She remembered the first time she’d met him. It hadn’t been long after Mama’s funeral, after she had moved into Davencourt and wheedled Grandmother into letting her redecorate the bedroom she’d chosen. She and Grandmother had been in town to choose fabrics, but Grandmother had run into one of her cronies in the fabric shop and Jessie had quickly gotten bored. She had already chosen the fabric she liked, so there was no reason to hang around listening to two old biddies gossip. She had told Grandmother she was going to the restaurant next door to get a Coke and made her escape.
She had gone there; she had learned early that she could get away with a lot more if she simply did what she really wanted to do after she’d done what she’d said she was going to do. That way she couldn’t be accused of lying, for heaven’s sake. And people knew how impulsive teenagers were. So, icy Coke in hand, Jessie had then whisked herself down to the newsstand where dirty magazines were sold.
It wasn’t really a newsstand, but a grimy little store that sold hobby kits, a smattering of makeup and toiletries, some “hygienic” items such as rubbers, as well as newspapers, paperbacks, and a wide selection of magazines. The Newsweeks and Good Housekeepings were prominently displayed up front with all the other acceptable magazines, but the forbidden ones were kept on a rack behind a counter in back, and kids weren’t supposed to go back there. But old man McElroy had arthritis real bad, and he spent most of his time sitting on a stool behind the checkout counter. He couldn’t really see who was in the back area unless he stood up, and he didn’t stand up very often.
Jessie gave old man McElroy a sweet smile and wandered over to the cosmetic section, where she leisurely inspected a few lipsticks and selected a sheer pink lip gloss, her reason for being there should she get caught. When a customer claimed his attention, she whisked herself out of sight and slipped into the back area.
Naked women cavorted on various covers, but Jessie spared them only a brief disdainful glance. If she wanted to see a naked woman, all she had to do was strip off her clothes. What she liked were the nudist magazines, where she could see naked men. Most of the time their peckers were small and limp, which didn’t interest her at all, but sometimes there would be a picture of a man with a nice, long, fat one sticking out. The nudists said there was nothing sexy about running around naked, but Jessie figured they lied. Otherwise, why would those men be getting hard like Grandmother’s stallion did when he was about to mount a mare? She had sneaked into the stables to watch whenever she could, though everyone would have been horrified, just horrified, if they’d known.
Jessie smirked. They didn’t know, and they wouldn’t. She was too smart for them. She was two different people, and they didn’t even suspect. There was the public Jessie, the princess of the Davenports, the most popular girl in school who charmed everyone with her high spirits and who refused to experiment with alcohol and cigarettes the way all the other kids did. Then there was the real Jessie, the one she kept hidden, the one who slipped the paperback porn books under her clothes and smiled sweetly at Mr. McElroy as she left his store. The real Jessie stole money from her grandmother’s purse, not because there was something she couldn’t have just for the asking, but because she liked the thrill of it.
The real Jessie loved tormenting that little brat, Roanna, loved pinching her when no one could see, loved making her cry. Roanna was a safe target, because no one really liked her anyway and they would always believe Jessie rather than her if she carried tales. Lately, Jessie had begun to really hate the brat, rather than just disliking her. Webb was always taking up for her, for some reason, and that made Jessie furious. How dare he take Roanna’s side instead of hers?
A secret little smile curved her mouth. She’d show him who was boss. Lately she had discovered a new weapon, as her body had grown and changed. She had been fascinated by sex for years, but now physically she was beginning to match her mental maturity. All she had to do was arch her back and take a deep breath, thrusting out her breasts, and Webb would stare so fixedly at them that it was all she could do to keep from laughing. He’d kissed her, too, and when she rubbed her front against him, he had started breathing real deep, and his pecker had gotten hard. She had thought about letting him do it to her, but an innate cunning had stopped her. She and Webb lived in the same house; she would be taking too much of a chance that others would find out, and that might change the image they had of her.
She had just reached out for one of the nudist magazines when a man spoke behind her, his voice low and raspy. “What’s a pretty little gal like you doin’ back here?”
