Wisconsin Wedding (Welcome To Tyler, No. 3) (16 page)

After that, he tasted her everywhere.

And she him.

Then she was drawing him onto her, into her, and because it had been so, so long, it hurt a little, but it was a welcome hurting, and he held back just long enough, although she could see that it was an effort. But then there was no holding back. It was as if the fire at their feet had spread over them, consumed them, until they were red-hot coals, burning everything they touched.

It was a long, long time before they burned down.

When they did, Nora gathered up her scattered clothes and dashed to her bedroom, leaving Byron dead asleep in the study.

She looked at her reflection in her antique mirror. At her love-swollen lips and reddened breasts, at the places where she could still feel his touch on her.

“Some old maid you make,” she said, not lightly at all.

And she locked her door, so as not to tempt fate or a Rhode Islander in the form of Byron Sanders Forrester.

N
ORA AWOKE
to the clanging of pipes, the hissing of her radiator and a warm haze enveloping her. In a few minutes she was sweating under her quilt. In another minute, she was on her feet, pulling on her robe and stomping to the kitchen. She stopped at the thermostat in the hall.

“Seventy-two!”

Incredulous, she found Byron in the kitchen. Even as it struck her how oddly right he looked at her counter, she noticed he had on running shorts and a Boston Marathon T-shirt. No shoes, no socks. He smiled a good-morning at her and cracked an egg on the side of her medium-size stainless steel bowl.

“I’ve
never
had the thermostat up that high, even in the dead of winter,” she told him. “I’m surprised the furnace didn’t blow up.”

Byron began whistling some obnoxiously cheerful tune. “You really are such a genial soul in the morning. As far as I’m concerned, Miss Nora, if you leave a man sleeping stark naked on your study floor with your thermostat set at a notch above frigid—”

“Sixty is a perfectly reasonable nighttime setting.”

“Tell that to my vitals.”

He’d cracked another two eggs into the bowl. That made at least three. Was he expecting guests for breakfast? Just what other liberties did he intend to take with her home?

“If,” he went on blithely, “you’d tossed a quilt over me
or put another log on the fire, I might have resisted the impulse to turn up the heat to a humane level.”

“I don’t mind you turning up the heat, but seventy-two?”

He cracked another egg into the bowl. “It’s a nice round number, guaranteed to thaw certain frozen body parts. And I didn’t turn
up
the heat. I turned it
on.
A fine but critical distinction.”

“Easterners,” Nora said, and sat down at the table, since it didn’t look as if Byron needed any help just yet. If the kitchen had been any warmer, she’d have needed a fan. “What are you making?”

“A frittata.”

“A glorified omelet. How many eggs are you using?”

“Enough. I’m not using all the yolks.”

“Are your frittatas better than your pumpkin soup?” she asked dubiously.

He grinned. “My frittatas will melt in your mouth.”

It wasn’t an exaggeration. While he worked his miracles with her eggs, she made toast and coffee, breaking out her mocha java beans, and set the table with Aunt Ellie’s best English stoneware breakfast dishes. Nora was warm in her chamois robe, so she went back to her bedroom and changed into her lightweight waffle-weave cotton robe, which, ever the optimist regarding Wisconsin weather, she hadn’t put away yet for the season.

“I’ll let you have your way with my thermostat until I head off to work,” she told Byron upon her return to the kitchen for cleanup.

His dark eyebrows went up. “Oh?”

“Byron! Are you going to act like an eighth-grader again today? I can’t say anything without your twisting it around into something dirty.”

“What’s so dirty about any of my remarks?”

“You know what I mean.”

He squirted way too much dishwashing liquid into her sink. “Are you going Victorian virgin on me again?”

“Now that,” she said, almost under her breath, “would be a neat trick, wouldn’t it?”

And after cleanup, they ended up making love, laughing and teasing each other, on the lace coverlet of the bed in the front guest room. Byron spirited her there while she was supposed to be getting ready for work, on the pretext that the radiator didn’t work. She had a look. It worked fine.

“It was probably slow heating up,” she said, “because it hasn’t been on since early spring. I like a cool house.”

“Do tell. Instead of turning up the heat I should have crawled into bed with you at dawn. Let you warm up my cold body parts.”

She shrugged. “It would have been cheaper.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “I tried, you know. Your door was locked. Sort of like closing the barn door after the cows’ve gotten out, wouldn’t you say?”

“More like,” she said, “after the bull had been on a rampage.”

