A Plum Orchard novel

Five

A hand clamped on her shoulder, a cool hand with a gentle yet firm grip. “I know what you’re thinking, Dixie. You are the Dixie, right?” a soft voice asked.

She stiffened, caught in the act of running away. “If I said no, would that mean I could escape from this madhouse, and you’d never be the wiser?”

“Well, no. I’d be the wiser. I’d know you just as easily as if I’d run into you buying milk at the Piggly Wiggly. Landon talked about you all the time, and he must have showed us a hundred pictures of you.” She paused for a moment, putting both hands on Dixie’s shaking shoulders, forcing her to turn around.

What met Dixie’s eyes was a creamy-skinned, fresh-faced young woman of no more than maybe thirty, with long chestnut hair spilling over her shoulders and down her spine, and a pair of the widest, deepest green-blue eyes Dixie had ever encountered.

Her coloring was naturally peach-inspired, and the clothes she wore, a T-shirt that read Georgia Tech and black capris, were as simple as Dixie’s. “I’m Catherine, Cat for short, Butler. I’m general manager of Call Girls.”

“Gage’s new fiancée, right?”

Cat flushed a pretty pink—the kind of pink you flushed when you were wildly in love. “That’s me. Em asked me to tell you she’d see you tomorrow. Something about the hot tub at the big house and cold king crab.”

Dixie suppressed a smile. As a single parent with a husband who’d just up and decided he deserved a midlife crisis a little early, Em deserved a good pampering. “She deserves it after today.”

“And you are definitely Dixie Davis. Landon always said you were even prettier in person than you are in your pictures. He was right. And that voice!” Cat said with obvious delight. “It’s fantastic—so raspy and smoky. You’re gonna give the girls a real run for their money.”

Dixie grimaced. “I think today I don’t want to be Dixie Davis, and I don’t want to give anyone a run for anything with my raspy or my smoky.”

Cat grinned, revealing adorable dimples. “If only trading lives with someone else was as easy as the words simply spoken, hmm? Now, before you set off to givin’ someone hell—and yes, I can see that look on your face, Landon described your ire well—hear me out. The voice you hear in there on that phone is Marybell Lyman’s, and she’s not role-playing. It’s just the voice our creator gave her. And it works for her, but we have strict rules about that sort of thing at Call Girls. I promise.”

Still shaken, though to a lesser degree, Dixie’s tongue got the better of her. “Clearly, the rules for Italians and stallions escaped Landon.”

Cat chuckled. “What’s the harm in making a small mob fish feel like a big ol’ shark? That’s why men call us, Dixie. To interact with women they’ve fooled themselves into believing are incapable of living without their magically lust-inducing words.”

Dixie exhaled a breath of regret, ashamed she’d jumped to the same conclusions people still jumped to about her. “I’m sorry. I heard...and I just assumed—”

“Never you fear, Dixie. Landon wouldn’t allow calls generated from men who wanted to talk to underage girls. He was a kind soul. In fact, it remains a strict rule. We entertain lots of fantasies here at Call Girls, but there are absolute no-no’s, and if anyone’s caught indulging a client in something that’s off the table, it’s cause for permanent termination.”

Another sigh of relief shuddered through her, leaving Dixie unsure how to respond to this woman who looked as if she’d just fallen off the pages of Seventeen magazine.

She’d expected women who popped their gum, half-dressed in spandex catsuits, wearing six-inch stilettos and more eyeliner than Brugsby’s Drugstore cosmetics counter could supply. Instead, a pretty, fresh-faced, articulate woman greeted her with a lovely smile and a lilting Southern accent.

One of these things was not like the other, and two of these things weren’t even kinda the same.

Dixie squared her shoulders and pushed her hand toward Cat. “My apologies for my inexcusable manners. Yes. I’m Dixie Davis. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Cat gripped Dixie’s hand, curling her fingers around it to give it a firm shake before letting it go. “No, it’s not. Not yet anyway. You look like you’re ready to find the nearest pitcher of sweet tea laced with bourbon to drown yourself in.”

“Booze wouldn’t go denied,” Dixie confessed, dropping the tips of her fingers to the pockets in her skirt.

