Wisconsin Wedding (Welcome To Tyler, No. 3) (10 page)

“For how long? I mean, are you going back?”

“I have gone back,” he said.

“So you’re president of one of the most prestigious publishing houses in the country?”

There was no way around it. “Yes.”

“Well,” she said, and muttered something about having forgotten the cranberry sauce. She got a small bowl from
the fridge and sat back down, changing the subject to the fate of the Tyler Titans, the high school football team, in their latest game, and how Ricky and Lars Travis were both talented pianists but so different. Finally, she looked at him and said, “Harvard, huh?”

“Yep.”

“Well, that makes everything easier.”

“How so?”

“You’re not the man you were three years ago. You’re someone else. You’re Byron Sanders Forrester, East Coast blue blood, amateur photographer, president of Pierce & Rothchilde, Publishers—I don’t know. You’re just not the Byron I saw staring at me in Gates’s window that summer. I guess…” She paused, swallowing a piece of turkey. “I guess in a way that Byron doesn’t exist.”

He leaned back. “Nice try, Nora.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It won’t work. You can’t erase me. You can’t press a damned delete button and just eliminate me.” He pushed back his chair and leaned over the table, so that he could almost feel her breath on him. “I am the same man who slipped your bra off that night in the tent. It was lace—it had a front clasp. I’m the same man who kissed the little mole on your stomach. I’m the same man who went skinny-dipping with you in that swimming hole in the stream—”

“Stop!”

“I’m the man who made love to you, Nora Gates.”

She jumped to her feet. “Leave the dishes. I’ll—”

“I’m not a dead file you can just clear out of your cabinet.”

“I’ll do them when I get back. I take a fitness walk most evenings.”

He turned around in his chair so he could see her sneak
across her kitchen. “I’m not somebody you made up one summer.”

She smiled coolly, distantly. “Make yourself at home—I won’t be long.”

She was already at the kitchen door. Byron tilted his chair back on two legs. “You know,” he said, not cool, not distant, “you should be thanking your lucky stars I do exist. In fact, you’re damned lucky I turned up in Tyler again.”

Only her eyes—as always—betrayed her intensity. “I fail to see why.”

“Because, Miss Gates,” he said, “you’re trying to become something you’re not.”

“And what, pray tell, is that?”

“Your Aunt Ellie.”

He could see her swallow. “You’re wrong.”

“Am I?” he asked gently.

“Yes.” She looked away. “Anyway, we’re not discussing me. Three years ago, you tried to be something you weren’t. Don’t try to resurrect Byron Sanders now. It won’t work.”

“I don’t know,” he mused, setting his chair back down on four legs. If she wouldn’t talk about Aunt Ellie, he couldn’t make her. “That haughty way you talk…I think you’ve been spending too much time rereading Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters.”

“You can be such a jerk, you know that?”

“That’s better. Thought you might call me an ‘incorrigible rake’ or a ‘dastardly fellow’—”

He didn’t see it coming. He was still thinking Jane Austen when he noticed the cookbook flying through the air; she’d snatched it from a shelf by the door and launched it before he could react. It missed by far fewer inches than the Beethoven had.

Byron laughed, reassured. He’d thought for a second that mentioning Aunt Ellie had only reminded Nora that she wasn’t behaving the way she figured she ought to behave. But if she was back to throwing things, she was at least letting her emotions, however raw, rip. “Look at it this way—my being here will improve your aim.”

And she was off, wishing out loud that her life
did
have a delete button so she could send him into the electronic ether. Byron was unreasonably glad that she at least wasn’t neutral on the subject of her ex-lover.

Suddenly he was ravenous. Reaching across the table he grabbed Nora’s plate and finished off her dinner. Then, half to annoy her, half because he’d been taught to be a proper guest, he did up the dishes.

But that wasn’t the only reason he did them. Washing the dishes was one way of staking out territory in whatever relationship they were to have in the days until Cliff and Liza’s wedding—and beyond. He wasn’t just Nora’s guest. He wasn’t an old friend. And he sure as hell wasn’t somebody who hadn’t
existed
one August three years ago. He was a man who’d loved her, and there was no way either of them could deny it.

There was no way, either, he thought, scrounging in her kitchen drawers for aluminum foil, that he could deny it would be all too easy to fall in love with Nora all over again. What was it about the woman?