Alarmed, Jessie snatched her hand back and whirled to face him. She was always so careful not to let anyone see her in this section, but she hadn’t heard him approach. She stared up at him, blinking wide, startled eyes at him as she prepared to go into her act of the innocent young girl who had wandered back here by accident. What she saw in the hot, impossibly blue eyes looking down at her made her hesitate. This man didn’t look as if he would believe any explanation she could make.
“You’re Janet Davenport’s kid, ain’t you?” he asked, still keeping his voice low.
Slowly, Jessie nodded. Now that she’d had a good look at him, a strange thrill ran through her. He was probably in his thirties, way too old, but he was really muscular and the expression in those hot blue eyes made her think he must know some really nasty things.
He grunted. “Thought so. Sorry about your mama.” But even as he said the conventional words, Jessie had the feeling that he didn’t really care one way or the other. He was looking her up and down in a way that made her feel peculiar, as if she belonged to him.
“Who are you?” she whispered, casting a weather eye toward the front of the store.
A feral grin bared his white teeth. “The name’s Harper Neeley, little darlin’. Mean anything to you?”
She caught her breath, because she knew the name. She had snooped through Mama’s things on a regular basis. “Yes,” she said, so excited she could barely stand still. “You’re my daddy.”
He’d been surprised that she’d known who he was, she thought now, watching him as he lazed beneath the tree while he waited for her. But as excited as she’d been at meeting him, he really hadn’t given a damn that she was his daughter. Harper Neeley had a bunch of kids, at least half of them bastards. One more, even if that one was a Davenport, didn’t mean anything to him. He’d approached her just for the hell of it, not because he really cared.
Somehow, that had excited her. It was like meeting the secret Jessie, walking around in her father’s body.
He fascinated her. She had made a point of meeting with him occasionally over the years. He was rough and totally selfish, and she often felt as if he were laughing at her. It infuriated her, but whenever she saw him, she still felt that same electric excitement. He was so nasty, so totally unacceptable to her social circle … and he was hers.
Jessie couldn’t remember exactly when the excitement had turned sexual. Maybe it had always been like that, but she just hadn’t been ready to recognize it. She had been so focused on bringing Webb to heel, so careful to indulge herself only when she was safely away from her home area, that it simply hadn’t occurred to her.
But one day, about a year ago, when she had seen him, the usual excitement had suddenly sharpened, turned almost feral in its intensity. She had been furious with Webb—what was new about that?—and Harper had been right there, his thickly muscled body enticing her, his hot blue eyes drifting down her body in a way no father should ever look at his daughter.
She had hugged him, cuddled against him, sweetly called him “Daddy,” and all the while she had been rubbing her breasts against him, rolling her hips against his pecker. That was all it had taken. He’d laughed down at her, then crudely grabbed her crotch and shoved her to the ground, where they had gone at each other like animals.
She couldn’t stay away from him. She had tried, knowing how dangerous he was, knowing that she had no power to control h
im, but he drew her like a lodestone. There were no games she could play with him, because he knew her exactly for what she was. There was nothing he could give her and nothing that she wanted from him, except for the mindless, heated sex. No one had ever screwed her the way her daddy did. She didn’t have to gauge her every reaction or try to manipulate his response; all she could do was simply lose herself in the hot nastiness of the sex. Whatever he wanted to do to her, she was willing. He was trash, and she loved it, because he was the best revenge she could ever have chosen. When Webb got into bed beside her at night, it served him right that he was sleeping with a woman who, only hours before, had been sticky with Harper Neeley’s leavings.
CHAPTER 4
Roanna stared after Jessie as she rode away from Davencourt, up toward the hilly part of the Davenport lands. Jessie usually preferred a less demanding ride, over fields or level pastures. Why would she deviate from custom? Come to think of it, she had ridden that way a couple of times before, and Roanna had noticed it but not paid attention to it. For some reason, this time she was puzzled.
