Birthright

by Judith Arnold

  “She’s great.”

  “This town needs some women in it. Younger women. Don’t you think Aaron ought to think about settling down? Thirty-three years old. I think it’s time. Don’t you, Wally?”

  “Aaron doesn’t need any input from us, Evie,” Wally said tactfully.

  Aaron didn’t need this entire conversation. His mother was in no position to counsel him about settling down. Besides, he couldn’t think about women until he got over his despicable obsession with Lily Holden.

  Drummer gave Evie a pat on the shoulder. “You take care, now, Evie.”

  Aaron pocketed his change, nodded a farewell to his mother and followed Drummer out of the café. “She ought to join your wife’s bridge club,” he muttered. “She’s got more gossip inside her than all your wife’s friends combined.”

  “Has she got a theory about Jacob Steele missing his father’s funeral?”

  “Let’s see…He might be living on a beach estate in the Bahamas, or he might be dead.”

  “I like the first better than the second.” Coach shrugged, then extended his hand to Aaron. “I’ll give you a call. Let me know how the swimming pool works out. And for God’s sake, if you’ve got the money, pay yourself a salary.”

  “If I can, I will,” Aaron promised. “I have to see how fast I burn through the budget on other necessities for the program first.” Something entered his vision peripherally, a flicker, a glint, a sharp sudden stab: Lily Holden just across the street, a few yards down, entering the bookstore.

  He ordered himself to forget he’d seen her. But he couldn’t forget. Knowing she was there had the effect of spilling ink over his brain. Every other thought was obliterated, submerged beneath the spreading black. All he could remember was the cause of the spill. Lily.

  He gave a reflexive wave as Drummer headed down the sidewalk to his shiny new pickup truck. He stared without seeing as Drummer got in, revved the engine and pulled into the flow of traffic. Then, unthinkingly, Aaron crossed the street to the bookstore.

  She was somewhere inside, not visible from the sidewalk, but he’d seen her enter, so he knew she was there. And knowing that, he knew what he had to do: make a U-turn and walk away, keep walking until he’d reached his own car and then drive away, and keep driving.

  He went into the bookstore.

  Lily wasn’t in the front area of the store. He hadn’t seen her leave, but she might have wandered around to the apartment where the Steele sisters lived, which was connected to the store. Ruth and Rachel had owned the store forever, but in the two years since Aaron had moved back to town, Kate McCann seemed to be handling most of the day-to-day operations. And after losing their brother so recently, the sisters were probably even more dependent on Kate.

  She was at the counter, chatting with a plump middle-aged woman who looked familiar to Aaron. But then, everyone in town looked familiar to him, which might just mean he’d been here in Riverbend too long. When Kate caught his eye, he gave her a slight nod, then moved past the carpeted front area, a lounge where, he supposed, people could sit and read, although he couldn’t imagine pulling a brand-new book from a shelf, reading it and then putting it back on the shelf without paying for it.

  He wandered through the lounge to the shelves and pretended to browse. He was close to finishing the Grisham he’d bought a couple of weeks ago. But he had a new legal thriller, one recommended by Kate, sitting on his dresser, so he didn’t really want to buy anything. What he wanted was what he shouldn’t want: to see Lily, to talk to her. To torture himself by standing close to her and gazing into her magnificent eyes—and feeling like some kind of depraved creep for desiring her.

  He spotted her in the art section, leafing through a coffee-table book. Her back was to him, which gave him the opportunity to study her undetected. She had her hair pulled into a ponytail, held with a silver clip, and she wore neat khaki shorts and a white T-shirt made out of some kind of fancy fabric that created intriguing shadows as it draped from her shoulders to her narrow waist. Her bottom was small and round, and her legs were slim. He’d never seen them before; she’d always been wearing either jeans or a long skirt. Her thighs and calves were tan and taut, as if she worked out or played tennis. Her ankles were absurdly slender.

  He swallowed. Gorgeous legs, gorgeous figure and gorgeous golden hair. The urges she aroused in him were exactly the sort that would prompt a decent brother to slug any man who experienced them. Maybe he should slug himself.

