Ain't She Sweet? Read Online Free PDF Page A

once looked gaunt now seemed patrician.
    Sugar Beth knew the smell of money, and it clung to him like smoke. When she’d last seen him, his hair had fallen to his shoulders. Now it was just as thick, but cut in a movie star’s short, dramatic rumple. Whether an expensive salon product or good health had produced its dark sheen was hard to tell, but one thing was certain. He hadn’t gotten a haircut like that in Parrish, Mississippi.
    He wore a ribbed turtleneck with Armani written all over it and black wool trousers that had a thin gold pinstripe. Not only had Ichabod Crane grown up, but he’d also gone to grooming school, then bought out the place and turned it into an international franchise.
    She hardly ever had to look up at any man, especially not when she was wearing dominatrix heels, but she was looking up now. Into the same haughty jade eyes she remembered. All her old resentment came rushing back. “Nobody told me you were here.”
    “Indeed? How amusing.” He hadn’t lost his British accent, although she knew accents could be manipulated. Her own, for example, could go North or South, depending on circumstances. “Do come in.” He stepped back and invited her into her own home.
    She wanted to give him the finger and tell him to go to hell. But running was another of life’s luxuries she could no longer afford, right along with throwing hissy fits and maxing out her credit cards. The contempt that tightened the corners of his thin lips told her he understood exactly how much his invitation stung. Knowing he expected her to stomp off gave her the determination to set her shoulders and step over the threshold . . . into Frenchman’s Bride.
    He’d ruined it. She saw that right away. Another beautiful Southern home ravished by a foreign marauder.
    The rounded shape of the entrance hall and its sweeping curl of staircase remained the same, but he’d destroyed Diddie’s romantic pastels by painting the curved walls a dark espresso brown and the old oak moldings chalk white. A jarring abstract hung in place of the painting that had once dominated the space, which had been a life-size portrait of herself at age five, exquisitely dressed in white lace and pink ribbons as she curled at her beautiful mother’s fashionably shod feet. Diddie had insisted the artist add a white toy poodle to the painting, even though they didn’t have a poodle, or any dog, despite Sugar Beth’s pleas. But her mother said she wouldn’t have anything in the house that licked its private parts, or licked anybody else’s for that matter.
    White marble inset with bands of taupe had replaced the worn hardwood floors. The antique chests were gone, along with a gilded Marie Antoinette mirror and a pair of gold brocade chairs. Now, a gleaming black baby grand piano dominated the space. A baby grand in the entrance hall of Frenchman’s Bride . . . Sugar Beth’s grandmother with her avant-garde tastes might have enjoyed the oddity, but Diddie was surely doing belly flips in her grave.
    “My, my . . .” Sugar Beth’s accent headed deeper south, the way it did when she’d been put at a disadvantage. “And haven’t you just put your own stamp on things?”
    “I do what amuses me.” He regarded her with the arrogance of a nobleman forced to speak to the scullery maid, but she deserved his hostility, and no matter how much he still raised her hackles, it was time to face the music. Long past time.
    “I wrote you a letter of apology,” she said.
    “Did you now?” He couldn’t have looked more disinterested.
    “It came back. Return to sender.”
    “You don’t say.”
    He intended to keep her cooling her heels in the entrance hall. She didn’t deserve any better, but she wouldn’t grovel, so she struck a compromise between what she owed him and what she owed herself. “Too little, too late, I realize that. But what the hell?
    Repentance is repentance.”
    “I wouldn’t know. I don’t have much to repent.”
    “Then pay