Читать книгу: «Baby, You're Mine»

Chapter One

Fanning herself with the folded Manatee Creek News she’d found on the stoop, Phoebe huddled in the porch swing, suitcases piled beside the front door.

Sooner or later Murphy would come home. He had to.

Because she’d just bet her last dime that he would be here. No, not her actual last dime. After buying the plane tickets and paying the taxi from the airport, she had fifty dollars left. Heck, by some folks’ standards, she reckoned she should count herself a wealthy woman.

The swing creaked, rusty chain rubbing against wicker and metal, the sound loud in the hot afternoon silence.

Her daughter’s sticky body was plastered tight against Phoebe as the little girl kicked the swing back and forth with both sneakered feet. Her small, pointed face was peony-pink from the heat.

“Nice breeze.” Lightly tapping the end of Frances Bird’s button nose, Phoebe lifted a hank of sweat-damp hair away from her own neck. “Thanks, baby. Every little breath of air helps.”

In the heat and humidity, Phoebe’s fine, curly hair stuck to her cheek, frizzed. Her lipstick had worn off hours earlier, and the makeup she’d applied so carefully in the fresh morning air of Wisconsin had long ago melted off her face. If she could muster the energy, she supposed she ought to slather on a bright red lipstick, show Murphy a happy face. And she would, too, once she found an ounce of get-up-and-go. Giving credit where credit was due, though, she had gotten up and gone. But now she was here.

And here she’d stay.

Until she talked with Murphy.

The swing wobbled, tilted, as Frances Bird shifted. “I’m thirsty, Mama. I want a cool drink, and I need it now.”

“Patience, Bind.” She tugged her not-quite-a-baby to her. The warm, little-girl scent rose to Phoebe, and she rested her cheek against her daughter’s sweaty forehead and inhaled.

Terrifying, the weight of all this love.

With a wiggle, Frances Bird braced her heels against the wooden porch boards and shoved, sending the swing careening to one side. “Don’t have any patience left. I am parched,” she said, all reasonableness as she stuck her face close to Phoebe’s. “And I would very much like a soda pop. With ice.”

At the moment, Phoebe would have settled for ice. A bucket full. She’d dump ice down the neck of her T-shht, slick the coolness over her neck.

“Maybe there’s a water spigot on the side of the house.” Standing up, Phoebe took Bird’s hand. “That’s the best I can do right now, dumpling.”

“If it has to be, it has to be,” Frances Bird said on a long sigh, straight-as-a-stick brown hair flopping into her eyes.

Watching her daughter’s woebegone expression, Phoebe decided the McAllister women were into sighing altogether too much. Sighing could become a real unattractive habit if she didn’t watch herself. She allowed her voice to take on an edge of tartness. “Come on, Frances Bird. Don’t mope. It’ll be an adventure.”

“Won’t be.” Frances Bird stood and clumped down the stoop with Phoebe, sneakers smacking each step.

They found the spigot at the back of Murphy’s house. “What a mess.” Frowning, Phoebe yanked at the weeds and woody vines screening the lumpy hose lying on the sandy ground. She wrapped the hem of her T-shirt around the hot metal faucet and twisted. Sun-heated, the hose bucked and heaved in her hands, spewing brown water into her eyes and down her arms. “Whoa!”

“Yuck.” Frances Bird leaped backward and wrinkled her nose at the murky brown water splashing onto her legs. “Hot!”

“Water’s water, sugar-dumpling. Let it run. It’ll cool in a second. And when it does,” Phoebe smiled teasingly and waggled the hose at her, “you’re going to be all wet, my darling girl”

“No!” Frances Bird darted behind Phoebe. “You. Not me.” She wrestled for the hose, and Phoebe let the soft plastic uncoil into Frances Bird’s hands. Soaking them, water sprayed and splashed in spar ling drops that clung to Frances Bird’s hair like a rainbow halo.

“It’s as cool as it’s going to be.” Phoebe held the hose steady while her daughter drank. “Well, dumpling, good thing you’re not all dressed up. You have as much water outside you as in.”

Frances Bird shook her head. Water arched, then silvered down to the ground. Looking up, she smiled. “Yes. Water,” she said blissfully and jumped feet first into the mud, happy for the first time that day.

Phoebe let her play. There was no rush. They weren’t going anywhere.

Squashing down her anxiety, she chased Frances Bird. Bird chased her back until they were both breathless, their bare feet covered in pale mud. “Enough, enough,” Phoebe finally panted as she shook sopping strands of hair out of her eyes.

