Buch lesen: «A Plum Orchard novel»

One

“Hellooo,” Emmaline Amos growled comically slow into her cell phone. “This is Mistress Taboo. Are you worrrthy?” The infamous line her best friend Dixie Davis had perfected during her three-month stint as a phone-sex operator bounced off the walls in the offices of Call Girls Inc., sounding ridiculous coming from her lips.

As a follow-up, Em looked in her best friend Dixie’s direction, and attempted to mimic her famous sultry gaze. Or what their group of mutual friends had all officially dubbed the “Dixie Smolder.”

The smolder was a combination pack—one part come-hither glance, one part dreamy half wink of her eyes. When Dixie did it, all the men fell at her feet in a big pile of redneck limbs and puddles of drool.

When Em tried it on for size like she had tonight during girls’ night out—it was as though she’d invented the unsexy.

From behind her reception desk, Nella Carter, Call Girls’ new operator in charge of assigning calls, began to giggle until she had to hold her stomach and cover her mouth.

When she caught her breath, she pointed at Dixie. “You,” she snorted, “were Mistress Taboo, boss? I still get calls for her. Seriously, you?”

Dixie rolled her eyes at the mention of her former phone-sex operator nom de plume. “Em’s had too much wine. I absolutely never, ever sounded or looked like that,” she protested, sipping her glass of wine with a giggle, knowing full well she had.

Em reached for the bottle of wine between them on Nella’s desk and nodded her head, the giddy buzz in her brain making her mouth work overtime. “You did, too. You sounded just like that, all sexified and naughty.”

“Then we can all thank heaven Mistress Taboo is officially retired from phone-sex operatin’ and instead became the owner of Call Girls, ’cuz that was plain painful to my ears.” Dixie mocked a shudder.

Em poured herself another glass of wine, the fluid sloshing in time with her liquid-filled stomach. “Do not deny the win that encompasses Mistress Taboo, Dixie Davis. Just look what that very naughty name, and winning this crazy phone-sex contest Landon thought up for you and Caine, got you.”

Nella adjusted her headset, her hazel eyes wide with surprise. “You won Call Girls? In a contest?”

Em slapped her hand on the desk. “You bet she did. Not only did she win a multimillion-dollar phone-sex company, but she won a house the size of Atlanta, with that camel you pass by every day in the backyard, no less. She got Sanjeev, the personal assistant from heaven above. The whole shebang, lock, stock and flyswatters posing as floggers. To boot, she also found her way back to the arms of your other boss, Caine Donovan, a man so divine, angels weep with longin’ for him.” She waved a wobbly hand around the lush guesthouse office where Call Girls was headquartered and grinned. “And she talked me into running it all as general manager. This wasn’t just a win, it was an epic win.”

Dixie grinned. “Who better to keep us all in line when Cat and Flynn ran off and got married and are now preparin’ for their first child than you, Em? If you could keep me and Caine on the righteous path, you could keep Satan himself honest.”

Nella gave her lush surroundings a fresh eye. “So Call Girls Inc. belonged to Landon Wells, right? The one everybody’s either callin’ richer than God or crazier than a bedbug?”

“Uh-huh. Rest his soul. And now it belongs to Dixie here.” Even two months later, Em still hadn’t quite digested the situation.

Nella frowned. “I don’t get it. How do you win a phone-sex company?”

“You have the most amazing best friend ever, who even on his deathbed, knew what was good for you. Landon was both Dixie’s and Caine’s best friend. Dixie and Caine were engaged ten years ago, but they had a fallin’-out to beat the likes of World War Three, broke up and left town.”

Dixie shook her head of red curls with a giggle. “Your general manager exaggerates. It was not like World War Three.”

But Em disagreed. “Hah! Lest you forget the fire and rain... Anyway, Landon, in all his wisdom and hilarious sense of humor, knew they belonged together. So when Dixie and Caine came back for his funeral, he left this very company to them in his will—with one stipulation. They had to become phone-sex operators and work the phones. Whoever collected the most calls at the end of two months won the company.”

