must be Roy, the vet student. “I said he was mooning over her.”
There was the sound of laughter then and running water as they presumably washed their hands in a utility sink.
Seconds later, two males entered the room, rubbing their hands briskly against the outside chill, which they carried in with them. They nodded at him in greeting and sat down on the benches, maneuvering their long legs awkwardly under the table.
Only then did Clay notice the woman who stepped through the doorway. She was tall and thin. Her long, looong legs that went from here to the Texas panhandle were encased in soft, faded jeans, which were tucked into a pair of work boots. An oversize denim shirt—probably belonging to one of her brothers—covered her on the top, hanging down to her knees with its sleeves rolled up to the elbows. A swath of brunette hair lay straight and thick to her shoulders. Not a lick of makeup covered her clear complexion. Even so, her lips were full—almost too full for her thin face—and parted over large, even, white teeth. She resembled a thinner, more beautiful version of Julia Roberts.
Clay put his forehead down on the table and groaned.
He knew everyone was probably gawking at him as if he’d lost his mind, but he couldn’t help himself. He knew even before the fever flooded his face and arms and legs and that particular hot zone in between…he knew exactly who this stranger was. It was, unbelievably, Annie Fallon.
He cracked his eyes open a bit, still with his face in his plate, and glanced sideways at her where she still stood, equally stunned, in the doorway. Neither of them seemed to notice the hooting voices surrounding them.
How could he have been so blind?
How could he not have seen what was happening here?
How could he not have listened to the cautionary voice of the bellhop who’d warned of destiny and God’s big toe?
All the pieces fit together now in the puzzle that had plagued Clay since he’d arrived in Memphis. God’s big toe had apparently delivered him a holy kick in the pants. Not to mention the fever He’d apparently sent to thaw his icy heart.
Clay, a sophisticated, wealthy venture capitalist, was falling head over heels in love with a farmer. Old McAnnie.
Donald Trump and Daisy Mae.
Hell! It will never work.
Will it?
He raised his head and took a longer look at the woman who was frozen in place, staring at him with equal incredulity. It was a sign of the madness that had overcome them both that the laughter rippling around them failed to penetrate their numbed consciousness.
He knew for sure that he was lost when a traitorous thought slipped out, and he actually spoke it aloud.
“Where’s the hayloft, honey?”
Clay felt as if he’d landed smack-dab in the middle of the Mad Hatter’s party. It was debatable who was the mad one, though—him or the rest of the inmates in this bucolic asylum.
Love? Me? Impossible!
Music blared in the background—ironically, “Can’t Help Falling in Love”—and everyone talked at once, each louder than the other in order to be heard. A half dozen strains of dialogue were going on simultaneously, but no one seemed to notice. Good thing, too. It gave him a chance to speculate in private over his monumental discovery of just a few moments ago.
I’m falling in love.
Impossible! Uh-uh, none of this falling business for me.
What other explanation is there for this fever that overtakes me every time I look at her? And, man, she is so beautiful. Well, not beautiful. Just perfect. Well, not perfect-perfect. Hell, the woman makes my knees sweat, just looking at her.
Maybe it’s not love. I’ve never been in love before. How do I know it’s love? Maybe it’s just lust.
Love, lust, what ever. I’m a goner.
But a farmer? A farmer?
“How come you and Annie keep googly-eyeing each other?” Johnny asked.
“Shut your teeth and eat,” Aunt Liza responded, whacking Johnny on the shoulder with a long-handled wooden spoon.
“Ouch!”
Meanwhile, a myriad of platters and bowls were being set on the table. Aunt Liza assured him this was an everyday meal, not a special spread on his behalf.
Pot roast—about ten pounds, give or take a hindquarter—cut into half-inch slabs. Mashed potatoes. Gravy. Thick noodles cooked in beef broth. Creamed spinach. Pickled beets. Succotash—whatever the hell that was! Chowchow—whatever the hell that was, too! Tossed salad. Coleslaw. Homemade biscuits and butter. Pitchers of cold, unhomogenized milk at either end of the table sporting a two-inch head of real cream. Canned pears. Chocolate layer cake and vanilla ice cream.
There were enough calories and fat grams on this table to fatten up the entire nation of Bosnia. Yet, amazingly, everyone here was whip-thin. Either they’d all inherited good genetic metabolisms, or they engaged in a massive amount of physical labor. He suspected it was a combination of both.
“Do you think it’s a good idea to eat so much red meat and dairy?” Clay made the mistake of inquiring.
“Bite your tongue,” everyone declared at once.
For a moment, Clay had forgotten that these were dairy farmers whose livelihood depended on milk products. Plus, they had about a hundred thousand pounds of beef on the hoof in their own backyard.
Clay rubbed a forefinger over his upper lip, pondering all that had happened to him so far this day. In the midst of the conversations swirling around him now, he felt as if he were having a personal epiphany. Not just the monumental discovery that, for the first time in his life, he was falling in love; it was much more than that. He’d never realized till this moment how much he’d missed having a family. He never would have described himself as a lonely man—a loner, perhaps, but not lonely. Now he knew that he’d been lonely for a long time.
And that wacky bellhop had been right this morning about his coldness. Over the years, he must have built up an icy crust around his heart. Just like my father. Little by little, it was melting now. Every time he came within a few feet of Annie, a strange fever enveloped him, and his chest tightened with emotions too new to understand. He yearned so much. For what exactly, he didn’t know.
In a daze, he reached for a biscuit, but Chet coughed meaningfully and Aunt Liza glared stonily at him. Once he sheepishly put the roll back, Annie took his hand on one side, and Jerry Lee on the other. All around the table, everyone bowed their heads and joined hands, including Aunt Liza and Chet, who sat in the end chairs, on either side. Then Annie said softly, “Lord, bless this food and all the poor people in the world who have less than we do, and even the rich people who have less than we do. For this bounty, we give you thanks. Amen.”
Everyone dug in heartily then, passing the bowls and platters around the table as they chattered away. Clay soon found himself with an unbelievable amount of high-cholesterol food on his plate, and enjoying it immensely. He practically sighed at the almost sinful flavor of melt-in-your-mouth potatoes mixing on his palate with rich beef gravy.
“Frankie Wilks called when you were in the barn.” Jerry Lee bobbed his eyebrows at Annie. “Said something about wantin’ you to go to the Christmas Eve candlelight ser vice with him.”
“Oooooh! Oooooh!” several of her brothers taunted, meanwhile shoveling down food like monks after a Lent-long fast.
“Who’s Frankie Wilks?” Clay’s voice rose with more consternation than he had any right to exhibit. Yet.
“The milkman,” Annie said, scowling at Jerry Lee. She had a hearty appetite, too, Clay noticed, though you wouldn’t know it from her thin frame. Probably came from riding herd on her cows.
Did they ride herd on cows?
Then Annie’s words sank in. The milkman? The milkman? I have a five-million-dollar portfolio, I’m not a bad-looking guy, attracting women has never been a problem for me, and my competition is…a milkman?
Competition? Whoa! Slow down this runaway testosterone train.
“Don’t you be sittin’ there, gloatin’ like a pig in heat, Chet,” Aunt Liza interjected as she put another slab of beef onto Clay’s plate, despite his raised hand of protest. His mouth was too full to speak. “You got a phone call today, too, Chet.”
Everyone at the table turned in tandem to stare at Chet.
“Emmy Lou?” Chet didn’t appear very happy as he asked the question.
“Yep. She was callin’ from London. Said she won’t be home before Christmas to pick up the baby, after all.”
“Stupid damn girl,” Annie cursed under her breath. Clay suspected damn was not a word she used lightly.
“You drove her away, if you ask me,” Hank accused, reaching for his dessert, which Aunt Liza shoved out of the way, pushing more salad his way first.
“Who asked you, mush-for-brains?” Chet snapped.
“All you had to do was tell her you looooovvvve her,” Roy teased. He waved a forkful of potatoes in the air as he spoke.
“I offered to marry her, didn’t I?”
“Offered? Sometimes, Chet, you are dumber than pig spit,” Annie remarked. “Have some pickled beets,” she added as an aside to Clay.
Chet’s face, which was solemn to begin with, went rigid with anger, but he said nothing.
“Is this Lilith?” Annie addressed Aunt Liza as she chewed on a bite of pot roast.
“Yep. Nice and tender, ain’t she?” Aunt Liza answered. “Thank God we got rid of the last of Alicia in the stew Friday night. She was tougher than cow hide.”
They name the cows they eat? Will they eat those two sheep that were in the Nativity scene, too? Or—God forbid—the donkey? Bile rose in Clay’s throat, and he discreetly pushed the remainder of his pot roast to the side of the plate.
“Speaking of cows, I noticed this morning that Mirabelle’s vulva is swollen and red,” Johnny interjected. “We better breed her soon.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow night.”
Clay choked on the pot roast still remaining in his mouth. A thirteen-year-old kid was discussing vulvae at the dinner table, and no one blinked an eye. Even worse, Annie—his Annie—was going to breed a cow. “Can I watch?”
“Huh? Oh, sure,” she said and resumed eating. Clay liked to watch Annie eat. Her full lips moved sensuously as she relished each morsel, no matter if it was a beet or the chocolate cake. He about lost it when her tongue darted out to lick a speck of chocolate icing off the edge of her bottom lip. “If you’re sure you want to. Some people get kind of squeamish.”
“I can handle it,” he asserted. Heck, he’d probably seen worse in Grand Central Station. But, hot damn, Annie had just-like-that agreed to let him observe her breeding a cow. And she wasn’t even embarrassed.
“Are you rich?” Roy asked.
“Rooooy!” Annie and Aunt Liza chastised.
“Yes.”
“Yes?” Everyone at the table put down their eating utensils and gaped at him. Except Annie. Her face fell in disappointment. Could she be falling in love with him, too? He didn’t have time to ponder for long. He just kicked into damage control. “Well, not rich-rich.”
“How rich?” Annie demanded to know.
Before he could respond, Hank commented, “Betcha draw a bunch of chicks, having heaps of money and all.”
“At least a bunch,” Clay said dryly.
Annie flashed Hank a glower, which the teen ignored, smiling widely. “Man, if I had a little extra cash, and a hot car, I would be the biggest chick magnet in the whole United States. I’m already the best in the South.”
His brothers hooted in reaction to his high self-opinion.
“If you’d get your mind off the girls once in a while,” Aunt Liza reprimanded, “maybe you’d pass that cow-cue-lust.”
Everyone laughed at her mispronunciation of the word calculus, except Annie. “And, by the way, where is your second-term report card, Mr. I-Am-the-Stud?”
“Uh-oh,” Johnny and Jerry Lee groaned at the same time.
“You had to remind her,” Johnny added.
Clay’s lips twitched with suppressed mirth. Being in a family was kind of fun.
But Jerry Lee was back on his case again. “Do you have a chauffeur?”
Clay felt his face turn red. “Benson—George Benson— doubles as my driver and gardener. His wife Doris is my cook and house keeper.”
“You have a gardener!” Annie wailed. You’d think he had told her he employed an ax murderer. “And a house-keeper!”
“Do you live in a mansion?” Johnny’s young face was rapt with interest.
“No, he lives in a trailer, you dweeb,” Hank remarked, nudging Johnny in the ribs with an elbow.
“No. Definitely not. Uh-uh. I do not live in a mansion.” This was the most incredible conversation Clay had ever experienced. Why was he trying to downplay his lifestyle?
To make Annie more comfortable, that was why.
Annie’s eyes narrowed. “How big is this nonmansion?”
“Tweytfllrms,” he mumbled.
“What?”
“Twenty-two rooms. But it’s not a mansion.”
“Twenty-two rooms! And you live there alone?” She appeared as if she might cry. “You probably have caviar for breakfast and—”
He shook his head quickly. “Toast, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and black coffee, that’s what I have. Every day. I don’t even like caviar.”
“—gold faucets in your bathrooms and—”
“They’re only gold plated. Cheap gold plating. And brass. I’m pretty sure some of them are brass.”
“—and date movie stars—”
“The only movie star I ever dated was Brooke Shields, and that was because she and I are both Princeton alumni. And it wasn’t really a date, just brunch at—”
“Brooke Shields!” five males at the table exclaimed.
Annie honed in on another irrelevant fact. “He eats brunch. Brunch. Oh, God! He must think he’s landed on Welfare Row. Better Slums and Gardens.”
“Who’s Brooke Shields?” Aunt Liza wanted to know. “Is she one of those Melrose Place hussies Roy watches all the time?”
Before anyone could explain, Annie sighed loudly and declared, “Maybe I’d better take you back to your hotel tonight.”
“Annie!” Johnny whined. “You promised we would put up the Christmas tree to night.”
“Yeah, Annie,” Jerry Lee chimed in. “We would have had it up by now if it wasn’t for your dumb Nativity scene idea.”
