She pressed hot, tiny kisses to his forehead, slid her tongue into his ear and lit him up like a just-struck match. Gus pulled her off the counter, light and yielding in his cupped hands, her eyes half-shut and dazed. He turned toward the hallway he’d seen her disappear into last night and whispered raggedly in her ear, “Where’s your bedroom?”
Her eyes flew open, her arms shot out and her fingers caught the door frame. “What?”
“Your bedroom, sweetheart. Where is it?”
“I’m not your sweetheart, Mr. Munroe, which proves you don’t know the difference between love and lust. Now please put me down.”
“I think I proved it perfectly.” Gus eased her to the floor, scrambling for a way to save face, to soothe the hurt and reproach simmering in her almond eyes. “You and I are sexually mature adults. We can enjoy lust and not confuse it with love. When I was Aldo’s age I fell in love with every girl who tripped my hormones. And that was every girl I laid eyes on in the course of a day.”
“Oh. Well.” She lowered her eyes and smoothed her sweater, her cheeks flushed, a pulse beat still jumping in her throat. “Then I guess you proved your point, Mr. Munroe.”
“Gus,” he said, and sighed with relief. Saved again by desperation.
The phone rang. Gus stepped out of the way and Cydney ducked past him to answer it. “Hello?” she said, tucking the receiver beneath her chin. “Dad. What are you doing up?” She glanced at the clock on the microwave. “It’s almost three in the morning in Cannes.” Then she winced and held the receiver at arm’s length. “Don’t yell at me! I can’t hear you when you yell!”
Gus bristled at the bellow he could hear clear across the kitchen. He wanted to grab the receiver from Cydney and slam it in Fletcher Parrish’s ear, but stepped into the living room to give her some privacy.
“That’s the most selfish thing I’ve ever heard, Dad. This is Bebe’s life and Bebe’s choice.” Gus backed up a step, drawn by Cydney’s furious hiss as she tried to keep her voice down. “No one has betrayed you, least of all Bebe. She fell in love with a sweet, funny, wonderful boy.”
He heard Cydney’s voice break, decided to hell with privacy, and wheeled back into the kitchen. She looked up at him, an angry glitter in her eyes, and nodded at him to stay.
“I won’t discuss this.” She listened a moment, her jaw clenched. “First, I don’t want to. Second, the no-talent pretty boy is standing in my kitchen.” She broke the connection with two fingers, banged the receiver down on the counter next to the microwave and turned to face him. “My father called you that. I apologize for repeating it.”
“I’ve been called worse by book critics.” Gus crossed his arms and his ankles and leaned against the counter. Any closer and he doubted he could keep his hands off her. “At least your father said I was pretty.”
She laughed, but it was shaky. So was she, the pulse in her throat still jumping. Lust and temper pumped a lot of adrenaline.
“You’d feel better if you hit something. But please,” Gus covered his nose with his hand, “not me.”
This time her laugh wasn’t quite as shaky. “Do you know my father, Mr. Munroe?”
“Gus,” he said, and shook his head. The go-away-kid-you-bother-me brush-off Parrish had given him at the mystery conference hardly counted. “I take it he’s not too thrilled with Bebe marrying Aldo.”
“He’s furious because she’s marrying the nephew of the no-talent pretty boy who knocked him out of first place on The New York Times List, and he just found out about it.”
“That was years ago. Ancient history.” Gus had a framed copy of the list hung in a place of honor in his office to prove it. “Who told him?”
“My sis-ter,” she said, making two distinctly annoyed syllables of the word. “Apparently Gwen talked to Bebe today and asked about Aldo’s family. When Bebe told her Aldo is your nephew, she just had to call Dad. She couldn’t let me tell him.” She blurted the last, did an uh-oh blink and shot Gus a guilty look he didn’t understand. “What I mean is, I can usually break things to Dad without him blowing a gasket.”
It didn’t surprise Gus that Gwen Parrish had ratted on him. Like father, like daughter, he thought, recalling the People magazine article about Fletcher and Gwen Parrish, the one that hadn’t mentioned Cydney. Hmmm. Sibling rivalry. How could he make use of it?
That’s the last straw, Munroe, his inner voice said. I quit.
“No one will miss you,” Gus replied. Out loud, but fortunately just as Cydney hung the receiver back on the base. He didn’t think she heard him over the plastic clunk until she glanced at him over her shoulder. “I’m sorry. What did you say? Miss who?”
