Black Gold Page 5

  "I… uh… really… it would be best if we made arrangements for the middle of the month or later," she said. "I have some conflicts in my schedule before then. But I can assure you I'll give you my full attention, line up some studio time as soon as—"

  "Can't do it then. Has to be now." Chase knew what the odds were that he could get his schedule changed: zero heading to the negative numbers. With less than two months on the job, he wasn't the most junior man, but there were guys who'd been hustling a long time to get their hitches lined up so they could be home for birthdays, anniversaries, kids' graduations. He wasn't about to jeopardize any of their plans by requesting more time off.

  Regina looked from Chase to Sherry and back. "Well... I suppose we could try to work locally. Maybe see if there's anywhere we can record a few tracks. For today, I was wondering if we could just talk. And I'd love to hear you sing some more."

  Sherry nodded, swallowing hard. "Yes, ma'am. It's just I've got to leave for work in about half an hour."

  "Oh." Regina looked disappointed. "Well, we'll do the best we can, then. And tonight? Do you have plans?"

  "Just with Harry. He's taking a summer school class, and I have to help him with his algebra and fix him his dinner and—"

  "Sherry," Chase scolded quietly. She refused to look at him, but he pressed on. "How many times has Matthew asked you and Harry to come to dinner?"

  The girl ducked her chin and her mouth wobbled. She suddenly looked much closer to being a child than an adult. "We don't take charity," she whispered.

  Chase felt a muscle twitch in his jaw. "It isn't charity," he scolded, but he kept his voice gentle because he knew from experience what happened when he pushed Sherry too hard. She disappeared. Oh, she was still right next door, working two jobs and taking care of her brother, but she'd head the other way when she saw him coming or claim to be much too busy to talk. "This is your chance, Sherry. We've talked about that. Right?"

  For a moment, no one spoke. Then Chase reached out and, very gently, tipped her chin up with his fingers. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Regina flinch. "Right?" he repeated, even more quietly.

  Sherry nodded, a very small motion.

  "How about this?" Regina said brightly. They both looked at her. She was speaking fast, her voice gone high and tight, and her smile didn't quite meet her eyes. "If arrangements can be made for your brother, I'd love to take the two of you out to dinner in town. Say, seven o'clock? Is that convenient?"

  "That'll be just fine," Chase said quickly. "Though, you know what? I think I'll stay back with Harry and take care of the tutoring myself. I'm pretty good at math."

  "Oh no you don't," Regina said, fixing him with a glare. "I asked both of you."

  "Please," Sherry said quickly. Chase sighed, knowing he was beat already. He could, maybe, just maybe, resist one skinny hard-headed, crazy-talented girl he'd come to think of as like a kid sister. And—if he took a cold shower and hit himself on the head with a frying pan—he might possibly be able to turn down an invitation from a woman who dressed like Betty Boop and spoke with the voice of every dream he'd ever had since discovering he could order adult content when his dad left him in the hotel rooms.

  But there was no way he could resist them both at once.

  "Aw, hell—I guess I could stand to eat."

  "Excellent!" Regina clapped her hands together. "So, Chase and I can talk now, and get all of our boring business out of the way. And tonight we can focus on you." She beamed at Sherry, who looked both terrified and elated.

  "Miss McCary," she said, "thank you. I mean, thank you so much, really. You don't have any idea what this means to me. Even just a chance."

  "You're a talented young woman," Regina said. "You've got a great future."

  Together, Chase and Regina watched Sherry run around like a cyclone, searching for her purse and keys and sunglasses before she sprinted for her car. Her old sedan didn't look like it could make it across the yard, much less all the way into town, and the engine had a dispiriting coughing fit before it finally fired all the way up, but as Sherry drove off down the road she gave the horn a tap and waved out the window.

  "Hell of a gal," Chase said. "She's going to make you a lot of money some day."

  "Stop trying to distract me," Regina said.

  "Excuse me?"

  "The whole reason I came out here? Remember? I want to talk about you."

