Terra Little - Beneath Southern Skies

Nate wasn’t an entertainer in the common sense of the word, but he was just as much a celebrity as Pamela Mayes was. As a reporter at a well-respected news station, he had established what would’ve ended up being a respectable, if not mundane, career for himself. But as a freelance investigative journalist, he had found a way not only to entertain people, but also to make them think. If his stories were informative, sometimes hard to swallow and often gut-wrenching, the photos that he took, the magic that he created from behind the lens, were absolutely awe-inspiring and even more so. He took the pictures that others turned away from and made you look at them. It hadn’t taken the powers that be long to notice that special something that he possessed, and along with notoriety had come wealth and a different kind of fame. On top of that, he was mouthwateringly sexy.

Linking him with Pamela Mayes and being able to substantiate the link with the kind of factual evidence that Tressie could’ve provided would have ignited her career. And then writing a no-holds-barred follow-up exposé about the life and times of the infamous Pamela Mayes, about everything that happened before and after her relationship with Nate Woodberry, would’ve shot Tressie’s career straight into orbit.

But she had missed the boat and now it was too late.

The trauma of burying her twin sister, the only biological family that Pam ever had, had already been written about in a biography that had sold millions of copies while Tressie had been too afraid to defy Nate’s order of silence. Pam had been involved in other scandals since then, and now that she was happily married and fairly domesticated, she was busy trying to build a legacy that she could be proud of. These days she was working hard to downplay her penchant for negative media attention and bring her philanthropic efforts to the forefront.

So Tressie would never get to write about what had to have been an intense connection between Nate and Pam. They had been lovers—she was sure of it, though she didn’t have a scrap of proof. Nate would never admit to it and Pam wasn’t exactly in a position to be completely forthcoming, but there it was just the same.

As if reading her thoughts, Nate’s lips moved closer and hovered less than a breath away from hers. “I can see that you are listening,” he whispered, “so I’ll make this quick. To answer your question, sugar—no, I’m not the king of your comings and goings. No man in his right mind would want that responsibility. But for the next little while, let’s just say that I’m the king of Mercy, Georgia, and as the king, I’m giving you a royal decree. If you came here to stick your pointy little nose into the eminent domain situation here in Mercy and make a mockery of it, forget about it. These people need help, but they don’t need your kind of help. Understood?”

No, but...whatever. “Um, yeah, I guess so.”

“Good. Do you need me to help you pack?”

“N-no.” Especially since she wasn’t planning on going anywhere.

“Then we understand each other.”

“Perfectly.”

“Good. So I’ll see myself out.”

“Please do.”

Silly man, Tressie thought as she watched Nate disappear down the stairs. Now that he had piqued her curiosity, did he really think she was going to just pack up and leave without finding out what was going on?

She breathed a sigh of relief when she heard the door slam and then raced downstairs to the front door to double lock it behind him. Back upstairs, she went into her old bedroom and peeked out the window at him from behind the blinds. The Navigator burned rubber backing out of the driveway and taking off down the street. Once it was out of sight, she dropped her towel and slipped into a pair of shorts and a fresh tank top.

Then she powered up her laptop and went on a searching expedition. An eminent domain situation in Mercy, Georgia? What the hell?

* * *

The Navigator couldn’t carry Nate away from Tressie’s house fast enough. Pushing the bulky machine well beyond posted speed limits, he drove back the way he had come by rote, his thoughts churning at warp speed despite the fact that his body was exhausted. Before he had discovered that Tressie was back in town, all he had wanted to do was get to his mother’s house as quickly as possible, take a long, hot shower and crawl into bed. Now all he could think about was seeing Tressie naked, and suddenly the prospect of getting into an empty bed didn’t seem quite so satisfying.

He hadn’t been intimate with a woman in several months, almost a year by his own self-imposed-celibacy calculations, and he was feeling deprived of it right now more than ever. When he was on assignment, the story always took precedence. Women, as much as he loved them, were a luxury that he couldn’t afford to indulge in. The slightest distraction on location could cost him his life, so he had long since learned to channel all his energy in the only direction that mattered—time and place, and getting in and out alive.

The press liked to paint a picture of him that was far from the reality of his everyday life. For every woman that he’d ever actually established some sort of relationship with, there were at least ten more that they had erroneously linked him to. If he let them tell it, he spent most of his time seducing unsuspecting women and breaking their hearts. But the exact opposite was actually closer to the truth. When he wasn’t on location, he spent most of his time locked away in his darkroom, which was precisely why none of the relationships that he had taken time out of his busy schedule to cultivate had ever actually moved past the dating stage.

He was married to his work.

But he wasn’t working now and, with images of Tressie’s water-streaked breasts etched into his brain, his body was acutely aware of exactly how long it’d been since he had been close enough to a woman to do anything more than breathe in her scent. Not that he was the least bit interested in Tressie Valentine, he reminded himself as he executed a left turn that balanced the Navigator on two wheels, because he wasn’t. Still, he couldn’t help wondering how he’d never noticed that she was so damn sexy.

Of course, the possibility that he was half–out of his mind from lack of sex was a very real one. But he was pretty sure that he’d been thinking with the right head when he noticed that her bottom lip was slightly plumper than her top one and, therefore, begging to be sucked; that she had twin beauty marks—one centered perfectly above her top lip and the other in the center of her chin—and he’d thought about touching the tip of his tongue to them. That her breasts were beautifully tipped with what had looked to his suddenly dry mouth like large, ripe blackberries. Hadn’t he?

Either way it was a moot point because Tressie Valentine had to be the last person on earth that he wanted to get involved with, even if it would’ve been just for the sake of hot, sweaty sex. For one thing, she talked too much and he had never been attracted to chatty women. And for another, he wasn’t inclined to deal with the kind of drama that she would undoubtedly introduce into his life. His hands were full enough as it was with the drama going on in Mercy, without adding another ingredient to the mix. Plus, if there was a God in heaven, the woman would be on the other side of the state line, headed back to New York, before nightfall.

Pushing any and all thoughts of Tressie Valentine to the back of his mind, Nate pulled into his own driveway and shut off the Navigator. As he hauled his duffel into the house and took it with him into the only room in the house that was still furnished, he decided that if she wasn’t gone by the end of the day, he would track her down—again—and strangle the hell out of her.