Southern Gentlemen Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE AUTHORS

  JENNIFER BLAKE

  “Jennifer Blake touches the hearts of her audience…”

  —Rendezvous

  Jennifer Blake will “thoroughly please.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Blake…consistently produces compelling stories…”

  —Library Journal

  EMILIE RICHARDS

  Iron lace is “a gripping novel of shattering intensity from a storyteller of outstanding merit.”

  —Romantic Times

  Iron lace “is intricate, seductive and a darned good read.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Rising Tides “features a multilayered plot, vivid descriptions, and a keen sense of time and place.”

  —Library Journal

  Also available from MIRA Books and JENNIFERBLAKE

  GARDEN OF SCANDAL

  KANE

  LUKE

  Also available from MIRA Books and EMIILIE RICHARDS

  IRON LACE

  RISING TIDES

  BEAUTIFUL LIES

  JENNIFER BLAKE

  AND

  EMILIE RICHARDS

  SOUTHERN GENTLEMEN

  CONTENTS

  JOHN “RIP” PETERSON

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  BILLY RAY WAINWRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  JOHN “RIP” PETERSON

  by Jennifer Blake

  With love and affection to all the Southern

  gentlemen in my life.

  1

  “I want you.”

  The bald declaration echoed against the crumbling plaster walls of the old parlor. John “Rip” Peterson let it stand for its shock value, but also because it was the exact truth.

  The woman who faced him paled but did not look away. Rip had to admire her valiant self-possession even as he damned it. He didn’t scare Anna Montrose one bit. And he wanted to, needed to, or he might as well call it quits.

  Backing off was not in the plan. If it had ever been an option, he wouldn’t be here at the historic plantation house known as Blest, would have no purpose in confronting Anna. He certainly wouldn’t be laying his needs and desires on the line.

  “You expect me to—sleep with you?” she asked with disbelief. Her eyes darkened to storm-cloud gray as she waited for his answer.

  What would she do if he said yes? The need to find out pounded in Rip’s veins, throbbed in the lower part of his body with every hard beat of his heart. Would she allow him to take her if he reached out for her? Or would she slap him down?

  The answer would have to wait. He had too much at stake to play that game. At least for now.

  “That’s a quaint way to put it, also highly inaccurate,” he said with a short laugh as he shoved his hands deep into his pants pockets. “Sleep would be the last thing I’d expect—if that kind of payment was what I had in mind. But, no. What I expect from you is something you and your family have always had without question. I want respectability.”

  Her features went blank for an instant, during which it was almost possible to see her mentally switch gears. The pale tint of her skin flared to a wild rose shade. She moistened her lips—a movement that Rip followed with intense interest and also a drawing sensation in his chest.

  When she spoke again, her voice was husky. “I don’t think I understand.”

  No, she wouldn’t.

  Anna Montrose had never understood him. Not when she was a child, dressed as a Christmas angel with gold-tinsel-edged wings and long, shining blond curls, while he was shanty trash from across the river in ragged denim and broken-down shoes, watching her in awestruck adoration. Not when she was the teenage daughter of the town’s most prominent family, zipping around in her fancy convertible while he drove the rusty pickup he’d rescued from a junkyard and put back together with his own greasy hands. Not when he had made a friend of her brother Tom for the sake of being near her, and always claimed he wasn’t hungry when invited to eat because they had such perfect table manners while he had none.

  Anna would not recognize the low cunning that had made him wait until she heard the rumors he was back, saw his bulldozers on Blest’s lawn and finally came to him. She could have no idea that he had planned this meeting so she faced him in the dim room with the light from the high windows falling across her face while his back was to it.

  Anna Montrose hadn’t changed. She still had the classic features, wide-spaced eyes and shining hair that people thought lovely. She was still perfect while she made him feel like the boy he had once been—big, dark and awkward, hiding his tender feelings under sullen bravado.

  He wasn’t the same at all. Prison did that to a man.

  “It’s simple,” he answered in caustic explanation. “I want what this town took away from me sixteen long years ago. I intend to begin where I left off, to have my old life back, only better.”

  “And you think I can arrange that for you?” The question carried wonder beneath its disbelief. He also heard relief, which did nothing for his ego.

  Voice soft, gaze lethally straight, he said, “I know you can.”

  “If I don’t, or can’t deliver, then you’re going to raze Blest.”

  She drew a deep breath, as if she could not get enough air. The movement lifted her breasts under the cream silk of the short-sleeved suit she wore against the summer heat. She was well aware of where his attention strayed, it seemed, for she crossed her arms over her chest. Her voice was sharp when she spoke.

  “You would actually do that, tear down one of the most famous old houses in Louisiana, for the sake of a bunch of retirement condos around a golf course?”

  An ironic smile curled his lips. “Is that what the gossip says?”

  “Do you deny it?”

