Home At Last Chance (Last Chance #2)(16)
Author: Hope Ramsay

She handed Tulane a water bottle, which he opened and crushed in several long swallows, and then he turned back to the line of autograph seekers. He could be incredibly charming when he wanted to be. She had never seen him treat a race fan—especially a young fan—with anything other than the utmost respect and courtesy.

She didn’t bother him with her concerns about the man in the cowboy hat. Instead, she leaned over to the security guard standing beside Tulane. She pointed to the man, who leaned against the store’s cinderblock façade with one foot cocked, in cowboy fashion. “I wonder if you could check that guy out. He’s got trouble written all over him. Says he knows Tulane and wants to talk with him, but you know how some of these guys are, ready to pick a fight.”

The guard, a paunchy man with receding hair and bad teeth, assessed the situation and then pulled a walkie-talkie out of his belt. He started talking loudly and officiously in true Barney Fife fashion. Everyone could hear what he was saying, including the fans. Goodness, the man was a moron.

The last three ladies in line let their gazes wander nervously in the direction of the store. Tulane looked up, too. The man standing in the shade tipped his hat again. Tulane’s shoulders tensed, but he didn’t say anything that might alarm the fans. He simply smiled up at the ladies and quickly finished signing the last few autographs.

When he was finished, Tulane pushed up from the table and turned toward Barney, the security guard. “Call off your dogs. The man over there is my older brother.”

Sarah’s stomach dropped to her ankles as Tulane gave her one of his annoyed eye rolls. “Sarah, this ain’t New York, you know. We don’t have drive-by shootings out here in the boonies, unless it’s pheasant season. Next time, ask before you call out the cavalry. That’s Clay, the brother you didn’t meet before.”

He shook his head in disgust, then turned and sauntered in Clay’s direction. Now she realized why the cowboy had seemed so familiar and perhaps so dangerous. Clay was bigger than Tulane. But like his other brothers, Clay had the same build, the same walk, and the same deep, soulful Southern drawl. And his eyes were very much like Elbert’s—the palest shade of gray.

“Uncle Pete’s dead,” Clay said in a low voice. “He collapsed this morning. Momma sent me to come get you. The funeral’s going to be on Saturday. Aunt Arlene and Momma pushed it up so you could attend.”

Tulane and Clay stood in a little scrap of shade cast by the Value Mart. It was hotter than hell out there, but suddenly Tulane felt icy to the point of numbness. He needed to get out of this heat. He needed to go someplace private so he wouldn’t make an a-hole out of himself right there in public.

Pete was dead.

“Shit.” Tulane stared up at the blue Carolina sky searching for something that he couldn’t even name. His eyes started to water up. Sarah was standing right there, eavesdropping like she always did. He really didn’t want that woman to see him cry like some kind of sissy. That would be the height of humiliation.

“Tulane,” Clay said and took him by the shoulder—a steady, familiar, brotherly touch. It didn’t make the ache in his heart go away. “Momma’s at home waiting on you. She’s pretty upset, and—” Clay’s voice pinched. Pete was Momma’s only brother, and Pete had been a surrogate father for Clay as well. Pete had been everything Daddy was not.

Tulane studied his brother’s pale eyes, stained at the moment with a goodly amount of red. Clay had done some crying recently, by the looks of things.

“Crap. I’ve got all these arrangements made for me. I’m supposed to race in the truck race on Friday and—”

“I can fix everything,” Sarah said, pulling her BlackBerry out of her pocket. “Let me get on it.”

Bless her heart, the woman understood. She had that phone attached to her ear inside of five seconds. She started talking a mile a minute, just like a little Yankee, and something inside his chest eased a bit.

It sure was impressive the way Sarah could manage things, and Tulane felt a surge of gratitude toward her, not only for doing the arranging for him, but because she understood why going home was important.

He was suddenly mighty glad she was there, even if she was getting a bird’s-eye view of the unwanted tears in his eyes.

One minute Sarah was standing on the blacktop at the Value Mart, and the next moment she found herself in the back seat of Clay Rhodes’s minivan, sandwiched between a fiddle and a guitar case. Despite the soccer-mom qualities of the well-used Windstar, Clay Rhodes drove that thing like he was the stock car driver and not Tulane. He headed north at a speed that didn’t faze Tulane, but had Sarah hanging on to the strap handle above the back door with her right hand and her BlackBerry with her left.

She faced her fear and discovered a talent for working her smartphone one-handed. She got Tulane out of all the races he was scheduled to run on both Friday and Saturday, as well as the hospitality tent appearances for National Brands and a number of his smaller sponsors. She even fixed it with Jim Ferguson so that a private jet would be waiting for Tulane Saturday night at the Allenberg Municipal Airport to take him directly to Charlotte, where the weekend’s racing events were taking place. A replacement driver would qualify the No. 57 Ford on Saturday. Tulane would still race Sunday afternoon.

