Jed's Sweet Revenge (18 page)

“Hmmm,” she sighed. Her warm, pliant body nestled close to him by tantalizing degrees, breasts indenting against his forearm, loins cushioning his hip, hand sliding softly across his chest and down the center of his stomach. Jed couldn’t help the way his back arched in response. When her fingers found what he’d tried to ignore, they rushed over it in tender amazement. “Oh, my,” she whispered, sounding stunned.

His ruse was hopelessly destroyed. “I’m tryin’ to show you that I’m not always a wild-eyed goat,” he protested, as his eyes flickered open in dismay. “I
was pretty charged up last night and I don’t want you to think … I was tryin’ to let you go back to sleep without bein’ attacked right now.” Jed turned his head against the downy pillow and gazed at her with apology. “It’s okay, gal. That part of me’s got a mind of its own in the mornin’. You don’t have to feel obligated.…”

“I got a hankerin’ for you, boy,” she whispered in a perfect imitation of his drawl. “Don’t go lily-livered on me. I reckon I know what I want, and I ain’t scared of gettin’ it.”

With her funny accent she sounded like a Cajun Scarlett O’Hara, and when she mixed it with a cowboy drawl the result was hysterical. Jed laughed until he could barely breathe.

“I can see I worried for nothin’,” he finally rasped. “You’re gettin’ too big for your britches, gal.”

“I got no britches,” she drawled solemnly.

“Let me check. Yep. No britches.”

“I got no patience.” Her hands moved over him wantonly. “I got no shyness. This filly has turned wild.”

They wrestled playfully, and she won by straddling his thighs and holding his head by both ears. Jed wound a hand in her long hair and pulled her down for a deep, satisfying kiss. “Reckon you need some tamin’,” he murmured. “Reckon I’ll stay on this pile of sand awhile and see if I can make you behave.”

She radiated happiness as she looked down at him. “I love you, cowboy.”

“I love you.”

He held her so tightly that he felt her heart beating against his ribs. Or maybe they shared the same heart. It seemed possible. Anything seemed possible here, with her. Anything, that is, except her plan for him to stay.

Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into a month, and September’s cooler breezes made the island temperatures drop to idyllic levels. Jed never brought up the subject of the two of them leaving the island. He started to at times, but a strange, troubled intuition always stopped him. He knew that part of it was sheer contentment.

He couldn’t deny that he loved the lazy, timeless passing of days marked only by sunrises, sunsets, and the rhythm of the tides. He’d head back to reality before long, but in the meantime he’d spend his hours making love to Thena, watching her paint, and helping her catalog the minute, whimsical details of flora and fauna and weather. She was his whole life.

At night he read her books. At first he felt self-conscious, as if a grown man ought to be embarrassed for liking make-believe stories. But with Thena’s encouragement, the books became something he treasured. He and she would read for hours in bed, and then one or the other would reach out an inviting hand, and the reading would be over for another night.

Beneba Everett radioed one windy afternoon that she was coming to dinner, and they took Thena’s rattling, lurching truck to the dock to meet her. Jed politely held his laughter as her small motorboat
bounced toward them. Buffeted by the wind, it looked like a drunken water beetle.

When the beetle finally bobbed next to the dock, Beneba refused Jed’s helping hand and clambered out with a spryness that amazed him. The elderly black munchkin hugged Thena and after Thena’s introduction, grunted a hello to him in her low Gullah accent. Then she plopped a basket full of string beans and her personal belongings into his arms.

As she paraded to the truck, Jed stared after her. Beneba was comical but innately dignified, with eyes that held an ethereal light. Old gal probably had cataracts, Jed decided, and that accounted for the eerie blue-white cast to those dark peepers. Her bare feet churned the sand with youthful vigor, and her kinky gray hair bounced in a long braid. Her coffee-colored skin was wrinkled, her arms and legs lithe, and her oversized print dress had a wild gardenia pinned to one shoulder.

She was sort of a wild gardenia herself, he decided. And she had the commanding manner of an ancient sage. “Yoda,” Jed whispered to Thena out of the corner of his mouth.

“What is a ‘Yoda’?” she whispered back.

