Crooked Hearts (45 page)

Ah You clapped his spidery hands together and grinned from ear to ear. “Go tell Missy!” he suggested, but Reuben was already sprinting up the front steps.

“Grace!” he hollered in the hall.

“Reuben?”

She was upstairs. He started up, she started down, and they met in the middle. “Grace—great news!”

“Reuben, I have to tell you!”

His wife of seven years was prettier than ever. He’d gotten used to feeling floored by the sight of her when he hadn’t seen her in a while—three or four hours, say—but when she came upon him all of a sudden wearing
white,
like now, it was always a double-flooring. He wasn’t sure why; something moving and terribly sweet about innocence and goodness, and then something deliriously ironic about chastity and virtue … or maybe it was just the way white made her skin even creamier and her hair look like spun gold … “What?” he asked, coming out of his pleasant trance when he noticed how flushed her face was.

“No, you first.”

“Okay.” He started back down the steps.

“Oh, no, let’s go up,” she suggested, plucking at the back of his shirt. He turned around obligingly and followed her up the stairs.

They went to their bedroom, which was Grace’s old bedroom, with a wall knocked out years ago to add more space. They had a new bed, too, an oak four-poster with a white tester and quilt, and pillows at the headboard piled halfway to the ceiling. Grace took Reuben’s hand and led him to the bed, which was where she wanted to be when she told him her news. Her husband of seven years was handsomer than ever, which didn’t seem possible but was the literal truth. She loved the way he looked in his work clothes—the faded blue work shirt and the old gabardine trousers he wore with suspenders—and she liked to tease him by asking, on days when he looked particularly sweaty and filthy, if he was really the same man who used to tell her that all he wanted to do was sip iced champagne on his veranda and watch other people do all the work. She didn’t know anybody, René Morrel included, who worked harder than Reuben, or anybody who enjoyed what he did so completely.

She could guess what he wanted to tell her, but she didn’t say so. Sitting beside him on the high mattress, brushing a dark, beguiling lock of his hair back from his suntanned forehead, she said, “Okay, what?”

“The ’91 is smashing,” he said with a proud grin.

She couldn’t spoil his news, but pretending to be surprised by it was another thing. “I knew it,” she gloated, slipping her arms around his neck. “Haven’t I been telling you it would be magnificent?”

“You have,” he admitted. “That’s exactly what René called it, by the way:
magnifique.”

“Ah,
très bon.”
She gave him a smacking kiss on the cheek. His happiness multiplied hers—something else that didn’t seem possible, not on this day of days. “Will you take it to the French Club exhibition in June?”

“Hell, yes. We’ll blow the hair off their heads, Gus. René says we can call it
de luxe.
I’m naming it Sparkling Sonoma,” he said reverently.

“Sparkling Sonoma,” she repeated, with suitable awe.

“We’ll stay at the Palace Hotel when we go, and dress up and put on the dog, go to the opera every night if we can stand it—”

“The Palace?”

“Why not? We’re going to be rich, Gus, I can feel it. The luxury market’s been waiting all its life for this wine.”

“I’m already rich.”

He didn’t hear. “René wants to go back to Cramant and Avize this summer and bring back more cuttings. He says the Pinot Noir might do better higher up, and I’ve been thinking we could try Pinot Blanc for part of the ’98 cru, but not unless Cutler sells us those thirty-seven acres on the mountain.” He jumped up, too excited to sit. “I’ll go get you a glass. You won’t believe— Oh.” He grinned, sheepish. “I forgot. You have news, too.”

“Well, compared to yours, it’s hardly anything.”

“Okay, then, I’ll—”

“Reuben! I was kidding; come back and sit down. This is—this is—
news.”

He sat.

She faced him, shiny-eyed and flushed, and unable to stop smiling. “I went to see Dr. Burke while I was in town.”

He frowned. “Why?”

“Because I’ve been feeling funny.”

He took her hands, his elation gone. “Gracie, what’s wrong? You didn’t say a word; I didn’t know you were sick—”

“I’m not sick,” she interrupted, beaming. “Oh, Reuben. We’re pregnant.”

He didn’t move; he was in open-mouthed shock. “But we can’t be,” he finally got out.

“I know! But we are!”

“How?”

“The usual way, I guess.” She giggled. “Dr. Burke says it’s one of those things.”

“One of those things,” he echoed, wide-eyed.

“He started talking about Graafian follicles and egg viability and blastocysts—but then he just admitted he really can’t explain it. I said it was a miracle, and he said that was as good an explanation as any.” For no reason she could think of, she started to cry.

Reuben wrapped her up in his arms. He was still dumbfounded, still trying to believe it. “A baby,” he said, trying the word out.