At which point he’d pounced, flinging her onto the bed and tickling her unmercifully, until she was howling with laughter, screaming for him to stop before the neighbors called the police and Brick Bauer himself came to see what was up. “Then I’d have to vote against the sheriff’s substation to keep him quiet, and there goes my reputation….”

Byron had silenced her laughter.

Quite efficiently.

And made her late for work for the first time in twenty years. When she told him, he applauded. “On your way out,” he said, “turn down the heat. It’s hotter’n hell in here.”

He did have a way of getting her to not take life—and herself—too seriously. Given the tragedies of his own life, it was a remarkable gift.

It was just her luck to run into Inger Hansen in the Gates Department Store parking lot. “I was just coming in to look for something for Liza for her wedding,” she said, peering closely at Nora. “You look flushed, Nora. Are you ill?”

“No! Really, I—I ate a big breakfast.”

And she held back a silly giggle, imagining what immature, crude,
funny
rejoinder Byron Forrester would have ready. He was, she thought, a decidedly unsettling influence on her life. And a potentially wonderful
part
of her life. But she couldn’t think about romance and such now. There was a Thanksgiving window to plan, the Christmas season to prepare for—plenty of work to be done.

On her way up to her office, however, she stopped at the book section to see what Gates carried from Pierce & Rothchilde.

Not a single title.

She and Byron were, she thought, hardly for the first time, from very different worlds.

* * *

“S
O
,” C
LIFF SAID
, “you’re setting her up for a broken heart all over again.”

Byron could feel his brother’s tension. Cliff was standing in front of him on the veranda, where he’d gone with a cup of coffee. They’d spent the morning and early part of the afternoon together in the lodge, which, when the renovations were complete, would be an incredible place. Mostly they’d talked about the past. And the implications of having discovered a body on the premises. On the surface, Cliff was avoiding speculation until he had concrete information. But underneath, like so many in Tyler, he was worried. If the body
was
that of Margaret Lindstrom Ingalls, how had
it gotten there? What did his future grandfather-in-law know? How would his future mother-in-law, a sensitive and perhaps somewhat emotionally fragile woman, react? And Liza, Byron thought. How would Cliff’s future wife react? Could they continue to live at the lodge where her grandmother might have been murdered?

Then there was Cliff himself. He’d already seen far too much murder and destruction, far too many families torn apart. With his big church wedding just days away, he had to be feeling the stress.

It was easier, Byron realized, for Cliff to focus on his younger brother’s somewhat suspicious love life.

“Cliff, she’s an adult,” Byron said patiently. “She doesn’t need your protection. And I
do
care about her.”

Cliff looked around at him, his face unyielding, even ravaged, speaking volumes about how difficult the transition from recluse to ordinary human being still was for him. That he couldn’t have done it without Liza’s unconditional love—and his unconditional love for her—was crystal clear. “Nora Gates has to live in this town after you’ve gone. So do I.”

Byron sighed. He had no good response, if only because he’d stopped believing in crystal balls. He didn’t know what the future would bring. He did know, however, that he’d never loved anyone—now or three years ago—as much as he loved Nora Gates. But was love enough?

Cliff looked out toward the lake. It was a bright, clear, crisp Wisconsin afternoon. The weekend rain had whipped most of the remaining leaves from the trees, leaving them suddenly bare, their gray branches and trunks outlined in sharp focus against an achingly cloudless sky. Only clusters of rust-colored leaves and a few fading yellows clung to the odd tree. In town, more leaves had held on through the wind and rain. But it was very cold. Before he left Nora’s
house, however, Byron had lowered the thermostat, not to sixty, but to a reasonable sixty-five.

“I don’t know,” Cliff said, squinting at the sparkling lake. Coming up next to him, Byron could see the pronounced lines at the corners of his brother’s eyes. They were eyes, he thought, that had seen too damned much of humanity’s dark side. “Sometimes I think Forrester men are destined to break the hearts of the women they love.”

Byron tensed. “Cliff, don’t.”

“Look at Mother. How she’s suffered for having loved Dad.”

“She married a military man. There was a war. They knew what they were doing. Cliff, you’re not Dad. Liza isn’t—”

But Cliff turned abruptly, the strain he was under, just for an instant, rising to the surface. “Liza and I are forever. That doesn’t mean I won’t break her heart. And you, Brother. You’re more like Dad than you want to admit. I’m like the Pierces. I like to sink roots. Tyler’s a good place. I can stay. But you? You like to wander.”

