Past Due Read online

  Chapter Two

  “You have a new boyfriend?” Charlotte sounded halfway intrigued, and halfway hurt that I hadn’t told her.

  I ignored her. “How do you know about that?” I asked Mary Kelly instead.

  She smiled, her eyes glittering. “Everyone knows. It’s the talk of Sweetwater.”

  Great.

  Then again, I probably shouldn’t be surprised. Margaret Anne Martin’s perfect daughter carrying on with LaDonna Collier’s good-for-nothing colored boy is the kind of grist the gossip mill lives for.

  “Why is Sweetwater talking about it?” Tina wanted to know. “Are you finally kicking that good-girl image, Savannah?”

  Oh, hell, yes. In a big way.

  “Who’s the lucky guy?” Charlotte still sounded hurt, but curious too.

  “Rafe Collier,” I said.

  There was total silence around the table as they all gawked at me. I don’t know why Mary Kelly was staring. She’d already known, or so she said. But maybe she’d thought it was just a rumor. Or maybe she was surprised I was willing to admit it.

  “Oh my God!” Tina managed, eventually. “You’re dating him?”

  Dating. Sleeping with. Pregnant by. Yes, sirree.

  “Why?” Charlotte asked.

  I turned to her, and she added, “After you and Bradley broke up, I thought you’d end up marrying Todd Satterfield. He’s been carrying a torch for you ever since high school.”

  I was well aware of that. “He proposed.” Repeatedly.

  “And you turned him down?”

  I did. Repeatedly.

  “You could have married Todd Satterfield, and you’re dating Rafe Collier instead?”

  I nodded. Dating, sleeping with, pregnant by. Yes, indeed.

  “Wow.”

  There was silence for a few moments, and then Tina broke it again. “So I guess it must be true what they say about black men, huh?”

  Mary Kelly sent her a quelling sort of look, and Tina looked guilty. I blushed.

  In case you’re unaware—as I had been, until someone explained it to me—what they say about black men is that they’re well-endowed. Physically. And although Rafe is only black on his father’s side, I have no complaints about that part of him.

  Of course, I have no complaints about any other part of him, either. And since my only standard of comparison was my ex-husband, it wasn’t like I could really speak with any kind of authority on this subject. Bradley had been merely average in bed, in every way.

  And anyway, that wasn’t why I was involved with Rafe. I’d fallen in love with him long before I’d seen him naked.

  However, I didn’t feel like justifying my feelings or my relationship. Not to Tina and Mary Kelly. If Charlotte wanted to talk about it, I’d tell her—privately, later—but I didn’t feel like I owed the others anything. Certainly not the details about my boyfriend’s personal assets.

  So I just smiled and devoted myself to my salmon. After a moment, the others did the same.

  Eventually, the conversation veered onto other subjects, and then it became time to break up the party. Mary Kelly and Tina went off on their own, and Charlotte faced me across the table. “Talk.”

  “About?” I watched Mary Kelly and Tina as they headed for the exit. They had their heads together, whispering, and you can call me paranoid if you want, but I knew they were talking about me.

  “What do you think?” Charlotte said.

  I shrugged and returned my attention to her. “Not much to tell. I met Rafe last August. He called, wanting a realtor to come out and show him a house.”

  “And you went?”

  “It was a Saturday morning when no one else was in the office. I had no idea it was him at first.” And I still wondered whether, if I had known, I would have gone. Most likely I would have, since I was desperate to sell my first house, but I would have thought long and hard first.

  “Did he recognize you?” Charlotte asked.

  My lips twitched. “As soon as he heard my name. I’m pretty sure he thought it was funny that I had no idea who he was.”

  He’d teased me. I could still hear his voice, with that half-suppressed amusement, asking me whether I’d been struck speechless by his good looks.

  And truthfully, that had been part of it. Looking at him takes my breath away. It had then, and it still does now.

  The other part was that he looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. At that point it had been more than twelve years since he’d left Sweetwater, and I hadn’t thought about him once in the meantime.

  “Then what?” Charlotte said.

