“Don’t forget Lily,” Mya reminded him. She gave him a long, penetrating stare. “You don’t like it, do you, when I mention Sammie’s name?”
“Why would you say that?”
“Because you get a little frown between your eyes whenever I talk about her.”
“I didn’t realize that,” he admitted. “Maybe it’s because whenever you mention her name, I’m reminded that she was your sister.”
Mya nodded. “But I am not my sister. Sammie was complex and almost impossible to figure out but I’d learned to accept and love her in spite of her peculiar idiosyncrasies.”
“It would be a sad world if we all looked alike and thought alike.”
“You’re so right, love. Now let me get up so I can get ready for bed.”
“Where’s my night-night kiss?”
Her lips found their way to his, shivering slightly as the contact sent currents of desire racing through her. Giles returned the kiss, increasing the pressure until her lips parted; his tongue searched the recesses of her mouth until she moaned as if in pain. Her tongue touched and dueled with his and ignited a fire that threatened to consume her mind and body.
“Giles,” she moaned, the sound coming from somewhere she didn’t know existed.
“I know, baby,” he whispered against her trembling lips. He rolled off her body and stood at the side of the bed, staring at her heaving breasts. “Good night, my sweet.”
Mya stared up at the ceiling and heard rather than saw him leave the bedroom as he closed the door behind him. Groaning, she turned over on her belly and pounded the mattress. Giles had only kissed her and now she was like a cat in heat. She had changed her mind about them making love because she knew she could not hold off not allowing Giles to make love to her until they were engaged, because she wanted him to want her for herself as if he’d never met Sammie or fathered Lily.
And it wasn’t for the first time that she blamed herself for not having as much as experience with the opposite sex as her sister. She’d dated a few boys in high school, but none reached the point where they were intimate. It was in her second year in college that she had her first serious relationship with an adjunct lecturer from a nearby college. He was older, divorced and responsible for awakening her dormant sexuality. They slept together for two years until he secured another position out of the state. It was another three years before she dated again. But it lasted less than four months before she called it quits.
After she returned to Wickham Falls and was appointed to teach at the college, she finally accepted Malcom Tate’s invitation to have dinner with him. She had been reluctant because they worked together. She enjoyed his company because he was closer to her age and they had a lot in common. The exception was temperament. She was composed while he was volatile and that did not bode well for a future together.
Mya closed her eyes and willed her mind blank. So much had happened in the past year that she needed a daily journal to record the events: she’d become an aunt, buried her sister and become a mother, and now she had committed to share her life and future with her daughter’s father. The million-dollar question was: what’s next? She wasn’t in love with Giles but with time she knew she would come to love him.
She opened her eyes and slipped off the bed. She had to get up and shower before falling asleep in her clothes.
* * *
Mya woke the same time as she did every morning. Her internal clock indicated it was time for her to get up. She completed her ablution in record time because she wanted to be up and dressed before Lily woke.
She made her way down the staircase to the wing of the house with the master bedroom. The door was closed. When Giles mentioned that his parents had installed a nursery in their home, she did not think it would be within their bedroom. Mya knew she would have to wait to see Lily.
Her sock-covered feet were silent on the gleaming parquet floor when she walked down a wide hallway and peered into exquisitely furnished rooms. Paintings, wall hangings and fragile vases validated Giles’s claim that his mother had earned a degree in art history. The spaces were reminiscent of rooms in museums with priceless objets d’art. She lingered outside one room with tables and curio cabinets filled with obelisks and sculptures and carvings of Egyptian cats, jackals and crocodiles. She walked down a hallway with framed prints of impressionists, cubists and modern artists and turned into a large gourmet kitchen.
Mya swallowed a gasp of surprise when she saw Pat and Giles sitting together in a breakfast nook. She did not know why, but she hadn’t expected them to be up so early. It was only 5:45 a.m. Giles wore a white T-shirt and jeans, while his father was dressed for work. She could not pull her eyes away from Giles’s muscular upper body. His clothes had concealed a man in his prime and in peak conditioning.