  They were still standing in front of the Tar Barn. Sherry had left the door unlocked again, a habit she was having a hard time breaking. Before her parents' accident, they'd all lived in a house out in the middle of the land Sherry's father helped farm, where the odds of anyone coming by, much less breaking in, were tiny. Of course, hardly anyone came out to the ranch, either, other than the crew from Arkansas who had taken up residence in the bunk house.

  Speaking of which... Chase ventured a peek in the direction of the house, and wasn't surprised to see that Jayne and Matthew had wandered out on the porch. Matthew was pretending to hang laundry on the line strung between two trees, which was a dead giveaway because after wrecking an entire load of towels when a strong wind blew them off the line, he'd stuck to the industrial sized dryer in the laundry room. As for Jayne, she wasn't even bothering to pretend. She sat in one of the rocking chairs watching them, a book unopened in her lap. Seeing Chase glance over, she waved and gave him an encouraging smile.

  "Let's walk," he said brusquely, turning his back on the house. He grabbed Regina's hand and led her down the dirt path in the other direction. Past the trailer and through the little woods, it continued into the fields.

  "Slow down," Regina said, struggling to keep up with him. The shoes: he'd forgotten her ridiculous shoes. The pointy heels were getting stuck on every rock and weed and root, and if she wasn't careful, she was going to wind up facedown in the weeds.

  "It's not far," he said. "I don't suppose you could try going barefoot?"

  She looked at him in horror, as though he'd suggested she strip off her clothes and go the rest of the way naked. Back on the porch, Jayne had set her book on the windowsill and was starting to make her way toward them. Great—just what he needed. Chase knew that his friend was just trying to help, but the last thing he wanted was Jayne coming over and singing his praises. After all—though he was having trouble remembering why—he was trying to get rid of this woman, not win her over.

  "In that case..."

  He had one hand around her waist and another behind her knees before she could react. Then she was up off the ground, settled pleasantly in his arms, her curves just right in his grip.

  "What are you doing?" she shrieked.

  "Helping," he said through gritted teeth, as he stalked down the path, trying to ignore the faint scent of her perfume, the view of her breasts now pressed against his chest. "Don't want to mess up those nice shoes of yours."

  "But I—we could—you can't—"

  By the time she finished sputtering, they had arrived at the tree house. With a trace of regret, he set her down. She blushed and dusted imaginary dirt from her skirt.

  "You think you can handle the climb?" he asked. "Because otherwise, way I see it, we got two options. You can either come up piggyback, or I can lower down the rope and—"

  "I'm fine," Regina said, refusing to look at him. She took a deep breath and grabbed the first of the boards nailed to the tree generations ago, when Mimi's departed husband had been a little boy. She put the toe of her shoe tentatively on the board near the bottom of the tree and boosted herself up. She kept going, and Chase enjoyed the view of her hips straining against the fabric as she edged up the trunk.

  A few feet up, her shoe slipped on the board and she gave a startled squeak.

  "Easy, girl," Chase said, automatically reaching for her. He found himself with one hand on the small of her back and another cupping the rounded cheek of her ass. It was both firm and deliciously soft, even through the nubby fabric of her skirt, and he couldn't resist tightening his fingers on h
er flesh.

  She kicked him, her heel grazing his shoulder.

  "Hey!" he yelped as she scurried the rest of the way up to the platform above his head with no further hesitation. "An inch to the side, and you could have taken out my jugular! Those heels should be classified as deadly weapons!"

  "Then you shouldn't have assaulted me," Regina called over her shoulder, disappearing into the little wooden structure.

  Chase stood for a moment, his fingers tingling from the feel of her. "I was just trying to save you from falling," he protested. He was rewarded from silence from above.

  It was true, though. Well, at least until the moment when he had her in his hands. God, had it really been so long since he'd held a woman that even a handful of scratchy fabric could get him hot?

  He shook his head and headed up the trunk.

