A Daring Vow (Vows) Read online

  “Look,” he said with a trace of impatience, “there is nothing I would like better than to close things up and send you a check, but it’s not that easy. There are decisions to be made, and they have to be made by you. You’ll have to come home.”

  Being told what she had to do, especially by Taylor, only strengthened her resolve. “No.”

  “Why, Zelda?” he said, his voice gentling for the first time. “You afraid to come back here, sugar?”

  With a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach, she heard the familiar dare in his tone. He’d gotten her into trees, onto rooftops, into trouble with those taunting dares of his. Sugar, hell!

  “I’m not afraid of anything, Taylor Matthews,” she snapped, falling into a trap as old as the first day they’d met. She heard his low, satisfied chuckle and bit off a few more choice words that occurred to her. Finally she gave in to the inevitable. “Okay,” she said grudgingly. “I’ll do what I can.”

  “Soon, Zelda.”

  Was he anxious to see her? More likely, just anxious to get it over with. “I’ll be there when I get there,” she told him with her very last bit of spunk.

  She slammed the phone down then because she couldn’t tolerate one more smug word, one tiny little hint of I-told-you-so in his voice. Then she sat staring at the phone, dismayed. She was going home. She would see Taylor again. Dear Lord, what had she been thinking of? What had her mother been thinking of to get her into this mess?

  The fact that Ella Louise had left an estate tangled in so much red tape that Zelda had no choice but to go back to Port William to straighten it out didn’t particularly surprise her. Her mother never had been one for doing things the ordinary way. It was Taylor’s involvement that was a kick-in-the-pants shock.

  Still stunned, she went in to explain to Kate that she needed time off, after all.

  “Of course, you have to go,” Kate said at once, her expression clearly relieved that Zelda had finally seen sense. “Take as much time as you need. I’ll call in that temp we used on your last vacation. If there’s anything I can do for you from here to straighten things out, if you need legal advice, you just have to call.”

  Zelda fiddled with the back of the chair she’d been clutching for support. “I hate leaving you in the lurch, though. You have that big divorce case coming up next week. Maybe I should put this trip off. It’s not as if I can do anything for Mama now. Besides, how much of an estate can there be? Last I checked, she was dirt poor and wouldn’t take a dime from me to change that. Maybe I ought to let the state take her pitiful possessions and get on with my life.”

  Kate’s gaze narrowed at the suggestion. Zelda knew her brilliant legal mind was bound to consider such an idea practically sacrilegious.

  “Zelda, is there some reason you don’t want to go back to South Carolina?”

  Zelda couldn’t figure out how to explain that she hadn’t been able to leave Port William fast enough. She was a different person now, confident, respected…tamed, some might say. She didn’t want to alter Kate’s impression of her, but she could see from her boss’s determined expression that nothing but the truth would end the cross-examination. As a whole slew of opposing attorneys knew, Kate was a master of the technique.

  “You know how you see those shows about slow, backwater towns and you think they’re just old-fashioned stereotypes?” Zelda said eventually. “Well, Port William is the prototype. The people there didn’t know exactly what to make of Mama, and they certainly didn’t know what to make of me. She named me after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s loony wife, for goodness’ sake. All the townspeople knew about Fitzgerald was what they’d figured out from reading The Great Gatsby. It didn’t leave a great impression in their narrow little minds.”

  “Surely they didn’t blame you for being named for some dead author’s crazy wife?”

  “Blame me?” Zelda replied thoughtfully. “I don’t suppose so. They just figured I was destined to follow the same path into a mental institution or else live out my days like Mama in some drunken stupor. And that was before I moved to Los Angeles. Now they’ll probably want to hold an exorcism to rid me of the devil.”

  Kate, born and raised in trend-setting, accepting L.A., looked skeptical. “It can’t be that bad.”