“I’ve done my wandering.”

“Have you?”

“For three years.”

“Now you’re back at Pierce & Rothchilde. And you hate it.”

Byron said nothing.

Cliff’s mouth twitched. “Mrs. Redbacker still there?”

“She’ll go out like Grandpa Thorton.”

“Feetfirst,” Cliff said.

“I like the job. I’ve got weekends for wandering.”

“You still take pictures?”

Byron shrugged. “Always.”

His brother’s only response was a small nod as he sipped his coffee, still steaming faintly.

“I don’t think,” Byron said, choosing his words with care, “that Nora will regret what’s happened between us, regardless of what the future brings. And it’s not just what I want and who I am, you know. It’s also a matter of what she wants and who she is.”

Cliff kept his coffee mug close to his mouth. “And right now you contradict what she thinks she wants and who she thinks she is.”

“In a nutshell, Brother,” Byron said, “that’s it.”

* * *

W
HEN
N
ORA CAME HOME
from the store a couple of hours early to prepare for her Halloween party that evening, she found Byron in her bedroom checking out his glow-in-the-dark skeleton costume in her full-length mirror.

“Good Lord,” she said, “where did you find
that?
”

“That’s classified information.”

There was nothing like it at Gates. It was a black knit unitard—including feet—with a skeleton outlined on the fabric in white fluorescent paint. He looked positively eerie.

“I have white face paint, too,” he said.

“Gross.”

“There’s a hood and a mask, but they’re a bit much, don’t you think?”

He held them up. They were more than a bit much, so he received no argument from her. All day, she’d worked hard and diligently to keep in mind that she was a woman who didn’t focus exclusively on the moment. She always kept in mind the past and the future—where she’d been, where she was going. When she was with Byron Forrester, the past seemed unimportant and the future elusive, something that would take care of itself. But that was dangerous thinking, she’d told herself. And it wasn’t her.

But he was so damned sexy in his sleek skeleton costume.

“Ahh,” he said with considerable relish, “if only the Pierce & Rothchilde board could see me now.”

His hair was wild and dark, and he had plaster dust in his cuticles, a couple of scraped knuckles. He’d spent the day, she remembered, at the lodge with Cliff. She found it strange, yet curiously right, that two brothers from the East had ended up in Tyler, Wisconsin. One definitely to stay, the other probably not.

But she wouldn’t think about Byron’s leaving right now.

“Any calls to Rhode Island today?”

“Only from. Seems my pal Hank Murrow was a bit premature in gloating about his technothriller mega-contract. Now he wants us to buy some dreary tome he’s written.”

“It’s not good?”

“Oh, no. I’m sure it’s great.”

Nora made no pretense of understanding the publishing industry, or Byron Forrester’s attitude toward it. “What about his technothriller?”

“Who knows? It’s not what P & R does.” He pulled at the neckline of his skeleton suit. “God, I’m about to suffocate in this thing. It’s like being encased in a giant rubber band. How was the store today?”

“Busy.”

“Gearing up for the Christmas rush already?”

She nodded, unable—or at least damned unwilling—to take her eyes off him. She’d worn a navy wool gabardine coatdress with chunky silver jewelry to the store, distracted periodically all day by images of Byron slipping it off her when she got home. Now here he was in her bedroom.

“The party’s not for another three hours,” she said.

Naturally he read more meaning into her statement than she’d intended. “Oh?”

“I was just reminding you—”

“In case I didn’t want to run around in my glow-in-the-
dark skeleton costume for the next three hours or in case I had other plans in mind?”

She snapped her mouth shut. “I just thought you might get hot.” Then she added, because he was determined to give her no rest, “In your skeleton suit.”

“It is a bit close. Here, give me a hand—there’s an invisible zipper in the back. Stand aside, though. When I peel this thing off it’ll snap back down to Ken doll-size.”

He did have a point.

He’d also neglected to tell her how little he had on underneath his costume. Not that there’d been much mystery.

“Are you blushing?” he asked, highly entertained.

“Men have no modesty.”

“Mustn’t generalize. Besides, there’s nothing here you haven’t seen…aha, so that’s it! You’re not the least embarrassed, Miss Nora. That’s pure
lust
I see in those beautiful gray eyes of yours.” He slid his arms around her and drew her close. “You are beautiful, you know.”

“No one’s ever told me—”

“That’s because they were afraid you’d clobber them if they did. You do have a temper.”