“Your guests started leaving around nine,” Tonia said abruptly, rising off the sofa. “And it’s now half past ten. So why hasn’t Joe joined us yet? Do you think Maisie is unwell?”
“No,” Margaret said. “I suspect he’s reading to her to help her fall back asleep. He probably missed her. If there was a problem, I’m sure we’d hear of it.”
“So sit down, Tonia”—Daniel Banner grasped his wife’s wrist as she made to move past him—“and leave the lad alone before you drive him all the way to Canada with your pestering. Georgia’s far enough to have to come to visit.”
“He’s checking the grounds, ma’am.” Rufus’s soft-spoken statement startled her and the Banners, for they jerked to look at him, too. Unruffled by their combined stares, Rufus continued in his measured baritone, “He told me on his way to return Miss Maisie to her bed that after she was settled, he was going to take a look around, ensure the grounds were clear.”
“Clear of what?” Daniel let go of Tonia to push to his feet beside her. “Is he expecting more trouble? Maybe I should go—”
“I’m sure everything is fine, Mr. Banner,” Margaret said carefully, setting her champagne on the low table to stand, too. “He’s been away a few days and probably wants to ensure everything on the estate is buttoned up, as it should be before everyone retires for the night.”
Unless...Had he had seen something, or someone, to prompt him to go outside instead of back to the parlour to spend time with his parents, whom he hadn’t seen in months? Or was he simply being his usual cautious—enigmatic—self, prowling around like a wolf in the shadows?
“Mr. Banner didn’t seem to be alarmed, missus,” Mr. Rufus said. “Just interested in taking a look around outside. And just so’s you know, ma’am, it’s my fault Miss Maisie was up. She heard me putting Mr. Banner’s belongings away and opened her door. She thought it was him. I told her that yes, he was home, but that she should get on back in bed and wait to see him in the morning. I guess she couldn’t wait.”
“See?” Margaret said to her anxious house guests. “All’s well. I’m sure he’ll join us very soon.”
The Banners finally relaxed, and resettled on the sofa. She joined them in sitting but not in relaxing as she reclaimed her drink and nursed it.
He would join them soon. But considering how frosty he’d acted towards her before he’d rushed out after Maisie, she had to wonder if it wasn’t prudent of her to retreat to her chamber now and leave the Banners to enjoy a quiet visit with their son untainted by the awkwardness she knew would plague her and Mr. Banner’s interactions no matter how carefully they tried to pretend she hadn’t turned down his offer of friendship, if not something more, after barging into his room and quite deliberately seducing him.
But how best to excuse herself?
The minute she stood up, Tonia would too. And once up and moving, she was a hard woman to rein in. The last thing Margaret needed was for her to go out in annoyed search of her recalcitrant son, who himself had been annoyed by the sight of his daughter in her nightdress at a party when he’d undoubtedly believed her safely tucked away in bed at Lily Grove, where he’d left her before leaving town.
She could almost see and hear the explosion as mother and son’s strong personalities and similar, if divergent, expectations for their own child collided like a pair of war planes midair.
“He hasn’t changed a bit,” Daniel said. He grabbed his drink off the table and, taking a sip, settled it on his knee to tip his chin towards the window. “He was like that at home, too, wandering around in the dark. Always the last of our boys to settle down and go to sleep, even though he was the youngest.”
“Yes,” Antonia agreed wistfully. “I asked him once why he was always awake so much later than his brothers.” She offered Margaret a faint smile. “He told me it was because he needed to know everyone was safely in bed and the doors and windows secure before he could sleep. He’s always been such a responsible soul.”
Margaret shared her smile and then put the champagne flute to her lips to hide their tremble.
Oh, Margaret, you silly, silly fool. You let your guard down, and now you’re done for, aching for a man you could love but can never have, the way his mother pines for the boy that used to be hers and never will be again.