  “We kept bumping into one another. He saved my life once. It’s easy to get attached to a man who does that. And then he went to Memphis for a month, and left me alone in Nashville with lots of time to think. By the time he got back, I was pretty sure I’d fallen for him.”

  “Wow,” Charlotte said.

  “I was this close to sleeping with him.” I held my hand up, thumb and index finger a scant quarter inch apart.

  In truth, we’d been in bed together—his bed—and I’d been closer to sleeping with him than a quarter inch. If we hadn’t been interrupted, I would have. “But then the phone rang. It was the police. To tell me that Marquita Johnson was dead. Remember her? She was a couple years older than us?”

  “Big, black girl?”

  I nodded.

  “Why would they call to tell you that?”

  “Rafe had hired her as a live-in nurse for his grandmother. She’d been missing a couple of days. And Tamara Grimaldi—the Metro PD detective—didn’t know that Rafe was back. He’d just driven in from Memphis that morning. So she called me instead, since I was babysitting Mrs. Jenkins.”

  “Who’s Mrs. Jenkins?”

  “Rafe’s grandmother,” I said.

  “I thought nobody knew his people.”

  “We figured it out. Last August.”

  Charlotte blinked, perhaps at the mention of ‘we.’ And in truth, Rafe had figured it out first, and that’s why he’d been in Nashville in the first place. It had taken me a bit longer to put the pieces together.

  “Was he a suspect?” Charlotte asked. “In Marquita’s murder?”

  “Sheriff Satterfield suspects him of everything that goes wrong in Maury County. He always has. Tamara Grimaldi knows better.”

  Charlotte looked confused, and I added, “He works for the TBI. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigations. He spent ten years undercover, and after his cover was blown last fall, he started training the rookies. They do a lot of hand-to-hand combat and that kind of thing.”

  “I thought he went to jail,” Charlotte said.

  “He did.” He was sentenced to two years in Riverbend Penitentiary for assault and battery at eighteen. “The TBI sprung him after two years, and sent him undercover.”

  “Wow.” It was hard to say whether Charlotte was more impressed or more horrified. “It sounds like something out of a TV show.”

  Yes, it did.

  She bit her lip. “It isn’t that I’m not happy for you, Savannah...”

  “I know,” I said.

  “It’s just a lot to digest. I mean, Rafe Collier... of all the men in Sweetwater, I’d have put him at the bottom of the list of the ones I could imagine you having anything to do with.”

  “Sure.” I would have, too, in the past.

  “How does your family feel about it?”

  “Catherine and Rafe get along well enough. If Catherine approves, then Jonathan approves. And Dix is fine with it, too.”

  A shadow crossed Charlotte’s face. “Horrible about his wife.”

  Quite. My sister-in-law Sheila—my brother Dix’s wife—had gotten herself murdered back in November. Dix wasn’t over it yet, although he and Tamara Grimaldi were developing an interesting relationship. Unless I was reading the signs wrong, of course. But they spoke a lot, and occasionally Dix would drive up to Nashville to have dinner with Grimaldi. In a purely platonic way, I’m sure, since he wasn
’t ready for another relationship yet.

  “Your mom must be having kittens.”

  Let me count the ways. “She’s dating Bob Satterfield, you know.”

  “The sheriff?”

  I nodded. My mother’s fondest wish was that I marry Todd. She’s still hoping I’ll come around to her way of thinking, and dump Rafe.

  “I’m sorry, Savannah,” Charlotte said. “I want to be happy for you, I really do, but I’m having a hard time with this. I mean... what could you possibly have in common with him?”

  Not a lot, on the surface. But Rafe understands me in a way no one else does. And he lets me be myself, in a way no one else ever has.

  “I love him,” I said.

  Charlotte blinked. “Are you sure it isn’t just...” She hesitated delicately and lowered her voice, “lust?”

  Looked like maybe I wasn’t the only good girl at Columbia High who had noticed that Rafe was hot, even at seventeen.

