Bett, fool that she was, had encouraged them. Bett had the uncanny ability to gather people of all ages together and bring out their spirit of fun. The thought of a formal dinner party would have panicked her—she’d told Zach a thousand times she just wasn’t the type to cope with large groups of people. He let her go on thinking that.
Between the two of them, laughing, they strained the mixture in the kettle, added the yeast and poured it in the big earthenware crocks to cool. Bett disappeared from his sight then, her blond head popping up here and there during the next two hours. The mudpacks were washed off; the washer was started; one crew tackled the floor and another miraculously produced dishes for dinner. Then there were the dinner leavings to clean up.
Zach watched his wife, a very small locomotive in nonstop action. She was humming most of the time. Quick frowns were replaced by quick smiles, her face vibrantly expressive, her body lithe and free in action, totally feminine.
He loved that lady.
***
Bett was still humming unconsciously as she said goodbye to the last guest at the door. She loved having this gathering every year, but this year had been special. Her mother had joined in, actually joined in. She hadn’t heard Elizabeth laugh so much in well over a year. When Grady had reached out and swatted her mother’s rear end in passing, Bett had thought for a moment that her mom was going to fall over in shock, but she’d recovered. The women had fussed over her like a new hen in the flock. Elizabeth, her pants destroyed, her blouse unrecognizable, her hair flying every which way, had had a very good time.
***
“The women were so nice,” Elizabeth said from the doorway of Zach’s study.
Bett glanced up from the book in her hand, smiling. “They are, aren’t they, Mom?” She was so tired she could barely see straight, but the steady motion of Zach’s old rocker had soothed that weariness for an hour now. She set the book down, noting with some surprise that Elizabeth was rubbing her hands as if she were cold.
“That Susan Lee asked me over for coffee tomorrow.”
Elizabeth edged into the study, slightly nervous. Bett, perplexed, drew up her jean-clad legs and folded her arms around them. “You’re going to go?” she asked lightly.
“Yes.” Elizabeth sat on the edge of the couch, primly drew her knees together and studied the books on the shelf with an absent frown. “That Grady,” she said disgustedly. “I have
never
seen a more ill-tempered man. So gruff. I doubt he’s had a woman near him in thirty years.”
“He is a character,” Bett agreed.
“I told him I’d bring him a home-cooked dinner sometime.” Elizabeth adjusted the neck band of her orange blouse. “The old coot. I felt sorry for him.”
Bett nodded, curiosity and amusement reflected in her clear blue eyes. “That was nice of you.”
“He doesn’t deserve it,” Elizabeth said flatly, and then sighed. “I thought I’d do up a pot roast, some of those small new potatoes, maybe an apple pie—”
Bett smothered a grin. “He’ll never recover.”
“The thing is…” Elizabeth stood up and started wringing her hands again. “Grady’s one thing. Of course I’ll take him over a dinner. Brittany, you know I’d do that for anyone. But Grady is not Aaron,” she said nervously. “And Aaron. He actually had the nerve to…”
“What?” Bett asked, perplexed.
“Ask me to dinner. Actually like a
date,
”
Elizabeth said disgustedly. “Can you believe that? At my age? Married for twenty-five years?” She took a book from the shelves, and started leafing through it. “I think I’ll read tonight. I’m just too tired to work on my afghans.”
Pesticide Management
?
“Now just sit down a minute, Mom,” Bett coaxed.
Elizabeth promptly collapsed in a chair. “It’s ridiculous. What would Chet think? Your father would think I encouraged him. I didn’t do a thing, Brittany; I can’t imagine anything more foolish than people our age—”
“I don’t think it’s foolish at all,” Bett said gently. “Why on earth shouldn’t you go out to dinner with him?”
“Because what would your father have thought?” Elizabeth said unhappily.
Bett’s words were measured, very soft. “I think Dad would have been delighted to know that someone cared enough about you to ask. And he would have been happy to know you were having a good time. You think he would have liked the thought of you being alone?”
Tears welled in Elizabeth’s eyes. “I still miss your father.”
“I do, too, Mom.” Matching tears welled in Bett’s eyes.
