Wild Midnight Page 5

  Rachel doubted it. As far as she was concerned Beaumont Tillson was dangerous. And violent. And nothing that had happened in this office had reassured her.

  “We don’t have much time,” she reminded the lawyer. “We really must use the road, especially to bring the tractor in again to cultivate the tomato plants in a few weeks, when the weeds begin to appear.” She frowned. “It seems we’re a long way from even negotiating. And we are right, under the law. I have taken time to look it up, and there is no record that the road has been closed off for forty-eight hours every year to keep it private property.”

  The lawyer looked at her oddly. “Mrs. Brinton, I hope you don’t mind my saying you are a very persistent young woman. It certainly rubs Beau Tillson the wrong way. We may go about things a little differently here in the South than, say, in Philadelphia. After you’ve been here awhile you’ll understand that at times we beat about the bush, let the dust settle, smooth things out, and talk a lot before we get back to the point.” He smiled. “Sometimes we don’t even get to the point, or so it seems to outsiders. We place a great deal of importance on letting things work themselves out. As for the matter at hand—I’m beginning to believe we might be running Beau Tillson to the wall a bit by insisting that he’s got to give in to what you people think you’ve a right to. Do you follow me?”

  “I don’t see how,” Rachel replied.

  He only smiled. “Until we get Beau out of that corner, he’s going to be harder to deal with than a sore-eyed bear. And just repeating that he doesn’t seem to know the law isn’t going to help matters either. I want your promise,” the lawyer said, getting up, “that you’ll let me handle this.”

  Rachel stepped out into the lawyer’s parking lot to a warm gust of wind and a sudden, hard spring rain. She couldn’t help a little moan of dismay. She had dressed carefully for this meeting in her good tailored suit of fine moss-green wool and her one and only best pair of handmade calfskin pumps and matching handbag, but she had no umbrella. It seemed appropriate that the disastrous morning should end with this, a good soaking of her best clothes. She wore her hair tightly coiled on top of her head in its rather prim, braided coronet. At least the wet, she tried to console herself, couldn’t reduce her hair now to a banshee’s bush of wild red curls, as it usually did. It was already frizzing where it escaped in tendrils around her cheeks and the back of her neck.

  With a sigh for the expensive leather purse she held over her head as a shield, Rachel started across the parking lot at a quick pace. She was so absorbed in hurrying, her head down, that she didn’t see the figure of a man until he stepped out from behind a battered jeep. She suppressed a yelp of sheer fright just in time.

  “I’m not through with you,” Beaumont Tillson growled. His large hand shot out to grab Rachel’s wrist, knocking the covering pocketbook away from her face.

  The rain trickled down through the separated strands of his sun-streaked hair and into fine, straight dark brows. Rachel caught the full impact of his narrowed glittering look as he bent his head to her.

  “I haven’t got time to fool with you, lady.” Drops of water hung suspended in tangled dark lashes. “Three hundred dollars is my offer. You can sign a waiver when I give you the money that you won’t use my road.”

  Was he mad? Rachel wondered. Truly crazy? At the moment he looked it. “G-get out of my way,” she said, her voice quavering. She carefully did not try to wrench her hand free from the hard grip that imprisoned it. In the rain, through the wetness of their soaked clothing, she was aware of the sharpened scent of the man’s body, his hair, the soapy aroma of clean male skin. Rachel’s nerves jumped. He was much too close, holding her, threatening her, when all she wanted was to get to her car. “What are you doing?” she cried. “Let go of me!”

  His eyes dropped to her soft, partly opened lips. “Why don’t you go back where you came from,” he muttered, “and leave me alone?” A long moment passed, and then the look lifted to her eyes. “You’re causing me a lot of trouble, lady, and I haven’t got time to fool with you. I’m offering you three hundred dollars.”

  “That’s idiotic,” Rachel cried. The long hard shape of his thighs were pressed against her; his lower body left a distracting imprint on her own. She was suddenly and incongruously aware of the picture they must make to anyone passing by—a tall man in a soaked business suit and an equally wet young woman trying to shield her head with a pocketbook, pressed tightly together for all the world like lovers having some sort of quarrel.

