Chapter 20
J.J. looked down at their naked toes drawing cirlces in the dark water and sighed. “This whole day has felt like a dream, Cheri.”
“A real good one.”
He felt her nudge closer to his side and rest her head on his shoulder. They were now hip to hip, their arms forming an X behind each other’s backs, just like they used to do back in school. The moon was up, a sliver above the trees, but it was enough to light up each other’s faces.
“I heard you paid a visit to the Wimbley Real Estate offices this morning,” J.J. said.
“How’d you hear that?”
He laughed. “You can’t be serious. This is Bigler, sweetheart.”
“Hmmph.”
“Not going to tell me what transpired?”
“Just more of the same ugly stuff, I’m afraid.” When Cheri looked up into his face, J.J. was startled by the intense sadness he saw in her expression.
“Baby, what—”
She shook her head and looked away. “I confronted her,” Cheri said, her voice barely a whisper, her eyes focused out across the dark lake. “I don’t know what I expected, but all I got was more bullshit about how you failed to live up to your sacred vows.”
J.J. put his beer down on the freshly sawed boards of the dock. “That’s a fair statement.”
“What?” Cheri turned toward him again, her eyes flashing.
“I did fail. Miserably. I stood there like an idiot and said I promised to love and cherish her till death do us part when I knew it was impossible, since I couldn’t even manage it for the ten minutes it took us to get hitched. I never loved Tanyalee. Marrying her was the biggest mistake I ever made—well, second only to sleeping with her without protection.”
Cheri stayed quiet a long moment, looking down at her feet. “Did she tell you she was on the pill?”
J.J. shook his head. “I’m not going there, Cheri. Please don’t ask me to.”
She let go with a suddenly icy laugh. “Well, she’s sure as hell not going there, so if you want me to know what happened, if you want me to know the truth, you are the only way I’m going to get it.”
“I won’t ruin your relationshp with your sister. It’s between the two of you.”
He watched Cheri shake her head. “It’s already ruined, J.J. She flat-out told me today that she hated me and wished I was dead and that I was to blame for Mama’s and Daddy’s deaths.”
J.J. jerked his head back in horror. That was pure evil, even for Tanyalee. “You know that’s ridiculous, baby.”
Cheri shrugged. “It’s something I’ve always carried around with me. She was just rubbing it in.”
“That’s the craziest shit I’ve ever heard.” J.J. brought his face down close to hers, trying to get her to look him in the eye. “You were seven years old, Cheri. Your parents went to the beach and there was a gas leak in their rental—how in God’s name was that your fault?”
She flashed her eyes at him briefly, then looked away. “I’ve heard it from Viv, too.”
“Heard what? That you were to blame for them dying? Why the hell would Viv lay that guilt on a little girl? You’ve got to be wrong about that.”
Cheri shook her head, looking off across the lake. “The night after the funeral, I snuck down to eavesdrop on the grown-ups. Viv, Granddaddy, and Purnell were sitting in the parlor. Viv said it. I heard her. She said that Mama and Daddy needed to get away from me and Tanyalee because we fought so much, because I was such a belligerent and stubborn little girl who’d always resented sweet little Taffy, and the constant yelling and fussing was enough to drive my parents crazy.”
J.J. held his breath. All he could think was, Oh, God, no.
“Viv said that all my parents wanted was a moment’s peace.” Cheri paused, swallowing hard. “And Purnell … Purnell said, ‘They got it, the poor souls.’”
J.J. brought his arm up around her shoulder, but Cheri remained stiff against him. “That was an incredibly insensitive and stupid thing to say,” he whispered. “Sometimes people lash out in their grief, and don’t realize what they’re doing. I’m so damn sorry you heard that.”
They sat quietly for a moment, their toes still circling in the water. Eventually, he felt Cheri’s breathing slow.
“That’s not the only thing Tanyalee told me today, J.J. She warned me that you would turn on me one day and she hoped that God had mercy on me when it happened.”
J.J. shook his head. “Of course she did.”
“Tanyalee told me she had a miscarriage and that was all she’d say.”
Cheri looked up at him again, her face a mask of resigned sadness. “I want to know what’s possible for you and me in the future, but I have to know the truth about the past first. You’re the only place I can go to get it.”
J.J. sat perfectly still for many long seconds, until he knew he had no choice. Cheri deserved the truth. “Yes, Tanyalee told me she was on the pill. She miscarried a few weeks after the wedding but it slipped her mind to mention it to me. I only found out because her doctor’s office left a message on the answering machine.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“So I went looking for her. With a heads-up from Turner, I tracked her down at the Tip-Top Motel.”