It wasn’t until the green watermelon stripes of Last Chance’s water tower came into view that it occurred to Sarah that she should have gotten into the limo at the Charleston Value Mart and headed back to Florence, instead of riding in the back seat all the way to Last Chance.

Of course, she had gone into crisis mode the moment she had realized the situation, and Tulane had kept her preoccupied for most of the ride as he issued directives to her like the celebrity he was supposed to be. She had handled the crisis beautifully, like a real experienced advance person, and not the virgin she had been a few weeks ago.

Except that she had advanced herself to Last Chance, South Carolina—a place with one stoplight and not much more. She had no luggage, no car, and her BlackBerry’s battery was just about dead.

She wondered if there was somewhere nearby where she could rent a car. It was a good two-hour drive back to Florence.

Clay pulled the van to the curb a half block down the street from Ruby and Elbert’s house. Tulane and Clay got out of the van and started striding up the sidewalk, both of them tense through the shoulders, both bearing that hollow-cheeked appearance men get when they grieve and don’t want to break down and show it.

Neither of them paid any attention to her as she hopped down from the back and struggled with the slightly sticky sliding door of the old Windstar. Her dying phone rang as she hurried after the big men, who were eating up the distance between the van and the house on their long, good-ol’-boy legs.

She checked the display—Deidre Montgomery.

Oh great, just what she needed. Last Chance might be in the middle of nowhere, but unfortunately it still had cell phone service.

She accepted the call. “Hello, Deidre.”

“I heard about the death in Tulane’s family. Are you still with him?”

Sarah should have known that Deidre would hear about today’s events sooner rather than later.

“Uh, yeah, I’m here.”

“Here, where?”

“In Last Chance, South Carolina.”

“Where?”

“Last Chance. It’s Tulane’s hometown.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Deidre said.

“No, that’s the name of the town.”

“How quaint,” Deidre said in her snide New York tone.

Sarah didn’t bother to explain that Last Chance was not even remotely quaint. Quirky was a much better adjective. “Yes, it’s very quaint. It has a water tower painted to resemble a watermelon,” she said.

Deidre sniggered. “Nice work, kid. Now, I want you to stick to Tulane like superglue the next couple of days. Just tell him National Brands is making you available 24/7 to handle anything he needs in his hour of grief. There’s a hotel there, right?”

Sarah didn’t want to explain that the only lodging nearby was a place called the Peach Blossom Motor Court, which, if Mrs. Randall was to be believed, sold rooms only by the hour.

“Uh, yeah,” she said. “There’s a hotel.”

“Good. I want you to put on that Boston charm and worm your way into his whole family scene. You know the drill, help them brew coffee and bake cookies and that sort of thing. And you can use the National Brands expense account to purchase catering or whatever for the funeral. It’s on us…” She paused dramatically. “And I want a full report on Monday. And don’t think I won’t notice if you don’t send a report. I asked you for a full rundown on Tulane three weeks ago. I’m still waiting.”

“About that, Deidre, I—”

“It’s fine, Sarah; with the current marketing plan in place, we don’t need to find a replacement until next year.”

“A replacement?”

“Well, that will depend entirely on the report you file on Monday, won’t it?”

“A report on what?”

“On everything. His parents, his siblings. I want to know who we’re dealing with. If he’s going to be a spokesperson for car seat safety, he’s got to be squeaky clean, you understand? I figure a funeral is just the sort of time when the family shit is liable to hit the fan. You know what I mean?”

Heat crawled up Sarah’s face, but maybe it wasn’t because of Deidre’s casual profanity. The woman was a witch. She wanted Sarah to spy on Tulane and his family during a funeral? Did the woman have no heart?

“Um, Deidre, there’s been a death in the family, don’t you think—”

“Sarah, grow up. We need to make sure this guy is the right spokesman. And it’s not just National Brands that needs to know all the little details. I’ve been talking with the producers of Racer Rabbit. If we do that deal, Tulane has to be worthy of the endorsement. I’ve been researching possible replacements. Augie Tallon might be available.”

Sarah’s stomach clutched. Deidre had stolen all the ideas she had put into that memo she’d written three weeks ago. National Brands was putting all her ideas into motion, and not a single person had given her any credit.

“Augie Tallon would be an amazing representative for our brand. He’s considerably smoother than Tulane,” Deidre said into Sarah’s ear.

“But—”

“Don’t be a fool, Sarah. If you want to help Tulane, then you need to dig up the entire backstory. Who hates who. All the bad things he did as a kid and a teenager. The girls he knocked up and deserted. You know, all that stuff.”

Sarah had reached Elbert and Ruby’s front yard, trailing after Tulane and Clay by several yards. Fortunately, her phone began to emit a low-battery warning. “Uh, that’s a lot of stuff, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is. But I know you can do it. And Sarah, the way you handle yourself in this could make or break your career. Don’t disappoint me.”