The Bourbon Thief(82)

Levi had his hands on her shoulders, steadying her. He looked into her face and nodded.

“What about Charleston?” she asked.

“What about Charleston?”

“We could live there. We could sell, I don’t know, half the island’s acres to the timber company. We’d have plenty of money then without going back. We could move to Charleston and be together there like we were that week. Couldn’t we?”

Charleston. They’d gone there a week after Tamara recovered from her two nights’ stay in the forest. He told her she deserved a real honeymoon, and Tamara knew he wanted to take her mind off their fight, off her anger at her mother. He wanted a fresh start for them, so he’d blown what was left in his savings to get them four nights at an old house turned inn—supposedly haunted like every other house in Charleston. They wore their best clothes and ate at fine restaurants, took a carriage ride around town, toured old houses and sat outside their fancy room on their fancy balcony drinking wine and tea. And at night they could hardly sleep in their antique King Louis bed on their silk sheets for how much they wanted each other. The last night there they’d spotted a shelf cloud in the blackening sky, and sure enough a storm hit so hard the whole town lost power. The innkeeper gave them an oil lamp to light their room, and with thunder and lightning and rain pounding the walls and the roof, she and Levi had done things to each other that she could hardly think about now without losing her mind. She’d said words to him she hadn’t known were in her vocabulary, and he’d done things to her she hadn’t realized people did to each other. She’d spent half the night with her face in the pillow trying to stifle her own moans and screams as Levi turned her inside out. The next morning she’d woken up raw and sore and covered with enough love bites she could have passed for a spotted jaguar. When she chided Levi for making her walk funny, he disavowed all knowledge and insisted that if she’d been violated and sodomized the night before, it must have been the ghost of the inn who had done it because he’d slept all night long like a baby in a cradle. Tamara had said if it was the ghost of the inn who’d done all that to her, she’d be extending her stay.

They’d learned things about each other that night.

And Tamara had learned something about herself. Every time they’d stepped foot in their fancy inn, the desk clerk or the porter would say, “Mornin’, Mrs. Shelby,” or “Evenin’, Mr. Shelby, Mrs. Shelby.” She’d been Mrs. Shelby-ed half to death those four days by those fine old-world Southerners with their fine old-world Southern manners. All day every day it was “Good weather we’re having today, aren’t we, Mrs. Shelby?” and then a tip of the hat and “Mrs. Shelby, don’t you dare pick up that suitcase, it is twice your size. You let Mr. Shelby handle it or wait for the porter.”

Mrs. Shelby. It had sounded funny the first ten times these strangers said it to her, not so funny the next ten. By the end of their trip, Tamara Maddox was long gone, never to be seen again. She was nobody if she wasn’t Mrs. Shelby. And Mrs. Shelby wanted to stay Mrs. Shelby. She wasn’t going to be a pretend wife biding her time until she had all the family money and she could run off to Majorca or Rome. She wanted to be a real wife to him for the rest of her life.

“Tamara?”

She looked up at him.

“I just... I don’t want to lose you. I finally feel like we’re really married. Not, you know, just doing this for the money.”

Tamara leaned into him and Levi put his arms around her.

“You’re not going to lose me just because we go back home a couple weeks. Your mother’s not God. She’s a mean woman, and trust me, I know how to handle mean women by now.”

“You won’t let Momma do something to us?” Tamara asked. “I know she’ll try to get between us.”

“You think I’d side with a woman who sicced the cops on me?”

“No. But I’m still scared.”

“I know.” Levi sighed and her head moved over his chest. “I can’t say I’m excited about laying off all the Red Thread workers and dealing with that mess. But we’ll just do it. We’ll rip off the Band-Aid and get it done fast as we can so we can come back here and start our life up again. Then we’ll have all the money we need. We can buy a house in Beaufort. We can turn the island into a park. Or maybe just keep it for ourselves. And Bowen will be real happy to make all wine barrels instead of bourbon barrels. He says they’re more fun because they’re harder to make and you get to talk on the phone to French people all the time. He swears there’s a vintner in France who’s in love with him and he’s ready to go there to find out.”

Tamara laughed and wrapped her arms around Levi’s waist.

“See?” Levi said. “I’ve got all the good ideas. Just don’t worry so much. Your mother can’t hurt us if we don’t let her.”

“I want to believe that.” She linked her hands at the small of his back and squeezed him close. She wanted to tell Levi how much she loved him and how much she needed him, but he knew all that, and telling him again wouldn’t make it any more real. But times like this she felt like they were born to be together, and if they couldn’t be together, she would die.

“Whatever comes our way now, we’ll find a way to carry it. We’re married. We’re family. We’re in this together. Right?”