“No, he didn’t.”

“Then I guess it’d be okay.”

“Afterward, may I come to see you again?”

Her pursed mouth began to work with emotion. “Jade, we loved that boy. We like to never got over what he done to hisself.”

“Neither have I.”

“It almost kilt Otis, too.” She wiped her nose on the cup towel. “He’s proud, you know, the way men are. Me, I figure we got something coming for all the grief we suffered over Gary. Somebody ought to pay for what happened.”

Jade reached out and pressed her arm. “Thank you. I’ll be in touch soon. And please remember not to say anything to anyone about this.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

“Say, Mom?”

“Say, what?”

Graham looked up from the Sports Illustrated he was thumbing through. He was stretched out on the floor of their living room, lying on his stomach. “That sounded funny coming from you. Mostly black guys say that to one another.”

“I met a man

once—a white man—who began most of his sentences with ‘say,’ and it annoyed me so much I sent him to jail.”

Graham rolled to his back, then sat up. “No kiddin’?”

“No kidding.”

His dark hair was tousled, his eyes bright. Unabashedly, Jade took a moment to adore him. Since his and Cathy’s arrival in Palmetto the week before, Jade couldn’t seem to look at him enough. She had missed him terribly during their six-week separation. It was the longest stretch of time they had ever spent apart, and she hadn’t enjoyed it.

“If you don’t believe me,” she said, “ask Mr. Burke the next time you see him. He knows better than I that the man belonged in jail.”

“Mr. Burke’s so cool.”

“Cool?”

Jade tried to apply the slang adjective to the man. He worked incessantly and took every delay—such as inclement weather or malfunctioning equipment—as a personal affront. He elevated conscientiousness to the degree of fanaticism. Building the plant had become his crusade. He was almost as obsessive about it as she.

“I guess you could call him cool.” She deliberately kept her tone noncommittal.

Dillon had no vices that she knew of. He had never been drunk or hung over in her presence. If he saw women, he saw them away from the trailer. To her knowledge, he had never brought a woman to the construction site.

“When I first met him, I thought he was sorta mean,” Graham told her.

“Mean?”

“He doesn’t smile a lot, does he?”

“No, I guess he doesn’t,” she said thoughtfully. On the few occasions she had seen him smile, it had been a self-derisive expression.

“And the first day you took me out to the site, he yelled at me when I climbed up on the bulldozer.”

In the brief time he’d been in Palmetto, Graham had talked her into taking him to the site three times. He was fascinated with it. Now she wondered if it was Dillon and not the excavation that attracted him.

“I’m glad Dillon yelled at you. You had no business playing around that machinery. It could be dangerous.”

“That’s what Mr. Burke said, too. He told me that people who flirt with getting hurt like that have shit for brains.”

Tags: Sandra Brown Romance
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