Chapter One
He was going to be trouble. Jessie knew it from the
instant she laid eyes on him.
Disheveled and more than a little sweaty from her morning
ride, she had just come up through the house from the
stables and collapsed in a rocking chair on the second-
story gallery, which, thankfully, was shady and situated
to catch the faintest breeze. Her thick, curly auburn
hair, having escaped from its careless bun long since,
tumbled anyhow around her face and down her back. One
particularly irritating strand had found its way inside
her collar and tickled her neck. Grimacing, she scratched
at the irritation, neither noticing nor caring about the
smear of mud on her knuckles that her action dully
transferred to her right cheek. Indeed, the dirty streak
was not the abomination it might have been, so well did it
blend with the general unkemptness of her appearance.
The riding dress she wore had been made for her when she
was thirteen, five years before. It had once been deep
bottle green, but it was so faded by years of hard use
that in some spots it was the color of dust-dulled spring
grass. To make matters worse, she had been considerably
less well developed five years ago. The buttons up the
front of the bodice strained to hold it together, mashing
her generous bosom nearly flat in the process, and this
despite the fact that only the previous year Tudi had
added wide insets of fabric to the garment's side seams.
The skirt was much darned and some three inches too short,
allowing far more of her worn black boots to show than
propriety permitted. Not that propriety even entered
Jessie's headas she lifted her feet, crossed them at the
ankles, and rested her lower heel on the railing that ran
around the gallery, putting a scandalous amount of white
cotton stocking and thrice-turned petticoat on view.
"Here, now, you cain't do that! You put your laigs down
and sit like a lady!" Tudi protested, scandalized. She was
seated in another of the half-dozen rockers that lined the
wide porch, her gnarled black hands buried deep in a bowl
of string beans she was snapping for supper. Jessie gave
an ill-used sigh but obeyed, letting her feet drop loudly.
With a satisfied grunt Tudi returned her attention to the
beans.
Beside the porch, a ruby-throated hummingbird flitted in
and out of the pink-veined blossoms of the mimosa from
which the vast cotton plantation took its name. The tiny
bird's characteristic sound and bright plumage drew
Jessie's eyes. Watching it, she bit with relish into the
cherry tartlet she had purloined from Rosa, the cook, on
her way through the house to tide her over until luncheon.
From the road that wound past the house came a series of
rattles and clops as a buggy rolled smartly into view. Its
appearance distracted Jessie from the feeding hummingbird,
and she observed its approach with interest. When she saw
that it would turn up the long drive that led to the
house, instead of continuing on toward the nearby river,
she frowned. It could only be a neighbor, none of whom she
particularly cared to see, probably because they all
disapprovedof her and made few bones about it. "That wild
Lindsay child," the planters' womenfolk called her. Their
delicate daughters scorned her as a playmate, and their
eligible sons seemed unaware that she was even alive.
Which state of affairs, Jessie continually assured
herself, suited her just fine!
Then, with even less enthusiasm than she would have
awaited the arrival of one of the neighbors, Jessie
recognized the petite, exquisitely turned-out woman
perched beside the driver as her stepmother, Celia. Her
eyes moved on to the dark-haired driver, where they fixed,
narrowing. Him she did not recognize at all, and in a
community where one knew all one's neighbors, from the
wealthiest planters to the poorest of the dirt farmers,
that was cause for surprise.
"Who's that?" Tudi looked up, too, as the carriage bowled
toward them along the oak-lined drive. Her hands, busy
with the beans, never faltered, but her eyes were wide and
curious as they fastened on the stranger.
"I don't know," Jessie replied, which was the truth as far
as it went. She shunned the neighborhood social doings as
assiduously as she would a nest of vipers, so it was
always possible that someone had a visitor whom she hadn't
met. But it was quite clear that the man, whoever he was,
was no stranger to Celia. Celia sat snuggled too closely
against his side, so closely that their bodies touched.
She wouldn't sit like that with any just-met beau. In
addition, Celia smiled and chatted in blatant provocation,
and her hand moved every few minutes to stroke the
stranger's sleeve, or give his arm a pat. Such behavior
was nothing short of fast. Coupled with Jessie's knowledge
of her stepmother, it gave her a dreadful, disbelieving
inkling of who the stranger must be: Celia's new lover.
She'd known for several weeks now that Celia had a new
man. After ten years of living with her pretty blond
stepmother, Jessie could tell. Jessie's father had been
dead for nine years, and in that length of time Celia had
had easily double that number of men. Celia was careful,
but not careful enough to hide her indiscretions from the
keen eyes of her less-than-adoring stepdaughter. Jessie's
first realization of the true purpose behind Celia's
frequent prolonged absences had come when she'd happened
upon a letter Celia had been penning to her latest
paramour and had accidentally left in the back parlor.
Knowing that it was rude to read others' correspondence,
Jessie nevertheless did. The missive's blue language and
impassioned tone had made an indelible impression...
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