“Well, actually…uh, I’m not feeling so good,” Clay surprised himself by saying. He was in a sudden panic. If he went back to the hotel, he’d have no opportunity to study this fever thing with Annie…or this falling in…uh, what ever. He could easily conduct business on his pocket cell phone from the farm, for a day or two anyhow.
“You aren’t?” Annie was immediately concerned.
“Maybe coming downstairs was too much for you.” Aunt Liza got up and walked to his end of the table, then put a hand to his forehead to check his temperature. “Yep, he’s got a fever.”
No kidding! What else is new?
“I’ll help you back up the steps,” Chet offered.
“No, that’s all right. I think I could sit in a chair and watch you put up your tree.” I am shameless. Pathetic, even. Then, before he had a chance to bite his tongue, he blurted out, “I’ve never had a Christmas tree.”
Everyone stared at him as if he’d just arrived from Mars. Or New Jersey.
“My father didn’t believe in commercial holidays,” he disclosed, a defensive edge to his voice. Put a zipper on it, Jessup. You don’t want pity. You want…well, something else.
“That settles it, then,” Aunt Liza said, tears welling in her eyes.
Yep, pity.
Annie reached under the table and took his hand in hers.
On the other hand, I can stomach a little pity.
Immediately, a warm feeling of absolute rightness filled him almost to overflowing. He knew then that he’d made the right decision in forestalling his return to the city. Besides, he’d just remembered something important.
He hadn’t checked out the hayloft yet.
Annie Fallon had thought she had troubles this morning before she ever left for Memphis. Little had she known that her troubles would quadruple by nightfall.
In fact, she’d brought trouble home with her, willingly, and it sat big as you please right now on her living room sofa, with one extended leg propped up on an ottoman, gazing at her with smoldering eyes that promised…well, trouble.
Clayton Jessup III had looked handsome this morning when Annie had seen him for the first time in his cashmere overcoat and custom-made suit. But now, sporting a nighttime shadow of whiskers, dressed in tight, faded jeans, a white T-shirt, and an unbuttoned blue plaid flannel shirt that brought out the midnight blue of his eyes, the man was drop-dead gorgeous, testosterone-oozing, hot-hot-hot trouble-on-the-hoof, with a capital T.
“I need to talk with you…alone,” he whispered when Annie stepped close to get the popcorn and cranberry strings he’d been working on for the past two hours. When Aunt Liza had first suggested that he help make the homemade decorations, he’d revealed with an endearing bashfulness, “My father would have been appalled to see me performing this mundane chore. ‘Time is money,’ was his favorite motto. Over and over he used to tell me, ‘You’re wasting time, boy. Delegate, delegate, delegate.’” Then Clay had ruined the effect of his shy revelation by asking Aunt Liza the crass question, “Don’t you think it would be cheaper, timewise, to buy these garlands already strung?”
Clucking with disapproval, Aunt Liza had shoved the darning needle, a ball of string, and bowls of popcorn and cranberries in his lap. “You can’t put a price tag on tradition, boy.”
Along the same line, he’d observed, “I never realized Christmas trees could be so messy.” Her brothers had just dragged in the seven-foot blue spruce from the porch, leaving a trail of fresh needles on the hardwood floors. “Wouldn’t an artificial tree be a better investment in the long run?”
They’d all looked at him as if he’d committed some great sacrilege. Which, of course, he had. An artificial tree? Never! Couldn’t he smell the rich Tennessee forest in the pine scent that permeated the air? Couldn’t he understand that bringing a live tree into the house was like bringing a bit of God’s bounty inside, a direct link between the upcoming celebration of Christ’s birth and the world’s ongoing rejuvenation of life?
“Think with your heart, not your brain, sonny,” Aunt Liza urged.
Now the tree decorating was almost complete, except for the star—which had been in the family for three generations—the garlands, and the last of the handcrafted ornaments made by Fallon children for the past twenty-five or so years. And all Annie could think about was the fact that the man had said he wanted to talk with her, alone. About two thousand red flags of warning went up in Annie’s already muddled senses. “If it’s about your threat to sue, well, you can see we don’t have much.”
The Fallons were a proud family, but her brothers were trusting souls, and in the course of the evening they’d casually divulged their dire need for a new barn roof, the money crunch caused by lower milk prices, and Roy’s tuition woes. They’d even discussed at length how every year at Christmastime the Fallons performed one good deed, no matter how tight they were for money. One year it had been a contribution to a local farm family whose house had burned down. Another year they made up two dozen baskets for a food bank in Memphis, complete with fresh turkeys, home-canned fruits, vegetables and preserves, crisp apples, and pure maple syrup. Still another year, when the till was bone-dry, they’d donated ten hours each to Habitat for Humanity. This year, they hadn’t yet come up with any ideas. But they would before Christmas Eve. Tradition demanded it.
“You can sue us if you want, but it’s obvious that we barely have two dimes to spare. I’ll fight you to the death if you try to take our farm.”
“What in God’s name gave you the idea that I want your farm?” he snapped. Then his voice lowered. “It’s not your farm I’m interested in, Annie.”
Annie loved the way he said her name, soft and special. But there was no way in the world she would ask what he meant by that enigmatic remark. “Perhaps we could pay for your medical expenses over a period of time.”
He shook his head slowly. “I’m insured.”
Okay, he’s insured, but he didn’t say he wouldn’t sue us. Should I ask, or assume that he won’t? Hmmm. Better to let sleeping dogs lie. “I hope you’re not going to stop us from doing our Nativity scene for the rest of the week. You’ve got to know it’s our last chance. And—”
He put up a halting hand. “I’d rather you didn’t go back to that sideshow again, but that’s not why I want to talk with you.”
“It’s not?” Annie’s heart was beating so fast she was afraid he might hear it.
“It’s not.”
“What do you want from us, then?”
“From your family…”—he shrugged—“nothing.”
She reflected on his words. “From me?” she squeaked out.
A slow grin crept across his lips, causing those incredible dimples to emerge. Annie had to clench her fists against the compulsion to touch each of the tiny indentations, to trace the outline of those kiss-me lips, to—
A low, masculine chuckle emerged from said lips. “If you don’t stop looking at me like that, Annie, love,” he said in a husky undertone, “I’ll show you what I want.”
Annie, love? Mercy! “I don’t know what you mean,” she said huffily, and backed away before he could tell her exactly how she’d been ogling him and what he would show her.
“You know what I mean, Annie,” he commented to her back. “You know.”
She didn’t know, not for sure, but her imagination kicked in big-time. It was the fever, of course—that strange malady that seemed to affect only the two of them when they were in the same room. Hadn’t they complained of the heat all night? And they both knew it had nothing to do with the roaring fire in the fireplace. It was a fire of another kind entirely.
After that, in the midst of their decorating efforts, Clay helped Hank with his calculus homework. No one was surprised that a man with his financial background could actually perform the complicated equations. Then Jerry Lee expressed a curiosity about Clay’s electronic planner gadget. He showed him its various gee-whiz functions and answered questions about the stock market. Annie had never realized that Jerry Lee was even interested in the investment world.
Throughout the evening, Aunt Liza coddled them all by bringing out trays of hot chocolate and her latest batch of Christmas sugar cookies. “Have another,” she kept urging Clay, who swore his jeans were going to unsnap.
Now that was a picture Annie tried to avoid.
Finally, the tree decorating was complete.
“Turn off the lamps and flick on the tree lights,” Aunt Liza advised. The darkened room looked beautiful under the sheen of the multicolored lights. There was a communal sigh of appreciation from everyone in the room, even Clay.
“Is everyone ready?” Johnny asked, reaching over to turn up the volume on the old-fashioned stereo record player. It had been pumping out Elvis Christmas songs all night.
Her family began singing along with “Blue Christmas”…a less than harmonic but poignant custom that always brought tears to Annie’s eyes. It reminded her of her parents, now gone, and the yuletide rituals they’d started that would be carried on by Fallons forevermore. In some ways, it was as if, at times like this, their parents were still with them.
Annie glanced over at Clay to see how he was reacting to what he must consider a sappy custom. By the glow of the tree lights and the burning logs in the fireplace, she noticed no condescending smirk on his face. He seemed stunned.
Moving to the front of the sofa and leaning forward, she inquired, “What do you think of your first Christmas tree?”
Before Annie could blink, he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her down to the sofa at his side. One of her brothers chuckled midstanza, but Annie couldn’t bother about that. Clay had tucked her close with an arm locked around her shoulder and her hip pressed tight against his. Only then did he answer…a husky whisper breathed against her ear.
“This is a Christmas I will never forget, Annie, love.”
They were alone at last.
And Clay had plans.
Big plans.
Aunt Liza had gone to her bedroom on the first floor off of the kitchen after wishing everyone Merry Christmas and giving each a good-night kiss on the cheek, including Clay, who felt a tightening in his throat at being included in the family. Hank had put another log on the fire for them, winked, then hit the telephone for a long chat with his latest girlfriend. Roy and Jerry Lee had gone out to the barn for a final check of the farm animals. Chet was upstairs giving his baby a last nighttime bottle. Johnny was probably asleep already, being among those who’d gotten up by four A.M. today to do farm chores before going into Memphis. Even Elvis had shut down for the night.
Clay turned to Annie, almost overwhelmed with all the new emotions assailing him. “What’s happening here?” he asked in a hoarse voice that surely tipped her off to his sorry condition.
“I don’t know,” she answered, not even having to ask him what he meant, “but it scares me.”
“Me, too,” he said, nodding. “Me, too.”
“I never really believed in all that instant-attraction stuff. It’s the kind of thing you see in sappy movies, or read about in romance novels. Not real life.”
“I thought it—the instant…uh, attraction stuff—was a woman thing…some half-baked idea women dream up to snare men.”
Neither of them said the word, but it was there, hovering between them…a wonderful-horrible possibility.
Then, unable to resist any longer, he relaxed the arm that had been wrapped around her shoulder, holding her immobile. His hand crept under her silky hair to clasp the bare nape of her neck. His other hand briefly traced the line of her jaw and her full, parted lips before tunneling into her hair, caressing her scalp.
She moaned. But she didn’t pull away. She, too, must sense the inevitable…the impending kiss, and so much more.
“Oh, Annie, I’ve been waiting to do this for hours.”
“I’ve been waiting, too,” she confessed, turning slightly so he could see her better. “For a long, long time.”
He wasn’t sure if she referred to a kiss or this bigger thing looming between them. By the expression of fear on her face, it was probably the latter. Hell, he was scared, too.
At first, he just settled his lips over hers, testing. With barely any pressure at all, he shifted from side to side till they fit perfectly. Then, deepening the kiss, he persuaded her to open for him. The first tentative thrust of his tongue inside her mouth brought stars behind his closed lids and another moan from Annie. He pulled back and whispered against her moist lips, “You taste like candy canes.”
She smiled against his lips and whispered back, “You taste like popcorn. All buttery and salty and movie-balcony naughty.”
Chuckling, he cut her off, kissing her in earnest now, long, drugging kisses that went on and on. He couldn’t get enough. She seemed to feel the same way.
“Annie, love,” he cautioned after what appeared an hour, but was probably only a few minutes, “your brothers are back.” The clomp of heavy boots could be heard on the back porch by the kitchen.
They both sat up straighter, their clasped hands their only body contact.
“G’night,” Roy and Jerry Lee said as they passed through the living room on their way to the stairs. There was a snicker in Roy’s tone, but thankfully he said nothing more.
“Were they kissin’?” he heard Jerry Lee ask in an undertone once they were in the upper hall.
“Do pigs grunt?” Roy answered.
“Annie? Our Annie? Yech!”
“What? You didn’t think she knew how to kiss?”
“Sure…I mean, I guess so. It’s just…I never saw her lookin’ so pink and flustery. And Clay, he looks guilty as sin.”
“Better not be too guilty, or too sinful,” Roy growled.
Their muted voices faded to nothing.
Annie put her face in her hands and groaned. “Pink and flustery! I’ll never hear the end of this. Never. By tomorrow morning, my brothers will be making pink jokes. ‘What’s pink and goes squawk-squawk?’ ‘A flustered Annie chicken.’ Ha, ha, ha.”
Clay barely suppressed a smile. Her embarrassment was endearing. “Annie, that’s not a joke. It’s not even funny.”
She raised her head. “Since when do my brothers’ jokes have to be funny? And don’t think you’re going to escape their teasing either. Uh-uh. You are in for it, big-time. How about, ‘What’s got a scratchy jaw and googly eyes?’”
“Annie,” he warned.
“‘A Princeton hog in rut.’” At his gaping mouth, she nodded her head vigorously. “See. That’s what you can expect.”
Is she saying I have googly eyes…what ever the hell googly eyes are? Clay lowered his lashes to half-mast and pulled Annie into his embrace again, fitting her face into the curve of his neck. He kissed the top of her head, murmuring, “Oh, Annie. It doesn’t matter what they say when this feels so right.”
