Southern Hospitality (2 page)

She looked straight ahead with no indication on her heart-shaped face that she knew he was intently studying her profile. Her hair was a rich, dark brown, almost black, where her pony tail was threaded through the back of her cap. Oversized sunglasses were perched on her straight nose and her mouth was tempting as she licked her lips after completing her bubble.

Logan shook his head to dismiss his errant thoughts and loosened the knot of his charcoal-colored knit tie. He had to find Planchet, not ogle the local scenery. The heat was getting to him already. There was a thirty degree jump in temperature from cool, crisp Boston to sunny and seventy Little Rock as the pilot had cheerfully announced just before landing. Well, he’d take overcast and cold any day, if his
guardian
couldn’t bother to be on time. He’d heard southerners had a slower paced life, but the plane had been on the ground for a half hour.

Looking around, he grimaced when he realized that everyone else was gone. Only a hotel van and the Ford truck remained with any sign of human life. A line of empty cars were parked to his left at the airline arrivals. No one seemed to care, however. Actually, there didn’t seem to be
anyone
around to care, he amended in surprise. The unusual solitude around the airport added to his sense of unreality. There weren’t a multitude of honking horns from bumper-to-bumper cars jockeying for position that drowned out the police whistles to keep the traffic moving, and there wasn’t a taxi in sight.

With a sigh of resignation, he picked up his suitcase, cursing the overcoat he wouldn’t need. “Excuse me, can you tell me how far it is to the city?”

“Sir?”

Her soft question was almost too studied, Logan thought, narrowing his eyes. Unfortunately, her sunglasses masked her expression, so he couldn’t tell if she was really startled by his approach. “Are you waiting for me?” he asked bluntly, fairly sure he already knew the answer.

“I beg your pardon?” She drew herself up to stand straight, her head level with his shoulder.

Logan had an impulse to laugh. She had more of a regal stance than a half dozen debutantes who were registered in the Blue Book. No, he corrected himself when her nose tipped upward. She was stiffening up more in the dowager class, rivaling his own mother’s impervious stance.

“My plane just arrived and you seem to be waiting for someone. Could I be the person you’re picking up?” he continued. He knew he was being cryptic, but he couldn’t seem to resist. For some reason, he wanted to see what it would take to get her to remove her sunglasses.

She put her hands on her hips with emphasis and looked him up and down. Logan had the impression she didn’t like what she saw. The emotion, however, could be an extension of the discontent he’d been feeling since Preston made his ultimatum, and the resulting confrontation between his mother and his uncle.

Tory had to admit that Logan Herrington was even more impressive close up, and that she was also behaving very badly. Part of it was Herrington’s fault, though, with his very upper crust accent and demanding tone of voice, even if there was an interesting, smoky quality to it. She was already mad at T.L., so she didn’t need to be patronized on top of it. And he didn’t have to have such an aloof look in his gray-blue eyes or glare down his solid Roman nose.

“Sir, I think you’re mistake—”

“Ma’am, is this fella bothering you?”

Both Tory and Logan were surprised by the interruption. The policeman had come up quietly, seeming to appear out of nowhere.

“Look, officer, there’s been a misunderstanding,” Logan stated, giving his companion an accusing look.

“I was addressing the young lady, sir, if you don’t mind,” the policeman reprimanded, losing his affable smile.

“No, sir, there’s no problem here. This gentleman is looking for his ride,” Tory put in with a small twinge of remorse. She had to make up ground fast. Her temper had only made a silly situation worse.
Dumb move, Victoria.
“I think he was expecting my daddy instead of me. I’m Tory Planchet.”

“You’re old T.L.’s girl? Well, I’ll be. My boy played ball with your brother at A.S.U.,” the middle-aged officer said with a proud smile. “You tell Trev that Grady King said hi.”

“Sure will, Officer King,” Tory replied, letting the excess air out of her lungs in a rush of relief. T.L.’s name had done its usual, and she had the added bonus of the man knowing her brother. Then she looked at Logan.

