Just in Case

By Elizabeth Marx

Work hard. Play hard. Love hard. That’s the Southern way.

Revell Marshall has built a life and career working with objects as fragile and damaged as Scarlett while reassembling the delicate stained glass windows that saved the small town of Crossroads, Alabama from ruin. He’s determined to do whatever it takes to lure the one girl he’s always loved back to Alabama, even if he has to rid the town of someone keeping her away. Once Scarlett returns, he’ll do anything to win her heart. Even if he has to help her piece together the facts of her mother’s past and expose old secrets he’d rather leave buried.

Stay clear of the past to protect the future. That’s the survivor’s way.

Scarlett Marbry a child prodigy, and an acclaimed Sacred Harp singer until the day her mother committed suicide knows she’s never been good enough for Revell. In the aftermath of tragedy, she refused to sing another note, running away from Crossroads and whatever pushed her mother over the edge. Seven years later family obligations and a long lost letter lure her back, but she’ll have to face the one she left behind and a horrible truth she never intended to encounter.

What if the love you thought would always be yours turns out to be forbidden?

You better hold tight to your heart...
Just in case.

Alabama Secret Series
Each book is a stand alone novel with crossover characters.
Just in Case Book 1
Just Close Enough Book 2

*New Adult*
**+17 due to language, sexual situations, and sensitive subject matter**

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elizabeth Marx
• Release date: Jun 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310812125

Elizabeth Marx

Windy City writer Elizabeth Marx brings cosmopolitan flair to her fiction, which is a blend of romance and fast-paced Chicago living with a sprinkle of magical realism. In her past incarnation she was an interior designer--not a decorator--which basically means she has a piece of paper to prove that she knows how to match and measure things and can miraculously make mundane pieces of furniture appear to be masterpieces. Elizabeth says being an interior designer is one part shrink, one part marriage counselor and one part artist, skills eerily similar to those employed in writing. Elizabeth grew up in Illinois and has also lived in Texas and Florida. If she’s not pounding her head against the wall trying to get the words just right, you can find her at a softball field out in the boonies or sitting in the bleachers by a basketball court. Elizabeth resides with her husband, girls, and two cats who’ve spelled everyone into believing they’re really dogs. Elizabeth has traveled extensively, but still says there’s no town like Chi-Town. You can contact the author at [e-mail] or visit her website www.elizabethmarxbooks.com

Book preview

JUST IN CASE

JUST IN CASE

Alabama Secrets Series Book 1

Elizabeth Marx

Elizabeth Marx Books

Contents

Scarlett’s Sacred Harp #29

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Scarlett’s Sacred Harp #435

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Scarlett’s Sacred Harp #33

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Scarlett’s Mazey Grace #1

A FEW WORDS ABOUT SACRED HARP

HOW YOU CAN SUPPORT INDIE AUTHORS

ALABAMA SECRETS SERIES

JUST CLOSE ENOUGH

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Elizabeth Marx

Also by Elizabeth Marx

Also by Elizabeth Marx

Copyright © 2013 by Elizabeth Marx

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are use fictitiously.

JUST IN CASE

Copyright © 2013 Elizabeth Marx Books

Editor: Melissa Ringsted, There For You Book Editing

http://thereforyoumelissa.blogspot.com

Cover Design: oh so Novel

https://design6569.wixsite.com/ohsonovel

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Created with Vellum

For anyone who has suffered the loss of his or her innocence at the hands of someone you trusted . . . may you not only survive the loss but also learn to thrive once again.

E

Scarlett’s Sacred Harp #29

In vain to heav’n she lifts her eyes

For guilt a heavy chain

Still drags her downward from the skies

To darkness, fire, and pain.

---

She is the daughter of suicide

For stain a blemish dark

Until we meet at Eastertide

For knowing, dire, and stark.

1

IF IT STARTS WITH MAMAW SAYS, WRITE IT DOWN, IT’S GOSPEL

SCARLETT MARBRY

---

All that was left of the preacher’s body was a few charcoal briquettes. The bearded fellow in front of me whispered to his cohort.

