The Hellion (29 page)

Lee had all he could take. He stalked across the room and whirled Talmadge around by an elbow.

"I'm getting mighty damn sick of you thinking you can control our lives, so get this through your head." He nudged Talmadge in the chest with two strong fingers that set him back a step. "You're all through interfering!"

"Not when she's about to make the same mistake twice, I'm not!"

Tommy Lee's face was grim, his fists clenched at his sides while blue veins bulged up the length of his bare arms. "The mistake wasn't hers, it was yours! But you just can't admit it, can you, Talmadge? You took something away from her that you had no right taking away, and the disaster was doubled when you found out it could never be replaced. And now here I am, back in her life, bringing it all back for you to face. That's what you're fighting against!"

Talmadge's face was mottled and his jowls shook. "I love my daughter, but I won't stand--was

"Love her! Hah!" Tommy Lee glared, jamming his fists onto his hips. "If you love her you've got a damned strange way of showing

it. You don't give a damn what
      
347 she's feeling. All you care about is protecting yourself from having to admit that the decision you made twenty-four years ago made more people miserable than you'd care to count!"

"Don't go laying the blame on me, Gentry. You screwed up your life all by yourself. You didn't need any help from me!"

Exasperated, Tommy Lee rammed four fingers through his damp hair and shook his head. "How blind can you be, man? How long are you going to keep fighting what's right before your eyes? Rachel and I never should have been forced apart--never! We tried to tell you that twenty-four years ago, but you and my mama and daddy knew so much better than Rachel and me what was good for us, didn't you?"

"And if I hadn't, where would she have ended up? Married to a drunkard who couldn't be satisfied with one woman."

"She was the only one I ever wanted, and you know it," Tommy Lee growled dangerously.

"Well, you finally got her, didn't you? And you made sure the whole town knew it by leaving your car in front of her house all night long!"

Suddenly Rachel intervened. "What about me?

You talk as if I had no choice in the matter. Daddy, I asked him here. I did not ask you. I should think, since you saw the car, you would have had the common decency to respect my privacy."

"Don't you go preaching to me about common decency, missy! Not when I walk in here and find your clothes floating on the top of the pool and him half naked at eight o'clock in the morning!"

"That's exactly what you did! You walked right in as if it were your God-given right. Well, it's not. I'm all grown up now, Daddy, and this is my house, and you have no right to walk into it unannounced and give me a lecture on how to live my life!"

Her fists were clenched, and the tendons in her neck stood out. Everett raised a hand in appeal. "Rachel, for God's sake, don't you care what people think?"

"No, not anymore. I've lived my whole life according to some nebulous code that you pushed down my throat. But there's no room in that code for mitigating circumstances, is there? Tommy Lee has changed. I've changed." She pressed her hands against her chest and leaned toward him supplicatingly. "Why can't you see that?"

"All I see is a daughter I have
  
349 to be ashamed of. Lord, girl, I protected you from gossip all these years. What do you suppose it does to me to see you take up with him again?"

"Daddy, please, for once, could you think about my feelings instead of your own? Would you ask yourself why I'm with him again?"

His face grew hard and he pierced Tommy Lee with a venomous gaze that passed from his naked chest to his bare toes. "I believe that's altogether too obvious."

Rachel moved a step nearer Tommy Lee until her shoulderblades touched his chest. "No. You're seeing only what you want to see. Your own stubbornness is making you blind. Daddy, I love him. Can't you accept that and let us all try to forget the past?"

Everett's face turned scornful. "Love him! For God's sake, girl, don't delude yourself because I caught you red-handed."

Tommy Lee's hands came up to rest on Rachel's shoulders as he stated, "It's you who are deluding yourself, Talmadge. I have a feeling it's the only way you could have lived with the decision you made all those years ago."

The sight of Tommy Lee's hands resting possessively on Rachel's shoulders made Everett cringe. "Marshall would have--was

"No, Daddy." Rachel's eyes closed for a long moment, as if in finality. "You've chosen all the men for me you're ever going to. Marshall is a carbon body of Owen, and though it's taken me some soul-searching to admit it, Owen was not the kind of man I needed to make me happy. This time I'm doing the picking," she ended prophetically.

Her voice softened to an appealing note. "Daddy, Tommy Lee has asked me to marry him. If I do, will we have to fight you every step of the way, just like before? Would you do that to us ... again?"

Everett's shock was complete. He gaped from Rachel to the man behind her, and to his daughter again. "You can't mean it. Rachel, you've never had a vindictive bone in your body, but if you're doing this just to get back at me for--was

"No, Daddy. I told you. I love him." On her shoulders, Tommy Lee's hands tightened reassuringly.

Everett sensed himself losing ground and blustered, "You love some ... some teenage fantasy. But

we're talking about real life here.
      
351 We're talking about a man with three ex-wives!"

To Tommy Lee's surprise, she smiled and squeezed his fingers, which still rested on her collarbone. "Then I'd better watch my p's and q's, hadn't I?"

Everett was stupefied. "Rachel, for the love of God--was

But she calmly stepped forward and cut him off. "Daddy, as I said earlier, I didn't invite you here." She led the way toward the foyer without turning to see if he followed, but when she reached it, he was right on her heels, hoping to talk some sense into her. He didn't get the chance. She opened the door and stood waiting for him to walk through it. "In the future when you come to see me, I'd appreciate your knocking before you come in."

When she had closed the door behind his angrily stalking form, she turned to find Tommy Lee waiting in the archway. He opened his arms and she walked into them and clung, her cheek pressed against the silky hair on his chest, and his arms circling her shoulder tenaciously. "Darling, I'm so sorry," he said gruffly.

