“Who’s watching the puppies?” he asked the girls.
Belinda had called him earlier that spring to tell him that Griffin had purchased two Yorkshire terriers for their nieces with the hope that it would make them more responsible. He was introduced to the two puppies for the first time when he drove to Paoli to reunite with his brother-in-law.
Layla shared a look with her sister. “Nigel and Cecil are with the lady who owns their mother.”
Sabrina sniffled. “Aunt Lindy and Uncle Griff said we can’t have them until they get back from their honeymoon.”
Chandra registered her brother’s what’s-going-on look? “Mom and Dad’s subdivision has a no-dogs rule and Griffin’s mother and father are leaving for Martha’s Vineyard tomorrow.”
Myles stared at his youngest sister. Although she’d recently celebrated her thirtieth birthday she looked much younger. Chandra’s normally gold-brown complexion was several shades darker from the hot tropical sun. She’d spent more than two years in Central America as a Peace Corps volunteer. Chandra had taken a leave from her teaching position at a private elementary school to teach in Belize. She was also much thinner than she’d been in years. Either she wasn’t eating enough or she was working much too hard.
“They can stay here with me,” Myles volunteered, “that way you can come over and play with them.” Ear-piercing shrieks filled the air as Layla and Sabrina jumped up and down, hugging each other.
“Thank you, Uncle Myles,” they said in unison.
He tugged gently on the hair Layla had secured with an elastic band. “You’re very welcome. After you guys eat breakfast, we’ll drive over to Paoli to pick up your puppies.”
Chandra handed Sabrina the bag. “Please take this into the kitchen. I need to speak to your uncle for a few minutes.”
“Are you going to talk about grown folks business?” Layla asked.
“Yes, Miss Know-It-All,” Chandra teased.
“Do we have to wait for you before we can eat, Aunt Chandra?” Sabrina asked.
Chandra shook her head. “No. You can eat without me.” They sprinted toward the rear of the house. She realized it had to cost Griffin and Belinda a small fortune to feed growing teenagers.
Reaching for his sister’s hand, Myles led her out to the porch. “What’s up?”
Leaning against a thick column on the porch, Chandra folded her arms under her breasts. “Where did you disappear to last night?”
He narrowed his gaze. “It’s been a very long time since I’ve had to account for my whereabouts, little sister.”
Chandra stared at her bare toes in a pair of leather sandals. “That came out all wrong.”
“I’d say it did,” Myles drawled.
A slight frown furrowed her smooth forehead. “I’m only asking because you disappeared at the same time Zabrina did, and I thought maybe the two of you were together.”
“And what if we were, Chandra?”
“Were you?”
There came a beat of silence as brother and sister stared at each other. “Yes. She had too much to drink, and I took her to my room so she could sleep it off.”
Chandra closed her eyes while shaking her head. “Myles, you do realize what you’re doing?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Why are you starting up with her again? If she left you once, then there’s always the possibility that she’ll leave you again.”
“Who said I was starting up with her, Chandra? What did you expect me to do? There was no way I was going to let her get behind the wheel of a car when she was under the influence. Her son recently lost his father and grandfather. Did you expect me to stand by and let him lose his mother, too?”
“I can understand your concern, Myles. But Zabrina is not your responsibility.”
“She was last night.”
“What about this morning? What about tomorrow and the next day and the day after that?” Chandra stopped her rant long enough to study her brother’s impassive expression. “You’re still not over her, are you?”
Myles, swallowing the biting words poised on the tip of his tongue, struggled not to lose his temper. When Zabrina had ended their engagement all of the Eatons were upset with the news. But twenty-year-old Chandra had appeared almost indifferent to the calamity as everyone scrambled to call out-of-town friends and relatives to inform them the wedding had been canceled. Apparently it’d taken a decade for Chandra’s resentment of Zabrina to fester before coming to the surface.
“Let it go, Chandra.” His voice, although soft, was cutting and lethal.
“But, how can you—”
“I said to let it go,” he repeated. “What goes on between Brina and I has nothing to do with you.”
She rolled her eyes. “If that’s the way you want it.”
Myles shot her a warning glare. “That’s exactly how I want it.” Turning on his heel, he opened the door and went inside the house, leaving his sister staring in his wake.
Chandra exhaled a breath. She didn’t want to fight with her brother. As it was they rarely saw each other since she’d joined the Peace Corps, and she couldn’t remember the last time Myles had spoken so harshly to her.
Myles was the perfect older brother, because he’d always protected his younger sisters. Once Myles reached adolescence his father had told him that it’d become his responsibility to take care of the women in the house, and that included his mother. She’d believed it had something to do with their father juggling his schedule when he was on call at the hospital while running his medical practice. Dr. Eaton had become an anomaly as one of a few general practitioners to still make house calls.
Unfortunately there was no one to protect Myles from Zabrina Mixon’s treachery. Donna and Belinda were more vociferous in expressing their rage. But Chandra hadn’t said anything because it’d been the only time in her life when she’d seriously considered giving someone a serious beat-down. By the time she’d returned home from New York, where she’d been enrolled at Columbia University, her anger had subsided.