With one final spray of the hose for each of them, she turned off the spigot, leaving the hose neatly coiled underneath. When they returned to the front of the house and its empty driveway, anxiety twisted the knots in her stomach tighter.

Still no Murphy. What would they do if he didn’t come home until after midnight? What if he’d gone out of town? She should have called, she knew she should have. Oh, what a fool she’d been not to call.

But she hadn’t. Couldn’t.

Every woman had her limits. She’d hit hers.

Hiding her apprehension, she plopped down on the step beside Frances Bird, gasping, but finally, blessedly cool.

The sun was edging the tip of the thick, moss-draped branches of the live oaks at the front of Murphy’s house when she heard the rumble of an engine.

She didn’t have time to catch her breath. He was just there, climbing slowly out of his cobalt-blue pickup, ambling right up to the foot of the stairs, his big, dark shadow falling over her. Murphy never moved fast. Like glaciers, he took his own sweet time.

“Hey, Murphy,” she said and stayed seated. Lord knew her knees would buckle if she stood up. Water still dripped from the ends of her hair, down the back of her T-shirt. “Long time, and all that.” She couldn’t seem to get a good breath. She rested one palm lightly on Frances Bird’s head. With her other, she gestured to the stash of cans and sawhorses in the back of his truck. “Busy?”

Strings hung from the armholes of his sleeveless, washed-to-cobwebs shirt By the grace of God and a miracle of thread, one button clung to the placket of his shirt. Sweat-plastered to his ribs, the shirt hung open, revealing a narrow streak of hair bleached to sunshine gold. Glowing in the bright light, that tapered line drew her gaze unwillingly down the taut muscles of his chest to the waistband of paint-kaleidoscoped jeans, jeans so worn on the seat that it was a wonder his ever-loving Jockey shorts weren’t on display. Or maybe Murphy wore boxers these days. Maybe Murphy Jones had turned trendy and wore designer thongs. Like lottery balls popping into the air, wild, unpredictable, her thoughts slammed into each other.

He rested one plaster-dotted work shoe on the step below her and leaned forward. “Well, bless my soul. Look what the cat dragged in. And on a scorching June day. What brought you to this neck of the woods, Phoebe?” He nudged her bare knee with a long, callused finger, blinked, stepped back and crossed his arms.

“Hospitable as ever, I see.” Laying her arm across Bird’s shoulders, Phoebe smiled brightly up at him and wished desperately she’d found time for that red lipstick and that her feet weren’t caked with dried mud. Fetching dimples would be a plus, too. “No how-do-you-do? No how’s life been treating you in the last, oh, how many years has it been? Eight?”

He paused as if he were counting them up. “Yep. Eight sounds about right.” The tip of his work boot nudged her bare toe. “Come for a visit, did you?”

From beneath the red and blue bandanna he’d tied over the top of his head and knotted at the back, damp, dark brown hair curled down his neck. A shine of sweat darkened his hair and skin, slipped down his temples to his jaw.

His glance slid to her daughter. The tiny bead of sweat vanished into the rumpled collar of his shirt. “Hey, kid,” he said, nodding.

Frances Bird beamed at him, tilted her head and batted her eyelashes. Her rosebud mouth curled with happiness. “Hey, Mr. Man.”

Phoebe almost sighed again, and stopped herself before she became a wind machine. Frances Bird had been born flirting. The result of an absentee father? Phoebe’s own failure? Or simply southern genes asserting themselves in spite of an aggressively midwest upbringing? Phoebe tried not to overanalyze her daughter’s lightning-bug sparkle around males. Tapping her daughter’s shoulder, she said, “Frances Bird, meet my—what are you and I to each other, Murphy?” She lifted her chin, giving him a little attitude, but she couldn’t manage the smile this time. “Not brother and sister.”

“Not by a damn slight” Murphy held her gaze.

“Family, anyway,” she said through a tight throat. “Family. That counts for something, even after eight years. Right?”

He didn’t say a word.

“Hey,” four-year-old Frances Bird said, her flushed cheeks dimpling with delight. “Me and my mom are going to live with you.”

“Oh?” Murphy didn’t move an inch. The pleasantly interested question would have fooled anyone who hadn’t grown up with him.

But his poker-faced acknowledgment didn’t fool Phoebe for an instant. She heard the dismay behind his affable drawl, and her anxiety increased, threatened to blaze out of control.

Avoiding his coolly distant perusal, she slicked Frances Bird’s wet bangs off her face. “Well, sugar, that hasn’t been decided.” The worst he could do would be to send them packing. And if he did? She’d handle that, too. She had no choice. “We’re here for an afternoon’s visit. To catch up on old times. That’s all. Don’t panic, Murphy.”