She sighed, which he took for a nonverbal sign of agreement, and nestled closer. “I suppose you want to sleep with me.”
Whoa! That got his attention. “Where did that come from? We were just kissing, Annie.” Not that other parts of my body weren’t headed in that direction. But, geez! Talk about getting right to the point!
Annie put her hands on his chest and shoved away slightly so she could look at him directly. “Are you saying you don’t want to make love with me?”
“Hell, no.”
He reached for her, but she squirmed back, keeping her distance.
“Me, too.”
Me, too? What does that mean? Oh, my God! Did she just say she wants to make love with me? “Annie, this is going a bit fast, don’t you think? I mean, I’m not sure it’s a good idea making love on your living room couch where anyone could barge in at any moment.” Me, too? Son of a gun! I do like a woman who can make up her mind. No games with my Annie. No, sirree.
She made a snorting sound of disgust, waving a hand in the air. “That’s not what I meant, you dolt.”
His spirits immediately deflated. Damn!
“I’m just trying to tell you that…uh…um…”
“What?” he prodded. This was the most disarming, confusing conversation he’d ever had with a woman, and if it got any hotter in this room he was going to explode.
As if mirroring his thoughts, Annie wiped her forehead with the back of one hand and began to unbutton her flannel shirt, revealing a tight white T-shirt underneath.
He refused to look there.
He was not going to look.
He was looking.
Man, oh, man!
That had been her bra in the bathroom, all right. Her breasts pushed against the thin material, full and uptilted, the nipples puckered into hard peaks. It wasn’t that she was big busted, but because she was so thin, it appeared that way. Good thing she didn’t look like that in her Blessed Mother outfit or she’d have had men propositioning her right there in the Nativity scene. Or else she’d get some super tips.
“Stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?” he choked out.
“Like you’re…like you’re…”
“…interested?” He couldn’t stop the grin that twitched at his lips.
“Stop smirking. I’m trying to tell you something.”
“Oh?” he said, trying his damnedest not to look at her chest and not to grin with pure, unadulterated anticipation. As a final measure, he clenched his fists at his sides to keep from grabbing for her.
“I’m a virgin.”
That was the last thing Clay had expected to hear.
“A virgin?” he squeaked out. A twenty-eight-year-old virgin?
“Yeah, isn’t that the biggest joke of all?”
She was actually embarrassed by her virginity. Well, it did put a new light on their making love. Not that he didn’t still want her, but it sure as hell wouldn’t take place on a sofa with broken springs in a houseful of gun-toting brothers and an aunt who wielded a wicked spoon. “Annie, why tell me this now?”
“You have a right to know…if I’m reading that glimmer in your eye the right way.”
She is. Clay lowered his lashes and tried his best to curb that “glimmer” in his eye.
“You probably think I’m repressed or gay or ultrareligious. But it’s just that I haven’t had time for dating since my parents died. And Prince Charming doesn’t come riding his charger down the lane to a dairy farm real often.”
“So I’m the first prince to come your way?” he asked with a laugh.
She slanted him a Behave-yourself glare and went on, “Now that you know, I suppose you don’t want me anymore.” She glanced at him shyly and looked away.
He took her chin in his hand and turned her face back to him. Kissing her lips lightly, he murmured, “I still want you.”
A slow, wicked smile spread across her lips. “Stand up, then,” she ordered.
Huh? With his brow furrowing in confusion, he got up cautiously, bracing himself on one crutch. At the same time, the stereo suddenly came on with Elvis wailing, “It’s Now or Never.”
He jerked back at the unexpected noise and Annie laughed.
“The stereo does that sometimes. There’s a short in its circuit, I guess.”
He thought about telling her that was a safety hazard, but decided he had more important things on his mind right now. Like why she’d wanted him to stand, and why she was staring at him, arms folded across her chest, with that odd expression on her face. She was probably afraid, being a virgin and all. It was sweet of her, actually.
“Don’t be afraid, Annie. I won’t do anything to hurt you.”
She laughed, a joyous, rippling sound mingling with Elvis’s husky now-or-never warning.
That was probably nervous laughter, Clay concluded. Still, he tilted his head to the side, questioning. “Annie?”
“Take off your shirt, Clay. Please.”
Her softly spoken words ambushed him. With a quick intake of breath, he almost swallowed his tongue.
“Reeeaal slow.”
Annie could see that she’d shocked Clay, but she didn’t care. This was her big chance.
Just because she was a virgin didn’t mean she was a dried-up old spinster with no needs. As she’d told him before, there weren’t many princes who ambled on down the farm lane. And when one not-so-perfect specimen accidentally rode in, well, heck, she’d be a fool not to drag him down off his destrier and have her way with him.
“I have needs,” she told him matter-of-factly.
“Needs?” he choked out. Geez, the man looked as if he were choking on his own tongue. Where was the suave, cool-as-a-hybrid-cucumber man who could cut a person off at the knees with a single icy stare?
Okay, sometimes Annie forgot that city people didn’t understand the plain speaking of farm folks who lived with the facts of life on a daily basis. Those who worked with the land and animals tended to be more earthy, more accepting of the forces of nature. Sex was just another of the physical urges God gave all animals, nothing to be embarrassed about. At least, that was what she told herself. If she didn’t justify her behavior in that way, she’d have to admit she was a lust-driven hussy with a compulsion to jump this poor prince’s royal bones.
“Yep. Needs,” she answered with more bravado than she really felt. If he rejected her, she was going to crawl in a hole and never come out. “So shuck that shirt, honey. I’ve been having indecent thoughts ever since I saw you in the emergency room in those cute little boxer shorts.”
Stains of scarlet bloomed on his face at her mention of his boxers. Or was it her needs turning up his internal thermometer?
“This is a joke, right?” Clay said, backing up a bit.
Oh, swell! I’m scaring him. Slow down, Annie. Play it cool. Pretend he’s just hairy old Frankie Wilks.
Ha!
“No joke, Clay. You have a chest that would cause a cloistered nun to melt, and I already have a fever to begin with. So take off the darn shirt, for crying out loud.” Her voice had turned shrill at the end.
“All right, all right,” he said, raising a palm in surrender. “Let’s backtrack to step one. You want me to take off my shirt because you like my chest?”
“Yes.”
He smiled then, one of those glorious affairs that bared his even white teeth and caused those irresistible dimples to play peekaboo with her heart. “What if someone walks in…like your aunt?”
She pooh-poohed that idea. “Do you think Aunt Liza hasn’t seen a man’s chest before? In a house with five males?”
“But Annie,” Clay explained with exaggerated patience. “If you want me to take off my shirt, I’m pretty sure I’ll be wanting you to take off your shirt.” He flashed her a So-there grin.
“Oh.” Delicious images swam in Annie’s head at that suggestion. “Well, I guess I forgot to mention that Aunt Liza is dead to the world once her head hits the pillow. Her alarm clock, set religiously for four A.M., is the only thing that will awaken her now.”
“Yes, you did forget to mention that fact.” His grin didn’t waver at all. “And your brothers?”
“The same. Besides, there’s an unwritten rule in the Fallon house. Nobody walks in unannounced on a courting couple…not that you and I are courting, mind you. Don’t get your feathers all ruffled in that regard. I’m not out to trap you.”
“My feathers aren’t ruffled,” he protested indignantly. Then, understanding that they wouldn’t be interrupted, he immediately pulled off the flannel shirt and raised the T-shirt over his head. Superman couldn’t have done it faster. After that, standing still, he waited for her to make the next move.
He wasn’t smiling now.
He was so beautiful. Wide shoulders. Narrow waist and hips. A thin frame, but not too thin. Muscles delineating his upper arms and forearms and the planes of his chest and abdomen—not a muscle-builder’s puffed-up flesh, just healthy, fit male muscle. Dark, silky hairs peppered his chest, leading down in a vee to the low-riding jeans.
Under her sweeping appraisal, he never once lowered his eyes. Women faltered under such close scrutiny, but not men…not this man.
“Can I touch you?” she whispered.
She saw the hard ridges of his stomach muscles lurch.
Heat curled in her stomach.
At first, he closed his eyes and a low, strangled sound emerged from his lips. He appeared to be out of breath, panting. When he lifted his eyelids, Annie almost staggered backward under the onslaught of blue fire. “If you don’t touch me, I think I’ll go up in smoke,” he whispered back.
Well, that sounds encouraging. She stepped closer and put her hands on his shoulders. He tried to take her in his arms, but Annie swatted his hands away. She wanted to do this herself, with no distractions. “Let me…I want…” she murmured, her brain reeling with feverish urgency. “I want to do things to you. So many things.” Things? What things? Where are these outlandish thoughts coming from? And how am I getting up the nerve to say them aloud?
“Annie…” he started to say, then paused, lost for words. “You take my breath away.”
“Don’t move,” she ordered, and ran her fingertips down both sides of his tension-corded neck, over his shoulders, skimming over the light fur on his arms to his hands, where she twined their fingers for one brief moment, raising the knuckles of one hand, then the other for a brief kiss. She released his hands then, setting them back at his side.
Smoothing the palms of her hands across his chest, she felt his heartbeat thud. She watched in fascination as the flat male nipples hardened and elongated.
Clay gritted out one crude word between clenched teeth.
Annie decided to take the expletive as a compliment.
She couldn’t resist then. Lowering her head, she licked one nipple, sucked it into her mouth, rolled it between her lips.
“Omigod, omigod, omigod!” Clay exclaimed, snaking out a hand to grasp her nape, then lifting her into an embrace where her hips cradled his erection. Alternately kissing her with a devouring hunger and growling into the curve of her neck, he ended up cupping her buttocks and rocking her against him. All the time he was overcome with a violent shiver.
Incredibly, Annie felt herself approaching climax. It was way too soon for that, and not the way she wanted it to happen.
It was Clay who slowed the action. Setting her away from him, he said in a gravelly rasp, “Do you know what I want, Annie, love?”
She cocked her head to the side. “I think so.”
“Not that, silly girl. I mean, yes, I want that, but not now. What I really want is to feel your skin against mine.”
It took several moments for his words to sink in. When they did, Annie felt a thrill of excitement ripple through her already oversensitized body. She jerked off her flannel shirt, then drew the T-shirt up and over her head, leaving only a plain, white nylon bra. Through its thin fabric, her small nipples stood out with stiff, pale rose peaks, aching for his touch.
His eyes studied her with apparent appreciation. He licked his lips as he waited for her final unveiling. When the wispy bra fell to the floor, his eyes seemed to water up. “Oh, Annie, you are so beautiful.”
She wasn’t beautiful; Annie knew that. But it was nice that he found her appealing. She wanted to be beautiful for him.
“It’s your turn now, sweetheart. Don’t move,” he said then, giving equal attention to her body, murmuring compliments to each part examined by his tantalizing fingers and feathery kisses. When he came to her breasts, Annie’s heart stood still. First he raised them up in the palms of his hands, then skimmed both nipples with the pads of his thumbs. By the time he angled his head down to wet one, then the other with his lips and tongue, and finally suckled rhythmically, Annie was mewling in an increasing frenzy.
Recognizing her spiraling passion, Clay eased backward toward the couch, taking Annie with him. But he lost his balance and fell onto his back, half reclining, with one leg extended out to the floor. Annie tripped, too, and ended up plopped on top of him. When she raised herself up, she found herself, amazingly, straddling him, jean-clad groin to jean-clad groin.
Clay groaned, a long, husky sound of pain emitted through clenched teeth.
Immediately, Annie remembered Clay’s injuries. It was a sign of her fevered brain that she’d forgotten to begin with. “Oh, my God! Did I hurt you? Is it your head? Or your ankle?”
Clay tried to laugh, but it came out strangled. “That’s not where I’m hurting, Annie.” He rolled his hips from side to side against Annie’s widespread thighs, and Annie felt the clear delineation of the ridge pressing against her with an urgency that matched her own.
“Oh,” she said.
Clay chuckled. “‘Oh’ about says it, darling.” Then he chucked her under the chin.
“I’ve shocked you, haven’t I?” she asked, belatedly shy.
Shocked would be the understatement of the year, Clay decided. Who knew when I woke up this morning, a cold, dreary day in Princeton, that my evening would end with such unexpected manna from heaven? But wait a minute. He didn’t like the look creeping onto Annie’s face. “Don’t go shy on me now, Annie.”
“I’ve never behaved this way before…so forward and uninhibited,” she confessed, hiding her face in her hands.
“Your eagerness excites me. Tremendously. Don’t you dare stop now,” he said in a suffocated whisper, prying her fingers away. “I have plans for you that require a major dose of forwardness and uninhibitedness.”
“You do?”
Was that hope in her voice? “Absolutely. Are you afraid?”
“No. Are you?”
He laughed outright. God, how he loved her openness.
