The Reluctant Countess (37 page)

Also upcoming: Patricia Olney’s irresistible
JADE’S GAMBLE
, Linda Cajio’s sinfully sexy
STRICTLY BUSINESS
, and three blazing hot books from Sandra Chastain:
A DREAM TO CLING TO, LOVE AND A BLUE-EYED COWBOY
, and
MAC’S ANGELS: MIDNIGHT FANTASY
.

If you love romance … then you’re ready to be
Loveswept
!

Gina Wachtel

Associate Publisher

P.S. Watch for these terrific Loveswept titles coming soon: March brings Ruthie Knox’s scorching
ALONG CAME TROUBLE
, and some classic you’ll want to read: Patricia Olney’s moving and funny
STILL MR. AND MRS
., Juliana Garnett’s compelling and sensual
THE BARON
, Jean Stone’s exceptional and heartwarming
FIRST LOVES
, Linda Cajio’s extraordinary
UNFORGETTABLE
, and beloved author Iris Johansen’s
brilliant
AN UNEXPECTED SONG
. In April, we’re excited about Megan Frampton’s emotional and powerfully erotic tale
HERO OF MY HEART
, Karen Leabo’s electric
HELL ON WHEELS
, Linda Cajio’s stirring novels,
HE’S SO SHY
and
DESPERATE MEASURES
, and Sandra Chastain’s spellbinding books,
NIGHT DREAMS
and
PENTHOUSE SUITE
. Don’t miss any of these extraordinary reads. I promise that you’ll fall in love and treasure these stories for years to come.…

Actually I wasn’t prepared at all. I just wanted to go to bed. I was tired and cranky, sweat was puddling between my boobs, and my armpits smelled like sprouting onions. Deodorant cost one ninety-five at the prison canteen, well beyond the means of someone who earned ten cents an hour. Given a choice between M&Ms or Mennen, I’d pick the sweet and live with the stink. Repulsive, yes—but chocolate is what gets you through the day, and no one else smells any better.

If I’d stuck to chocolate, things might have turned out differently. But I had a leftover cough drop from a bout with bronchitis, and when my cellmate, Tina Sanchez, developed a tickly throat, I gave her the cough drop. Just being a pal, right?

Wrong. You’re supposed to return unused medications to the medical director. The staff tracks pharmaceuticals the way the CIA tracks yellow cake in the Middle East. A cellblock officer caught the menthol scent on Tina’s breath and wrote her up for taking a nonprescription drug. Since I was the one who’d dished out the illicit substance, I was written up, too. Along with a bunch of other drug offenders—aspirin pushers, Alka-Seltzer peddlers, and Midol dealers—Tina and I were sentenced to garden detail.

Not exactly the Bataan death march in a suburban peas and petunias plot, but Taycheedah’s gardens are a whole different chunk of real estate. Looking out over them is like gazing at the Great Plains; you wouldn’t be surprised to see buffalo and buzzards
roaming around out there.

The first days of September had been sunny and hot, and in the perverse way of growing things, every tomato on six acres had ripened on the same day. Ten thousand of the squishy red things, demanding to be handpicked before thunderstorms swept through and turned them into salsa. We picked. And picked. And picked some more. All morning, all afternoon, and into early evening. When it got to be five o’clock I thought we’d be dismissed for dinner. But no-o.
You do the crime, you do the time:
that was the warden’s motto. The kitchen staff sent out sandwiches and bottles of water and we ate sitting cross-legged in the dirt. Then we hauled ourselves to our feet and went back to work.

My spine was an archipelago of ache, my skin felt scalded, and my teeth were filmed with bugs. The rank, catnippy odor of tomatoes clung to my clothes. I straightened and stretched at the end of my gazillionth row, rubbing my back and anxiously scanning the sky to the west, which had turned the pus-yellow of a fading bruise. The air was thick enough to stir with a spoon. Crickets chirped storm warnings. Lightning flickered in a raft of distant clouds.

Lightning terrified me. I glanced uneasily at the officer on duty, hoping she’d let the tomatoes go to mush and order us back inside. She didn’t. She just yawned, leaning against a tree, staring glassily into space. Obviously, distant lightning wasn’t high on her list of concerns.

“Did you know that lightning can strike as far as ten miles away?” I said to Tina, who was picking on the opposite side of my row.

“So what?” Tina scoffed. “Your chances of getting hit by lightning are less than winning the Powerball.”

“You’ve got it backward.” The heat was making me cranky. It was Tina’s fault I was on this gulag detail in the first place. “The odds against winning the Powerball are greater than your chances of being struck by lightning.”

“I ain’t never won the lottery and I ain’t never got hit by lightning neither, so that proves my point.”

Tina’s logic made my brain hurt. I opened my mouth to explain her faulty reasoning, which would probably have resulted in Tina’s giving me a mashed tomato facial, but at that moment a siren began to wail. I nearly jumped out of my sweat-streaked skin. Dropping my tomatoes, I clapped my hands over my ears.

“Is that the escape siren?” I asked.

“No, you goober. That’s the tornado siren.”

Tornado?
My stomach did a roller-coaster dip. Tornadoes scared me even worse than lightning. What were you supposed to do? In grade school we’d had to practice tornado drills, crouching under our desks with our arms over our heads and our butts in the air. By the time the drill ended, our classroom smelled like a cauliflower factory.

The guard-snapped out of her heat-induced stupor, blew a whistle, and bellowed, “All right, everybody, form up in a line. We’re returning to the main unit. Inside, you will proceed to your designated—”

A galloping wind drowned out her voice, bowled over the tomato plants, and hurled leaves through the air like green rain. The storm blitzed in faster than anyone could have expected. Thunder shook the ground and a zag of lightning split the sky. The mercury vapor lamps that lit the grounds exploded, plunging us into murky gloom.

