Wisconsin Wedding (Welcome To Tyler, No. 3) (17 page)

“Only with you.” He had her in such a tight embrace she could do nothing with her arms except slip them around him; he had a strong, smooth back. “You seem to bring out…not the worst in me, I think, but whatever it is I’m feeling, good, bad, or indifferent. I’m afraid I’m not very good at censoring myself when I’m around you.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?” he asked seriously.

“It’s not like me— I’m usually more controlled. But yes, I think it’s good. I don’t hold anything back when I’m with you. I just can’t seem to be…well, circumspect.”

“I’m glad.”

“And you?”

He smiled. “What you see is what you get.”

She knew it was true. Even three years ago, when he’d neglected to tell her the whole truth of who he was and why he’d come to Tyler, he still had been his own person. Most of her negative feelings toward him for the past years had stemmed not from what he’d done or said, but from what he’d let her—deliberately or otherwise—believe about him, from her own suppositions, deductions, prejudices. He was more centered now, more balanced, but the irreverent sense of humor was still there, the sexiness, the energy, the optimism. He’d needed those three years on his own. So had she. But he was still the Byron she’d loved three years ago. And he’d loved her. She was sure of that now.

“I’m not holding back on you,” he said, without her prompting. His smile had faded, in its place an expression of warmth and gravity. “I’ve never known anyone like you. I’ve never felt for anyone what I feel for you. I doubt I ever will.”

She draped her arms over his hard, bare shoulders. She could feel her lips part, inviting him, but she didn’t wait for his response. Instead she tilted back her head and kissed him lightly on the chin. “The first time I saw you on the street outside Gates,” she said in a low voice, “I knew you’d change my life. It was just there, a certain knowledge. I didn’t know how or why or in what way, but I knew you were meant to be standing out there on that sidewalk while I was doing that window. And I don’t even believe in fate.”

“I felt the same way.”

She nodded. “I believe you.”

“Nora—”

“Byron, I want you to know that I do trust you. I’m not saying I know what’s going to happen to us. I don’t know where we’ll go from here. But I do know that the past—what I used to think about you—what I
needed
to think…”
She paused, wishing she could be more articulate, wishing she could explain how certain and yet mixed-up she felt. “I just believe you now.”

His arms tightened around her, and he seemed unable to speak. Their mouths were very close. She let her tongue flick against the edges of his teeth, into his mouth.

And he responded, in action if not in words. Lifting her, he carried her to the bed. Halfway there her shoes fell off. He kissed her deeply, his tongue plunging far into her mouth, its sensual rhythm a promise of what was to come, a promise of much more than sex. Her dress was hiked up to midthigh. When he laid her on the bed, it hiked up to her waist.

Finally, he managed to whisper her name. It was enough.

She assumed he’d start by removing her dress, or stand back so that she could, but he didn’t. Already his eyes were dusky with passion. He peeled off her panty hose, purposefully taking her underpants with them this time. The air in the bedroom was cool on her overheated skin. She didn’t object.

Starting at her ankles, he slid his hands, alternating between his fingertips and palms, up the insides of her legs. She ached with anticipation. A small moan escaped when he came to her inner thighs, betraying her longing. He paused just for a moment. She was almost overwhelmed with a need that was sensual, earthy, so very real.

He touched his fingers to where she was dark and moist. She arched for him, cried out for him not to stop, but he drew back, all the way to her ankles again, were he followed the same trail with his tongue, until he was back to where she was wet and dark and aching, and this time he stayed. In seconds she was a volcano erupting, spilling out molten lava, and at some point he dispensed with his scrap
of underpants, entering her with a heat that matched her own.

“I love you,” he whispered. “I think I always have.”

And she believed him.

Finally, when they became aware of the world again, Nora noticed the clock. “My party!”