He found the foil, then tripped over the book she’d pitched at him. It was a low-fat, low-everything cookbook. Snatching it up, he grumbled aloud that there wasn’t
anything
about that unforgiving prude that should attract a solid, reasonable, nonself-destructive man such as himself. Was she just a challenge to him? Did he want her only because she’d made herself so damned unattainable?

“You are out of your mind, my man,” he muttered. “You’ve no business wanting that gray-eyed witch.”

But then he could see those gray eyes fill with unspoken pain, with loss and grief, and love, when he’d mentioned Aunt Ellie, and nothing, he knew, would ever be simple or easy when it came to his feelings for Nora Gates.

* * *

A
FTER HER TENSE
and over-long day, Nora returned from her brisk three-mile walk relaxed, if also tired and cold and a bit chastened. She could warm her hands in a pan of dishwater and soothe her soul with a good book and an early lights-out. But Byron had already done the dishes. He’d even slipped her cookbook back into its slot on the shelf. Looking at its torn cover reminded her of her fit of anger, but that was over now. She wouldn’t let him get to her like that again.

She found him in the study, where he had a fire going in her brick fireplace. He was sitting on the carpet in front of the fire, his long legs stretched out in front of him, just staring at the flames. He seemed unaware that she’d come in.

“Thank you for doing the dishes,” she said.

He glanced up at her; she hadn’t moved from the doorway. “You don’t have to thank me. How was your walk?”

“Invigorating.” She licked her lips, suddenly unsure if she should go any further. She’d done some thinking on her walk. A lot of thinking. “I haven’t been very grown-up about your being back in Tyler. I mean, throwing things
is
a bit puerile….”

“Puerile? Haven’t heard that word in years. Look, Nora, I don’t mind honest emotion—in fact, I’m glad you can be yourself when you’re around me. And you’d never get so out of control as to hurt me….”

She almost smiled. “You always have been an optimist.
I do admire that about you—and your sense of humor. Most of the time, anyway.” She cleared her throat, wondering if launching down the perilous path of being amiable with Byron had been a smart idea. But here she was. “You’ve made it clear that your lying about your name had nothing to do with me—that things you didn’t tell me three years ago were…well, you know. It’s over. I see no reason why we can’t go on from here and at least be civil to each other.”

“I haven’t thrown anything at you.”

He did know how to upset her equilibrium. “That’s true, but you can’t deny that you’ve deliberately tried to provoke me.”

“Okay. I won’t deny it.”

“Byron…” She sighed, breaking off. “Never mind. I’ve had a long day. If you don’t need anything from me, I’d like to turn in, do some reading.”

“Jane Austen?”

“Byron…!”

He smiled. “Sweet dreams, Miss Gates.”

She did not have sweet dreams. She dreamed about him again. Aunt Ellie was still alive, grinning her toothy grin as Nora and Byron made dinner together, laughing and chopping carrots as if the three of them were a happy, if unorthodox, family. Spinster businesswoman, orphaned niece, wandering photographer. The dream made no sense. It took place in the present, although Aunt Ellie had been dead for three years, and she’d seemed to like Byron, enjoy his company, although how could she? He’d lied to her, too. But the discrepancies didn’t strike Nora until she woke up with a start, heart pounding, for the dream had ended—abruptly—with Byron kissing a silver band on Nora’s finger.

“Perish the thought.”

It was rather like coming to amid a nightmare in which one was tumbling from an airplane without a parachute.

Throwing on her chamois bathrobe, she was out in the kitchen before she remembered that part of her dream was true: Byron
was
back in Tyler. And in a fit of madness, she’d agreed to have him as her houseguest.

“Oh, Lord.”

He had a pot of coffee on already and was digging in her refrigerator, plaid shirttail hanging out over jeans that after years of wear fit comfortably over the muscular contours of his hips and legs. He was barefoot. He grinned a good-morning over his shoulder, and she saw that his hair was still tousled from sleep. His jawline was a sexy shadow of dark beard. He looked every bit the rakish photographer, but she quickly adjusted her image. He was the president of an East Coast publishing house. He’d been born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. To him, Gates Department Store—Aunt Ellie’s labor of love, her dream, her creation—was probably quaint. Nora realized, with a pang, that she didn’t know this man—that she had no right to hate him.