The greasy haired man took a swipe through his mullet. Couldn’t be more fitting for a man who preached Hell and Damnation out one side of his mouth while he was pouring moonshine on the flames coming out the other side.

Cross bastard, the beard said.

Mean son of a bitch, grease ball replied. Scary as fire and brimstone on meth.

The beard chuckled low in his gullet. Sure could keep a noose on his congregation though.

His women folk too.

As I blotted my tears, I forced myself to focus on the round stained glass window casting beautifully hued crimson, cobalt, and gold shadows over their caskets. I was feeling as trapped as the facets of colored glass held in place by their fine lead filaments. The last time I sat in this pew there was only a clear glass window in the chapel and it seemed unfair that now this round embellished window streamed beautiful prisms of color over my grandfather’s casket.

All I wanted was the letter promised me and I’d be gone from Crossroads forever. I glanced at the two mahogany coffins, one open and the other one closed.

Grandfather’s dead. Good riddance.

Mamaw’s dead. God rest her kind soul.

Mamaw means grandmother in the hilly backwoods of the Sand Mountain Region. At least Mamaw is now with my mother in Heaven and she isn’t alone anymore. That’s what concerned me most when Mazey Grace died; not that I was sixteen and parentless, not that I might have to bide my time under my grandfather’s strict roof, but that my mother would have to rest alone eternally. Unless she’d been cast in the fiery pit because she’d committed a mortal sin. No, God wouldn’t be that cruel to her. I’d always worried about her before myself I thought as I moved my sunglasses so I could dab at my eyes again.

I’ve always been anxious about everything but I wasn’t concerned about what part of Hell my grandfather, Preston Marbry, was now residing in. I was just happy he was there and far away from the women who raised me. It was more than a coincidence that my grandparents died on the anniversary of my mother’s suicide, but I wasn’t quite ready to face those questions yet.

Wedged into the corner of the last pew furthest from the aisle, my mind racing with all these thoughts, when I felt someone’s gaze at the nape of my neck. I refused to turn and see who it was. I’d had enough dirty looks since I’d arrived in Alabama and I was happy to hide behind the anonymity of my super-sized shades and the netting of my black pillbox hat.

No one knows exactly how the house caught fire, Auntie Delta said to the person she greeted right outside the entrance to the chapel, less than two yards away.

A deep voice cleared his throat before he spoke, What happened?

Preston was burned alive in the back bedroom. Maybe one of his cigars. Auntie’s voice quivered. My sister, Oglear, died in her rocking chair in the front room of smoke inhalation, and there wasn’t much of the house left. The strange thing is, Oglear left trinkets out under her Sequoia tree for Scarlett.

Scarlett? The man asked on a hitched breath before he evened out his tone and asked, They believe it was an accident?

The deep tenor of the voice pooled in the center of my chest and its call forced me to turn and see whom Auntie was speaking to but all I could see was a broad pair of shoulders in a navy blazer. His sandy hair curled over his collar, he had long sideburns, and a strong jaw. He raised his hand and rubbed the back of his neck as if he was uncomfortable and, for some reason, I couldn’t pull my eyes away as his fingertips brushed the tiny hairs on his neck. The tiny hairs on my body rose in response as if they were synced. He spoke a few more words, which I didn’t catch, and then he leaned in and Auntie kissed his cheek.

That’s when I realized who he was.

I couldn’t help myself; an audible gasp escaped my lips as my heart rate accelerated.

Another blue haired lady across the aisle clucked her disapproval, whether it was to my latest sound effects or at the fat Marbry cousin barreling into the chapel late with his tie undone I couldn’t tell.

Auntie dropped her voice to a caustic level and continued whispering to Revell.

Revell Marshall was in Alabama? He was supposed to be long gone from here. It had been a long time and I wasn’t supposed to recognize him, as if my body could ever forget. I wasn’t supposed to moon over him or ever consider what might have been. At least that’s what Mamaw told me, and what I’d forced myself to believe. Because believing Revell and me had ever been anything more than friends was wishing upon a star, a star in a galaxy light years beyond my own.