  Zelda didn’t argue, but she knew in her heart that she’d actually given the town the benefit of the doubt. The sheriff was probably painting up a cell just for her return. Folks in Port William had never entirely understood that the things she’d done had been the high-spirited hijinks of a teenager trying desperately to live up to the failed dreams of a sad and lost mother. If she could have splashed in public fountains at midnight, as her namesake reportedly had, she would have done it. Port William, however, had been short on fountains. It was probably just as well. She’d gotten into enough mischief as it was.

  She’d been easy prey for a boy such as Taylor, who’d had his own demons to sort through and had known just how to tease her into accompanying him. Foolishly, she’d thought that their daring exploits would bond them together forever, but she couldn’t have been more wrong. In the end, Taylor had proved himself to be every bit a Matthews—disgustingly stuffy, terrifyingly ambitious and thoroughly predictable. He had rid himself of the wild girl from the wrong side of the tracks without a backward glance.

  She’d hated him for abandoning her, for leaving her lost and alone in a town that could never understand her longing for acceptance. Even more, though, she had hated seeing the passionate man she’d loved since childhood become another sacrifice to the Matthews tradition. She wondered if he’d turned out to be every bit as stodgy as his father, or if some spark of that individuality and spunk he’d shown with her had remained.

  No use speculating, she thought. She’d find out soon enough. To her deep regret, her pulse bucked a little just at the prospect.

  She was going to see Taylor Matthews again.

  God help her.

  Chapter Two

  Port William looked exactly as Zelda had remembered it, exactly as it had looked for the past century, probably. Pine trees littered the ground with their long, slippery needles. With the exception of one or two sadly neglected plantation houses on the outskirts of town and the big, brick Matthews place on top of a hill overlooking the river, most of the community consisted of small clapboard houses. Almost without exception, each had a wide front porch, a rocking chair or swing from which to observe the passing of time, and a row of azalea bushes turning brown as the chill air of autumn belligerently pushed its way south. The lazy Waccamaw River wound its way toward the sea, providing a few picturesque settings in the lowland locale that was an otherwise quaint painting that time had faded.

  As she drove in from Charleston, her speed slowing with every mile, Zelda made note of the few obvious changes, starting with the familiar welcome sign that announced that the town of Port William, founded in 1756, now boasted a population of 1,027. It had grown.

  Beyond that, the only real concession to the nineties that she could see was a strip mall about two miles from the center of town. It consisted of a national discount store, a modern grocery store and a video rental store. On the outside, at least, everything else looked almost the same, except for a new coat of paint here and there and some visible updating of equipment.

  Based on the number of pickups jammed along the strip of asphalt in front, Harlan’s Feed and Grain was still the gathering place for men, a handful of tobacco growers and the usually out-of-work textile mill employees. The fancy riding mowers displayed on the back side of the parking lot, however, suggested Harlan had updated his stock to more high-tech, high-priced wonders. She couldn’t imagine who was buying them.

  Vera Mae’s Salon de Beauty had new curtains hanging on the windows, but through the open doorway Zelda could see the same old red-vinyl chairs inside. She wondered if Vera Mae was still doing her famous beehive hairdos and cementing them in place with spray.

  Next door, Sarah Lynn’s Diner was packed with the
lunch crowd. Zelda was willing to bet Monday was still the day Sarah Lynn baked her famous lemon meringue pie. She doubted the plump, matronly woman, who’d looked after Zelda like one of her own, had gone trendy and put key lime pie on the menu in its place. The locals would shun such innovation, dismissing it as putting on airs.

  Zelda ignored the fact that her mouth was watering at the thought of that lemon meringue pie. She wasn’t up to announcing her presence in town quite yet, much less handling Sarah Lynn’s sympathy. Instead she drove her rental car straight on to the house in which she’d grown up.

  When she pulled onto the tiny patch of lawn, she turned off the engine and sat staring at the old frame house, which was badly in need of paint. It was no better or worse than most of the houses around it, but Zelda had always resented the way her parents had let it go to seed. When she was fifteen, she’d earned enough money to buy paint and had given it a coat of white herself, slapping it on with zeal, if not neatness. From the looks of it, that was the last coat of paint it had received.