His straight, dark brows were drawn together over the bridge of his nose. The set of his square jaw had his wide mouth pulled into a grim line. She noticed that there were tiny laugh lines around his eyes and wondered when in the distant past he’d smiled or laughed.

“Ummm, toss your suitcase in the back, and we’ll go,” she said with an airy wave of her hand, trying to pretend the last few minutes hadn’t happened.

When he didn’t move, she hesitated. She pulled her sunglasses halfway down her nose and gave him an assessing look once again. “You
are
Logan Herrington, aren’t you?”

“Uh-huh,” he answered, giving her the impression he’d like to deny it. Without another word he tossed his kid leather case, along with his sport coat and cashmere topcoat, into the back of the truck. He only flinched slightly as he noticed the bits of straw and dirt in the truck bed.

Tory marched around the bulky front end of the truck. She jerked open her door, ignoring the protest of the hinges. Curtiss had driven the truck last, which meant she needed to spend time making up for his neglect. If it didn’t have four legs, an object wasn’t worth her younger brother’s attention, even one of T.L.’s vintage vehicles. Too bad Logan only had two legs, or she could hand him over to Curtiss; however, she’d agreed to be press officer for the rally group. T.L.’s high-handedness, Curtiss’s neglect, and her own stupidity were making this a
wonderful
afternoon. And the fact that in spite of his good looks, Logan Herrington’s personality almost had less charm than her boorish oldest brother Sanders.

She barely gave Herrington time to get settled before she slammed the truck into gear. Her raw feelings found solace in controlling the modified engine under the pickup’s hood. Influenced by her temper, she aimed the truck out of the airport drive with less than her usual skill. Maneuvering the vehicle kept her from admitting most of her present troubles were her own fault, and that Logan Herrington made the truck’s cab seem to shrink to half its size.

“Is the airport always this hectic?” her passenger asked, his tone colored with a superiority managed only by inhabitants of metropolitan areas with populations over a million.

“It’s never really crowded, Mr. Herrington,” she snapped, making the turn onto the road as sharp as possible when the man failed to mask his snort of disdain. “It was planned that way. Unlike a few well-known, congested airports I’ve been in, this one has the parking traffic separated from the drive-through traffic. That’s what gets the airport emptied so quickly—careful planning.”

“I see,” Logan responded, then fell silent. Tory was sure he was planning his next negative comment while she accelerated down the road toward the expressway. She couldn’t very well tell him to stick it in his ear, as if he were one of her brothers.

She gave him a sidelong look, slowing for the entrance ramp. He even had an irritating posture-perfect way of sitting. He certainly didn’t look happy to be here, or maybe he was just naturally disagreeable. His air of sophistication didn’t mean he wasn’t interested in rally racing. She’d learned during her first weekend working on a rally that the conversation could range from Art Deco architecture to yacht racing, as well as driving tactics. Looks meant nothing.

Today no one would guess she was Victoria Planchet, the owner and creator of Bill of Fare Catering, soon to be Bill of Fare Shoppes. She didn’t appear to be the same business woman who was a Cordon Blue chef, the recipient of numerous rave reviews from food critics, and winner of many cooking awards. No one would recognize her as the same elegant woman who had accepted the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce’s top award just two weeks ago.

“So, how far was the airport planned from your thriving metropolis, Ms. Planchet?” Logan asked with irritation, ruining the softening of his companion’s mood brought on by her own thoughts.

“You’ll see it after we get through the woods and the swamp,” she returned, her sweet voice one that would have made Blanche DuBois envious. The wooded scenery on either side of the highway helped her exaggeration, not revealing that they were only a few miles from a city with close to 200,000 people.
He was expecting uncivilized surroundings, so why not give them to him?
she thought, already forgetting her earlier twinge of remorse.

“How fascinating,” he replied, his bored tone only confirming her suspicions.