My hearing strained to filter between the notes of the drone ecclesiastical music lapping over the waves of whispered words of condolence to catch another note of his deep voice. I was attempting to eavesdrop on Auntie’s murmured conversation again because I wasn’t going to stare, even though I wanted to, but I glanced around and eyes were on me, always on me, and if they caught me looking at Revell someone might misconstrue it.

But I couldn’t stand not knowing what was going on behind me, so I stretched, straining my neck to find Revell and his navy blazer moving toward the exit. My heart plummeted. I glanced at Auntie; she was my mamaw’s oldest sister and she was giving one of Preston’s brothers, a small hunched man, an earful of something sour, or so the curl of his lips said. Auntie was a maiden aunt who raised her illegitimate son alone just like my mother had raised me. It was a bond they shared but Auntie was a tell-it-like-it-is woman and my mother was a wishy-washy secret keeper. I often felt as close to Auntie as I was to Mamaw and could never figure out why Mamaw sometimes held me at an arm’s length, while Auntie always wrapped me in the security of her love.

The small chapel was jam-packed with both Marbrys and Woodhams. Were they lured here by Preston’s perceived holiness? It was more likely that even in death they dreaded his reprisals. Preston was always preaching about things that put fear in the hearts of men. Or maybe they were hoping for a blessing of some of his bounty, although I couldn’t imagine there would be much left from a holier than thou revivalist preacher.

The only reason I’d come all the way from Chicago was to collect a letter promised me and to say good-bye to Mamaw. Any goodness I had learned in this world was certainly passed onto me from the softly spoken wisdom she guided her only daughter with. I’d also come out of a sense of relief . . . relief that with the lid of his coffin closed, just maybe, I could finally seal the door closed on the past. Maybe I could move on, after this funeral I would never drive the red clay roads of Alabama again. I would forget my summers and Christmas holidays spent here that brought me such anticipation of being with my friends Mandy and Polly Anna. Maybe I would even forget the exaltation and wonder I felt while I wandered the countryside of my mother’s youth with Revell Marshall, the one man I’d never been able to incinerate from my consciousness.

Perhaps with Preston’s death I could let go of all the answers I still sought. Possibly I could bury my burning desire to know what burden was so great that my mother thought death was her only way out and I could accept that I’d never know who my father was. Maybe there were no answers as to why my mother boarded a Greyhound bus on a snowy Friday in Chicago and rode all the way back here to kill herself on Sunday morning other than her battle with depression.

If there were answers they would now be buried in the Alabama soil covering my grandparents’ final resting place, on either side of my mother. The question of her suicide was as complicated as why Mazey Grace loved and feared her father, Preston, in equal measure. As complex as why she went out of her way to make me despise my grandfather, a man the small town of Crossroads hid their fear of behind a tattered screen of high esteem.

The scent of burnt coffee and Revell’s hasty exodus beckoned me to the exit like orange cones to a detour sign. I forced myself not to fidget and watched the faces of my kin parade by, sizing me up in my black dress, hat, and heels that cost more than a week’s worth of groceries for most of them.

These great-aunts, great-uncles, and cousins, even the seconds and thirds, hadn’t seen me since my visit the Christmas before I turned seventeen. On that occasion I was in Crossroads Memorial Chapel but I wasn’t quietly crying in a pew with my hands folded in my lap. Back then, I screamed and tried to claw my way into the casket with my mother. I wanted to curl up and die alongside her because I’d seen my mother do something no child should ever imagine. She was the only parent I had ever known and the only place I wanted to be was with her. I didn’t care I was making a spectacle of myself, or so Mamaw whispered in my ear. Then she said resolutely, Grandfather wouldn’t like you airing your mama’s dirty laundry in town.

Later, I hated myself for what I’d done next, but I’d looked her in the eye and said, I hate Preston. I spoke with as much venom as I’d often heard my mother screech those words within her sleep, or bellow them at the height of her mania.