  “Oh, hell, no,” he drawled. “When did it ever do me any good to deny anything in Montrose?”

  She hesitated, as if attentive to something in his voice or face. When she spoke again, it was a single, expressionless word. “Why?”

  “Business,” he said, and stared at her, daring her to contradict him.

  She lifted her chin. “I don’t think so. I think it’s revenge.”

  “Do you?” he asked. At least she was thinking, which meant he had her full attention.

  “You’re striking back at the people around here for daring to send you to prison, and at my family for the testimony that helped put you there.”

  “And what about you? Don’t you think I have anything against you?”

  She made a small, despairing movement of her head that caused the light from the dusty windows to dance across the wild honey waves of her hair. “I never did anything to you.”

  Rip’s fingers tingled with the need to reach out and shake her, or else smooth his hands over the satin fineness of her skin, the gentle curves under her suit. At the same time, he had a flash of the old, disturbing feeling that his touch might sully her.

  As he stared at her, however, he saw she was not quite as he had pictured her so often in his mind. She was taller, and her face had lost its youthful fullness so that the skin conformed more closely to the fine symmetry of the bone structure. Her eyes were more secretive, ye
t oddly more vulnerable. Just looking at her made his throat tighten and his chest swell.

  “Maybe it was what you didn’t do,” he answered finally, though the suggestion carried an undertone of derision directed, for the most part, at himself.

  Her lips tightened and she looked away. It was a hint that she remembered, as well as he did, the hot, delirious summer afternoon when they had almost become lovers.

  For an instant he was there again in that far-off moment. He could feel the tender shape of her beneath him, the warm sun between his shoulder blades, the grass tickling his forearms braced on either side of her. He remembered the haunting fragrance of her skin and hair, the quick thuds of her heart beating against his chest. She had been so sweet, all yielding grace and innocence. He had been clumsy with disbelief and fear that he might hurt her. And with terror that it wouldn’t, couldn’t, last.

  How right he had been.

  “I don’t think this has anything to do with me at all,” she said finally. “I think you’ve come back here with fistfuls of money and a king-size chip on your shoulder. You want to prove to everyone that you made good in spite of them, regardless of what happened. You’ve looked for a way to hurt Montrose and my family, and destroying Blest seems a good place to start.”

  “It would be, wouldn’t it?” The words were pensive as he watched the agitation and distress mirrored on her features.

  “Oh, no doubt! If anybody knows how to hurt us, it’s you. You understand how much this house means, has always meant. You heard my mother and father talk about the old days here a thousand times. You were there when Tom and I used to scheme about buying it back, restoring it to the way it was before my grandfather lost it during the Depression.”

  She was right. Having no dreams of his own, Rip had latched on to theirs, Anna’s and Tom’s. He had grown to love the old West Indies house with its long galleries like sheltering arms, spacious rooms, intricate woodwork and huge, ghostlike murals. He had even loved the name: Blest, blessed place, home of the blessed.

  He had loved it, coveted it. Now it was his, to do with as he pleased.

  “I know how you feel about it,” he said after a moment, “how Tom felt.”

  “You and Tom were…”

  “Good friends,” he supplied as she faltered, then stopped.

  She gave him a straight look. “He never came back.”

  “I know.”

  “Who told you?”

  “I made it my business to stay informed,” he said evasively.

  “My mother always thought you knew something, had some idea where he might have gone.” The words were taut with suspicion.

  “She was wrong. Tom never contacted me.”

  Anna gave no answer, only looked away again, shielding her dark gray gaze with lashes that made faint shadow patterns against the fragile skin under her eyes.

  “Neither Tom nor any of the rest of it has anything to do with what I want from you,” Rip said, as much for the distraction as to return to their original discussion. He didn’t like seeing her in pain, even if he was the one who had caused it. Especially if he’d caused it.

  “Oh, certainly not,” she said in sarcastic disbelief as her head came up. “Respectability, I think you said. I suppose you want to be a gentleman farmer, maybe president of the chamber of commerce or even deacon—”

  “No!” He stopped her with a chopping gesture of one hand. “Social position, public office—they mean nothing to me. I just want to be a part of this community.”

  “You don’t need me for that.”

  “Oh, but I do,” he said quietly. “I need someone to show me how to dress, how to act, which fork to use—all the things I never knew and haven’t had time to learn in the last few years. That someone is you.”

  “If I agree, you’re willing to forget the retirement complex, leave Blest alone. Just like that?”

  “Not quite,” he said, holding his gaze steady. “If you undertake to turn me into a gentleman, I plan to restore the house and live here.”

  A puzzled frown pleated her brow. “But you could learn the things you need from anyone.”

  “You’re the key, the only way it will work,” he corrected her. “It’s not enough to turn myself into the kind of man who might live here. I also need to be seen with you to show that my company’s acceptable. That means going out to dinner together, showing up wherever a man and woman might go for entertainment these days. I would expect you to introduce me to your friends and include me in any invitations that might come your way in the next few weeks.”

