“It’s not that—it’s a great offer, an amazing offer. Neither of us would take back the agreement to sell. But now we each have to figure out what to do next.” Suz made it sound like a chore.
Annette felt Steve’s gaze but didn’t return it. “But we can’t wait to explore the possibilities,” she said brightly.
Suz pinned on a dutiful smile. “Endless possibilities. Which reminds me, now that selling Every Detail is wrapping up, the town house is next.” She turned to Annette and almost did a double take. “What? You hadn’t thought about selling?”
“Naturally, I’ve thought about it,” she lied.
Sell the town house? She would be homeless. No, that was ridiculous. She would have money to buy something—where?—and, besides, as long as Max had a roof overhead, she would not be homeless. Of course that roof was in Tobias….
“I thought, without the business,” Suz said, “I mean, there’s no reason for either of us to be tied to Glen Ellyn or the Chicago area, and with you up here—”
“Temporarily.” She got the word in fast, because Steve was opening his mouth.
“Doesn’t have to be. In fact this could be exactly the sort of great opportunity you’re both looking for.” Annette couldn’t pin anything on Steve’s tone but would swear she’d picked up a rumble of triumph. “You should both look around Tobias—lots of opportunities here. We’re growing, but not too fast.”
“Yeah?” Suz’s eyes brightened. “Looks like you’ve redeveloped along the lakefront. Nice job. You’ve kept the genuineness of the town while adding appeal.”
“Thanks.” He gave her the full Steve Corbett smile. “It’s attracting summer folks who come for the lake and resort. But the other seasons are too quiet. And some haven’t benefited from the upswing in business, like retired folks on fixed incomes. They’re stretching their pensions by selling things like quilts and knitting. We need to include them. We’re looking for ideas—the sort of ideas I bet a pair of entrepreneurs like you could provide.”
“We’ll keep that in mind.”
Annette glared at Suz for including her, but spoke with forced cheer. “If we’re going to get these cookies made before you leave, we better get going.”
“Didn’t mean to keep you,” Steve said, then added to Suz, “but if you feel the urge to discuss the ins and outs of selective redevelopment, give me a call.”
Suz laughed and waved as they said goodbyes. Clearly in danger of bursting, she restrained herself until they were in the car.
“He’s very attractive. Very attractive.”
“Suz, subtlety does not suit you. Come out and say it.”
“Remember I said on the phone that you’re dealing with different emotions? Well, I want to add to that—you’re also dealing with the reality of Steve Corbett. Maybe you’d dealt with some of your emotions about him and what happened, but it’s different dealing with a flesh-and-blood man. Very nice flesh, by the way, and don’t try to tell me you haven’t noticed and felt that.”
“How pathetic would that be? Still wanting a guy seven years later who got someone else pregnant while he was engaged to me?”
Suz didn’t fall for that nonanswer. “About as pathetic as a guy whose bride walked out during the wedding still wanting her seven years later.”
“I had darn good reason to walk out—the best reason. No one could…” Anger had carried her through the first half of her response before the rest of what Suz said sank in. “You think he…”
“Uh-huh, I think he. As if you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t.” She backed the car out of the parking spot. Then she admitted, “I wondered. But, really, Suz, how could you… You only saw him for a few minutes.”
“Didn’t Smokey the Bear say something about it only taking a few minutes to start a forest fire? That grocery story will be smoldering for weeks.”
She went right to the crux as she drove through town. “You think I’m falling for him again?”
“I don’t know, but that’s not what worries me.”
“Then what worries you?”
She caught Suz’s quizzical look. “Have you seen the way he looks at you? And when you touched him, just that little brush on his hand…oh, my.”
Heat spread through Annette. It started from the vicinity of her heart. Had she been totally unaware of the tenor of Steve’s manner toward her until Suz mentioned it? Or had she been pretending not to be aware so she didn’t have to deal with how it made her feel? How good it made her feel.
“That’s what worries me,” Suz said.
“You needn’t worry. I’m no longer some girl who can’t help herself from falling for the guy. I am not going to fall for him.”
Suz shook her head. “You can guard yourself against falling for him, and I don’t doubt that you would keep any such feelings under wraps. But for the first time since I met you, I don’t think you can guard yourself against what someone else feels for you. What are you going to do about Steve falling for you again? Or still? That’s something I don’t think you have any defense against.”
“That’s presuming you’re right he’s, um, expressing a preference for me.”
Suz rolled her eyes.
“Okay, okay, but it still doesn’t mean it’s what he really feels. I mean, he could be pretending to show interest to get a response so he could feel vindicated.”
“Vindicated?”
Clear of town, they started around the lake. “As you said, I left him at the altar, and even though I had a reason he can’t fault me for, his masculine ego might have taken a hit.”
“I think it’s a fair assumption that his ego and other parts took a hit when you walked out of your wedding.”
Annette ignored that. “It would be human nature to try to get me to respond, to show I was still attracted to him. You know? He would feel vindicated—that the woman who left him at the altar still wanted him. That’s probably what’s going on.” She eased her hands on the steering wheel, satisfied.
