He grinned, unapologetic. “When’s your party this year?”
“Tuesday evening.”
“If I’m still around, what’ll you do with me? I haven’t dressed up for Halloween in years. A lot of years.”
She gave that one some thought. “Well, you’d make a damned good goblin. Wouldn’t even take that much imagination. But I think most likely I’d just dress you up as a skeleton and stick you in a closet. Appropriate, don’t you think?”
“Let’s not talk about nerve,” he said, climbing to his feet.
“Where are you going?”
“Thought I’d run up to the lodge for a little while. It looks as if the weather’s breaking— I’d like to let Cliff and Liza know what happened to us.”
“Okay.”
He hesitated. “Nora, I’m sorry I left the way I did three years ago, with so much unsaid. I let you believe some pretty unpleasant things about me. I thought I was doing the right thing.”
“Maybe you were,” she said, almost inaudibly.
“I don’t know, but I…well, I’ve been wondering if I shouldn’t leave Tyler for now. Come back just in time for the wedding.”
“Why?”
“Because of you. Nora, I don’t want to mess up your life. I want to respect your choices— I do care about you, you know.” He smiled. “Why else would I tease you the way I do?”
She swallowed, her throat tight, and wished she could just go on hating him. But she couldn’t. She wasn’t sure she ever had. He hadn’t been half as mean to her three years ago as they both were pretending. He’d told her he had to leave Tyler. He’d explained he knew she couldn’t go with him. He just hadn’t explained why he couldn’t stay, and had let her believe that she hadn’t meant enough to him. And he’d never asked her to go with him. Of course, she hadn’t offered.
He left her alone in the study, the fire dying down, his muffin untouched, his coffee still steaming. Nora wiggled her toes inside her socks. She was nice and toasty. With Byron gone, she could do a few things around the house.
She wondered if he’d be back for dinner.
Well, it wasn’t that hard to whip up something for two. She was used to it from her days with Aunt Ellie. If he showed up, he showed up. If not…
If not, she’d eat alone, as she had almost every night for the past three years.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE CUCKOO CLOCK in the study was striking midnight when Byron tiptoed into Aunt Ellie’s old bedroom down the hall from the kitchen. He’d just come in. He had enough damned pumpkins for every man, woman and child in Tyler. Barney, who had to be 105 years old, had known a soft touch when he saw one. Byron had listened to the weather reports. It was going to rain all day tomorrow, and even with Liza’s bridal shower in the middle of the afternoon, that made for one hell of a long Sunday ahead. Byron planned on carving a lot of pumpkins.
Cliff had already told him he needed space tomorrow. Liza could play the sweet bride-to-be and unwrap a dozen toasters, but he needed time alone to think. Byron understood. They’d called London from the lodge, talked to their mother. By the time Byron got on the phone, she couldn’t stand it anymore and had burst into tears. Cliff knew. She’d held it together for him, but listening to Byron’s end of the conversation, he’d figured out what was going on.
“I wish I could undo all the suffering I’ve caused her,” he said when Byron hung up.
“She wishes she could undo what you’ve suffered. None of us can, Cliff. Let it be enough that we want to.”
Cliff had twisted his hands together. “I’m close,” he’d said in a choked whisper. “So damned close. If I lose it again…”
But he hadn’t finished, retreating out into a very cold, very dark night, and Liza, white-faced, had joined Byron in the kitchen. It was painful to see such a vibrant woman look so worried and scared.
“I’m canceling the wedding,” she said. “It’s too much for him.”
“Don’t Liza. Not yet. Let me get out of here and see if he doesn’t rally—”
“No…no, Byron, you’re just not getting it. It’s not you. It’s crowds, the prospect of really thinking about the future. Cliff’s used to living just for today. He hasn’t thought about tomorrow in years, if that makes any sense. I’m making him. With me, he has to think about a big wedding, becoming a part of my family, having a family himself one day. The stress of you and your mother—that’s only a small part of what he’s going through.” She threw up her hands and let them flop down to her sides. “I’m just asking for too much too soon.”
