“Certainly. I’ve offered her coffee, but she says it won’t take long.”
At last he pegged the expression. Protectiveness. Eleanor had begun working for him not long before the accident. Though he’d never shared his feelings with her, he was all too aware of how she’d shouldered extra burdens during those long months in the aftermath, when it was all he could do to put one foot in front of the other. She’d been the one to sign for the delivery of the divorce papers.
“No idea why she’s here?”
Eleanor’s mouth tightened. “I can tell her you’re busy.”
“No.” He owed Cleo an apology. She must be completely overwhelmed by all that had happened. He’d stormed in with impulsive plans, as usual. Cleo was one for slow, careful moves. “I’m right behind you.”
Eleanor’s disapproval was evident to him, and when he entered the reception area, he could see that Cleo hadn’t missed it, either.
She looked so small, standing there. So resolute.
He riffled through a handful of responses—Why did you come? What do you want?
Man, you’re still beautiful.
He settled for “Good morning.”
Nerves wriggled in her gaze, but she remained ramrod-straight. “Do you have a minute?”
His brave little soldier. “Sure. Eleanor said you didn’t want coffee?”
“I have to get to the shop, but—” She held off until they were inside.
Malcolm shut the door and saw her shoulders relax slightly. “Are you all right?”
“Of course.” She took in the room. Checked out his view. “This is nice. Very nice.” Her fingers trailed idly over the mahogany desk. She’d always been so…tactile.
A vivid memory of those slim fingers stroking his flesh rocked him to the core.
“Cleo, why are you here?” His tone was too harsh, but no way was he explaining it to her.
She bit her plump lower lip in that way he’d seen her do a thousand times. He had to look away.
“It’s all different, isn’t it?” She glanced over her shoulder. “New address, high-rise building. Not one stick of the old furniture.” Her smile was soft and sad. “Remember how you used to say you’d hit it big one day? You have, haven’t you?”
“I guess so.” He’d done well long before the accident, but it was true that he’d thrown himself totally into making money after they’d split up. Displaced all his pain and rage and longing into climbing the mountain of ambition.
Leaving behind him the gentle valley of peace and home and love. A poor trade, but all he’d been able to manage.
“I’m happy for you. You’ve always worked so hard.”
She appeared to mean it, so why did he have a sour taste on his tongue?
He struggled to return the favor. “Your shop appears to be thriving. You’ve become a first-choice destination for the privileged set. Everywhere I go, women rave about The Jewel Box.”
She shrugged. “Betsey’s a big help.” Her face shuttered then, her mind likely traveling, as his was, to yesterday’s confrontation between their two daughters.
“She’ll get past it, Snow. She’s got a good heart.”
“Victoria got drunk last night.” No prelude, no easing into it.
He closed his eyes. “Damn.” He opened them again and rounded his desk. “I’ll talk to her. And I’ll get her out of there this week.”
“No.”
“What?”
“I don’t want her to leave. Benjy told me this morning that he wished they could stay. He’s such a love, Malcolm. I—” She averted her gaze. “It was my fault she stormed out last night. I have to do better.” Green eyes locked on his. “And I will.” A faint, rueful smile. “Somehow.”
“Snow, she wants to love you—”
She held up a hand. “Let’s don’t assume our usual positions on opposite sides of that issue.” She paused. “I didn’t drop by to tell you about her or to ask for help.”
He waited, but she said nothing more. “Then why are you here?”
She compressed her lips, then exhaled. “To apologize. You were only seeking to do something good for both her and Benjy, and he’s so excited about your plans. I have no right to sabotage them.”
His heart warmed. “Don’t sweat it. You had a lot thrown at you in one day’s time.”
“So did you.”
She didn’t know the half of it. “We’re in this together, Snow.”
She swallowed hard and glanced around the room, but not before he registered the glistening in her eyes. He was seized by an age-old urge to gather her near. Protect her.
But before he could act on it, she uttered a cry and crossed to his bookshelves.
He realized instantly what she’d seen.