They had to scramble. Together they lined up the jack-o’-lanterns they’d made on the front porch and got them lit, put the spooky music on the stereo, tucked ghosts and goblins and shrunken heads here and there, filled a tub with water for apple-bobbing, loaded bowls with mountains of treats. At last Byron sauntered off to put on his skeleton costume, and she retreated to her bedroom, where she quickly smoothed out her bed and put on her layers of makeup, her jewelry and the filmy, gaudy fabric.

“Good God!” Byron said, staring at her when she joined him in the living room. “How many years have you been dressing like that?”

“It’s the same costume I always wear. My rendition of a gypsy—”

“Well, if there’s a single person left in Tyler who still believes your Victorian virgin act after seeing you in this getup, I’ll swear you’re as pure as the virgin snow myself.”

“What? I’m
not
a gypsy.” She laughed, loving how he teased her—how he refused to take her too seriously. “It’s sort of a sexy costume, I realize, especially for me, but—”

“Sort of?”

If the proverbial doorbell hadn’t rung, in another minute there’d have been a gypsy and a glow-in-the-dark skeleton making love on the living room floor.

By six-thirty, Nora’s house was packed. People who didn’t ordinarily come to her annual Halloween party took advantage of her open invitation and showed up. She figured most of the newcomers had stopped in to get a
glimpse—quite literally—of the skeleton in her closet. Byron seemed to enjoy popping out of the entry closet, scaring the daylights out of little kids. Then, of course, charming them.

People came and went; others lingered. Nora tried introducing Byron as her houseguest, who’d be staying through Cliff and Liza’s wedding on Saturday, but he refused to say he was anything but a skeleton in her closet. It made for many widened eyes.

“You always have this many people at this thing?” he asked, pulling her aside.

“Not half. Everyone wants to see what you look like. It’s not easy to tell with the face paint. The clingy costume doesn’t leave much of the rest of you to the imagination.”

He grunted. “I should have dressed as a pirate and kidnapped you, given them all something to talk about.”

“They have plenty to talk about as it is.”

His eyes turned serious. “Do you care?”

She smiled. “If talk’s the only punishment, it’s well worth the crimes I’ve committed.”

“And to think,” he said, laughing, “we’ve only just begun our crime spree.”

Later, when the little kids had gone home, Nora put on the cassette of
Night on Bald Mountain
and broke out the hot mulled cider and the pumpkin rolls—no strings or seeds included—she’d made ahead and frozen. They were filled with layers of cream and nuts, then sprinkled with sifted powdered sugar. They’d been Aunt Ellie’s favorite. Nora also had her biggest pottery bowl brimming with warm cinnamon applesauce.

Into this quieter, homey part of her Halloween festivities, Liza Baron walked, pale and scared, wearing a huge, patched denim jacket that had to be Cliff’s. Someone started to tease her about not wearing a costume. But she
didn’t smile in her vivacious way, and her big eyes wouldn’t focus. Nora quickly set down her tray of mugs filled with steaming cider.

But Byron was already on his glow-in-the-dark feet, grabbing his future sister-in-law as she stumbled into the music room. “Liza, what’s wrong?”

She looked at him, the tears spilling down her white cheeks. “It’s Cliff.” She almost collapsed, but Byron was there. “He’s gone.”

B
YRON TOOK
the next flight East.

He’d told Liza—and Nora—that he thought he knew where his brother was headed.

When his plane touched down at Logan Airport in Boston, he got his car out of long-term parking and drove to Providence, arriving very late. It seemed he’d been gone for years, yet it had been less than a week. He called Nora from the kitchen phone in the Pierce house on Benefit Street, half-expecing his grandfather to sneak around the corner and whack him with his cane for slouching. Thorton Pierce had been a brilliant publisher and a formidable grandfather. He had never taken—or, to be fair, tried to take—Richard Forrester’s place. He’d made no secret of his mystification over his son-in-law’s choice of a military career, particularly when there was a war on.

Nora picked up on the first ring.

“Any word from Cliff?” Bryon asked, just in case.

“None.”

“I didn’t expect there would be. Is Liza with you?”

“Yes. Alyssa talked her out of staying at the lodge alone, especially…well, you know.”