Nella suddenly grinned. “So that’s what all the talk about the Phone-sex Hunger Games is? I hear the rumblin’s in town all the time about you and Caine and how you two got back together. I ignored the bad and focused on how romantic it was under such a crazy set of circumstances.”

Yeah. Em sighed and nodded at Nella. “The most romantic set of circumstances ever. Friends like Landon don’t come along often. He loved these two so much, he meddled from the afterlife.”

Dixie’s smile was misty-eyed and blissful at the same time. “I’ll always wish Landon was here to see it—see us finally together. Maybe walk me down that aisle now that Caine’s proposed. And see you and I such good friends after a long spell of resentment.” She patted Em’s hand, tipping the glass she held upright to keep more liquid from sloshing out.

“Oh, I heard all about you and Em from that Essie Guthrie. My, she can talk,” Nella confided.

Em waved a finger. “Never you mind what that Essie tells you. She’d just as soon Call Girls was banished from Plum Orchard for good.”

The Mags, Plum Orchard’s generations-old society of women of prominence, had really given running Call Girls out on a rail their best efforts. They’d made all sorts of pleas to the mayor and the county—even the state of Georgia, and in the process, they’d attempted to make everyone’s life associated with Call Girls miserable.

Landon had done his homework when he’d moved the company here, and so far they’d been lucky, but Em still worried those bunch of gossipmongers might come up with a way to shut them down.

Dixie wrinkled her nose. “Just you forget about those awful Mags, Em, and let’s focus on the good stuff. Like how I also got LaDawn, Marybell and Cat as the best employees and friends a girl could ask for. For that, I’ll always be grateful. So a toast to Landon?” She raised her wineglass toward the ceiling in silent salute to her best friend.

“Hear! Hear!” Em cheered. Though her sigh, hot on the heels of her good spirits, was forlorn and wistful.

Nella leaned forward on her desk, folding her hands. “If you don’t mind me askin’, how did you become involved in all this, Em?”

“I don’t mind at all. I worked for Landon’s lawyer, Hank Cotton, at the time. So I spent his last days with him, doing all sorts of things he needed taken care of, and that’s when he asked me to oversee Dixie and Caine if they decided to stick around and accept the terms of his will. He said it was time Dixie made an ally here in Plum Orchard. I thought it was the throes of death talkin’, knowin’ how Dixie and I didn’t get along in school, but how could I say no to a man I’d come to love and respect in the course of our dealin’s? He was dyin’. I’d rather have died myself than say no to him.”

Dixie rubbed Em’s arm. “But he left her a letter to open once things settled down with Caine and I to explain everything, didn’t he, Em?”

Now Em’s smile was wistful. “He did, and once I read it, it all made sense. But to think, he’d appoint prim and proper Emmaline Amos, once Dixie Davis’s biggest target in high school, the mediator of her phone-sex contest... Well, everybody thought it was just crazy. They still talk about it now, almost three months later.”

They talked because she was the most unlikely suspect. Who’d believe good-girl Em knew much of anything about sex?

They talked plenty about how scandalous it was that an actual phone-sex company was housed in the middle of their quaint little town, and how horrible Dixie was for talking dirty.

They talked. That’s what Plum Orchard did, and though Em loved her small town and almost everyone in it, faults and all, they’d forgotten the core of what Landon had intended with all those machinations.

The purpose, the driving force behind Landon making Dixie and Caine play his game—the reason he’d gone to such great lengths to see his two best friends happy, had been lost in the mire of gossip Dixie’s return had created.

Love. Landon’s love for his friends, their love for each other—one that even after almost a decade, hadn’t died.

The kind of love Em found herself feeling a pang of yearning for as of late. One that lasted—one that filled her soul. One that didn’t want to divorce her because he wanted to cross-dress and become Miss Trixie LeMieux and he’d been too ashamed to tell her...

She cupped her chin in her hands and sighed again, listening with fondness to the music of the chirping phones from the back offices, where the on-duty operators took their calls from clients. They’d hired four more operators since she’d taken over as GM. Business was good, even if her jump back into the dating pool wasn’t.

