The Best Way to Lose (9 page)

Pride refused to allow her to join the stampede from the room. There was calm deliberation
in the time she took, saying her good-byes to her late husband’s business friends while she worked her way slowly to the door. Yet her senses were always alert to Trace, warning her that they would ultimately meet at the door.

The Italian handbag hung from a strap over her shoulder. Pilar paused to put on the black kid gloves, conscious that Trace was finally beside her. Ebony combs swept the midnight sleekness of her hair away from her face and revealed the pearl studs piercing the lobes of her shell-like ears.

“I guess I should thank you for voting for me.” The sound of his low voice vibrated over her skin.

“You’re welcome,” she replied smoothly and kept her gaze downcast while she fitted the soft material between her fingers.

His arm crossed in front of her vision as he leisurely braced a hand against the wall and blocked her path to the door. Her glance made a darting lift to his face before she returned to the task of drawing on the other glove.

“Everyone waited to follow your lead. With their support, you could have made a fight of it,” he pointed out, tilting his head downward and to one side to probe curiously at her expression.

“You obviously came looking for trouble. I’m sorry I disappointed you.” She arched him a cool smile, aware of the straining tautness of her nerves.

His earthy virility was a physical presence in front of her, the bronzed column of his throat and the wisps of chest hairs springing into view where his shirt collar was unbuttoned. She was conscious of his rough good looks and the firm line of his mouth. There was a thready awareness that she missed the contact with a man’s body—Elliot’s body.

“I don’t think you’re sorry,” he mused.

“Does it matter?” Pilar countered with forced indifference. “You own the majority stock. And you’re Elliot’s son, so why shouldn’t you take over now that he’s gone?” It was her reason for not attempting to block his takeover of control. “Besides, as you pointed out, the company hasn’t been paying any dividends, so I didn’t have anything to lose.”

“That’s true.” But his eyes continued to probe.

“The company is yours to do with as you wish.” There was a curtness in her voice. “That’s what you wanted. I don’t know what you intend to do with it—probably ruin it the way you’ve blackened everything else in your life. I’m sure you tore all your toys apart when you were a child. Now you have a bigger toy that you can destroy. I don’t particularly care.”

His jaw hardened at her coolly aloof condemnation. He made an unhurried push away from the wall and shifted out of her path to the door. “I’m going to be making a lot of trips back and forth between Natchez and New
Orleans these next few months. I’m sure you’ll understand if I’m too busy to call on you when I’m in town.”

“Of course.” Briefly Pilar inclined her head, nodding to him before she moved smoothly to the door. Her flesh tingled with the sensation of his gaze, observing her departure.

T
he cuffs of the white shirt were rolled halfway back on his forearms. The dove-gray jacket to his suit was hooked on a finger and slung over his shoulder, a multistriped gray tie sticking out of a side pocket. The top buttons of his shirt were unfastened to invite the evening breeze onto his damp skin.

Without that stirring of air, it was sticky and sultry, but the ice cream cone was refreshingly cold. Trace strolled along the street in the general direction of the riverfront park atop the bluff and took his time eating the melting ice cream, licking it and letting its coldness glide down his throat.

There was already a small gathering of people in the park. Some were lounging on the grass and others were standing or tossing
Frisbees. The local school band was putting on a summer concert from the bandstand in the park. Brassy notes filled the air, sometimes discordant. A hot summer sun held its angle in the sky, stubbornly lingering above the horizon.

A scattering of lethargic applause followed the final note of a song. Trace stopped in the shade of an old oak on the edge of the park and rolled the ice cream around in his mouth. There was a break in the band’s playing, a shuffling of music and licking of reeds. His glance wandered idly over the park grounds with their panoramic view of the bridge spanning the Mississippi River below and the green cluster of trees on the opposite bank.

His attention lingered on the stone marker, erected to commemorate the historic old trail known as the Natchez Trace. It had been established by the Indians long before any white men ever set foot on the continent, part of a trade route that extended as far north as the Great Lakes. In the settling of the nation it had been a post road for the mail, connecting Natchez to Nashville and creating a highway in the wilderness.