“Is there any other way?” Byron had asked, rhetorically. “Half measures don’t work in a relationship. It eventually comes to a point of all or nothing.”
Liza had looked at him knowingly. “Is that what happened with you and Nora?”
“I promised I wouldn’t tell.”
She hadn’t pushed, instead throwing on her wild serape and heading out to find Cliff. Byron admired her courage, her unshakable love for his brother. They’d already triumphed. The rest—the wedding, the painful Forrester family reunion—was just logistics. When they both saw that, they’d be fine.
Byron had tried pitching Cliff’s old tent. It leaked. Then the wind blew it down. And he’d known he wouldn’t stay out all night, anyway. He had to go back to Nora’s little twenties house with the mums on the porch.
“Nora?”
“So it is you.” She sat up in bed, only her silhouette visible in the dark room. He noticed she had a night-light. Living alone didn’t come that easily to her. “You’re lucky I don’t sleep with a gun under my pillow.”
“I just wanted to let you know that I’m back.”
For a few seconds she didn’t speak. Then she said, “Okay.”
“Pleasant dreams.”
“Thank you.” He started out, but she stopped him. “Oh, Byron. I’ll make breakfast in the morning. I bought eggs.”
He couldn’t help a small grin. “Knew I was coming back, did you?”
“No,” she said quietly. “No, I really had no idea.”
That did it.
He took three long strides across her dhurrie-carpeted floor and grabbed her by the forearm, not hard. She could have pulled away if she’d wanted to. He drew her toward him, careful not to lose his balance and fall onto the bed. If he did, they were doomed.
In the dim, pale glow of her night-light, her eyes were liquid and luminous, and he recognized the painful loneliness in them, because it was the same agony he’d felt night after night for the past three years. Even as he’d known he was doing what he had to do, even as he’d structured a good life for himself, he’d wake up nights knowing that his life could have been more than it was. It was like that for Nora, too. He knew it. Her life was good. But it could be more than it was, and on dark, lonely nights, she knew it, too.
And so he kissed her.
Her lips tasted of his best dreams, and when she kissed him back, moaned softly against him, he knew he’d wake up in his brother’s collapsing, leaking tent. This couldn’t be real. He slid his tongue into her mouth, stroked the sharp edges of her teeth. He felt himself hardening. Her tongue circled his, tasting, testing. To steady himself, he grabbed her by the waist. It almost did him in. His fingers dug into the flimsy fabric of her little nightgown, felt the hot, smooth flesh underneath. It was no dream. If he had dreams as real as this, he’d never wake up.
But he made himself let go, stand up straight.
“Next time,” he said, his voice hoarse, tortured with wanting, “know I’ll be back.”
* * *
“I SEE YOU FELL for Barney’s routine.”
Nora was sitting at the kitchen table, watching Byron bring in his twelfth pumpkin, which he plopped on the counter with all the others. She hadn’t seen so damned many pumpkins since she’d fallen for Barney’s routine.
Byron leaned against the counter, crossing his arms over his muscular chest. “How does it go?”
“He’s getting old, doesn�
��t think he’ll plant any pumpkins next year.”
“He’d hate to see his last crop used for compost,” Byron added, grimacing.
Nora grinned. “He uses his pumpkin money—”
“To buy heating oil for winter.”
“That’s a switch. Last fall it was heart medicine. The routine works best on tourists. He doesn’t even try it on townspeople anymore.”
“It ever work on you?”
“Once.”
“Aunt Ellie?”
“Never. She went to school with Barney, said he tried at lunchtime to sob-story his classmates out of their desserts. He does grow nice pumpkins, though.”
With a dubious grunt, Byron turned around and pulled two knives from her magnetic rack. She admired the way he moved. So far, they’d been friendly with each other, if careful to keep plenty of breathing room between them. She hadn’t gotten to sleep last night until after dawn. It wasn’t because she’d actually regretted having fallen for his charms. She was honest enough with herself to admit she’d wanted him to kiss her. It was, instead, that she’d enjoyed their kiss too damned much. She’d lain awake because she’d wanted more. She hated the wanting, but it was, she thought, extremely difficult to deny.