“Where?” Cheri’s eyes squinted in disbelief.
“Room 34 to be exact. With some guy.”
“Huh?”
J.J. tilted his head back and laughed. “That’s what I said.” His laughter mellowed into a sigh. “Yeah. Ugly, ugly, ugly. She never admitted it, but I’m pretty sure she was trying to get pregnant again real quick, thinking I wouldn’t notice it was the world’s first twelve-month human gestation.”
Cheri tilted her head and stared at him, her nose and mouth scrunched up. It made him chuckle. He kissed her wrinkled nose. “The answer to your unspoken question is no—we never had sex after that first time, so she had to go elsewhere for what she wanted. I couldn’t do it, Cheri. I didn’t love her—I didn’t even like her. But, I gotta admit, there was a part of me that…”
J.J. managed to stop himself, but knew he’d gone too far, and now Cheri was staring at him. She expected him to finish his thought. “Part of me wanted to get you out of my system, I guess. After what happened in Florida, I knew I’d be dead to you, that this town would be dead to you. I wanted to burn it all away.”
She raised a single eyebrow at him.
“I think I saw those months with Tanyalee as a way to punish myself.”
“For what exactly?”
“For ruining my chance with you—forever.”
J.J. gasped when Cheri slipped her small hand over his. Her skin was so smooth and warm. The delicate bones of her hands wrapped around him like a velvety ribbon, and her thumb rubbed the top of his wrist. “But she trapped you, Jay. She wanted revenge against me. You were just caught in the middle.”
“I wasn’t exactly a victim,” he said softly. “It was my decision to sleep with her in the first place. My penis. My mistake. My responsibility.”
With his free hand he reached over and touched the side of her face. He smiled at the smear of eggshell white that went across her cheek like war paint. Then he ran his hand over her paint-speckled hair.
“What?” she asked, slowly returning his smile.
“You’re covered in paint.”
“Really? Well, so are you. Here, let me help you clean up a little.”
Cheri was suddenly on his lap, her arms around his neck and her lips opening to his. J.J. grabbed her, the need in him immediate and fierce—until he felt himself falling straight over the edge of the dock and into the water.
“Hey—” The cold slapped him and he surfaced with the sound of Cheri’s laughter ringing in his ears. She was already swimming away, though she was laughing too hard to make headway with her sloppy strokes.
“Y’all in a load of trouble now, girl,” he said, heading after her.
“No!” she shrieked. “Stay away!”
A few loons decided to join in her protest.
“You want to play, do you?” As J.J. closed in on her, Cheri began kicking her feet hard and fast, shooting water into his face.
“No! Stop!” She was laughing so hard she could barely get the words out.
J.J. was suddenly aware that all this noise was the most beautiful music he’d ever heard, a crazy cacophony of loons, laughter, and lake water. He began laughing, too, gasping for breath as he reached one of her flipping feet.
“Gotcha!” He yanked her toward him and her sweet ass slammed into his belly. J.J. flipped her over and got an arm under her back, reached his feet down into the muddy lake bottom for leverage and began hauling her out through the reeds.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked, her fingers already tearing at his shirt buttons.
“Somewhere warmer and drier.”
“What y’all fixin’ to do with me?” When J.J. saw the mischievousness in her eyes, his heart nearly broke apart. Here she was—tight in his arms, joy in her heart, her fingers doing their best to get his clothes off—and he wasn’t sure he could handle this much luck. He hadn’t felt this hopeful since the day he stood on her front porch in Tampa, and she’d answered the door, smiled, and threw her arms around him. “Ain’t made up my mind yet, sugar,” he said. “You got any ideas?”
“Yeah, I got a few,” she said, just before she put her hot lips on his cold, wet chest, and began kissing down his sternum, her tongue flicking at his ball bearing of a nipple until bolts of pleasure shot through his boxers.
J.J.’s feet hit hard ground and they cleared the water without a moment to spare. His knees were on the edge of giving out, not because the woman in his arms was a burden—Cheri barely weighed anything—but because his dick was getting so hard he had forgotten how to put one foot in front of the other.
“I thought maybe we could take a shower together,” she said, biting down on his other nipple. “The grout’s dry.”
“Oh, f*ck, that’s the best grout-related news I’ve ever heard.”
She giggled, and the second her lips left his flesh he pulled her higher and clamped his mouth on hers as they tackled the front steps.
