Read BlackWind for Free Online

than words ever could have. He ground against her and, at her gasp of shocked breath, grinned brutally.
    “Aye,” she said on a breathless note. “T'would be my pleasure to have you escort me, Milord.”
    He stepped back. “Then it's settled.”
    “Did I have a choice?” she muttered, looking around to see if anyone had been a witness to her capitulation.
    “No,” he answered and started walking backward. “See you next Tuesday?”
    “Of course.” She laughed.
    He gave her the deaf language sign that had become their special goodbye, winked, and headed toward the bicycle he had chained to an oak. She sighed as she watched him throw a long leg over the seat. The muscles against his light green T-shirt rippled and her eyes fell of their own accord to his tight derrière in the torn, faded jeans.
    “Hey, aren't you going the wrong way?” she yelled.
    He looked back. “Going to Aunt Lou-Lou's!” He stood on the pedals and pumped hard, the bike cantering from side to side as it sped beneath his powerful legs.
    She laughed again, shaking her head. “I should have known,”
    Sean had one addiction and that addiction was hot boiled peanuts. The best place in town to get them was at a roadside stand run by a cheerful black lady named Lou-Lou Rainey. Packed in little brown bags wet from the salty water, the green peanuts were Sean's favorite treat. To Bronwyn, his militant craving for the peanuts was an endearing trait.
    To Sean, they were nectar from the gods.
    * * * *
    Deirdre McGregor looked up from the kitchen sink when she heard the car door slam under the carport. She stared out the window, not seeing the lush lawn Dermot had spent thousands of dollars to landscape earlier that spring. She did not see the pretty white latticework gazebo or the glider and Adirondack chairs that formed a quaint seating arrangement on the old brick-paved patio. “Is that you, Bronwyn?” she called as the door to the mudroom opened.
    “Yes, Ma'am.”
    Girding herself for the talk she had been instructed to give her daughter, Deirdre pushed away from the sink and took a seat at the breakfast table. “I'd like a word with you, dear,” she said as her daughter entered.
    “Wanna drink?” Bronnie asked as she made a beeline to the fridge. When Deirdre didn't answer, she turned with a cola bottle in her hand, wobbling it from side to side. “Mama? You wanna drink?”
    “No thank you, sweetheart.”
    Bronnie shrugged, fumbled in the catchall drawer for the bottle opener, popped the cap, then tossed the opener back in the drawer. “I don't see why Daddy won't let us buy drinks in the can.”
    “'They don't taste the same,'” Deirdre quoted her husband.
    “I can't tell the difference,” Bronnie said. She looked at Deirdre, who was sitting with her hands clasped tightly together. “Is something wrong?”
    “Sit down. We need to talk.”
    “Okay. What's up?”
    Deirdre closed her eyes for a moment, then squared her shoulders. “Bronwyn, your father and I have come to a decision. We know it isn't going to set well with you, but under the circumstances, you have given us no alternative.”
    “Alternative to what, Mama?” Bronnie asked.
    “We know you have been seeing the Cullen boy. We—”
    “You've never forbidden me to see Sean.”
    “Not in so many words, but you are perfectly aware of how we feel about him.”
    “You don't know him,” Bronnie reminded her.
    Deirdre threw out a negligent hand. “That is beside the point. We know about his parents and—”
    “His parents have nothing to do with the kind of man Sean Cullen is, Mother!”
    “Bronwyn,” Deirdre said, annoyance rife in her tone, “he is not of your class.”
    Bronnie sat back in her chair, her face hard. “You mean he isn't a doctor's son or the grandson of a state senator, don't you, Mama?”
    “The boy failed his senior year of high school! What does that tell you about his ambition? He comes from a very unacceptable class of people. I mean—look