The mysterious dead body discovered on the premises. It had to give anyone, even the irrepressible Liza Baron, pause. Byron nodded grimly, aware of his own solitude in the elegant town house. It was well after midnight, but Nora sounded fresh and alert, one of Tyler, Wisconsin’s rock-
solid citizens, a responsible woman who could be counted on in an emergency. In addition to wanting to make love to her night and day, Byron did also admire her.

“There’s nothing more I can do tonight,” he told her.

“I know,” she said, more for his sake, he felt, than for hers. “Cliff’s a grown man. It’s not as if he’s likely to be in any danger.”

Liza, in fact, had given no indication whatever that Cliff had flipped out. Despite the strain he’d seen in his brother earlier in the day, Byron was inclined to believe her assessment. But what Liza hadn’t articulated—and what he knew she most feared—was that Cliff Forrester had up and left her the same way, for the same reasons, that he had left Rhode Island and his mother and brother so many years before.
Liza and I are forever. That doesn’t mean I won’t break her heart.
Cliff’s words of less than twenty-four hours ago.

But Byron thought he knew, finally, something that Cliff, even after his years of isolation, was only beginning to figure out. His stress and need and fears in these days before his marriage to the woman he loved weren’t about cold feet. They weren’t about his reluctance to face crowds or his fear of flipping out and hurting someone, even Liza.

No, Byron thought, looking in his refrigerator for something to eat. He found a shriveled apple and a beer. He chose the beer. It hissed when he unscrewed the cap.

Cliff’s stress and need and fears were about Colonel Richard Forrester of the United States Air Force. They were about a man who’d died in captivity a long, long way from home and about the son who’d tried—and almost died—to save him. Ultimately, they were about confronting who Clifton Pierce Forrester had been, as a brother and a son, as a boy and a young man. They were about all of those
things, Byron knew, because he was there himelf, coming to terms, at last, with the past. Accepting what was.

He sipped his beer, but it didn’t taste right, and he broke out the last of his grandfather’s private stock of brandy and poured himself a glass. He went up to the top floor of the grand, historic house, where he had his studio. Or, more accurately, what was supposed to be his studio. Since his return to Pierce & Rothchilde, he’d had precious little time for photography or anything else.

Aunt Ellie, he thought for no particular reason, would have loved the sweeping staircases, the eclectic furnishings that reflected the best in American craftsmanship, from the 1790s when the Pierces were shipbuilders, to the 1990s when they were publishers. Byron didn’t know what they’d be in the year 2000.

“Snooty publishers,”
Aunt Ellie had called Pierce & Rothchilde in her outspoken manner. She loathed anything in herself or anyone else that smacked of elitism.

The house was warm. Upon leaving for Wisconsin, Byron hadn’t thought to turn the heat down from its usual sixty-eight-degree setting. Now…well, it was obvious to him that nothing would ever be the same. Like his last trip to Tyler, Wisconsin, this one had changed him forever.

In his studio, Aunt Ellie grinned her toothy grin from behind a glass-fronted counter on the first floor of Gates Department Store. Beside her, smiling demurely, was her grandniece and namesake, Nora. Byron had had the picture blown up and framed. It was his favorite of all the shots he’d taken that hot Wisconsin August, one he’d held back from the series the Chicago paper had published just before Aunt Ellie’s death, lauching the photographic career of Byron Sanders. Eleanora Gates had seldom left Tyler in her long lifetime, but she’d seen so much, knew so much.
The best gift you can give someone you love is the gift of being
your whole self. Don’t give yourself to Nora in pieces, Byron. She can’t put you back together. No one can but you. If you ask that of her, you’ll destroy yourself. And you’ll destroy her.

He raised his brandy snifter to her. “You were a wise and kind woman, Miss Eleanora Gates.”