“A baby,” she sniffled.

“Ours. Oh, Christ, Gus. Our own little baby.”

They rocked each other until she pulled away. “Are you crying, too?” she asked, astonished.

“Hell, no.”

“Yes, you are.” She pressed her wet cheek against his and whispered, “Thank you for giving me a baby. I love you, Reuben.”

“I love you, Grace. Let’s he down,” he whispered.

They kissed, and fell back on the bed, and touched each other with gentle hands. It could’ve gone either way then; they could’ve kept laughing and crying and caressing each other, or they could’ve pulled themselves together and made love. A moment passed, and Grace felt things beginning to move in the latter direction—when the sound of footsteps coming down the hall told her they were about to have company. She tried to sit up, but Reuben wouldn’t let her—he hadn’t heard a thing—until Henry coughed, Lucille tittered, and Ah You sighed, all of them huddling in the doorway like sheep trying to get into the fold.

“Hello, there,” Reuben greeted them, with, a noticeable lack of enthusiasm.

“I thought you were coming right back down,” Henry complained, bustling in, oblivious to nuance.

“Are we interrupting?” Lucille trilled good-humoredly. “We thought we’d have a toast.”

Grace acknowledged her half-wink with a grin. This sort of thing happened fairly often, and if it wasn’t Lucille accidentally walking in on her and Reuben, it was Grace accidentally walking in on Lucille and Henry. They were all newlyweds here, or at least they felt like it.

Ah You carried a tray with a magnum of champagne and four glasses. He set it on the edge of the bed, opened the wine expertly, and began to pour.

Reconciled to the interruption, Reuben brightened. “We’ve got something even better than this to toast,” he announced, reaching for one of the bubbling glasses. “God, will you look at that
color?”

“No, let’s drink to the wine first,” Grace said quickly, touching his arm. It seemed only fair; they had the rest of their lives to celebrate their miraculous new child, but Reuben’s champagne victory was necessarily fleeting. She would be gracious, secure in her glorious motherhood, and let him go first.

“Sure?” he said softly, skimming his fingers up the back of her neck. “Ah You knows already, doesn’t he?”

She nodded. Ah You knew everything at all times. “No, I want to toast the wine first. Then we’ll tell.”

“Okay.” He touched his lips to the side of her mouth, then faced his family and held up his glass. “A toast to Willow Pond.”

“To all of us,” Lucille put in.

“To rolling in dough,” Henry amended crassly, lifting his shot glass of orange juice.

“To Sparkling Sonoma,” Grace offered.

Ah You was a teetotaler, but today he was making an exception. Holding up his bubbling flute, he cried,
“Mazel tov!”

A Biography of Patricia Gaffney

Patricia Gaffney is a
New York Times
bestselling and award-winning author of twelve historical romances and five contemporary women’s fiction titles. She has won the Romance Writers of America’s Golden Heart award and has been nominated six times for the RWA’s RITA award for excellence in romance writing.

Born on December 17, 1944, in Tampa, Florida, to an Irish Catholic family, Gaffney grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. After graduating from college, she worked as a high school teacher for one year before beginning a fifteen-year career as a freelance court reporter. It was during this time that she met her husband, Jon Pearson.

Gaffney’s life changed course in 1984 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her battle with the disease prompted her, in 1986, to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a novelist. Her first novel,
Sweet Treason
(1989), won a 1988 Golden Heart Award and the
Romantic Times
Reviewers’ Choice award for First Historical Romance. Her second novel,
Fortune’s Lady
(1989), which is set in England against the backdrop of the French Revolution, was shortlisted for the RITA. She followed her early success with
Another Eden
(1992),
Crooked Hearts
(1994),
Sweet Everlasting
(1994),
Lily
(1996),
Outlaw in Paradise
(1997), and
Wild at Heart
(1997), the latter of which was among ten finalists for RWA’s reader-nominated Favorite Book of the Year Award.

Since the late nineties, Gaffney has found added success writing women’s fiction. Her novels
The Saving Graces
(1999),
Circle of Three
(2000),
Flight Lessons
(2002), and
The Goodbye Summer
(2004) all appeared on several national bestseller lists.
The Saving Graces
was on the
New York Times
bestseller list for seventeen weeks.

With her friends Nora Roberts (writing as J. D. Robb), Mary Blayney, and others, Gaffney has also contributed novellas to three anthologies, all of which were
New York Times
bestsellers.

Gaffney lives with her husband and two dogs in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania.

Gaffney at age three.

Gaffney celebrating her twenty-first birthday in Vienna, Austria, during her junior year studying abroad.

Gaffney attended graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She’s pictured here during what she refers to as her “hippie days” in the early 1970s.