  “You have it all worked out.”

  “I believe in having an alternative plan,” he said in answer to the suspicion in her voice. “This was always a possibility.”

  Anna studied him an instant, as if trying to read his face. “You know most of my friends. We all went to school together.”

  “That doesn’t mean they’ll give me the time of day unless you vouch for me.”

  “You underestimate them, I think,” she answered. “But I still don’t understand. You’ve made it big in a world where small town folk like us can’t even compete. Why do you care what anyone thinks?”

  “Maybe I have something to prove.”

  “And you’ll use me to do it.”

  “You can always refuse.” The words were reasonable enough, but he allowed no hint of compromise to shade his voice.

  She moved away a few restless steps. Glancing over her shoulder, she said, “You’re certain that’s all you expect?”

  “It’s a start. Of course, if I keep the house I’ll have to renovate, make it livable. I’ll need you to show me how things once were, help choose colors and furnish the rooms. It could turn into quite a job, but I’m sure we can work out an acceptable financial arrangement.”

  She stopped, turned to face him. “You’re offering to pay me?”

  “It’s a normal exchange, services for cash.”

  “I don’t want your money.”

  “You don’t have to make it sound as if I’m trying to turn you into a call girl,” he said tightly. “Unless you’d prefer it that way.”

  “No!” As if to soften that rejection, she said again in a lower tone, “No,”

  His laugh was short. “I thought not.”

  Anna felt drained, as if she were fighting a losing battle. The man who faced her in the shadowed, high-ceilinged room had a reputation as a hard business opponent, a demon at negotiation and an expert at manipulation to achieve his goals. She could believe it. He was using her doubts and suspicions to make her do exactly as he wanted.

  She didn’t know Rip Peterson anymore, couldn’t begin to guess what was going on in his mind. The man who stood before her was a stranger, powerfully built, attractive in a harsh, intense fashion, but frightening in his assurance and inflexible purpose. Only his midnight black hair, coppery skin and the high cheekbones which proclaimed the Spanish and Indian “Red Bone” blood inherited from his mother’s family were any indication he was the same boy she had known.

  Blest, her Blest, belonged to Rip Peterson, town bad boy turned electronic mogul, who had confounded them all by beating the odds. He had bought the place from behind the protection of a faceless corporation, so the gossips said, claimed it before anyone could guess what he was doing. It was his and he was holding it to ransom.

  Would he really destroy the fine old house if she refused his request? Staring at his hard features across the dusty width of the parlor floor with its threadbare Aubusson carpet, Anna thought he might easily tear Blest down board by board out of sheer malice. Or for no more than a vindictive whim.

  Blindly, she turned away from him, moving toward the open doorway and into the long hallway that cut through the house from front to back. She paused, her gaze on the mural that stretched along the entire length of the north wall.

  It showed Blest as it had been in another time, a grand showplace set like a gem against the white velvet of cotton fields in full bloom. Small black figure
s toiled along the cotton rows while gentlemen in tailcoats and ladies in wide skirts took their leisure on the upper gallery. Still, the scene was misty and ephemeral, as if based on a myth without substance, a false celluloid dream of how life in the south had once been.

  The real focal point, however, was the three young people who picnicked under a tree on the front lawn. It was Anna, Tom and Rip in modern clothing, two of them blond and tan, the other dark and slightly apart. All three appeared to be relaxed and contemplative in the summer heat, intent on their own dreams. They were a part of the past yet separate from it; they looked forward, not back.

  This particular composition had been done by Blest’s caretaker, Papa Vidal, using ordinary house paint, during one of the long-ago summers when Anna, Tom and Rip had first found their way into the big, deserted house. The two old ladies who had bought Blest in the late thirties had just died and the niece from California who had inherited couldn’t be bothered to look after it, much less live in it. The niece had let Papa Vidal stay on in the small cottage on the grounds that had been his home all his life.

  The elderly black man was a local legend. Even sixteen years ago, he had been of venerable age and quite a character, with white hair like crinkled spider-webs, patchwork vests he quilted himself, and a Silky chicken named Henrietta that he carried in a deep pocket. He hadn’t minded the three teenagers coming around. He knew they weren’t apt to bother anything, knew the family history and the fact that half the old furniture in the place were Montrose family heirlooms sold with the estate.

  Papa Vidal enjoyed their company. He told them many stories, about the young bride who ran screeching from the house on her wedding night in the 1840s, the sharecropper who hanged himself in the toolshed during the 1880s, the famous author who hid out in a back bedroom in the 1950s and handed manuscript pages through the door in exchange for glasses of whiskey. He told, too, of how he started to paint using brushes left behind by some artistic visitor, and of the yearly art festival that had evolved from the display of some of his canvases downtown on the courthouse square.