And he dialed Mrs. Redbacker’s home number, because it was Tuesday night. She’d be with her mother, alternating as she did with her siblings to keep the elderly lady out of a nursing home, and he was guaranteed to get her message machine. Which he did. He left instructions for her, then finished his brandy in the company of Aunt Ellie and her grandniece, and went downstairs.

In his mail—delivered by a housekeeper he hadn’t yet mentioned to Nora—he found a thick padded envelope that looked suspiciously like a manuscript. Didn’t anyone know the difference between a publisher and an editor these days? He didn’t have time to
read.

“Aw, gee.”

It was Henry “Hank” Murrow’s technothriller. There was a note attached. “Thought you might want to have a look to see how stupid New York publishers really are.”

Having nothing better to do until morning and knowing he’d never sleep, Byron started to read. After page three he knew that New York publishers weren’t nearly as stupid as ol’ Hank wanted to believe. But he did keep reading.

At least worldwide mayhem was a distraction from thinking about Cliff.

And Nora Gates.

“Oh, Nora,” he whispered, hoping for a dose of her pragmatism and can-do spirit. He’d need them.

* * *

L
IZA PACED
back and forth from the living room, through the music room, down the hall to the kitchen and back until
dawn, then collapsed for a few hours on the study couch. When Nora asked if she needed anything, she pulled in her lips in a look of pure Ingalls stubbornness. “The bastard could’ve left me a note.”

Never had Nora seen anyone as worried about someone and yet as strangely confident that everything, in the end, would be fine. She’d watched Liza’s initial panic settle into a slow burn of frustration. But whatever Cliff’s agenda, his love for Liza Baron was a given. That was settled. Nora considered it bizarre. Cliff Forrester had cut out on Liza just days before their wedding, she might for all she
really
knew never see him again—and yet there was no doubt in her mind that he loved her. Then what the devil was love? Who needed it?

Love, Nora had thought uncomfortably as she dragged herself off to bed, was a peculiar thing. But she’d known that for years. Look at how she felt about Byron. It was the most mixed-up jumble of feelings any person could possibly want to endure. Her hopes and longings and needs and dreams all suddenly seemed to revolve around that dark-eyed Easterner, and made for lots of tossing and turning. She ached for him. She hurt for him. She wanted for him. She wanted him to be happy, to be everything he could be, needed to be. He had definitely turned her world upside down.

But life was easier when her world was right side up.

In the morning, she called Albert first thing and told him she wouldn’t be in today. “I’m not surprised,” he said. “I had coffee at the diner this morning and heard that Cliff Forrester had bailed out on Liza Baron. Word is she’s hiding out at your place.”

“She’s not hiding. She’s staying with me until we know more.”

“Then the rumors are true?”

Too late, Nora realized she’d been had. She was in the awkward position—one she usually studiously avoided—of having to comment on gossip instead of merely hearing it. She’d seldom confirmed or denied a Tyler rumor. “Albert, you know I don’t comment on other people’s personal affairs.”

“Well,” he said, undeterred, “at least tell me if the wedding’s still on. Will folks be lining up at the door to return wedding gifts?”

“They shouldn’t be,” Nora said crisply, changing the subject before hanging up in relief a few minutes later.

If only Byron would call again. She and Liza needed information. An update. Any scrap of fresh news they could hang on to. But the phone was annoyingly silent. And she couldn’t call him. He’d neglected to give her his Providence number and it was unlisted. She’d tried Rhode Island information even before she’d called the store.

Liza had come into the kitchen. Her hair was tangled and sticking out at odd angles, and her eyes, ordinarily so clear and bright, were puffy and red from insufficient sleep. She’d borrowed a flannel nightgown from Nora that came to well above her ankles. She was barefoot, but Nora wasn’t worried, since she’d kept the thermostat at whatever “humane” temperature Byron had settled on.

“Good morning,” Liza said.

“’Morning. Coffee?”

She smiled weakly. “Just inject it directly into my veins. Anything new?”

Nora shook her head.

“What’s that I smell?”

“Corn muffins.”

