Dixie Virgin Chronicles: Clementine (Book 5) Read online

  The Dixie Virgin Chronicles: Clementine

  Book Five

  PEGGY WEBB

  Copyright 2013 by Peggy Webb, second edition

  Copyright for Cover Design 2013 by Kim Van Meter

  Copyright © 1989 by Peggy Webb, first edition

  Smashwords Edition

  Prologue

  From: Clemmie ([email protected])

  To: Molly, Bea, Janet, Belinda, Joanna, Catherine

  Re: Old Maid

  I’m having a hard time not thinking of myself as an old maid. Tomorrow I’ll be twenty-five! If Mr. Right ever does come to Peppertown, Virginia will be too old to do anything about it! Still, I’m making a cake, complete with candles! I was thinking of giving myself a surprise party, but with my brothers away at college and all of you scattered, I’m going to have a big celebration for one. And I’m going to be as decadent as it’s possible be in this one-horse town. I might even eat cake naked!

  Hugs,

  Clemmie

  From: Janet ([email protected])

  To: Clemmie, Bea, Molly, Belinda, Joanna, Catherine

  Re: Birthday wishes!

  If I weren’t on the Mississippi Gulf Coast at a medical convention, I’d be there with bells on! Dan and the doggies are here, too. They’re having a fabulous time romping on the beach while I’m stuck in meetings.

  I just had a wonderful thought! Why don’t you see if one of your boarders will watch after things a day or two while you drive down here? I’ll book you a room next to ours! My treat, Clemmie! Do come!

  XO

  Janet

  From: Bea ([email protected])

  To: Clemmie, Janet, Catherine, Molly, Belinda, Joanna

  Re: Hit the road!

  Happy, happy birthday, Clemmie! Grab Janet’s offer! I’ll bet the Gulf Coast is crawling with hunks! If you find one, go ahead and break Rule Four! Listen, it’s your birthday! Virginia deserves a celebration, too!

  If I weren’t so busy I’d drive across and join you. I’m covered up – and you can take that every way you want! I highly recommend marriage, and especially sex!!! Of course, I’m busy outside the bedroom, too. Russ and I bought a citrus grove that has a wonderful, rambling old house on the property. It’s big enough for both dogs and the cat and as many children as we decide to have. He wants to start trying for a family right away, but I’m holding out for lots of practice first!

  Actually, I’m also launching a fabulous advertising campaign for Russ and trying to redecorate the house. Molly, I wish you were here to help! I’m hopeless with colors and can’t decide between peach and yellow for the den of pleasures. That’s the bedroom, in case you didn’t know!

  Hugs,

  Bea

  From: Molly ([email protected])

  To: Clemmie, Bea, Catherine, Joanna, Belinda, Janet

  Re: Your Birthday!

  Doing a happy dance for you, Clemmie! And you are NOT an old maid! Good grief, you’re in your prime! There is the cutest guy helping me get the art gallery ready for the grand opening – a carpenter who wears this tool belt hip slung over his tight jeans. SEXY!!!

  OMG, just listen to me! Naturally, he doesn’t hold a candle to SAM, the most incredibly scrumptious man in the whole wide world!!! Still, Clemmie, if you could come to Florence, I’d introduce you!

  Bea, paint the den of pleasures red! There’s this really gorgeous shade called Ming. If passion had a color, that’s what it would be! You want Russ to get hot every time he walks through the door!!!

  Much love,

  Molly

  From: Joanna ([email protected])

  To: Clemmie, Bea, Janet, Belinda, Catherine, Molly

  Re: Birthday Toast

  CLEMMIE!!! I’m toasting you and your Virginia by drinking champagne from a gold sequined evening pump!!! Do hire somebody to look after the boarding house for a week and COME TO MADRID! My guardian will be more than happy to get you a ticket. We’ll have a BLAST!

  Besides, I’m DYING for one of the Dixie Virgins to meet Fernando. I’M IN LOVE!!! Janet, before you get your panties in a wad, he’s not a bullfighter. He’s this really cool, really HOT guy with an engineering degree and A CUTE BUTT! I’m thinking of breaking Rule Four!!! But don’t tell Kirk!