An announcement was being made from the bandstand and Trace let his gaze wander back to it. Only snatches of the words reached his hearing, the rest of it being carried away by the rushing breeze. He couldn’t make heads or tails out of what was being said, but he recognized a couple of the local dignitaries on the bandstand. Some sort of plaque was
being presented to a dark-haired woman in a cherry-red dress.

His tongue paused in its lick of the ice cream, the sight of Pilar momentarily jolting him. A restlessness ran through his nerve ends, coiling and uncoiling in frissons of tension. In the last two years he’d seen her, maybe, three times and the last one over seven months ago. Yet nothing had changed—not the feelings she aroused in him nor her stiffly cordial attitude toward him.

His gaze locked onto her form, searching for little details. She was wearing her hair shorter; its length brushed the tops of her shoulders now instead of cascading onto her back, and its style was fuller and softer. The material of her cherry-colored dress was a shiny fabric like silk, padded at the shoulders in an old-fashioned style with short capped sleeves. The soft wind caressed it, blowing it against her figure to outline the shape of her hips and thighs, then swirling it to hide them.

There was a movement in his side vision, and Trace glanced off his shoulder to see a stocky policeman ambling past him. More white hairs than iron gray were sticking out from under his cap. The short-sleeved shirt of his summer uniform was clinging damply to his thickening middle. Dark sunglasses protected his eyes, but it didn’t keep Trace from recognizing him.

“Hey, Digger.” It was a lazily drawled greeting that brought the man up short.

There was an initial blankness in Digger’s
expression while Trace came under the scrutiny of those sunglasses before a surprised smile broke across Digger’s face. He changed his course to wander over and stand next to Trace.

“Hell, I didn’t know it was you standing there,” he declared and rested his pudgy hands on his hips to let the air circulate around his body. “When did you make it back into town?”

“I grabbed a ride on the
Sophie B
when she left New Orleans.” His attention strayed to the bandstand while he answered the question. “She dropped me under-the-hill about an hour ago.”

“Are you gonna be in town for a spell? You’ve been comin’ and goin’ like a yo-yo lately. In and out, in and out. You’ve done more travelin’ since you became a respectable businessman than you ever did before,” Digger observed. “And here I thought you were gonna drop anchor.”

“The whole system needed a major overhaul. It should start getting smoother.” He munched on the sugar cone while he continued to watch the dark-haired woman on the bandstand.

“A lot of people didn’t figure you’d stick it out. They thought you’d come into the business a-swingin’ and a-fightin’, then walk away when it was knee-deep in trouble.”

“Weren’t you one of them?” Trace slanted Digger a dryly amused glance and finished the ice cream cone. With a handkerchief from
his pocket, he wiped the stickiness from his hands, momentarily draping his jacket over his arm, then swinging it over his shoulder again when he was done.

“Yeah,” Digger admitted a little sheepishly.

Trace changed the subject. He’d already faced down all the doubts from others. Considering the heller he’d been, it wasn’t surprising that no one believed he’d actually stay with it. There had been a couple of times when he’d wondered if it was worth the resistance he met on all fronts, including the men he’d worked with on the tugs.

“What’s this all about?” He gestured to the bandstand, where Pilar was making some kind of acceptance speech. “Do you know?”

“It’s some kind of civic award, recognizing all the things she’s done for the betterment of the community or some such thing like that.” Digger shrugged away the inexactness of his answer. “The idea of making it a public presentation was just a way of getting people to come to the concert.”

At the conclusion of her short speech Trace joined in with the desultory applause, his jacket swinging from his mildly clapping hands. As she was escorted down the steps he hesitated, then glanced at Digger.

“Guess I might as well say hello to her so the gossips don’t start talking about me being rude and ignoring my father’s widow.” It sounded like a good excuse.

“Yeah.” A dry smile lifted the corners of the man’s mouth as he seemed to gather up energy.
“I’m supposed to be checkin’ out a complaint about kids smokin’ pot up here. Some poor old lady swears she could smell it. See ya later.”