Elizabeth stared directly at the bookcase. “They were such good years, Brittany, every one. We didn’t always agree, but that never seemed to matter. It’s funny, how little that’s really a measure of anything. And sometimes…sometimes I get terribly frightened at how very many years I have left. Too many—always to be alone, never to have anyone to
do
for again, to fuss and cook for, to just be with. I wouldn’t want anything the same. I would never expect or even want to love anyone the way I loved your father, but I…and then suddenly I feel so wretchedly disloyal for even considering…because if you think for any minute I could forget your father…”
“Mom.” Bett pushed herself out of the rocker and went to lean over her mother, folding her close, smelling the same faint rosewater scent she could remember from the time she was a baby. “You wouldn’t be disloyal to go out to dinner with someone else. To see someone else. You would be pleasing Dad very much. You think he would want you never to care for someone else just because he’s gone? You just can’t think that, because Dad just wasn’t like that. Now, you love to go out to dinner—”
“Well, I told him no, anyway.” Elizabeth rubbed nervously at her eyes. “I still think it’s halfway foolish.”
“You can call him back. It isn’t foolish.”
“I’ve never called a man in my life, and I’m certainly not about to start now.” Elizabeth stood up, and picked up her book, staring at it blankly. “Besides, I haven’t a thing to wear.”
“So…Brittany.” Elizabeth emerged from the closet, holding first one dress and then a second up to her slip-clad body. “What do you think? The blue or the yellow print?”
Holding on to the tag end of a mile of patience, Bett dutifully surveyed the choices. The navy dress was polka-dotted, simple in line, set off by a crisp red belt. The other was a bright splash of orange and yellow and green. “The blue,” Bett suggested.
“But the blue would need beads. They’re wearing chunky beads this season and I really don’t have any to match the dress,” Elizabeth explained. “You
really
think the blue?”
“I really think the blue. You don’t have to have beads.”
Elizabeth turned. “What you
really
think is that I’m worrying too much about going out to this dinner.”
The tag end was running out. “It
is
just a din—”
“I think the yellow is much…perkier.”
“That it is,” Bett said crisply.
“With orange shoes.”
“Fine, Mom. You’ll look just fine.” Bett rose from the bed and moved swiftly toward the door. Fresh from the shower, she’d just had time to don an old jumpsuit before the questions started. She’d been answering the same questions for days. In the meantime, her hair was wet and she was still barefoot; Zach had come in from the woods more than an hour ago and she knew he was starving.
“Then why did you tell me to wear the blue, if you thought the yellow would do just as well?”
Bett sighed. “I do like the blue better, but the yellow is fine. Now, if you don’t mind, Mom, I’m going down—”
“I don’t like the blue at all.”
“Then don’t,” Bett said ominously, “wear the blue.”
Elizabeth steadfastly regarded the expression on her daughter’s face, then pulled on a ruffled robe over her slip. “You and I, Brittany, have simply never shared the same taste in clothes. I’ll ask Zach.”
A very poor idea. Bett opened her mouth to say so, but her mother could occasionally move on winged feet. From down the hall, Bett heard the rapid knock on her bedroom door, quickly followed by a garbled cry. Elizabeth’s flushed face reappeared seconds later; she wouldn’t meet Bett’s eyes. “I forgot,” she said flatly, “that Zach sometimes…walks around like that after a shower.”
Zach, in the next room, was debating whether to leave the door standing wide open or to purchase stock in a dead-bolt company. To close the door was simply without purpose. Closed doors drew Elizabeth like a magnet. Absently, he pulled on a pair of jeans and then a pullover, running a rough brush through his wet hair afterward. After a long run of irritability all week, humor had gradually taken over. An issue of self-preservation.
He’d never really cared if an entire convent saw him naked, but this
was
the week for Elizabeth and doors. Liz always panicked when Bett was on the other side of a closed door—he was beginning to believe she had a hidden device invisibly connected to Bett’s thigh that lit up lights when he touched his wife—but this week, she’d picked on Zach. Twice when he was fresh out of the shower, once when he’d been shaving and once when he had the stupid idea that he could corner Bett for a little kiss and tickle if they were safely behind a door
and
a shower curtain—he doubted that his mother-in-law had recovered from that one yet. Thank God they could still escape to the woods every once in a while for alfresco lovemaking, but the weather would be turning chilly soon…
Elizabeth was remarkable. The farm season was finally winding down. Used to immediately claiming more time with Bett, Zach suddenly found his wife hovered over by a more zealous chaperone than a vestal virgin in early Rome would rate. The lady was rarely shakable. She never slept. Come in for a nice relaxing cup of coffee, and she was full of exhausting chatter. Turn on a football game, and the washing machine went manic. One thirty-second grab at Bett’s fanny, and those eyes were all over him. On occasion, Liz hesitantly suggested she might go to town by herself, and they all but pushed her out the door… It was a question of making hay while the sun shone.