  BIG HUGS!

  Joanna

  From: Catherine

  To: Clemmie, Joanna, Belinda, Molly, Bea, Janet

  Re: Celebrate

  Clemmie, sweetie, pull out all the stops. You deserve it! Eat naked, dance naked, just don’t cook the cake naked. Grease might pop out and ruin Virginia. Get some champagne, too. Forget the shoe! Drink it from a condom!

  Joanna, do NOT break Rule Four, especially not with a foreign guy you barely know!!! OMG, sweetie, don’t you know STD is rampant! Besides, every one of us swore we’d never give away for free what a man ought to have to slave for!

  XOXO

  Cat

  From: Janet

  To: Joanna, Bea, Molly, Catherine, Clemmie, Belinda

  Re: Fernando

  Joanna, don’t you dare break Rule Four for Fernando or anybody else over there in Spain! Ditto everything Cat said in spades!!! Who is this man, anyhow?

  Janet

  From: Belinda

  To: Clemmie, Janet, Bea, Molly, Catherine, Joanna

  Re: Everything!

  Oh, have a wonderful birthday, Clemmie!!! If I weren’t at Disney World with Reeve and the kids, I’d be right there celebrating with you! Molly, why don’t you call one of those hot guys you sent to my rescue when I was trying to get Reeve’s attention! That first one – I can’t even remember his name now – really made me feel special. Clemmie deserves that!

  Joanna, are you really in love and or just lonesome because you’re so far away! Oh, I hope it’s love because that’s so amazing!

  Bea, we’re going to stop by to see you and Russ while we’re in Florida! I want to see your new house and your grove, and the kids are dying to see your pets!

  You wouldn’t believe how much time Reeve takes off from work now! He’s so relaxed and happy. We travel a lot – sometimes with Betsy and Mark, sometimes just the two of us. We call those private times our honeymoon getaways! Every one of them is as steamy and sexy and delicious as the first one. Now I’ve got Virginia smoking hot. Fortunately, the children are in their rooms napping, and Reeve rented a condo with a private hot tub. It has become one of our favorite places!!!

  XOXO

  Belinda

  Chapter One

  Clemmie lit the candles—all twenty-five—and sang “Happy Birthday.”

  Her voice sounded lonesome in the big old house. As a matter of fact, she was lonesome. The twins were off at college, Harvey and his tuba were on their way to symphony rehearsal in Fulton, and Miss Josephine Tobias, who was upstairs, was no company at all. She couldn’t hear anything less than a sustained bellow.

  Sometimes Clemmie wondered what her life would have been like if her parents hadn’t died, if she hadn’t moved back to Peppertown to take care of her twin brothers. Today was one of those days. Nothing exciting ever happened in Peppertown. Here she was, practically an old maid, and she couldn’t scare up an adventure or a romance if forty-five pygmies had her trussed up and staked out to burn.

  Clemmie sighed. Not that she was unhappy. Far from it. She loved her rambling old house; she loved her small town; she even loved the parade of eccentric and sometimes crotchety boarders who came and went in her life. But just once she wished something exciting would happen to her.

  She watched the candles blaze on her cake and thought about a birthday wish. Not that she believed in birthday wishes. But they were traditional, and she was trying her best to ha
ve a traditional birthday. After dealing with leaky faucets, stopped-up sinks and a budget that never stretched quite far enough to cover the essentials and still have enough left over to get that green silk dress she was craving, she had made up her mind to be as frivolous and decadent as she could be on her birthday. And what could be more decadent than having birthday cake for breakfast? Well, maybe eating naked, but that would be too risky. What if Harvey forgot his keys and saw her standing stark naked in the kitchen?

  She closed her eyes.

  “I wish—” She stopped in mid-wish. All the things she needed poured through her mind—enough money to repair the roof and still pay the college bills for her twin brothers, a sewing machine that didn’t do the satin stitch when it was supposed to overcast, the patience of Job to deal with Miss Josephine... Frivolity and decadence, she reminded herself.