“Listen, Annie—stop, you witch…I can’t think when you do that.” She was leaning forward, her hair a thick swatch curtaining his face, as she still straddled him. Back and forth, she was brushing her breasts across his chest hairs.
“That’s the point, isn’t it? Not to think?”
He leaned up and gave her a quick kiss. “You don’t act like any virgin I’ve ever known.” Not that I’ve known very many…or any, for that matter, that I can recall.
“Just because I didn’t do that, doesn’t mean I didn’t do anything,” she said, meanwhile kissing a little line from one end of his jaw to the other.
Clay fought against the roil of jealousy that ripped through him at the thought of any other man touching his Annie in any way. Had it been the milkman, or someone else? How many someone elses? “Annie, you’re driving me mad. Be still for one moment. Please.”
Surprisingly, she did as he asked. Of course, when she stilled, she also sat upright, square on his already over eager, overengorged erection. He closed his eyes for one second, to keep them from bulging clear out of his head. Finally, when he managed to speak above a squeak, he said, “We’re not going to make love to night, Annie.”
She stiffened at once, and her face went beet red. “You don’t want me?”
“Of course I want you, but I refuse to make love with you on an uncomfortable sofa, out in the open, with a houseful of people…no matter what you say about sleeping patterns or rules for…uh, courting.”
She pondered his words, then seemed to accept their logic. “So, we’re not going to make love tonight? Will we ever?”
“Oh, for sure, darling. For sure.”
She smiled widely at that.
“And there’s another thing, Annie, love. We have to talk about this thing that’s happening with us.”
“It is…strange.”
“Strange, overpowering, confusing. I have an idea, Annie. Let’s go out tomorrow night. Slow down this runaway train. See where this relationship is going.”
“I like the sound of that.”
He took a breast in each hand then and admired the contrast of the firm, white mounds against his darker skin. “I love your breasts. I love the way they aren’t big, but appear to be so because of your thin frame.” He stretched his head forward to savor one of them with his mouth.
She made a keening sound low in her throat, halfway between a purr and a cry for mercy. “I thought we weren’t going to make love,” she gasped out.
“True. We’re not going to make love. But we can make out. A little.”
“Oh, goody,” she cooed. Before he knew what she was about, Annie slid a hand between them and caressed his tumescence. “Does this count as making love or making out?”
He about shot off the couch. And all he could think was, Who the hell cares?
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Annie.” Very carefully, he dislodged her grasp and placed both her hands at her sides and held them there. “You’ve been running the show for much too long in your family. It’s time for you to sit back and let someone else take over.”
Her chin went up.
“All right?”
After a long pause of hesitation, she nodded.
He proceeded then to unbutton her jeans.
Her eyebrows shot up in surprise, but she didn’t protest.
“Lift up a little, honey, and lean forward,” he advised. When she did, he slid a hand inside the waistband of her pan ties, down between her legs. The warm wetness he met there caused him to sigh with pleasure. “Oh, Annie, love, you feel so good.”
“Clay,” she cried out, unsure whether she wanted him to touch her there.
Before she had a chance to think further, he inserted a long middle finger inside her tightness and rested a pulsing thumb against the swollen bud. “Now, Annie,” he encouraged her with a guttural hoarseness, “you ride…you set the pace.”
“I…I don’t think I can,” she whimpered.
“Yes, you can, darling.”
And she did.
With each forward thrust, she brushed the ridge of his erection. They were separated by denim material, but the sensation was still intense. With each withdrawal, that part of his body yearned for her next stroke. It didn’t last long. Probably only minutes. But when Annie began to spasm around his finger and melt onto him, he held her fast by the hips, leaned forward to kiss her with a devouring hunger, and bucked upward…once, twice, three times.
“Annie, love,” he whispered into her hair a short time later. She was nestled at his side, both of them stretched out full-length on the sofa.
“Hmmm?” She was half-asleep and sated.
Clay couldn’t have been prouder if he’d pulled off a million-dollar investment deal. You’d think he was personally responsible for having made the world move. Well, he had, actually. For both of them.
“Clay?” she prodded.
“I think I’m falling in love with you,” he disclosed. He hadn’t intended to tell her…not yet. But his senses were on overload, brimming with so much joy. He couldn’t contain it all.
“I already know I’m in love with you. I think I fell the minute I saw you storming across that vacant lot looking like Scrooge himself.”
He poked her playfully in the ribs at that insult, but inside he felt such a triumphant sense of elation. Annie loves me. Annie loves me. Annie loves me. It was all so new and strange and confusing. Not what he’d come to Memphis to find. It would pose all kinds of problems in his life. But what a wonderful, wonderful thing. Annie loves me.
Annie worried her bottom lip with her teeth then. Obviously, she had something on her mind. Finally, she blurted out, “When will you know for sure?”
Clay chuckled and said, “Maybe after we check out the hayloft.”
I love her.
It was Clay’s first thought when he awakened the next morning to bright sunlight warming the cozy bedroom. You’d think it was springtime, instead of four days before Christmas. But then, Clay recalled, he was in Tennessee…almost the Deep South.
With an openmouthed yawn, he stretched widely, becoming immediately aware of the ache in his ankle and at the back of his head. He glanced to the side, saw the bedside clock, and jolted upright, causing the dull pain to intensify. Ten o’clock! He hadn’t slept beyond six A.M. in the past twenty years.
Oh, well! First he would take a shower. Afterward he had at least a dozen calls to make, first to check with his office in New York, then to set the hotel sale in motion here in Memphis.
But there was only one thought that kept ringing through his head. I love Annie. Clay was not a whimsical person. If anyone had told him a few days ago that he would believe in love at first sight or romantic destiny, he would have scoffed heartily. He didn’t know how it had happened or why, though he suspected, illogically, that it involved that dingbat bellhop and God’s big toe and Elvis’s spirit. He’d been fated to come to Memphis. Not to sell the blasted hotel, though he would do that as soon as possible, but to find Annie. Amazing!
It would take some doing to get Annie moved to Princeton. Probably they’d have to wait till after the holidays. Oh, he knew it would be hard for her to leave the farm, but she had Chet and her brothers here to take over for her. And her Aunt Liza would care for the boys. Hell, he’d hire a live-in house keeper to help Aunt Liza if necessary. Or the whole gang could come live with him, though he couldn’t imagine that ever happening. It would be like the Clampetts moving to Princeton. All he knew was that it was time someone took care of Annie, and Clay thanked God it was going to be him.
Would they get married?
Of course. There was no way her family would allow her to live with a man without the bonds of matrimony. And Annie would want that, too, Clay was sure.
How did he feel about marriage? Hmmm. A few days ago, he would have balked. But now…Clay smiled. Now the idea of marrying Annie seemed ordained. Perfect.
So everything was all set. He and Annie would go out to night on a date. He would propose. She would accept. They’d make plans for the wedding and the move to Princeton. And a honeymoon…they’d fit a honeymoon in there, too. Perfect.
The only problem was that Clay kept hearing the oddest thing. Somewhere in the house, a radio was playing that old Elvis song, “Blue Suede Shoes,” but every time Elvis would belt out a stanza that was supposed to end in a warning not to step on “my blue suede shoes,” Clay kept hearing, “…don’t you step on God’s big toe.”
If Clay was a superstitious man, he would have considered it a premonition.
“You’ve got to be kidding!”
Clay had showered and shaved with a disposable razor he’d found in the bathroom. Then he’d unhesitatingly entered Chet’s room, where he borrowed a clean set of clothes, including a pair of new underwear straight from the package. This family owed him that, at least. Okay, he owed them a lot, too, he was beginning to realize…like a new life.
But now, Aunt Liza had forced him into a chair at the kitchen table, where she’d placed in front of him a half dozen platters heaped with bacon and sausage, hotcakes dripping with butter and maple syrup, scrambled eggs and leftover biscuits from last night (also dripping with butter), slices of scrapple (which he feared contained pork unmentionables, like noses and things), black pudding (which Aunt Liza told him without blinking was blood sausage), coffee, orange juice, and a glass of cold milk with a head of pure cream.
“All I ever have for breakfast is coffee, juice, and an English muffin or toast,” he demurred.
“Well, you ain’t in New Jersey now, boy. So eat up. I got some oatmeal cookin’ on the stove, too, to warm up your innards.”
He groaned. “If I eat all this, I won’t be able to move.”
“You ain’t goin’ anywhere anyhow, sonny. You’re stuck here on the farm with a gimp leg, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“But I have work to do…calls to make—”
She slapped a couple of pig-nose slabs on his plate and glared at him till he finally gave in. He pushed the pig-nose slabs to the side, though, and gave himself modest helpings of eggs and biscuits, one sausage link, two slices of bacon, and one hotcake, but before he knew it his plate was overflowing.
Despite all his protests, the food was mouthwateringly delicious, and he told Aunt Liza so. She smiled graciously at the compliment and sat down at the table with him, sipping a cup of coffee.
“When did everyone leave for Memphis?” he asked as he ate…and ate…and ate.
“’Bout nine,” Aunt Liza said, nibbling on a buttered biscuit slathered with strawberry jam, while she continued to drink her coffee. “They wanted to get an early start today…hopin’ the Christmas shoppers and tourists will be out early.”
Clay nodded. “Why didn’t they leave Jason here with you?”
Aunt Liza’s shoulders slumped, and her parchment cheeks pinkened. “I can’t be on my feet too long. Gotta take lots of naps. And sometimes I don’t hear the baby when he cries.”
Clay wished he hadn’t asked when he saw the shame on her wrinkled face. He decided silence was a better route to take…to shut his big mouth. So he tentatively tasted a piece of the black pudding, which was surprisingly palatable.
“So when you gonna make an honest woman of our Annie?” Aunt Liza asked unexpectedly.
His milk went down the wrong pipe and he sputtered. He probably had a cream mustache, to boot. “I haven’t done anything to make Annie dishonest,” he asserted, wiping at his mouth with a napkin.
Aunt Liza gave him a sidelong glance of skepticism. “That whisker burn she was sportin’ on her cheeks this mornin’ didn’t come from a close shave, honey. Besides, Roy and Jerry Lee was sayin’ somethin’ ’bout ‘pink and flustery’ and ‘guilty as sin.’ Don’t suppose you know what they was talkin’ about?”
Clay hated the fact that his face was heating up, but he wasn’t about to cower under the old buzzard’s insinuations. He raised his chin obstinately and refused to rise to her bait.
“We got one loose chick hatched on this place, and I don’t want no more,” Aunt Liza went on. “Randy roosters and footloose hens are runnin’ rampant these days.”
Clay didn’t have the faintest idea what she was talking about. Roosters and hens and chicks?
“Now I don’t countenance loose behavior none, but you’d best be keepin’ these,” she said, pulling a small box out of her apron pocket and shoving it his way, “just in case the devil sits on your shoulder sometime soon.”
“Wh-what?” Clay stammered as he realized that Aunt Liza had handed him a box of condoms. Oh, man! A woman old enough to be my grandmother is giving me condoms. “Where did you get these?”
“The supermarket.”
“You…you went into a supermarket and bought condoms?”
“Yep. Durn tootin’, I did. ’Bout caused ol’ Charlie Good, the manager, to swallow his false teeth.”
“You bought condoms for me? But…but I just got here yesterday.” Clay’s head was reeling with confusion.
“Don’t be an idjit, boy. ’T weren’t you I bought those suckers for.” Aunt Liza took another sip of coffee, ignoring the fact that he was waiting, slack jawed, for her next bombshell. “Chet learned his lesson good, I reckon, with that little chick of his. But I was figurin’ on havin’ a talk with Hank. That boy’s headed on the road to ruination sure as God made Jezebels and hot-blooded roosters.”
Hank? She bought the condoms for Hank? That makes sense. I guess. Whew!
“This whole generation’s goin’ to hell in a handbasket, if you ask me.” Aunt Liza made a tsking sound, piercing him with a stare that included him in the wild bunch. “I blame it all on the tongue business.”
The tongue business? Don’t ask. Don’t ask. “What tongue business?”
“Tongue kissin’. What tongue business didja think I was gabbin’ about?” she answered tartly, as if he should have known better. “When courtin’ couples start tongue kissin’, the trouble begins. Next thing ya know they’re buyin’ Pampers by the gross.”
She narrowed her eyes at Clay, and he just knew Aunt Liza was going to ask him if he’d been giving Annie tongue. Before she could speak, he put up a halting hand. Time to put some brakes on this outrageous conversation.
“Aunt Liza,” Clay said in the calmest voice he could muster, without breaking out in laughter, “Annie and I have not had sex.” Yet. “But even if we had, what ever happened or didn’t happen or is about to happen is between me and Annie.”
