Carnal Innocence Read Free Page A

eighty, Tucker added his own excellent tenor. His fingers drummed up and down on the steering wheel, looking like piano keys.
    Barreling over a rise, he had to swing wide to the left to avoid ramming into the back side of a natty BMW. He tooted his horn, not in warning but in greeting as he skidded around the elegant maroon fender. He didn’t slack his speed, but a glance in his rearview mirror showed him the Beemer was stopped, half in and half out of the lane leading back to Edith McNair’s house.
    As Jerry Lee switched into his raw-throated “Breathless,” Tucker gave a passing thought to the car and driver. Miss Edith had passed on about two months before—around the same time that a second mutilated body had been discovered floating in the water down at Spook Hollow.
    That had been sometime in April, and a search party had been whipped up to look for Francie Alice Logan, who’d been missing for two days. Tucker’s jaw clenched when he remembered what it had been like, trudging through the bayou, carrying a Ruger Red Label and hoping to hell he didn’t shoot off his own foot, or find anything.
    But they’d found her, and he’d had the bad luck to be with Burke Truesdale when they did.
    It wasn’t easy to think about what the water and the fish had done to sassy old Francie, the pretty little redhead he’d flirted with, dated a time or two, and had debated sleeping with.
    His stomach clenched and he bumped up the volume on Jerry Lee. He wasn’t thinking about Francie. Couldn’t. He’d been thinking about Miss Edith, and that was better. She’d lived to be nearly ninety and had passed on quietly in her sleep.
    Tucker recalled that she’d left her house, a tidy two-story built during the Reconstruction, to some Yankee relative.
    Since Tucker knew that no one within fifty miles ofInnocence owned a BMW, he concluded that the Yankee had decided to come down and take a peek at his inheritance.
    He dismissed the northern invasion from his thoughts, took out a cigarette, and after breaking a thumbnail-length piece from the tip, lighted it.
    Half a mile back, Caroline Waverly gripped the wheel of her car and waited for her heart to slide back down her throat.
    Idiot! Crazy bastard! Careless jerk!
    She forced herself to lift her trembling foot off the brake and tap the gas until the car was all the way into the narrow, overgrown lane.
    Inches, she thought. He’d missed hitting her by inches! Then he’d had the gall to blast his horn at her. She wished he’d stopped. Oh, she wished he’d stopped so she could have given that homicidal jackass a piece of her mind.
    She’d have felt better then, having vented her temper. She was getting damn good at venting since Dr. Palamo had told her that the ulcer and the headaches were a direct result of repressing her feelings. And of chronically overworking, of course.
    Well, she was doing something about both. Caroline unpried her sweaty hands from the wheel and wiped them against her slacks. She was taking a nice, long, peaceful sabbatical here in Nowhere, Mississippi. After a few months—if she didn’t die of this vicious heat—she’d be ready to prepare for her spring tour.
    As for repressing her feelings, she was done with that. Her final, ugly blowout with Luis had been so liberating, so gloriously uninhibited, she almost wished she could go back to Baltimore and do it again.
    Almost.
    The past—and Luis with his clever tongue, brilliant talent, and roving eye definitely belonged to the past— was safely behind her. The future, at least until she’d recovered her nerves and her health, wasn’t of much interest. For the first time in her life, Caroline Waverly,child prodigy, dedicated musician, and emotional sap, was going to live only for the sweet, sweet present.
    And here, at long last, she was going to make a home. Her way. No more backing away from problems. No more cowed agreeing to her mother’s demands and expectations. No more struggling to be the