“Aw, I’ve gotta get you some current movies, gal.” Grinning, he hoisted the basket to his shoulder.

After they reached the house, Beneba puckered the entirety of her dark face around a clay pipe and spent every spare minute squinting at Jed in an assessing way. He secretly renamed her Popeye and squinted back.

The three of them sat on the porch shelling beans, and even he, with his taciturn nature, was surprised by the lack of conversation. Beneba seemed perfectly content to absorb life rather than comment on it, and after awhile he realized that he liked her, despite her shrewd squint.

She adored Thena, that was obvious in the way she patted and hugged and smiled at her, and Jed
could see that the feeling was mutual. It worried him, because he wondered how Thena could leave the ancient black woman, her adopted grandmother, behind. Hell, he’d cart the old gal out to Wyoming and set her up in a fancy house near his and Thena’s, if that’s what it’d take to make Thena happy.

Thena put the string beans on to cook for dinner. In the interim, Beneba pulled a bottle from her basket and gave Jed a glass of homemade dandelion wine so strong that the huge, unsuspecting swallow he took made his eyes water. “Hah,” she snorted, as he blinked rapidly in the wine’s aftermath. “His face is red. He wants to cough, but he has too much pride. Maybe that’s not a good sign. Too much pride could be his heartbreak.”

He’d been tested, and he knew it. “Ma’am, I’ve had grain alcohol that didn’t taste this strong. This stuff would burn the hide off a full-grown elephant. Pride’s got nothin’ to do with my not coughin’. My lungs are shriveled up.”

She laughed, obviously considering that a compliment, and afterwards squinted at him with a degree of approval, he thought. They ate a dinner of new potatoes, fried fish, cornbread, and the fresh-cooked beans, then sat on the porch again and watched twilight cover the moss-draped forest with mysterious shadows. Beneba smoked her pipe and pumped herself back and forth in the largest of Thena’s four rockers. Thena sat in one next to her, and Jed settled at Thena’s feet. She stroked his hair affectionately, and he leaned against her bare legs with sleepy devotion.

He wore only the white pants, but wished he wore nothing at all, so that every inch of his body could bask in the warm, caressing air. If Beneba hadn’t been visiting, he and Thena would be sitting here naked. Nakedness—“nekkidness,” as Thena said when she imitated him—was their accustomed state on many occasions, both in and out of bed.

But for now. Thena wore floppy blue shorts and a 1950s bathing suit top that had belonged to her mother. Its rigid modesty didn’t suit her. he thought, but its innocence did. He smiled with a sense of peace and happiness that swelled his chest.

“You,” Beneba told him abruptly, “are a blessed man. I see it on your face. I hear it in the rhythm of your breath. This place has taken your heart.”

Jed looked up into her sharp, wise eyes. “No,” he corrected politely. He wasn’t going to risk Yoda’s wrath, but he wasn’t going to listen to any mumbo jumbo about the island, either. He nodded toward Thena. “This woman has taken my heart.” Her fingers pressed deeply into his hair in loving response.

“Thena and the island are the same. You love one, you love the other.” Beneba let pipe smoke curl lazily toward the porch rafters. “You leave one, you leave the other.”

Jed frowned uneasily. “I’m not gonna leave Thena.”

“You will leave Sancia, and you will leave Thena. I have dreamed it.”

Jed cursed silently as Thena’s fingers stiffened against his scalp. “What makes you say such an awful thing, Grandmother?” she demanded.

“Because it’s true, child. Your man won’t admit that he has taken this place into his heart. He’ll make himself leave one day, because he’s stubborn and full of blind hate for his grandfather. I can only pray that he’ll be smart enough to come back.”

“You don’t mince words, do you,” Jed said in a stern voice. He leaned forward and hooked his arms around his updrawn knees, his blissful mood ruined. “But you don’t know me well enough to tell my future.”

“I know you. I know what you come from, because I was your mother’s nursemaid.”

Both Jed and Thena looked at her in shock. “You never told me, Grandmother,” Thena murmured numbly. “Why not?”