  Not quite ready to go inside, she rolled down the car window and drew in a lungful of the fresh, pine-scented air. Memories crowded in like so many teenagers trying to be first in line for concert tickets. A few of those memories were even good, like the time she and Jimmy Martin had sat on the creaky front porch swing holding hands while Mama played Grandpa’s old Glenn Miller records inside. And there was the time Taylor Matthews had pelted her bedroom window with stones in the middle of the night and dared her to go skinny-dipping in the river with him. Naturally, she hadn’t been able to resist.

  Taylor Matthews, she thought with yet another sigh. He figured in too many memories of her past. To her disgust, ever since his call, she hadn’t been able to get him out of her mind. Once they’d been drawn together as inevitably as any two star-crossed lovers in history. In the end, though, it had all turned to ashes.

  Damn his father’s political ambitions! she thought with as much vehemence now as she had then. If it hadn’t been for Beau Matthews’s obsessive drive to see his boy in the state capitol—or the White House, for that matter—she could have claimed Taylor’s heart publicly. Everyone in town saw that he was sweet on her, anyway.

  But once Taylor had passed adolescence and started listening to his father, he’d begun hating himself for those wicked, wayward feelings he couldn’t control. She had seen it in his eyes and slowly withdrew into a protective shell, determined that he would never see how his change in attitude was quietly killing her. She’d had one lapse, the night he’d finally broken up with her, and to this day she regretted letting him know how much his defection had mattered.

  She couldn’t help wondering now if he’d finally found some suitable, boring woman to stand by his side and satisfy his daddy’s standards. In all the years she’d been away from Port William, she had never asked about Taylor and her mother had never volunteered a word. It was just as well. Zelda hated being wrong, and she’d never in her life been more wrong than she had been about Taylor. He might have been sexy as sin and he might have exhibited exactly the kind of dangerous, wild streak that appealed to her in his teens, but he’d grown up into a stuffy, judgmental man—just like her own daddy, who’d trampled on Ella Louise’s spirit until she was nothing more than a shadowy presence.

  That, she thought, snapping herself back to the present, was a whole other kettle of fish. And one she didn’t intend to explore, not today, not ever if she could help it.

  * * *

  The Port William grapevine was apparently still in fine working order. Within minutes of her arrival, Zelda was surrounded by a group of neighbors, all wearing black and all bearing covered dishes. She’d be eating macaroni and cheese, green bean casseroles and Jell-O salads for a month.

  “Why on earth did Mama ask Taylor to handle her estate?” Zelda asked the three women in order to cut off their insincere murmurs of sympathy. Not one of them had said a kind word about her mother when she was alive. Still, Zelda credited them with having more insight into her mama’s final days than she did. “Did she explain that to any of you?”

  “Well, he is a lawyer, honey,” Mabel Smith reminded her.

  Zelda caught Mabel trying to keep her disapproving gaze off of Zelda’s colorful outfit, a thrift-shop ensemble of gauzy, floating materials that bore her own unmistakable flair for the dramatic. No doubt Mabel considered it totally unsuitable for mourning. Zelda knew, however, that her mother would have loved it. In fact, she could probably find some floppy picture hat to match hidden away in the back of her mother’s closet.

  “Taylor’s the only lawyer in town these days, come to think of it,” Betty Sue Conner chimed in.

  “What happened to Will Rutledge?” Zelda asked, recalling the sweet old man whose office had always reeked of pipe smoke.

  “Dead.”

  “John Tatum?” She tried to keep the note of desperation out of her voice. Surely she could hire someone else to represent her to deal with Taylor.

  “Moved to Charleston, five, maybe six years ago,” Mabel said.

  “Honey, I thought you and Taylor were friends once upon a time. More than that, in fact,” Elsie Whittingham said. “Why I can recall plain as day the time that old man Highsmith found the two of you up in his hayloft. What a ruckus that caused!”

  Betty Sue grinned. “Almost gave Beau Matthews a heart attack. He thought sure you’d end up pregnant and ruin all his big plans for Taylor.” Her expression suddenly sobered. “Funny how things turn out, isn’t it?”