Cat tilted her head, her eyes glittering and playful. “So you made it this far, right? That’s a sure sign you’re at least a little curious. Do you want to soldier on? Or do we end this conversation with a pleasant but cordial ‘it was lovely to meet you?’”

Dixie swallowed hard, her throat full of sandpaper, but she squared her shoulders. She was in. “We soldier. We definitely soldier. Battlefields and hand grenades ahoy.”

Cat’s grin was infectious. “I confess, we all wondered what you’d do. I laid the biggest bet in the ‘Dixie pool’ by the way.”

“Bet?” Why, yes, Dixie. You’re familiar with bets. Those crazy situations where you challenge some poor soul, not nearly as skilled as you, to race you for the win? Sometimes they involve money—other times? Hands in marriage.

She shook off the voice of her past and repeated, “Bet?”

“Well, yes. The bet that said you’d at least come see what you could see. You know, investigate what this was all about? Everyone else thought someone with the kinda means you come from would run away to your palace in wherever it is rich folk build their palaces. Not me, though. I just knew, from all the talkin’ Landon did about you, you wouldn’t turn tail. Knew it. So thank you kindly for the two hundred dollars I just won. Pizza night’s on me.” She let loose a breathy whisper of a giggle.

Dixie managed to ignore the fact that this as yet unnamed group of women had bet against her and her palace and blurted something random. “You have a pizza night at Call Girls?” Phone-sex operators ate pizza? Next someone would tell her hookers had expense accounts.

Cat grinned that contagious grin again. “Well, of course we do. We’re not heathens, Dixie. Just because we call all parts southern on your anatomy words your mama would’ve washed your mouth out with soap for sayin’, doesn’t mean we blow up edible condoms and decorate them with whipped cream all the time. We’re just like most everyone else. We have all sorts of things here at the office. Christmas parties—baby showers, ‘Wear Your Pajamas to Work Wednesday.’ You name it, and Landon insisted upon it. You know how much he loved parties, and impromptu parties were his specialty. It boosts morale if you can have a little party on the boss’s dime, don’t you agree?” she said with a conspiratorial wink.

She’d like to have a little something on the boss, all right. She’d like to have a chokehold on him. “I...” Dixie held up a finger, putting it to her lips for a moment and shook her head. “I’m going to stop now so I don’t come off sounding like an uneducated, high-handed ass. Something I’m sure happens to you a lot. With first impressions being everything, I’ll just say this is unexpected.” Her head swam from so much unexpected.

“Your surprise is understandable, but I promise you, we’re mostly all just average women who needed to find a way to make ends meet. Well, with the exclusion of LaDawn. She really was a—” Cat leaned in, leaving the lingering scent of jasmine and roses in Dixie’s nose, and whispered, “a lady of the evening in Atlanta. Landon talked her out of the life and gave her a job here at Call Girls where she’s been ever since.”

Everyone’s knight in shining armor, weren’t you, old buddy?

“Some of us even have children, and Sheree has a husband who’s out of work.”

Once again, judge not lest ye be judged, Dixie Davis. “I—I’m sorry... I just thought...”

Cat crossed her arms over her chest as if she’d heard it all before. Yet, it didn’t come across as a defensive gesture at all. “We know what you thought—or think. It’s what everyone in this narrow-minded dink of a town still stuck in the 1950s thinks, and we’ve only been here just a few days. Some who call themselves open-minded think that. But I promise you we’re not so different than the rest of the workforce. We’re just more...er, colorful.”

“Ladies, I bid you good evening,” a cheerful voice with a British accent called from the sliding glass doors.

Dixie’s limbs instantly froze even as her stomach heated. Oh, good. Candy Caine was on the loose.

“Michael Caine, right?” Cat said on a tinkling laugh, her cheeks staining the color all women’s cheeks stained when Caine did an impression.

No one was left untouched by Candy Caine’s charm. Dixie had to fight not to roll her eyes and whisper a warning to Cat to beware the Donovan spell. Instead, she stiffened her spine, lifted her chin, and activated her Caine-Away force field.

He made his way across the tile with his pantherlike prowl, full of grace and a sensual glide of his cowboy boots. His legs, thick and muscular, worked under his tight-fitting jeans, flexing in time with his rhythmic walk.

