The Sweetest September. Liz Talley

menu. No more visions of her in a wedding dress smiling at the dark-headed Southern boy with the alligator grin.

      Stick a fork in her dream of respectability.

      Done.

      The phone went silent just as the self-loathing took over. This was what her life had come to—driving the memory of heartbreak away with random stranger sex in a backwater crap hole. She’d never sunk so low.

      “Perfect, Shelby,” she whispered, leaning onto the stall door. The bathroom still spun a bit but she remained upright. The worst of it was she couldn’t drive in the state she was in, and she was utterly alone on her little venture out to tour Louisiana plantations. She’d either have to sit at the bar and drink water until the drunk wore off...which could be a good five or six hours, or swallow her pride and call Darby and ask him to come get her. Neither one appealed to her, but she guessed that was too damn bad.

      She’d come to terms long ago that if she waited on Prince Charming to arrive on a white steed, she’d be worm food before he showed up.

      As always, it was up to her to figure out a solution.

      She dug her phone out of her purse, noted her missed call was from Delta Airlines and asked Siri about cab service. What good was having a couple of million bucks sitting in a bank if you couldn’t pay an exorbitant cab fare once in a while? But no dice on a cab. Wasn’t even a taxi service out this far.

      So she dialed the number to Beau Soleil, Darby’s childhood home. The man owed her a ride back to Bayou Bridge. Time to go back to Seattle.

      Goodbye, Louisiana.

      So long, life she thought she’d have.

      * * *

      JOHN BEAUCHAMP CLOAKED himself inside the pickup truck that had seen better days, tossing his beat-up cowboy hat onto the bench seat and leaning his forehead against the steering wheel.

      His chest felt like he’d been hit with a wrecking ball, tight and achy, the way it had been the entire day of his wife’s funeral a year ago. He needed to cry. He needed to punch something until his knuckles bled...until the pain went away.

      What in the name of Jesus had he been thinking in there?

      He hadn’t.

      That was the problem.

      He’d come to Boots Grocery to drink away the pain and ended up screwing some blonde chick in the bathroom. Like it meant nothing. Like he hadn’t just betrayed the vows he’d made eleven years ago last month. Like that would lessen the hurt.

      No. The pain never abated, and trying to extinguish it with some bar bunny had done nothing more than release crushing shame.

      John felt in his pocket for his keys, pulled them out and reached toward the ignition, but then remembered—he was drunk as a sailor and couldn’t drive.

      Since his younger brother, Jake, was on a fishing trip, he’d have to call his older brother to pick him up.

      No. He didn’t want to see the pity in Matt’s eyes, nor the unstated disappointment that would quickly follow. Getting drunk wasn’t something they did in the Beauchamp family. Hell, naw. Praying was what they did in the Beauchamp family.

      But that hadn’t gotten him anywhere, either.

      Goddamn it.

      Nothing took away the damaged part of himself, nothing healed the open sore, erased the knowledge he hadn’t been there when she died...hadn’t even had a chance to try and save her. How could God let that happen to Rebecca, the sweetest, most wonderful person in all of Magnolia Bend? Hell, in all of St. James Parish. Why her and not someone else?

      Why not him?

      John tilted his head back and punched the dashboard. “Ow.”

      He shook his hand out and sank back onto the worn leather, the world tilting crazily. He needed to buy a new truck. This one reflected who he was—dinted, dinged and worn out. He had the money, but something stopped him every time. Because he didn’t want to change, didn’t want to move forward.

      And now he’d not only drunk himself sick on the anniversary of that day, but he’d shamed himself with Shelby.

      That had been the bar bunny’s name.

      Shelby.

      She’d had nice straight teeth, a big laugh and sugar in her smile. He’d thought maybe she could make the dull throb go away. Someone named Shelby ought to bring sunshine, but in the hard light of that bathroom, he’d seen the same emotion reflected back in her eyes—sadness.

      “Shit,” he said into the darkness, wiping the moisture from his eyes. He allowed his head to slide from the headrest, and listing sideways, he flopped onto the bench, knocking his old hat to the floorboard. The seat belt jabbed him in his back, but he ignored the discomfort and instead fastened his eyes on the stars twinkling out the window in the deep purple Louisiana sky.

      All his life he believed in heaven. In God. When your daddy’s a pastor, it’s pretty much expected. But for the past year, John had stopped believing in anything except the morning sun and the pale moon. Except the rain that fell straight onto the cracked earth and the tender shoots stretching up from the ground. He’d believed in nothing but what he could see.

      An empty house.

      A made bed.

      A lonely man.

      And then he didn’t care if the tears came. He only cared that he’d loved Rebecca and she was gone.

      Gone like the whiskey he’d just used to numb himself...

      Just plain gone.

       CHAPTER TWO

      Ten and a half weeks later

      THE DUST BOILED up around her rental car making Shelby squint to see the tractor rolling along the rows of tall plants. Sugarcane. That’s the crop John Beauchamp grew on the thirteen-hundred acres owned by the Stanton trust. Or at least that’s what Annie Dufrene had told her when she’d called with the report...and unstated questions.

      But Shelby hadn’t given any answers.

      For one thing, the private investigator was her ex-boyfriend’s sister-in-law. For another, Shelby hadn’t told a soul the reason she had to find John Beauchamp.

      Yeah.

      The gravel road wound through the green fields leading her to a white-columned farmhouse with a wide front porch. The hedges out front needed a good trim and the flower bed had long gone the way of despair. A patch of gravel indicated a parking area, so Shelby rolled to a halt there, sucking in deep breaths of air-conditioning and tried to still her pounding heart.

      You can do this, Shelby. You have to do this. It’s only right and fair.

      With shaking hands, she pulled down the visor and looked at herself in the mirror. She looked good. The Louisiana humidity had been chased away by a cold front and so her bouncy blond hair looked like something out of a shampoo ad. She’d applied her makeup with a careful, light hand, and the taupe-and-orange-striped wrap dress emitted a polished vibe. She looked just right to tell a man she’d met only once that she was having his baby.

      Yeah.

      She still couldn’t believe she was pregnant, but the visit to the obstetrician a month ago had confirmed what she’d tried to pretend away when the monthly bill hadn’t arrived. She had no clue how it had happened. Even in the drunken haze, she remembered the condom being tossed into the trash can, the torn package she’d scooped up. Proof she’d been responsible.

      The fact the stick had awarded her with two blue lines had caused her to literally drop to her knees.

      Pregnant.

      She’d immediately lost the lobster she’d