  She tried again. “I wish I had a man. Somebody besides Harvey and the postman, please. And send him fast, before I’m too old to pucker up.”

  Laughing at her own foolishness, she leaned over and blew out her candles in one single breath.

  Clemmie applauded herself and cut a huge piece of cake, one with two pink sugar roses on it. She figured if she was going to celebrate, she might as well do it in style. She’d worry about extra pounds tomorrow.

  Taking her piece of cake, she sat down at the kitchen table and looked out the window. A mockingbird in the backyard was helping her celebrate, hopping among the autumn leaves on the crab apple tree, singing his heart out. Underneath the tree the tomcat, who belonged next door, was switching his Persian tail, waiting for the bird to hit a sour note and a shaky branch at the same time and fall into his clutches.

  Clemmie laughed aloud. Peppertown wasn’t New York City, but it was home, and she loved it. Her life was filled with small day-to-day dramas—the cat chasing a bird, Miss Josephine imagining a burglar, one of her brothers winning an intramural track event and the other getting his heart broken in a campus romance. And who needed excitement when she had the Dixie Virgins for friends?

  She was well into her second sugar rose when the doorbell rang.

  “Isn’t that just like Harvey to forget his key?” she said to herself.

  She put her half-finished cake on the kitchen table and walked into the polished hallway. The doorbell rang again.

  “Just a minute, Harvey. I’m coming.”

  When she opened the door, she almost swooned. Not only was the man standing on her doorstep not Harvey, he was the most gorgeous hunk of male flesh she’d ever seen. He was tall and luscious and burnished gold all over, his skin, his hair, even his eyes. They were a brilliant and startling amber.

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  His voice was every bit as glorious as he was.

  “Good grief. There’s a birthday fairy, after all.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Clemmie still couldn’t believe what was in front of her. Peppertown hadn’t seen a man like him since Spike Rogers had come back from World War II covered with glory and honor and more women than you could shake a stick at. Or so the legend went.

  “You’re not Harvey.” She knew her mouth was open but she couldn’t help it. After all, it wasn’t every day that a woman got her birthday wish dropped onto her doorstep.

  “No. But I’m good at pretending. If I can bring that charming smile back to your face, I’ll be Harvey. What’s he like?”

  “Limp spaghetti.”

  Clemmie had always known her habit of saying exactly what she thought would someday get her into trouble. Today was the day. The gorgeous stranger was laughing so hard his sides were shaking. He was bound to think she was crazy. Or worse, mean spirited.

  Clemmie had a sudden panicked vision of the stranger not being pleased with a crazy landlord. He might decide to leave. And she couldn’t afford the luxury of losing a boarder. If she wanted to keep her business afloat, she’d better forget about being frivolous and begin thinking like a sane, sensible boarding house owner.

  “I know you must think I’m crazy,” she said. The sparkle that lingered in the stranger’s eyes flustered her even more. She reached up and ran a hand through her hair. “Harvey is a boarder of mine, and when the bell rang, I assumed he had forgotten his key. You...startled me.”

  Michael Forrest took a full minute to appraise the woman standing in the doorway. She reminded him of a 1920’s movie vamp with that cap of sleek black hair, those exotic upward-slanting green eyes and that wonderful bow shaped mouth, ripe cherry red, sensuous, almost pouting. And yet, with that pink smear on her face, she looked innocent and appealing. A fatal combination. Lord deliver him from innocent looking women. Most of them had the hearts of barracudas.

  Old habits of caution made the back of his neck prickle. Already the woman in the doorway had made him laugh at practically nothing. That was clearly a danger sign. If there had been another place to stay in Peppertown, he would have turned and walked away, but he was stuck with the only accommodations in town.

  “I’m sorry I startled you.” He tore his gaze away from the woman and glanced around at the peaceful landscape. The entire town, and especially this house, could be the set for Field of Dreams. He’d been told rural Mississippi was like that, but this was his first time to see for himself. He turned his attention back to the woman. “I suppose you didn’t hear my car drive up.”

  “No, I didn’t. I’m afraid I was too busy celebrating. Today’s my birthday.”