  “I’m sure.” The fact that the sex was good—and so much better than anything I’d had with Bradley—was a nice bonus, but not the reason I fancied myself in love with him. “Just wait until you meet him. You’ll understand.”

  “Sure,” Charlotte said, but I could tell she didn’t believe me.

  I grew up in the Martin Mansion, an antebellum home on the north side of Sweetwater, on the road to Columbia. Rafe calls it ‘the mausoleum on the hill,’ and it’s easy to see why. It’s almost two centuries old—completed in 1839—and it’s big and square and built of red brick, with tall, white pillars holding up the second story porch and the roof. It screams of old money, and although it’s beautiful—in a staid, settled, Southern way—it hasn’t changed overmuch in the past two hundred years. My mother hasn’t, either. She was born and raised in the South, and her mores are still those of a dyed-in-the-wool Southern Belle. She can’t stand my boyfriend, and as such, my own relationship with her is a bit strained, too.

  When I got to the mansion, I was pleased to realize she wasn’t home. It was Friday, of course, so she was probably out to dinner with her beau, the sheriff. Todd’s daddy.

  I hadn’t seen her in a month or two—since Easter, to be specific—and I felt a bit guilty that I was relieved not to have to deal with her... but having to brave my mother’s silent disappointment and snide comments after Charlotte’s less-than-enthusiastic reception of my big news was just more than I could bear. I went upstairs to my room instead, changed out of my dress and into my nightgown, and crawled into bed with the phone. What I needed more than anything, was to hear Rafe’s voice.

  “I miss you,” I told him when he picked up.

  He sounded amused. “It’s only been five hours since you left, darlin’.”

  “The bed’s empty. And I’m cold.”

  His voice dropped into the seductive range. “I can warm you up. Want me to tell you what I’d do to you if I were there?”

  I admit it: I shivered, and my skin broke out in goose bumps. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

  He chuckled, the sound low and warm “Afraid you’re gonna go blind, darlin’?”

  Something like that. “It won’t be the same.”

  “Betcha I can make you feel warmer, though.”

  No doubt. Phone sex wasn’t going to cut it, however, so I changed the subject. “How was the baseball game?”

  Just after I’d headed out to Sweetwater this afternoon, Rafe had driven to Montgomery Bell Academy, one of Nashville’s premier prep schools, where his son David is a student. David’s mother was Elspeth Caulfield, another Columbia High student, and he was adopted by a very nice couple named Ginny and Sam Coleman after Elspeth had to give him up. Rafe had had no idea David even existed until last fall, but in the six months since, Ginny and Sam had—cautiously—let the two of them get to know one another.

  I think they’d been afraid at first that Rafe would take David away from them, since he hadn’t known about David’s birth or adoption, and—as David’s biological father—he probably had the right to sue for custody of his son. Or at least he had the right to try. But once it became clear that Rafe had no plans of trying to take David away from the people who had raised him and who loved him, everything worked out, and Ginny and Sam were happy to let the two of them spend time together.

  So while I’d been talking to Charlotte, Mary Kelly, and Tina at the Wayside Inn, Rafe had been watching his son play baseball.

  “Fine,” he said now. “They won. Three-two.”

  “Congratulations. Did you ever play baseball?”

  “No, darlin’. I was too busy getting in trouble in high school. And they don’t outfit the inmates at Riverbend Penitentiary with baseball bats.”

  Understandably so. “Doesn’t the TBI have a baseball team?”

  “Sure they do. But when you’re deep undercover, it don’t make much sense to go to bat for the TBI baseball team.”

  Right.

  “I play a mean game of pickup football, though. And basketball.”

  “I’ve never been good at sports,” I admitted.

  Not that my mother had ever allowed me to play any. Sports are unladylike. But I’d suffered through P.E. along with everyone else, and had never moved beyond the very basic ability to jump and run.

  “You ride well,” Rafe said.

  “What do you mean? I don’t... Oh.” I flushed.

  He chuckled, but didn’t pursue the subject. “How was dinner?”

  “Disappointing,” I said.

  There was a beat. “I don’t guess you’re talking about the food?”