“Well, that may very well be, Mr. Hoity-Toity City Feller, but if there’s a weddin’ to be planned, I gotta commence makin’ a menu, and preparin’ food. Everyone in the whole county will wanna come to Annie Fallon’s weddin’, that’s for sure. I don’t wanna be goin’ to all that trouble for a bride with a belly what looks like she swallowed a watermelon seed nine months past.”
I’m going insane. I just discovered I’m falling in love, and already she has me making babies and walking up the aisle, in that order. And, good Lord, does she think we would get married in a farm house? With pigs’ noses and cows’ blood and other equally distasteful stuff on the wedding menu?
Now that was unkind. She’s only being concerned. You really are being hoity-toity, if that means the same as poker-up-your-butt snobbish. C’mon, Jessup, stop acting like you’re in Princeton.
“Aunt Liza, if and when Annie and I decide to marry, you’ll be the first to know.”
“Oh, I know, all right,” she said, leveling him with a scrutiny that saw right through his facade. “I knew the minute Annie brung you through that door yesterday. I knew when the radio kept bopping on and off all day with Elvis’s music that his spirit has come into the house. I knew when you gawked at Annie all durin’ dinner last night, and couldn’t keep the love out of your eyes. I knew—”
“Enough!” he said with a laugh of surrender. “Pass me the pigs’ noses.”
Clay was waiting on the front porch when Annie got home at five.
She felt the now familiar feverish heat envelop her the minute he came into view. It was the strangest, most wonderful, scariest feeling in the world to drive up in the pickup and see this man she’d come to love in such a short time, just standing there waiting for her to come home.
Leaning against a porch post, he was dressed in his neatly pressed suit, the sides of his jacket pulled back over his slim hips by hands that were tucked into the pockets of his slacks. One crutch was propped beside him. It was a casual pose, but Annie could see he was as nervous and excited as she was.
“Hi,” she said breathlessly, coming up the steps.
“Hi,” he said back, his eyes crinkling with amusement as they skimmed over her, from bouffant hair to Blessed Mary robe.
She stopped midway up the steps, an attack of timidity overcoming her. All day she’d been thinking about him, the wicked things he’d done to her last night, how he’d made her feel. Now, all the thoughts she’d wanted to share with him stuck in her throat. What if he’d changed his mind? What if his heart wasn’t racing as madly as hers? What if he didn’t really want to take her out to night? What if he didn’t love her?
Clay uncoiled himself from his leaning position and stepped forward, slowly. One hand snaked out to grasp her by the nape and draw her closer. “I missed you,” he said in a husky voice.
“Oh, God, I missed you, too. But I look awful,” she said, waggling her fingers in a flustery fashion to indicate her caricature appearance. Flustery? I’m probably pink, too. Roy and Jerry Lee were right. Flustery and pink.
Clay chuckled. “Just shows how far gone I am. You’re beginning to look good even as a sixties Madonna.” He dragged her close and lowered his head toward hers. Annie watched, mesmerized, as his eyelids fluttered closed and his lips parted.
Then she forgot everything, too engrossed in the kiss, which seared her already feverish body to her very soul. When he slipped his tongue inside her mouth, she felt his heat, and knew the fever had overtaken him as well.
She moaned against his open mouth.
He moaned back.
A sharp rapping noise jarred them both from their kiss, ending it far too soon. It was Aunt Liza, using her wooden spoon to knock a warning on the kitchen window, which looked out over the porch. “There’d better not be any tongue business goin’ on,” Aunt Liza called out. “Remember what I told you, young man.”
Annie leaned back, still in the circle of Clay’s arms, and peered questioningly up at him.
He laughed. “You don’t want to know.”
“Hey, Clay,” Chet greeted him. Still dressed in his Elvis/
St. Joseph gear and high, duck-tail hairdo, Chet had just come from the pickup truck, where he must have been gathering the baby’s paraphernalia, which was looped over one shoulder. The baby, which he held in the other arm, was wide-awake and gurgling happily, swatting at Chet’s nose with a rattle. Chet must have heard Aunt Liza, because he waggled his eyebrows in commiseration and commented, “Aunt Liza gave you the tongue lecture, right?”
“Oh, no!” Annie groaned, putting her face in her hands.
“We made eight hundred dollars today,” Johnny informed him cheerily as he skipped up the steps, Elvis hair bouncing up and down. His sheepskin shepherd outfit was in sharp contrast to his duct-taped sneakers. “Annie says I can get a new pair of athletic shoes for Christmas if we keep going at this clip. And see, Annie? I didn’t say one single word about ‘pink and flustery,’ just like you warned.”
“Where do you think you’re going?” Annie asked Johnny. “There’s milking to be done.”
“I know, I know. Don’t get your dander up. I have to go to the bathroom first. They can start without me,” he whined, pointing at his brothers.
Roy, Hank, and Jerry Lee, still dolled up as Elvis wise men, were unloading the donkey and two sheep from the animal van, alternately smirking toward him and Annie and trying to get the stubborn donkey to move. At one point, Roy and Jerry Lee were shoving the donkey’s butt while Hank pulled on a lead rope. The only thing they accomplished was a load of donkey manure barely missing their feet.
“I swear, Annie, I’m butchering this donkey come Christmas,” Roy vowed.
Clay tasted bile rising in his throat. They wouldn’t really eat donkey, would they? Hell, they ate beef blood and pigs’ noses. Why not donkey? “Hurry and shower so we can go out,” he whispered to Annie. “I have big plans for tonight.”
“Big plans? Oh, my! I certainly hope so.”
“Before you shower, we’d better go out to the barn and breed Mirabelle. She’s not gonna be in heat much longer. I don’t think we wanna wait another twenty-one days for her to go in heat again.” Clay hadn’t realized that Chet still stood on the porch, behind them. “Here,” Chet added, handing the baby to Clay, “take him in the house for me. We’ll be back in a half hour or so.”
“What? Who? Me?” Clay said, staring at the wide-eyed baby who gaped at him as if his father had just delivered him to King Kong. Clay was holding the kid gingerly with hands under both his armpits. Just when Clay thought the baby was going to let loose with a wail of outrage, Jason gave him a slobbery smile and belted him on the forehead with a rattle.
Clay could swear he heard Aunt Liza giggling on the other side of the kitchen window. She probably considered it just payment for tongue.
A half hour later, Annie hadn’t returned to the house. Aunt Liza had changed baby Jason after Clay had performed the amazing feat of feeding him a bottle. The kid, who was really quite precious, was now cooing contentedly from his infant seat in the kitchen, where he was pulverizing a piece of melba toast.
Clay decided to check out this cow-breeding business.
What he saw when he entered the huge barn stunned him. First of all, there was the overpowering smell: cow manure, the hot earthy scent of animal flesh, and fresh milk. A cow belched near him and he almost jumped out of his wing-tips. The sweet reek of the cow’s breath that drifted toward him on the wake of the bovine burp was not unpleasant, but strange. Very strange.
There was a center aisle with about sixty black-and-white cows lined up in stalls on both sides. Jerry Lee was washing down cow udders and stimulating teats, while Roy was hooking the teats up to automated milking contraptions, six cows at a time.
Hank was shoveling feed in the troughs for the big cows, which must have weighed about 1500 pounds, at the same time ministering to the sixty or so young stock at the far end of the barn. The whole time he was addressing the cows by name. Florence. Sweet Caroline. Aggie. Winona. Rosie Posie. Lucille. Pamela Lee. On and on, he chatted with the cows. How he ever remembered all the names, Clay didn’t know.
Johnny was sitting off to the side, bottle-feeding a half dozen baby calves. “Hey, Clay, wanna help me?” he asked.
“Uh…I don’t think I’m dressed for that,” he declined. Besides, he wanted to see what Annie was doing at the other end of the barn. She and Chet were in a separate, larger stall with one humongous cow about the size of a minivan. That must be the breeding section.
“Where’s the bull?” he inquired casually, as if he strolled through barns every day to view cow sex.
Chet and Annie jerked to attention. Apparently they hadn’t heard him come up behind them. Well, no wonder. With all these cows mooing, he could barely hear anything himself.
“We don’t have any bulls,” Annie answered. “We butcher or sell off all the male stock.”
“Why?”
“Bulls are too darn ornery, that’s why,” Chet answered. “They’re not worth the trouble, believe me.”
“But…but how do you breed the cows then?”
“Artificial insemination,” Chet informed him. “This is the nineties, man.”
It was only then that he noticed Chet was holding the cow still, even though it was tied by a loose rope to the front of the stall. Annie, on the other hand, stood there with a big brown apron covering her Virgin Mary gown. On one arm, she wore a plastic glove that reached all the way to the shoulder. In the other hand, she held a huge syringe-type affair, more like a twenty-inch caulking gun. My Lord!
“You’d better step back,” Chet warned him.
Clay’s eyes bugged and his mouth dropped open at what he saw then. Almost immediately, he spun on his heels and rushed outside…where he proceeded to hurl the contents of his stomach, which Aunt Liza had taken great pains to stuff all day long.
I wonder where this ranks in the God’s-big-toe category?
Clay had almost botched things, big-time.
At first, it had seemed as if their blooming relationship had been slam-dunked back to step one, or zero, with his disastrous reaction to that scene in the barn. He still shivered with distaste at what he’d seen, but he was doing his shivering internally. The sooner he could erase that picture from his mind, the better. In time— maybe ten or twenty years—he would, no doubt, forget it totally.
Annie had appeared crushed when she’d followed him out. He could understand that. Farm work, in all its crude aspects, was what Annie did for a living—her identity. It had been obvious that Annie thought he was repulsed by her. But it wasn’t her, it was what she’d been doing. But Clay hadn’t dared say that. Instead, he’d lied, “My stomach has been upset all day. It must be the aftereffects of those painkillers, or something I ate.”
She’d stared at him dubiously. “Maybe it’s not such a good idea for us to go out on a date. Things have been happening too fast. We haven’t stopped to consider our differences. It’s probably a good idea for us to slow down and count to ten—”
Reconsider? Count to ten? No way! We’re not even counting to two. Oh, God! She’s going to dump us. He’d backpedaled then and convinced her to give him another chance. At what, he wasn’t sure. He only knew he loved her, cow breeding or no cow breeding. And he didn’t want to blow the best thing that had ever happened to him.
Now, strolling down Memphis’s famous Beale Street, he was getting yet another view of his Annie. This one he liked a whole lot better than all the rest. So far, he’d had the Priscilla Virgin Mary, the jeans-and-flannel farm girl—he was still waiting for the Daisy Mae outfit, darn it!—and the cow breeder to the bovine stars. Now Annie wore an ankle-length floral print skirt of some crinkled gauze material over a satin lining. It was robin’s egg blue with gold flowers. On top was a long-sleeved, matching blue sweater of softest angora, which reached to her hips and was belted at the waist. The gold flowers of the skirt were picked up in embroidery around the sweater’s neckline. On her legs she wore sheer stockings and old-fashioned, lace-up ankle boots. Her lustrous brown hair was pulled off her face by gold clips and hung in disarray to her shoulders. She’d even used some makeup for the first time since the day Clay had met her—a little blush, mascara, and lip gloss, as far as he could tell. She looked smart and sexy. Sort of like Julia Roberts, but better, to his mind. No wonder he’d fallen head over heels in love with her.
Clay couldn’t stop looking at her.
And she couldn’t stop looking at him.
She smiled at him.
He smiled back.
He was using one crutch to keep his full weight off his sprained ankle, which was almost better today. With his free hand, Clay twined Annie’s fingers in his.
She swung their clasped hands.
Clay couldn’t understand how he got so much pleasure from just holding hands with a woman and hobbling slowly down the street. Annie had been giving him a running commentary on the history of Memphis.
“Are you sure you don’t want to eat yet?” she inquired. “It’s almost eight o’clock.”
He shook his head. They’d already passed up hot tamales and greasy burgers at the Blues City Café, where Tom Cruise had filmed a scene for the movie The Firm, as well as ribs, catfish, and world-famous fried dill pickles, the specialties at B. B. King’s club.
“How about this?” Annie had stopped in front of Lansky Brothers/Center for Southern Folklore. “This museum is dedicated to preserving the legends and folklore of the entire South, but especially Memphis. They have an excellent photography collection here.”
“My mother was a photographer,” Clay revealed. Now, why did I mention that? I never talk about my mother.
“Really? Did she use her maiden name or her married name?” Annie was already tugging him by the hand to enter the small museum, where a plaque informed him it was the site of the former Lansky Brothers Clothing Store where Elvis, B. B. King, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and others had purchased their clothes. Well, that impresses the hell out of me. I’d want to buy my boxers in the same store as Elvis, for sure. Geez!
But Clay knew he was dwelling on irrelevant garbage to avoid thinking about Annie’s question. Finally, he answered, “Her maiden name. Clare Gannett.”
“Clare Gannett? Clare Gannett? Why, she’s famous, Clay.”
“She is—was—not!” he said with consternation.