The band instructor lifted his baton and looked to see that all his young musicians were in readiness. The bronze plaque felt heavy in Pilar’s arms, its wood sticking to her bare skin. She was hot and tired of smiling for everyone’s benefit, but she was obliged to stay through a few more songs before it would be proper to leave.

At least she was out of that hot sun, and there was a breeze. She longed to take her shoes off and feel the cool grass under the bottoms of her feet. She feigned an attentiveness to the band’s rendition of a popular song.

A hand lightly touched her arm, drawing her sharp glance to the auburn-haired woman standing with her. “Look who’s here,” Sandra Kay murmured, her eyes alive with interest as their glance went past Pilar. “I didn’t know he was in town again, did you?”

When she saw Trace Santee strolling across the grass toward their small party, heat-raw nerves prickled. “Hardly.” Her attention reverted to the bandstand in a struggling attempt at indifference.

“In a way it’s a shame you and Trace never became close. After all, he is Elliot’s son,” Sandra Kay mused with absent regret, then shrugged faintly. “Of course, I don’t think Trace has ever felt any strong family ties. He’s
always been something of a lone wolf.” She lowered her voice even further, an indication to Pilar of Trace’s imminent appearance. “I wish some psychiatrist would explain why women find rogues like Trace so attractive—even happily married women like myself. They always seem a little wicked, and a little dangerous. And I guess there’s the feeling that if you had a wild little fling, he’d never tell.”

It was just innocent female talk, but Pilar was agitated by it. She didn’t care for the subject or Trace Santee. It had always been impossible to think of him as Elliot’s son, especially since he was six years older than she was.

“Why, good evening, Trace.” Sandra Kay greeted him, pretending that she hadn’t seen him coming. “I never knew you attended something as tame as a band concert.”

“On a lazy summer evening like this, who has the energy for anything more?” he countered with a sleepy look that was faintly sexy. When it wandered to Pilar, a thready tension caught her system in its web. “Evening, Pilar.”

“Evening, Trace,” she returned the greeting, a taut breathiness in her voice. All her senses were alert in a wary reaction to his presence while she maintained an attitude of aloofness.

The breeze had ruffled the virile thickness of his dark hair, and there was a bronze sheen to the chiseled angles and planes of his face.
His stance was relaxed, loose and at ease. The jacket of his summer-gray suit was slung over one shoulder, and the material of his shirt was sticking to his skin, outlining the flatly muscled chest and the width of his shoulders. The mat of chest hairs visible where his shirt was unbuttoned seemed to add to the reek of earthy masculinity. Pilar stiffened at its prepotency.

“I see you’ve thrown off your mourning rags.” The idle roam of his gaze made her conscious of the way the breeze flattened the silk fabric of her dress against her figure. “New dress. New hairstyle. Very nice.” The nod of approval seemed to dryly mock the changes.

“Thank you.” There was a curling of her fingers into the palm of her hand, nails digging in to distract her sensitive nerves.

His glance drifted to the plaque she was holding. “I wasn’t close enough to hear your speech after you were given the award. What’s it for?”

He shifted to her side, angling his body to read the words engraved on the bronze shield as she tipped it away from her body.

There was no contact, but a rawness ran down her entire right side at the closeness. It was as if she could actually feel the heat of his body radiating onto her flesh, and the musky, warm smell of him was all around her. The agitated beat of her pulse only added to the brittle tension that wouldn’t let her go.

“It’s just a community service award.” Pilar deliberately sounded off-hand about it, putting no special importance on the standardly worded plaque on which her name had been engraved.

“‘In recognition of meritorious service—’” His voice trailed away after the beginning phrase as he skimmed the rest of the high-sounding words. Her sidelong glance checked to see if he had finished and met the taunting brilliance in his half-lidded eyes. “That should warm the cockles of your heart on a cold night.”

“I have no doubt that something like this would mean nothing to you,” she challenged, all smooth and poised on the outside, except for the glitter of anger in her eyes.

“I’m not likely to find out, since it’s doubtful I’ll ever be given one.” Dryness riddled his voice, but there wasn’t a hint of regret or remorse over the fact as Trace changed his position, creating more distance between them.