His eyes danced, or else it was the flickering of the flames. “I think you’re the one trying to do the distracting.”
“Do you miss Providence?”
“No.”
“Do you feel the same way about Providence as I do about Tyler?”
“No.”
“But you’ve been there two hundred years,” she said.
He laughed, the flames still dancing in his eyes. “I haven’t.”
“You said the Pierces…”
“Actually, the Pierces have been in Providence for more than three hundred years. They’ve had their house on Benefit Street for only two hundred.”
Nora tried to imagine it. “Those are serious roots.”
“Cliff and I are the last direct descendants of Clifton Pierce—”
“The founder of Pierce & Rothchilde.”
“Cofounder. There are other Pierces in Providence. We both love the Pierce house and I guess Providence will always be home, but I’ve traveled too much and have had too many varied experiences to sink down ‘serious roots’ there.”
“Or anywhere else?”
He looked at her. “Not necessarily.”
She smiled. “There, you see? I have distracted you.”
“No,” he said in a low voice, touching her mouth with one finger, “you haven’t.”
His touch, as brief and light as it was, rekindled the desire she’d managed to keep at a slow, quiet burn through her dinner of salad and stringy pumpkin soup and her routine meeting of the Tyler town council. If she’d bypassed the study and gone straight to bed, as common sense had told her to do, she’d have dreamed about him. Now she knew she wouldn’t have to rely on dreams.
“That’s okay,” she said. “I haven’t distracted myself, either.”
“I wondered.”
His lips grazed hers. It was just a small kiss, a taste. It had the effect of a small spark on a very short fuse. Nora sizzled. Unfolding her legs, she sat up straighter than he was, her chest at his eye level. He unbuttoned just one button of her pale lemon silk blouse. She glanced down and could see the lacy edge of her bra, her breasts straining against its stretchy fabric.
“Byron, I don’t want to dream about you tonight.”
He looked up at her. He was propped up on one elbow, turned on his side, his head at a different angle, so that the flames no longer danced in his eyes. “What do you want?”
With a hand that trembled only slightly, she unbuttoned three more buttons on her blouse. They were small buttons, shaped like pearls, and not that difficult to work. In a few seconds, she slipped the blouse from her shoulders. She could feel the silk drop onto her hips and the heat of the fire on her exposed skin, which glowed in the orange light. Her nipples were hard against her lace bra. She reached around to unclasp it, but Byron stopped her, instead reaching around himself. With one hand, he unfastened the hook. The fabric fell loose. He slipped one strap off her shoulder and then the other, until her breasts were free. She shook the bra off her arms and watched him watching her.
“You have your answer,” she whispered.
And he rose onto his knees, his mouth, already open, reaching hers. His tongue was hot, wet, insistent. She got to her knees as well. He caught her breasts with his palms, moaned softly into her mouth as his tongue plunged deeper. Slowly, he moved his hands down her sides, around to the small of her back. She pressed herself against him, feeling the warmth of his shirt against her bare breasts. Now she, too, moaned.
“I never thought this would happen to me again,” she whispered. “Not twice in one lifetime.”
He answered with her name, spoken hotly against her mouth as his hands slipped into the waist of her skirt, sliding inside her underpants and stockings, down lower until he was cupping her buttocks, lifting her against him. His fingers went lower, deeper, probing, exploring.
They melted together to the floor.
“I want to see all of you,” he said hoarsely. “To touch you everywhere.”
Happy to comply, she unzipped her skirt in back, arching up slightly, but then he seized the hem and slowly, erotically, pulled the skirt down over her hips, her thighs, her ankles. He cast it aside. Breathing hard, he made shorter work of her panty hose. She lay on the carpet in just her lace bikini underpants, her feet very close to the fire. She doubted she looked much like a stern, Victorian old maid.
“I thought I’d never want you more than I did three years ago,” Byron said, his voice low, hoarse with the desire that made him hard and taut all over. “But I do. Nora, there’s never been anyone in my life even remotely like you. I knew when I left Tyler I’d never forget you—and I never did. I never will.”