Slowly, she extended her hand and wrapped slender fingers around the old wooden frame she’d rescued from a garage sale and refurbished. Inside was her first anniversary gift to him, a sketch of her deepest dream. The artwork wasn’t highest caliber, but it came straight from her heart.
He’d bartered home repairs with an old woodcarver, and for their second anniversary, he’d given her heart’s wish back to her, carved into the headboard of the bed he’d made with his own hands.
Other women fantasized about fame or glory or wealth. Cleo’s paradise was a house—only one, where she’d live forever—surrounded by trees. Small children, a dog, a cat. A woman. A man. One safe place, filled to the rafters with love.
They’d lived in that house; they’d had those children—if not quite so many—and assorted dogs and cats, along with birds, snakes, mice and any other strays David could bring home.
They’d known that love.
And seen it lost.
Cleo drew the frame to her breast, head bowed and shoulders rounded as she clutched it against her. When finally she looked at him, her expression was stricken to the soul. “Oh, Malcolm.”
He did go to her then, wrapping her in his arms and bending his head over hers, his own eyes stinging. Memory and love and pain raged through him, and he felt her tremble against him as they huddled together in a vain attempt to shield something unutterably precious.
He searched for words. “Snow…I—”
“No—” She tore herself from his arms and backed to the door. “Please. I can’t bear it.” She whirled to go; then, as if only now remembering what she held in her hands, turned back. Thrust it at him.
He reached out but didn’t grasp it yet. “Do—do you want it?” He wasn’t sure what he wished for her to say.
She looked at it again, sorrow mingled with hunger. Her naked soul stared up at him through green eyes he’d loved for most of his life.
She tried to gather herself then; the effort was painful to watch.
“Snow, take it.” But you have the bed, he nearly protested. Leave me something.
“No.” With trembling hands, she returned it to the shelf. “It wouldn’t be right,” she whispered. “I made it for you.”
His phone rang at that moment, startling them both. “Ignore it,” he ordered.
But the spell of the moment was broken. Before his eyes, Cleo reassembled herself. “I should go.” She composed herself in nearly military rigor. “But thank you.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Channing, but this is the call you’ve been waiting for from Ms. Wainwright,” Eleanor said from the door. “I apologize, Mrs. Channing.”
Joanna. The timing stunk.
If he’d hoped Cleo wouldn’t recognize the name, it was clear from her features that the hope was in vain. When she glanced back, her face was a polite stranger’s. “No need for apology. I’d better get to work. Whenever you want to start on the tree house is fine with me, Malcolm. Make yourself at home.”
He shouldn’t have needed an invitation.
It is my home, Snow.
Or should be.
But no more.
Malcolm signed. Watched her go.
Picked up the phone.
Late that evening, Cleo drove int
o her increasingly crowded driveway. As soon as she stepped out of her car, she could hear the music. “Stop in the Name of Love” played with loud, thumping fervor.
She nearly got back in and left. It had taken everything in her to survive the day.
But there was Benjy.
As she opened the side door to the kitchen, she made out Lola’s unmistakable torch-singer voice, along with what was clearly a child’s. The third singer’s she didn’t recognize.
Rounding the corner, she peered into the dining room and ground to a halt. In front of Cleo’s long cherry-wood table, Lola belted out the tune, while Benjy stood in sock feet on the table behind her, brandishing a matching wooden spoon as a microphone. In the corner of the living room close by, Aunt Cammie pounded away at the piano.
The other voice was her daughter’s, one Cleo had forgotten Victoria possessed, lost in years of rebellion and anger. Crystalline. Pure and lovely.
But that wasn’t what held Cleo fast in surprise. It was the sparkle in her daughter’s green eyes, the glow on her face.
Victoria was having fun. All of them were.
Wistfulness twined its way through Cleo’s heart, a moment’s bittersweet longing to be playing with them. For an instant, she imagined joining the fun.