She was trembling uncontrollably as she shook her head against his chest. "No, it's not your fault. Oh, Tommy Lee, how could he just ... just come in here like that and start shouting at you?"

He rubbed her shoulder and kissed the top of her hair. "He's desperate, Rachel. He's clung to his self-righteousness for a long time. Imagine how frightening it is to a man like him to have to admit he was wrong."

"But he's so bullheaded! Would it hurt him for once to say, okay, Rachel, go ahead and love Tommy Lee, and be happy?"

Tommy Lee's warm palm rubbed her spine. "Did you ever stop to think that maybe he's a little jealous, too? He's had you to himself for quite a while."

She pulled back and gaped up at him in surprise. "Jealous? But he was never jealous of Owen or ... or Marshall."

"He didn't need to be. He could control them."

She sighed wearily and fell against him. "Oh, I'm so tired of it all. All I want is for everyone to see how foolish all this hostility has been, and settle it once and for all so we can get

on with our lives." He folded her
     
353 close to him again and rocked her gently. After several minutes she murmured plaintively, "Oh, Tommy Lee, remember how it used to be? When we were young and our mothers would be having iced tea on the lawn and you and I would come charging out of the house with our tennis rackets? They'd smile and wave, and tell us to have a good time. I've often wondered, if my mother had lived, would it have made a difference? She was so different from Daddy."

She heard Tommy Lee swallow against her temple. "They were like second parents to me."

She rubbed her hands along his back, feeling his steady heartbeat against her breast, wondering again if love was powerful enough to overcome such long-standing enmities. Loving him, even marrying him, would never be enough. Until the hostilities were over, the two of them could never know complete serenity.

"Tommy Lee?"

"H'm?"

"I want to make a bargain with you."

He drew back, tilting his head to see her face. "A bargain?"

She looked up with eloquent brown eyes,

hoping what she was doing was right.

"A bargain."

"What kind of bargain?"

"You ... you still want to marry me?"

He released a breathy, rueful laugh that said it all, and she went on, fixing him with her steady eyes. "I'll promise to marry you if you'll promise to go see your mama and daddy and make peace with them."

She felt him begin to stiffen and quickly framed his jaws with both hands, holding him where he was. "Please, hear me out. When you pull away and get that look on your face you remind me of Daddy. In your own way you're as stubborn as he is, don't you see?"

Tommy Lee didn't appreciate being compared to Everett. He gave an ironic sniff, but she forced him to listen to reason.

"The only way it'll work for us is if we make every attempt at forgiving," she went on. "You've just said my daddy is frightened of admitting he's been wrong all these years. Well, aren't you, too? So where do we start putting an end to it all?" When he tried to pull away again she held him, continuing persuasively, "Oh,

Tommy Lee, I saw the look on
    
355 your mama's face--and your daddy's, too--when they saw you walk up those church steps last Sunday. They love you and they miss you terribly, and whether you want to admit it or not, you miss them, too. You're their only son, and Beth is their granddaughter. Isn't it time you became a family again?"

Beneath her palms she felt his tense muscles and quivering nerves, and made small, soothing circles with her thumbs on his cheeks. "I want to tell you something that I've never told you before," she said in an equally soothing voice, studying his deep, dark eyes. "Your mother and father were against sending me away. My mother told me before she died. She was never happy with the estrangement between the two couples, but there was little she could do, given my father's stubbornness. He's very strong-willed, and he talked your parents and my mother into agreeing with him about giving the baby up for adoption. I spent years blaming all of them equally, but it was really my father who forced the issue. If I can forgive him, can't you forgive your parents, too?"

She could see his defenses weakening and rushed on. "I'll help you. I'll go with you if you

want. You and I together have a chance to show them how to forgive. Maybe ... just maybe, if we take the first step, they'll follow suit." She smiled at the idea. "Imagine it--we could set off a whole chain reaction."

But Tommy Lee remained unconvinced. "You're so idealistic. What if they throw me out?"

Behind his words she sensed a vulnerability that touched her heart. "They won't. You know they won't. All it'll take is for one of you to make the first move."

"And you really think if we can patch things up with them they'll suddenly soften toward Everett?"

"It's worth a chance, isn't it?"

"And what about this newest fracas? Are you forgetting you just threw your daddy out of your house? I'd say that leaves you and him with some patching up of your own to do."

She dropped her hands from his face, but captured the two ends of the towel that hung around his neck. "We've fought before. But in the end we always seem to realize that we're the only family left. You leave him up to me for the time being. When he sees me happily married to you, he's bound

to soften." She smiled up at him.
      
357 "There's something you have to realize about my daddy. Underneath all that bluster he has a grudging respect for anybody who'll stand up to him." She tugged on the towel and drew him down for a short kiss. "So what do you say?"

"You drive a hard bargain, Rachel."

Suddenly she saw through the idealist's eyes he accused her of having and slipped her hands beneath the towel, locking her fingers behind his neck while meeting his brown eyes intensely. "I want it to be the way it used to be."

"It'll never be the way it used to be."

"It could be better." She squeezed his neck for emphasis. "It could be ... you know it could. You, me, your parents, my father ... and Beth. What about her? You're cheating her out of her own grandparents by carrying this grudge."

"I know." He sighed wearily and drew her into his arms, resting his chin on top of her head. "I know."

"Grandparents can be a wonderful influence on young people, and vice versa. And besides"--she kissed his Adam's apple--"I thought I was the woman you'd do anything in the world for."

Somewhere in the house, bacon was burning and the buttons of a shirt sang out against the metal tumbler of a dryer. Tommy Lee folded Rachel against his heart and buried his face in the flower-scented skin of her neck, realizing that if things went right he had within his grasp the chance of gaining back everything he'd once had taken from him.