LITMIR.BIZ

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fashion sense rivaled her mother’s—to select her outfits for important occasions.

      She might look elegant, Chelsea thought now. The problem was, she didn’t feel elegant. What she felt was irritated. And drab. Dammit, she considered with a burst of frustration, she knew she should have worn the red.

      Raintree, Georgia

      There was nothing finer than sex first thing in the morning, Cash considered as he engaged in some slow, postcoital caresses with the lushly endowed blonde lying beside him.

      The bedroom was dark, lit only with the pale, silvery pink light of a new dawn. The sweet fragrance of Confederate jasmine wafted in through the open window, mingling with the woman’s perfume and the redolent scent of lovemaking.

      “Nice,” he murmured as he nibbled luxuriously at her throat.

      “Much, much better than nice.” Melanie Tyler linked her hands around his neck and treated Cash to a long, wet kiss. “If I’d only known southern men were so good in the sack, I’d have joined the Confederacy a long time ago.”

      He chuckled warmly. “It takes two.”

      Cash liked Melanie Tyler. A lot. And for more than great sex, although, he admitted readily, compatibility in bed was always a plus. He’d met her at the Magnolia House, an inn where her movie company was staying while filming a sprawling Civil War epic. Within fifteen minutes of meeting the actress in the lobby bar, they’d been tangling the sheets in her room. The affair had been going on for a month now and both accepted that her time in Georgia was at an end.

      Melanie treated sex as a man did. She enjoyed it for what it was, took what she wanted, gave what she could, and when it came time to move on, she did. With no regrets.

      “Oh, hell.” She leaped from the bed as if burned.

      “What’s the matter?”

      “I almost forgot. Marty called yesterday.” Marty, Cash knew, was her agent. “That writer who interviewed me for Vanity Fair is going to be on Good Morning America today.”

      Cash leaned back against the headboard and enjoyed the view of Melanie fiddling with the television dial. The remote had disappeared early last night amidst the sheets. As much as he genuinely liked her, Cash could not imagine this free-spirited sex goddess living in the White House.

      “You’re not really going to marry that stuffed-shirt senator, are you?”

      “That’s for me to know and you to guess, sweetheart.” She returned to the bed and snuggled up beside him as they waited through the segment where Roxanne Scarbrough was demonstrating how to prepare a proper southern Easter brunch.

      The lifestyle demonstration ended. A commercial for a new, improved detergent was followed by another pushing the wonders of quilted toilet paper.

      “How would you like to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom?” Melanie asked.

      “I suppose it depends. Would I be sleeping there alone?”

      She laughed. “Don’t be silly.”

      Across the room, on the nineteen-inch television screen hidden away in an antique armoire, the commercials faded away.

      When the camera focused in on a close-up of Charlie Gibson introducing the magazine writer, Cash knew he’d lost Melanie. Her sudden alertness reminded him of the way Blue, his old German shorthaired pointer, had reacted upon sniffing out a covey of quail. Looping his arm around her smooth, nude shoulders, he settled down to watch the interview.

      From what Melanie had told him about the importance of this interview, Cash realized he’d formed a mental image of some hardened, thin-lipped, cynical Yankee journalist who’d seen it all and didn’t like much of what she’d seen.

      As the camera shifted to the young woman seated across from Charlie, Cash experienced a white-hot jolt of recognition.

      Although she was as beautiful as ever, Cash thought Chelsea looked tired. And if she’d chosen those obviously expensive sedate clothes to appear older and more sophisticated, she’d failed. Because the subdued colors only called attention to the gleaming copper penny hue of her long straight hair.

      Her bright eyes—the color of new money—were wide and warm; her mouth smiled easily. The way she answered Charlie’s questions with brief, but thoughtful answers, revealed she’d matured. She’d also revealed a vulnerable, intelligent side of Melanie that even Cash, who prided himself on being able to read women, hadn’t discovered.

      “I didn’t know you had a degree in economics from Johns Hopkins.”

      “When I first started out in Hollywood, being smart wasn’t sexy.” Melanie didn’t take her eyes from the screen. “Hush. I want to hear what she’s saying.”

      So did he. Chelsea Cassidy’s voice was still as smooth as heated honey. He could have listened to it all morning.

      All too soon, the interview was over. When Cash found himself wishing they’d thought to tape it, so he could listen to those dulcet tones again, he decided that lack of sleep and too much champagne at last night’s wrap party for Melanie’s film must have killed off a few too many brain cells.

      “Well, what did you think?”

      “She was pretty good.”

      She hadn’t known him long, but her next words proved that she’d come to know him well. “Christ, Cash, trust your hormones to leap to attention at the sight of a beautiful woman. I was talking about what Chelsea Cassidy had to say. About me.”

      It was not Cash’s style to ignore one woman for another. Since he’d first lost his virginity in an upstairs bedroom of Fancy Porter’s whorehouse, Cash had prided himself on being an attentive, thoughtful lover. Fancy had taught him a lot of things that long hot summer of his fifteenth year. But the two most valuable lessons had been that a slow hand was worth a dozen quick fucks and treating a woman as if she were the only female in the world invariably paid off big time.

      Concentrating on the woman who’d warmed his bed so well and so often these past weeks, Cash pulled Melanie closer. “You’re a lot better than damn good, sugar.”

      “Well, I know that.” She pouted prettily and brushed some dark hair back from his forehead. “And, by the way, I think Chelsea is married. Or, if not married, seriously involved. While we were doing the interview, she got a call from some guy she was living with. Nelson somebody.”

      So she’d actually gone and done it, Cash thought with a burst of cold, angry derision. She’d actually married that arrogant, pompous jerk.

      “Not that I imagine a little detail like marriage vows would much matter to you,” Melanie said.

      “I never sleep with married women.”

      It was true. These days, anyway. Well, almost true, Cash amended as Lilabeth Yarborough came to mind. But hell, Lilabeth’s husband had left the former high school cheerleader and their three kids to seek his fortune on the NASCAR racing circuit, and although they’d never actually gotten around to signing the papers to make the divorce legal, Billy Yarborough hadn’t been back to Raintree for two and a half years.

      “Besides, why would I want her?” He nibbled seductively at Melanie’s earlobe. “When I have you?”

      “Damn. I don’t know what’s wrong with my mind today.” She was out of bed again like a rocket, scooping up last night’s discarded clothes which made a path from the doorway to the bed. “I’m sorry, Cash. But I’m booked on the ten-thirty flight back to L.A.”

      Cash drove her the thirty miles into Savannah. After watching her disappear down the jetway he stopped at a newsstand in the terminal and bought a copy of Vanity Fair.

      Over the intervening years, he’d managed to convince himself that those crazy six months with Chelsea had been nothing more than a particularly virulent attack of lust. He’d gotten over it. And her. He survived the uptown Yankee girl

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