In response Mamaw squeezed me to her, holding me tight. Finally, I stopped fighting her and she swiped my tears away. When I looked up at her and asked forgiveness Mamaw’s smile was as sweet as Sand Mountain’s best Sorghum syrup, which she poured across freshly baked biscuits for me that very morning. Her calm demeanor was as serene that day as the smile reaching out for me from her open mahogany coffin today.

I fiddled with a necklace Mamaw had somehow managed to leave for me, stored in a cigar box of trinkets and then stuffed inside a man’s old work boot. The necklace was a rectangular piece of cobalt stained glass, fitted in a silver frame with a filigree fan shape attached at the bottom. It wasn’t painted to look like a stained glass window; it was a miniature stained glass window. I’d held it up to the sunlight enough times since yesterday’s sunrise to know its facets intimately.

Also in that same cigar box were Mamaw’s hair combs. Mamaw had beautiful silver hair and I never saw her once without those combs holding her hair in some style. I was surprised by how light but sturdy they were and even more surprised when I turned them over and saw ‘Tiffany’ stamped in the silver. My mother’s hand written Sacred Harp songbook was inside the box too, but I wasn’t prepared for the old piece of newsprint fitted into the bottom. It was faded, as if someone had left it out in the sunlight to bleach the words away, but scrawled in my grandmother’s elegant script were these words, ‘There is no stain, my dear Scarlett, just light from within.’

How could Mamaw leave me these trinkets I’d always treasure unless she knew she was going to die?

But there was no letter from my mother and perhaps this journey was all for nothing. I’d have to leave without the suicide note. I got to my feet without making eye contact, signing the guest book, or speaking my final farewells.

In my mind’s eye the questions luring me Deep South, to this Podunk town atop the southwestern edge of the Appalachian Mountains, now etched themselves onto the neatly contained piece of glass hanging from my neck. The delicate pane of glass seemed to match the extraordinary window mesmerizing me only moments ago. I buried all my unanswered heartache in that piece of glass as its blank reflection stared back at me. I accepted deep within my own heart that the answers I sought might be so dark that light would not be able to filter through them. Determined to never heed the call of darkness again, I would wait till I got to my rental car before I cried and screamed and raged with the burden of the loss of my mamaw, the woman who’d so gently formed me in her likeness.

As I moved past a confused looking funeral director and a concerned Auntie, I mumbled, I hate Preston Marbry and I have so many reasons why!

2

BLESS HER HEART, SHE CAN’T HELP SHE’S NOT SOUTHERN

REVELL MARSHALL

---

She pushed through the front door, the tail of her trench coat flapping out around her like a backwoods banshee. In my twenty-eight years, I’d never seen the combination of heels that high, legs that long, or a strut that confident. Certainly someone like her wouldn’t stroll across the floor of Three Sips Distillery. I ducked into the storage room so I could watch her without being seen.

I’d caught a glance of her earlier at the wake, but she had been dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. This was the last place a woman like her belonged. My bar was formerly called Down and Out. I was doing everything within my power to diminish the image, but her presence mocked me. Crossroads was only one of three towns in the county that wasn’t dry, thus the name Three Sips.

My gaze swept over the woman again. It would take more than three sips of good whiskey to take the edge off the scenarios burning through my imagination at the sight of her. It was lust, unexplainable, mind-boggling, burning hot lust, for a perfect stranger.

I’d swear the lights flickered the moment her fingertips left the panic bar and the jukebox came to life on Aerosmith’s Janie’s Got a Gun as she stepped over the threshold.

I wasn’t expecting any patrons at this hour of the evening, especially a black clad peacock who looked like she’d stepped off the pages of a Prada catalog and made a wrong turn somewhere near the design center in Atlanta.

Even though it was Saturday evening everyone in this town was at P.M.’s wake. P.M. stood for Preston Marbry, a.k.a. Preacher Man, but we called him P.M. because it was what he was up to in the p.m. that identified him as the drunken, moonshine-selling, slime ball he was. Everybody was paying his or her respects, except for Polly Anna and me. After I’d stopped by and spoken with Miss Delta, I returned to the bar and asked Polly Anna if she wouldn’t rather go on and say her goodbyes and then have the evening off. I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what you were doing on the side of the mountain, she said.