A familiar and unwanted clench, deep within Dixie’s core, tightened as he drew closer.

He stopped a couple of feet from the women and grinned, holding out his hand to Cat, showcasing his enticingly visible pecs beneath his fitted navy blue shirt. “I’m—”

“Caine,” Cat twittered, her free hand making a nervous pass over a long strand of her hair to smooth it. “Caine Donovan. I’d know you anywhere, too. We’ve heard a lot about you from Landon.”

“Sorry I’m a little late.”

Cat smiled at Caine. “I figured you might be. LaDawn said she heard at the diner you were over doin’ Ezrah Jones’s laundry for him. Is that true?”

Caine shrugged his shoulders. “He’s had a rough go of it since Louise died, hasn’t been showing up for poker in the park with his buddies from the VA. Just thought I’d check on him, maybe offer some support. Louise used to make cookies for me whenever I won a meet. She was a great lady.”

Cat sighed a dreamy sigh. “You’re as nice as Landon said you were. He told us all about your high school exploits, and how you three were thicker ’n thieves back in the day.”

“And now it looks like we’ll be thicker than phone sex,” Caine joked, eyeing Dixie with that penetrating gaze that asked as many questions as it had ever answered.

“Damn. Guess I lost this bet, which might make pizza night a totally different ball game,” Cat said to Dixie with a snicker.

“Pizza night?” Caine queried, raising one eyebrow and wiggling it.

Dixie’s chin lifted defiantly, her eyes pinning Caine’s. “Yeah, funny thing about pizza night... The women all bet I wouldn’t show up today, but Cat. Cat had my back.”

Cat dipped her head. “But we definitely didn’t think you’d show up, Caine. You know, as rich and successful as your real-estate business is back in Miami.”

Caine made a comically sad face, and in Daryl from The Walking Dead’s voice, he said, “It cuts me deep you think I’d run away from the chance to talk dirty when I have the best Sean Connery impression ever. It speaks volumes about our future working relationship, ma’am. We’re lackin’ trust.”

Cat howled her pleasure, her slender shoulders shaking with laughter beneath her T-shirt. She pointed up at him. “Daryl—The Walking Dead, right? Lawd in all his mercy! Landon told us all about your celebrity impersonations. You really are as good as he said,” she gushed.

Hark! Who goes there? What was that she heard in the distance? Yet another woman fallen prey to Caine Donovan? Dixie fought another roll of her eyes.

Turning her back on Caine, Dixie forced a smile to her lips and put her hand on Cat’s arm to draw her away from the sexual napalm. “So maybe you could explain all of this? How Call Girls is run. What’s expected of us? The thing about our chosen personas?” That troubled her the most, choosing a persona.

“You mean our specialty kinks, right, Dixie?” Caine made a point of reminding her, stepping around both of the women so he could peer into the archway that led to the great room and the subsequent bedrooms.

Dixie fought a scowl at his deliciously fresh, clean scent, but couldn’t fight the pop of her lips. “Why yes, Candy Caine. That’s exactly what I mean. I’m all about finding out what my kink is.”

“Um, we, in the business, that is, actually call them fetishes. Just an FYI,” Cat interjected with another of her easy smiles.

“Fetish.” Dixie nodded, mentally making a note of it for future fetish exploration. “Got it.”

“Studious as ever,” Caine remarked dryly, clearing his throat.

The reference to her lack of interest in her studies back in her high school days didn’t go unnoticed. “That’s what got me that 4.3 GPA in college,” she reminded him with a flash of her eyes. “If memory serves, you had a 4.2.” So humph.

“Studying was what got you a 4.3, Dixie? And didn’t you leave college to cruise the seven seas on some rich guy’s yacht?”

It was only two seas, thank you. Her blood pressure soared.

Just as Dixie was about to sling an arrow dipped in contempt back, Cat threw a hand up between, staring them both down with a matronly glare. “Okay, to your corners.” She swished a warning finger at them, shooing them apart. “So let’s just get this all out in the open, because even though I’m office manager, Landon was kind enough to allow me to take college courses online while I oversee Call Girls. So quite often, in between calls, I’m studying. Which means not only do I have other employees to protect, but my future career, as well. I can’t do that if I’m breaking up petty disagreements between the two of you.”

