Ingrid had run back to her husband in the hope that the New York man could pacify his rich, angry wife.
“Poor Luke,” Jocelyn said as she pulled her hair back into a ponytail, but she couldn’t keep the grin off her face. She could say the words, but she didn’t feel that there was anything “poor” about him at all. Maybe he’d visit today. Maybe he could—
She paused because she thought she heard something outside. Maybe it was a truck, but when she looked out the window, it was only Greg, Sara’s boyfriend. No doubt they were going to work on the dress shop today. True to what Sara had told them about him, he seemed to have a bottomless bank account, and he’d bought the used-furniture store on the corner McDowell Street and Lairdton, diagonally from the Great Oak, as Joce had found out that it was called.
As she looked down at Sara and Greg from her bedroom window, Joce had to work not to envy them—and to wonder if she’d been an idiot. When she’d arrived in town, two men had come into her life, but she’d thrown them both out—and they’d made no effort to get back into her good graces.
“So much for an ‘ardent courtship,’” she said aloud.
Downstairs, the kitchen was empty, as it was Monday morning and Tess wasn’t catering a party. Joce didn’t know how she did it. She was working full-time plus catering as many as four parties on the weekends. Of course Jim was there helping her, but it was still a lot to do.
Joce had some milk and a bran muffin, then went to her desk to start work, although it was becoming more frustrating with each day. She was tempted to e-mail Bill Austin and ask if she could visit him and make photocopies of the letters his grandfather had sent about Miss Edi. She’d take one of those tiny photocopy machines with her so the letters would never leave the premises. She’d promise him that she…As often happened lately, her mind wandered off into thinking what she could do, wanted to do, but it always came back to the fact that she’d pretty much hit a brick wall in her biography of Miss Edi.
She remembered the story that Dr. Dave had dangled before her eyes. An upside-down car. A rescue. What happened?
Jocelyn went back upstairs and got the little double-framed picture that had been Miss Edi’s prize possession. On the day she passed away, Jocelyn had surreptitiously slipped it off the bedside table and hidden it inside her shirt. At the time, she’d assumed that everything would go to charity, but she wanted that one thing to remember her friend by.
Jocelyn well remembered the first time she asked Miss Edi about the hair in the braid. She’d been about ten years old and curious about everything in the world.
“It’s hard to imagine it now,” Miss Edi said, “what with men today having hair down to their waists, but back then the sides of men’s heads were shaved with a buzz cutter. But David hadn’t had a haircut in a few weeks, so I was able to get a few strands of it and I wove the braid of his hair and mine.”
“What color were his eyes?” Joce asked, looking at the black-and-white photo.
“As blue as yours,” Miss Edi said, smiling. “And he had a chin with a dimple in it like you do.”
“Like my mother’s,” Jocelyn said.
“Chins like yours are a hereditary trait.”
“My grandfather said his chin was just like ours, but that his four other chins covered it.”
Miss Edi smiled. “I wish I’d been here then and could have known your mother and her parents.”
“I’m glad you came to rescue me,” Jocelyn said. “I’m like one of your burn patients except that my scars are on the inside.”
Miss Edi shook her head in wonder at Jocelyn. “Sometimes you say things of extraordinary wisdom.” As they often did, they smiled at each other in perfect understanding.
Jocelyn glanced up from the photo and her memories to the window, then did a double take. She put the frame down, then leaned closer to the window. She could just see what she thought was the end of the bed of a truck. Luke’s truck, and it was parked where he was working on the herb garden.
Slowly, Jocelyn stood up and looked down at herself. Miss Edi would be appalled, but she had on a new pair of jeans—Sara had sold them to her from the wholesale clothes she was buying by the truckload—and a dark pink shirt. Was her shirt too formal? Should she change? Into what? A halter top? Something with spangles and tassels?
Laughing at herself, she ran down the stairs and into the kitchen to go out the back door, but she paused, then ran to the freezer, grabbed a pack of pot roast, and tossed it into the microwave. “Might as well be prepared,” she said as she went out the door.
“Hi,” she said as Luke rammed the shovel into the ground and pulled up a huge hunk of dirt.
“This place is a mess,” he said. “Look at the weeds growing here. They’ve probably established themselves until I’ll have to burn them out.”
“With your bad temper?” she asked without a hint of a smile.
“Flamethrower breath,” he said, still frowning, then he jammed the shovel in the ground and glared at her. “Look! I’m married. I’m sorry I didn’t ask if that was all right with you. For some stupid reason I thought I was your gardener, not your boyfriend. The whole town thought you were coming here to marry Ramsey. You were going to at last connect the families of McDowell and Harcourt.
“I don’t know what was wrong with my not knowing that I couldn’t talk to you because I was married. And if I may remind you, that’s all I did. I apologize. I live alone. Sometimes it seems like every person who lives in this town is related to me, so what’s to talk about? Our childhoods? How we used to skinny-dip in your pond?
“So put me up against a wall and shoot me, but I talked to a woman who was not my wife. Who, by the way, I haven’t seen in so long that I hardly recognized her.