Wouldn’t be prudent, was my reply before turning away.

She’d given me a snort of derision and an angry collision of her eyebrows that brooked no further interaction from me. I’d walked back to the liquor storage room to take a quick inventory of what we’d need when the real wake began. The Marbrys would insist on bootlegged whiskey, pressed from Preston’s own still, and it would be passed from hand-to-hand as insincere praises slipped from their lubricated lips.

When the door opened, Polly Anna looked up from washing miniature Mason jars, but didn’t speak a word as the young woman approached the bar. The peacock eased on to a swivel barstool, crossing her legs with the grace of a Southern debutante, while she tossed the large black pocketbook on the sticky bar top carelessly. I wasn’t an expert in women’s accessories but I knew her purse, which was like a small luggage, reeked expensive. I’d shopped enough with my sister, Mandy, to know. That bag was sized larger than most diaper bags for twins and the leather was probably as silky as a baby’s freshly powdered bottom.

Her face was angular with fine skin, and familiar to me, but the oversized sunglasses and ridiculous hat with netting prevented me from figuring out exactly whom she looked like. She removed the hat and it looked like a black widow spider sitting on the bar. She started pulling pins from the back of her head, wincing as she did. Then she ran her fingers through her hair and scratched at her scalp until the entire dark mass framed her face.

A double Spiced Boxed Whisky on the rocks, she said politely as she started pulling her elbow-length leather gloves off by the fingertips.

I couldn’t help myself, I watched her, as transfixed as Polly Anna was. The young woman’s movements were so practiced and elegant I couldn’t look away. She started at the index finger and loosened the glove at the tip of her finger before moving on to her middle finger, then her ring finger, then her pinky, and finally her thumb. Once she had the silk lining loosened, she gave a gentle tug on the tip of her middle finger and the glove gave way grudgingly, as if the leather was sore to lose the comfort of the captivating and perfectly manicured hand it was concealing.

She removed the second glove in exactly the same manner before she bothered looking back up at Polly Anna, who stood as still as a wax figure in a museum. The woman slipped her dark, oversized sunglasses partway down her perfectly formed patrician nose and examined Polly Anna from her golden headed mop of hair all the way to the her oversized belt buckle, not missing a detail in between.

I thought Uh-oh, ’cause Polly Anna didn’t take shit from anyone, that’s why she was the only barmaid I’d ever hired. Three Sips Distillery might now host a beautiful southern interior — from the uneven floorboards I’d pulled from an old barn in Guntersville, to the new bar I’d hand stained and fitted with custom stained glass, to the twinkling Christmas lights that danced around the perimeter of the room — but the patrons were still a little rough around the edges. The sweet, but at times surly, barmaid who’d been tough enough to cut off every redneck in shit kickers with enough nerve to start slurring his words wasn’t going to take kindly to a prissy stranger.

The young woman gave Polly Anna a soft smile of encouragement and said, Sweetheart, it’s emptier than a hog pen on Easter Sunday in here, do you think you can pour me that drink?

Polly Anna burst out laughing, which was usual in a woman as optimistic as our Polly Anna, but something I hadn’t heard from her in a long time. Polly Anna’s reaction, combined with the woman’s nasally Yankee accent spewing the Southern saying confidently, had me totally transfixed. That and the fact that I was dying for her to take off her coat so I could see if what it was keeping warm was as fine as what I’d seen so far.

I don’t know if it was what the young woman said or the fact that such a fancy lady said it, but Polly Anna couldn’t stop chuckling and snorting as she moved to the liquor well, filled a glass with ice, and poured the whiskey without necessity of a shot glass.

The young woman pulled her sunglasses the rest of the way down her nose and placed one of the stems of the glasses between her perfectly formed teeth. She bit into them.

I swallowed. Hard. Realization dawning.