Protect? As if they both had a penchant for serial killing?

“Now, Landon told us all about the two of you and your ongoing love affair with a good war of words. He told us everything about your childhoods, Dixie’s legendary mean-girl reputation here in Plum Orchard, your love of a good bet, your eventual engagement—the ugly ending to your engagement—the subsequent years you both spent hating each other over the ugly end to said engagement, all while he continued to remain friends with you both. Big yawn. Old news, right?”

Both Caine and Dixie remained stubbornly silent.

“Right?” Cat prompted, her expression stern and schoolmarmish.

Their grating sighs were simultaneous. “Right,” they responded in unison like two guilty children.

“Good. So here’s how this is gonna play out. I know there are hard feelin’s between the two of you, and that’s too bad, but they’re absolutely not for the workplace. I run Call Girls, and I run a tight ship. If you decide to join us, I won’t have the two of you taking potshots at each other, and making everyone around you uncomfortable while you do it. If you want to beat each other up over your history together, do it somewhere else. Do we understand each other?”

Like two chastised children, they both let their eyes fall to the tiled floor.

“And do not roll your eyes at me, Dixie Davis,” Cat warned, planting her hands on her hips.

Dixie stopped mid-eye roll and sighed, letting her shoulders sag and her chin hitch forward like the petulant child she turned into whenever Caine was around. Their bickering was bound to affect those around them, and that was unfair. “I’m sorry. We can really suck.”

Cat giggled. “Landon told us all about your brand of suck. We were locked and loaded.”

Caine’s eyes were contrite when he shot Cat a sheepish grin after scrubbing his knuckles over his jaw. “I’m sorry if we made you feel uncomfortable, too.”

“Apologies accepted. Now let’s let bygones be bygones and get to introductions and the business at hand, okay? The girls are dying to meet you both.”

Caine nodded his dark head. “Perfect. So let’s set about finding our fetishes. Whaddya say, Mistress Taboo?” He didn’t wait for Dixie to answer. Instead he held out his arm to Cat and smiled. “Shall we?”

Cat giggled again, soft and as lovely as she was, but a quick glance at Dixie had her clamping her lips shut and frowning before she regained her composure. She roped her arm loosely through Caine’s, keeping a visible distance between them. “C’mon. I’ll introduce you to everyone and familiarize you with what goes on here.”

Dixie stuck her tongue out at Caine behind his back, and hurried to shuffle up to the other side of Cat, grabbing onto her free arm and winking. Her chuckle was throaty, but her words held the ultimate dare. “Let the games begin.”

* * *

Back in her room, freshly showered and comfortable in an old T-shirt, Dixie snatched her phone with Landon’s text from the nightstand and raised her fist to the ceiling with a shake. “You suck, Landon,” she muttered, making Mona and Lisa stir.

After an hour with Caine, Cat and the women of Call Girls, Dixie’s head was still spinning. She’d thought she’d made her choice the moment she’d thrown down the challenge to Caine in Hank Cotton’s office.

Now? She was regretting her impulsivity. Once Cat had explained the inner workings of the phone-sex business, and only after Dixie was done mentally rolling her eyes at Caine, who’d smiled, joked and blatantly flirted with the ladies while making it appear this challenge was going to be akin to some leisurely stroll in the park, she’d waffled.

As she processed bits of information such as, she was her own boss and her hours were flexible, but some of the best, most loyal U.S. clients called in at night between the hours of midnight and three. And it was up to her to create an interesting, yet alluring phone-sex operator pseudonym, a website for that pseudonym, and an area of sex she specialized in. Scripts on how to handle difficult client calls, calls that got out of hand, all kinds of calls, calls, calls were readily available to them.

Shortly after meeting the women who ran the phones, and introductions, and all the details of the running of a phone-sex company, Dixie began to wilt, exhausted from the day’s events.

Cat, clearly intuitive, had handed her the Call Girls phone-sex operator package, and told her to go get some rest before she made her final decision.

That was where she was now. Making her final decision. Her eyes flew to her bedside clock. And she only had eighteen hours and counting to do it.

