Page 1 of Chieftain (The Outlander Book Club… in Space! #1)
Emmy
"King of men"
The sigh escaping Clara's lips belonged to a teenager, not a grandmother. As did the low suggestive chuckle uttered by Willa.
"Ya'll ever wonder exactly how long Jamie Fraser's wang is?" Pearl, the oldest of us at age sixty-six, also possessed the dirtiest mind.
"I don't think it ever tells in the book," Agnes said, frowning as she sidestepped a batch of poison ivy. "I do recall in season one of the TV show—there was this scene…."
"Have mercy!" Daisy's cheeks flashed as red as the clay path we trod. "Can we please stop talking about…penises."
Willa snorted with laughter, as I seemed to recall she always did when the word penis was uttered.
Pearl held a hand up to testify. "All I'm saying is that Sam Heughan is one fine specimen of manhood. The only man on Earth that could play Jamie Fraser."
"Henry Cavill might have done a fine job," Pearl argued, salt and pepper eyebrows waggling. Tall with waist-length gray hair pulled up into a high ponytail, she resembled an aging Amazon and acted like one too.
"Keanu," Agnes sighed. "Keanu would have done a fine job." I wasn't surprised by Agnes' choice. She picked Keanu Reeves to play everyone from Rhett Butler to Mother Teresa.
I bit my tongue to stifle a giggle as the discussion devolved into debating the finest asses in celebrity today. The girls didn't appreciate anyone poking fun at these essential philosophical discussions.
I really loved these nuts!
The Tuesday Night Outlander Book Club. The six of us had been fans of the book series since the late nineties when Daisy caught Agnes substituting a copy of Dragonfly in Amber for a hymnal during church one Sunday.
Since the minister was Daisy's husband, she took it as a personal affront until Agnes loaned her a copy of Outlander, and the rest was history.
That was twenty years, nine books, and one television show ago.
Our after-church book discussions evolved into a weekly dinner where we discussed every syllable of Diana Gabaldon's writing.
Divorces, deaths, and births brought us closer together, and today's hike into the Appalachian mountains was just another of our customary monthly excursions trying to create the world of Outlander in our home state.
Although the north Georgia mountains in springtime were a far cry from the wet chill of Scotland.
The sun was a blazing golden ball emanating considerable heat for early May.
It rained yesterday, and a haze of gray in the distance promised more to come.
The wind tickled the boughs of the surrounding pines, spinning them with a gentle hum.
Birds hustled across the sky, gathering paraphernalia for nest building.
Every so often, the wiggle of long gray ears could be spotted among the grasses.
The trail we strode was ancient, embossed with a carpet of liverworts, like an entrapped army of lichens fleeing the oncoming mountain.
It was Willa's idea to hike the Appalachian approach trail, beginning at Amicalola Falls and ending at Springer Mountain.
It was supposed to be an easy trek—for old farts like us.
Despite being the youngest in the group, after six hours on the trail, my feet hurt, my knees hurt, my ass hurt, and my stomach rumbled hungrily.
Pearl had suggested a spa day. We should have listened to Pearl.
"Emmy, you have to be the tiebreaker," Clara announced.
Her silver-streaked dark hair bobbed about her head when she turned back to look at me.
"Pearl and I think Henry Cavil would have been a good Jamie Fraser.
Willa and Daisy say that guy that used to play Jon Snow.
"She scrunched her nose, glancing at Agnes, who walked at my side.
"Agnes doesn't count. She only ever votes for Keanu. "
I allowed myself a snort. "Liam Neeson," I smirked. He'd also make a damn fine Rhett Butler, although he was much too tall to play Mother Teresa.
"You should know what Emmy would say," Pearl grunted as we started up a slight incline. "She's got a thing for British men."
"I got a thing for Liam Neeson," I confessed with a chuckle.
"Good heavens!" Daisy's face still held the red tint. "Can we talk about something else we sound like… like…."
"A bunch of horny old broads?" Pearl suggested with a cocked brow.
Daisy issued a sound like she expected the gates of hell to open up and swallow us whole in punishment for lusting while the rest of us cackled with laughter.
Her face looked like a bright red balloon underneath the brim of her navy-blue baseball cap, but her brown eyes sparkled.
