Ain't She Sweet? by Susan Elizabeth Phillips Read Free Book Online

home in disgrace, are you, then? So much for you and your mum’s fancy ways, boyo. Now you’ll be doin’ honest work like the rest of us.”
    For that alone, Colin would never forgive Sugar Beth Carey.
    He lifted his glass, but even the taste of ten-year-old scotch couldn’t erase the single-minded defiance he’d seen in Sugar Beth’s eyes. Despite that assault he’d delivered in the disguise of a kiss, she still believed she had the upper hand. He set his glass aside and contemplated exactly how he would disabuse her of that notion.
    “Have I done wrong? So many prim persons stared as though they could not believe their eyes!”
    GEORGETTE HEYER, The Grand Sophy
    CHAPTER THREE
    Sugar Beth finished the potato chips that made up her breakfast and gazed across the kitchen at Gordon, who lurked in the door, looking hostile. “Get over it, will you? It’s not my fault Emmett loved me more than you.”
    He experimented with his psychotic Christopher Walken expression, but bassets were at a disadvantage when it came to projecting menace. “Pathetic.”
    He looked offended.
    “All right, punk.” She rose from the table, crossed the living room, and opened the front door. As he trotted past, he tried to bump her, but she knew his tricks and she sidestepped, then followed him out into another chilly, drizzly February morning. Since this was Mississippi, it could be eighty by next week. She prayed she’d be long gone by then.
    As Gordon began to sniff around, she gazed over at Frenchman’s Bride. She’d been trying not to think about last night’s encounter with Colin Byrne. At least she hadn’t crumbled until she’d reached the carriage house. Old guilt clung to her like cobwebs. She should have tried harder to make amends, but apparently, she hadn’t grown up as much as she wanted to think.
    Why, of all people, did he have to be the one who bought Frenchman’s Bride? If he’d ever spoken to the press about moving back to Parrish, she’d missed it. But then he seemed to shun publicity, and there hadn’t been that many interviews. Even his jacket photo was distant and grainy, or she’d have been better prepared for the dangerous man she’d encountered.
    She made her way toward the boxwood hedge that separated their properties and pushed aside the bottom branches. “Right through here, devil dog.”
    For once, he didn’t give her trouble.
    “Make Mommy proud,” she called out.
    He took a few moments sniffing around, then found a satisfactory spot in the middle of the lawn to do his business.
    “Nice doggie.”
    Despite what she’d told Byrne, she’d read Last Whistle-stop on the Nowhere Line right along with the rest of the country. How could she have ignored the story of people she’d heard about all her life? The black and white families, rich and poor, who’d populated Parrish during the 1940s and 1950s, had included her own grandparents, Tallulah, Leeann’s great-uncle, and, of course, Lincoln Ash.
    The public’s appetite for atmospheric Southern nonfiction had been whetted by John Berendt’s runaway best-seller, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. But while Midnight had dealt with murder and scandal among the wealthy aristocracy of old Savannah, Last Whistle-stop had mined gold from small-town life. Colin Byrne’s story of a Mississippi town recovering from a segregationist legacy had been filled with the eccentric characters and domestic dramas readers loved, along with a strong dose of Southern folklore. Other books had tried to do the same thing, but Byrne’s fondness for the town, combined with his wry observations as an outsider, had put Last Whistle-stop in a league of its own.
    She realized Gordon was trotting toward the house, not one bit intimidated by its grandeur. “Come back here.”
    Of course he ignored her.
    “I mean it, Gordon. I have to go into town, and if you don’t come here right now, I’m leaving without you.”
    She couldn’t be sure, but she thought he blew