Chapter One

Chapter One

She’d gone to bed with her shoes on, and not by accident. She’d deliberately climbed under the covers fully clothed and pushed her shod feet down between the clean sheets. Because she felt like it. Because she was mad at the world at large and whatever force passed for God in particular. Because it was the kind of thing an icon didn’t do. And Margaret Elizabeth Banning, otherwise known as Miss Li’l Bit, definitely qualified as an icon in her little part of the world. Which just went to show that if you lived long enough, any old damn thing could happen to you. At least it could in a place as lacking in a sense of humor as Charles Valley. Humor and memory. There probably weren’t five people left in town who remembered that in her youth, at six feet tall, with far more nose than chin and a father who was, to put it politely, different, she had been considered a disaster. Then she was the homely-as-a-mud-fence daughter of the local lunatic who couldn’t get herself a man if her life depended on it. Now she was an icon.

“That Miss Li’l Bit,” the locals would say, to visitors who’d come to Charles Valley to soak up its southern charm and visit its world-famous horticultural center, “she’s the real thing—Old South to her toes. She’s a Banning on her daddy’s side. They’ve been here since before the War of Northern Aggression, which is what we like to call it.” Pause to allow the listener to chuckle at adorable southern humor. “She still lives in that big old white house that’s been in the Banning family since her great-granddaddy bought it in eighteen six