Now and Forever (5 page)

“And now I'm your worst enemy, is that it?” He brushed back the hair from her temple.

“That's it,” she replied stonily.

He drew his hand back and started the jeep.

 

Minutes later, the brakes squealed as Russell pulled up in front of the ancient Cole
man home. Tish smiled at the familiar lines of the pre-Civil War architecture. It was white and had two stories and square columns. It was outrageously conventional, like Jace Coleman himself, with no frills or elegant carving on the woodwork. It was austerely simple in its lines and was practical right down to the front porch that ran the width of the house and held a porch swing and a smattering of old, but comfortable, rocking chairs and pots of flowers that bloomed every spring.

As Tish got out of the jeep, ignoring Russell's watchful gaze, the sound of feminine voices burst out of the house.

“You're back, you're really back!” A small, plump whirlwind with short black hair came bounding out the front porch and down the steps, almost knocking Tish down as she was caught around the neck by small hands and soundly hugged.

“Lena!” she murmured, hugging the younger girl. “Oh, I missed you so!”

“No kidding? With that blond-haired, blue-eyed dreamboat you told me about sitting at your feet, and you missed
me?
Come
on, Tish!” Eileen laughed, a flash of perfect white teeth in a face dominated by big dark eyes. “But I sure have missed you. You don't know what a
beast
Russell's been to live with lately!”

“Surely, you jest,” Tish teased, with a hard glance at the towering man beside the jeep that told him it was no joke to her.

“That one didn't fly over my head, baby,” Russell cautioned with a sharp smile. “Careful.”

“They're at it again, I see,” Nan Coleman sighed from the porch, eyeing Russell and Tish. “Fighting, and Tish hasn't been home an hour.”

“Forty-five minutes,” she replied, laughing as she went to hug the dainty brunette on the steps. She looked into curious green eyes. “I came right over. How are you, Nan?”

“Bored to tears,” the shorter woman wailed, cutting her eyes provocatively to Russell. “All the handsome men in the country are busy with harvest.”

“I thought I made up for that before harvest,” Russell said, his voice deep and sen
suous as he smiled, his eyes holding Nan's until she blushed.

Tish felt a sudden emptiness inside her and turned quickly to Eileen. “I brought you a present from the coast,” she said, with a lightness in her voice that was a direct contrast to the dead weight of her heart. “A coral necklace.”

“When did you find the time to shop?” Eileen laughed.

“I managed a few minutes away from Frank.”

“Tell me about him,” Nan said, taking her arm. “I've never known you to get serious about a man. He must be special.”

“Nan will bring us home, Russell,” Eileen called over her shoulder. “Tell Mattie we'll be back before supper, okay?”

“Okay, brat,” he told his sister.

Nan stopped and turned. “Oh, Russ, I'm having a party for Tish next Saturday night, kind of a homecoming get-together. You'll come, too?”

He lifted a dark eyebrow, but his eyes danced. “I might.”

“He may not come for you,” Eileen told
Nan, “but he'll come for his ‘baby,'” she added with a mischievous wink at Tish.

“I'm not anybody's baby,” Tish said quietly. “I'm almost twenty-one, Eileen.”

“Makes no difference,” Nan said from her five years advantage. “Paternal fondness doesn't recognize age, does it, Russell?”

His dark eyes swept over Tish's face, and she fought a blush at the intensity of it. He climbed into the jeep.

“Will you come?” Nan persisted.

“Maybe.” He turned the jeep and drove away without a backward glance.

“Maybe!” Nan groaned, standing with her hands on her small hips as she watched him roar away in a cloud of dust. “That,” she said, “is the most exasperating man God ever made! Just when you think you've got him in the palm of your little hand, he flies away, right through your fingers.”

“You knew better,” Eileen teased. “Russell belongs to Lisa, and no woman stands a chance against her.”

Tish started to ask about Lisa—there was something familiar about the name, as if she'd heard it before at Currie Hall—but Nan was already talking again.

“…never seen him so restless,” she was saying as they went inside.

“I don't know what's wrong,” Eileen sighed. “He's been like a caged tiger for the past couple of weeks. It's the crops, I guess. This had been a rotten year for farming.”

“Tell me about it,” Nan laughed. “You ought to hear Dad when he gets the market reports. But let's not talk about crops. I want to hear all about Tish's trip.”

“I want to hear all about Frank Tyler,” Eileen said, dropping down beside Tish on the Early American sofa in the parlor while Nan went for iced tea. “What does he do?”

“He's an electronics engineer. His family owns an electronics company, and he's a vice-president,” she said.

“Oh,” Eileen said.

“But he's wonderful,” Tish protested, crestfallen at her adopted sister's reaction. “Good looking, talented; he doesn't even have to work, he just enjoys doing it.”

“So does Russell,” Eileen said. “Fourteen and sixteen hours a day sometimes.”

“Eileen, I'm not comparing them,” Tish said pointedly. “We both know Russell's a breed apart from any other man. But I like
Frank very much. I think you'll like him, too.”

“Can he ride?” Eileen asked.

“I don't know.”

“Does he hunt or fish?”

Tish cleared her throat. “What are you going to wear to Nan's party, Lena?” she asked, hoping to divert the younger girl.

“A gag, if she doesn't shut up,” Nan laughed, bringing in a tray with three frosty glasses of iced tea on it.

“Amen,” Tish said with a smile. She took a glass and drank thirstily. “Just what have you got against Frank, seeing you don't even know him?” Tish asked Eileen.

The teenager's full lips pouted. “He's an outsider.”

“Oh, for God's sake, you sound just like Russell,” Nan said, shaking her head. “Even though he was championing civil rights before it was even popular, he has that one abiding prejudice.”