Maybe it was because she still felt resentful at Jessie’s last zinger, though God knows it hadn’t been any worse than the usual cut at her fragile self-esteem. Maybe it was because she, unlike everyone else, expected Jessie to be up to no good. Maybe it was that damn perfume. She hadn’t been wearing it at lunch, Roanna thought. A scent that strong would have been noticed. So why had she doused herself with perfume before going for a ride by herself?
The answer dawned on her with blinding clarity. “She’s got a boyfriend!” she whispered to herself, almost overcome with shock. Jessie was slipping around behind Webb’s back and seeing someone! Roanna almost suffocated on her indignation on Webb’s behalf. How could any woman, even Jessie, be fool enough to jeopardize her marriage to him?
Quickly she saddled Buckley, her current favorite, and set out in the same direction she’d seen Jessie take. The big gelding had a long, slightly uneven gait that would have been jarring to a less experienced rider but covered distance at a fast clip. Roanna was used to his stride and settled herself into his rhythm, moving fluidly with the motion as she kept her eyes on the ground, following the fresh imprints of Jessie’s horse.
Part of her didn’t believe Jessie really had a boyfriend—it was just too good to be true, and besides, Jessie was too smart to drop her bread butter-side down—but she couldn’t resist the tantalizing possibility that she might be right. Gleefully she began plotting some vague revenge against Jessie for the years of hurts and slights, though she didn’t know exactly what she could do. Real revenge wasn’t part of Roanna’s makeup. She was far more likely to punch Jessie in the nose than she was to plot and carry through some long-term plan, and she would get a lot more enjoyment out of it. But she simply couldn’t pass up the opportunity to catch Jessie doing something she shouldn’t; it was usually she who was goofing up and Jessie who was pointing it out.
She didn’t want to overtake Jessie too quickly, so she reined Buckley to a walk. The July sun broiled down so white and merciless that it should have washed out the colors of the trees, but it didn’t. The top of her head burned from the heat. Usually she crammed a baseball cap on her head, but she was still dressed in the silk blend slacks and shirt she had worn to lunch, and the baseball cap, like her boots, was in her bedroom.
Dawdling was easy in that heat. She stopped and let Buckley drink from a small stream, then resumed her leisurely tracking. There was a slight breeze blowing into her face, which was why Buckley caught the scent of Jessie’s mount and gave a soft whicker, alerting her. She immediately backtracked, not wanting the other horse to alert Jessie to her presence.
After tethering Buckley to a small pine, she quietly made her way through the trees and up a small hill. Her thin-soled sandals slipped on the pine needles, and she impatiently kicked them off, then clambered barefooted the rest of the way to the top.
Jessie’s mount was about forty yards below and to the left, calmly cropping a small patch of grass. A large, mosscovered rock jutted up just over the crest of the hill, and Roanna crept over to crouch behind its bulk. Carefully she peeked around it, trying to locate Jessie. She could hear voices, she thought, but the sounds were odd, not really words.
Then she saw them, almost directly below her, and sank weakly against the hot surface of the rock, shock clanging through her body. She had thought to catch Jessie meeting with one of her friends from the country club, maybe necking a little, but not this. Her own sexual experience was so severely limited that she couldn’t have formed the images in her mind.
A bush partially concealed them, but still she could see the blanket, Jessie’s pale, slim body, and the darker, more muscled form of the man on top of her. They were both stark naked, he was moving, and she was clinging to him, and they were both making sounds that made Roanna cringe. She couldn’t tell who he was, could only see the top and back of his dark head. But then he moved off Jessie, rising up on his knees, and Roanna swallowed hard as she stared at him, her eyes huge. She had never seen a naked man before, and the shock was jarring. He pulled Jessie up on her hands and knees and slapped her rear, laughing harshly at the hot, guttural sound she made, then he was driving into her again the way Roanna had once glimpsed two horses doing it, and dainty, fastidious Jessie was clawing at the blanket and arching her back and rotating her butt against him.