“Good morning,” Mya said cheerfully.
Giles jumped up. Apparently she had startled him. “Good morning.” He approached her as she entered the kitchen. He cupped the back of her head and brushed a kiss over her parted lips.
Easing back, she nodded to Pat. “Good morning, Grandpa.”
Pat lifted his cup of coffee in acknowledgment. “Good morning. You’re quite the early bird.”
“I get up early to take care of Lily.”
“You don’t have to do that with Mandy hovering over her like a mother hen.” He patted the bench seat next to him. “Come sit down. Giles, please make her a cup of coffee. I was talking to Giles about Mandy and I taking Lily to the Bronx Zoo today, and he said I’d have to ask you. I plan to go into the office this morning for a couple of hours, then come back and pick up Mandy and the baby. We keep a stroller, car seat and a baby carrier on hand, so transporting her shouldn’t be a problem. Mandy says she’s going to make her food and store it in a bag that will keep it warm, along with bottles of milk and water.”
“If you want my permission, then you have it.” Taking Lily to the zoo was a way for them to bond with her. “What do you have planned for tomorrow?”
Pat flashed a sheepish grin. “We were talking about possibly driving up to Boston to introduce Lily to Mandy’s brother and sisters. I have a feeling she wants to show her off,” he said under his breath. “Skye’s scheduled to arrive today, so we’ll wait and see if she wants to come with us.”
“If you go to Boston, Dad, then that’s not going to be a day trip,” Giles said as he walked to the breakfast nook carrying a mug of steaming hot coffee. He set the mug on the table. “Coffee with a splash of milk and one sugar for the pretty lady.”
“That’s what I told your mother. But she says if we hire a driver, then we can do it in a day.”
Mya stared at the liquid in the mug. Lily had become somewhat of a novelty to the Wainwrights and she realized they wanted to spend as much time with her before she went back to Wickham Falls. She ignored the anxiety tightening the muscles in her stomach when she thought of not seeing her baby for more than twenty-four hours.
“You can keep her overnight if you want.”
Pat’s face lit up like the rays of the rising sun. “Bless you, my child.”
Giles sat down next to Mya and combed his fingers through her unbound hair. “What do you want to do today?”
She shivered slightly from his light touch when his finger traced the outline of her ear. “Other than a little shopping, I’m open to whatever you want.”
“I’d like to take you into the office to meet Jocelyn. After that, you can shop until you drop.”
“Who’s shopping?” Amanda asked. Bending slightly, she placed Lily on the floor and the little girl crawled over to Mya.
“I am.” Mya scooped Lily off the floor. Amanda had given Lily a bath, combed her hair and secured a lock of hair atop her head with a narrow white ribbon. “Good morning. Your grandma made you look so pretty with that ribbon in your hair.”
Amanda smiled. “You don’t know how
long I’ve waited to put a ribbon in a little girl’s hair.”
Giles stood up and kissed his mother. “Something tells me you’re partial to girls.”
Pinpoints of color suffused her fair complexion. “That’s not true. I love my sons as much as I love my daughter, but it’s different when it comes to dressing little girls.”
Giles kissed her again. “Just teasing. Do you want coffee?”
“Yes, please.” Amanda sat down next to her husband. “Do you want to eat breakfast here or do you plan to grab something at the office?”
“If it won’t be any trouble, I’d like to eat here.”
Amanda patted the shoulder of his crisp white shirt. “Of course it’s not any trouble.”
Mya waited until Giles brought his mother’s coffee before handing off Lily to him. “I’m going to help your mother fix breakfast.”
Amanda appeared surprised by her offer when she said, “You really don’t have to help me.”
“But I want to. I’m not used to sitting around doing absolutely nothing.”
“That’s because you don’t know how to relax,” Giles interjected.