She was certain she wasn’t destined for the kind of love Dixie and Caine had fought so hard for. You only bore witness to something like that once in a lifetime, and if what Clifton said about her was true, she was too conservative and prissy to ever find that kind of passion.

But she had her new job here. She didn’t care what the people of Plum Orchard said about it, either. Working for Call Girls made her happy—gave her purpose. “Look how far we’ve come, huh?”

Dixie grinned, twisting a long strand of her red hair around her index finger in dreamy satisfaction and sighed. “I can’t even believe what’s come to pass in the past few months since I’ve been back from Chicago, Nella. For both of us. Did you know, not four months ago, Em was in the middle of divorcin’ that cheater Clifton, I was up to my britches in debt, Caine and I were at each other’s throats trying to beat each other at phone sexin’, and everyone here in good ole Plum Orchard, Georgia, still hated me because of my mean-girl high school days—Caine included. So much has changed,” she marveled.

Em’s smile was wry. It was true. But Dixie still wasn’t very popular. She’d tried hard to put to rest her wrongful ways since she’d returned, but some just couldn’t let go of the past. She popped her lips with a smack of a reminder. “Well, not everything’s changed.”

Dixie flapped a dismissive hand at the implication Em made in reference to her archnemesis. “Thank you for reminding me Louella Palmer still sniffs the air when I walk by as though I’ve been dipped in cow dung.”

No one wished Dixie more ill than Louella. Dixie’s old high school rival still held her responsible for allegedly stealing Caine Donovan out from under her nose.

For the past few months since she’d become such close friends with Dixie, Louella and her fellow group members, the esteemed Magnolias, had outright shunned Em for forgiving Dixie and her jaded Plum Orchard past.

A burp threatened to escape Em’s lips. She swallowed the acidic bite back with a wince before saying, “I just want you to know your enemies. I can’t have Louella sneakin’ up behind you when you’re not lookin’. Remindin’ you of the people that wish you ill is my duty as your person.”

Dixie cocked her head, her pretty blue eyes playful. “This person thinks your person’s had too much to drink tonight. I know your theory is Jesus drank wine, and that’s supposed to make it okay to indulge—and usually, I’d roll with it. But He didn’t go out on girls’ night with you tonight—and I’m pretty sure He never had a hangover. So, it’s my duty as your person to tell you, you might suffer one come mornin’.”

But Em wouldn’t hear of hangovers and Jesus. She’d spent two minutes too long thinking about disapproval and Plum Orchard when there were other things to attend. Like learning to smolder—it was what brought all the boys to your yard, or so she’d heard.

She focused on watching her reflection in her phone as she tried once more to perfect this thing Dixie did with her eyes while men lined up for her.

It would be nice to have just one man stand in a grocery line, even if it was just next to her. Like the man she’d shared the longest, most breathtaking stare with in the square the night her life had almost fallen apart. The night when she’d accused Dixie of something so deplorable, she still couldn’t breathe from the horror.

She’d overheard the man’s name was Jax, but in her mind, when she daydreamed about him, he didn’t have a name. To use his name was too intimate—too personal. Attaching his name to her fantasies was akin to writing him personalized love letters. Once you knew a person’s first name, next you were inquiring about their well-being, and that always led to personal details you were better off not knowing. Fantasies didn’t have morning breath or scratch their unmentionables.

So the man on that night in the square was simply him.

And she hadn’t seen him in well over two months.

Em “smoldered” again at Dixie, putting her back into it and rolling her shoulders, pretending she was seducing him. “How’s this?”

Dixie patted Em’s hand, wrinkling her nose. “When you smolder at me, do it like you’re thinkin’ about doin’ the do, not like you’re squinting because the sun’s in your eyes, honey. More Marilyn Monroe, less like you have bug guts in your eye,” she teased lovingly, pulling Em to her office and waving back at Nella to carry on with her calls.

Em gave her a pouty expression, plunking her phone down on Dixie’s desk with a sigh. “I guess you’ll just have to stay the Smolder Queen, Dixie. I try and try. Practiced all week for girls’ night tonight, but I just can’t seem to look anything other than a darn fool. Just ask that poor man at the bar who thought I used those drops you get at the ophthalmologist to dilate my eyes.” She batted her eyelashes for effect, only to have them stick together from the extra mascara she’d applied.