  No. He should turn around and leave. That was what he should do.

  But she pivoted, and her smile at seeing him was so spontaneous, so obviously pleased, he couldn’t move. “Aaron!”

  “Hi.” He swallowed again, took a deep breath and moved toward her, as if he hadn’t been swamped with X-rated thoughts, as if she wasn’t his half sister, as if there was nothing wrong with their smiling at the sight of each other.

  “I decided I needed a new book of art prints. I’m looking for inspiration,” she told him. “I’m trying not to be safe.”

  He wasn’t sure what she was talking about, although he guessed it had something to do with her painting. “You don’t need a book for inspiration,” he said.

  “Not inspiration,” she conceded. “Courage.” She extended the book she’d been thumbing through. He took it, balanced its heavy weight in his palms and checked out the cover: Renaissance Masters. Then he opened it to the page she’d been admiring and scrutinized the print. The painting featured a pale naked woman with a pot belly and pudgy thighs, her hair fluttering in ribbons about her face and plump little angels flying bare-ass around her head.

  That would teach him to open his mouth. He’d made one comment about her watercolor rendering of a jug and pear, and now she was sharing great art with him as if she thought he was an expert. What the hell kind of painting was this? The woman was fat. The angels were fat. They’d all look a lot better with some clothing on them.

  They were the opposite of Lily.

  And that was an unforgivable thought.

  “Um…what is this?” he asked cautiously.

  “It’s a Titian. Have you ever heard of him?”

  “He was a Renaissance master,” Aaron guessed, flipping to the cover of the book.

  She took it back from him. “You need an education,” she said, grinning. “Maybe I ought to buy this for you.”

  “Don’t do me any favors.”

  “Then I’ll buy it for me. I haven’t bought an art book in years.” She flipped a page, sighed with apparent delight at another painting of a fat naked woman and closed the book with a thud. “Maybe I ought to audit an art course at the college this fall. What do you think?”

  He didn’t know what he thought, other than that her asking him his opinion about what she should do struck him as uncomfortably intimate. Of course she should audit an art course if it would make her happy. Then again, she might find an art course boring. She’d finished her education more than a decade ago. She could probably teach an art course at the local college as easily as take one.

  His silence tweaked her. “You think I’m a pest, that’s what you think.”

  “No.” He thought she was beautiful and elegant and her shirt looked like silk, and he’d bet all the money she donated to the summer program that her skin felt silkier than the shirt. He thought she was the worst temptation he’d ever faced. He thought talking with her on his deck last Friday night was one of the highlights of his life, even though she’d been in tears for most of the conversation.

  He thought he was in big trouble.

  “Are you free tomorrow night?” she asked.

  Oh, God. Very big trouble. “I don’t know,” he answered, a flat-out lie. He knew damned well he was free tomorrow, and he knew damned well he should tell her he wasn’t. But he was hedging, hoping, playing with fire.

  “I was thinking about having some friends over to celebrate the Fourth of July, after the parade. Nothing fancy.”

  She wanted him to come to
her house to celebrate the Fourth of July? With a bunch of her River Rat buddies? What’s wrong with this picture? he thought, suppressing a wry smile.

  “I don’t think so,” he started to say, but when she touched his forearm and gazed into his eyes, the words got stuck in his throat. He felt something akin to an electric shock searing through him, jolting his entire nervous system with sizzling heat.

  “I haven’t had any of my friends over to the house since I bought it,” she admitted, her eyes still locked with his. “I don’t even know if they’ll come.”

  “Of course they’ll come,” he said, his voice sounding tight to him. “Why wouldn’t they?”

  “Because…Just because.” Apparently that was all the explanation she could manage. She sighed, then tried again. “Because they don’t know about me.”

  And Aaron did. Aaron knew about her because she’d told him, and what he knew didn’t seem particularly troublesome. She’d had a bad marriage. Her husband was dead. Now she was back in town. End of story.