“They’d look nice lined up on your porch for your Halloween party,” Byron said, pointing at the line of small, medium-size and large pumpkins. “I’ll even buy the candles for you.”
“I thought you weren’t going to be here.”
He shrugged, not looking at her. “Changed my mind.”
She hadn’t asked him where he’d gone last night, why he’d come back. “Any particular reason?”
“No place else to go.”
“Weak, Byron. Very weak.”
He handed her a knife, which, given his deliberately inadequate answer and the cocky, sexy way he looked at her, was brave of him. She set it purposefully on the table and got up and fetched a pumpkin, a smooth, deep orange one of medium size. It would make a perfect jack-o’-lantern. Setting it on the table, she made sure it was steady and sliced into it with her knife.
“We’ll need newspapers for the guts,” she said. “The recycling bin’s just inside the cellar door.” He went after them. When he had the cellar door open, she added, “And Byron, you don’t have to tell me anything you’d rather not tell me. You’re just my houseguest. You’re welcome to stay through Liza and Cliff’s wedding.”
He returned with a stack of newspapers, which he slapped onto the table. “You know,” he said in a low voice, his eyes even darker than they’d been last night, “when you go Victorian virgin on me, it just makes me want you more.”
“Cad,” she said, unable to hold back a smile.
He grinned. “Count on it.”
Naturally he chose the biggest pumpkin, but it was slightly misshapen and had a golf-ball-size growth on one side. He patted it as if it were a prize piglet.
Continuing from where she’d stabbed into her pumpkin, Nora carved a neat circle for a lid, which she gently lifted, intensely aware of Byron’s eyes on her. She wondered if rich East Coast publishing types ever made jack-o’-lanterns, as kids or as adults. Suddenly she was madly curious about his life, his upbringing, everything about him.
“I had dinner with Cliff and Liza last night,” he said abruptly. “Cliff’s on edge—he tries not to show it, but it doesn’t take a genius to see that I’ve opened a can of worms by coming here. And I can’t just up and leave. I need to be here.”
“For his sake?”
“Yeah, even if he doesn’t know it. But for my sake, too. We’ve had a long, hard row to hoe, Cliff and I. It’s time we got it done.” He ran his fingers over the circumference of his pumpkin, as if he were a surgeon and this a delicate operation. “Our mother’s flying in from England on Thursday.”
“She lives there?”
“No, she’s visiting a friend—a Pierce & Rothchilde author, actually. She hasn’t seen Cliff in five years. And in the past three years, I haven’t…well, I haven’t made her life any easier.”
Nora set her pumpkin cap gently on the table. “Byron, I know Cliff’s lived in Tyler for years, but he’s kept to himself. No one but Alyssa Baron—and now presumably Liza—understands what drove him into his isolated life up at the lodge. As I said before, you don’t have to tell me. I just want you to know that I, too, am in the dark.”
He nodded, but said nothing.
“Do you know how to carve a pumpkin?” she asked.
“I haven’t done one since I was a kid. Why, are there rules?”
“No, but it’s one of those things that’s not as easy as it looks. My first one usually comes out looking like Frankenstein’s monster.”
“Well, it’s Halloween.”
He seemed distracted, studying her with those mesmerizing eyes. She could almost feel the sandpapery roughness of his beard stubble against her cheek, against her breasts. Licking her lips, she scooped out pumpkin guts and seeds with one hand.
“My father was held prisoner and killed in Cambodia. Cliff was there. There was nothing he could do. He ended up staying, got caught up in the Khmer Rouge horrors, the killing. God only knows what all he saw. He did what he could, was almost killed himself, got out.” With the tip of his knife, Byron drew a light line around the top of his pumpkin. “Our family hasn’t been the same since.”
“Your father was in the military?”
“Air Force. Mother was supposed to have fallen for someone who’d have liked to run Pierce & Rothchilde—she could have run it herself but nobody thought of that at the time—but she didn’t. We did the Air Force routine for a while when we were young, until Dad volunteered for Vietnam. Then Mother took us to Providence to wait out the war. Only he never came home.”