Tick, tick, tick.

The only thing she had decided on, if she didn’t chicken out, was the pseudonym Mistress Taboo. Caine had used it to taunt her, but it stuck like an earworm.

Flopping on the bed, she absently flipped through the ream of papers Cat had given her while she stroked Mona’s ear. Her eye caught the list of “specialties” Call Girls allowed, stilling her movement. “What, in all of heaven, do you suppose infantilism is, Mona?”

“Oh, you know, the usual. Men in diapers, baby bottles,” Caine said, strolling into her bedroom on bare feet, in a pair of cargo shorts and nothing else.

The defined lines of his face almost always took Dixie’s breath away. Tonight was no exception as the shadows cupped his strong jaw and enhanced his sharp cheekbones.

Her heart thrummed with the inevitable longing it had since the day she’d set her sights on him in high school. Dixie forced herself to look directly into his eyes instead of at the chest she’d once brazenly sat atop as he... Dixie gulped. “How unexpected to find you’re so in the fetish know,” she drawled, digging for the old Dixie, the one who was cocky and capable of keeping her composure catty and aloof all in one sentence.

Caine’s eyebrow rose in that condescending way while his chest glistened in all its lickability in the dim lamplight. Coming to stand at her feet, he reached around her to give Lisa’s broad head a scruff of his knuckles.

As the skin of his arm brushed hers, she sucked in a breath of air at the tightening of her nipples.

“Wanna see who knows the definition of more fetishes?”

“Almost as much as I’d like to see my spleen advertised on eBay.”

Caine’s eyes narrowed, glittering with amusement while his lips formed a sexy, cocky challenge of a smile. “That’s because you know you’ll lose. What’s the matter, Dixie? All bet-out for the day?”

“I’m all Caine’d out for forever. So what do you want, and why are you in my room? I don’t recall hearing a knock.”

Rising to her feet, she brushed a strand of her wet ponytail from her face, stepping around his solid frame.

“Door was open. And pillows,” he said, jamming his hands into the pockets of his shorts as if he wasn’t standing in front of her with no shirt on. “I know Sanjeev always has extra in here. I need another pillow. Please,” he tacked on with syrupy emphasis.

Dixie’s throat grew dry and gritty. “There aren’t a hundred people on staff who could find you pillows?”

“Unlike you, I don’t want to wake the staff for something as ridiculous as a pillow. I know you’re used to having someone at your beck and call, Powder Puff. I, on the other hand, fend quite nicely for myself and wouldn’t dream of waking them.”

“Look at you here in my room, fending,” she mocked. His insinuation that she was selfish enough to wake an entire household over something as trivial as a hangnail infuriated her. In fairness, it wasn’t exactly an untruth from her past, but it was no less infuriating now in the present.

And that was exactly what Caine wanted. Rather than rise further to his bait, Dixie turned on her heel, hoping the sway of her backside made him salivate just like it used to.

She threw the linen closet door open and peered inside, reaching for the chain to unsuccessfully turn the light on. The bulb was out. For all the fancy, highfalutin’ gadgets Landon had in this house, he’d overlooked the simple things when he’d renovated.

The heavy oak door snapped back at her, smashing into her hip with a hard thud, meaning the spring was broken. Dixie spread her legs to hold it open, using her foot to keep it in place while attempting to adjust her vision to see the interior. The space had a small entry, and was just large enough to house some shelving full of soft, fluffy towels and silken bedding.

The door creaked when Caine came up behind her. Pushing her foot aside, he used his large hands at her waist to move her deeper into the closet. “I asked for a pillow. Not directions to the Fountain of Youth. What’s taking so long?” he questioned, craning his neck upward to glimpse the top shelves.

Distracted by the light press of his fingers and the sting of the fleeting memory when Caine’s hand was never far from hers made her forget about the door. “Don’t let the—”

The door slammed shut behind them with a heavy thud, enveloping them in the quiet, Tide-scented darkness. Caine knocked into her, jolting her forward so her nose just missed the edge of a shelf before righting her with his arms.

Which left his rocklike, warm body pressed tight against her back.

Certainly a dilemma of her libido’s highest order.