“Keet!”
The squirrel had returned to lodge her most recent complaint with the landlord. J.J. paused the kiss long enough to address her. “Now you just hush for once, you bossy thing. This is none of y’all’s business.”
He placed Cheri down on the porch and they both began ripping their sopping wet clothes off their bodies. As he peeled everything off, J.J. was suddenly relieved that he’d left his wallet, phone, and keys inside the cottage before they’d gone to the dock.
Moments later, he was still struggling with his boots and socks as he watched Cheri scurry through the living room, bare-ass naked, past the ugly green couch under a clear plastic drop cloth, and down the hall to the bathroom. The vision of her pink and perfect little body made his hands shake, which only added to the frustration with his wet bootlaces. He grabbed the wet condoms from his jeans pocket, and ran through the living room, water flinging with every step.
* * *
The feel of J.J.’s solid flesh under her soapy fingers was glorious. The sensation of hot water pounding onto their cold skin made her shiver with pleasure. The erection pressing up against her belly had her dizzy with lust. It had been many months since she’d been with a man, but it had been many long years since she’d been with J.J., and she had no intention of waiting a second longer.
“Have you figured out what you’re going to do with me?” she teased him.
“Hell, yes,” J.J. said. “I’m gonna make up for lost time, Cheri. I’m gonna make up for every month that went by that I didn’t have you to laugh with and love and make hot and wild love to.”
“That sounds like a big job.”
“Fortunately, I have everything I need.”
“Yes, you do,” she said.
J.J.’s hands slid up and down the sides of her body. His palms cupped her ass, pressed into her hips, brushed down her thighs and up again. She was well aware how hungry he was for her—he was eating her up with his hands, devouring her with his eyes, consuming her with his lips.
“I want you bad, Cheri.”
“I want you, J.J.” Her p-ssy throbbed. She felt like she was going to come just by being in close proximity to the heat and desire shooting off his body.
“Tell me,” he growled into her ear.
“I always have. I always will.”
“What? You what?”
“I love you, J.J.”
He moaned into her mouth as he kissed her. She threw a thigh up around his hip. After many long moments of that kiss—building up, mouths on fire with the taste of each other, tongues pushing and teeth nipping—the mood switched. The kiss slowed. The touch was loving and gentle.
J.J. pushed her away slightly, then spun her around so that her back faced him, and pressed her shoulders down. Cheri gasped as she felt him spread her thighs apart with his knees. She slapped her hands against the tile wall, and shuddered with pleasure at the feel of his hands sliding down the back of her legs. He was kneeling behind her …
The instant his hot tongue slid between her p-ssy lips, she came, bucking and moaning and pressing back against his mouth. It was too much! Too fast! She laughed at herself at the crazy pace of this! It usually took her a long time and lots of concentrated attention to get her to orgasm.
With J.J., it was nearly automatic.
He chuckled softly, his mouth still pressed to her sex, the vibration tickling her as she came down from the orgasm. Slowly, he removed his lips from her, slid his hands up her legs and stood, reaching over her to turn off the water. He threw the shower curtain open and grabbed a towel, helping Cheri to stand upright as he dried her off, alternating swipes of the soft towel with soft kisses. She did the same for him, and then he picked her up and carried her across the hall into the bedroom.
Dark. Silent. Peaceful. No curtains on the windows. No neighbors. Not a stitch of clothing between them. J.J. laid Cheri down on her back and got up on top of her. He was there, so solid, so warm, so loving and gentle, as he scooped her into his arms.
“Don’t take yourself away from me again, Cheri. Please don’t do it.”
She shook her head, tears welling in her eyes, overwhelmed by the feel of this moment. Somehow she’d come full circle in the span of a week—home, love, a place in the world, the right man to belong to. She opened her legs to J.J., as if she were opening herself up to the possibility of being completely alive, completely present. Her heart felt so full she thought it might burst at the seams.
J.J. braced himself on his knees, grabbed a condom and slipped it on, and in seconds he had his hands under her bottom and was lifting her up. There was just enough moonlight for her to see the outline of their joining. She felt speared into—all heat and stretching and pushing deep into her being. J.J. started slowly, careful with her, careful that his hardness and his thickness wasn’t a shock to her system. Once she’d accepted him, he dug his fingers into her flesh and pulled her away and against him, in and out, the music of their bodies meeting the only sound in the world.