“That’s because mothers aren’t allowed to relax,” Amanda countered. She took a sip of coffee and stared at Mya over the rim. “Because you’ve pierced Lily’s ears, I have a set of earrings I’d like to give you for her. And once she turns sixteen, she’ll inherit the pearls and matching earrings my grandmother gave me for my sixteenth birthday.”
Mya was slightly taken aback with the generous offer. She’d noticed the magnificent strand of South Sea pearls and matching studs Amanda wore the night before. “Don’t you want to give the pearls to your daughter?”
Amanda slowly shook her head. “There’s a little wicked tale attached to the baubles. My grandfather died suddenly, leaving my young and attractive grandmother a very eligible widow. After a respectable period of mourning, men came calling on her. She went out with some and rejected a number of others. What she suspected was that most were after her money. So she decided to test them. In other words, put your money where your mouth is. She told each of them that her birthday was coming up and she wanted jewelry as a gift. Some gave her earrings and others broaches. There was one gentleman in particular who’d asked her father what was her favorite jewel. He told him pearls. And not the ordinary cultured pearls but the golden South Sea variety.
“The potential suitor paid someone to sail to Tahiti and bring him back enough thirteen millimeter pearls for a necklace and earrings. It took nearly four months but when he presented my grandmother with the pearls, she decided he was the one. They were married a year later and she gave him six children—all boys. I was her only granddaughter, so I inherited all of her jewelry. I’ve put aside some for Skye, and the rest I was saving for my granddaughter.”
Mya knew Amanda loved talking about her family and there was no doubt she had many, many more stories to tell. “Lily’s a very lucky little girl.”
“After breakfast, we’ll go through the jewelry and you can pick out what else you want for Lily.”
Pat cleared his throat. “I hope you save some for Patrick because he and Bethany may change their minds and have another baby. And it could be a girl.”
Amanda shook her head. “That’s not happening because Bethany told me she’s done having children. I didn’t press her about it, so I’m assuming she’s either having or had a procedure so she wouldn’t get pregnant again.”
Sitting in the kitchen and talking was something Mya missed with her family. Her father would come home and vent about his workmen or customers who changed their minds after he’d designed a table or a headboard. Then it was her mother who updated everyone with news from home about a relative who’d been caught cheating on his wife or a wife cheating on her husband. Mya never thought of it as malicious gossip but idle chatter because there wasn’t anything else to talk about. Occasionally they would discuss politics and the fact the country was going to hell in a handbasket as it had over the past two hundred years. What Graham and Veronica sought to do was shield their daughters from local gossip, but as they got older what they heard from their classmates they never repeated to their parents. Their peers whispered about girls who’d slept with every boy on the football team, and several underage girls who’d sought to hide their relationships with older men, and then there were the boys and girls who were gay—rather than come out they waited until graduation to leave Wickham Falls to escape the taunts and harassment to live openly with a same-sex partner.
And nothing had changed when Sammie came back to the Falls to live and people began noticing that she was putting on weight. Once her condition was evident, folks wanted to know who the father was. Both she and Sammie were mute because her sister wasn’t the first single mother in Wickham Falls and she definitely would not be the last.
Mya joined Amanda at the cooking island as they selected the items needed to make breakfast for their men.
Chapter Nine
Mya stared at the emerald-cut ruby ring surrounded by a double halo of flawless blue-white diamonds set in twenty-four carat gold on her left hand. Amanda had insisted she wear it because the blood-red stone was the perfect match for her golden skin tones.
“I can’t take it.”
“You can and you will,” Amanda insisted. “That ring belonged to my mother but she hardly ever wore it because she didn’t like red. And the gold made her pale skin look washed-out.”
“It’s magnificent.”
Amanda smiled. “I agree.” She pressed her palms together. “Now let’s see what else is in this so-called treasure trove I can give away.”
Mya was in awe when Amanda handed her a pair of diamond earrings for Lily. They totaled a carat, set in platinum and the accompanying appraisal certified they were flawless.