  “No. The Wayside Inn has excellent food.”

  “The company?”

  “When I got there, another woman I knew from school was waiting too, so she and someone else joined Charlotte and me for dinner. Do you remember Christina Foster and Mary Kelly?”

  “Can’t say I do,” Rafe said. “Sorry.”

  “No problem. They remembered you. And Mary Kelly broke the news that we’re dating.”

  His voice was mild. “That what we’re doing?”

  “You know what I mean.” And no, that wasn’t what we were doing. “I just didn’t see the need to give Mary Kelly and Tina all the intimate details.”

  “Sure.”

  “I told Charlotte, though. After the two of them left.”

  “And how did Charlotte take the news?”

  “Not as well as I had hoped,” I said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with all my friends and family.”

  “You don’t?”

  OK, so I did. They were racists. And socio-elitists. And a few other -ists. Not to mention short-sighted and set in their ways. And—before I could get too upset—they were also worried about me, and concerned that I’d get my heart broken by a guy whose background was so different from mine that we might as well be from different planets.

  Once upon a time, Todd had warned me about the cultural differences between us.

  I’d told him not to be ridiculous, that Rafe had grown up less than three miles away from me, and that there were no cultural differences to worry about.

  But Todd had had a point, even though I’d been unwilling to acknowledge it at the time. Rafe had grown up poor, in a trailer in the Bog, while I was the princess from the mansion on the hill. The Martins weren’t rich by any means, but we didn’t lack, either. I’d had both my parents, until my dad passed away from a heart attack a few years ago. Rafe had grown up with a single mother, barely more than a child herself when he was born, and a grandfather who liked nothing better than to knock them both around. And when I’d gone to finishing school in Charleston, Rafe had been kicking his heels in prison, after beating LaDonna’s on-and-off boyfriend half to death.

  On the face of it, we were different enough that a relationship between us would never work. And the surface was all my friends and family could see.

  “I love you,” I said.

  There was a beat. “Yeah?”

  “Of course.”

  Another beat,
then... “I love you too.”

  “Would you like to talk dirty to me now?”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” Rafe said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. I leaned back against the pillows and prepared to have my socks blown off.

  Chapter Three

  All good things must come to an end, so of course Mother was there when I woke up.

  “Good morning, darling.” She leaned in and air-kissed first one cheek, then the other. “Breakfast?”

  “I don’t think so.” I scooted up on one of the stools at the kitchen island. “I’m still full from last night.” And what’s more, I was dealing with morning sickness. And since Mother didn’t know that I was pregnant, and since running for the bathroom with my hand over my mouth as soon as I forced down the first bite would be a dead giveaway, it was probably better not to tempt fate.

  She didn’t insist. I wasn’t surprised. Every Southern Belle learns to develop—or at least feign—a birdlike appetite.

  “Did you have a nice time with Charlotte?” she asked instead.

  “It was fine.”

  She wrinkled her brows, and then immediately smoothed them out again. “Oh, dear. What happened?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “She doesn’t understand why I’m involved with Rafe.”

  I could see the corners of her mouth compress. “I’m sorry, darling.”

  Oh, sure. The lack of sympathy in her voice was overwhelming.

  “I don’t care,” I said viciously. “I love him. And if you and Charlotte can’t be happy for me, then that’s your loss, not mine.”

  Mother didn’t say anything to that. She wasn’t about to claim to be happy for me, and she was too well-bred to tell me I didn’t know what I was feeling, although she probably believed, like Charlotte, that I’d been bowled over by the sex. Everyone I knew—even my mother!—seemed perfectly capable of seeing Rafe’s sex appeal. Why couldn’t any of them see that he had more going for him than just being hot?

  “Here,” Mother said and put a cup of black coffee in front of me. “What are your plans for today, darling?”

  I contemplated the cup like I was thinking of taking a sip, while I wondered how long I could avoid drinking before she asked me why I didn’t. Caffeine isn’t good for the baby, either, and then there was that gag reflex. “Lunch with Charlotte at noon. And then the party at six.”