Bile rose hotly in Roanna’s throat, and she ducked down behind the rock, pressing her cheek against the rough stone. She closed her eyes tight, trying to control the urge to vomit. She felt numb and sick with despair. My God, what would Webb do?
She had followed Jessie out of a perverse, mischievous desire to cause trouble for her hateful cousin, but she had expected something minor: teasing kisses, if another man was involved at all, maybe meeting some of her friends and slipping away to a bar or something. Years ago, after she and Jessie had first come to live at Davencourt, Webb had sternly neutralized Jessie’s spitefulness by threatening to spank her if she didn’t stop tormenting Roanna, a threat Roanna had found so delicious that she had spent days trying to provoke Jessie, just so she could watch her hateful cousin get her rear end warmed. Amused, Webb had finally taken her aside and warned her that the punishment could come her way, too, if she didn’t behave herself. That same impish impulse had prompted her today, but what she had found was far more serious than she had anticipated.
Roanna’s chest burned with impotent rage, and she swallowed convulsively. As much as she disliked and resented her cousin, she had never thought Jessie was stupid enough to actually be unfaithful to Webb.
Nausea rose again, and she quickly turned around to drape her arms across her drawn-up knees and rest her head on them. Her movements scraped against some small gravel, but she was too far away for them to hear the slight noises she was making, and at the moment she was too sick to care. They weren’t paying much attention to anything around them anyway. They were too busy pumping and humping. God, how silly it looked … and how gross, all at the same time. Roanna was glad she wasn’t any closer, glad that the bush had hid at least part of them.
She could just kill Jessie for doing this to Webb.
If Webb knew, he might kill Jessie himself, Roanna thought, and a chill ran through her. Though he normally controlled it, everyone who knew Webb well was aware of his temper and took care not to arouse it. Jessie was a fool, a stupid, malicious fool.
But she probably thought she was safe from discovery, since Webb wouldn’t be back from Nashville until tonight. By then, Roanna thought sickly, Jessie would be all freshly bathed and perfumed, waiting for him and wearing both a pretty dress and a smile, and silently making fun of him because only a few hours earlier she’d been screwing in the woods with someone else.
Webb deserved better than that. But she couldn’t tell him, Roanna thought. She could never tell anyone. If she did, the most likely outcome would be that Jessie would lie her way out of it, saying that Roanna was just jealous and
trying to make trouble, and everyone would believe her because Roanna was jealous, and everyone knew it. Then both Webb and Grandmother would be angry with her rather than with Jessie. Grandmother stayed exasperated at her most of the time anyway for one reason or the other, but she couldn’t bear for Webb to be mad at her.
The other possibility would be that Webb did believe her. He might really kill Jessie, and then he would be in trouble. She couldn’t bear for anything to happen to him. He might find out some other way, but she couldn’t do anything to prevent that. All she could do was not say anything herself and pray that if he did find out, he wouldn’t do anything to get himself arrested.
Roanna slipped from her place of concealment behind the rock and quickly made her way back over the hill and through the stand of pine trees to where she had tethered Buckley. He blew a soft greeting and shoved his nose at her. Obediently she stroked the big head, scratching behind his ears, but her mind wasn’t on what she was doing. She mounted him and quietly walked him away from the scene of Jessie’s adultery, heading back to the stables. Misery weighed heavily on her thin shoulders.
She couldn’t understand what she’d seen. How could any woman, even Jessie, not be satisfied with Webb? Roanna’s childhood hero worship had only intensified in the ten years she had been living at Davencourt. At seventeen, she was painfully aware of other women’s response to him, so she knew it wasn’t just her opinion. Women stared at Webb with unconscious, or maybe not so unconscious, yearning in their eyes. Roanna tried not to look at him that way, but she knew she wasn’t always successful, because Jessie sometimes said something sharp to her about mooning around Webb and making a pest of herself. She couldn’t help it. Every time she saw him, it was as if her heart gave a great big leap before starting to beat so fast that sometimes she couldn’t breathe, and she would get warm and tingly all over. Lack of oxygen, most likely. She didn’t think love caused tingles.