Holy Heaven, Mary and Joseph. Sister Scarlett Marbry’s fancy self was sitting in my bar.

You have raccoon eyes and Miss Piggy’s nose, Polly Anna said as she picked up the drink and looked down the length of the bar in either direction as if searching for something. I stepped back so she wouldn’t see me spying on them. When Polly Anna didn’t locate what she was looking for, she turned to the antique bar-back I’d traveled two hundred miles to salvage, and pulled one of the custom-made stained glass doors open. She bent inside one of the cabinets and rummaged around, pulling something bright canary yellow out. She slapped in down in front of Scarlett.

I cringed.

Our finely embellished napkins for your tears. They’re leftovers from Early Robert’s bachelor party, but you won’t mind the oversized teats will you? Polly Anna asked.

Scarlett picked up the napkin and dabbed under her eyes. Are they heifer teats or hog teats? she asked as she swiped at her nose. Then she pulled her arms out of the half sleeves of her coat. Only a Yankee would wear a trench coat with half the sleeves cut off; for them it was probably high fashion, but for me it just seemed highfalutin.

Eyeing the deep plunge at the front of Scarlett’s black dress, I thought neither heifer nor hog, nor are they as lovely as yours.

Scarlett picked up her glass and saluted Polly Anna before she placed the rim against her lips. She threw her head back and downed the contents. She had the most beautiful profile in silhouette; perfectly arched Cherokee cheekbones, a pair of dark, deep-set sultry eyes, and a bustline that made it hard for me to manufacture saliva.

Lordy, lordy I’m surprised you showed up for P.M.’s funeral, Polly Anna said, glancing around as if nervous.

Swallowing a heavyhearted breath, I tried to forgive her for not coming back here when my daddy died.

I came for Mamaw and I want my mother’s suicide note. Scarlett swirled the ice around in her glass. Since when do you call him P.M. instead of Preacher Man?

In the a.m. he preaches and in the p.m. he leaches.

Scarlett slammed the glass on the bar, backhanded her mouth, and mumbled, Now that’s a sermon I can warm up to.

I had a few go rounds with your granddaddy over snake handling and I decided I wasn’t going to be scared of the man.

Scarlett pushed her glass toward Polly Anna. I’ll have another to celebrate.

You’ll be drunker than a skunk at a perfume convention if you keep that up. Polly Anna crossed her arms over her middle and said, I did make sure the secret Santa gifts will still be distributed tomorrow.

Thanks for taking care of that. Scarlett swallowed and blinked a few times. Although things might have turned out differently if I’d come back like Mamaw asked.

You can’t blame yourself for everything that happens on Look Out Mountain. Polly Anna offered, and it was good advice as she leaned closer to where Scarlett was seated. And if this isn’t the saddest sort of welcome I’ve ever received—

I decided it was time to make my presence known. I picked up the case of bootlegged whiskey and started around the corner. At the same time Scarlett stood up on the front rail of her barstool and threw her arms wide, making her bangle bracelets sing along her toned forearms. As she leaned over the bar to throw her arms around Polly Anna, I got an exceptional view of the slit that ran up the back of her dress. And her silky legs. And her toned backside.

Just as she was squeezing all of the air out of Polly Anna, I ended up directly behind her. I could see all the way up her dress, to the lacy top of her black thigh highs and into the dark silk wilderness beyond.

Struggling for oxygen I lost my footing and careened into a table just as Polly said, I’ve missed you, Scarlett.

Sister Scarlett Marbry. P.M.’s granddaughter. The daughter of the most celebrated beauty queen that had ever been birthed in Marshall County. Not many had seen hide nor hair of Scarlett since her mother’s burial, but even on that sad day, every man in the surrounding five counties knew Scarlett would one day outshine her mother’s magnificence.

I was completely shocked that she’d come back! Polly Anna was keeping secrets. Maybe this is why she hasn’t made a frontal assault on me about being up at Copperhead Tabernacle.