In the meantime, if he’d had any idea how much turmoil one simple little dinner date with Aaron was going to cause this household in anxiety and preparation… Zach went down the stairs two at a time, headed for the kitchen and started haphazardly opening cupboards.
The thought of nutrition made him ill. Broccoli was a very healthy food. Broccoli and salmon loaf went well together; they’d had that combo twice this week. Zach searched the bottom cupboard until he found a can of spaghetti in the very back, one of a few cans Bett had stocked about two years before in case of a winter snow-in. Not that they’d ever use that kind of thing, she’d told him. Bett was crazy. He’d lived on the stuff in college. And the thought of pure starch delighted him.
He opened the can and was pouring the contents into a pan when the doorbell rang. Absently wiping his hands on a towel, he strode toward the front door and greeted Aaron, he hoped without showing in expression or action that he would have bribed him to take Liz out if the dear man hadn’t thought of the idea himself.
Aaron wasn’t really husband potential for Elizabeth or anyone else; he simply liked conversation and didn’t like to eat alone. An old bachelor at sixty, he was a gentle man, and provided the ideal means of getting Elizabeth’s feet wet, so to speak. Dressed in simple dark pants and a corduroy jacket, Aaron smiled easily as he stepped inside. Zach thought wryly that the poor man couldn’t possibly guess that his arrival had been prefaced by an entire week of agonizing over hairstyles and new shoes, deep depressions over the state of Elizabeth’s wardrobe, and searching out the town for matching purses for every outfit she
might
want to wear.
“Can I get you a drink?” Zach asked, hoping for his own sake that Aaron would accept.
“No, thanks, Zach. We’ll probably have a little wine at the restaurant. Season go okay for you and Bett?”
“Terrific. Been busy?”
Aaron’s schoolteacher background showed. He told Zach all about his arthritis, his grapes and the politics in the community, while Zach moved into the kitchen, stirring the spaghetti. Finally Bett popped in the door.
“Aaron! How are you?” she said vibrantly.
Zach caught a whiff of Bett’s perfume. The nights were turning cold; she’d slipped into that velour thing she liked to wear on autumn nights. The wine color gave her skin a fragile porcelain softness, especially in the V that led up her long throat. Her bare toes peeked out from the legs of the jumpsuit; obviously, Bett had dressed in a hurry. Far too much of a hurry—though the style of the outfit was loose and flowing, he could tell from the way she moved that she didn’t have a stitch on underneath it. Her hair was wisping all around her face, gold strands only half dried. The smell of her skin drew him, like some hypnotizing—
“…all right, Zach?”
He blinked, his spoon still dipped in the spaghetti. Belatedly, he noticed the frantic expression she was conveying with her eyes, the slight, desperate nudge of her head toward the doorway.
“I’ll keep Aaron company,” Bett prodded him frantically, and then smiled brilliantly for Aaron.
As he left the kitchen, Zach decided quite rationally that he was going to poke little pins into a voodoo doll of Elizabeth if there was even one more tiny problem concerning this evening with Aaron, particularly if she dragged Bett into it.
Elizabeth, as it happened, was standing at the top of the stairs in a blue–and-white polka-dotted dress, groomed, perfumed and wringing her hands. “Zach, Brittany is furious with me,” she said tearfully. “I’m not going. I just can’t go. Please say something to Aaron. I just can’t…”
Zach took the imaginary pins out of the imaginary doll with a sigh, put his arm around his mother-in-law and motioned to her to sit down next to him at the top of the stairs. “It’s just a dinner,” he said soothingly. “But for God’s sake, Liz, if you really don’t want to go, there’s no crisis. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. And if it’s going to cause you this much anxiety—”
“The last time I dated anyone—it was Chet, of course—my mother served milk and cookies when he came to the door. For heaven’s sake, I don’t know how to talk to a man anymore. Not
alone.
It’s not that I don’t want to go. I even have this terrible feeling Chet would be kicking me for being so stupid.”
“Well, I have no intention of kicking you for being so stupid.” Absently, he realized that that was a most inappropriate thing to say. “Liz, if you want to go, go. If you don’t want to, that’s fine, too. It was supposed to be fun for you, that’s all, and if the evening is really going to get you this upset—”
“It would be terrible for Aaron if I backed out now, when he’s already here,” Elizabeth said nervously.