“Sometimes you think too much,” Suz said. “Let me ask you one last question. Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Still want him?”
“Don’t be absurd.” She laughed, though her hands tightened on the wheel again. “What I want are chocolate chip cookies…or maybe the dough.”
Chapter Seven
If Annette had been asked before she answered the back door Sunday afternoon whether she had any expectations of who might be on the other side, she would have said no. But when she saw Steve and Nell Corbett standing outside the storm door, she knew she must have had some expectations, because this pair was way outside of them.
“Are you going to invite us in?”
Steve’s question snapped her out of a mini trance. She opened the door, smiling at Nell.
“We come bearing gifts,” Steve said, indicating two shopping bags he held as well as a small one Nell carried. “Better put that down while you take your boots off, Nell.”
“Not gifts,” Nell objected. She sat on the floor and yanked off one rubber boot. “Food. We brought food.”
“Food can be a gift, Nell.”
Annette bent down, setting the first boot upright. “Do you need help?”
Nell shook her head. “I can do it.” But her attention remained on her father, who was wiping his shoes. “I don’t want any of my presents to be food. Not Christmas and not my birthday.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. But this food is for Max and Annette.”
Nell’s shoe came off with the second boot, but she put it on, closed its Velcro fastener and popped up before Annette could help. “Where’s Mr. Max?”
“He’s in the other room.” Nell scooted to the living room. Annette turned toward Steve, who was putting the bags on the kitchen counter. “It’s kind of you, but really, we don’t need—”
“Don’t get all stiff. It’s neighborliness, not charity. Besides, I’m just an emissary. Muriel Henderson and Miriam Jenkins and some of the o
thers sent these things.”
“We brought brownies,” Nell announced as she bounced into the room with Max following more slowly. While the men said hello, she said to Annette, with the air of someone determined to be straight with the world, “We bought them. They’re not as good as Mrs. Grier’s but they’re good. And I thought Mr. Max should have brownies.”
“She and your friend Suz apparently belong to the same school of health care,” Steve murmured.
“What have you got there?” Max asked.
Steve delved into one bag. “Looks like Polly Bernard’s brats casserole. And I suspect this is Miriam’s potato surprise.”
“What’s the surprise?” Nell asked, eyeing the plastic container.
“Four kinds of cheese.” Until she said it Annette would have sworn she had entirely forgotten this particular culinary staple of any Tobias gathering. She remembered eating it for days after her mother’s funeral. She could never see it without remembering the sour taste of charity it had left in her mouth.
To hide her suddenly moist eyes, she reached into the second bag and pulled out a covered rectangular pan. “But… This is the dish.” She blinked her eyes dry as Max and Steve looked at her. “The dish that had the lasagna in it that I cooked the first night. I washed it and then I couldn’t find it later.”
“I gave it to Lenny to give back to Muriel,” Max said.
“And she filled it with more lasagna,” Steve said, catching her gaze and holding it. “The woman passes out the way some people sneeze, but she can make a mean lasagna. And she was concerned about Max.”
Annette turned, busying herself with putting away the food. She’d received his message loud and clear. Neighborliness, not charity.
Was that true? Or was it the difference between a man brought up in a home where he never lacked for anything and a woman brought up in a home where the necessities were scarce enough to feel like luxuries?
“Mr. Max knows how to use a hammer, so he could teach me.” Nell’s voice brought Annette’s attention to the discussion. “And then I wouldn’t—” Nell looked to Annette. “Pul—uh, pulverize anything.”
Annette nodded, then matched the girl’s triumphant smile.
“Max doesn’t want to do that with his hurt wrist, Nell,” Steve said.
“He’s got another one that’s not hurt.” She turned to Max. “Don’t you? And you could use that one to show me how.”
“Nell—”
But Max had already crumbled. “Sure. I could show you.”
“Nell, you can’t—”
“It’s okay, Steve,” Max said, gesturing for Nell to precede him toward his workshop. He stopped in the doorway. “I hope you’re grooming this kid for power because I don’t think she’s cut out for being a foot soldier.”
“Please, don’t mention the military to her,” Steve said. “She already plans to be president of several countries. And the fact that she’s talking serial instead of simultaneous power should be a great relief.”
“Because she won’t try to unite several countries?”
“Because she doesn’t plan on being dictator of the world.”
“C’mon, Mr. Max!” Nell called, apparently already in the workshop.
“Yes, ma’am.” He grinned—the most genuine grin Annette had seen from him all week—then disappeared from view.
Still looking toward the doorway, Steve said, “Now, how about a brownie? That’ll teach Nell to railroad Max, she’ll miss out on the brownies.”
Annette opened the bakery box and gave him a brownie on a salad plate, then took one for herself. They sat across from each other at the kitchen table. They used to sit at right angles—it had made it easier to touch under the table.
“Steve, there’s something I want to talk to you about.” The way he stilled had her jumping into what she’d intended to say to remove any confusion. “About Miss Trudi. Actually, about Bliss House. Something has to be done. It looks terrible, and it could be dangerous.”
He sighed. “Get in line. Half the callers to the office say the same thing.”
