has one of him with Reba,” Reggie put in with some excitement. “He did a feature piece on her for Parade Magazine.”
Reggie had every one of Reba McEntire’s albums. She suddenly grabbed up a pen to hold in front of her mouth like a microphone and began singing one of Reba’s songs. This was something she often did, pretending either to be a singer or a television commentator. Reggie was every bit pretty enough to be either; however, she could take clowning and showing off to the point of annoyance, as far as Marilee was concerned. Right then was one of those points, and Marilee felt her temper grow short as Reggie kept jutting her face in front of Marilee’s and singing about poor old Fancy.
“Reggie, would you keep an eye on Corrine and Willie Lee for me?” she said, thus diverting the woman to more quiet childishness, while Marilee went to their publisher’s solid oak door and knocked.
The sound of hammering drowned out her knock, and she had to try again, and when still no answer came, she poked her head in the door. “Mr. Holloway?” She was unable to address him as Tate, being at the office.
He turned from where he was hanging a picture. “Marilee! Come in…come in. Just the person I’ve been waitin’ for. You can come over here and help me get this picture in the right place.”
It was a picture of him with Billy Graham, black-and-white, as all the photographs appeared to be. He placed it against the wall and waited for her instructions, which she gave in the form of, “Higher…a little to the left…a little lower. Right there.”
Having, apparently, a high opinion of her ability to place a picture, he marked the spot and went to hammering in a nail.
In a flowing glance, Marilee, wondering how an accomplished journalist of Tate Holloway’s wide experience would manage in tiny Valentine, took in the room. The sedate, even antiquated office that had belonged to Ms. Porter was gone. Or perhaps a more accurate description was that it was being moved out, as pictures and books and boxes full of articles, a number of them antiques, were in a cluster by the door. Next to that, in a large heap, lay the heavy evergreen drapes, which had been ripped from the long windows, leaving only the wooden blinds through which bright light shone on the varied electronic additions: a small television, a radio scanner, a top speed computer and printer, a laptop computer, and one apparatus that Marilee, definitely behind the electronic times, could not identify.
The major change, however, was to the big walnut desk, which had been moved from where it had sat for eons in front of the windows, facing the wall with E. G. Porter’s portrait. Marilee had always had the impression that Ms. Porter would sit at the desk and look at her father on the wall and worship him. Or maybe throw mental darts at him.
Now the desk sat in front of that wall, looking away from it, and behind, where E.G.’s august portrait had hung, was an enormous black-and-white photograph of Marilyn Monroe in the famous shot with her dress blowing up.
After eyeing that for a startled moment, Marilee’s gaze moved on to the clusters of photographs already hung—the ones of Tate Holloway with Reba and President Nixon, and ones of him receiving awards, and with soldiers, and a curious one of a boy plowing with a mule. She stepped closer for a better look at that one. Next to the faded snapshot of the boy and the mule was one of a lovely blond woman in the front yard of an old house, her arms around two boys.
“That’s my mother,” Tate told her, coming up behind her. “With me and my brother, Hollis. I’m the older, skinnier one.”
“And that’s you, plowing with a mule?”
“Yep. Farmin’ in East Texas in the fifties. My mother took that picture. Mama liked to take pictures.”
He had come to stand very close behind her. Close enough for his breath to tickle her hair.
“This is Mama in front of the house me and Hollis bought her.” His arm brushed her shoulder as he pointed at another photograph. “And this is how my daddy wound up.”
He tapped a photograph of a mangled black car stuck to the front end of a Santa Fe Railroad engine.
“I like to see where I’ve come from and how far I’ve journeyed and remind myself where I don’t want to go,” he said with practicality. Then, the next second, “You smell awfully good, Miss Marilee.”
That comment jerked her mind away from the horror of the mangled car. She turned, and her shoulder bumped his chest, because he didn’t move but stood there gazing at her with a light in his clear, twinkling blue eyes that just about took every faithful breath out of her lungs.
His gaze flickered downward, and hers followed to stop and linger on his lips.
The next instant she stepped quickly away from him and said as casually as possible, “And just what does that picture mean in your journey?” She gestured at the photograph of Marilyn Monroe.
“Well—” he sauntered to the desk and laid down the hammer “—I like the touch Marilyn gives the place.”
“What touch are you going for, exactly?”
“Oh…I think a photograph like that sets people off balance, for one thing.” He folded his arms, and his strong shoulders stretched his shirt. “And it is lively. I might come in here feelin’ a little too serious about myself and things in general, and I’ll look up there at that beautiful woman—” he looked up at the picture and grinned “—with a laugh like that and those legs goin’ to heaven, and it makes me remember the true secret of life.” He gave a little wink.
Marilee took that in and took hold of the solid walnut back of the visitor chair, feeling the need to have the chair between herself and Tate Holloway.
She looked at him, and he looked at her in the manner of a man who was intent on having what he wanted. It was both flattering and unsettling.
Breaking the gaze, she said, “I need to discuss my job here.”
His eyebrows went up, “Well, you go ahead, Miss Marilee…as long as you aren’t about to tell me you’re gonna quit.”
Marilee reacted to this with a mixture of gratification and annoyance. There was something very commanding in the way he spoke, as if he would not allow her to quit.
“Do you want a raise?” he asked before she could speak. “I can spare twenty more a week—okay…I’ll go to thirty.”
“I don’t want a raise…but I’ll take it.”
“I won’t force it on you, if you don’t want it.”
“I want it. I only meant that a raise wasn’t what I was going to discuss, but now that you’ve offered, I will take it.”
“Well, since it isn’t a question of a raise, there’s no sense in talkin’ about it.”
“But we are talking about it now, and I’ll take it. My workload has greatly increased since Harlan and Jewel left.”
“Okay, twenty dollars a week it is.”
“You said thirty.”
He cocked his head to the side and regarded her. “What was it you wanted to discuss about your job, Miss Marilee?”
Keeping her hands pressed