Chapter 33
Welcome Back
LEANED UP AGAINST THE wall in the hallway just outside and out of sight of the parlour doors, Joe fought a host of conflicting emotions, the chief of which was the ridiculous and childish urge to tear up at the pride in his father’s voice, and grief in his mother’s, as they shared with Mrs. Sweeney his boyhood nocturnal habit—a habit so ingrained in his daily living now he did it without conscious thought. Like tonight.
After tucking Maisie back into bed and pressing a kiss to her forehead with a promise to tell her all about his trip in the morning, he’d slipped out the rear of the house to avoid another run-in with his mother so he could do outside what he would later do inside the house: check that what should be locked was locked and that everything and everyone else was where and as should be. He’d never considered his pre-slumber ritual as a sign of his being an overly responsible soul. More a compulsive one. For if he didn’t do his nightly checks before bed, he couldn’t and wouldn’t sleep.
But to them, his compulsion was not only endearing, it was worthy of their praise. Their respect.
On the heels of that throat-tightening realization was anger at their surprise appearance at Sugar Hill.
Why the hell hadn’t his mother written...?
“Hell,” he muttered, remembering the envelope he’d left unopened on his loaned desk.
Letting his shoulders drop, he let go of his unfounded outrage. Misdirected outrage, actually.
It wasn’t arriving back at Sugar Hill to find his parents there. It was arriving back at Sugar Hill to find his daughter there, and Mrs. Sweeney hosting a party half-full of people he’d rather slit his throat than talk to. Then there was Lyons’s protégé, Mr. Lewis, and the way he’d looked at Margaret and she at him, stoking a ferocious jealousy he had no right to feel.
With a growl, he pushed off the wall.
“Joseph. It’s about time.” His mother scrambled to her feet as he entered the parlour, and, leaving her glass of champagne on the low sofa table, she swanned over like a cloud of hornets to buss his cheeks. Grasping him by his upper arms, she leaned back and said, “You grow taller and more handsome every time I see you.”
“And you more beautiful, Ma,” he said, which earned him a pleased flush.
“Jesus, Tonia,” his father said, muscling his way into the welcome. “He’s not four years old anymore. He’s almost thirty-two, for God’s sake.” And striking out a hand, he grinned. “How’s it going, boyo?”
“Good, Da,” Joe said, smiling as he took his father’s hand and gave it a firm shake. “And it’s good to see you.”
“Better to see you,” his father said. “Another minute, and I’d have had to ask your lovely new boss for a hammer and a pillow so I could help your mother relax.”
“Daniel,” his mother exclaimed, and swatted him on the arm with the back of her hand.
Joe laughed, not at his father’s joke—which was in worse taste than the bright yellow-and-white polka-dot tie Joe assumed he’d worn with his grey suit in homage to his mother’s outfit, or at his mother’s physical retaliation—but at his parents’ familiar bickering that too often ended in hostility and used to cause him real angst. Now it only seemed funny.
Maybe it was because he was so much taller now that he was almost thirty-two years old.
Grinning, he caught a movement in the corner of his eye and instantly sobered.
Margaret offered him a cautious smile, her slim fingers pale on the stem of her champagne glass.
“Welcome home, Mr. Banner,” she said softly.
He nodded, unable to summon a reply owing to the rigidity of his throat.
If she’d looked beautiful his
first trip in the room earlier in the evening, when he hadn’t allowed himself to look at her directly but had taken in her diaphanous pink gown and sparkly updo from the corner of his eye, she looked positively stunning now, facing him fully and with no one else to distract from her. Or that was how it felt.
Despite his parents and Rufus there in the room with them, he felt as he had that day alone with her at the pond, the same pull in her gaze as she’d slowly removed her clothing to saunter in and join him, the same lustful tug in his groin as he resisted the urge to go to her.
The gown’s weightless fabric seemed to ebb and flow around her like lake water suffused with a pale-pink summer sunrise, while the diamond-adorned combs holding her hair in a coordinated tousle glittered like morning dew.
Not an angry mermaid or flawless statue this time, but an ethereal forest fairy he wanted nothing more than to lay down on a bed of wildflowers and slowly undress.