“I think Lily and I are good for now,” she said when Amanda selected a diamond bracelet. “Why don’t you wait until she’s older when she can really appreciate the sentimentality. Then she can say Grandma gave me this ring for my tenth birthday or this necklace for my high school graduation.”
Amanda nodded. “You’re right.”
Mya hugged the older woman. “I’ll always remember today because of the ring.”
“So will I, because it is the day I got my second daughter.” She pulled back. “I get on Pat about interfering in his kids business only because I don’t want him to make the same mistake I did when I tried matching Giles up with my best friend’s daughter. He punished me in the most severe way possible when he disappeared for years. No one in the family knew where he was, and there was a point when I didn’t know whether he was dead or alive. I had no idea he’d joined the military until he called to let me know he was being deployed. It was that day I swore I would never meddle in my children’s lives again. Pat and I are not happy with the man Skye has chosen to live with, but I refused to say anything to her. When she’s had enough, she’ll leave him. There is one thing I know about the Wainwrights. They are survivors.”
Amanda was right. Sammie had died so that Lily would survive. And not only was Lily a survivor but Mya knew she was also a survivor. She watched Amanda lock the box and return it to a wall safe behind a framed Rembrandt reproduction.
“Art students would love your home.”
“You’re probably right. I had a photographer approach me with an offer to photograph the house for a slick architectural magazine but I turned him down. Some of the pieces are originals and many are copies, and I don’t want to invite thieves who use the most devious ways to break into someone’s property. It was only after I became an empty nester that I decided to turn the house into somewhat of a museum. Whenever the grandkids come over, I simply close the doors to the rooms with the art. I’ve catalogued and have every piece appraised, and I’ve indicated in my will who gets what. I will not have my children fighting one another over material items.”<
br />
Mya wanted to tell Lily’s grandmother that she and Sammie hadn’t had that problem. Their parents had divided everything they owned evenly. Amanda was candid when she said there had been a time when she’d had a live-in housekeeper, but now she valued her privacy, and the housekeeper only came in two days a week and whenever she hosted a get-together.
Mya nearly doubled over in laughter when she saw Lily crawling along the carpeted hallway to get away from Giles, who was on all fours crawling after her. Piercing screams rent the air as Giles pounced on Lily and pretended to gobble her up. Pressing her back against the wall, Mya moved past them and took the staircase to her bedroom.
Mya emerged from the en suite bath after brushing her teeth to find Giles sitting on a chair bouncing Lily on his knees. “You better be careful juggling her like that before she barfs on you.”
Giles lifted several strands from Lily’s moist forehead. “That’s all right. My princess can do anything she wants.” He glanced up, his gaze lingering on her hand. “Where did you get that ring?”
She held out her hand, fingers outstretched. “Your mother gave it to me. She said it belonged to your grandmother.”
Giles dropped a kiss on the back of her hand. “It’s beautiful.”
“I agree.”
“She also gave me a pair of diamond earrings for Lily, but she won’t be able to wear them until she’s older.”
“Mom loves giving gifts. You’ll discover that when we come back for Christmas.”
Mya knelt near the chair, her eyes meeting Giles’s. “Are you going to miss not living in New York?”
Giles pressed his forehead to Mya’s. “What I’d miss is not being with you and Lily. I could live anywhere as long as we’re together. Dad and I had a very candid talk earlier this morning about what it means to be a father. His father was a workaholic and Dad followed in his footsteps. I hadn’t realized how much I resented my father not being around for dinner until I shared this morning’s breakfast with you and Lily. Night after night, I’d watch my mother hold back tears when she stared at the empty chair at the opposite end of the table waiting for my father because he was always running very late. One night, Patrick had had enough when he raised his voice to Mom and told her that she was deluding herself if she expected her husband to share dinner with his family. That must have been a wake-up call for her because she never waited for him again.”
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