Pulling her legs further onto his thighs, J.J. leaned forward and grabbed her behind her back. He pulled her up, balancing her weight on his thighs, pushing deeper, his mouth going to her breasts, her nipples, the orgasm building so slow and hard inside her she had to gasp for air.
Cheri heard a long and high-pitched wail and it took a moment for her to realize the sound was hers, coming from her body, her soul.
She flung her arms around J.J.’s neck and let her head fall back as he continued to ram into her, call out that he loved her, and the force of his explosion was enough to send her over the edge yet again, harder this time, wilder, higher … she was lost in it.
Lost, and found.
* * *
The next morning it rained. They slept in as the water beat down on the tin roof of the cottage, waking only to make love and fall asleep again. They made love two more times—just to be sure neither of them were imagining anything, J.J. pointed out. Eventually, they went rummaging for warm clothes. It was quite a sight watching J.J. build a fire in the skintight outfit that was his only option for the moment—a pair of Cheri’s baggiest sweatpants, her largest sweatshirt, and her roomiest socks. Once the fire was going, he grabbed their wet clothes and shoes from the porch and draped them on the hearth and mantel.
Meanwhile, Cheri put Aunt Viv’s sweet potato casserole in the oven along with some leftover ham and set about tidying up the cottage. She dragged the drop cloths out to the back porch lean-to, set the table with mismatched dishes, and placed the canning jar of the still-perky flowers in the center. She opened the kitchen window for fresh air, and smiled at the blue and white checks in the breeze.
Cheri wandered back into the living room and stood behind J.J. as he placed another log on the fire. “I never did thank you for the bouquet,” she whispered in his ear, wrapping her arms around him.
“I never did tell you they’re from me.”
“Of course they are.”
“Damn. I wanted to be a man of mystery.” J.J. spun her around in his embrace. He pulled her tight, and Cheri could feel his heartbeat, slow and sure.
“I don’t want any more mystery,” she heard herself say. “I just want to know things, to be sure of a few things in life for a change.”
He kissed the top of her head. “You’ve come to the right place, then,” he said.
“You sure?”
He laughed. “I’m sure you can be sure about me. I love you, Cheri.” He brushed the hair from the side of her face and planted a kiss on her lips. “I’ll always be straight with you. I promise. These are my real stripes you’re looking at. There’s nothing about me you can’t see or don’t know. As usual, Tanyalee was wrong about that.”
She nodded, resting her head on his chest once more.
* * *
By the time they finished eating, J.J.’s clothes were dry and he emerged from the bedroom looking relieved. “Never was big on cross-dressing,” he said with a grin.
Cheri had already arranged piles of financial documents on the living room floor, the couch, the coffee table, and on top of several turned-over bankers’ boxes. She’d sorted them into general categories: year-end income and expense statements, ad revenue summaries, contracts for ad sales, monthly bookkeeping reports, and the newspaper’s state and federal tax returns.
For about two hours, Cheri went over the oldest of the financial records, and found the first indication of missing money was in July 1964. From there it looked like hundreds of dollars were skimmed off ad revenues, month after month, year after year, until 1971, when questionable expenses began to show up. There were breaks in the pattern in 1987 and again in the early 1990s.
She took notes. She entered numbers into the spreadsheet in her laptop. When her brain began to hurt, she decided she’d start in on her father’s things. It would be hard, but it had to be done.
Cheri sat curled up on the end of the couch with the floor lamp nearby, four boxes of her father’s personal belongings arranged at her feet. Granddaddy had said that inside the boxes she’d find everything that was in his office at the time of his death.
Cheri upacked all the things a businessman in the 1980s might cling to even as the world went digital—a Rolodex, a desk blotter and calendar, a datebook, a wall clock, a business card collection, a small leather notebook with phone numbers and birthdays, and a stack of paper expense reports. She also found several framed family photos—one of her daddy and mama on their wedding day, Mama’s lacy confection of a princess dress spread out around her in the grass, Daddy standing tall and handsome and proud; one of Granddaddy and Gramma a few years before she passed; one of Aunt Viv in her twenties, a knockout in a tight pink Jackie Kennedyesque Easter suit and matching pillbox hat; and a photo of Cheri and Tanyalee.
She placed that photo in her lap, angled it toward the floor lamp, and studied it. She remembered the day the photo had been taken.
They’d gone to the Cataloochee County Fair. She was six and Tanyalee was four. They’d begged long and hard to be allowed to have a Sno-Kone and so sported the telltale blueberry-blue and raspberry-red rings around their lips. They had their arms linked over each other’s shoulders—which must have been a rarity—and they were smiling and laughing like little girls who hadn’t a care in the world.