“Your father,” he ad-libbed. “I said it sounds like no one will miss him at the wedding.”
“Gwen will. She and Dad are like this.” Cydney crossed her first two fingers and smiled ruefully. “So will my mother, in spite of her so-called engagement to Herb Baker. A very nice man, but I’ll be surprised if you receive an invitation to their Christmas Eve wedding.”
She moved back to the table and sat down. Gus joined her.
“Oh—invitations.” She smacked her hand against her forehead, tore her sketch off the pad and passed it to him with the pen. “Can you give me a list of how many guests you’d like to invite? If you’ll fax the addresses to my mother, I promise I’ll mail the invitations.”
Gus stared at the pad and pen, his throat suddenly tight. Arthur and Bethany Munroe, he wished he could write. With all his heart he wished it. Miss Phoebe Munroe. Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Munroe, Sr. College buddies he’d lost track of, friends from Joplin he’d let slip away when he’d retreated to Crooked Possum.
“Can’t think of a soul.” He pushed the pad back to Cydney. “I’m sure Aldo has friends from school he’d like to invite.”
She looked at him for a moment, then said: “You don’t like us.”
“I don’t like you? Where did that come from?”
“Right here, Angus.” She shoved the blank pad at him, so hard it spun in a circle on its cardboard back. “My father has so many friends he needs four address books to keep track of them.”
“Fletcher Parrish is the party animal of the literary world,” Gus replied testily. “I’m the guy who needs to get out of Crooked Possum.”
“I thought you said you don’t know my father.”
“I know of him. Publishing is a very small and incestuous world. I have it on good authority that anyone with a liquor license knows your father on a first-name basis.”
“That’s a persona my father chooses to project,” she replied coolly. “He thinks it increases his sales. I’m sure you and your publisher believe your hermit-on-the-mountain act does the same thing.”
“It’s not an act.” It was the truth, and Gus felt like a dweeb, a total social misfit admitting it. “I’ve lost track of everyone I knew in Joplin. My parents are dead. Aldo’s parents are dead. Aunt Phoebe is dead. I simply don’t have anyone to invite.”
“All right, Angus.” She took the pad back and laid the pen on top of it. “I don’t believe you, but if that’s the story you intend to stick to, then we’ll simply seat some of Bebe’s guests on Aldo’s side of the aisle and fill up the empty chairs.”
“Why would I make up such an unflattering story?”
“It’s what you do for a living, make up stories. And I think you’d do anything to cause trouble.”
“Then why did I offer Tall Pines for the ceremony?”
“I don’t know,” she said, narrowing her eyes at him. “I haven’t figured that out yet. But I will—and I’ll be watching you.”
“Well, you just watch away, Cydney.” Gus got to his feet, yanked his jacket off the chair and pulled it on. He’d said it himself—she was a perceptive little nut. “You’ll see me doing everything I can to make you welcome in my home and Aldo’s wedding day the happiest of his life.”
She snorted ruefully through her pert little nose. “I’ll believe that when I see it.�
�
“Then keep your eyes open,” he shot back, and she flushed all the way to the roots of her silver-blond hair. “I’ll see you on Thursday.”
chapter
eleven
If Tall Pines had failed to make it as a bed-and-breakfast Cydney knew why. No one could find the damn place. Even with a map.
She thought the one Angus Munroe faxed Georgette was bogus, saw sabotage in directions he’d written in the margins, notes like, “Turn left off Double Y onto gravel road at Gib El-bert Senior’s mailbox—not Junior’s—then left at big oak tree with split trunk at third curve.” Until she reached the third curve on the gravel road and realized there were no signs and no street names. Only landmarks like the big oak tree with the split trunk and Gib Elbert Senior’s—not Junior’s—mailbox.
Half an hour later, when a gray barn with a red roof failed to materialize on the south side of another gravel road where the map said it should, Cydney wasn’t sure if she’d turned left at an oak or an elm. She was lost, hopelessly, and she knew it. Just like last summer when she’d tried to find Crooked Possum. She nosed the Jeep as close to the edge of the wretched road as she dared—there was no shoulder—and sat with her hands clenched on the wheel.
“Does any of this look familiar to you, Aldo?”