She helped him with his own clothes then, lifting his shirt over his head, resisting the sweet agony of pressing her breasts to his chest. First things first. He wasn’t wearing a belt with his jeans. They came off with little effort. Underneath he wore deep purple stretch underpants not much bigger than her own; they barely contained him.
“I thought all East Coast blue bloods wore striped boxers,” she said.
“Not this East Coast blue blood.”
And in a matter of seconds, he wore nothing at all.
Hooking his thumbs into the elastic waist of her underpants, he slid them down her thighs, over her knees, down her shins, her ankles and off.
He looked at her for a long time, seeing all of her. And he touched her, tentatively at first, as if making certain they hadn’t plunged together into the same dream. Nora had never experienced anything so deliciously erotic. And he did what he’d said he’d wanted to do, touching her everywhere.
After that, he tasted her everywhere.
And she him.
Then she was drawing him onto her, into her, and because it had been so, so long, it hurt a little, but it was a welcome hurting, and he held back just long enough, although she could see that it was an effort. But then there was no holding back. It was as if the fire at their feet had spread over them, consumed them, until they were red-hot coals, burning everything they touched.
It was a long, long time before they burned down.
When they did, Nora gathered up her scattered clothes and dashed to her bedroom, leaving Byron dead asleep in the study.
She looked at her reflection in her antique mirror. At her love-swollen lips and reddened breasts, at the places where she could still feel his touch on her.
“Some old maid you make,” she said, not lightly at all.
And she locked her door, so as not to tempt fate or a Rhode Islander in the form of Byron Sanders Forrester.
CHAPTER TEN
NORA AWOKE to the clanging of pipes, the hissing of her radiator and a warm haze enveloping her. In a few minutes she was sweating under her quilt. In another minute, she was on her feet, pulling on her robe and stomping to the kitchen. She stopped at the thermostat in the hall.
“Seventy-two!”
Incredulous, she found Byron in the kitchen. Even as it struck her how oddly right he looked at her counter, she noticed he had on running shorts and a Boston Marathon T-shirt. No shoes, no socks. He smiled a good-morning at her and cracked an egg on the side of her medium-size stainless steel bowl.
“I’ve never had the thermostat up that high, even in the dead of winter,” she told him. “I’m surprised the furnace didn’t blow up.”
Byron began whistling some obnoxiously cheerful tune. “You really are such a genial soul in the morning. As far as I’m concerned, Miss Nora, if you leave a man sleeping stark naked on your study floor with your thermostat set at a notch above frigid—”
“Sixty is a perfectly reasonable nighttime setting.”
“Tell that to my vitals.”
He’d cracked another two eggs into the bowl. That made at least three. Was he expecting guests for breakfast? Just what other liberties did he intend to take with her home?
“If,” he went on blithely, “you’d tossed a quilt over me or put another log on the fire, I might have resist
ed the impulse to turn up the heat to a humane level.”
“I don’t mind you turning up the heat, but seventy-two?”
He cracked another egg into the bowl. “It’s a nice round number, guaranteed to thaw certain frozen body parts. And I didn’t turn up the heat. I turned it on. A fine but critical distinction.”
“Easterners,” Nora said, and sat down at the table, since it didn’t look as if Byron needed any help just yet. If the kitchen had been any warmer, she’d have needed a fan. “What are you making?”
“A frittata.”
“A glorified omelet. How many eggs are you using?”
“Enough. I’m not using all the yolks.”
“Are your frittatas better than your pumpkin soup?” she asked dubiously.
He grinned. “My frittatas will melt in your mouth.”
It wasn’t an exaggeration. While he worked his miracles with her eggs, she made toast and coffee, breaking out her mocha java beans, and set the table with Aunt Ellie’s best English stoneware breakfast dishes. Nora was warm in her chamois robe, so she went back to her bedroom and changed into her lightweight waffle-weave cotton robe, which, ever the optimist regarding Wisconsin weather, she hadn’t put away yet for the season.