I managed to not drop the liquor. When I was directly behind Scarlett’s barstool, I looked up to meet the gaze she threw over her shoulder at the sound of my clumsy approach. Her eyes weren’t brown, they were purple . . . as purple as the violets I’d picked for her the day her mother had been laid to rest on Look Out Mountain. Her hair and lashes as brown as the mountain soil they’d overturned for her mama’s grave. Her lips were as red as the canned cherries I’d bought from Piggly Wiggly so Miss Mabel could bake them a pie because I knew cherry was Scarlett’s favorite.

Revell? she hissed, as if confused. Her perfectly formed mouth was frozen in the shape of an ‘O’.

My name on her lips hit me like a F150 clocked over the speed limit, impacting the center of my chest in a head on collision. I had forgotten what a simple look from Sister Scarlett Marbry could do to a man. Possibly because the last time she’d looked at me she was only the outline of the woman she would one day be. At eighteen, she was a mere shadow of the gorgeous woman leaning over the bar in front of me now.

Scarlett considered her barely restrained backside and tried to turn and reclaim her seat. Unfortunately, the snakeskin stilettos she was wearing had the slippery intent of the evildoer in the Garden of Eden, and Scarlett slithered onto the stool with enough force that the barstool fell backwards.

Known throughout the state of Alabama for both my gentlemanly behavior and my athletic grace, but even I wasn’t capable of discarding the crate of whiskey fast enough to stop Scarlett’s head from colliding with the table behind her on her way to the floor. Plus, I couldn’t chance breaking the mason jars of what would be P.M.’s last batch of hooch because I wanted his final send off and everything associated with him wiped from the minds of Marshall County as if he’d never existed. The moonshine would expedite the process.

Now here, at my booted feet, fell the last of his progeny, the one thing about him I’d allowed myself to remember and remember well.

The only thing that came from him worth having . . . and Heaven help me . . . as inappropriate as it was I still wanted to have her.

3

MY MAMAW SAYS: WHY DON’T YOU SWEEP AROUND YOUR OWN DOORSTEP?

SCARLETT

---

Mortification.

The pain from the clunk on the head was nothing compared to the indignity of being sprawled out on the newly polished floor of what had once been a dive. A double whiskey had knocked me on my backside, which had been thoroughly ogled by the absolute last guy on earth I’d ever imagined ogling me. It was the chiseled face of the man I’d never imagined seeing when I returned to Alabama, staring at me now. The guy whose eyes appeared to be torn between calculating my immediate life expectancy and the thin slash of flesh exposed above the top of my thigh-high hose to the hem of my designer dress.

The face of the guy who was all-wrong for me, too old for me. The one who came from the world that would forever be beyond the grasp of my backwoods genealogy, at least that’s what Mamaw told me. And Auntie confirmed it with her muttering disapproval.

Scarlett, are you all right? a deep teasing voice, that sent twitching through my limbs, asked.

I’d closed my eyes when I’d turned and caught him checking out my backside, that’s why I’d catapulted backwards and off the barstool like the opening act at a Cirque de Soleil show. I peeked through one eye to make sure it was him. It was. His voice had always been deeper than the other boys I knew because, in reality, he was a man even back then.

I’m seeing things, I managed to squeak out.

He grumbled something unintelligible or maybe I just couldn’t hear or see straight.

Revell Reynold Marshall was twenty-three years old the last time I’d seen him, the winter of my senior year of high school. Four grades apart because I was always too smart for my own good, but five years apart in age because God had thought it fair to make me jailbait to the sweetest boy I’d ever kissed behind the wood pile. Back when I still believed that the truth about where I came from and who I was didn’t make a difference.

Opening my other eye so I could narrow it as I glared at Polly Anna. She leaned over the bar, grinning like a one-eyed rooster quarantined in a hen house for the blind and indigent.

I’ll get some ice for that bump, Polly Anna squawked. The one on the back of your head. ’Cause there ain’t enough ice in Iceland for the wound to your pride.

Why didn’t you warn me? I hissed at Polly Anna before I turned to Revell and managed to say, I’m fine, I think, but damn my head feels as if it’s been fired through a Confederate cannon.

