“I want an answer, Michael. Now.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he mumbled.
“Good. And you’d better mean it, because I’m dead serious. As of tonight, you’re grounded. For two weeks. You may go to baseball practice and to games, to church and to your Scout meetings. There will be no parties, no hanging out at the mall with your friends, no sleepovers, no phone calls. And you can’t have your friends over here, either.”
“But, Mom—”
She forged on. “If there is any monetary damage from this episode, it comes out of your allowance. Now, have I convinced you that this was, indeed, a ‘big deal’ and that it had better not happen again?”
Her son nodded sullenly. “I bet none of the other guys get grounded,” he muttered.
“Well, I’m not their mother, am I?” Savannah retorted, then almost winced at hearing her own mother’s words tumbling out of her mouth. She had always hoped to avoid those tired old parenting clichés with her children, but sometimes they just escaped of their own volition, it seemed.
“I’m punishing you as much for your attitude now as for what you did tonight. We’ll be talking more about this, Michael, but now I’m tired and angry and I think it’s best if we both calm down before we discuss it any further. Good night.”
“‘Night.” His answer was barely audible.
By the time Savannah was finally able to close herself into her own bedroom that evening, she was a nervous wreck. This day had simply been too much to handle, she thought with a weary shake of her head. She felt as though she was balanced on a wire with her family’s entire future on her shoulders, and adding just one more element would make it all come crashing down.
She sincerely hoped that Kit wouldn’t prove to be that one disastrous element.
THE CAMPBELLVILLE grapevine was amazingly efficient. The moment Savannah walked into her office the next morning, she knew the gossip lines had already been activated.
A cluster of co-workers gathered in one corner of the main room stopped talking abruptly when. Savannah entered. Someone cleared his throat. Someone else coughed. The group broke up quickly, though Savannah was aware of the surreptitious glances thrown her way.
From the reception desk, outspoken Patty Grant was the first to greet her. “Is what I heard true?” she demanded.
Savannah swallowed a groan. “I don’t know, Patty. What did you hear?”
“I saw Annalee Grimes when I stopped at the doughnut shop on my way to work this morning. Annalee said she was at your house last night when Christopher Pace showed up on your doorstep. The Christopher Pace!”
“Then, yes, what you heard is true. I met Kit while I was on vacation. He was talking about setting his next book in the South and I suggested that he use Campbellville as research.” The lie Kit had concocted slipped a bit too easily from her own tongue, she thought guiltily.
Patty’s eyes widened. “He’s going to put Campbellville in a book?”
Since Savannah was already committed to the excuse Kit had provided—which, she had to admit, was much more innocuous than the real reason he’d given for tracking her down—she answered firmly. “No. He’s going to create a fictional small Southern town of the future. He just wanted to study the atmosphere here to give his setting a realistic feeling.”
“Wow. Why didn’t you tell us you knew Christopher Pace?”
Savannah grimaced. “Maybe I didn’t think anyone would believe me,” she suggested, trying to smile.
“I’d have believed you,” Patty insisted. “Well…I might have thought you were teasing at first, but I would have believed you if you’d sworn it was true. I’d love to hear all the details about how you met him and what you talked about and everything. Is he really as good looking as he is on TV?”
“He’s very attractive,” Savannah answered vaguely. “Excuse me, Patty, I have some calls I have to make before nine o’clock.”
Patty wasn’t pleased to have the fascinating conversation cut short, but she didn’t try to detain her supervisor any longer.
By the time she was supposed to leave for lunch, Savannah wished heartily that she’d called in sick that morning. One more speculative look, one more sympathetic approach about her “problems” with her son, one more avid question about Christopher Pace, and she would be tempted to scream, she thought in exasperation. Her staff could hardly concentrate on their jobs for prying into her personal life.
Something told her that her relatively anonymous life in Campbellville would never be the same….
7
KIT FELT RIDICULOUS as he waited for Savannah in a booth in the very back of a small diner some ten miles out of Campbellville. Savannah had been so furtive when she set up this meeting, he wouldn’t have been entirely surprised if she’d asked him to wear a disguise.
Why was she so afraid to be seen with him? It wasn’t as if no one knew he was in town. He would bet the women who’d met him last night had already spread the news throughout the county, judging by their unabashed questions about why he was there and how long he planned to stay.
He was accustomed to the curiosity and attention. Savannah apparently wasn’t.