Myles wanted her to let it go, and she would. She only had another three days before she returned to Belize, and she didn’t want to spend the time she had left in the States arguing with her brother.
Leaning away from the column, she walked off the porch and into the house.
* * *
Zabrina sat on a cushioned rocker on her porch, watching as dusk descended over the landscape like someone slowly pulling down a shade. She’d prepared a light dinner, watched the evening news, then settled down to read. But restlessness, akin to an itch she couldn’t scratch, assailed her and she gave up trying to read to sit on the porch.
She hadn’t wanted to admit it, but she missed her son. She’d agreed to let Adam spend a month with his great-aunt and younger cousins. Zabrina had wrestled with her conscience when her cousin had asked Adam to spend time with her young children, and in the end had relented.
Her son was bright, curious and amazingly artistic, and she’d found it a daily struggle not to become an overly protective mother. Permitting Adam to spend time with his cousins was the first step.
Resting her bare feet on a cushioned footstool, she closed her eyes and inhaled the scent of blooming night flowers. The gentle peace she hadn’t felt in years swept over Zabrina. Her three-bedroom, two-bath house was much smaller than the twelve-bedroom mausoleum she’d lived in with Thomas, but it was hers and hers alone. Once she decided to sell the house that had been home to generations of Coopers she knew she’d taken the first step to empower herself.
Thomas’s attorney had encouraged her to hold on to the house and property for investment purposes. What he didn’t understand was that she hated living in a place that made her feel as if she were in a museum. She’d had someone from an auction house appraise the house’s co
ntents, and was shocked with the final accounting.
“What’s up, Zabrina?”
She opened her eyes and sat up straighter, hearing her closest neighbor’s greeting. The day she and Adam moved in, Rachel Copeland had come over with her eight-year-old daughter and eleven-year-old son to introduce her family and bring her a pan of lasagna. Rachel confided that she’d been praying for someone with a child to purchase the newly constructed home so her children would have someone to play with. Most of the homeowners in the two-or three-bedroom subdivision were either young childless couples or retired couples looking to downsize.
She and Rachel had one thing in common—both were widows. Rachel had lost her military career-officer husband in Afghanistan. Although Zabrina told her that she’d lost her husband in a drowning accident, she’d neglected to tell her that her late husband had been Pennsylvania’s junior senator. She’d managed to keep to herself while settling in. A bus came to pick up Adam to take him to a private school and brought him back in the afternoon.
Zabrina waved to her neighbor. “Not much, Rachel.”
Rachel walked up the porch steps and folded her tall, slender body down into a dark green wicker chair with a green-and-white-striped cushion. “The weather is really nice tonight.”
Zabrina smiled at her neighbor. Rachel’s pale blond hair was pulled off her thin face into a ponytail. She would’ve been thought of as plain if not for her large eyes that were more violet than blue. Her nose was straight, thin and her lower lip full enough to make her appear petulant. Rachel revealed that she’d been a catalogue model before she married her late husband.
“It’s perfect.” A ceiling fan stirred the warm gentle breeze.
Rachel let out an audible sigh. “I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of putting in a ceiling fan on my porch.”
“I almost regretted having it installed when I caught Adam poking at it with a tree branch. There were splinters everywhere. Once I made certain he was not injured, I grounded him for a week. And that meant no drawing.”
“No drawing or no television?”
“For my son it’s no drawing. He says he wants to be an animator when he grows up.”
Rachel’s pale eyebrows shot up. “He likes drawing that much?”
Zabrina nodded. “Yes. It’s become an obsession with him. I’ve tried to get him involved in other things, but he quickly loses interest.”
“My Maggie is a dance fanatic and Shane believes he’s a kung fu master. I spend all of my free time chauffeuring them between dance and karate classes. My mother came over earlier and took them home with her. Now that they’re on summer break I’ll have a little more time for myself.” Rachel sat up straighter. “What do you say we go out clubbing one night next week?”
Zabrina gave her an incredulous look. “You’re kidding, aren’t you?”
Rachel leaned forward. “Do I look like I’m kidding? My husband’s been dead three years and he had long talks about what he wanted for me if he didn’t come back alive. He told me that he didn’t want me to spend the rest of my life mourning for him, and now I realize what he was trying to tell me. I’m thirty-four years old and I’m lonely and horny. Even if I don’t sleep with a man I want one to hold me close and tell me things a woman wants and needs to hear.”
Zabrina smiled. “Well, if you put it that way, then I’ll go out with you.”
She wanted to tell her neighbor that she hadn’t been out clubbing but had gone to a wedding where she’d flirted with a man she had no intention of seeing again, and she’d drunk too much to forget another whom she’d never stopped loving.
Rachel’s smile was dazzling. “Thanks.” She pushed to her feet. “I don’t know about you, but I’d like to go for a walk.”
Zabrina swung her legs over the footstool and stood up. “Let me get my shoes and I’ll join you.”