That goaded her into her next move. Deftly she flipped the tape out of the tapeplayer and reached down into the container on the seat between them. A quick glance at the new tape’s title she’d selected from her brother’s section made her smile in satisfaction. Herrington didn’t need to know she was replacing David Sanborn’s sax with David Allen Coe. Curtiss’s taste for country-western music would add just the right atmosphere to the remainder of the ride. She knew she guessed correctly when her passenger winced the moment Coe began his ultimate country western song,
You Never Even Called Me By My Name,
that included trucks, trains, prison, booze, lost love, and his mama in the appropriate plaintive voice.

“Curtiss says you’re here for three months to get human interest material, as well as cover the rallies around the area,” Tory began as the city’s skyline came into view, her tone suggesting he wouldn’t know a human’s interest if he fell over it. She forged on, determined that he wouldn’t be the only one making keen observations. “From my year at Vassar, let me guess at your background.”

“You went to Vassar in New York?” Logan asked, clearly unable to stop himself. His startled question implied she’d just landed from Mars and wanted to see his leader.

“Is there another one? I didn’t realize,” she returned, smiling placidly while turning off the expressway. “As I was saying, you must have started at Choate, and like all good, little Massachusetts Ivy Leaguers gone on to Harvard.”

“Princeton, actually. Herringtons don’t like to follow the masses,” her companion confided. Tory caught the faint ghost of a smile on his lips out of the corner of her eye, but decided it was her imagination.

“How daring. Princeton it is then, before you followed faithfully in your daddy’s footsteps in the family business,” she finished in triumph. He couldn’t deny he’d joined the Herrington Publishing Group since that was who had sent him here. The touch of humor—no matter how fleeting—almost threw her. There couldn’t be too much humor in anyone who said,
awk-too-ally.

“Only a year at Vassar? Was it the snow?”

There it was again, that hint of amusement in his voice—a voice that was getting a suspiciously heavier New England accent with every syllable. “I only agreed to go North for a year to my mother’s alma mater. Then I was allowed to go to the school of my choice.”

“Which was?” he prompted, showing real curiosity at what school she selected over Vassar.

“The University of Nevada at Las Vegas,” Tory announced proudly with her own touch of superiority before changing gears to scale the steep incline of Cantrell Hill. Herrington wouldn’t guess she’d gone to Nevada to learn hotel management, but became so fascinated with catering and food preparation that she’d developed those special skills. Even T.L. was proud of her select catering service that customer demand was now expanding into three retail stores, specializing in meals for what Trevor called the “Zap and Serve” crowd.

“That’s certainly an interesting choice,” Logan replied without bothering to hide his skepticism.

“The climate was so much better for my health, and I didn’t hear how funny I talked three times a day from absolute strangers, who had a distinctive accent of their own,” Tory informed him. She knew she was baiting him, but she just couldn’t seem to help herself. Although she’d made a number of good friends at Vassar, there were also many who treated her as if she’d just learned to wear shoes and eat food with utensils.

She wasn’t sure if that was why she was being so hateful to Logan, or if it was his similarity to her oldest brother. Sanders tolerated his younger sister and two brothers, but was always critical of anything they said or did. Tory, Trevor, and Curtiss were sure that T.L. had been given the wrong baby at the hospital and got Sanders by mistake. Of course, Sanders wasn’t anywhere near as good-looking as Logan.

As quickly as the thought came, Tory knew she needed to do something to offset it. “So, was I right, Mr. Herrington? Are you Mr. Ivy League?”

“I get the impression you’re describing something that crawled out from under a rock,” Logan answered softly, all traces of humor gone from his voice and handsome face.

Tory knew he gave her a searching look from beneath half-closed eyelids before he turned back to watching the houses they passed. “Let’s just say the axiom of East meeting West goes tenfold for me with North and South. The cold climate seems to have a decidedly adverse effect on Yankee development.”

The silence in the truck’s cab was eloquent as Tory downshifted for a red light. Her hand squeezed the knob of the gearshift tightly as she wondered if she’d gone a tad too far.

“Well, what now, Miz Scarlet?” inquired Logan, his imitation of her own slight accent coming out with the usual disastrous results when a Yankee attempted a southern drawl of any kind.