  She tried to break away from him. “You must talk to Pembroke Screven, the lawyer. Call him and make an appointment!”

  With an infuriated movement he jammed her tightly against him, crushing her struggles. “Listen, do you think this whole thing is some sort of joke?” His other hand grabbed Rachel’s throat, long fingers holding her easily. That jeweled look was only inches from hers. “I can’t have a public road into Belle Haven—it’s an open door to any developer that wants to get in. Damn, are you listening?”

  Rachel stood frozen, her face gone white, the dark velvet of her eyes deepened and wide. Pembroke Screven could deny all he wished that this man was not violent, nor dangerous, but the feel of that angry grip on her throat and the glitter of frustrated fury on that handsome face told her otherwise. The pressure of his hard fingers dug into her soft skin; when she swallowed they seemed to dig against her windpipe, making a growing buzzing in her ears. It occurred to her that he didn’t know how tightly he was holding her. A strange, floating stillness enveloped them, enclosed by the thrumming rain.

  “Hell,” she heard him say. His fingers quickly released her throat. His arm still held her tightly, his head bent. Rachel had a blurred glimpse of satiny skin over hard cheekbones, the thick fringe of dark lashes lowering, the sensuous, curving mouth too close. His breath brushed her lips. “Hell,” the husky voice murmured, “why not?”

  Beau Tillson’s mouth closed over hers.

  It was a seizure by warm, masculine lips that punished, that dominated her mouth with almost reflexive expertise. He moved into her startled gasp quickly, his tongue thrusting deep into her mouth to overwhelm any resistance. Rachel went rigid under the sensuous onslaught. This man had kissed too many women; it was a trick, she realized with a rush of blind shock. A joke. It ravished without ardor, almost scornfully assured of success. And, she found, she was not immune; her knees actually buckled as that practiced electricity leaped from his lips into hers.

  It took several stunned seconds before she realized that he shifted subtly, changing as his kiss raised some buried desire deep within him. His hands left their painful grip on her upper arms to slide around to her back. Incredibly, she heard a low, hungry noise in his throat, mixed with surprise. It had to be surprise—his tongue swept into her mouth, hot and fierce, caressing her as though he would devour her, get enough of her before the sensation faded away. When it didn’t, when she clung to him, trembling helplessly, that golden gaze darkened. His arms tightened, simply pulling her to him as his thighs opened to bring her in contact with the wet front of his suit and the pressure of his obvious arousal.

  Rachel was almost witless with his wild assault on her senses. She had never experienced the feel of such exploding, irrational sexuality, or the sensations it awakened in her. He mumbled something hurriedly against her mouth, his teeth teasing her lower lip as his hands slipped to her bottom, fingers grabbing to pull her against his legs. But as his thighs clamped her legs between them, Rachel felt a jolt of revulsion.

  What was she doing? It was ugly and awkward, she didn’t want this to be happening with a violence totally alien to her, Rachel threw up her arms, flailing wildly, jerking away from him so quickly that she broke free.

  “Stop it!” she cried. She reeled backward into the rain, holding her hand to her burning lips.

  Before he could grab her again she frantically found her pocketbook and hurled herself away. She lunged through the puddles to her car, tore the door open and threw
herself into the front seat. Rachel slammed the door behind her and pressed down the lock. She was shaking as she scrabbled for the ignition keys in her purse.

  Beau Tillson had followed her around to the driver’s side. She saw him bend in the slanting downpour to slam his hand against the window. “Open up,” he shouted. “Open the door and let me in. I need to talk to you!”

  She tore through the compartments in her purse frantically, looking for her keys. She had to get out of there before he did anything else. “I can’t talk to you now,” Rachel screamed at him.

  It was beyond belief. He had mauled her, kissed her, right there outside the lawyer’s office! She was genuinely frightened. Whatever had happened had slipped beyond her control, beyond anything rational. She was shaking so hard she could hardly fit the ignition key into its slot.

  “Call Pembroke Screven.” She wouldn’t even turn to look at him as he bent to beat his fist on the glass of the car window. “Call the lawyer!” she yelled.