* * *
Zabrina was glad Rachel had suggested going for a walk. It was just what she needed to shake off a case of doldrums, and she’d quickly discovered they weren’t the only ones who were out for a walk. Couples—young and some not so young—strolled along a lit path that bordered a bird sanctuary. There were joggers and others walking dogs.
She and Rachel talked about everything from recipes to the economy and their children. What they did not talk about were men, or the lack of men in their lives. Zabrina understood Rachel’s need to meet a man. After all, she’d had more than three years to mourn the death of her husband and the father of her children, while her own arranged marriage had ended less than a year ago.
Reaching for Rachel’s arm, Zabrina pulled her away from two frisky puppies heading for her. “Watch out.”
Rachel shook off her hand, bending down to touch the tiny bundles of fur. “Aren’t you two just too cute?”
Zabrina glanced up at the man pulling gently on the leashes of the yapping Yorkshire terriers. “Myles?”
Myles nodded. “Good evening, Brina.”
“What...what are you doing around here?”
Myles’s gaze swept over the woman who unknowingly still held a piece of his heart. “I’m staying at Belinda’s house.”
Her eyelids fluttering, Zabrina tried to process what Myles had just told her. “But, she told me she was moving to Paoli.” A small town north of Philadelphia, Paoli was a friendly close-knit community of fifty-four hundred that was family-oriented.
“She did, but with the housing market the way it is she’s decided to hold on to her house until the market improves.”
Zabrina hadn’t realized how fast her heart was beating until she felt the rapid pulse in her lip. Myles was going to spend the summer in a house within walking distance of her own. Each time she walked or drove along the road near the bird sanctuary she knew she would always look for a glimpse of Myles Eaton.
She pointed to the puppies that were now yapping at Rachel. “Do they belong to you?”
“No! Do I look like the lap-dog type?”
“Easy, Myles,” Zabrina said, biting back a smile. She knew she’d hit a raw nerve because she was aware that he liked big dogs.
“They belong to my nieces.”
She hunkered down, rubbing one of the pups behind the ears. “You are so cute. What’s your name, baby?”
Myles stared at Zabrina kneeling on the ground in front of him, curbing the urge to run his fingers through her hair. He recalled the number of times he’d wakened to find her long hair spread over the pillow beside his. Those were days and nights he’d believed would never end.
“I think that one is Cecil, and the other is Nigel.”
Zabrina came to her feet. “They are adorable. Please excuse me, but I’m forgetting my manners. Myles, this is my neighbor Rachel Copeland. Rachel, Myles Eaton.”
Rachel offered Myles her hand. “It’s very nice meeting you. How long have you and Zabrina known each other?”
Myles stared at Zabrina. “We grew up together.”
“Zabrina and I are going clubbing in a few days. Would you like to come with us?” Rachel asked. She wasn’t smiling, but grinning. “You can bring your wife or girlfriend along if you want.”
“Rachel!”
Zabrina couldn’t understand what had gotten into her neighbor. First she’d talked about being horny, and now she’d invited a stranger to go out with them, as well as Myles’s wife or girlfriend, though Zabrina doubted he had one. If he’d had a wife there was no doubt she would’ve come with him to her sister-in-law’s wedding, and if there was a serious girlfriend, then she, too, would’ve attended the wedding.
Rachel turned and glared at Zabrina in disbelief. It was apparent Myles and Zabrina hadn’t seen each other in a while or else she would’ve known he lived within walking distance of their subdivision. And inviting him to go out with them, even if he was involved with someone, would be the perfec
t cover for them not to look like two desperate women trolling clubs to pick up men.
“It’s obvious you and Myles haven’t seen each other in a while, so I thought inviting him along would give you two the opportunity to reminisce.”
Myles smiled when Zabrina stared at the ground. He knew she was uneasy about interacting with him, because what they’d shared the night before wasn’t easily forgotten.
“Rachel’s right,” he said quietly. “Hanging out together will allow us to talk about old times. Where and when are you going?”
Rachel spoke first. “We’re not certain. But it will be this week.” She pulled a tiny cell phone from the pocket of her shorts. “Give me your number and I’ll call and let you know.”
Myles noticed the narrow gold band on the ring finger of the chatty blonde’s right hand. His gaze shifted to Zabrina’s bare fingers, then her wide-eyed stare. “I have Zabrina’s numbers,” he said, after a long pause.
Rachel clapped her hands. “That’s great! You can call her and she’ll let you know what’s up after we decide on a place...unless you can recommend one.”
“I’ll let Brina know.” Myles didn’t want to commit until he spoke to a former high-school classmate. Hugh Ormond had changed careers, going from investment banker to chef and eventually opening an upscale restaurant that featured dining and dancing a block from Broad Street, affectionately known to Philadelphians as Avenue of the Arts.
Rachel extended her hand for the second time. “Again, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Myles.”
He smiled the sexy smile that never failed to make a woman take pause. “The pleasure is all mine, Rachel.”
Zabrina’s neighbor had provided him with the perfect excuse to see her again.
“I guess we’ll see you soon,” Rachel crooned.
Forever an Eaton: Bittersweet LoveSweet Deception Page 24