But just as she pictured herself taking her place beside them, she knew better. She was no singer. No dreamer. Lola and Victoria could ignore reality; she was the sensible one.
Her presence would spoil everything. So she backed away.
The motion caught Victoria’s eye, however, and her daughter froze. Cleo tried to duck out of sight, but Lola saw her next.
“Come on, hon.” Lola waved her over with a smile.
Benjy’s face lit. “Nana, sing with us! We’re The Supremes.”
Aunt Cammie kept playing, and Lola advanced on Cleo, grasping her hand. “Here, take my mike. I’m loud enough without one.”
Cleo clasped the spoon in her hand, torn between the rush of heat to her face and a split-second picture of herself in the middle of the group.
Belonging there.
She darted a glance at her daughter, afraid of the derision she knew was waiting, remembering last night’s bitter exchange.
Victoria’s body broadcast a mixed message. The loose delight had vanished into tension, but some of the sparkle lingered, and on her lips, the trace of a smile played.
Cleo was paralyzed by indecision.
Then Lola started singing again, and Benjy chimed in with his “woo woos,” interrupting only to say, “Please, Nana.”
Cleo stared at her daughter, waiting.
The moment spun out as if endless.
Then Victoria scooted over slightly to make room.
Cleo took her first deep breath, while a prayer of thanksgiving rushed to her lips. Gripping the wooden spoon as though her life hung in the balance, Cleo slipped into the magic, searching for a voice that was almost as unsteady as her knees.
Dinner that night was an island found after a shipwreck. The golden glow of shared joy bathed all of them in its light. Cleo tore lettuce for a salad while Aunt Cammie stirred the risotto and Lola sipped her wine and supervised. Victoria instructed Benjy on setting the silverware on the table.
Had someone been looking in the window at them, the scene would have seemed so…normal. Untroubled.
Cleo listened with one ear to Lola’s tale of a former boyfriend in Florida, a lifeguard half her age, but her gaze returned, again and again, to her daughter. Whatever the reason for the night’s fragile peace, Cleo was too grateful to question it.
As she watched Victoria’s patience with Benjy, Cleo saw a different daughter inside the skin of the rebel. For a moment, Cleo spun back into a rare memory of Victoria showing the same evenhandedness with David.
What had they been doing? She searched for the elusive wisp.
A present for Malcolm. A birdhouse David had wanted to build him. The project was almost finished the day Cleo found them in the tree house, intent upon their labors.
In the instant her presence had been felt, Victoria had metamorphosed before her eyes from tolerant guide to sullen teen.
Just now, Victoria stepped aside from the centerpiece she and Benjy were constructing, and Cleo gasped. The sound sent her daughter’s head whipping around, and Cleo couldn’t jerk her gaze away quickly enough.
“It’s extraordinary, Vic—Ria,” she stammered. “How lovely.”
From mundane ingredients such as napkins and glasses and bread plates, her daughter had built a series of platforms in the center of the table. In each little niche, she and Benjy had placed a mélange of everyday fare—a handful of pecans in a small wooden bowl, an orphan glass filled with red and green nandina leaves, a rosy apple here, a golden pear there, fall leaves sprinkled like stardust in between. Assorted candles stood as sentinels.
All of it ordinary, yet the overall effect was stunning. Cleo wanted to elaborate but feared she might have already said too much.
Ria shrugged. “It’s just…something I made up.”
“It’s beautiful. You have real style. None of those items is unusual by itself, but the composite is amazing.”
Shy surprise was tainted by distrust. The shutters slammed down as before. Her daughter turned away. “Let’s go wash our hands, Benjy. Dinner’s nearly ready. Right, Aunt Cammie?”
“Yes, dear. Only a couple of minutes more.”
The rejection sliced into Cleo’s heart. For a moment there, she’d glimpsed a path to a new beginning, a way to behave as a real family, the dream she’d cherished during years spent following Lola wherever whim took them.
Almost her dream. Important pieces were missing. David and Betsey.
Malcolm.