“I’ll let you have your way with my thermostat until I head off to work,” she told Byron upon her return to the kitchen for cleanup.
His dark eyebrows went up. “Oh?”
“Byron! Are you going to act like an eighth-grader again today? I can’t say anything without your twisting it around into something dirty.”
“What’s so dirty about any of my remarks?”
“You know what I mean.”
He squirted way too much dishwashing liquid into her sink. “Are you going Victorian virgin on me again?”
“Now that,” she said, almost under her breath, “would be a neat trick, wouldn’t it?”
And after cleanup, they ended up making love, laughing and teasing each other, on the lace coverlet of the bed in the front guest room. Byron spirited her there while she was supposed to be getting ready for work, on the pretext that the radiator didn’t work. She had a look. It worked fine.
“It was probably slow heating up,” she said, “because it hasn’t been on since early spring. I like a cool house.”
“Do tell. Instead of turning up the heat I should have crawled into bed with you at dawn. Let you warm up my cold body parts.”
She shrugged. “It would have been cheaper.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “I tried, you know. Your door was locked. Sort of like closing the barn door after the cows’ve gotten out, wouldn’t you say?”
“More like,” she said, “after the bull had been on a rampage.”
At which point he’d pounced, flinging her onto the bed and tickling her unmercifully, until she was howling with laughter, screaming for him to stop before the neighbors called the police and Brick Bauer himself came to see what was up. “Then I’d have to vote against the sheriff’s substation to keep him quiet, and there goes my reputation….”
Byron had silenced her laughter.
Quite efficiently.
And made her late for work for the first time in twenty years. When she told him, he applauded. “On your way out,” he said, “turn down the heat. It’s hotter’n hell in here.”
He did have a way of getting her to not take life—and herself—too seriously. Given the tragedies of his own life, it was a remarkable gift.
It was just her luck to run into Inger Hansen in the Gates Department Store parking lot. “I was just coming in to look for something for Liza for her wedding,” she said, peering closely at Nora. “You look flushed, Nora. Are you ill?”
“No! Really, I—I ate a big breakfast.”
And she held back a silly giggle, imagining what immature, crude, funny rejoinder Byron Forrester would have ready. He was, she thought, a decidedly unsettling influence on her life. And a potentially wonderful part of her life. But she couldn’t think about romance and such now. There was a Thanksgiving window to plan, the Christmas season to prepare for—plenty of work to be done.
On her way up to her office, however, she stopped at the book section to see what Gates carried from Pierce & Rothchilde.
Not a single title.
She and Byron were, she thought, hardly for the first time, from very different worlds.
* * *
“SO,” CLIFF SAID, “you’re setting her up for a broken heart all over again.”
Byron could feel his brother’s tension. Cliff was standing in front of him on the veranda, where he’d gone with a cup of coffee. They’d spent the morning and early part of the afternoon together in the lodge, which, when the renovations were complete, would be an incredible place. Mostly they’d talked about the past. And the implications of having discovered a body on the premises. On the surface, Cliff was avoiding speculation until he had concrete information. But underneath, like so many in Tyler, he was worried. If the body was that of Margaret Lindstrom Ingalls, how had it gotten there? What did his future grandfather-in-law know? How would his future mother-in-law, a sensitive and perhaps somewhat emotionally fragile woman, react? And Liza, Byron thought. How would Cliff’s future wife react? Could they continue to live at the lodge where her grandmother might have been murdered?
Then there was Cliff himself. He’d already seen far too much murder and destruction, far too many families torn apart. With his big church wedding just days away, he had to be feeling the stress.
It was easier, Byron realized, for Cliff to focus on his younger brother’s somewhat suspicious love life.
“Cliff, she’s an adult,” Byron said patiently. “She doesn’t need your protection. And I do care about her.”