“So now everyone in town is angry at me. My father’s half in love with you; my mother is so mad that she won’t invite me over for dinner even once a week, so right now I’m at the mercy of Ingrid and a microwave. And the church sent the pastor over to have a talk with me about infidelity and about corrupting minors. Maybe he means Ingrid, but thanks to enough Botox to give her the plague, she only looks fourteen.
“So I came over here to dig. Nobody else in town will let me near their gardens, but I need to work with the earth. You have any problem with that?”
“You like pot roast?”
“Pot roast?” he asked dumbly.
“With carrots and Worcestershire sauce. I have your mom’s recipe.” She put her hand up. “If you start crying, you can’t have any.”
Luke pulled the shovel out of the dirt and tossed it onto the back of his truck. “Why do I feel like I’m the object of some plot?”
“Join the club,” Joce said. “Your grandfather is using me to get you away from the…I want to quote him exactly…‘that grasping little gold digger he married.’ Yeah, that was it.”
“Shouldn’t you be keeping this a secret between you and my grandfather?”
“Are secrets allowed in this town?” she asked as they neared the house. “I thought there was a law against them. Keep a secret and get put in jail. On the other hand, your cousins kept the secret of your being married so well that not even Tess knew about it. I hear she yelled at Ramsey so long and loud that they had to repaint his office.”
He blinked at her. “I think you’ve lived in Edilean too long.”
“But you came back to it from wherever you were, doing whatever you were doing…” She looked around to see if there was anyone near, then lowered her voice. “Up north.”
“What in the world are you talking about?”
“Did you know that your right eyebrow twitches on the tip when you lie?”
“No, that’s hunger.”
“Whatever it is, you and everyone else have again jumped over some big secret about you. I mean, other than the fact that you’re married, that is.”
“About to be unmarried,” he said as he opened the door and let her go in first.
“Don’t tell me you at last had t
he courage to file for a divorce.”
“Annulment. We haven’t spent enough time together to call it a marriage.”
“And she committed fraud,” Joce said softly. “You thought you were getting one kind of woman and she turned out to be something else.” Joce politely left out the truth, that she’d used her pregnancy to get him to marry her, then had an abortion.
“Yeah,” Luke said, “but maybe I should have tried harder. Maybe I should have…”
“So she came back to see if you two could get back together?”
“More or less,” he said as she handed him a beer.
“And how’s that working?”
Luke gave a one-sided grin. “Not so good. How come you aren’t still mad at me?”
“Your grandfather said that if I talk to you he’ll let us have part two of Miss Edi’s story.”
“That the only reason?”
“Only one. As I’m sure you know, I’m trying to write a book about Miss Edi, but I can’t find a lot of information. I need those stories.”
“So it’s just work, is it?”
“Just work,” she said, but she was smiling.
“I guess you just want to read what must be a very romantic story.”
“Of course I want to hear what Miss Edi did. I always assumed she was a virgin.”
“Why’d you think that? Her David get wounded in the wrong place?”
“I couldn’t exactly ask her that, now could I? Did you wash your hands?”
“No. Is that really my mother’s pot roast?” he asked as he washed his hands.
“It is if she makes it by the recipe, but maybe she left a secret ingredient out of it. Maybe I should have put a few borage flowers on top.”
“Getting sick of the cupcakes?”
Joce rolled her eyes. “Your dad and Tess are starting to talk about opening a store in town. Between Sara’s upscale dress shop and Tess’s bakery, Edilean is going to turn into SoHo.”
“That is a very unfunny joke.”
“Maybe the Steps and Ingrid could do some photo shoots here. They could languish in the back of your pickup wearing Armani. It would be a great setting. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Could you stop it with Ingrid? That’s over.”
“No it’s not. You’re still married until you have the paper saying you aren’t.”
“Does that matter to you?” he asked.
“No, of course not,” she said quickly as she used a pot holder to remove the big pouch of pot roast from the microwave and put it in a bowl.
“Have you ever kissed Ramsey?”
“I really and truly don’t think that’s any of your business,” Joce said.
“I have a reason for asking.”
“Yes, I’ve kissed him at least a thousand times. Truly a magnificent experience.”
Luke was leaning against the sink, the beer in his hand. He set it down, then walked toward her without saying a word.
“Let me get some silverware and—”
He put his hand under her chin and tipped her face up to his, then he kissed her. It was a gentle, sweet kiss, but it made her knees start to buckle.
When he pulled back, her heart was racing, and she wanted to put her arms around his neck and continue.
“Do you understand now?” he asked as he stepped away, not touching her.
“Understand what?” she asked.
“About you and me. About why my grandfather had you to his house for lunch, why Ramsey was sent out of town, why Ingrid was brought back into my life.”
“You want to stay with her?”
“I need to end it legally between her and me. She can fight her own battles with the big shot in New York.”
“You know about him?”
“Did you think I thought she came back here out of love for me? I married her because she was carrying my child and she—” He looked away. “I don’t want to relive that. As soon as MAW can get the paperwork through, the marriage will be annulled, then I plan to do some ‘ardent courting.’”
“Ardent, huh?” she asked, grinning. “And how would that start?” She stepped toward him.