  “There’s no reason for your friends to stop being your friends, Lily,” he assured her. “Even if they knew, they’d still be your friends.”

  She didn’t appear entirely convinced, but she gave him a brave smile. “So I can count on you to be there?”

  Damn. No. She couldn’t count on him.

  “I’d like to think of you as my friend, Aaron,” she murmured so earnestly the current buzzing through his body jumped a few volts. “I know we weren’t friends when we were younger, but we’re friends now, aren’t we?”

  They were more than friends. And less. But like a man under a spell he nodded. “Sure.”

  “Then I’ll see you tomorrow night,” she said, releasing his arm and sending him such a sunny smile he couldn’t seem to muster a protest.

  Later he would regret this, he thought as she waltzed toward the counter to pay for Renaissance Masters. Later he would call himself seven kinds of a fool for agreeing to go to her house—if he’d actually agreed to go. He wasn’t sure he had.

  But he hadn’t said no. He hadn’t wanted to say no. Damn it, he wanted to be her friend.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WHATEVER HAD POSSESSED HER to tell Aaron she was inviting friends over to her house after the Fourth of July parade?

  Aaron had possessed her. She’d seen him and felt brave, the way she always seemed to feel brave when he was near. The art book might give her courage, but true courage—like Aaron’s, the courage to stand tall despite one’s background, one’s mistakes and transgressions, one’s insecurities and fears—didn’t come from a book. It came from character.

  So she would make a few calls and see who was available after the parade. She would have her friends over to her house—all her friends, not just the old ones but the new one, the special one. Aaron.

  She didn’t have a barbecue grill, but that was all right. Back in Cohasset, it would have been considered déclassé to host a barbecue on July Fourth. The parties she and Tyler used to attend at the club had been studiedly casual, with towers of shrimp and cold cracked crab, squab instead of chicken, polenta instead of corn on the cob, and exquisite blueberry-and-strawberry tarts with whipped cream—red, white and blue. Microbrewery beers rather than the usual brands—although, of course, Tyler had skipped those for more potent spirits. She’d always driven home after those parties. She’d insisted on that, despite Tyler’s voluble protests that he was perfectly capable of taking the wheel.

  Merely thinking about his protests made her shudder.

  All right. Tomorrow was a day to honor the courage of the nation’s founders. If they could declare their independence from England, surely she could find the nerve to declare her independence from the ghosts of her past, the sins of her marriage. Surely she could find comfort with her friends.

  RIVERBEND’S FOURTH OF JULY parade hadn’t changed much since Aaron’s childhood. As it had then, it still started with a caravan of fire engines, all blaring their sirens and deafening the throngs lining the sidewalks along the Courthouse Square. After the fire engines came the kids on bicycles, their handlebars draped with red, white and blue crepe-paper streamers. Then a fellow on stilts, dressed as Uncle Sam. A few clowns. Mayor Baden and her husband, waving to the crowds as they cruised along in a Chevy convertible. A Conestoga wagon. Floats, some advertising the downtown stores, others highlighting various civic organizations. The garden club’s float was covered with flowers. Killian’s float featured high schoolers posing like models on its flatbed. The local grange float held bales of hay with kids in overalls and straw hats perched on them, waving.

  Aaron could have sworn this year’s bales of hay were identical to the bales on the grange floats of his youth. He could have sworn the same guy was teetering on those stilts, portraying Uncle Sam. The only change between then and now, as far as he could tell, was that Abraham Steele wasn’t in this year’s parade, seated with the mayor in the convertible and waving to the onlookers.

  The only other change was inside himself. As a child, he’d always felt as if he hadn’t belonged at the parade. His classmates used to stand along the curb, waving small flags and diving for the hard candies that people tossed at them from the floats. Sometimes they’d climb onto the mailboxes and fire hydrants, or sometimes they’d swerve their own bicycles into the street and ride along with their friends on the decorated bikes. They’d watch in groups, in gangs, munching on cotton candy and hot dogs, laughing and jostling each other. They’d never asked Aaron to join them, and he never had.