Bird’s mouth puckered up with stubbornness. “You said—”

“I know what I said, Frances Bird.” This time Phoebe couldn’t stop the sigh that came rolling up from her toes.

“And what did you say, Phoebe?” A breeze lifted the corner of Murphy’s shirt, brushed it back from his chest, died away in the stillness. “About coming to live with me?”

Frances Bird patted Phoebe’s knees comfortingly. “Tell him, Mama, what you decided.”

When Phoebe didn’t speak, Frances Bird leaned forward confidingly and rested her elbows on her skinny knees as she looked up through her eyelashes at Murphy. “We are bums on the street. So we’re going to live with you now ’cause we got no place else to go. And Mama said, home by damn—”

“Don’t swear, Frances Bird.”

“—is where when you go, they got to take you in. And that’s that, she said.”

“Yeah?”

With her hair swinging about her face, Bird nodded vigorously. Water dotted the faded blue of Murphy’s jeans. “And, Mama,” she said earnestly, “you say the damn word all the time.”

Stifling the groan that battled with yet another sigh, Phoebe lifted Frances Bird onto her lap. “Shh, baby. The grownups have to talk now.”

“That’s for damn sure.” He reached up and tugged at his bandanna, shadowing his eyes.

At Murphy’s use of the forbidden word, Frances Bird poked Phoebe’s face and rolled her eyes.

He studied them for a moment, a long moment that had Phoebe’s bare toes curling and heat flooding through her again before he said softly, “Bums on the street, huh?”

“Not quite.” Phoebe shaded her own eyes as Frances Bird leaped into explanation.

“Oh, yes. But we didn’t sleep in boxes. We stayed at a motel one night. With tiny pink soaps. Soooo pretty. I kept one.” Frances Bird batted her eyelashes again, smiled, and kept talking like the River Jordan, rolling right on down to eternity.

Phoebe yearned to sink through boards of the porch into a quiet, cool oblivion where Murphy Jones’s too-observant gray eyes couldn’t note her every twitch and flinch. Although easygoing, Murphy had never been a fool. Not likely he’d become one since she’d last had a conversation with him. This homecoming, if that’s what it was, was not going well.

“We got fired. and we got debts, and—”

“Enough, Frances Bird.” The hint of steel in Phoebe’s voice finally silenced her chatty daughter. Lifting her chin, Phoebe held his gaze. “Well, Murphy, are you going to keep us standing outside for the rest of the night?”

He rubbed his chin with his knuckles thoughtfully. “Seems to me, Phoebe, you’re sittin’, not standin’.” His drawl curled into the deepening blue twilight of the heat.

“Murphy’s right, Mama.” Frances Bird tugged the hem of Phoebe’s shorts. “We’re sitting.”

She stood up. “Fine. Now I’m standing. Everybody happy?” Turning her back, she marched up the stairs to the swing, anger crackling down her spine with every mud-caked step. This was worse than she’d anticipated.

More humiliating.

She was tired, worried sick, and Murphy was only going to torment her, tease her, and drive her crazy the way he had when they were young. She’d never understood her reaction to him, or his to her, but she was in no mood today to sit or stand for it. Sherman had marched on Atlanta and burned it to the ground and maybe she was burning her bridges with a vengeance, but at the moment she couldn’t care less if she left nothing but ashes in her wake.

And knowing his cool gray eyes were watching her every movement perversely fueled her temper.

She grabbed one of the battered suitcases and swung to face her daughter. “Bird, we’re on our way. Say nice to have met you to Murphy.” Wishing she’d pasted on that red lipstick after all, she stomped off the porch.

“Mama!” The frantic tug at Phoebe’s shorts didn’t stop her march down the steps. But Bird’s anxious whisper, a whisper that was loud enough to hear from five feet away, halted Phoebe with one foot dangling in mid-air. “We got no place to go. You said.”

“Come on into the house.” Murphy’s sigh echoed her earlier ones. Like chickenpox, sighing was apparently contagious. “Looks like that talk you mentioned can’t wait.” Metal jangled on the ring at his belt loop as he unclipped a key. The look he cast Frances Bird was shrewd. “Anyway, the kid must be hungry.”

“Very hungry.” With a lightning-fast mood change, Frances Bird smiled winsomely at him. “You got Jell-O? I like Jell-O. Red. With peaches.”

“No red Jell-O.” Murphy unlocked the door and flung it open. “Bananas okay?”