“It’s going to start out with no touching until I’m no longer married. And until you realize that I’m not like your father.”
“What?”
“You said I was like your father.”
“I know,” Joce said, and she stood up straighter, no longer leaning toward him. “But—”
“No buts. We’ll start over. So what devious plan did you and Gramps come up with to get me to do what he wants me to do?”
“First, you have to take golf lessons,” she said as she put a huge helping of pot roast and vegetables on a plate and served it to him.
“What?” Luke asked in horror.
“Just a few. Twenty or so, then he’ll give us the second part of the story.”
“And what do you have to do?”
“Pass muster of all your many relatives, make the town believe I’m worthy of a house they think is theirs, live up to comparisons of Miss Edi, be—”
“Okay, I get the idea. How are you doing so far?”
“What do you think?”
He gave her a look of such lust that Jocelyn could feel her hair roots becoming warm.
“What’s going on in here?” Tess asked from the doorway. “You two planning on giving Sara a run for her money? Watch out for carpet burns and splinters.”
“Are you talking about what I think you are?” Luke asked, sounding very prudish.
“Whatever fits your imagination,” Tess said as she smiled at Jocelyn.
“Do you need the kitchen?” Joce asked. Luke was halfway through the plate of food.
“No,” Tess said, “I came by to deliver a gift to the two of you.”
“So who knows we’re in my kitchen together?” Joce asked.
“Everyone who saw Luke drive his truck down Edilean Road heading for here knows.”
“Which means the entire town,” Luke said, but he seemed to expect it.
“So what’s the gift?” Joce asked.
“Oh, yeah.” Tess stepped back into the hallway for a moment, then returned with a big picnic basket with a bow on the handle.
“Did you and Jim do that?” Joce asked, smiling.
“Why would we?” Tess asked.
“Because you two use her kitchen, dumping all the expenses onto Joce, but you and that tightwad father of mine keep all the profits.”
“Oh, that,” Tess said as she shrugged. “But, no, it’s from Dr. Dave.” She put her hand on the back of Luke’s chair. “So how come Jim and his father-in-law can’t stand each other? Jim is so sweet. I can’t understand—” Pausing, she patted Luke’s back. “Are you all right?”
“No one’s ever called his father ‘sweet’ before,” Jocelyn said. “Luke and his mother team up against the dear man.”
Luke groaned as he kept eating. “My grandfather—”
In the next second, Luke and Jocelyn looked at each other, their eyes wide as it hit them who had sent the picnic basket. Instantly, they made a dash toward Tess. Luke got up so fast the chair fell backward and hit the floor.
Tess’s eyes widened, then she started running toward the front door, afraid they were going to stampede her.
“The basket!” Jocelyn yelled. “Leave it!”
Tess bent as she kept running, put the basket on the floor, then went out the front door, slamming it behind her.
Joce and Luke attacked the basket with both hands. Packets of cheese, a slim loaf of French bread, containers of salad, and a thermos were hurriedly put on the floor. In the bottom, wrapped protectively in a plastic bag, were the yellowed pages that Joce had seen at Dr. Dave’s house.
She and Luke grabbed them at the same time, lifted them, then looked at each other.
“We have to be sane about this,” Luke said.
“I agree,” Joce said, nodding, but not releasing the pages.
“Food. Outside. Y
ou read. I dig.”
“Perfect,” she said as she kept one hand on the pages, the other putting the food back in the basket.
When everything was back in place, Luke narrowed his eyes at her. “You have to let go.”
“No, you have to let go.”
“So when will your book be finished?” Luke asked, sounding as though he were just making conversation and meant to stay there all day, never releasing his side of the manuscript.
“As soon as you let me go so we can read this!”
Luke couldn’t repress his smile as he let go of his end of the manuscript. “Okay, but you don’t get out of my sight.”
“I think I can handle that,” she said suggestively, and Luke’s smile grew broader. He took the basket in one hand, and as they went through the kitchen he got the plate of his mother’s pot roast, which he hadn’t finished.
Ten minutes later, they were outside and the food was spread around them. Luke sat on one side of the red and white cloth his grandfather had included in the picnic and ate while Joce reverently opened the old pages.
“Ready?” she asked Luke.
He nodded. “Stop talking and read!”
She looked down at the pages and began.
17
LONDON
1944
SIR, I RESPECTIVELY decline this assignment,” Edi said, her eyes straight ahead, her spine rigid as she stood in front of General Austin’s desk.
“Harcourt,” he said in a voice of patient intolerance, “this is a war and you’ll do what you’re told to do—as we all have to. If I send two soldiers to Dr. Jellicoe’s house, people will see them and suspect him. His cover will be blown. Therefore, I want you, a woman, to go with my driver and deliver this magazine to Dr. Jellie. Do I make myself clear?”
“Perfectly clear,” Edi said. “But I disagree with your decision about who to send. One of the other women, Delores perhaps, would be better at this job than I would be.”
“Delores is an idiot. A flat tire would send her into hysterics. I need someone who can be cool under stress.”
Lavender Morning Page 23