“Well, not Annie Leibovitz famous, but she has a fame of sorts here in Memphis.”
It doesn’t take much to be famous in Memphis. Just be a store that sold Elvis a pair of boxers. Or the barber who gave him a haircut. Or the playground where he scraped his shin.
“Annie, my mother was not a famous photographer. For one thing, she died when she was only twenty-five— Whoa…wait a minute—what are you doing?” Annie paid for two tickets, and was pulling him determinedly past the exhibits into another room.
“See,” she said, pointing to one wall where there were a series of photos of Elvis Presley. Casual shots…leaning against a car, strumming a guitar, standing in front of the Original Heartbreak Hotel. A framed document explained that Clare Gannett was one of Memphis’s premier photographers, documenting on film many of the city’s early music performers during the sixties—not just Elvis, but many rock and blues personalities who later went on to fame.
Oh, great! My mother knew Elvis. First I find out my father owned a hokey hotel named after one of Elvis’s songs. Now I find out my mother must have known the King. What next?
“Legend says that Elvis loved Clare Gannett—”
Clay put his face in his hands. He didn’t want to hear this.
“—but she fell in love with some Yankee who came to Memphis on a business trip one day. They say the Yankee bought the hotel and next-door property where her studio was located as a wedding present for her. The studio later burned down, and Clare Gannett died in the fire. The hotel owner, your father, refused to erect anything else on that site. Isn’t that romantic?”
“Annie, that is nothing but propaganda, a silly yarn spun for gullible tourists.”
“Maybe. But legend says Elvis was heartbroken over losing Clare Gannett. It was after that he decided to marry Priscilla. Some people even think he wrote ‘Dreams of Yesterday,’ better known as ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You,’ in her memory.”
Clay turned angrily and stomped as fast as he could on one crutch out of the building. He was breathing heavily, in and out, trying to control his rage.
“Clay, what’s wrong?” Annie asked softly. She came up close to him and put a hand on his sleeve.
He waited several seconds before speaking, not wanting to take out his feelings on Annie. “Annie, my mother abandoned me and my father when I was only one year old. So your telling me she had a relationship with that hip-swiveling jerk doesn’t sit too well with me.”
“I’m sorry, Clay. I didn’t know. But maybe you’re wrong about her. The legend never said that anything happened between them. In fact, she supposedly broke Elvis’s heart when she married your father. Maybe—”
He leaned down to kiss her softly, the best way he could think of to halt her words. “It was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
She gazed at him with tears in her eyes. Tears, for God’s sake! Not for a moment did she buy his unconcern.
“Hey, let’s go in this place,” Clay suggested cheerily, coming to a standstill in front of Forever Blue, a small jazz club. He desperately sought a change of mood. “It doesn’t seem as crowded as some of the other joints.”
As they entered the establishment, Clay accidentally jostled a woman standing transfixed in the doorway.
“Sorry,” they both mumbled.
A short blonde in a formfitting blue dress and matching high heels was staring at the piano player as if she’d seen a ghost. Her face was taut with some strong emotion as she clenched and unclenched her hands at her midsection. Suddenly the piano player seemed to notice her. He faltered slightly, then stopped playing his rendition of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” Before anyone in the audience could fathom his intent, he jumped off the small stage and rushed after the woman who had spun on her heel and run out the door onto busy Beale Street.
Clay and Annie looked at each other and shrugged as the man rushed past them, obviously in pursuit of the mysterious woman.
“That was Michael Arnett, the owner of this club,” Annie informed him. “He’s a famous songwriter, too. Did you ever hear ‘Only a Shadow’?”
“The Jimmy Blue hit?” Clay wasn’t a fan of popular music, but he’d have to be dead not to be aware of that song and its phenomenal success.
“Yes. That was one of Michael’s songs.”
Michael? She calls him by his first name? “You know this guy?” Clay hated the wave of jealousy that knifed through him. He hated the possibility that he might have a milkman and a musician as competition. He hated the fact that the dark-haired piano man was tall, slim, and probably considered handsome by some myopic women.
“A little. Michael and I went to the same high school, but he graduated a few years ahead of me.”
Okay. So maybe I overreacted a little. “It looked as if something serious was going on with that woman.”
Annie nodded. “Yeah. I hope it works out.”
He smiled at Annie’s whimsy as he guided her in front of him into the club. At the table next to theirs, a beautiful woman with short, tousled, honey-colored hair, in a dark, conservative business suit, was talking a mile a minute to a guy in a Hawaiian shirt and baseball cap. The guy was leaning back lazily in his chair, clearly amused by her nonstop chatter. It sounded as if she was reciting the tourist directory of Memphis, and every fact and figure ever compiled.
Suddenly, the woman began belting out the lyrics to “Only a Shadow.” Her date didn’t appear quite so amused now. In fact, his face went white with concern. With good cause, it would seem. Within seconds, the woman pitched forward, her face almost landing in her bowl of chili, but for a last-minute rescue by her male companion.
Clay shook his head at Annie. “Nice bunch of people here in Memphis.” He flinched as the woman began to sing again.
“They are nice,” Annie insisted. “In fact, that man is Spencer Modine, one of Memphis’s financial success stories. He made his money in California, but he returned here to start up a record company.”
“Spencer Modine?” Clay rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Hell, are you talking about the Bill Gates of Silicon Valley? The computer whiz kid who made a killing in computer software?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did you go to high school with him, too?” he grumbled.
Annie laughed. “No, I didn’t.”
They settled back then to order drinks and a mushroom-and-sundried-tomato pizza. A short time later, Arnett and the woman he’d pursued came back into the club. Arnett seated her near the stage, and he resumed playing. Clay moved his chair close to Annie and fiddled with the ends of her hair, nervous as a teenager on his first date.
“Annie, love,” he whispered, kissing the curve of her neck. She smelled of some light floral fragrance…lilies of the valley, maybe. As always, there was that delicious heat ricocheting between them.
“Hmmm?” she purred, arching her neck to give him greater access.
“I don’t want to go back to the farm…yet.”
“Me neither,” she said softly, turning to stare directly into his eyes.
“Will…will you come back to my hotel room with me?”
Annie continued to stare into his eyes, unwavering. She had to know what he was asking. Finally, she nodded, leaning closer to place her lips against his, softly. “I have to go back to the farm to night, though. There’s the four A.M. milking before we come back into Memphis for the Nativity scene.”
He stiffened at the thought of the woman he loved demeaning herself in that ridiculous sideshow. “Annie, stay home at the farm tomorrow. Give up the Nativity scene venture. Let me help you—and your family— financially.”
She immediately bristled. “No! The Fallon family doesn’t accept charity.”
He should have known she’d balk. But, dammit, how was she going to reconcile accepting his money after they were married? “What ever you say, sweetheart. It was only a suggestion,” he conceded, for now.
She softened at his halfhearted apology. “I want to be with you, Clay,” she whispered.
“Not half as much as I want to be with you.”
The piano player had just finished up a blues song, so fast and intricate that his talent was evident. Next, in reaction to the loud requests from two ends of the club for “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and “Jingle Bell Rock,” Arnett played a skillful blending of both yuletide classics. When he finished, silence reigned briefly, followed by thunderous applause.
Clay barely noticed the piano player and his girlfriend leaving the club once again. All he could think about was Annie and the fact that they were going to be together to night. It appeared as if it would turn out all right, after all. No more celestial big toes.
He hoped.
Annie was nervous, but exhilarated, as they entered the foyer of the Original Heartbreak Hotel.
It was only ten o’clock, and the hotel lobby still buzzed with activity, its guests coming in for the evening, or just going out, in some cases. As myriad as Memphis itself, the guests ranged from sedately dressed businessmen to a group of Flying Elvi. But mostly there were tourists come to view the spectacle that was Memphis, the adopted home of Elvis…like those two middle-aged women over there in neon pink ELVIS LIVES sweatshirts who were eyeing Clay as if they thought he might be someone famous.
“They think I’m George,” Clay informed her dryly, noticing her line of vision.
“George who?”
Clay shrugged. “Damned if I know. Straight, or Strayed, or something like that.”
Annie burst out in laughter. “George Strait?”
“Yes. That’s the one.”
Annie hugged the big dolt. “How could anyone in the modern world not know George Strait? Clay, you are too, too precious.”
He grinned at her calling him precious, then took her hand and led her around the massive Christmas tree in the center of the lobby. It was decorated with sparkling lights and priceless country-star memorabilia left by the various musicians who’d stayed in this hotel over the years. A gold-plated guitar pick from Chet Atkins. Guitar strings tied into a bow from Hank Williams. A silver star that had once adorned the dressing room of Eddie Arnold. Pearl earrings from Tammy Wynette. “Have you ever seen such a gaudy tree in all your life?”
“Clay, you need a major attitude adjustment.”
“And you’re the one to give it to me, aren’t you, Annie, love?” he said, flicking her chin playfully. “Come on. I need to pick something up from the desk.”
David and Marion Bloom, the longtime managers, nodded at Clay as he approached, and then at Annie, too. The refined couple, who resembled David Niven and Ingrid Bergman, right down to the thin mustache and the neatly coiled French twist hairdo, respectively, were probably surprised to see Annie with their boss, but they didn’t betray their reactions by so much as a lifted eyebrow.
“Did an express mail package come for me today?” Clay asked.
“Yes, sir,” David Bloom said, drawing a cardboard mailer out of a drawer behind the desk.
“And I have all those tax statements you asked me to gather together when you called this afternoon,” Marion Bloom added.
Clay took the mailer, but waved aside the stack of papers. “I’ll examine those tomorrow.”
Annie could see that the Blooms looked rather pale, their faces pinched with worry. Heck, everyone at the hotel was alarmed, from what Annie had heard when in Memphis earlier today. The possibility of imminent unemployment once the hotel closed had them all walking on tenterhooks, especially with the holidays looming. Annie would have liked to tell them that Clay would never close the hotel now that he knew what a landmark it was to Memphis, not to mention the connection with his mother. But it wasn’t her place.
“We’ll meet tomorrow at one with the accountant, right?” Clay asked the couple. When they nodded solemnly, he concluded, “Good night, then,” and led Annie toward the elevators.
Once the doors swished shut, Annie leaned her head on Clay’s shoulder and sighed. But he set her away from him and stepped to the other side of the elevator, staring at her with a rueful grimace. “If I touch you now, sweetheart, we’ll be making love on the elevator floor.”
She smiled.
“You little witch. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Clay observed with a chuckle.
Soon he was inserting the key into the lock of his hotel room. Once they entered, Clay flicked on the light switch, and Annie was assaulted with a dozen different sounds, sights, and smells. A carousel—a carousel, for heaven’s sake—was turning in one corner of the massive suite, churning out calliope music. A television in another corner clicked on automatically, playing a video of that old Elvis movie Roustabout. A popcorn machine began popping, and a cotton candy machine began spinning its weblike confection. Hot dogs sizzled on a counter grill, where candy apples were laid out for a late-night snack. And the bed—holy cow!—the bed was in the form of a tunnel-of-love cart with high sides, and what looked like a vibrating mechanism on the side to simulate a water-rocking motion.
“Clay!” She laughed.
“Did you ever see anything so absurd in all your life?” A delightful pink stained his cheeks.
“Actually, it’s kind of…uh, charming.”
“Please.” He begged to differ. Then, tossing his crutches aside, he leaned back against the door and pulled her into his embrace. “At last,” he whispered against her mouth.
When he kissed her, openmouthed and clinging, Annie could taste his need for her. What a heart-filling ego boost to know she could affect this man so!
With clumsy haste, they pulled at each other’s clothes.
“Slow down, honey,” Clay urged raggedly, then immediately reversed himself. “No, hurry up, sweetheart.”
“I can’t wait, I can’t wait, I can’t wait.…” she cried.
Soon they were naked, he with nothing but a bandage wrapped around one ankle, she with nothing but two gold barrettes, which she quickly tossed aside.
She saw his arousal, and felt her own throb in counterpoint. Leaning forward, she pressed her lips to his chest, breathing in the clean, musky scent of his skin.
Clay gasped.
“You are so hot,” she blurted out.
He grinned. “I know.”
“Oh, you! I meant you throw off heat like…like an erotic bonfire.”
Clay laughed. “So do you, Annie. So do you,” he whispered, holding her face with the fingertips of both hands. He gazed at her with sheer adulation, which both humbled and exalted her. Tears filled her vision at the admiration she saw in his wonderful blue eyes.
“I love you, Clayton Jessup. I don’t know how it’s possible to fall in love with someone so fast and so hard, but it’s the truth. I love you.”
“I feel as if I’ve been walking through life with a huge hole in my heart, and now, suddenly, it’s been filled. You make me complete, Annie. I know, that sounds so corny—”
“Shhh,” she said, putting a forefinger against his lips. “It doesn’t sound corny at all.”