“I can make do.” Bird dipped under his outstretched arm and into the dim interior of the house. “Mama says it’s a skill us McAllisters got.”

In the spirit of making do, Phoebe planted both feet firmly on the bottom step and reminded herself that she couldn’t afford pride. Not today. Not tonight. Anger drained away, making room for the poisonous dread she’d been living with for weeks now. She met Murphy’s guarded eyes and took a breath.

His wide hand rested on the door as he waited for Phoebe to follow her daughter. “Come into my parlor,” he said, and the ironic edge to his low, slow words did nothing to settle the ping-pong bounce of her stomach.

“I know how that story ends,” she muttered, dipping, like Phoebe, beneath his arm.

“Of course you do. You’re a smart woman. And an educated one.” The polite bend of his head toward her was even more unsettling as he shut the door quietly behind her. “But you came in anyway, didn’t you, Miss Phoebe Fly?”

“Ms. Fly, please.” She sent him a sweet smile as she scanned the room filled with cardboard boxes. Maybe she couldn’t afford pride, but by heaven, she didn’t have to let him know exactly how much the beggar maid she was. She trailed a finger along a dusty stack of boxes labeled CDs. “Love what you’ve done with your place. I guess the minimalist approach has a certain...charm to it, Murphy, but you’ve been here two years.”

He was so close behind her that his boots bumped against her heels, and she could swear his breath fluttered the hair at her neck. “Kept track, did you?”

“Same address on your Christmas cards the last couple of years.” Hiding her dismay, she wandered through a maze of boxes toward the kitchen that she’d seen earlier through the windows. “No furniture?”

“Got a bed.” His teeth flashed in a lazy smile. “Maybe I can’t afford anything else.”

That smile had drawn the girls of their youth to him effortlessly. Murphy’d never had to work at collecting a string of shiny-haired, long-legged girls to him. Like bees swarming to the scent of flower honey, they merely appeared on the porch, beside his car, everywhere.

“No sofa. No TV. No chairs.” Bewildered, she shook her head.

“Maybe I don’t need much more. I’m a simple man, simple tastes.” His smile widened until it lit up the gray depths of his eyes, sunlight flashing on bayou water, turning her knees to mush.

With an effort, she herded her thoughts together and forcibly drove memories back into the past where they belonged.

“Don’t be irritating,” she said. “Anyway, I can’t believe you’re too broke for furniture.” Bending her head back, she examined the high ceilings, the crown moldings, and the heart of pine floors. Why on earth had he allowed this beautiful house to stay in such disarray for so long? “Murphy,” she said as patiently as if she were talking to Frances Bird in a snit, “I know how much these old houses cost. And this one’s in terrific condition.”

“Did the work myself.”

“Of course you did. But you’re living like a man who’s ready to pack up and hit the highway at a second’s notice. You haven’t even unpacked, have you?” Not bothering to wait for his answer, she sashayed through the wide arched doors into the kitchen and stopped so suddenly that he bumped slam up against her backside. “Oh, Murphy, this is beautiful,” she whispered as she saw the light-oak pot rack suspended from the vaulted ceiling. Hanging above a work counter, the copper-bottomed pans blazed with light. “It’s like the one—”

“In your folks’ home.” He stepped back, taking with him the comfort of his body against hers, leaving her desolate in a way she couldn’t explain. But the kitchen, and Murphy next to her—the rightness of that moment overwhelmed her.

“Your home, too.” She wouldn’t cry. But the pots shone so brightly and familiarly, and she hadn’t felt at home anywhere for so long. “Always your home, Murphy.”

“Your parents were good people.” He turned away from her and went to the industrial-sized refrigerator. “They gave me a...” he paused, his obvious discomfort painful to her.

“They gave you a home, Murphy. They loved you.” She couldn’t keep talking about her parents, about the past. Tears would make it impossible for her to do what she had to. “Mama and Pops loved you. You know that.”

“Here, kid.” He handed Frances Bird a black-skinned banana from the freezer.

“Cold.” She poked it dubiously and frowned. “Why do you put your bananas in your freezer?”

Murphy scratched his chin, ran a finger under the edge of his bandanna. “Because they were going bad?”

“Okay.” Frances Bird smushed the pulp out and into her mouth with a finger. “I like this.” She beamed a wide, smeary smile. Dragging a stool up to the table in the middle of the room, she said, “And you can call me Bird.”

“All right,” Murphy said slowly, his voice whiskey-warm and smooth.

With Murphy’s attention on Bird, Phoebe brushed the tears away from her eyes. Her gaze lingered on the table where Bird sat contentedly mashing frozen banana between her fingers.