That would all come the following year.
But for the moment, there was Cheri with her missing front teeth and Tanyalee with her hacked-off front bangs (Cheri had needed a client for her pretend beauty shop), and they were the picture of summertime sisterly bliss.
Cheri remembered seeing this framed photo propped on a corner of Daddy’s desk, one day in particular. She’d been playing hide-and-seek in the publisher’s office as Daddy and Granddaddy talked business. She’d just turned seven, but even she could detect an odd nervousness to her father’s voice and a rare undercurrent of irritation in her grandfather’s.
She’d sat as still as could be in the corner next to the copy machine, hardly breathing. She stared at that photo of her and Tanyalee while she listened. Granddaddy had said, “That can’t be right,” and her daddy kept saying, “Follow the money. Follow the money.”
As a child, she had no idea what the phrase meant. Now she knew it was the infamous tip from Deep Throat to Washington reporters looking into the Watergate cover-up. It had long ago become a cliché in investigating any kind of political corruption or corporate crime. But what had her daddy meant by it that day in 1987, in the publisher’s office of the Bugle?
Cheri placed all the framed photos back in the box and closed the lid. She checked on J.J., stretched out on his back on the floor, a leg crossed over a knee, a stack of papers held up over his face, lost in concentration.
She’d forgotten. It was really that simple. All the time she’d been in Florida chasing and pushing and fighting for money and success—both before and after J.J.’s disastrous surprise visit—she’d forgotten what it felt like to be comfortable and at ease and in love with a man.
She didn’t have anything to prove with J.J. There was never a balance sheet with them, one that tracked the giving and the taking and checked for inequities. Maybe it was because they’d known each other so long. Maybe it was because they were just right for each other. Maybe she’d never understand it, and didn’t need to.
His eyes flashed her way and he smiled. “See anything that’s knocked your socks off yet?” he asked.
Cheri smiled back. “Yep.”
“Yeah? What?”
“You.”
He shook his head. “Besides that.”
“Nothing really. But I’ve been thinking about something and I’d like to run it by you.”
“Sure.” J.J. effortlessly sat up, spun around on his butt, and crossed his legs. She loved watching him move. It had to be all the mountain biking, hiking, and weight lifting he’d been doing since he was a kid, but he moved like a wildcat.
“If the possible theft was a story you were reporting for the Bugle or for your New York news service, what would be your basic approach?”
J.J. shrugged. “Follow the money.”
“I knew it!”
He laughed. “You getting all Woodward-and-Bernstein on me?”
She laughed, too. “No, but listen, seriously. Where did all this money go?” She got up from the couch and walked into the kitchen. “You want coffee?”
“Sure,” J.J. said. “But keep talking.”
Cheri put the water on to boil. “From what I can tell, somebody was skimming off the top of advertising revenues from the mid-sixties to the early seventies, but then suddenly switched it up and starting padding expenses.” She grabbed the coffee from the cabinet. “With a few exceptions, this has continued month after month, year after year, until very recently.”
“Then what happened?” J.J. asked.
“Well, the books got so f*cked up it was like Purnell just gave up trying.”
“But how could that have happened?”
She shrugged. “Granddaddy never had the books audited. And basically, until the newspaper business as a whole started going into the toilet, nobody paid much attention. If the Bugle had eight million in revenue and seven million in expenses, there was still one million in profit, and nobody asked any questions.”
“So you’re sure it was Purnell. And all these years—”
“He was stealing. I’m fairly sure of it. Which brings us right back to my original question—where did it all go?”
Cheri set out two mugs and the sugar and cream. “If the guy had been squirreling away money all these years, wouldn’t now be the time to tap into it? To fix up his house, maybe? To retire with? To run off to Bora Bora? Why is he still working when he’s obviously so ill and way past retirement age?”
“I’ll go to town hall tomorrow and look up Purnell’s property tax records, see if he still carries a mortgage.”
“You should probably do the same with Gladys and Granddaddy—just so we can rule them out.”
“Will do, but I think it’s time you take this to Turner. If you give him enough for probable cause, he can get his hands on all kinds of information—Purnell’s personal tax returns, investments, bank balances.”
“Absolutely, but I’m going to visit Purnell in the hospital first. I have to at least give him an opportunity to explain.”
“Better do it soon,” J.J. said, frowning. “He’s not long for this world, I’m afraid.”