  The engine started at once. Rachel backed her car at full speed, flooring the gas pedal. She saw him jump out of the way. She threw the Toyota into Drive and shot out of the parking lot and into Draytonville’s main street, sending a sheet of water into the air.

  She was so wet she was dripping all over the inside of the car. Something had happened that she couldn’t believe. This man had actually waylaid her on her way to her car and had forced himself on her! She was so stunned she couldn’t be angry.

  The station wagon rocketed around the corner to the state highway, and Rachel took her foot off the gas pedal, just missing a truck looming up out of the rain. The memory of the scent of his skin, that remarkable face, the taste of him, still confounded her. The lawyer, Pembroke Screven, had certainly known what he was talking about when he had warned her to stay away from Beau Tillson.

  Chapter Four

  It was still raining when Rachel walked into her house, and the telephone was ringing. The call was from Billy Yonge, curious to learn about the outcome of the meeting with Beaumont Tillson.

  For a moment Rachel was tempted to be blunt and accusatory: if he had been with her at the lawyer’s office, she wouldn’t have had a humiliating encounter with Beaumont Tillson in the parking lot afterward. Instead, standing by the wall telephone, still in her wet clothes that dripped and made a large puddle on the plastic tiles of the kitchen floor, Rachel limited herself to a “no progress” report with few details, and let it go at that. But she was still upset. Her hand shook as she hung up the telephone.

  A few minutes later Til Coffee called from the high school. “What’s wrong, Miz Rachel?” he asked. “You don’t sound like things went too fine. Any problems?”

  Rachel sighed. She was tempted to tell him that she’d been treated like a vulnerable female that morning, and it rankled her. She needed a shoulder to lean on, someone to tell about the encounters with Beau. But she decided it wasn’t fair to involve good, generous Til. Besides, she didn’t want to confess that she’d let Draytonville’s most notorious character waylay her outside the lawyer’s office. The incident was hardly something to inspire confidence in her as the cooperative’s executive secretary.

  At last she spoke. “It wasn’t a smashing success,” she admitted. “Beaumont Tillson wanted to offer the co-op three hundred dollars to stop using the road, and he really didn’t want to negotiate, even when the lawyer asked him to.” She hesitated. “He certainly doesn’t waste any time being polite.”

  “Beau’s a hothead,” Til said. “If he can’t get what he wants one way, he’ll try some of that famous Beau Devil magic. He offered you money? He must be a reformed character, Miz Rachel. In the old days he would have offered to date you up and let you know he was doing you a favor.”

  There was an awkward silence. Rachel said even more carefully, “I’m really concerned that the co-op’s having trouble with him, Til. Mr. Screven told me of his, uh, war experiences.”

  To her surprise Til laughed. “Oh, Miz Rachel, that ‘crazy Vietnam vet’ thing is long gone. It was never true, anyway, not for the majority of troops that came home. It was just good stuff to make movies out of. Besides, Beau was one wild article long before Vietnam happened to him, and I told you why, didn’t I? He had a deprived childhood. In technicolor.”

  Rachel didn’t find it funny. “I’m hoping we didn’t make things worse. He ... I think he’s a violent, unstable man.” In a less than steady voice she went on, “What really bothers me is that the co-op is going to need to use the road this week. Mr. Screven said he would try to handle this for us, and see if he could talk to Beaumont Tillson soon. In fact he insisted on doing it himself.”

  “That’s a smart move. You can trust Poke Screven,” Til assured her. “He’s as straight-arrow as they come, true southern gentleman, handshake as good as his bond, word of honor and all that fine stuff. As a matter of fact, Screven used to date Beau’s mama, Miss Clarissa, back in the good old days, making your usual southern small-town connections. They told you about small town connections here in the South, when you took this job, didn’t they, Miz Rachel? That means there’s always something you don’t know about, but that you’re going to find out about eventually, probably when you least want to.”

  It was a typical Til Coffee statement, delivered in his usual bantering tone, and Rachel didn’t know what it meant. Leaning up against the wall with the receiver clamped to her ear, she said wearily, “I don’t understand. What do you mean, ‘find out about when you don’t want to’?”