Then, like an arrow piercing her, leaving her heart aching, Phoebe realized why the kitchen felt so familiar. “You have the old table from home. From the kitchen,” she murmured, her palm sliding across the smooth-grained walnut surface. She touched the vertical dent where she’d slammed down the turkey roaster in an argument with Murphy one Thanksgiving. If you could call it an argument when the other person stayed as calm and controlled as Murphy always did. She traced the dent again. “You kept it.”

“Pretty,” Frances Bird crooned, running her hand from one end of the table to the other, banana pulp streaking behind her small hand. “Pretty, pretty.”

Murphy’s palm lay on the table across from Phoebe’s, his fingertips stroking the wood as if he were unaware of his lingering touch against the grain.

“I needed a table. Your folks gave this one to me when they bought the new one. The chairs weren’t salvageable.”

“Oh.” She looked at the two painted ladder-back chairs lined up against the wall.

“I’m surprised you recognized the table. I refinished it.”

She swallowed. “I recognized it.” Oh, she couldn’t, wouldn’t, cry. Pain and yearning clamping around her heart, she swallowed again, looking blindly around the room that was like home.

Murphy didn’t want to see the glitter in Phoebe’s eyes. She had no right to go all teary-eyed on him over this damned table. It couldn’t mean anything to her.

She’d shaken the dust from home and town from her heels, diploma in hand, and, as far as he knew, never looked back. It had taken him hours to scrape off the crackled varnish and sand the table, to find the truth of the walnut. Every dusty, sweaty moment of sanding and stripping and scraping had been a pleasure. Compared to that, Phoebe’s tears didn’t mean diddly. That was a truth he needed to remember, too. He shrugged. “Just a piece of wood, that’s all,” he said, but his palm hesitated on the waxed surface.

“No.” Her voice was low and husky with those tears. Mirroring his own motion, her hand moved slowly against the shining surface. “Not just a piece of wood. Memories.” Her eyelashes fluttered, lifted, and for a moment he saw the tear-sparkle of her eyes.

“Piece of furniture. Needed repairing. That’s all.”

She turned toward him, almost as if she wanted to say something else, and her cheek caught the last ray of light from outside. He couldn’t look away from the play of light against her skin.

Her face was as smooth, as glossy as the table’s finish, as tempting to his touch. He’d learned the truth of that old wood, and he’d learned the truth of Phoebe. Like a butterfly, bright, fragile, she drifted here, there. Everywhere. As useless to expect that butterfly to last through the winter as to expect Phoebe Chapman McAllister to stay in Manatee Creek, to put down roots.

He lifted his hand carefully, his fingertips tingling as if he’d run them down a bare wire. Odd thoughts, this notion of Phoebe settling down, putting down roots. Tucking his palms under his armpits, he glanced at her with a scowl.

Her damp shirt clung to her like primer on drywall, every curve and bump outlined by the tangerine-colored, see-through cotton. He cleared his throat. He didn’t need to be thinking about Phoebe’s bumps and curves and how she looked like a juicy orange, all damp and glistening, waiting to be peeled. He tugged the bandanna from his head, wiped his hands and jammed the scarf into his pocket. “You and Frances Bird are wet. Y‘all want to get into some dry clothes?”

“I’m Bird. I told you already. Not Frances Bird.” Sitting on the stool she’d hauled to the table, Phoebe’s daughter beamed up at him. “Unless you’re real, real mad at me. Then everybody calls me Frances Bird.” She patty-caked her banana-coated hands together. Bits of pulp spurted onto the floor. “But I will not ever, ever, make you mad at me and I will stay out of your way while we are living with you and not be a bother at all and I will clear the table and pick up after myself. Okey doke?” She slapped her hands together for emphasis.

Banana shot onto his chin, dripped to his clean floor.

“Frances Bird. Get a paper towel.” Phoebe’s voice was stiff, but he heard the anxiety in it.

“See? I told you how it is. Now Mama’s mad at me.” Bird wrinkled her nose and sighed heavily.

He thought he heard Phoebe sigh too as he said, “Don’t bother, I’m fine. I’ll clean up later. After your mama and I have our conversation.”

“Right.” The quick look Phoebe threw her daughter carried a message he couldn’t quite decipher. Warning, sure. But something else there, too. The little girl settled back onto the stool, her brown eyes as big as paint-can lids. Phoebe shifted her feet, plucked at the drying fabric of her shorts where it stuck to her thighs. But she didn’t say anything more even as her daughter wiggled on the stool.