“Here.” His father thrust a glass of whisky in his hand. “Wash that road dust out of your throat. It’s clearly choking you to death.”
That earned a compressed lip smile from Mrs. Sweeney as she glanced into her champagne, freeing him from her emerald gaze long enough for him to gather his wits.
“Hello, Mrs. Sweeney,” he said, careful to keep his tone neutral and his demeanour appropriately deferent, the way a man talking to his boss in front of his parents, who believed him a responsible man, should. “You look very lovely tonight. Pink is a perfect colour on you.”
That brought a lot of pink to her cheeks, reminding him that she’d worn pink the last time he’d seen her, when he’d helped her out of that frilly confection just like he wanted to help her out of this gossamer one now.
Which reminded him that she’d dismissed his foolish hope for something more between them. And that he’d planned to give notice tomorrow, having sent two additional telegrams before leaving Atlanta—one to Savannah and one to Florida. Only now his parents were here.
“Hell,” he muttered, and gulped another mouthful of whisky.
“Joseph,” his mother exclaimed.
“Sorry, Ma,” he said, reflexively tilting his head away. But she kept her backhand to herself, instead shooting him a look that could have scorched the hide off of an alligator.
“I’m glad you’ve made it back safely, Mr. Banner.” Mrs. Sweeney’s emerald gaze flickered with sparks of intimate humour at odds with the tepid English reserve of her voice. “I look forward to learning more about your trip later. For now, I’ll leave you and your parents to get reacquainted. I’ll see you all in the morning—no, really, Tonia,” she added firmly when his mother started to protest. “You’ve waited long enough to see your son, and you’re leaving for home soon. I’ll not encroach on your time with him. Good night, all.”
She left in a glittering haze of pink, handing her champagne off to Rufus on her way into the hall.
“So...” his father murmured once she was gone, as he slapped him on the back to draw him close. “Sleeping with the little general, eh?”
SHE WASN’T SURPRISED when he tapped on her door at half past midnight. She’d half anticipated it. Hoped for it. But actually seeing him in the hallway via a small crack between the door and jamb she’d allowed in case it was someone else—those inscrutable, penetrating green eyes, and his inky hair forming fulsome curls along his nape now the weight of added length had been cut off, the red suspenders like vertical slashes of lipstick on his white shirt framing the opalescent buttons making her fingers twitch with the urge to undo them and brush her palms over his bronzed chest—she froze, terrified. Because if she opened the door further, it wouldn’t just be into her bed she’d welcome him. It was into her heart. And that was one place she’d promised herself she’d keep inviolate.
Yet, without a word or flicker of movement from him, her slippered foot slid back on the hardwood as her hand tightened on the knob and her arm drew open the door.
He was across the threshold before she could change her mind, and they were together in her bed, naked, before either of them spoke. And then it was only she who whispered, arching her back in response to his mouth’s quest for her nipple, her fingers tangled in his soft, ebony curls:
“Welcome back, Mr. Banner. Welcome back.”
Chapter 34
No Time for Regret
IT WAS A WHIPPOORWILL that woke him. He lay motionless on his back a moment, gathering his wits as he absorbed the warmth and contented feeling enveloping him courtesy of the woman snuggled against his side.
The bird’s next call a moment later cleared the last cobwebs of exhaustion from his mind and body that the week’s mental—and night’s physical—exertions had weaved through him, long enough for him to recognise the predicament in which he’d put them both.
Ignoring her sleepy, inaudible murmur of protest, he eased out from under the slender leg that she had thrown over his thighs as though to prevent his leaving.
“I have to go,” he whispered, planting a kiss behind her ear and earning a pleased moan. “I have to get back to my room before anyone wakes up.” Like his father, who for the sixteen years he’d lived at home had always risen before the sun, even when gravely ill.
“No rest for the wicked,” Daniel Banner would say as he hauled on the most recent wool sweater and cap his mother had knit and sent from Ireland for his September birthday, and that he wore year round—even in the height of summer—until the new set arrived. And then away he went, into the squall or pre-dawn darkness, coughing up a lung or softly singing “The Wild Rover” while Joe stood in the open door, watching him go.