“Nora, you didn’t have to—”

“I was up early. It gave me something to do.” While waiting for the phone to ring, she thought, but she was
unwilling to let Liza know the extent of her own emotional involvement in the Forrester brothers’ goings-on.

Liza sat at the table, and Nora brought her a mug of steaming coffee. The way things were going, she’d get used to having company for breakfast and would never want to go back to oatmeal alone with CNN and the
Tyler Citizen.

“I
hate
waiting,” Liza said suddenly, visibly squeezing her coffee cup, her impatience nearly palpable.

“It’s not my long suit, either.”

“Why the hell would Cliff go to Rhode Island?”

“Byron could be wrong—”

“But he’s not. You know he’s not.” She exhaled, setting her mug down hard. “Cliff’s told me zip about his life in Rhode Island. I’ve got the highlights, but he hasn’t talked a whole lot about what his childhood was like, what he did
before
he went to Southeast Asia. He’s got stuff to settle with his family and I…well, I’m not part of that.”

Nora poured herself a cup of coffee, took a sip. “Do you regret having invited Byron and Mrs. Forrester?”

Liza shook her head adamantly. “No, this had to come out and get done sooner or later. And you know me—better sooner than later. What that family’s been through can’t have been easy. Cliff’s taking a big step. I wish I were a part of it, but…if we’re going to be everything we want to be to each other, he’s got to do it all, come to terms with all he’s got to come to terms with. I can’t dictate what he needs to do and doesn’t need to do. I just hope…” She sighed, blowing on her coffee, not meeting Nora’s eyes. “I just hope he hasn’t run away because of this big wedding we’ve—
I’ve
—got planned. I would’ve thought he’d tell me if it was too much.”

“Surely he would have,” Nora said.

“Yeah, I guess. But everything’s moved so fast…” She shrugged, her words coming in bursts, her concentration not
at its best. “If it’s Rhode Island…you know, if his family’s been there for hundreds of years and he wants to go back there to live, I’m game.”

“You’d move East?”

“Sure.”

“But your needs and wants count, too.”

“Yeah. They do. They just don’t happen to include living in Tyler forever and ever. I mean, I can. It’d be great. But I can leave, too. If Cliff
has
to be somewhere, that’s okay by me. I’ve been thinking he has to be at the lodge. Now maybe I’m wrong.” She frowned. “Am I making sense? It’s like you, Nora. You
have
to be in Tyler. I don’t know what Byron wants, but I’ll bet he doesn’t need to be in Providence the way you need to be in Tyler.”

Nora wasn’t sure she liked the implications of what Liza was saying, which were that she was inflexible and stuck in her ways. But she focused on the other implication. “Liza, I know you think that Byron and I…that we…”

Liza’s grin, even with her disheveled appearance, held some of its old devil-may-care spirit. “Oh, give it up, Nora. You and Byron
are.
It’s so obvious.”

The oven timer buzzed, and Nora, glad for the distraction, got out the muffins, dumping them onto an old, bent cooling rack Aunt Ellie had had forever. She got out the butter and honey, heaped the muffins onto a platter, and brought them to the table, where she sat across from Liza.

“You couldn’t live in Rhode Island, could you?” Liza asked.

“I’ve never even been there.”

“What do you think Cliff’s up to?”

Nora shrugged. “Marriage is a milestone. No matter how willingly one goes into it, it’s got to make anyone think about the past—where one’s been. I’d guess Cliff’s making his peace, with whatever drove him to Timberlake Lodge
in the first place, the choices he’s made, what he’s done. Not just in Southeast Asia. Before that.”

Dropping a piping-hot muffin onto her plate, Liza asked softly, “You don’t think he’s running?”

“No, frankly, I don’t.”

She dipped her spoon into the honey. “Maybe I’ve asked too much of him too soon.”

“No more,” Nora said confidently, “than he’s asked of you or either of you has asked of yourself.”

Liza nodded, not so much in agreement as in acknowledgment that she understood what Nora was trying to say, and she looked thoughtful, contemplating Nora’s words.