“He’ll live through it,” Zach assured her. And for all that Elizabeth was a total nuisance who was driving him clear out of his mind, he really didn’t want her upset. He was fond of her, felt protective toward her. Any idea of marrying her off was based on caring for her and wanting a good life for her; it had never been a purely selfish wish to get her off their hands. On honest days, he occasionally felt like offering sacrifices to the gods that Bett had inherited mostly her father’s genes, but that was neither here nor there.
“You think I should go,” Elizabeth said distractedly.
“Nope.” Zach stood up, his voice firm. “You just got a headache, whatever. I’ll take care of Aaron. All Bett and I want is for you to be happy, and for all this trauma—”
Zach’s jaw dropped slightly as she stood up and took the step ahead of him, a definite hint of girlish swagger to her hips.
“I’ve never stood up anyone in my life, and I’m not about to start now,” she declared, and turned with a small smile. “Thanks, Zach. I knew I could count on you not to push me.” She turned to descend the stairs.
Zach stared after her. Governments would crumble if they tried to use Elizabeth’s logic. And for one entire evening, he no longer had to try.
Bett shot him a grateful look when the two came through the doorway. She didn’t know what Zach had done or how, but her mother greeted Aaron all relaxed and smiling, taking his arm as he ushered her out of the house. Bett stared through the window at the porch light shedding a yellow glow on the couple as they walked toward Aaron’s car. “Would it be terrible for me to admit I’m perfectly exhausted?” she murmured idly, and turned slightly. “I don’t know what you just did, Zach, but I admit I was close to the end of my rope.” Her eyebrows rose just a little. Zach was going around the living room turning off lights. “What are you doing?”
“Lock the door, would you?”
“Pardon?”
“Lock the door.”
For the first time in the five years they’d lived there, Bett locked the door. “Are we expecting burglars?” she inquired interestedly.
“Is the car gone?”
Bett glanced back at the window. “Yup.”
“Want to switch out the yard light for now?”
She switched out the yard light. Night rushed in in an instant; it was equally black inside and out, a dusty black made of billions of tiny charcoal circles all in motion in front of her eyes. “I’ll bet there’s some point to this,” she suggested wryly.
Zach made some muffled answer from the kitchen, where the last hint of faint light suddenly winked off. Bett stood in the silence for an instant, feeling the craziest little chill crawl up her spine. She could see nothing, hear nothing.
In the darkness, a stranger suddenly reached for her, a man she couldn’t see but only feel. An inexplicable fear made her stiffen…but in that very same moment her senses registered somehow a very handsome man, even if she couldn’t see him in the blackness. He was tall and he smelled like lime and musk and somehow like an autumn wind; his legs were long, the hard muscles pressed against her. As an attacker in the night, Zach was incomparable. His breath mingled with hers just before his mouth closed on hers with unerring skill, the cool taste of peppermint blended with the warmth of his mouth. A delightful crackle of lightning flashed through her bloodstream. Very pure, very potent desire.
“Open,” he murmured roughly.
Her lips obediently parted. His tongue thrust inside, firm and soft and deep. His palm cradled the back of her head to ensure her closeness, her accessibility. Submissive instincts surged through her. They didn’t often play dominant/submissive; they liked things equal, but…there was a time and a place.
“Dinner?” she breathed.
A very nice, practical thought, when her hands were already sliding around his back, clutching at his shoulders as her tongue sought further play with his. Her makeshift stranger had brazen hands. In long, slow, intimate sweeps, he was molding her body to his, pressing the velour to her skin. He really was going to have to let her lips go and allow her to breathe, though, she thought.
He did, momentarily. Quick, scattered kisses were pressed on her cheeks, her closed eyes. “You know what that does to me? Knowing you have nothing on underneath that?”
His mouth locked on hers again. This time he put a modicum of space between them, just enough so his knuckles could brush against her breasts as his fingers pushed down the zipper of the jumpsuit from neck to waist.
This particular jumpsuit had always fit loosely. His palms slid smoothly inside from her neck to the shoulders, pushing the fabric just ahead of his caress, and with very little effort the thing fell in a soft whoosh to the floor. Black was turning to dark gray as her eyes adjusted. She could make out a shadowed form in front of her pulling a sweater over his head. Her fingertips reached for the irresistible warmth of flesh, of smooth, hard contours. Her touch was possessive, and Zach’s breath suddenly roughened next to her throat. Her knees felt oddly double-jointed, something that shouldn’t happen to old married women. Zach was just…an intruder for the moment, an intruder with nothing on but a pair of jeans; his smooth-skinned chest was rock-hard, his heart pulsing beneath her palms.