The thin shoulders shrugged. “Old memories are best saved for appropriate times. I saved this one for this moment.” Her ghostly eyes bored into Jed’s. “I watched your mother being born. I helped raise her. Hardly a day went by for ten years that she and I weren’t together. Ten years, until your grandmother was killed in the hurricane. Then your grandfather cursed this island to hell and took your mother away with him.”

Her eyes gleamed in a way that made goose bumps run up Jed’s arms. “And now you’re here to complete the circle,” she added. “You can bring back hope; you can lift the curse.” She paused, her aura so hypnotizing that even the night insects seemed to have stopped singing, to listen. “I want to see your mother’s grandchildren grow up here. Your children. Yours and Thena’s.”

Jed’s stomach twisted in anger. “This island isn’t some sort of magical shrine, and I’ve had all I can take hearin’ about it. No child of mine and Thena’s is gonna grow up here in the shadow of old man Gregg’s dreams. He doesn’t deserve that kind of honor.”

“Jedidiah?” Thena whispered in a bewildered, wounded tone. “Is Beneba right? Are you going to leave?”

He twisted around and slowly grasped one of her hand in his. Even in the dimming light, he could read the fear in her silver eyes. Jed fought to make his voice sound light and teasing. “Now, gal, do you really think an island is the right place for a quarter horse ranch?”

She stared at him desperately. “There’s plenty of room here for your horses, Jedidiah. Sancia is six miles long, remember. It’s huge. And—”

“And it’s beautiful, I know. It’ll always be beautiful, and we’ll enjoy it every time we come to visit.”

“Visit? You mean you want me to live somewhere else?”

“I want you to live in Wyoming. We’ll take the dogs and Cendrillon and any of the other horses you want.” Her hand was cold and trembling. He grasped it harder, urgency gnawing at him. Again he tried to sound lighthearted. “Sweetheart, all the spirits you believe in here—they’re your spirits, not mine. They’d just as soon spit in my eye as look at me.”

“Your grandfather loved your mother,” Beneba interjected. “He loved you. He didn’t do by halves—he loved with all his soul. I saw that, time and time again, for years, and I know you judge him too harshly. He was a stubborn man—that I know too. He made mistakes. But he would never let his child, his little Amanda, die. If he had known she needed help—”

“He drove her away, he didn’t ask how she got along, he didn’t want to know, he let her die,” Jed said curtly. “Then he tried to take me away from my old man, who—God knows—didn’t have anything left but me.”

Thena stroked Jed’s hand anxiously. Her voice was tearful and begging. “Don’t you see, Jedidiah, that you were all your grandfather Gregg had left too? He wanted his little grandson, who was the only bit of Amanda and Sarah who still lived. He loved you.”

Jed pulled his hand away from hers and stood up. The light was nearly gone now, and the night was turning as black as his anger. He paced the porch, his hands clenched. “And when he couldn’t get me on his own terms, we never heard from him again. That shows how damn little he really cared.”

Beneba’s voice was calm and low. “Wyoming State Rodeo Association, Junior All-Around Champion, 1974,” she recited. Jed stopped pacing and looked at her in tense surprise. Thena, bewildered too, watched Beneba silently.

“How did you know that about me?” Jed asked the elderly woman.

She blinked slowly and let more pipe smoke waft upward before she answered. “Your grandfather didn’t forget his little girl’s nanny. He left me some money and some treasures—picture albums and scrapbooks about Amanda. And Amanda’s son.” She paused to concentrate on rocking for a moment. “Every time you got your name in the paper for anything, your grandfather knew it. You goin’ rodeo in Texas and get written in the paper there, he gets a copy. You goin’ rodeo in Canada and get written in the paper there, he gets a copy. I think he pays somebody just to keep track of what you do in the world.” She puffed her pipe again and tilted her little face up impishly. “You come to my house anytime, I’ll show you the picture books.”

Jed stared at her speechlessly, his jaw working. “I didn’t know,” Thena murmured beside him. “Grandmother, you should have told me.”

“I waited to tell Jed, first. I know when the time is right.”

Jed tried to regain control of his emotions. He walked to the edge of the porch and stood with his back turned, one hand braced on a rough-hewn column that supported the roof. Thena rose and went to him, her heart aching. She studied his expression fervently, trying to read it in the dark.