  Sometimes he’d watch the parade with the other outsiders—the farm kids who’d traveled into town just for the parade, the kids who journeyed to school on long bus rides on the county roads. They were isolated the way he was, removed from the social world of Riverbend. They never objected if he wanted to stand with them as the parade passed by.

  Today, however, the moment he reached the square after parking his car on East Chestnut Street and walking the few blocks to the parade route, Mitch Sterling waved him over. He had Sam with him, and Sam gave him a shiny grin as he approached. The boy clutched a flag and wore a cap with the Indiana Pacers logo above the visor.

  “Hot, isn’t it?” Mitch observed, adjusting his own hat, which featured the logo of a tractor brand on it.

  “Sure is,” Aaron agreed. The sun beat down on his head, making him wish he’d worn a hat, too. Around him children pressed close, smelling like bubble gum and popcorn and fruit-flavored ices. Half a block down, across the street, he saw his mother seated on a lawn chair next to her landlord and his wife. She’d phoned Aaron that morning and told him she wouldn’t need a ride to the parade, which had been a relief because until he’d left his house he hadn’t been sure he would even come.

  He’d come not because he wanted to remember those long-ago parades when he’d woven among the crowds, feeling cold stares on his back, feeling the absence of a group to hang out with, but because he figured everyone at Lily’s house would be talking about the parade and he’d feel pretty stupid if he had nothing to contribute to the discussion. Attending Riverbend’s July Fourth parade was practically a civic obligation. Aaron wouldn’t have minded skipping that obligation, but he’d mind people knowing he’d skipped it.

  So he was here.

  Sam Sterling tugged his arm and pointed at the vendor across the street, his cart straining beneath a colorful load of flags, megaphones, bicycle horns, balloons, whistles and other generally useless trinkets. “Don’t buy him anything,” Mitch warned. “He doesn’t realize how obnoxious most of those noise-makers are.”

  Aaron smiled. He wondered whether Mitch was going to be at Lily’s house later. Then again, he still hadn’t decided whether he would be there.

  Yes, he had. She’d said she would see him tonight, and he hadn’t disagreed. So he would go. Even if seeing her made him crazy. Even if he’d be much better off staying as far away from her as he could.

  A chorus of wails tore through the afternoon heat, the fire-eng
ine caravan wending its way toward the Courthouse Square to launch the parade. Children squealed and scampered, their energy revved up by the noise. Parents leaned out over the curbs, as if they couldn’t wait to see the lead engine. As Aaron felt the summer sun bake him on the outside, a different kind of warmth filled him from inside, an unwelcome warmth, the warmth Lily had been stoking in him since the day she’d stepped out of the art classroom and into his consciousness so many years ago.

  He really shouldn’t go to her house that evening. But he knew he would.

  CHARLIE CALLAHAN was out on the back porch, seated in one of the wicker chairs with his feet propped on the railing, when Lily emerged from the kitchen with a chilled bottle of beer for him. “That was Grace on the phone,” she reported. “Her daughter ate too much junk food at the parade and has a tummy ache. So they’re not coming.”

  Charlie accepted the beer with a sigh. “Kids can really spoil plans,” he said. “So is it just you and me tonight?”

  “No,” she answered, although her gathering had shrunk drastically between conception and execution. Mitch had been unable to attend, since he’d already agreed to go with Sam to a barbecue at the home of one of Sam’s friends. Erin and Joe Wilson had other plans for the holiday. Lily shouldn’t have waited until the last minute to ask people over.

  But she couldn’t force herself to be disappointed that her Fourth-of-July gathering was going to consist of only three people—assuming Aaron didn’t also back out at the last minute. Two guests—one of her oldest friends, and her newest—were plenty for her first attempt at entertaining.

  “Who else is coming?”

  “Aaron Mazerik.”

  Charlie’s gaze swung to her and his brows shot skyward. “Aaron Mazerik?”

  “We’ve talked a few times. We’ve gotten friendly.” I can confide in him, she almost said. I trust him as much as I trust you. Maybe even more.

  “Really.”