  Was that a blush he was seeing? He didn’t believe it. Nobody was that innocent, especially beautiful women. He’d learned that lesson a long, long time ago. In Hollywood there were two ways to survive encounters with women—play the wimp or the macho male. Without changing his expression, he lifted his armor into place and assumed his role of careless rake. It had served him well through the years. It should see him through his stay with this paradox, this guileless vamp.

  “Happy birthday, lovely lady.” He favored her with a smile that had fooled two movie stars into thinking he wanted to marry them.

  “My name is Clementine Brady, owner of Brady’s Boarding House. But you can call me Clemmie. Most folks do.” Clemmie gave him a welcoming smile she hoped would reverse any bad first impressions he’d had and get him to sign her guest book.

  Southern hospitality combined with the Southern drawl was lethal, Michael decided.

  “Michael Forrest.” He bent over her hand in his practiced manner. But when his lips touched the remnants of sugar icing clinging there, he almost forgot his act. He hadn’t tasted sugar icing since he was five. Quickly he released her hand. “My location manager, George Riker, recommended your boarding house.”

  Clemmie quickly stuck her hand behind her back. It still tingled where Michael Forrest had kissed it. She felt as if she was suffering from instant senility. She supposed that’s what happened to women who were seldom kissed when handsome strangers suddenly started nibbling at their hands. At the moment, she wouldn’t have been able to remember George Riker if he’d paraded on her front lawn stark naked.

  “George Riker?”

  “Yes. An earnest, sandy-haired young man.”

  “I remember him now. He was always so quiet. The perfect boarder. He stayed here about two months ago.”

  “George is like that. A man of few words. However he did recommend your boarding house—in glowing terms.” He smiled that smile again, the one that made her think of being serenaded by choirs of angels while eating chocolate bars with almonds. “I hope you have a room.”

  “For how long?”

  “A week, maybe longer. I’ll be laying the groundwork for a movie we’re going to film here.”

  “You’re in the movie business?”

  “Yes. Forrest Productions. Mine is an independent company.”

  “How did you ever find Peppertown?”

  “By good fortune.”

  The way he studied her made her hot all over, and she was absolutely certain Michael Forrest had invented sex.
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  Clemmie forced herself to keep in mind that the man was a boarder, a paying customer. But casting herself into the role of innkeeper when a hunk had dropped onto her doorstep out of nowhere was very hard.

  “I do have a room. Won’t you come in?”

  He came inside, and suddenly the hallway seemed dowdy to her. The wallpaper looked even more faded beside his bold good looks. But Clemmie had her pride. She lifted her chin and looked him squarely in the eye.

  “I hope you don’t mind an upstairs room, Mr. Forrest.”

  “Call me Michael.”

  “All right. Michael.”

  The way she said his name, soft and drawn out in almost three syllables, made his heart kick against his ribs. His armor had never stood the test against a Southern woman. He’d heard they were lethal. Looking at the woman beside him, he believed the tales. It was time to pull out all the stops with his act. He’d be the biggest cad she’d ever met. He’d woo her and seduce her and outrage her. He’d even make her think he wanted her in his bed, which was the last place he wanted her—or any other woman, for that matter. He still bore the battle scars from his affair with Hubbard, and that had been three years ago.

  He took stock of Clemmie again—the exotic green eyes, the silky black hair, the soft skin that drove a man crazy. Nothing less than the full act would protect him against her. When he’d finished, there would be no doubt in her mind that Michael Forrest’s intentions were strictly dishonorable.

  “I don’t mind any room at all, Clemmie, as long as you’re within calling distance.”

  He felt only a slight tinge of regret at the lovely blush that crept into her cheeks. It was surely just an act. Much like his own.

  “Then follow me, please. I hope you like a room with a view.”

  Clemmie gave a running commentary as she led him up the stairs.

  “The house is quiet now with only Miss Tobias here. You’ll be next door to her. Harvey lives downstairs. He’s a tuba player, but he’s very considerate about his practice hours. My twin brothers are in college now, but they’ll be home some weekends. Four of my permanent boarders aren’t here. They are teachers, and they’ve all gone to a conference in St. Louis.”