  It was awkward going, because the boards were nailed close together. Chase guessed that Earl Brackens had been only ten or twelve when he found the scrap lumber and nailed it into place up in the tree. It was a good tree, made for dreaming away summer days, and if young Earl's carpentry skills had left a little to be desired, it had taken Chase only a single afternoon to sand down the splinters and pound the popped nails back into place and patch a few holes. He'd told himself he was doing it for Harry—but the younger Dawkins was more of a skateboard kid than a tree house type. Besides, at fifteen, he had better things to do than while away his afternoons high in a tree.

  Chase, however, had never had a tree house. By the time he was ten, he'd had fois gras, champagne, and smoked his father's cigars and stolen peeks of his father's girlfriends' lacy underthings in the suitcases they left out in the adjoining rooms. But he'd never ridden a bike or gone to a Cub Scout meeting or joined a pickup ball game.

  It took Chase most of his twenties to make up for all the things he'd missed. The day he turned eighteen, he took a job as a dishwasher and a room in a run-down house where he bartered household chores and handyman projects for rent. He learned soccer from some of his restaurant co-workers and listened to ball games on the radio. He bought a secondhand bike and learned to ride in a parking lot after dark, too embarrassed to ride in public until he could stay on the bike without falling. He learned to cuss and ogle women and smoke cigars and play cards, and when he started picking up singing gigs a few years later, he learned to drink whiskey and wear a hat and charm a woman twice his age.

  But there were still holes in his past—none as painful as the knowledge that he'd been little more than an albatross to his dad, who acknowledged his absence with a monthly call to ask if he needed money and if he'd considered going to college yet and then got off the phone like it was radioactive—and this tree house filled one of them. Somehow, when the repairs were made and Harry couldn't be coaxed up the trunk, it was Chase who came out here on the occasional summer evening to think or read or watch movies on his iPad. Jayne and Matthew and Zane and Cal and Jimmy never came looking for him; they seemed to know instinctively when he needed to be alone out here.

  Not that there would have been room, even if they'd wanted to join him. As Chase pulled himself up onto the wooden platform, he saw that Regina was sitting daintily, her skirt tugged as far over her thighs as it would go, and there was barely room for him unless he squeezed in right next to her. Which, he reasoned, was why he was here, so...

  "Hey," she exclaimed as he bumped against her, easing his bulk down onto the plywood boards.

  "Sorry," he murmured, though he was anything but. He sat with his legs sprawled out, his feet hanging over the edge, his hip next to hers.

  If she minded, she didn't show it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Regina traced her fingers over the initials carved in the trunk that made up one wall of the tree house. Two more walls had been fashioned from boards nailed to branches, leaving the view of the fields beyond exposed. There was a crude roof overhead to protect from falling leaves and wind, but the little structure was defenseless against rain, and there were gaps between all the boards. It had been crafted with more love than skill, which somehow added to its charm.

  "Who are EB and EB?" she asked dreamily, touching the carved heart around the two sets of letters.

  "Earl and Elaine Brackens. They owned this place—both of them gone now. They were the third generation of Brackens to live out their lives here. Earl buried his wife down by the creek, alongside the rest of his relatives. Mimi—the woman who owns this spread—was his second wife, and since he never had any kids, the whole place went to her."

  "You sound like that's a bad thing."

  Chase shrugged.

  Regina studied him, trying to read the expression that clouded his eyes. Sadness, tinged with something else.

  "It's a shame, I guess—a place like this ought to belong to someone it means something to. Someone who appreciates it, who's willing to work hard to keep it up."

  "Somebody's working that land," Regina said, pointing at the rows of young plants in the fields below, the tender leaves gently ruffled by the breeze.

  "Oh, sure. Don't get me wrong, Mimi makes sure the acreage is all leased, what's left of it. Course, she's sold off a lot of it—the ranch is down to just over a hundred acres. Most of what you see belongs to other people now."

  "But you would have liked to see it all stay in one family."

  Chase frowned and shifted almost imperceptibly away from her. Regina had been very much aware of his body next to hers, the contrasting texture of the rough denim of his jeans and the soft cotton of his shirt brushing against her arm.