He led her to the bed then and they climbed over the ridiculously high side frames, laughing. It was an awkward exercise, with Clay’s injury.
“At least there’s no danger of us falling out of bed if you get too rambunctious,” she teased.
In response, he swatted her on the behind, which was raised ignominiously in the air before she plopped down next to him.
Turning serious, Clay rolled onto his back and adjusted her so she lay half over him. Then he took her hands, encouraging her to explore him.
And she did.
Oh, Lord, she did.
She told him things she’d never imagined were in the far reaches of her fantasies. She used words…wicked words that drew a heated blush to her cheeks, and a chuckle of satisfaction from Clay.
Clay told her things, too, in a voice silky with sex. He spoke of erotic activities that made her tremble with trepidation. Or was it anticipation?
“I never expected that a man’s hands could be so gentle and aggressive at the same time,” she confessed.
“Who knew you’d be so passionate!” Clay said as he performed magic feats on the many surfaces of her body. “I love the soft sounds you make when I touch you here. And here. And here.”
Clay nudged her knees apart and lay over her, weight braced on his elbows. He teased her nipples with his fingers and lips and teeth and tongue—plucking, sucking, fluttering, and nipping—till Annie ached for more. It was hard to believe that the staid businessman could be such an inventive lover.
Finally, finally, finally, he penetrated her, and there was no pain, just a stretching fullness. Clay went still, his body taut with tension as he watched her.
“I love you, Annie,” he whispered.
Her inner folds shifted around him in response, allowing him to grow even more, filling her even more.
“I love you, too, Clay. With all my heart.”
Only then did he begin to move, long strokes that seemed to draw her very soul from her body. Then he surged back in again. Over and over, he took her breath away, then gave her new life.
She drew her knees up to give him greater access.
His heart thundered against her breast.
“Come for me, Annie,” he gritted out painfully. “Let it happen, love.”
But Annie fought her climax till she saw Clay rear his head back, veins taut in his neck, and let loose with a raw animal sound of pure male release as he plunged fully into her depths. Only then did Annie allow herself to spasm around him in progressively stronger reflexes till she, too, cried out with pure pleasure-pain.
Annie wept then—not from physical soreness, or emotional distress. It was the beauty and rightness of what they shared that drew her tears. There was a dampness in Clay’s eyes, too.
After that, they made love again, a slow, serious exploration of each other’s bodies, their likes and dislikes.
Then they made love a third time…a joyous, rib-tickling affair, involving mattress wave machines and carousels and sinfully sweet cotton candy.
It was two o’clock in the morning, and she and Clay were sitting on the floor watching Roustabout. She wore only Clay’s dress shirt; he wore only a pair of boxers. She’d never enjoyed a movie more.
They were eating candy apples and chili dogs. He’d balked at the food choice at first, but Annie noticed that he’d then scarfed down two of both in record time, washed down with a Coke.
“We have to go back to the farm soon,” she said regretfully. “We don’t want to arrive when everyone is already waking up for the day. Talk about ‘pink and flustery’! I’d be more like red and catatonic…with mortification.”
“You aren’t having second thoughts, are you?” Clay stood up and was taking their empty plates and glasses over to the kitchenette counter. He stopped and stared at her with concern.
“No, sweetheart, I’m not ashamed of anything we’ve done together. I just don’t want to broadcast it to the world yet.”
“Good,” he said. “Because I have something for you.” Clay went over to the hallway where he’d placed the express mailer that Mr. Bloom had handed to him earlier. Pulling the string zip, he took out a small box and handed it to Annie.
She raised her brows with uncertainty, then stood up and opened the small cardboard box. Inside was a velvet box. Annie felt a roaring in her ears, and she began to weep before she even opened the tiny latch to see an old-fashioned diamond in a gold setting, surrounded by diamond chips.
“It belonged to my grandmother. I called my office this morning and had my secretary take it out of the safety-deposit box and mail it to me. If you don’t like it, we can buy a new one, what ever you want.” Clay was rambling on nervously while Annie continued to weep.
“It’s beautiful,” she sobbed.
“Will you marry me, love?”
“Of course I’ll marry you,” she said, and continued to sob.
“Here, let me put it on for you,” Clay urged, a tearful thread in his voice, too.
It was dazzling. Not too big. Not too modern. Ideal.
“Oh, Clay, I love you so much.”
“I love you, too. More than I ever thought possible.”
They kissed to seal their betrothal.
Then they sealed their betrothal in another way.
“How soon before we can get married, do you think?” Clay asked much later. “I’ve got to get back to my office sometime soon, and I hate the thought of leaving you behind.”
“I don’t know. Aunt Liza will want to have a big wedding, but we can do something small, for family only.”
“Is that what you want?”
“I’m not sure. I always pictured myself walking down the aisle in a white gown…the works. But now…well, I want to be married to you as soon as possible.”
“We’ll have a big wedding, if that’s what you always wanted, Annie, love. But we’ll set a new time record for arranging a big wedding. Okay?”
She nodded, unable to stop staring at the beautiful ring on her finger.
“Will you be able to come back to Princeton with me for a while? Would that be too scandalous for Aunt Liza?”
Annie laughed. “Oh, I think we could convince her that your house keeper is chaperon enough, but I couldn’t stay for more than a week. It’s too much to ask Chet and the others to take on my work for much more than that.”
“But, honey, at some point they’ll have to pick up your slack. When you move up north, they’ll have no choice but to—”
The small choked sound Annie made caught Clay midsentence.
“Annie…Annie, what’s wrong?”
Stricken, she could only stare at him. “You think I’ll move to New Jersey permanently?”
A frown creased Clay’s forehead. “Of course. You didn’t think I would be moving here, did you?”
“Yes,” she wailed. “You didn’t think I’d give up the farm, did you?”
“Yes.”
They were both gaping at each other with incredulity.
“How could you think that you and I would marry and live in that farm house? It’s too small for your family as it is.”
Annie shrugged. “I guess I wasn’t thinking that far. At some point, Chet will probably marry Emmy Lou, once he gets his head together. And I would imagine they’ll live at the farm house. But we could always build a house somewhere else on our land. There’s plenty of acreage.”
“Annie, I’m not a farmer.”
“Well, I am,” she said stormily then softened her voice, putting a hand up to cup Clay’s rigid jaw lovingly. “Clay, isn’t there any way you could do your work from Memphis?”
“Annie, my business has been operated from the same Manhattan office by three generations of Jessups. My family home has been in Princeton for almost a hundred years.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I am not moving to Memphis, and that’s final.” He pleaded with her to understand. “That farm of yours is a money drain, pure and simple. This afternoon I read some of the farm magazines sitting around your house. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that eventually you’ll have to sell off some land to developers or use hormones in your cattle feed. You’re about twenty years behind the times, babe.”
“How dare you…how dare you presume to tell me how to run my farm? And you know nothing about me at all, if you think I would ever sell off even a shovelful of Fallon land.”
“It’s an unwise financial decision, Annie. Believe me, this is what I do for a living. This is my expertise.”
“You can shove your expertise, Clay Jessup. And you can shove this, too,” she said, taking off the ring and handing it back to him. The whole time tears were streaming down her face.
“Annie, don’t. Oh, God, don’t leave like this,” he said, watching with horror as she snatched up her clothes and began to dress as quickly as possible. “Let’s talk about this. You’re not being rational.” He began to dress as well.
“You’re not coming back to the farm with me.”
“I don’t want you driving alone in the middle of the night.”
“I’m a big girl, Clay. I’ve been doing it for a long time.” Dressed now, she stared at him for a long moment. “Tell me one thing, Clay. Do you still intend to raze this hotel?”
“Of course. What would ever make you think otherwise?”
Annie tried, but couldn’t stifle the sob that rose in her tight throat. “Call me crazy, but I thought you were developing a heart.”
“You’re being unfair.”
“Life’s unfair, Clay.” She grabbed her shoulder bag and headed toward the door, anxious to be out of his sight now, before she broke down completely.
“I love you, Annie.”
Her only response was to slam the door in his face.
Clay gazed at the closed door with abject misery.
How could I have made such a mess of things? How will I survive without Annie? What should I do now?
And somewhere, whether it was the television or inside his head, Clay couldn’t tell for sure, Elvis gave him the answer: “I’m so lonesome I could cry…”
Truer words were never sung.
And Clay was pretty sure this qualified as a God’s-big-toe stumble.
Two days later, on Wednesday, a despondent Clay stared out his hotel room window as Annie and her brothers dismantled their live Nativity scene for the day. Tomorrow was Christmas Eve, so it would probably be their last day on the site.
Clay had no idea if he’d ever see Annie again after that.
Oh, he’d tried to reconcile their differences, but Annie wouldn’t budge.
“Are you still selling the hotel?” she’d demanded to know yesterday when he’d confronted her in the hotel café. She and her family had managed to deflect all his phone calls before that. She’d even threatened to give up their live Nativity scene yesterday, despite her family’s need for money, if he didn’t stop coming out and “bothering” her. “Well, answer me. Are you still selling the hotel?”
“Yes, but it has nothing to do with us, Annie. It’s a business decision.”
She’d made a harrumphing sound of disgust. “Would you move to Memphis?”
“Well, maybe we could live here part of the time…have homes in New Jersey and Tennessee.” See, I can compromise. Why can’t you, Annie? “Would you be willing to promise to never…uh…to never stick your arm up a cow’s butt again?”
Annie had looked surprised at that request. Then she’d shaken her head sadly. “Clay, Clay, Clay. You just don’t get it, do you? I’ve bred a hundred cows in my lifetime. I’ll breed hundreds more before I die. If you think cow breeding is gross, you ought to see me butcher a pig. Or wring a chicken’s neck, cut off its head, gut, and feather it, all in time for dinner. Believe me, cow breeding is no big deal.”
It is to me. And I refuse to picture Annie with a dead chicken or cow. She’s just kidding. She must be. “Don’t you love me, Annie?” He’d hated the pathetic tone his voice had taken on then, but the question had needed to be asked.
“Yes, but I’m hoping I’ll get over it.”
No! his mind had screamed. Don’t get over it. You can’t get over it. I won’t. I can’t.
That had been the last conversation he’d had with the woman he loved and had lost, all in the space of three lousy days in Memphis. Then today he’d discovered a card table in the lobby with the sign HEARTBREAK HOTEL EMPLOYEE FUND. Apparently, Annie and her family had donated two hundred dollars of their hard-earned money to start a fund for hotel employees who would soon be out of work, due to him. Annie had found a way, after all, to make him, albeit indirectly, involved in the Fallon family Christmas good deed for 1998. And it didn’t matter one damn bit to anyone that he’d dropped five hundred dollars in the box.
A knock on the door jarred him from his daydream. It was the elderly bellhop. “Mr. and Mrs. Bloom said to tell you the lawyers’ll be here any minute. Best you come down to the office to go over some last-minute details for the sale.”
The bellhop glared at him, then turned on his heel and stomped away, not even waiting for Clay to accompany him. Hell, the entire hotel staff, except for the Blooms, had put him on their freeze list. You’d think he was Simon Legree. Or Scrooge.
Minutes later, Clay was in the manager’s office, doing a last read-through of the legal documents. The attorneys hadn’t arrived yet, and David had gone out front to register a guest.
“Mr. Jessup, I have some things that belong to you…well, they belonged to your mother, but I guess that means they belong to you now.”
“What?” Clay glanced up to see Marion lifting a cardboard box from a closet shelf.
“When the fire occurred at the photography studio next door all those years ago, I was on duty. I managed to save a few scraps of things from the fire,” she explained nervously.
“Why didn’t you send them to my father?”
“I tried to give them to him when he came to Memphis to bury your mother, but he refused to take them…said he wanted nothing to remind him of her. It was the grief speaking, of course.”
No, it wasn’t the grief speaking. That’s how my father regarded my mother his entire life.
Hesitantly he opened the box. On top was an eight-by-ten photograph, brown on the edges.
“It was their wedding picture,” Mrs. Bloom informed him.
Clay felt as if he’d been kicked in the gut. His father— looking much younger and more carefree than he’d ever witnessed—was dressed in a dark suit with a flower in the lapel, gazing with adoration at the woman standing at his side carrying a small bouquet of roses. Their arms were linked around each other’s waists. She wore a stylish white suit with matching high heels, and she was staring at her new husband with pure, seemingly heartfelt love. They were standing on the steps in front of a church. The date on the back of the picture read August 10, 1967.
“How could two people who appear to have loved each other so much have fallen out of love so quickly?”
Marion gasped. “What ever are you talking about? They never stopped loving each other.”
Clay cut her off with a sharp glower. “My mother abandoned me and my father less than two years after this photo was taken.”
“She never did so!” Marion snapped indignantly. “Clare came here to tie up some loose ends with her business, and to give her and your father some breathing room over their differences. But they never stopped loving each other.”