“I’m sorry,” Nora said.
“Yeah.”
“Does Cliff blame himself?”
“He did.”
“And you? Do you blame yourself?”
Byron stabbed into his pumpkin. “I could have done more for both of them.”
Using her free hand, Nora scraped pumpkin goo from her palm and fingers, slapping it onto the newspaper. Body Found at Abandoned Lodge, the headline read. “And your mother?” she asked, keeping her voice neutral.
“She’s truly an amazing woman. She doesn’t blame herself, Cliff, or me—or Dad. She’s accepted what happened. Right now, she just wants to see both her sons happy.”
Nora smiled. “Who can blame her?”
“At least Cliff’s well on his way.”
“When my parents died,” Nora said, walking over to the sink for a paper towel, “I was absolutely positive it was my fault. I don’t think I’ve ever been as sure of anything in my life. It was illogical—I had nothing to do with planning or executing their boating trip—but my guilt had nothing to do with logic. Everyone tried to talk me out of how I felt, until I came to live with Aunt Ellie. She just let me feel whatever I felt. In time, the guilt went away.”
“Do you still miss them?”
“Yes. The missing never does go away. I wouldn’t want it to. I miss Aunt Ellie, too. I always will.”
Byron nodded, not with understanding, she thought, but with acceptance. “I think you and my mother would get along.”
“I hope to meet her.”
“Oh, you will. I plan to stick around until the wedding. I figure,” he said carefully, “the gossip about us will only get worse if I keep leaving and coming back. People’ll think something really is going on between us. If I stay, maybe they’ll realize I’m just a houseguest after all and you’re only doing Cliff and Liza a favor by putting me up.”
Nora narrowed her eyes. “What gossip?”
“You know small towns.”
She scowled. “Well, you don’t, Mr. Forrester. I’ve never been a subject for that sort of gossip in my life, so you needn’t worry.”
But he seemed worried, hacking at his pumpkin haphazardly, bound to make a mess.
“Byron—is something wrong?”
<
br /> “No.”
“If it’s our…our kiss last night, you needn’t worry about that, either. I certainly wasn’t an unwilling partner, but I was merely…well, I was curious as to how I’d respond should you…should we kiss again. But now I know.”
He set down his knife and glared at her. “Are you trying to tell me our kiss was a damned experiment?”
“Not an experiment. A test.”
“Well, did you pass? Did I pass?”
She pursed her lips, carefully slicing out the pumpkin’s eyes. It was a delicate maneuver and she didn’t want to make a mistake. Having Byron Forrester’s dark gaze pinned on her didn’t help her concentration. “Now, Byron,” she said, “let’s be adults about this. You know we were bound to kiss, just because of our history. Now it’s done with. We know what it’d be like kissing each other again because in a small fit of insanity we’ve gone ahead and done it. The mystery’s over.”
“The hell it is.” He tore off his pumpkin’s cap, which he’d failed to cut clean through in places, but what didn’t come easily he just ripped out. “I’ll have you know, Nora Gates, that I wasn’t wondering what it’d be like to kiss you again.”
Now, she thought, who was doing the self-deluding? “You weren’t?”
“No.”
Then she got his full meaning and felt her knees weaken.
“As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “nothing’s done with and the biggest mystery yet remains.”
“I see,” she said primly.
He grinned. “I’m on to you, Miss Gates. You drag out your Victorian virgin act whenever I hit a nerve.”
“Let’s get these pumpkins carved.”
He laughed. “Let’s.”
She turned the radio to a live broadcast of Madame Butterfly, which Byron vetoed, so they compromised on jazz. In the time Nora carved three pumpkins, Byron did two. His first wasn’t too bad, just rather uninspired. The second looked like something out of a science fiction movie.
“Kind of grisly, isn’t she?” Byron said.
“She?”
“Looks like a woman to me.”
Her three, of course, were perfect jack-o’-lanterns. They could have been carved from a mold. She displayed them side by side on the counter.
Wisconsin Wedding (Welcome To Tyler, No. 3) Page 13