  "What I want, and the way things are—I learned a long time ago that there's a big difference between those two," he said gruffly.

  Regina wasn't sure what to say to that. She settled on saying nothing at all. It was strange. With most people in her business, silence was in short supply. Take Carl, for instance—widely acknowledged as having the most successful one-man agency in the business—he could talk his way into or out of anything, and he did it by keeping up a steady patter, always staying one step ahead. Whether he was dealing with a client, a producer, or a booking agent, he had a way of subtly shifting every negotiation so he ended up with the bigger piece of the pie, and he did it by driving the conversation exactly where he wanted it to go.

  Their brief engagement was a perfect example. Regina had her doubts. Carl was widely known for the string of broken hearts he'd left all over town. But he laid out his proposal so convincingly that when he was done describing the wedding they'd have and the island honeymoon he'd planned and the house they'd buy and renovate together, it was as if it was already a done deal, and there seemed to be little left for Regina to do but agree. And she had—she'd barely blinked before he slid the two-carat diamond on her finger and bustled her off to his favorite restaurant for a celebratory champagne toast—but within a month, he had taken up with a girl who worked at the ridiculously overpriced boutique where he bought his custom-made shirts.

  Though if Regina was really honest with herself—and there was something about sitting up in a tree house with balmy September breezes blowing the scent of fresh-cut grass through the air that seemed to encourage honesty—the breakup had been just as much her fault as Carl’s. "You hold yourself back," Carl had said after she'd packed all the things she'd kept at his loft into a cardboard box. "In all the time I've known you, I never really knew all of you."

  And he never would... and no one else would either. Not even Meredith or her sisters understood that Regina had a soft spot for people who didn’t quite fit in, the ones who were overlooked and dismissed. It didn't take a degree in psychology to know where it came from. As the black sheep of the family, the only sister without musical stardom in her future, she identified with those who followed the beat of different drummers. But that wouldn't help her get ahead in life, as her early clients had proven. When she could actually bear to think about it, she wondered if the few gigs and reviews she'd gotten them had actually improved their lives, or only given them f
alse hope. So now she was committed to surrounding herself with success. She only signed clients who'd become stars, and only dated men who were at the top of their game.

  Which was why Carl had been perfect. Carl Cash, charismatic and photogenic and as slick as the day was long, was about as vulnerable as a granite boulder. He didn't need her and she hadn't hurt him, and that made him the perfect boyfriend while he lasted.

  Next to her, Chase shifted slightly, so that his leg brushed against hers. "Sorry," he mumbled, coloring. "Old injury, acts up when the weather changes."

  "But the weather's perfect!" Regina exclaimed. Sun dappled the weathered boards, and the temperature was balmy. There wasn't a cloud in the sky.

  "There's something going on with the atmosphere," Chase said. "I'm no weatherman, but it sure feels like there's some sort of storm brewing."

  "We'll see," Regina said stiffly, wondering how the man could mistake the tension between them for atmospheric disturbance. Honestly, men could be so thick-headed. Sometimes, people just rubbed each other the wrong way. There was no getting around it. Best to just avoid them and chalk it up to human nature.

  She really ought to climb back down to solid ground. Instead, she lapsed into silence, stealing glances at Chase's sun-browned forearm. He had the sort of muscles that were built from hard work instead of the gym, unlike Carl. His upper arms strained the sleeves of his shirt, which, now that Regina was only inches away, she saw was a little threadbare, faded from many washings. His jeans were equally worn, the fabric soft and faded and, she couldn't help noticing, snug in all of the right places. And his boots—though they were well cared for, the leather oiled and supple, she'd bet there were a lot of miles on them.

  All of which spoke to the kind of background that set off red lights for Regina. The hardscrabble, self-made types—entirely wrong to be attracted to. Because men like that could be hurt too easily. They'd been disappointed too often. They had no Carl-like defenses, no backup game plan, no black book full of women's phone numbers on standby.