  “Betty Sue,” Mabel said in a low voice clearly meant to shush her.

  Zelda let the warning go by, too lost in memories to question either one of them about it. Why wouldn’t those memories—good and bad—wither and die the way they should? Ten years should have been enough time to rob them of any impact at all. Obviously she didn’t have a lick of willpower.

  She tried harder to put them aside, but she couldn’t seem to help recalling in explicit detail the way she’d felt being held in Taylor’s arms up in that hayloft, or the surge of adrenaline she’d felt scrambling down and running away when they’d been caught. Their laughter had echoed on the night air, along with old man Highsmith’s shouts and the sound of a shotgun being fired into the sky as a warning. She’d never run so fast in her life, clinging to Taylor’s hand all the way, knowing that whatever happened they were in it together.

  Despite the danger—or perhaps because of it—it had been one of the happiest moments of her life. This wasn’t the first time it had come back to haunt her. No man had ever made her feel as exciting and alive as she had that night. The comparisons, whether she liked admitting it or not, were what had kept her single.

  But she was a different woman now, and Taylor most assuredly was a different man. That was what she had to keep reminding herself as she tried to block those old feelings.

  Before she could satisfactorily push the memory aside, however, the screen door squeaked and the man in question stood before her, bathed in the last rays of fading sunlight. Leave it to Taylor to make an unforgettable entrance. A TV evangelist couldn’t have asked for a more dramatic backdrop.

  Taylor stood where he was, hands shoved in his pockets, and nodded. “Zelda.”

  Since one word was all he seemed able to manage, Zelda matched him. “Taylor.”

  The three fluttering female guests suddenly thought of a dozen excuses for why they had to rush home. During their whirlwind departure, Zelda tried to gather her composure. She figured the best she could hope for was the restraint to keep from throwing herself right smack into Taylor’s muscular arms. Why the devil couldn’t the man have gone all soft? Maybe even bald? Instead, he was as lean and handsome as ever.

  She couldn’t seem to stop herself from drinking in the sight of him, from the fancy suit that couldn’t hide his football-broad shoulders to the untamed curl in his jet black hair, from the combative angle of his jaw to the spark of defiance in his clear gray eyes. That spark was a dead giveaway that Taylor
hadn’t changed, after all. He was already just daring her to do something outrageous, something he could no doubt condemn her for afterward. This time, though, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. She’d outgrown the need to defy the world at every turn. She would be pleasant, calm, mature…even if it killed her.

  She rose to her full height, an impressive five foot nine, and said in her most gracious but distant tone, “May I offer you a cup of tea?”

  Taylor blinked, then looked startled by the sight of her mother’s treasured silver teapot sitting on the scarred coffee table amid a collection of mismatched but elegant china cups. From the thunderstruck expression on his face, it was clear he hadn’t expected her to know the first thing about the social amenities. Zelda could have told him that no female could grow up in the South without learning a thing or two about social graces, whether they ever practiced them or not. Maybe he’d just figured to find her drinking the last of her mama’s bourbon.

  “I suppose,” he said finally.

  To her amusement he sounded as if he didn’t quite trust her ability to brew a drinkable pot of tea. Or perhaps he wasn’t sure even after all this time that she wouldn’t lace it with arsenic. Admittedly, the thought did hold a certain appeal.

  “I’ll taste mine first, if that’ll put your mind at ease,” she said wryly, causing him to scowl as an embarrassed flush crept up his neck.

  When they each had a cup and she’d taken a healthy swallow, she deliberately cast a defiant look in his direction. He regarded her warily. For a man who’d once displayed a remarkably silver-tongued charm, he seemed at a loss for words. She wasn’t inclined to help him out. She had enough to do just to keep her cup from rattling in its saucer and betraying her nerves.

  “I’m sorry about your mother,” he said eventually.

  He’d said it before on the phone. She hadn’t believed it then, either. Still, she nodded politely, thinking that he had a lot more to feel sorry about. Though Zelda doubted that she’d hear an apology for any of his past transgressions, she waited just the same.