When Joe was really young, he’d believed his father meant it, about being wicked. Of course, in time, he’d learned it was simply something adults said when they had to get on with the chore of living. Something he now said to Maisie sometimes, though until that moment, as his feet hit the rug under Mrs. Sweeney’s bed, he hadn’t appreciated the import of it. Or his father’s strength in using empty words to leverage himself up and out the door when he’d probably wanted nothing more than to slide back under the covers to the warmth and softness of the woman he was leaving behind to go and do what he had to do, not necessarily what he wanted to do.
Four noisy boys and a wife could drive any man to leave, temporarily if not permanently. But as he hauled on his trousers and buttoned them up before grabbing his shirt and shoes off the floor, it hit him that his father hadn’t gone to escape them. He’d gone to keep them housed and fed. And he’d always come back.
A night away. A week. A month...As a boy, he’d lost count the number of days his father, and later his brothers, one by one, were away on the Irish Lass hauling in catch after catch, because only one day had ever really mattered to him: the day they came home again.
It was that thought that carried him silently down the stairs to the guest wing, pulling on his shirt: how he owed his father and his mother a world of thanks for instilling in him the foundation of responsibility and a hard work ethic he’d used to build a life for himself and Maisie—and, God willing, the woman whose bed he’d crawled from, if he could convince her to take a risk on him when all he had to offer her was his love.
Tentatively hopeful that she might welcome something more with him than simple physical pleasure, and that he could send a new pair of telegrams advising two different plantation owners that he’d changed his mind, he eased open Maisie’s door a crack, needing a glimpse of her before he changed into his work clothes and headed out to check the fields while the rest of the house slept.
He squinted, peering through the shadowed darkness at the bed, which seemed oddly flat, with no humps to indicate a body, or even a bedcover. He shoved open the door.
“Maisie?” His whisper boomed in the silence. “Maisie.”
He yanked open the drapes and turned up the lamp, got down on his knees to look under the bed.
“Maisie?” He got to his feet and scanned the room.
“What’s up, boyo? My beautiful granddaug
hter playing hide and seek?”
Joe stared at his father, fully dressed in dark trousers and a blue cardigan over a white shirt, grinning at him from the open doorway.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “She’s not hiding. I...I don’t think. I don’t know. She’s not here. And neither is her bedding. Or Reba.”
“Reba?” His father’s smile faded as he took in the narrow mattress covered only in a single white fitted sheet with a single empty pillow on it. Scowling, his father cranked a look behind the door. “Where’d they go? To sleep somewhere else? Maybe upstairs, with that pretty—”
“Mr. Banner?” Miss Lisette appeared in the hallway behind his father, who moved aside to reveal her still doing up the ties of her red robe as she gazed at Joe, her black hair plaited in two even braids, her eyes wide with alarm, and her feet bare beneath the white ruffled hem of her nightdress. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know that anything’s wrong just yet,” Joe said, trying to stay calm against the waves of panic trying to spin his stomach into a vortex of nausea. “She may have just taken her blanket and Reba and found somewhere else to sleep.”
“Like upstairs—”
“No, Pa.” He shook his head. “Not there. Not with Mrs. Sweeney.”
“And you know because— Oh.” His father nodded. “Well then, maybe the parlour, or the study, or the front porch,” he suggested hopefully. “Or one of the other four empty bedchambers in this house. God knows it’s big enough to hide an army.”
“Yes, we’ll look,” Joe said. “Starting with my room.”
But his room was empty too, and quiet except for a few distant voices filtering in through the open window as field hands called out morning greetings before starting their work day.
He turned around. “Get dressed,” he said to Miss Lisette. “Pa and I’ll start checking the ground floor. Lisette, you start upstairs once you’re dressed. If we don’t find her in the house, we’ll turn this whole damn estate upside down until we do.”
My One True Love Page 32