Cydney glanced in the rearview mirror but didn’t see his blond head—or Bebe’s red one—in the backseat, just Herb Baker’s white Cadillac easing to a stop behind the truck.
“Aldo!” she shouted, and up he popped with Bebe, her lips red and bee-stung beside him.
“Yeah, Uncle Cyd?”
His face was flushed, and Cydney wanted to slap him. She’d offered to let Aldo take the wheel in Branson, but he’d declined. All the better to stay in the backseat and play feel each other up with Bebe.
“I said,” Cydney repeated testily, “does any of this look familiar?”
“Uh,” he looked out the windshield and the side windows. “Nope.”
I think this is how the Donner Party started, her little voice said.
“Oh shut up,” Cydney snapped, and Aldo blinked at her. “But I didn’t say anything.”
“Well, don’t.” In her mirror she saw Herb stretch out of the Cadillac and popped her door open. “And stay vertical,” she warned, as she slid out of the air-conditioned truck into the warm afternoon.
The cloud of gravel smoke settling over the Jeep made her sneeze. She waved it away and walked toward the back bumper to meet Herb. Grasshoppers sawed in waist-high weeds and frogs croaked somewhere past the autumn gold trees bending over a wire fence. Bullfrogs, huge and deep-throated, the size of the Cherokee’s tires by the sound of them.
Beyond that everything was still and stifling. This landscape of haze-shrouded hills and rocky fields was as alien to Cydney as Mars. It made every nerve in her body jump. She’d spent last evening answering the door to trick-or-treaters, then stayed up till 4 A.M. finishing two jobs for clients who simply couldn’t wait until she got back to town. She was so tired she had to force herself to smile at Herb, who leaned against the Cadillac waiting for her.
A nice man, she’d said to Angus Munroe, and he was, flipping up the clip-on sunglasses attached to his round, wire-framed bifocals as she came up beside him. His curly, gray-threaded dark hair and clipped mustache glistened in the sun. He had to be as hot and miserable as Cydney, but his smile was kind and patient. Maybe Georgette knew what she was doing after all. Her father would’ve been in a towering, screaming rage by now.
“Well, kiddo,” Herb said, an oh-well cheerfulness in his voice. “At this point I think we need a Global Positioning Satellite.”
“Oh Herb, I’m sorry.” Cydney parked her sunglasses on the top of her head and sagged against the Cadillac’s dusty chrome grill beside him. “I think I turned at Gib Elbert Junior’s mailbox.”
“Well, then.” Herb held his map up next to hers. “Let’s go back to Double Y and find Gib Elbert Senior’s mailbox. What do you say?”
Let’s forget this whole damn thing and go home, Cydney wanted to say. “Sounds like a plan,” she said wearily, and plucked a blue highlighter out of her pocket to mark the route Herb traced with his finger.
This was not the triumphant entrance to Tall Pines she’d envisioned. Sometime between 4 A.M. when she’d finally gotten to bed and six when she’d wakened with a jolt, too tired and too wired to sleep, she’d dreamed they arrived hours early at Tall Pines, stunning Angus Munroe with her uncanny sense of direction. She’d seen herself blithely tossing the map in his face as she sailed past him with her suitcase.
She’d dreamed about other things, too. The feel of his arms around her, the taste of his mouth, the rasp in his voice when he’d whispered, “Where’s your bedroom?” All of it to make a point and prove his argument. What an idiot she was to think he’d actually wanted her.
Cydney heard a car door open and glanced over her shoulder at her mother, smiling serenely behind her Ann Taylor sunglasses as she came around the Cadillac, every champagne-blond hair on her head in place, her skin smooth and taut. She and Bebe had spent all of yesterday at Georgette’s favorite day spa while Cydney ran herself ragged getting ready for the trip to Crooked Possum.
“How goes it, trailblazers?” Georgette asked, then glanced at the back window of the Jeep. She frowned and inched her sunglasses down her nose. “Where are Bebe and Aldo?”
“Hey!” Cydney shot off the Caddy and smacked her doubled fist against the tinted glass. “I told you to keep it vertical.“ She punched the window again and Bebe and Aldo sprang upright and apart on the seat.
Cydney turned around. Georgette slid her glasses another inch down her nose. “What was that about?”
“I’ve listened to those two pant and moan and paw each other all the way from Kansas City and I’m sick of it.”
