JoAnn Ross - Southern Comforts

“Besides, Susan will be throwing her bouquet soon. I have to be there.”

“Which would you rather have?” His deep voice heated her blood all over again. “A bunch of overpriced hothouse roses tied up in pink-and-white satin ribbons?” Taking hold of her wrist, he pressed her hand against his swollen groin. “Or this?”

What should have been an easy question was anything but. Chelsea thought of Nelson, waiting back at their table, armed with new arguments he’d undoubtedly worked out during her absence.

She also thought of tomorrow when she’d be off to her mother’s summer home at the Hamptons for a week’s visit before beginning work at the paper, and Cash would be on his way across the country to San Francisco. He’d landed a job with a famed international architectural firm whose name she recognized.

And even as she wondered how this rebel would fit into the buttoned-down world of designing high-rise office buildings for the corporate elite, Chelsea couldn’t help being impressed.

“You’d better make up your mind quick.” The thick, south-of-the-Mason-Dixon-line drawl was the same one he pulled out whenever he sensed her wavering. “Before we croak from inhaling too much Pine-Sol. Or your boyfriend suddenly stops thinking about himself long enough to notice you’re gone and sends someone to find you.”

Leaving with Cash Beaudine would not only be wrong, it would be the most outrageous thing she’d ever done. And for Chelsea, that was admittedly saying something.

She hesitated another heartbeat. Then, as she drank in the mysterious male scent emanating from Cash’s dark neck, Chelsea pictured the rumpled, unmade bed where she’d discovered the true meaning of passion.

Heaven help her, she was going to do it!

Five minutes later, she was sitting on the back of Cash’s jet-black Harley, racing down the road away from the country club. The wrinkled pink taffeta skirt was hitched up around her thighs, her arms were wrapped around his waist and her hair streamed out like a copper flag from beneath the black motorcycle helmet he’d stuck on her head.

It was a night made for romance.

A night when anything was possible.

A night Chelsea knew she’d remember for the rest of her life.

Chapter One

New York City, Seven Years Later

The Power Behind The Pretty Face

Roxanne Scarbrough is the doyenne of decoration, the maven of modern style. In addition to her monthly magazine, Southern Comforts, several New York Times bestselling how-to books, videotapes and a syndicated weekly television program, America’s favorite Steel Magnolia has inked a six-figure deal with Mega-Mart stores. Middle-class shoppers frequenting the booming, 347-store chain can now live and shop the Scarbrough way.

Mega-Mart’s budget for the new advertising campaign announcing their Southern Comforts line is 12 million, which should make the folks over at Chiat/Day a great deal more comfortable. Whatta deal! Whatta gal!

Adweek, March 26, 1996.

For a woman whose public image made Donna Reed look like a slacker, Roxanne Scarbrough proved to be a dragon lady extraordinaire.

Chelsea had never met anyone like America’s most famous southern belle. Which, for someone who had managed to survive interviews with both Madonna and Roseanne, was saying something. As she sat on the sofa in Good Morning America’s greenroom, waiting for her interview with Charlie Gibson, Chelsea watched Roxanne’s off-screen theatrics in amazement.

Since the limousine had delivered America’s most famous lifestyle expert to the studio from her suite at the Plaza an hour ago, she’d thrown a brush at the hairdresser who had quick reflexes and ducked just in time, stomped out of the room when the makeup woman had made the fatal mistake of suggesting a concealer to cover the faint scars from recent eyelid surgery, and managed to deride her personal assistant at every possible opportunity.

The makeup room was too hot. The greenroom too cold. The orange juice was frozen. And the Danish, horror of horrors, were cold.

“Honestly,” Roxanne huffed with a brisk shake of her sleek blond bob, “you Yankees have absolutely no sense of style!”

“I expect that’s why you’ve been invited on the program,” Chelsea replied blandly. “To bring culture to the philistines.”

Only the sharpest ear would have caught Chelsea’s veiled sarcasm. The glint in her green eyes would have warned anyone who knew her. As it was, the other woman was so wrapped up in her pique, it flew right over her head.

Roxanne’s gaze flicked over Chelsea like a medical researcher checking out the dog pound for potential experimental material.

“A hopeless task,” she asserted between bonded teeth, then announced to no one in particular, “This is a shitty time of day.”

When she pulled a cigarette from a crushed gold mesh pack and planted it between her lips, her assistant, a harried, pleasantly plump thirty-something woman, leaped to light it. Chelsea noted the lack of a thank-you. Perhaps no one had bothered to inform the southern doyenne of domesticity that slavery had been abolished.

“It fucks up my biorhythms.” The proclamation was exhaled on a cloud of noxious blue smoke that came puffing out of both nostrils like dragon fire. Chelsea said nothing. But she did wonder what the Steel Magnolia’s legion of fans would think of such earthy language escaping their guru’s glossy pink lips.

Roxanne glared around the room, which had nearly emptied; the third guest of the hour—an economist from Harvard scheduled to discuss the potential impact of baby boomers reaching Social Security age—had already sought sanctuary in the restroom down the hall.

“Where the hell is that boy with my tea?”

A moment later, one of the interns returned to the greenroom. His name was Brian, Chelsea had learned. The son of a West Virginia coal miner and truck stop waitress, he was a scholarship student from Penn. He was, he’d told her earlier, thrilled to have won this highly coveted internship. But of course, he’d shared that little nugget of personal information before he’d met Roxanne Scarbrough.

When she glimpsed the red-and-white tea bag tag hanging from the rim of the foam cup in Brian’s hand, Chelsea braced herself.

“What the hell is this?” Roxanne demanded.

“Roxanne,” her beleaguered assistant, Dorothy Landis, murmured, “it’s the tea you asked for.”

“This is not tea.” Roxanne crushed her cigarette out into a GMA ashtray with enough force to break the slim cylinder in two. Blazing blue eyes hardened to sapphire as they raked the cup the young man was holding.

“Tea is properly brewed in freshly drawn soft—but never chemically softened—water which has been heated in an enameled vessel. The leaves—preferably Imperial Darjeeling—should be dropped into the water just as it arrives at a brisk rolling boil, giving them a deep wheel-like movement, which opens them up for fullest infusion.”

Her voice, as it slashed away at the intern, was as sharp and deadly as a whip. “After which time it is poured into a scalded, preheated pot to allow the essential oils to circulate through the liquid.”

A very good four-carat diamond sparkled in the overhead fluorescent light as Roxanne reached out and plucked the white cup from the intern’s hand. “This is not tea,” she repeated. Turning her wrist, she deliberately poured the brown liquid onto his shoes.

Chelsea watched the bright red spots appear on his narrow cheeks. Fortunately, before the young man could make a mistake that might cost him his job, another intern appeared in the doorway.

“Ms. Lundon is ready for you now, Ms. Scarbrough,” she said.

Roxanne immediately stood up. Chelsea watched, fascinated in spite of herself, at the woman’s metamorphosis. Her perfectly made-up face softened, the hardness left her eyes and her lips curved into her signature smile. She ran her hands over her spring suit—pink with black piping, from this season’s Chanel collection, Chelsea noted—smoothing nonexistent wrinkles.