With a sigh, Cheri plopped down into the kitchen chair across from J.J. As the water heated, she let her thoughts wander. “So, hypothetically…”
He raised a brow and nodded.
“Who in this town does have money?”
J.J. shrugged. “Same as always. The owners of Amos Paper and Fiber. The Wimbleys. The Gladsen Tannery family. The doctors and the lawyers. Cataloochee County’s pretty much like the rest of the country—the top one half of one percent’s got more than the rest of us combined.”
Cheri nodded.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I’ll need to take that coffee to go.” J.J. reached across the table and stroked the top of Cheri’s hand with his thumb. “I got to go into the newsroom. We’re running a wrap-up feature on Barbara Jean tomorrow—you know, trying to get our sexy back when all we’re doing is rehashing the same, worn-out information.”
Cheri looked up at him and smiled. “I was entertaining my first day on the job, wasn’t I?”
His eyes sparkled. “Not nearly as much as now.”
She giggled as she rose from the table to pour the water through the drip filter. “Can you come back tonight?”
“If you’ll have me again.”
“That was my plan.”
Cheri was grinning as she returned to the table and poured out two mugs of coffee. The little drip pot and a pound of Folger’s gourmet blend from the Piggly Wiggly had been her first official household purchases with Friday’s paycheck.
“So why isn’t there anything new with the Barbara Jean story?” she asked.
J.J.’s sigh was tinged in frustration. “Turner says there’s going to be a break in the case this week.” He took a careful sip of his coffee. “Whoa! This is delicious, Cheri!”
“Really?” It was the first cup of coffee she’d made in close to eight years, and it was a relief to know she remembered how.
“I have a hunch they’ve already ID’d her body but there’s something they don’t want made public quite yet. That’s what I gather from talking to Turner, anyway.”
“So he doesn’t give you scoops, even though he’s your best friend?”
J.J. thought that was funny. “Sure, but not when it comes to a story this big. I can’t say I blame him. He says that as the county’s first black sheriff he’s got to do everything better, faster, and with a big smile. Plus, he’s got a lot of eyes on him right now—regional media, the Feds, the state.” J.J. grinned. “He’s playing this one by the rules.”
Cheri watched J.J.’s smile fade. He lowered his gaze and stared at the scarred old wood of the tabletop. “What’s wrong, Jay?” she asked.
He raised his dark blue eyes to her and tried to smile, but she noticed the tension in his mouth. “I’ve scoured every public record I can get my hands on that’s related to this case, but nothing is jumping out at me. Until they declare it a homicide, Barbara Jean is just another cold disappearance case, and the information’s been gathering dust for more than forty years. Anyone who had firsthand knowledge of the investigation is dead. Sheriff Wimbley died back in 2001. The witness is gone, obviously, and so are the state troopers who had the case, the workers who dragged the lake, the people who owned homes out at Paw Paw Lake—everybody’s dead. But…” He shook his head.
“What?”
“I know I’m missing something. I’m not seeing something that’s right under my nose, and it’s making me crazy, Cheri. I don’t miss shit as a rule, but I’m missing it now, when I can least afford to.”
“It’s the sister,” Cheri said. “The old lady who was crying at the crime scene. She’s still alive.”
J.J. chuckled. “And she’s as jumpy as spit on a hot skillet. She won’t have anything to do with us. She sicced her dogs on me last time I showed up, and she’s no nicer to Mimi. But we’ll keep trying.”
“Maybe I should talk to her.”
J.J.’s coffee mug stopped in midair.
“Or I could call her.”
“No phone,” J.J. said.
“I could just stop by and say I was in the neighborhood.”
“No neighborhood. She lives so far out in Maggie Valley that the postman delivers once a week.”
“I’ll write her, then.”
J.J. nodded. “No harm in that. I’ll take the note next time I venture out there, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up.” He stood to go, grabbed his jacket from a hook near the fireplace and turned to Cheri, his face suddenly soft and innocent because of his smile.
“Cheri, I’m so glad you’re here.”
She rose from her chair and went to him, finding her place in his open arms. “I’m glad, too.”
“But you look exhausted, sugar.”
“I’m fine.”
J.J. placed a finger under her chin and lifted her lips to meet his. He gave her a generous, slow kiss that sent a rush of warmth through her whole body.
“Maybe you should take a nap,” he said, his voice a husky whisper.
“Because it’s a rainy day?”
He chuckled. “No—because I doubt you’ll get much shut-eye tonight.”