He started to speak, but Marion put up a hand to halt his words. “You have to understand that there’s something about the air that comes down from the Blue Ridge Mountains. It gets in a Memphian’s soul. Your mother was Memphis born and bred. She had trouble adjusting to life in Princeton, and your father was a stubborn, unbending man. I think he feared the pull of this city on your mother—jealousy, in a way—and so he became dogmatic, unwilling to be flexible.”
“She left my father,” Clay gritted out.
Marion shook her head vigorously from side to side. “Clare wasn’t giving up on your father. She had every intention of returning home. If it hadn’t been for the fire…” Her eyes filled with tears as she spoke. She swiped at them with a tissue and pointed to an envelope in the box of miscellany.
Clay picked it up and immediately noticed the airline logo on the outside of the envelope. Inside was a thirty-year-old one-way ticket, Memphis to Newark. It was too much to digest at once. Clay stood abruptly and headed for the door.
“Mr. Jessup, where are you going? We have a meeting soon.”
He waved a hand dismissively. “I’m going for a walk. I need to think.”
“But what should I tell the lawyers?”
“Tell them…tell them…the deal is off…for now.”
It was Christmas Eve, and Clay was driving a bright red Jeep Cherokee up the lane to Sweet Hollow Farm, more hopeful and frightened than he’d ever been in all his life.
Would he and Annie be able to work things out?
Would her brothers come out with shotguns in hand?
Would he fight to the death for her…a virtual knight in shining Jeep?
Would Annie still love him in the end?
There was a full moon out to night, but Clay didn’t need it, or the Jeep’s headlights, to see. The entire barn and farm house were outlined with Christmas-tree lights. In the front yard was a plywood Santa and reindeer display, illuminated by floodlights. It resembled a farm version of the house in Chevy Chase’s movie National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. He wondered idly who had climbed up on the roofs of the house and barn to put up all those blasted lights. Probably Annie. Or Aunt Liza. Geez!
Clay was so nervous he could barely think straight, especially when he saw the front door open even before he emerged from the vehicle.
It was Annie.
Please, God, he prayed, no big toes this time.
“Clay?” Annie said, coming down the steps and walking woodenly toward him. She looked as if she’d been crying.
Who made her cry? I’ll kill the person who made her cry! Oh! It was probably me.
“Where did you get the Jeep?” she asked nervously, as if that irrelevant detail were the most important thing on her mind.
“I…uh…kind of…uh…rented it.” Clay’s brain was stuck in first gear.
“You came back,” she said then, surrendering to a sob. “I called the hotel all night and Marion said you were gone, and I thought…I thought you went home.”
“I am home, sweetheart.” Clay opened his arms to her and gathered her close. “I’ve done a lot of walking, and thinking, since you left me.”
“I’ve been so miserable,” she blubbered against his neck.
“Me, too, sweetheart. Me, too.” He was running his hands over her back, her arms, her hair, her back again. He kissed the top of her head, her wet cheeks, her lips. He tried to show her with soul-deep kisses how much he’d missed her, and how important she was to him. He couldn’t get enough of her. He was afraid to let go for fear this was all a dream.
Annie leaned back to get a better look at him. Cupping his face in her hands, she gazed at him, tears streaming down her cheeks, with such open love that Clay felt blessed.
“Annie, love, we’re going to work this out. I’ve talked with my legal department in New York, and they see no problem with my setting up a satellite office in Memphis. Could you live with me in New Jersey part of the time, if I’m willing to live here?”
Her mouth had dropped open with surprise. “You would do that for me?”
“In a heartbeat.” It’s either that, or suffer heartbreak. Easy choice!
“How about the hotel?”
“Well, I’m not sure. I called Spencer Modine this morning. Remember, you pointed him out to me at Forever Blue.”
“You called Spencer Modine? But you don’t even know him.”
He shrugged. “Modine certainly has the capital to finance a purchase of the hotel property, and he has the Memphis ties that would make such a landmark attractive to him. But I don’t know if I’m ready to give up the hotel yet. Oh, Annie, I’ve learned some things this week about my mother and father that are going to take me a long time to understand.”
She pressed a light kiss to his lips in understanding. “We don’t have to decide all this right now.”
“We?” he asked hopefully.
“We,” she repeated.
“Will you marry me, Annie, love?”
“In a heartbeat,” she said.
A short time later, they were heading toward the front steps, arms wrapped around each other’s waists, their progress hampered by his limp and their constant stopping to kiss and murmur soft words of love.
Clay couldn’t stop grinning.
“You’re looking awfully self-satisfied, Mr. Jessup.”
“Well, I’m a negotiator, Annie. It’s part of my business as a venture capitalist. I figure I just pulled off the deal of the century. I got you, didn’t I, babe?”
She laughed. “You had me anyhow, babe. I already talked to my brothers about taking over the farm so I could move to New Jersey. Why do you think I was calling you all night?” She tapped him playfully on the chin in one-upmanship.
“Well, you little witch, you,” Clay said. But what he thought was, Wait till you see what I bought at the mall. You haven’t had the last word yet.
Elvis was singing “Blue Christmas” on the stereo, a fire was roaring in the fireplace, the tree lights were flickering, and Clay was enjoying his first ever family Christmas Eve celebration. If his heart expanded with any more joy, it just might explode.
It was almost midnight, but already the family members were opening their Christmas gifts. Clay sat on the sofa with Annie on one side, holding his hand. Aunt Liza was on the other side, keeping an eagle eye on his hands, lest they stray.
The gifts the Fallons gave to each other were simple items, some homemade, some silly, many downright practical. Who knew that people got socks and underwear for Christmas gifts? Johnny raved over his new athletic shoes…the spiffiest in the store, according to Annie. Everyone received new shirts and jeans. The pearl stud earrings that Johnny had bought for Annie, probably from Wal-Mart, might have come from Cartier, for all her oohing and ahhing. And the boys exhibited just as much appreciation over cheap card games or music cassettes.
There were even gifts for Clay from the family, to his surprise and slight embarrassment. When Aunt Liza handed him a suspicious-looking small box, wrapped with Santa Claus paper, he almost choked. She wouldn’t!
Aunt Liza tsked at him till he unwrapped it to find an audio cassette of Elvis’s Greatest Hits.
“Whadja think I bought, you fool?” she said with a chuckle.
Chet, Roy, and Hank had pooled their money to get him a pair of low-heeled cowboy boots. Jerry Lee gave him a Wall Street joke book, and Johnny presented him with a tie imprinted with dozens of Holstein cows.
When it was Annie’s turn, she made much ado over the homemade tree ornament with his name and date stenciled on the back, thus symbolizing his formal acceptance into her family. Finally, with much nervous ness, she handed him what he sensed must be a special gift.
Tears filled his eyes, and he couldn’t speak at first. Inside was a leather album. The words on the front, embossed with gold letters, said, THE WORKS OF GLARE GANNETT. Annie had somehow managed to gather together dozens of photographs taken by his mother. On the last page was a copy of an obituary from a Memphis newspaper, detailing her artistic talent and what she had contributed to Memphis and music history.
“Where did you get these?” he asked when his emotions were finally under control.
“I badgered the museum curator yesterday. When he heard your story, he helped me pull those photos made by your mother, and I duplicated them at a one-hour photo studio down the street.”
“Thank you, love,” he whispered against her hair. Then he decided it was time to reciprocate. “Can you guys help me get some gifts from the Jeep?”
There was a communal awed curse from Annie’s brothers when they saw how the back of the Jeep overflowed with gaily wrapped packages, some in huge boxes.
Aunt Liza could be heard rapping on the kitchen window at that crude expletive. “I heard that, boys. You’re not too old for soap, you know. That goes for you, too, Mr. Jessup.”
After the boys had each made three trips, the living room was filled with his purchases. Hank closed the door with a shiver—it was turning cold outside, and snowflakes had just begun to flutter down in wonderful Christmas fashion—and he asked Clay, “Where’d you buy that spiffy red Jeep?”
“Oh, he didn’t buy it,” Annie explained. “It’s a rental.”
“That sure looked like a new car plate to me,” Hank commented as he hung his coat on an old-fashioned coa-track.
“Clay?” Annie tilted her head in question to him. “Did you buy yourself a Jeep?”
“Well, no, I didn’t buy a Jeep for myself.”
Everyone turned to stare at him then. Clay shifted uneasily, and his eyes wandered over to Hank.
There was a long, telling silence. Then Hank whooped. “Me? Me? You bought a car for me?”
“Clay Jessup! You can’t go out and buy a car for someone you barely know.”
“I can’t?” he said. “Well, hell…I mean, geez, Annie, Hank distinctly said that first night I was here for dinner that if he had as much money as me, he would buy a fancy new vehicle and be the biggest chick magnet in the United States. I knew you’d be upset if I bought him a Jaguar.”
“Holy cow! I wonder what I get if Hank gets a new Jeep,” Johnny commented in an awestruck voice.
Annie made a low gurgling sound, which he figured was his cue to move on to the other gifts.
Chet’s Adam’s apple moved awkwardly as he studied Clay’s gift…airline tickets for Chet Fallon and son, Jason, to London, dated December 26.
“At least you show some good sense,” Aunt Liza observed. “It’s about time someone pushed Chet in the right direction.”
For the entire family, Clay had bought a high-tech computer system that would allow them to program in all the statistics on their milk production. Aunt Liza got a micro wave, which she pooh-poohed at first, stating, “What would I do with one of those fancy contraptions?” But she was soon reading the manual, exclaiming, “Didja know you can do preserves in a micro wave?” By the time Jerry Lee went ballistic over his laptop, Roy had gone speechless over the bank envelope showing a trust fund passbook covering his entire vet school tuition, and Johnny was in tears over a new entertainment system for his bedroom, complete with portable T V, CD player, and game system…well, by then Annie had given up on her protests.
“It’s too much, Clay,” she said on a sigh of frustration.
“No, it’s not, Annie. Generosity is giving till it hurts…like you and your family do every Christmas. This is just money I spent here…money whose loss I won’t even miss.”
“But I still think you should take back—”
“Annie,” Aunt Liza cautioned in a stern voice, “shut up.”
They all laughed at that.
“So what did you get for Annie?” Hank wanted to know.
She gazed at the ring on her finger. “I have my gift.”
But Hank ignored her. “With all the great gifts he gave us, he must have bought you at least…a new barn. Ha, ha, ha!”
Annie folded her arms indignantly over her chest at the teasing, and Clay’s face heated up in a too-telling fashion.
“Well, actually…” he admitted, handing her a gift certificate from a local contracting firm.
“You didn’t!” Annie scolded.
He did. It was a purchase order for a new barn roof.
She punched him lightly in the stomach, but he didn’t care. He could see the love in her eyes.
A hour later everyone had gone to bed, except him and Annie.
“I love you, Annie,” he said for what must be the hundredth time that evening.
“I love you, too, Clay…so much that my heart feels as if it’s overflowing.”
“It’s hard to believe that so much has happened to us in the five days since we first met.”
“Maybe you were destined to come to Tennessee…for us to meet. Maybe there is an Elvis spirit looking over Memphis.”
Clay wanted to balk at the idea, but the words wouldn’t come out. “Maybe you’re right. Perhaps Elvis really does live,” he finally conceded. “Oh, I forgot. There’s one more gift I bought for you.” He reached behind the sofa and handed her the package.
“Clay, this is too much. You’ve already given me too much.”
“Well, actually, this gift is for me.” He waggled his eyebrows at her.
Hesitantly, Annie unwrapped the package, which came from a costume shop in the mall. Annie laughed when she lifted the lid. It was a Daisy Mae outfit—a white off-the-shoulder blouse, and cut off jeans that were cut off real high on the buttock. “You devil, you.”
“So, are you going to try it on for me to night?”
“Here?”
“Hell, no. In the hayloft.”
There was an old legend that said that on Christmas Eve on a farm, the animals talk.
One thing was certain. On Christmas Eve, 1998, on Sweet Hollow Farm, the animals in the barn, under the hayloft, had a lot to talk about.
If you believe the spirit of Elvis is still alive, you’re not alone.
It’s been more than twenty years since the King died, but almost six hundred Elvis fan clubs still flourish around the world. No one disputes the fact that Elvis had a profound impact on the music industry, but his magic lives on not only in his own songs, but in those of the many musicians influenced by his talent.
So, if you are one of those people who can’t help singing along when an Elvis tune comes on the radio…or if a smile breaks out when you hear “Blue Suede Shoes”…or if you believe some people “live on” after death, then please look for my December 1998 release, Love Me Tender. I n that book, there is a fake Spanish prince, a Wall Street princess…uh, trader known as “the Irish Barracuda,” and a secondary character named Elmer Presley, who thinks he’s Elvis reincarnated.
Maybe he is. And maybe he isn’t. But one thing’s for sure: the legend does go on.