  “Uh-oh, there goes the class bell. I gotta go in a minute. I mean Pembroke Screven will lean over backward to do just about anything for Beau Tillson—he treats him like his own son because Beau and Poke Junior were inseparable, right up to the time they went to Vietnam. Only Poke Junior didn’t come back. Now Beau’s sort of a substitute for the son Screven lost. Do you follow me? Or look at it this way—Poke Junior might have been the one to come back and Beau the one to die, if things hadn’t turned out differently. Only how could you, being a straight-arrow southern gentleman and one of the county’s most respected citizens, living in the same town, seeing Beau Tillson day after day, be any other way than upright and forgiving and even loving? You think about that,” he said, “because right now I gotta go.”

  Rachel did think about it. As she sat down at a desk cluttered with the cooperative’s paperwork she found herself absorbed by what Til had said about Beau Tillson and Poke Screven. Belle Haven’s owner and the lawyer’s son had gone to Vietnam together. Beaumont Tillson had come back and Poke Junior had not. Was Til saying that in some way Beau Tillson had been responsible for his friend’s death? And that he had been forgiven by the boy’s father?

  If true, what a burden of guilt it must be for the one who had returned alive. Or perhaps not, she thought, as the image of Draytonville’s infamous renegade came sharply to mind. She rested her elbow on the ledger where she had just been entering accounts payable, and tapped a pencil pensively against her teeth as she considered the strange story. Popular sympathy for Beau Tillson wasn’t something she’d encountered so far, and she had the uneasy feeling that what she’d just learned was merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg. It was the co-op’s plain bad luck that they had to deal with this strange man.

  Still, it was impossible not to wonder how Beau Tillson felt, living in the same town with the father of his best friend, whose death he perhaps had caused. And with a father so nobly forgiving he had virtually accepted him as the son he’d lost. It was either a miracle of humanity, Rachel thought uncharitably, or a deeper mystery than anything else.

  Rachel closed her eyes. The sensation of Beau Tillson’s arms around her and those strange jaguar eyes filled up her vision ... the feel of his mouth, warm and forceful, against hers almost overwhelmed her. Part of the shock had been that she’d never imagined herself being held and kissed by someone so dazzlingly handsome. It was like acting out some overheated teenage dream.

  She laid down her pencil, knowing
that she was reacting just as Beau Tillson had expected. “That old Beau Devil magic,” as Til Coffee cynically had labeled it.

  Rachel put the ledger aside and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. The weather had turned cloudy, with a drizzling rain whipped by the wind. The little house was damp, more like a February thaw in Pennsylvania than spring in the South. She didn’t feel energetic enough to light the wood already stacked in the fireplace; instead she got the afghan from her bed, took out her research books and curled up on the sofa in the living room to read.

  As part of her preparation for her job Rachel had read a number of books about the southern coast. She’d brought some with her from Philadelphia: a volume on the mansions of Charleston and Savannah; a picture book of Middleton and Magnolia gardens, the state’s great tourist attractions that had formerly been antebellum plantation showplaces; and a curious little book entitled The Gullah Dialect of the Georgia-South Carolina Coast Country written in the 1930’s by a renowned University of Chicago philologist. She’d bought it in a used bookstore in Bryn Mawr and found it a useful key to understanding the language used by Uncle Wesley Faligant and some of the older black tenant farmers.

  She knew she needed to immerse herself in it now, to distract her from thinking about what had happened with Beaumont Tillson that morning.

  The author, Dr. Lorenzo Turner, had come to the southern coast on a WPA grant during the Depression to make a study of the speech of the descendants of slaves. According to Dr. Turner, the Gullah dialect was a mix of the seventeenth century English settlers and remnants of the slaves’ African languages. The professor had corresponded with fellow academics at universities in cities in Africa, and they helped him identify many words the Gullah speakers used: words such as demo, a Mandingo word meaning to hunt; fere, Yoruba for trumpet; kosi, Kikongo for lion. No African language had survived intact in the New World, Dr. Turner found. But in the area from the Pee Dee to the Ashepoo rivers, bits and pieces of no less than thirty-one African languages survived.