Disoriented, I grabbed onto Tina and we bumbled around, tripping over vines, squishing tomato guts underfoot, trying to catch our breaths against the scouring gale. The air sizzled with electricity and my hair stood on end. The wind worked itself into a tantrum and slammed us along, Tina’s long braid whipping against my face until she was whirled one way and I was hurled another. I smacked up against the wall of the greenhouse and stepped in a load of peat moss from an overturned wheelbarrow.

Lightning flashed again, turning the world muddy purple. The purple goop spat
hail. Split pea hail at first, that sounded like the first faint pops of microwave popcorn, then fist-sized hail that smashed the greenhouse panes and sent shards of glass geysering into the air. A 747 revved for takeoff inside my skull. My ears popped, my hair tried to yank itself out by the follicles, and what felt like a dozen Dustbusters sucked at my clothes. Tree branches and gutter spouts hurtled through the air, outlined by strobes of lightning. Something enormous somersaulted toward me, growing bigger and bigger, blotting out the sky. I stared in disbelief. It was a house! An enormous house was about to smack down and squash me like the Wicked Witch of the East. When the rescue workers came around searching for bodies, they’d discover my feet sticking out from beneath the foundation.

“She really needed a pedicure,” they would say.

I was five years old when I watched
The Wizard of Oz
for the first time. My parents were out and my older brothers, who were supposed to be babysitting me, had abandoned me. Alone in the house, I poured myself a glass of Kool-Aid, dribbled my way to the TV, and popped a tape into the VCR. I couldn’t read yet, but the video cover showed a girl in a blue dress, a scarecrow, a lion, and a shiny metal man. I plopped down on the sofa, my legs so short they stuck straight out over the edge of the cushions, and watched, entranced, as a girl named Dorothy balanced along a fence, singing a song about a rainbow.

Then Almira Gulch appeared. Eyes like Raisinettes, chin like an ax blade, mouth like a rat trap. By the time she was pedaling her bike through the twister, cackling insanely and transforming into the Wicked Witch of the East, I was petrified, sobbing, and soaked.

My mother came home, switched off the movie, changed my underpants, and put me to bed. I wasn’t allowed to watch
The Wizard of Oz
again until I was nine years old,
presumably old enough to separate fantasy from reality, but even then I had to squeeze my eyes shut when the winged monkeys flew out of the witch’s castle.

A spatter of rain in my face woke me. Disoriented, I jerked upright, swiping water out of my eyes. Memory returned in jumbled fragments: lightning, wind, hail, a flying house. Had I actually been in the middle of a
tornado
?

The eerie purple clouds had vanished as the storm roared off east. The air smelled like Christmas trees and the sky had turned that soft, heavenly blue that precedes dark. Bricks, boards, mangled metal, and glass from the shattered greenhouse lay strewn about, sparkling beneath a layer of rapidly melting hail. And there, just a few feet away, was the thing that had struck me. Not a
house
falling out of the sky, Mazie, you hysterical tornado-phobe—just an old roof the tornado had snatched off a garage or shed. It was lodged against the prison’s perimeter fence, half in and half out of the grounds, as though it’d tried to escape but had been snagged at the last moment.

I took stock of my parts. No broken bones, merely a hard, painful knot about the size of a jawbreaker on my crown. Just a bump, I told myself.
Walk it off
, my horrible brothers would have sneered.

Heaving myself to my feet, I eyed the fallen roof. My heart started beating the way it had the first time I’d seen Taylor Lautner take off his shirt in the
Twilight
movie. I felt woozy. I felt short of breath. I felt terrified that I might be contemplating something stupid.

Shouts came from somewhere close by, puncturing my last-person-on-earth fantasy. Peering out through the jungle of tangled limbs, I glimpsed figures on the
grounds. The emergency generators kicked in at that moment. Lights blazed, motors hummed, and current surged through the fence wire in a whispery buzz. I figured I had about thirty seconds before someone spotted me. The whole point of making inmates wear orange jumpsuits on work details is to make them as visible as construction barrels.

Don’t even think about it
, I warned myself.

I have never been an impulsive person. You don’t want to be in line behind me at Baskin Robbins because I dither forever trying to choose between Peanut Butter Passion and Mississippi Mud. When I see a sweater I love in a store, I decide to wait until it goes on sale and when I go back my size is gone.

But four years in prison changed that. In prison you don’t have time to weigh the pros and cons of a situation. In prison you listen to your gut. And my gut was telling me
go for it
! My gut didn’t care that if a single hair came in contact with that fence, twenty thousand volts of electricity were going to surge through my body. My gut didn’t care that I had no clue what I would do if I actually escaped from prison. My gut had become a shoot-first-ask-questions-later type of organ.

Taking a running start, I leaped for the outthrust corner of the roof, snagged a rain-slick shingle, slung a knee up, and shimmied to the peak. I seat-of-my-pantsed down the other side and halted at the far edge. From here to the ground was a two-story drop. Heights are high on my list of phobias, with a scariness rating just below lightning, tornadoes, and those cardboard cylinders of biscuit dough that make a loud pop when you press a spoon against the seam and even though you’re expecting the noise it still makes you jump.

Heights made me sick to my stomach. Just watching someone in a movie climbing out on a ledge gives me sweaty palms. I cursed the gut feeling that had led me into this predicament. But here’s where growing up as a Wisconsin farm girl comes in handy: deep inside my otherwise chickenshit soul there lurks a tiny flicker of derring-doness
dating from the time when being allowed to hang with my brothers was the most important thing in my life, a time when I constantly tried to prove that possession of testicles was not the single standard for bravery. So I took all dares. Rode the bucking heifer. Climbed to the highest beam in the barn and jumped. Set off the string of firecrackers under the milk bucket.