Chapter 1

      The bleak winter landscape was as depressing to Ivy as the past few months had been, but she felt a sense of excitement as she watched the long country road. Ryder was on his way. Guilt wrenched her heart as she gave in to the need to see him, to listen to him, to love him. She’d always loved Ryder, even as she feared him. It was her secret passion for Ryder that had sent her running scared into a tragic marriage that had ended six months ago in the death of her husband. This would be the first time she’d seen Ryder since the funeral, and she was torn between delight and shame.

      She’d lost weight, but that only made her more attractive. She was tall and willowy, with long black hair that waved around her shoulders, and a complexion like fresh cream. Her eyes were as black as coal—a legacy from her French grandmother—framed by lashes that were thick and long and seductive. Ryder always said that she looked like a painting he had in his living room—an interpretation of the poem “The Highwayman,” depicting Bess with her long black hair. But Ryder was fanciful at times.

      Ryder had been at the funeral, down in Clay County, Georgia, near the banks of the wide Chattahoochee River, a good half hour’s drive from Ivy’s home in southwest Georgia. They’d buried Ben in the cemetery of the little Baptist church he’d attended as a child, under a canopy of huge live oak trees dripping with gray Spanish moss. Ivy had stayed close beside her mother, trying to ignore the tall, commanding presence across from her. Ryder had been at the house as well, and she’d had to pretend not to notice him, to pretend grief for a man who had made her life a living hell.

      Ryder couldn’t know that his very presence had been like a knife in her heart, reminding her brutally that her secret love for him might actually have led to Ben’s death. It had hurt Ben that Ivy couldn’t respond to him in bed, and because of that, he drank. The accident that killed him had resulted from one drink too many, and Ivy felt responsible for it.

      She thought back to her teenage years, when Ryder had been the whole world and she’d worshiped him. He’d never guessed how she felt. That had been a blessing. She smiled, remembering the tenderness he seemed to reserve especially for her. He wasn’t the world’s most lovable man; he had a quick, biting temper, but Ivy had never seen it.

      “That’s the first time I’ve seen you smile in weeks,” Jean McKenzie observed dryly, staring at her daughter from the hall. “It does improve your looks, darling.”

      “I know I’m a misery,” Ivy confessed. She went over and hugged her mother, ruffling the thick salt-and-pepper hair that framed eyes as dark as her own. “But you’re a doll, so don’t we make the perfect pair?”

      “Ha!” Jean scoffed. “Pair, my eye. The very last thing you need is to stay here for the rest of your life.” Her voice softened a little, and she frowned at the faint panic in her daughter’s eyes. “Listen, baby, it’s been almost six months. You have to start looking ahead. You need a change. A job. A new direction. Ben wouldn’t want this,” she added meaningfully.

      Ivy sighed and moved away from the older woman. “Yes, I know. It’s getting easier, as time goes by.”

      “I know that, too. I lost your father when you were only a toddler,” Jean reminded her. “In a way, I’m sorry you and Ben couldn’t have had a child. It would have made things easier for you, I think. It did for me.”

      “Yes. It was a shame,” Ivy murmured, but without really agreeing. A child would have been a disaster. At first, Ben had been a good friend, but he’d never been a good lover. He’d been always in a hurry, impatient and finally harsh because Ivy couldn’t feel the passion for him that he felt for her. She’d cheated him by marrying him, and it was guilt more than any other emotion that had haunted her since his death. She’d never felt passion. She wondered sometimes during the last miserable weeks of her marriage if she was even capable of it. She’d promised Ben that she’d go to a therapist, although she couldn’t imagine what one would find. Her childhood had been uneventful, but happy. There were no emotional scars. She simply didn’t want Ben physically, because she belonged, heart and soul, to another man—a man who’d always thought of her as his sister’s best friend and nothing more. And what could any psychologist have done about that?

      Money had been another ever-pressing problem. Ben had spent money recklessly when he was drunk, and when she’d insisted on going to work herself, to help out, there had been terrible arguments. Finally she’d given up trying to offer her help and reconciled herself to living in poverty. The months had gone into years, and Ivy eventually withdrew completely into herself and avoided contact with everyone, especially Ryder. That had been necessary because of Ben’s rage at seeing her speaking to him once at her mother’s. That had been, she remembered, shivering, the first time he’d struck her.

      A month shy of her twenty-fourth birthday, a piece of heavy equipment had fallen on him. A freak accident, they’d called it, but only to spare her feelings. She knew he’d been drunk when he’d gone to work. He’d handled the equipment haphazardly and paid the ultimate price. Just the morning of his death, he’d raged at her about Ryder again. He’d accused her of being unfaithful to him in her mind, of making his life hell. The words had haunted her ever since.

      She and her mother were churchgoing people, and it was that bedrock of faith that had helped Ivy get through the agony of guilt that had followed the funeral. It was all that kept her going even now.

      “When did Ryder call?” Ivy asked suddenly.

      “About an hour ago,” Jean said, yawning, because it was early and she’d had only one cup of coffee. It took her at least two to wake up, so she dragged back to the coffeepot and filled a cup for Ivy as well.

      “Will he stay long?” she asked, her eyes haunted.

      “Now, who knows what Ryder