Cliff looked around at him, his face unyielding, even ravaged, speaking volumes about how difficult the transition from recluse to ordinary human being still was for him. That he couldn’t have done it without Liza’s unconditional love—and his unconditional love for her—was crystal clear. “Nora Gates has to live in this town after you’ve gone. So do I.”
Byron sighed. He had no good response, if only because he’d stopped believing in crystal balls. He didn’t know what the future would bring. He did know, however, that he’d never loved anyone—now or three years ago—as much as he loved Nora Gates. But was love enough?
Cliff looked out toward the lake. It was a bright, clear, crisp Wisconsin afternoon. The weekend rain had whipped most of the remaining leaves from the trees, leaving them suddenly bare, their gray branches and trunks outlined in sharp focus against an achingly cloudless sky. Only clusters of rust-colored leaves and a few fading yellows clung to the odd tree. In town, more leaves had held on through the wind and rain. But it was very cold. Before he left Nora’s house, however, Byron had lowered the thermostat, not to sixty, but to a reasonable sixty-five.
“I don’t know,” Cliff said, squinting at the sparkling lake. Coming up next to him, Byron could see the pronounced lines at the corners of his brother’s eyes. They were eyes, he thought, that had seen too damned much of humanity’s dark side. “Sometimes I think Forrester men are destined to break the hearts of the women they love.”
Byron tensed. “Cliff, don’t.”
“Look at Mother. How she’s suffered for having loved Dad.”
“She married a military man. There was a war. They knew what they were doing. Cliff, you’re not Dad. Liza isn’t—”
But Cliff turned abruptly, the strain he was under, just for an instant, rising to the surface. “Liza and I are forever. That doesn’t mean I won’t break her heart. And you, Brother. You’re more like Dad than you want to admit. I’m like the Pierces. I like to sink roots. Tyler’s a good place. I can stay. But you? You like to wander.”
“I’ve done my wandering.”
“Have you?”
“For three years.”
“Now you’re back at Pierce & Rothchilde. And you hate it.”
Byron said nothing.<
br />
Cliff’s mouth twitched. “Mrs. Redbacker still there?”
“She’ll go out like Grandpa Thorton.”
“Feetfirst,” Cliff said.
“I like the job. I’ve got weekends for wandering.”
“You still take pictures?”
Byron shrugged. “Always.”
His brother’s only response was a small nod as he sipped his coffee, still steaming faintly.
“I don’t think,” Byron said, choosing his words with care, “that Nora will regret what’s happened between us, regardless of what the future brings. And it’s not just what I want and who I am, you know. It’s also a matter of what she wants and who she is.”
Cliff kept his coffee mug close to his mouth. “And right now you contradict what she thinks she wants and who she thinks she is.”
“In a nutshell, Brother,” Byron said, “that’s it.”
* * *
WHEN NORA CAME HOME from the store a couple of hours early to prepare for her Halloween party that evening, she found Byron in her bedroom checking out his glow-in-the-dark skeleton costume in her full-length mirror.
“Good Lord,” she said, “where did you find that?”
“That’s classified information.”
There was nothing like it at Gates. It was a black knit unitard—including feet—with a skeleton outlined on the fabric in white fluorescent paint. He looked positively eerie.
“I have white face paint, too,” he said.
“Gross.”
“There’s a hood and a mask, but they’re a bit much, don’t you think?”
He held them up. They were more than a bit much, so he received no argument from her. All day, she’d worked hard and diligently to keep in mind that she was a woman who didn’t focus exclusively on the moment. She always kept in mind the past and the future—where she’d been, where she was going. When she was with Byron Forrester, the past seemed unimportant and the future elusive, something that would take care of itself. But that was dangerous thinking, she’d told herself. And it wasn’t her.
But he was so damned sexy in his sleek skeleton costume.
Wisconsin Wedding (Welcome To Tyler, No. 3) Page 16