We'd make a horny old broad out of her, although it might take some doing.
Daisy's husband Gavin died just short of a year ago, and as far as she'd admit, he'd been her one and only.
The minister of the First Methodist Church in Athens, Georgia, he'd died falling asleep at the wheel while driving home late one night after comforting a dying parishioner.
I'd never seen anyone as lost as Daisy in those first few weeks after his death—and I'd seen many women deal with death.
"Emmy's awfully quiet. Betcha she's fanaticizing about book 1, chapter 14 with Liam Neeson. "Agnes gave Pearl a run for her money in the dirty mind category. She was also dating a man nearly twenty years her junior to get back at her husband for dating a woman thirty years his junior.
"I'll take that bet and raise you a fantasy of being in court.
" Willa's blue eyes peeked out from under a short mop of white hair.
The look she shot me was partly teasing, with an undercurrent of gratitude that always seemed present.
Of all the women, I was closest to Willa.
It was a closeness borne of death and war.
The passing of her husband Leigh and my seven-year battle to prosecute the son of a Georgia Power executive for his murder.
Leigh, a former Navy Seal, was a hero to his last breath, trying to break up a fight in a local convenience store and getting stabbed to death for his trouble.
In our twenty-year friendship, I'd only witnessed Willa cry twice, once when Leigh died, and the day her husband's murderer got the death penalty.
"I was actually thinking which bush it would be safer to pee behind," I said, drawing raucous laughter.
"Amen to that." Pearl huffed, making her way to a thick-leaf azalea while the rest of us scrambled to find our toilet.
We reconvened minutes later to find Pearl sitting on the fallen husk of a once glorious pine. "I say we set up camp for the night." Her tone was suggestive, but her body language plainly stated she didn't intend to walk another damn step.
"This wouldn't be a bad place," mused Willa, our resident camping guru.
We stood atop a plateau in the trail, to our right a clearing large enough to accommodate our four tents for the night. Trees stood guard along the perimeter, and columns of sunlight pierced the canopy to rest upon the meadow.
"Let's get the tents out," Willa took charge as usual.
Tents.
I suppressed a cringe at the word. I never camped as a kid.
My dad was outdoorsy, but my mother's idea of roughing it was a three-star hotel.
My husband—make that my ex-piece of crap, sorry-ass, lying, cheating ex-husband—took our boys on adventures but always opted for rustic cabins instead of tents.
Rick was too involved in making everything we did an educational experience rather than doing something for the pure joy of it. Asshole.
So here I stood, a divorced district attorney, just past my sixtieth birthday, about to spend my first night in a tent. An abode made of half-inch thick canvas that pretty much anything with a fang could rip through and eat me. Not to mention snakes. I wasn't about to mention snakes.
"Who's got the pump?" Agnes held something that looked like a massive, deflated balloon in her hands.
"I do," Clara announced, pulling a plastic and metal contraption from her canvas backpack. Her movements stilled, and she flinched at the grief flashing over her face. "It belonged to Curtis."
"Hey now," Agnes was at Clara's side in the time it took me to blink. "No tears on the trail—remember? We agreed."
We had agreed, but with four of us widowed, one divorced and the other involved in a heinous separation, it might have been folly's promise.
Clara was a trouper. She plastered on a smile, although the sadness haunted her deep brown eyes. Her husband Curtis died just eight years prior from a sudden heart attack.
"I say we don't talk about men at all," Agnes suggested as she wrestled with the contraption to inflate her air mattress.
"Well, that's impossible," Pearl whooped.
"How about we don't talk about men unless they're either unattainable or fictional," I suggested a compromise.
"Are you insinuating I'll never have a liaison with Keanu Reeves," Agnes narrowed her eyes at me.
"Well, not insinuating exactly," I teased, drawing an aggravated humph from her.
Of course, I wouldn't be surprised to find out Agnes had a fling with the celebrity.
She was strikingly beautiful with startling blue eyes, platinum blonde hair, and the most flawless skin and curvaceous figure money could buy.
Agnes could pass as being in her early forties, although I knew she was a year older than me—such were the perks of having a plastic surgeon for a husband.