Page 54 of Tate
“It’s up here.” She sat up. He spotted a tiny community nestled into the draws and foothills of a nearby mountainous rise. A tiny white church rose from the main street. Another one, bigger, sat at the edge of town. “The Mormon church.” Scarlett pointed it out. “Take a left at the café.”
The word Café in red lettering jutted out from the door of a nondescript white house. Yeah, he’d bet there was a lineup.
Across from an ancient Amoco, rusty and permanently closed, the tiny building had been converted to an outdoor eatery. It looked more like an auto parts store than a café.
“Right on South Willow.”
Surprisingly, the community was clean, the yards trimmed, the houses kept up. He drove past a row of double-wides with front porches and hanging flowers.
“There.”
He wasn’t sure what he might be expecting, but something inside him unclenched a little as he pulled up to a tiny green house with a white painted front porch. A potted geranium hadbreathed its last on the front stoop, but he spotted a trampoline in the side yard and a bike leaning against a mature oak tree.
He pulled onto the gravel drive, and Scarlett reached for the handle. “I’ll grab my stuff.”
Wait. He felt the pulse inside him as she let herself out.
Wait.Another tharrumph as a man came out onto the porch. He was tall and muscled, his shoulders thick. Maybe early forties, his long hair pulled back into a ponytail, and a layer of whiskers, more lazy than GQ, on his face. He wore a black muscle shirt and a pair of loose-fitting gym shorts, flip-flops. And his gaze settled on Scarlett with a slight uptick to his mouth.
Axel?
Ford didn’t know why he’d expected someone in his sixties. Maybe because his mother had just turned sixty and he thought Scarlett might be a year or two older than him. But this guy…
The man came off the porch toward Scarlett, swagger in his steps, like…well, a little like the biker at Dusty’s.
Ford got out of the truck. Clearly this ride wasn’t quite over.
6
The woman was on a mission to make him lose his mind.
And it just might work.
Tate didn’t move a muscle, his gaze on everything but Glo as she walked along the Japanese gardens of Cheekwood Estate, hand in hand with Sloan Anderson. A slight May breeze bullied the white Japanese lilacs that bordered the meandering paths dappled in purples and reds from the lingering twilight.
The perfect romantic stroll for a couple in love.
He glanced at Glo, just a check-in, then surveyed the area beyond her, the pavilion and stunted pines on the horizon ahead.
An impulsive stroll after an early dinner at the Watermark, just off Music Row.
At least he didn’t have to try to keep her in his sights at one of the blues joints on Bourbon Street or on the packed dance floor of the Wildhorse Saloon, venues he thought might be more the taste of the woman he knew.
Once knew.
But apparently that woman had vanished, replaced by this upper-crust society woman who preferred dinner and jazz at Sambuca, and Brahms at the Nashville Symphony. Gone wereher red cowboy boots, her daring painted-on tattoos, and the twinkle in her eye as she glanced at him standing in the wings.
No, all her glances and even sweet smiles she reserved for Sloan. Tonight she wore a high-collared pink dress, black heels that had to be killing her, and twined her fingers through Sloan’s as she listened to him drone on about the exploits of a senator during his season as a lobbyist.
A voice came through his earpiece—the driver, one of the security staff, waiting at the gate.
“Rango, it’s Swamp. ETA?”
Swamp, aka Baker Flemming from Florida. All the guys had nicknames beyond their formal names. Tate had been dubbed Rango after some cartoon Swamp had seen.
On his shift he worked with Rags—Art Ragsdale; Petey-Boy—Bobby Peterson; and Mitty—Walter Jenkins. Good guys who had stayed out of his business with Glo but knew something might be up after he’d come in one night a few days ago after a shift of watching Glo swoon over Sloan, taped up, and attacked the hanging bag in the weight room. Nearly threw out his shoulder again but felt the muscles start to knit together, and by the end, the adrenaline and heat of his frustration had worked into his bones, settled them, and spread out into determination.
Glo couldn’t possiblyreallylike this schmuck. He was smooth and manipulative. And he wanted his own limelight.