She didn’t warn me either. Revell chuckled. I didn’t know the Rebs used Yankee Doodle Dandy’s head for cannon fodder.

If they would have the South might have won the war. Yankees are a tenacious breed. I started to squirm around to straighten my dress.

Revell placed his large hands on my waist — as if to assist me to my feet, which only forced the hem of my dress up further. That’s the Cherokee blood in your veins that makes you stubborn, not the Yankee, he said, glancing at his hands on me before he cleared his throat.

The sheer strength of his touch startled me. I slapped his hands away as I struggled with my dress. The designer garment had never reached my knees, so it was a battle I was as destined to lose as the Rebs were the long battle at Day’s Gap.

Revell smirked but refused to look away from my face, pretending to be the accommodating Southern gentleman his mother had raised him to be.

What are you doing here anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be building skyscrapers in the middle of Asia? I asked.

Revell raised an eyebrow. Aren’t you supposed to be Miss America?

Who says I’m not? I huffed as I managed to get my stocking clad feet under me. I looked around for my traitorous shoes but when I tried to focus the room spun. Revell caught my wrist before I was polishing the floor with my backside for a second time.

He guided me onto another barstool. Those high-rise shoes you’re walking in are about to get you killed, he said, looking down at the raised welt on the inside of my wrist.

Placing my other hand over the half-inch circle I had burned into my wrist I chastised myself for taking off the gloves. I closed my eyes and exhaled, still remembering the intense pleasure I felt when I’d first scorched the delicate skin.

Revell squeezed my wrist and my eyes popped open. I can run track in those shoes. I brought my hand to my head to stop the spinning and to draw Revell’s attention away from my wrists. It’s these slippery floors and I think your barstool was booby trapped.

The barstool wasn’t designed for standing on, Revell growled as he righted the stool. After retrieving my shoes he knelt at my feet, his grip encircled my entire ankle as he steered each foot back into the high heels. Then he looked up at me with those very serious eyes. I was sorry to hear about your loss.

I let my forehead fall forward onto the bar top and moaned. The sight of him had actually made me forget why I’d been lured back to this godforsaken little town for a few minutes. Or maybe that was the whiskey, maybe it was the clunk on the head, or maybe it was the rough fingertips of the most beautiful man I’d ever known stroking my ankle. Only half of it’s worth being sorry over, I mumbled into the marble.

You aren’t feeling nauseous, are you? Revell stood, leaned in, and asked, as if concerned.

"As a matter of fact at the mere mention of him I am," I murmured.

What’s that? Revell asked, leaning over me and placing his hand on the small of my back so he could hear me.

I said, where the hell is Polly Anna with the ice?

Gentle fingertips brushed the hair off the back of my neck and his minty breath blew what strands were left away. His touch was familiar and drew the same response from my body: high alert. I shivered at the contact, but cold blasted through my impure thoughts as Polly Anna dropped a baggie of ice on the back of my neck.

Lifting my head I rested my chin on the bar. Spiced Boxed Whisky straight up, Polly Anna, and keep them coming.

Absolutely not! You probably have a concussion and the last thing you need is to exasperate the problem with alcohol, Revell said.

Turning toward the deep Southern twang of Revell’s voice I said, Please don’t tell me you’re a doctor.

He shook his head no but Polly Anna chuckled while pretending to stock the bar.

Lawyer? I raised an eyebrow. I’d like to sue whoever owns this dump.

I’m a business man. Revell looked around. I own this establishment.

You went to the University of Alabama to be an architect, I insisted, as if by saying the words I could explain his sudden appearance when I expected him to be thousands of miles away.

You went to Chicago and disappeared, he snapped back, obviously angry with me for insulting his place.

I was just kidding about suing you. I sat up, holding the ice against the back of my head. You want me to sign a waiver or something?

For the record, I went to Bama to play football. Revell retrieved the crate of whiskey he had been unable to drop when I careened backwards and started around to the other side of the bar. Is getting everything in writing always a must with you?

Are they still passing out cheerleaders at football two-a-days? I