Lola stopped beside her on the way to the table with drinks. “It’s a start, doll.” Then Lola, so free with physical gestures, set down one glass and hugged Cleo’s shoulders. “Don’t give up on her. She needs you more than any of us.”
“I have no idea how to handle her. What to say.”
“Yes, you do. You’re a good mother, Cleo. You always were.”
Cleo dropped her head and studied the tile countertop while her eyes filled and her chest ached. “No. I’m not—I can’t—”
“Nothing you really wanted has ever been out of your grasp, hon.”
Fury sizzled up her spine. “I lost two children, Lola.”
But Lola gave her no quarter. “You have one back now, and she brought you another. Are you going to run away when what you’ve longed for is here within reach?”
Exhaustion dragged at her. “Oh, Lola, it’s not even close.”
“I didn’t raise a quitter.”
Cleo’s head jerked up. “You didn’t raise anything, Lola. I raised myself.”
But Lola only smiled, triumph in her eyes. “And you did a fine job of it, I must say.”
Then Cleo saw her game. Anger had incinerated self-pity. She shook her head. “You are ruthless.”
Lola picked up the glass and winked. “Why, thank you, doll.”
Cleo returned to her salad, glancing at Aunt Cammie, who was stirring madly, her face wreathed in joy.
During dinner, Cleo had cause to be thankful for a second time that Lola was present and a fount of stories. She kept the conversation going until dessert, though both Ria and Cleo said little.
But Cleo had been studying her daughter, and a kernel of an idea sprouted, maybe the next building block in a bridge to her child. “Ria, May I ask you a favor?”
Ria was startled. Wary. “What?”
All eyes but Benjy’s were on them. He drove a little car around the edge of his plate.
Cleo swallowed hard. “I could use a new display at the shop. I’m curious if you would be interested in a job.”
Ria seemed stunned. Cleo could already see the no forming.
She rushed ahead. “I’m shorthanded right now, and it’s usually my responsibility, but if you could spare the time, it would free me to catch up on the paperwor
k that’s been mounting because I’ve had to be out front more.”
“Why?”
“One of my assistants quit, and Betsey only works two days a week.”
“No, why me?”
Cleo gestured to the centerpiece. “I like your flair.”
“Why would you trust me?”
Suspended halfway across a tightrope, Cleo felt her balance slipping. She cast a glance at Lola, intercepting her mother’s chiding frown at Ria. Ria’s expression was stormy.
Perhaps she should forget the whole idea—but even as she considered it, she saw the spark of interest in Ria’s eyes. She had been about to say because you’re my daughter, but perhaps they should stay a little more removed for now.
“We could make it a trial run. I’ll pay you, of course, but if you enjoy the work and the display is effective, we could make it more permanent.”
“Betsey will hate it.”
“It’s not Betsey’s shop. And your sister will adjust.”
“I may not be around long.”
Cleo’s heart thumped hard, but she forced herself to remain calm. “Even once would be a big help to me.”
Silence spun out in an agony of waiting.
Finally, Ria spoke. “I don’t have anywhere to leave Benjy.”
“Cammie and I would love to baby-sit,” Lola said, turning to Benjy. “Tyrone needs watching, and I think you’re just the man for the job, Benjamin, don’t you?”
Benjy smiled. “Sure, Grammy.”
Cleo and Ria exchanged startled glances. Grammy? From the woman who refused to be called by anything but her stage name?
Lola sniffed regally, daring them to comment. “Then it’s settled. Tomorrow your mother will go to the shop with Nana, and we’ll have ourselves a gay old time.”
Cleo looked at Ria. “I’d like to get started before the shop opens. Will eight or eight-thirty suit you?”
She couldn’t read the expression on her daughter’s face, but at last, Ria nodded. “I’ll be ready.” Then she rose from the table. “If you’ll excuse us… Benjy, it’s time for your bath.”
When they had left the room, Cleo sank back in her chair, drained by the effort.
Aunt Cammie pressed a kiss to Cleo’s hair.
The House That Love Built Page 10