“Eggs for breakfast?” he asked.

“I don’t eat eggs and you don’t need to make me breakfast.”

“Egad, what’s this? Eggs in a bottle?”

“It’s an egg substitute. Byron, I don’t permit houseguests to rummage at will in my refrigerator.”

He pushed aside her liquid egg substitute as if he’d found a moldy leftover. “What do you usually eat in the morning?”

“Oatmeal and raisins. Now out—”

“Okay.” He rose, making her kitchen seem smaller with his size and the sheer force of his presence. Nora wasn’t used to having anyone around in the morning, not even a
cat. When she had guests, she kept them out of the kitchen until she had breakfast ready. “Oatmeal it is. No raisins, though. You use brown sugar?”

She shook her head. He hadn’t buttoned his shirt all the way and what buttons he had done up were crooked. It was impossibly sexy. She could see curls of dark hair poking out. “I’ll cook,” she said.

“Nope. You sit. It’s Saturday morning and I’ve put you through hell the past two nights.” He laughed. “Bad choice of words. ‘Yesterday and the previous evening’ sounds less scandalous, hmm? I won’t judge your nights.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

He poured her a cup of coffee and set it on the table, although she’d yet to sit down. “Never.”

“Ha.”

“You take your coffee black, right?”

“I’m surprised you remember.”

He looked at her. “You shouldn’t be.”

At that, it was either sit or get out of there so she could collapse in private. She couldn’t stand around feeling out of place in her own kitchen. She tried the coffee. It was strong enough to pave a driveway, probably exactly what she needed. Byron got out the oatmeal, measuring cups, a pan. He studied the carton, frowning.

“Recipe’s on the inside of the top now,” she said.

“Ahh. Haven’t made oatmeal in a while.”

“You eat eggs every morning?” Then she remembered his background. “Oh. I suppose you have a housekeeper.”

“No housekeeper, and I don’t eat eggs every morning. I’ll often grab a bagel or a muffin or just make toast.”

In his tent, the morning after they’d first made love, they’d shared little boxes of cereal. They’d cut the boxes open with his jackknife and poured the milk inside and eaten with plastic spoons. It had been the most romantic
breakfast Nora had ever had. Sometimes she wished she could forget it.

“What’re you doing today?” he asked.

“I’ll stop by the store. Then I have some errands to run. You?”

“I need to see Cliff—he’s got to be rattled with all that’s going on.”

“This business with the body can’t have helped matters. I wish the Tyler police department would tell us
something.
The rumors…well, they’re unpleasant.”

Byron’s pot of water had come to a boil. He dumped in a couple handfuls of oatmeal, stirred, contemplated the pot, then dumped in a bit more. Nora had made oatmeal hundreds of times, and although she did have the recipe for a single serving memorized, she measured every time.

“Would you tell me what the rumors are?” he asked.

“I hate to repeat gossip.”

“That’s why everyone tells you everything.”

“Not everyone. Those who expect some little tidbit in return tell me nothing. Gossip is a currency for some people.” But that wasn’t anything Byron didn’t know, or cared about. She was just babbling because it was morning, she’d dreamed about him, and he was making oatmeal for her in her own kitchen. “You want to know because of Cliff?”

Byron nodded, and while he kept an eye on the cooking oatmeal, stirring it occasionally, Nora told him what she knew people were saying around town about the Body at the Lake. That it could be Margaret Ingalls. That Judson might have known more than he was letting on. That she’d been murdered. That she’d never run away.

“If nothing else, people say she wouldn’t have abandoned Alyssa the way she supposedly did,” Nora said.

“That’s Margaret’s daughter?”

“And Liza’s mother.”

“Considering what Cliff’s been through,” Byron said, dumping scoops of oatmeal into two pottery bowls, “this all could cause him to have a relapse. It could stir up nightmarish memories for him.”

“Nightmarish memories of what?”

He stared at her. “You don’t know?”

She shook her head. “Byron, nobody in Tyler knows anything about Cliff. Lots of people thought he was certifiable until Liza came back. Not a few wonder if—” She stopped herself.

“If Liza’s making a mistake?”

“It’s just talk.”

Byron nodded. “With the added strain of a big wedding and my being here, our mother planning to show up…”