She was officially a girls’ night out failure. Maybe everyone saw what Clifton saw, and trying to change that perception of her was a waste of time.

Dixie brushed Em’s hair from her face with a chuckle of sympathy, her slender fingers gentle, her blue eyes warm. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the business of smoldering, it’s all about the subtle at first. Stop trying so hard to be someone you’re not. You’re beautiful and funny and sweet all on your own. You don’t need the smolder or anything other than just you to do the talkin’. Turn down the volume on the sexy, Em.”

“Way down,” LaDawn Jenkins, fellow employee, friend and the best fetish-related phone-sex operator Call Girls had, advised, strolling inside from the guesthouse pool area.

Marybell Lymen, another operator and friend, followed behind, handing an open bottle of wine to LaDawn, who slugged back the liquid straight from the bottle.

Catherine Butler-McGrady, now retired after handing her Call Girls GM position over to Em, nodded her agreement, letting Marybell help her perch awkwardly on the end of a purple velvet chaise.

She rubbed her small swollen belly with a content smile. “You’re plenty sexy without the smolder, Em. Flynn said so just the other day. He said, ‘The longer that sad sack Clifton’s gone, the prettier Em seems to get.’”

Em snorted. “He did not.” She was not.

“Did, too,” both LaDawn and Marybell said, dropping into the chairs on the other side of Dixie’s large, white oak desk.

“And it’s true,” LaDawn confirmed. “You’re much less stuffy since divorcin’ Mr. Shady, honey.”

She wrinkled her nose at her friends. “Flynn doesn’t count. He’s my cousin, for gravy’s sake, and I might not be as stuffy, but I’m definitely not any sexier.”

Marybell and LaDawn oozed sexy, and they certainly weren’t afraid of the opposite sex. If she could just have an ounce of whatever it was they had that made talking to anyone other than old and deaf Coon Rider easier...

Cat waved a hand and scoffed. “You are, too. You’re sweet-sexy. Makes all the boys want to know what’s goin’ on under all that prim and proper. Peel away your layers and such.”

Em threw her hands up, frustrated with the lack of interest she stirred in the male population. “You make me sound like an onion. And where were all those boys who like onions at, I ask you? I can tell you this, they sure weren’t out tonight.”

Cat sighed. “Oh, honey, they just weren’t the right men. Nobody said dippin’ your toes back into the dating pool would be easy.”

LaDawn bobbed her head. “Peelin’ onions isn’t for the faint of heart, Miss Em. When the right one comes along, he’ll peel you raw.”

Em’s cheeks went hot. “Why is it so easy for you to say things like that and when I try, I sound like a bad actress in one of those dirty movies?”

Marybell threw her head back and laughed. “Because, silly, we do this for a living. We’re paid to entice men. We know all the tricks of the trade.”

She eyed the women who’d become some of her closest friends these past few months. “So teach me.” There. She’d said it. Maybe if she took a few lessons in flirting from the experts, she wouldn’t look like such a darn fool come next girls’ night.

Dixie’s eyes went wide with surprise. “You mean like teach you to talk dirty to men?”

Em smiled and nodded. Since she’d left her job as Hank Cotton’s legal secretary after Dixie offered to make her general manager of Call Girls, she’d spent a lot of time listening to LaDawn, Marybell and the other operators talk about all manner of “making the business” as Dixie called it—and she was sometimes horrified.

But most times, especially lately, she was intrigued by the things men wanted the operators to talk about.

Each day, while she monitored call stats and reports and kept the office running smoothly, she overheard conversations that made her blush the color of her mother’s red velvet cake. Yet, they also left her insatiably curious.

Maybe it had to do with what Dixie had called her molting process. She was shedding her old married life skin for a new single one, and hearing all the sex talk all day long left her secretly wanting to explore some of those things.