“Oh.” Georgette leaned against Herb’s shoulder. “Are we in Arkansas? I could swear I saw a sign that said Arkansas.”
Sign? Cydney wanted to shriek, I’d kill to see a sign! She pinched the bridge of her nose and shut her eyes. She wanted to go home, clicked her heels three times but nothing happened. White leather Keds just didn’t have the same magic as ruby slippers.
“How ‘bout I take the lead for a while, kiddo?” Herb asked.
“Oh please, Herb. Thanks.” Cydney opened her eyes and saw her mother gazing at her over her sunglasses with her right eyebrow raised.
“All righty, then. Onward and backward,” he said jovially, escorting Georgette around the Cadillac and opening her door.
Cydney walked to the truck, got in behind the wheel and fastened her seat belt. She caught Bebe’s eye in the mirror as she looked up. Her niece sat with her arms jammed together and her bottom lip stuck out.
“Buckle up, both of you.” Cydney swiveled the mirror to include Aldo in the order. “That should keep your hands to yourselves.”
“Really, Uncle Cyd,” Bebe huffed indignantly. “Aldo and I are engaged to be married.”
Cydney flung herself halfway over the bucket seat, so furious she didn’t care that she almost strangled herself in the seat belt. Bebe’s eyes widened and she shrank into the corner of the backseat.
“If you don’t suck in that lip and buckle that belt, young lady, the only thing you and Aldo are going to be engaged in is hitchhiking to Crooked Possum. You got me?”
“Y-y-yes, Uncle Cyd.” Bebe fumbled herself into her belt. Aldo fastened his in a flash.
Cydney put the Jeep in gear and made a bumpy U-turn over the gravel humped in the middle of the road, stepped on the brake and waited for Herb to wheel the boat-size Caddy around. She heard sniffles, cranked her mirror and saw Bebe wiping her tear-filled eyes.
“Oh, turn it off” Cydney snapped disgustedly. “You’ve behaved like a couple of randy fifteen-year-olds at the drive-in all daylong.”
“Aldo and I are in lovel“Bebe wailed tragically.
“You and Aldo are in beatl” she shot back, and blinked at herself in the rearview m
irror. In lust, in heat—same thing. Damn Angus Munroe. And the peach roses he’d brought her, too.
A horn beeped and Cydney started, blinking at the Cadillac’s red taillights. Herb waved at her in his mirror. She waved back and followed him down the rutted gravel road.
It took them an hour to find Double Y, where, sure enough, she’d turned at Gib Elbert Junior’s mailbox. Damn it to hell. Cydney made a left behind the Cadillac at Gib Elbert Senior’s mailbox, rubbed the headache pounding above her eyes and glanced at her watch. Two-thirty. Georgette had faxed Angus Munroe to expect them by one.
Cydney switched on the wipers and the washers to clear gravel dust from the windshield and turned behind Herb onto a narrow and pitted but mercifully paved road. The glass swept clean and at last she saw a sign, nailed to a weather-beaten post: CROOKED POSSUM, POPULATION 162, with an arrow pointing left. Herb made the turn and so did Cydney, slowing down behind the Cadillac at the 25 MPH CITY LIMIT sign.
“Don’t blink or you’ll miss it,” Aldo joked.
Bebe sniffed. Cydney cranked the mirror toward her and saw Aldo’s hand creeping toward hers across the backseat.
“Touch her,” Cydney warned, “and you’ll draw back a stump.”
Aldo snatched his hand away, and Cydney looked at the road in time to see a second sign, THANKS FOR VISITING CROOKED POSSUM, Y’ALL COME BACK, slide by on the right. Well, hell. She’d missed it.
“You’ve been a crab all day, Aunt Cydney,” Bebe whined tearfully. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m exhausted,” she said, steering the Jeep through a right-hand curve behind the Cadillac at a Y-split in the road.
“You should’ve come to the spa yesterday with me and Gramma.”
“Oh really?” Cydney challenged her in the rearview mirror. “If I’d gone to the spa who would’ve designed your wedding invitations and taken them to Kinkos to be printed? Who would’ve spent last evening addressing and mailing them because you and Gramma didn’t want to chip your freshly manicured nails?”
“I don’t know.” Bebe’s mouth trembled and her eyes filled. “You make it sound like it’s all my fault.”
Mother of the Bride Page 9