“Me, too,” Eileen said ungrammatically. “They don't belong. They come in and buy up land as if they're buying up a heritage with it, and they think owning one acre gives
them the right to rebuild their neighbors in their own images.”

“Hark, hear the voice of wisdom calling yonder,” Tish said, cupping her hand over her ear. She ducked as Eileen, laughing, drew back her glass as if to throw it. “Lena, you're impossible,” Tish smiled.

“Russ says it's my middle name,” Eileen agreed. “Oh, Tish, make him let me go to the party with Gus. He'll do it if you ask him.”

“Huh?”

“Gus. Gus Hamack. You remember him, he had red hair and two teeth missing and I used to take him apples to school,” Eileen prodded her memory. She smiled. “Of course, he has all his teeth now, and he's over six feet and just gorgeous! He's at Jeremiah Blakeley college studying to be a soil conservationist, and Russ lets him work here every other quarter so he can pay his tuition. Please, Tish?”

“We'll see,” Tish replied uncertainly, her heart freezing just at the thought of facing another battle with Russell.

“I'm going to wear something real slinky,” Eileen went on as if the whole mat
ter was settled. She leaned toward Tish with excitement burning like brown coals in her eyes. “I'll show it to you when we get home. It's blue and clingy, and off the shoulder, and if I wear a heavy wrap I may get out of the house before Russell makes me change.”

Tish shook her head in defeat. “Now I know what I've missed most,” she laughed.

It was late afternoon when Nan dropped Tish and Eileen off at Currie Hall. Mattie insisted on fixing her usual gigantic supper, even though the girls protested a lack of appetite. Tish wore a casual light blue shirt-waist dress to the table, a carryover from childhood when Russell refused to allow a pair of feminine legs in pants to sit near him. Schooled as her nerves were, though, they still shivered when she caught Russell's mocking gaze as she sat down next to Eileen.

“Has Dwight Haley already left?” Eileen asked while they ate.

Russell nodded. “He had to get back to Dallas. He bought your Angus bull,” he told the young girl with a half smile.

“Big Ben?” Eileen wailed. “Gosh, Russ,
I raised him from a nubbin, and he was the only Angus for miles and miles. Everybody's got Herefords,” she grumbled.

“That's why you haven't got Big Ben anymore,” he replied cooly, sipping his coffee and grimacing at the scalding temperature. He set the cup down. “I couldn't risk having him get in with my breeding stock. I'll let you have one of the Hereford calves to pet.”

“Sure, Russ, you'll let me have it to pet until it gets 200 pounds on it,” she groaned, “and then one night I'll find out I'm eating it for supper. That's cruel.”

“Cruelty can be a kindness, kitten,” he said abstractedly as he glanced at Tish, who quickly dropped her gaze to a mound of mashed potatoes and gravy.

“How would you like it if I sold one of your old Apps without telling you first?” Eileen was still grumbling.

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“On how much you got for him.” Russell grinned.

“Oh, Russ,” Eileen said, capitulating with a smile.

Tish watched the byplay between brother and sister while she savored the taste of her steak and onions. Russell was so good to look at, she thought. Had that arrogant tilt of his head always been so attractive, and why hadn't she ever noticed the way his dark hair curled just a little at the ends where it lay against his muscular neck? Her eyes traveled to his profile, chiseled and commanding in that dark face, his nose straight, his brow jutting, his jaw square and stubborn…

His head turned suddenly, his dark eyes narrowing, glittering, under a black scowl when he caught her eyes on him. She quickly dropped her gaze to her plate and hated the sudden heat in her cheeks.

Pushing back her far-from-empty plate, she rose. “I'm going to sit on the porch for a while,” she said, leaving before anyone could ask why she hadn't finished her supper.

She almost ran for the sanctuary of the long, wide porch, vaguely aware of the soft, deep laughter behind her.

She plopped down in the comfortable porch swing and rocked it into motion, lis
tening to the sound of hounds baying mournfully in the distance, the sound of crickets closer at hand. Her heart was slamming at her ribs from that fiery encounter with Russell's eyes. She crossed her arms across her breasts, feeling a sudden sweet chill with the memory. Frank has blond hair, she told herself, and blue eyes, and I can have him if I want him.

“Tish!” Eileen called suddenly, breaking in on the solitude with all the tact of an atom bomb.

“Over here, Lena!”

The younger girl scurried around the corner and sat down on the edge of the settee. “Russ's coming out,” she said quickly. “You won't forget to ask him about Gus, will you?”

The question made her blood run hot. She knew, quite suddenly, that she didn't want to be alone with him. “Stay here,” she told Eileen, “we'll ask him together.”

“Oh, no you don't,” Eileen protested, jumping up. “He'd eat me alive if he knew I asked you. Please, Tish, I'll do you a favor someday. Please?”

She gave in. It was impossible not to, with
those great, dark eyes pleading eloquently in the warm light of the window beside the swing.

“All right, I'll ask him.”

Impulsively, Eileen bent and hugged her. “You're the best sister anyone could want, even if you aren't really my sister. Thanks!”

She turned and ran toward the door, almost colliding with Russell, and gasped. “Gosh, Russ, do you have to stalk people?” she exclaimed. “You're as big as a house!”

“Two more helpings of apple cobbler,” he reminded the young girls, his voice deep and slow, “and that description may fit you, too.”

“I was only planning on having one,” she argued. “Well, I'm going up to my room. Tomorrow's a school day, and I've still got homework to do.”

“No TV until it's done,” Russell called after her.

“Yes, Sir!” Eileen called cheekily, and ran for her life.

Russell eased his tall frame into the settee and leaned back to light a cigarette. He was away from the window and all Tish could see of him was the red tip of the cigarette
as her eyes slowly became accustomed to the dark.