It was an about-face almost no one would understand. Maybe not even Dixie. Em was everyone’s good girl, well mannered, almost decorous to a fault—and dull as dirt. No one would believe the thoughts Emmaline Amos was having as of late.

She found her dull was slowly chipping away to reveal a shinier Em. Though she definitely didn’t feel very shiny after her failures tonight. Not even with the added shine of her semisexy new dress and the jellylike cutlets she’d stuffed in her bra to see if having larger breasts would keep her from repelling men like mosquito spray.

So Em nodded her head again—more sure than ever her alcohol-dipped brain was sending her a subliminal message that she was on the right track. “You heard me. I want to talk dirty. Bring it on.”

Her friends frowned at her as though she’d just told them she wanted to have relations out in the middle of the square on the steps of the gazebo.

Em dunked her fingers into the top of her lower-than-usual cut dress and pulled out one of the offensive gel breasts, slapping it on the desk with disgust at their wide-eyed surprise. “Stop lookin’ like I just confessed to a murder. Why does everyone think I’m such a priss?”

LaDawn scooped up the gel breast and shook it like a raw chicken breast, making it jiggle. “Because you are?”

With alcohol came fearlessness. “I am not. I quote the Lord, yes. But that’s only because Jesus analogies are all I have to make comparisons to real life. My mama was a true Southern Baptist, and it just so happens Bible verses are what stuck. So while I might be conservative on the outside, I don’t buy into it all the way you think I do. I like sex. I like it a lot.”

LaDawn reached out and patted her hand, her tone a little condescending, a little amused. “Good for you, honey. You still shouldn’t be playin’ with the big girls.”

“Em, talking dirty to some stranger on the phone isn’t like practicing to flirt with a man in real life,” Dixie reminded her. “I’m not sure how you’re connecting the dots here.”

“She connected them with wine.” LaDawn barked a laugh at her own joke.

Which only infuriated Em further. She raised a finger and swished it around. “Let me tell you a thing or two, Miss LaDawn, I could do it! I hear you naughty Nancys take calls all day long—I’ve learned some things from you.... I’m not sayin’ I want to talk to the men LaDawn considers herself ‘companionators’ to—that might be rushin’ things, what with the latex and flogging, but maybe something tamer. Who knows, maybe it’ll help me get better at talkin’ up the opposite sex—free me from the chains that bind or something.”

Or something. Anything to loosen her up and help her forget there were days when she felt like she was nothing but a stale loaf of day-old bread. There were days when Clifton’s words, even after almost a year, still stung. “How was I supposed to know, someone like you, conservative and nigh on prissy, would entertain the idea I liked to wear women’s clothes?”

Conservative and prissy.

She wanted to be a new Em. Open to owning her sexuality and leaving the buttoned-up perception of her behind.

Marybell snickered, swirling her glass of Pinot. “Very dramatic, Em, this freein’ of your sexuality. Next you’ll want to read the Kama Sutra cover to cover and pose nude for Playboy.” Marybell chuckled. “Taking calls isn’t like flirting in real life. We openly have sex using our words—we don’t just suggest it. Don’t confuse the two, pretty lady.”

“Girl, you are somethin’ else when you an’ libation join hands in holy alcohol, ain’t you?” LaDawn squawked, slapping her hand on her thigh. “Two glasses of Chardonnay and all of a sudden you’re Em the Emasculator.”

Em felt the office chair she was sitting in wobble. Or was she wobbling? She couldn’t be sure. She giggled on a hiccup, one that jolted her so hard, she fell into Dixie, who stroked her hair with a soothing palm.

She took a deep breath and waved a finger at LaDawn’s lithe form in a “fooled you, didn’t I?” fashion. “It wasn’t Chardonnay, FYI. I had four drinks at the bar. The ones with the orange swirly stuff and the pretty umbrellas in them. Four.” Take that, conservatism.

“Four?” LaDawn and Marybell chirped their surprise in unison.

“Okay, who was on Em duty while I was off two-steppin’, LaDawn?” Marybell asked, casting a glance of aspersion LaDawn’s way.

