Scarlet Woman. Gwynne Forster

      “Is he like that all the time?” Rachel asked Melinda as they walked down one of the main streets of Ellicott City, Maryland. “My father hardly ever raises his voice.”

      “Your father isn’t a preacher,” Melinda reminded her. “If other pastors are like my father, they’re always right. He talks over everybody and across everybody, because when he opens his mouth the world is supposed to shut up and take heed.”

      “Girl, you go ’way from here,” Rachel said. “He’s a good man. Last Sunday, he preached till he was plain hoarse and couldn’t say another word.”

      “Yes, I know he’s good, and I bet he started whispering into the mike. Nothing shuts up my father.”

      “He’s a righteous man.”

      “You’re telling me? He’s the only one on earth. I wish he’d understand that he can’t mold people as he would clay figures just because he believes they’d be better off.”

      “Now, Melinda. You don’t mean that.”

      She did mean it. Her father believed in what he taught, but he was driven by a secular monster, the one that made you want praise and acceptance. Tired of the subject and uninterested in Rachel’s views of Booker Jones, Melinda stopped talking. Who knew a man better than his family?

      “Rachel, why do you think Prescott put that clause in his will forcing me to remarry? I just can’t figure it out.”

      “Me, neither, girl, and Blake Hunter is going to see that you do it or lose everything, including your house.”

      Melinda shrugged. “I’m not worried about that, because I never intend to remarry.”

      Rachel stopped walking. “Was Mr. Rodgers mean to you? I’d have thought an older man would be sweet as sugar to a woman less than half his age.”

      Melinda smiled inwardly, aware that the comment reflected the local gossip about her and Prescott. “My husband treated me as if I were the most precious being on this earth. He…he was wonderful to me. Those four years were the happiest of my life.”

      “Well, I’ll be! I guess there’s no telling about people. Maybe I’d better start looking for an older man. I’m thirty-two. With a fifty-or sixty-year-old man, that ought to stand for something.” Rachel didn’t say anything for half a block, and then she spoke with seeming reluctance. “How old do you think Blake Hunter is? And how come he’s not married?”

      “Why would I know?”

      “He was your husband’s close friend, wasn’t he?”

      “They never discussed the man’s private affairs when I was around. I know practically nothing about him.”

      “I’ll bet you know he’s a number ten.”

      “A what?”

      “A knockout. A good-looking virile man who makes you think things you couldn’t tell your mother.”

      So she’d been right. Rachel hadn’t wanted to leave Blake’s office. The woman was after Blake. She told herself to forget about it. Nothing would ever happen between Blake Hunter and herself.

      Melinda walked into the redbrick colonial she’d shared with Prescott and froze when she realized she’d been expecting to hear his usual, “That you, dear?” “Get a hold of yourself,” she said aloud, squared her shoulders, and headed for her bedroom, determined to meet the rest of her life head-on. The sound of Ruby vacuuming the hall carpet reminded her that the upkeep of the house was now her responsibility.

      “We have to talk, Ruby,” she told the housekeeper. “I don’t understand it, but Mr. Rodgers didn’t provide for you in his will, and I can’t keep you on here. I’m afraid we’ll have to separate.”

      “He paid my wages for the entire year after his death, Miz Melinda. And last year, he drawed up a real good pension plan for me. Only thing is, I has to work here for the next twelve months. He done good by me.”

      Melinda swallowed several times and told herself it didn’t matter that Prescott had left his housekeeper better fixed than his wife.

      “Is Blake Hunter in charge of your pension and wages?”

      “Yes, ma’am. My pension starts thirteen months from now, and Mr. Blake will send me my salary every Friday, just like he always done.” She coughed a few times and patted the hair in the back of her head. “If I was twenty years younger, that man wouldn’t be single. No sirree. That is one sweet-looking man. A face the color of shelled walnuts.” She rolled her eyes toward the sky and wet her lips. “Them dreamy eyes and that bottom lip…Lord.” She patted her hair. “Honey, that is some man.”

      Imagine that. “He’s a hard man,” Melinda said, thinking of how lacking in compassion for her he’d seemed when he read the terms of her late husband’s will. Harsh terms, and so unlike Prescott. “But if anybody could break through that wall he’s got around himself, Ruby, I expect you could.”

      Ruby put the can of furniture polish on the table and shook out the chamois cloth she used for polishing. “Miz Melinda, that man just can’t help being hard. He done nothing but work from daylight to dark six days a week from the time he could walk till he finished high school. His daddy cracked that whip.”

      She stared at Ruby. Surely the woman was mistaken. “He told you that?”

      “No, ma’am. He sure didn’t, but I heard him telling Mr. Rodgers that and a whole lot more. That man been through somethin’.”

      Melinda’s eyes widened, but she quickly replaced that with a bland facial expression. No point in letting Ruby know that anything about Blake interested her. She’d had two shocks in two minutes, and she had a hunch she’d get more of them. She leaned against the wall and waited for Ruby’s next shot. Her impression of Blake had been of a privileged youth from an upper middle-class family. How had he become so polished? Ruby’s high-pitched voice interrupted Melinda’s musings.

      “Working a boy like Mr. Blake’s daddy done made him work would amount to child abuse these days,” Ruby said, warming up to the subject. “He said his folks was poor as Job’s turkey.”

      “Well, he certainly overcame it,” Melinda replied and walked rapidly up the wide stairs, richly carpeted in Royal Bokhara. However, realizing that she’d practically run from the talk about Blake because she didn’t want to think of him, she slowed her steps. As executor of Prescott’s estate, the man would be a fixture in her life for the next twelve months, and she’d better learn to handle the consequences.

      Blake Edmund Hunter looked from one woman to the other as Melinda stood to leave his office and Rachel Perkins remained in her chair gazing at him. Another one of nature’s stupid tricks! Rachel wanted him so badly she was practically salivating, and Melinda Rodgers didn’t know he was alive. His gaze followed Melinda’s svelte physique, straight, almost arrogant carriage and sweetly rounded buttocks as she strolled out of his office. He wanted her and had from the minute he first saw her, but he was Prescott’s friend, so he hadn’t let himself give in to it when Prescott was alive. He was damned if he’d succumb to it now.

      If anything turned his stomach, it was a gold-digging woman, an unfaithful wife, or a treacherous friend. She hadn’t given him reason to believe that she would be unfaithful to Prescott, and he was grateful for that, because she’d been temptation without trying and he wouldn’t have considered disloyalty to Prescott.

      Yet, as much as he desired her, he had reservations about her. For instance, that virginal innocence she wrapped around herself didn’t fool him. She was less than half Prescott’s age, and nobody could make him believe a young, gorgeous woman like her had married an old, solitary recluse for love. She’d married Prescott Rodgers for his money, and Blake would see that she carried out the terms of that will, or else. That clause Prescott had inserted requiring Melinda to marry within a year or lose her inheritance…He squeezed his eyes shut and told himself the lump