Carolina Moon

had other times when in secret he’d watched Tory. Hope and Tory. Tory and Hope.
    Where it all began, he thought again. Where it would end.
    A shudder ran through her, a chilly finger from nape to the base of her spine. Even as Tory glanced uneasily over her shoulder, she dismissed it as a product of the atmosphere and her own thoughts.
    After all, she was trespassing here, an intruder among the dead and beloved. The light was going, fat gray clouds rolling in from the east to smother the sun. There would be a farmer’s rain that night.
    She wouldn’t linger much longer.
    “I’m so sorry I didn’t come that night. I should have, even after the beating. He’d never have considered that I would defy him and leave the house. No one would have checked on me. I could never explain to you back then what it was like when he took his belt to me. The way every lash stripped away my courage, stripped away my self, until there was nothing left but fear and humiliation. If I’d found the courage and gone out the window that night, I might have saved us both. I’ll never know.”
    Birds were singing, trills and chorus. It was a bright, insistent sound that should have been out of place, and was instead perfect. Birds, the hum of bees going lazy in the roses, and the strong, living scent of the roses themselves.
    Overhead the sky was brooding, turgid with the storm clouds pushed by the wind that stayed high, too high to cool the air where she knelt.
    When she breathed it was like breathing in water. It felt like drowning.
    She lifted the globe again, and sent the silver stars shimmering.
    “But I’m back. For whatever it’s worth, I’m back. And I’ll do whatever I can to make it up. I never told you what you meant to me, how just by being my friend you opened up something inside me, and how when I lost you, I let it close again. For too long. I’m going to try to unlock it, to be what I was when you were here.”
    She glanced back again toward the screen of trees and the towers of Beaux Reves that rose behind them. Could they see her from there, in the stone tower? Was someone standing, closed behind the glass, and watching?
    It felt that way, as if eyes and mind and heart shut behind glass watched. Waited.
    Let them watch, she thought. Let them wait. She looked back at the angel, looked down at the stone. “They never found him. The man who did this to you. If I can, I will.”
    She turned the globe, then lay it under the angel so the horse could fly and the stars sparkle. And leaving it there, she walked away.
    The rain was coming down strong and cool when Cade swung away from town and took the road toward home. It was a good rain, a soaker that wouldn’t pound the young crops. If his luck was in, the rain would last most of the night, and leave the fields wet and satisfied.
    He wanted to get samples of the soil from several of his fields and compare the success of his various cover crops. He’d put in fava beans the year before, as they added the nitrogen his cotton was so greedy for.
    He’d test it the next day, after the rain, then compare and study the last four years of charts. The fava bean crop had done reasonably well, but it hadn’t produced a solid profit. If he was going to try them again, he had to be able to justify it.
    To himself, Cade thought. No one else paid attention to his charts. Even Piney, who could usually be depended on to at least pretend an interest, had glazed over when presented with the graphics.
    Didn’t matter, Cade decided. No one had to understand them but himself.
    And if he was honest, he’d admit that he wasn’t all that interested in them at the moment, either. He was using them to keep his mind off Tory, and what had happened the night before.
    So it was best to deal with her, with all of it. To clear the decks before he went home and washed off the day’s work.
    Cade’s brows drew together as the red Mustang convertible he’d been following took the turn into Tory’s lane. He swung in behind it, and those brows arched up as J.R. climbed out.
    “Well, what do you think?” Grinning ear to ear, J.R. patted the bright fender as Cade walked over.
    “Yours?”
    “Just picked her up this morning. Boots says I’m going through a midlife crisis. Woman watches too many talk shows, if you ask me. I say if it feels good and you can afford it, what’s wrong with that?”
    “She’s a beauty, all right.” With the rain streaming down, both men walked to the hood so