LaDawn popped her heavily lined lips, brushing her platinum hair off her shoulder with a scoff. “Oh, no. I told you I was gonna take second shift. That means before 11:00 p.m. you were babysitting.”

Marybell shook her head, the pointy spikes of her red-and-green Mohawk beginning to sag after a long girls’ night out. “Nope. Dixie was supposed to take eight to ten. I was ten till 12:00 a.m. We let Cat take the night off, seeing as she can’t keep her eyes open for more than twenty minutes at a time.”

Cat, now sprawled across the chaise, snored to prove their point.

All eyes went to Dixie, who shot them a sheepish grin, full of dimples and sunshine.

LaDawn grabbed the bottle of Chardonnay and poured her and Dixie another glass to share while Marybell dug a blanket out to cover Cat, tucking the edges under her chin. “You were textin’ with that confounded dreamboat of yours again, weren’t you? It’s not girls’ night if you’re textin’ with your man, Dixie. Then it’s girls’ night and Caine,” she admonished with a stern tone, but a smile she couldn’t hide crept across her lips.

Dixie wrinkled her nose. “But he’s so cute when he texts me,” she defended her schoolgirl behavior.

“If you can’t spend twenty minutes without contact with one Mr. Caine Donovan, you can’t be a girl out on a girls’ night. Then you’re just pathetic and maybe should be textin’ someone about obsession therapy,” LaDawn teased, poking Dixie’s arm with a glittery, purple nail. “So I’m callin’ it now, next time we all give up our cell phones at the beginning of the night so we don’t lose track of Em and her newfound love of spirits. Because look what happens when we do that. Four drinks and she gets to thinkin’ she should be learnin’ the tricks of the trade instead of just running the place.” She leaned forward and ruffled Em’s mussed hair with a chuckle.

Em stuck her tongue out at LaDawn.

LaDawn popped her lips at Dixie, ignoring Em. “While you’re off moonin’ over that man, it doesn’t mean Em doesn’t need lookin’ out for. She’s new to the single scene. Especially in a place called Cooters where every horn dog from here to Johnsonville goes to ladies’ night ’cuz the drafts are only a dollar. If someone doesn’t watch her, they’ll eat our innocent Em alive. You dropped the ball, Dixie Davis. Next time, you have to pull your shift and take my shift, too.”

Em gave her friends a sour face, tucking her hair behind her ears. “I’m plenty of adult sittin’ right here, I’ll have you know. I don’t need a babysitter, and I’m not so innocent. And if I want to have four drinks, I will. Maybe I’ll have five,” she said defiantly.

She deserved five. It had been a long two months since the finalization of her divorce. Seven total if you counted the time since she’d found out Clifton was an infidel who wanted to wear women’s clothing and live in Atlanta as Trixie LeMieux.

Most of the pain of that discovery had passed. That Clifton hadn’t even given her the chance to understand that part of him still stung. She’d always prided herself on being open to new things, despite the fact that she was born and raised in a town stuck somewhere in the 1950s.

Cross-dressing hadn’t ever entered her mind when she’d been thinking about what the word open meant, but who’s to say she wouldn’t have adjusted? Clifton just never gave her the chance to say one way or the other. He’d just left.

And now, here she was, single at thirty-six with an eight-year-old and a five-year-old to raise with little help from her ex-husband. His embarrassment after an incident in town, where his secret was publicly and cruelly revealed by none other than Louella Palmer, had kept him from coming to see the boys as often as they needed seeing by their daddy.

Dixie stretched her arms upward with a yawn of her perfectly glossed, pink lips. “Fine. Next girls’ night out, I’ll take two shifts. Now, what do you say we get you home, Em?”

Em shook her off, reaching for more wine. She could drink as much wine as she liked, her internal rebel coaxed. “Stop appeasin’ me, Dixie. I’m a grown woman, and I don’t want to go home to my lonely, empty house right now. Gareth and Clifton Junior are spendin’ the weekend at Mama’s, so I’m a free bird. Just like Lynyrd Skynyrd says.”

Dixie gave her a pointed look—one you’d give a willful preschooler. “You know what they say about idle hands and the devil.”