Free Chesapeake Tide by Jeanette Baker Page A

their French ancestors were a common-enough sight in Marshyhope Creek. But when Libba smiled, that was something else entirely. There wasn’t a man, woman or child whose breathing didn’t alter for a good minute or two while staring into that vibrant face, wondering what it was about her that held the casual observer spellbound. Taken individually, her features were pleasant enough to spark a passing interest, but not so unusual as to inspire that liquid, bone-weakening jolt of awareness that comes only occasionally in a lifetime to the very few and the very lucky.
    Russ had always known that no one but Libba could bring the glory of that wild, fire-leaping heat to his blood. No one since had come close to touching his heart. There was a time when he was sure she felt the same. Hell, he would have staked his life on it, poor judge of character that he was. And yet, two months after he’d left for college, after she’d promised to love him forever, Libba Delacourte had run off with a passing stranger.
    He was over it, of course, over her, over the anger and the hurt, even over the desire for retribution. If he stretched it a bit, he could even find it in his heart to be grateful to her. If it weren’t for Libby’s defection, he would never have joined the army, never seen the world, never broadened his horizons, so to speak. He wouldn’t have Tess because he wouldn’t have married Tracy. He wouldn’t have wasted years of his life in a disastrous marriage. Maybe he was being too charitable. Maybe Libba Jane did have something coming to her after all.

Six
    C hloe stared at the ceiling of her bedroom, unwilling to expend the energy necessary for a morning stretch. She’d been awake for nearly twenty minutes. It was still not even eight o’clock in the morning and it was already hot. Her grandmother had a cardinal rule for running the air conditioner. Don’t, unless the thermometer read one hundred degrees in the shade. For the first time in her life, Chloe understood the meaning of the word hot. She’d used the term before, even believed she’d meant it before, but she hadn’t really. Hot had nothing to do with California, not even in September when the temperature rose to the mid-nineties in the Valley. Given what she now knew, she would define what she’d previously known at home in Ventura County as comfortably warm. Hot had nothing to do with the gentle, temperate rays of a California sun. Hot was something completely different. Hot meant this place where she had been banished. Hot meant Marshyhope Creek and the mind-drugging, steam-bath, mosquito-biting heat of a Maryland summer.
    Nothing helped, not the four tepid showers she’d taken every day for the three days she’d been here, not the inadequate air conditioner that never quite made it to her second-story bedroom, not the fans humming in every corner of the house, not even the ice cubes melting on her chest. The heat slowed her body. Her movements were slothlike, her mind scrambled. She had no appetite. She couldn’t sleep. She hated this place and everyone in it, with two exceptions, her grandfather and Serena.
    After finally dragging herself out of bed, she headed down to breakfast. While serving the meal, Serena came up with the suggestion that Chloe be sent to the hardware store in town to purchase two molleys to fit over the screws to be drilled into the lathe-and-plaster walls of her grandmother’s sitting room, their purpose to hold pictures of Chloe as a baby. Her mother had brought them from home and Nola Ruth wanted them hung immediately. No one had objected to the errand and no one had volunteered to drive her. The last place on earth Chloe wanted to be was in a hardware store in a hick town in the middle of nowhere. But she said nothing. Rules were different here in Marshyhope Creek. At home she would have complained and wheedled her mother for a ride. Here, the thought had