“Well, then the town could get together and—”
He was shaking his head. “Miss Trudi likes charity about as much as you do. Besides, passing the hat for a Corbett isn’t likely to sit well with a lot of people. In case you haven’t noticed you’re not alone in your opinion of the Corbetts.”
“The town likes you.”
“I’m doing a good job,” he said, making a clear-eyed assessment, not bragging. “That’s an even exchange—I work, and they pay me. But even the benefit of cleaning up an eyesore isn’t likely to sway many to dig deep to fix Bliss House. Plus Miss Trudi’s eccentricities aren’t endearing to some people—they just think she’s strange. Hey, nobody ever said Tobias was a center of advanced thinking, especially not from the country club set. People like Jason Remtree and his pals.”
“Including your mother.”
“Including my mother. She has the deepest pockets in town, but she’s not going to put money into Bliss House so Miss Trudi can keep living there when she insists Miss Trudi should be in a retirement home if not a nursing home—”
“Oh, no! She’d hate that. That’s awful. You can’t—”
“Did I say I agreed with my mother? She also believes the property should be converted to more practical use.”
“In other words, profitable.”
“Absolutely. That’s another reason Remtree and his ilk won’t go for it—they’re the ones who would stand to turn a profit if they can get Miss Trudi out.”
“That’s awful! How can they do that to a wonderful old woman?”
“It’s ingrained in them to believe turning that block into high rises or a shopping mall or some other moneymaking venture is the right thing to do. Then they grab on to any evidence that backs their conclusion. Pretty soon they’ve got themselves thinking they’re doing what’s right for Miss Trudi.”
She was looking at him, the clean, spare planes of his face. The beginnings of lines not only at the corners of his eyes and mouth, but across his forehead. Lines of concentration…and worry. His job must involve a lot of worry. Trying to anticipate problems in order to prevent them. Trying to fix the ones no one anticipated. Looking out for his town and its people.
“How did you escape thinking that way?” Where was that darned string she needed to pull her words back in? She could swear she’d spoken the words before she’d thought them, and that left nothing to do but try to explain…or possibly to drown the first words in the ones that followed. “I mean, people do that, whatever their mindset, they look for evidence to prove what they already think—but mostly what people believe is what they were raised to believe, and that should have put you in the high rises and shopping mall camp. To be raised with that mindset and yet to see a different view…”
He covered her hand. The warm weight of his palm stopped her words.
“It’s nice to know you think I escaped. But if it hadn’t been for knowing you, I probably would have become a lawyer, and even though I had great plans to help people it would have been a lot easier to slide into politics and all the rest that’s expected of Corbetts.”
She slid her hand from under his, acknowledging the sudden coolness as a fact of physics, nothing more. “I was gone when you switched to getting your graduate degree in public administration.”
“True.” He curled his hand as if holding a cup. “So maybe it was heredity.”
“Right. Like Lana isn’t more Corbett than if she’d been born to the family.”
He paused so long she thought he wasn’t going to respond. She opened her mouth to return to the topic of Bliss House, but he spoke again.
“Try the other side of my family tree.”
“Ambrose?” She had only vague memories of seeing Ambrose Corbett around town. From what Steve and others said, he was a decent man, though stiff and not at all demonstrative. In that way, a Corbett through and through. “That doesn’t make—”
> And then she looked into his eyes and saw exactly the sense it made.
“Ambrose Corbett wasn’t my father,” he said without emotion.
“But… How could you know? Your mother—”
His laughter was so raw her throat hurt in sympathy. “Did my mother tell me? Hell, no.”
“Then how did you find out? When… Oh, Steve, are you sure?”
“I’m sure. Zach said something before he took off that started me digging.”
“Zach knew?” That made even less sense. Zach had always seemed to be on the outside of the family, so how could he?
“I suspect Mother let something slip. They had some royal battles the last month or two before he left. I’ve never heard her lose control except with him. He didn’t say anything outright to me. But what he did say…it fit with things I’d wondered about most of my life. So I started digging. Right before our wedding I found proof my parents were married a year later than they’d said they were—after I’d been born.”
“Before our wedding,” she murmured.
Either he didn’t hear or he pretended not to. “Over the next couple years I kept digging. My birth certificate had been altered. The original had father unknown. I tracked down an old lawyer Father—Ambrose—had used in Milwaukee. He was in a hospital and glad to have someone to talk to. He told me a lot of things I hadn’t known, all the way back to Tobias Corbett. Then he came down to Ambrose and Lana. He clearly thought I knew the whole story, and he let it slip that Ambrose had legally adopted me.”
His mouth twisted. “Guess I wasn’t Corbett enough to hide my reaction, and when he saw that I hadn’t known, he clammed up. I couldn’t get anything else out of him then. I went back later, but he’d died.”
“You suspected this when we were together, but you never said a word.”
He looked faintly surprised. “That wasn’t part of the deal you’d signed on for.”
“Your worries? Your hurt? That wasn’t part of what I’d signed on for? What do you think for better, for worse means?”
“But we didn’t get to that part, did we?”
Wedding of the Century Page 11
