Margaret had been furious with her mother for abandoning her, which of course she hadn’t—she’d died of complications following a miscarriage. But to a young girl desperate for her mother’s love...
Death was a form of abandonment. As was Mrs. Guenther’s slow dissolution of self.
If it had taken her years to understand that her mother hadn’t left willingly and to forgive her, she imagined it would take Miss Chloe longer given she couldn’t heal until she grieved, and she couldn’t grieve until she made peace with her mother’s death—which hadn’t happened yet. At least not in a way that made sense to a child.
When they turned off the main road up Sugar Hill’s drive and under the sheltering archway of oaks, she immediately glanced out the window, then silently chided herself.
Even if Mr. Banner were back from whence he’d gone, he wouldn’t be at the end of the drive, waiting to wave at her like adoring hoi polloi to royalty as she rolled past.
She closed her eyes, trying to stifle her irritation with herself.
Her grand intention to supplant him from her mind had failed miserably. He was her first thought in the morning and her last when she retired to bed. She found no respite in sleep, either.
Every night since his abrupt departure, she’d awakened in a tangle of sheets, damp with sweat and aching with a need teased to life by vivid and erotic dreams of him doing wild and wonderful things to her.
A sunburst of brightness made her squint as the coach rolled out of the shade and around the broad expanse of open lawn towards the house which loomed, large, white, and silent. She sighed.
Oh, how she prayed Miss Chloe, and Maisie too, found someone to fill the holes in their hearts left by the loss of their mothers. Someone who would love them so deeply and fully, the way Mr. Guenther loved his wife, that they might never discover, as she had, that while there was only one mortal death, there were multiple other painful ways to die before one expelled her final breath.
Chapter 31
Unexpected Visitors
MISS ALMA GREETED HER at the door late Wednesday afternoon upon her return from a full day’s tour through town and to nearby neighbours to extend personal invitations to the small and eclectic grouping who’d made Saturday’s guest list.
She was exhausted, and sticky from the heat, looking forward to nothing more than a cool bath and to put her feet up and read something other than a Sweeney family horror story. So it was with trepidation that she regarded the elder woman’s expression as Rufus slid her light wrap from her shoulders.
“What is it?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”
“I can’t say it’s exactly wrong, ma’am.” Miss Alma offered a nervous smile. “I just don’t want you to be upset with me, but Misses Odelia and Orva were here earlier today—”
“They what?” Margaret said as she lifted off her hat and gave it to Rufus. “When?”
“About eleven this morning. They stopped by to apologise to you for their brother and mother’s behaviour last time they were here. Said it had been gnawing on them for weeks. Rufus told them you weren’t home and suggested they leave a card, but Miss Odelia asked for me. She confided to me that she was in need of the water closet, so I invited Miss Orva to wait in the front parlour with me. I felt wrong asking her to wait out on the front step, or in the coach—”
“Don’t apologise, Miss Alma,” Margaret said. “The girls are not to blame for their mother’s and brother’s poor manners. I’m grateful to you for exhibiting what good manners look like and not sending them away when one would be unduly uncomfortable on the trip home.”
“That’s what I thought, ma’am.” Miss Alma’s relieved smile faded almost immediately. “Someone else arrived today, too.”
“Oh? Who?”
“Hello there!”
Margaret looked up at the voice and stared as a statuesque, olive-skinned woman with dark hair swept down the stairs towards her, ankle-length white afghan robes billowing like a frigate’s sails in a strong wind.
“You must be Margaret,” the woman said when she arrived in the foyer to extend a long-fingered hand on which gleamed a wide gold wedding band. “My son described you to a T, though he failed to convey just how beautiful you are. I’m Antonia, his mother.”
“Mother,” Margaret repeated numbly as she gripped the woman’s bare fingers lightly with her gloved ones.
“Mr. Banner’s mother, ma’am.” Miss Alma’s smile suggested she’d been caught off guard, too. “She and Mr. Banner—senior—arrived shortly after lunch. They’ve come for Miss Maisie’s birthday.”
“Miss Maisie’s birthday is today?” Margaret asked in horror. “I thought it was next week.”
“It is.” Antonia Banner nodded. “The twenty-second. We come early every year to ensure we don’t miss it. Didn’t my son tell you? He should have received my letter by now. I told him we’d be arriving on last night’s train and planned to stay overnight in town. I told him not to send anyone for us—we weren’t sure when we’d wake up—and that we’d hire a car and get here sometime after luncheon today. We so rarely get to do anything as luscious as lounge in bathrobes while other people prepare and bring us our breakfast, so we like to treat ourselves whenever we come for a visit.”
“Yes...” Margaret willed a smile as Rufus slid the gloves that she’d tugged off from her grasp. “I’m afraid it must have slipped your son’s mind to tell me. It has been rather chaotic around here, and he and I have been extremely busy on...separate matters. Unless he didn’t get your letter. He left Sunday on business, though we’re expecting him to return any time.” She cast a hopeful look at Miss Alma, who offered a faint negative head shake.
The twinkling light in Antonia Banner’s dark brown eyes faded along with her smile. “Miss Alma advised me of some of what’s happened, and of my son’s and granddaughter’s temporary absences. I apologise, Mrs. Sweeney,” she added gravely, “for not writing you, too. But I didn’t expect we’d have to inconvenience you. I thought we’d stay in the cottage with Joe and Maisie as we usually do. But along with failing to inform me of your loveliness, my son also neglected to tell me that his home had burned down.”
Margaret offered a mollifying smile. “As I said, we’ve all been extremely busy since then, and nobody more than your son. He’s worked many late nights. I’m sure he was planning to write you just as soon as he could.”
“Oh, he did write me.” Antonia Banner’s dark eyebrows winged upwards. “His last letter was dated July twenty-fifth. The cottage burned down on the...twenty-first?”
“Why don’t we enjoy some tea?” Margaret said. “On the rear patio?” she suggested to Miss Alma. That way, if Mr. Banner happened to return in the next hour or so, he’d have a moment’s notice to prepare before his mother realised he was back and rained all maternal hell down on him.
Miss Alma’s quick glance at Mr. Rufus and affirmative nod to Margaret suggested she understood Margaret’s intent in moving four-o’clock refreshments from the front porch to the rear patio.
“Coral and I will go help Winnie finish putting things together,” she said. “You are done with Mr. and Mrs. Banner’s room, aren’t you?” she added to Coral. When Coral nodded, she looked at Margaret. “I put them in the blue room, at the opposite end of the hall from your chamber, if that’s all right?”
“Uh, yes. That’s perfectly fi—”
“Toni!” A man’s voice erupted overhead. “Toni, where the devil—Oh.” The man halted at the head of the stairs, his rich auburn eyebrows shooting to his fading auburn hairline as he looked into the foyer. “Well, well, well,” he purred, his Irish accent lengthening the vowels to “weel, weel, weel” as he started down the steps, his gaze fixed with discomfiting familiarity on Margaret. “Who’s this?” he asked, pausing next to Antonia Banner to run an incredulous gaze over Margaret. “Surely not the little general our son wrote us about?”
“Little general?” Margaret murmured.
“Tomás Daniel Banner, sh
ut your foolish mouth and say a proper hello to Mrs. Sweeney, our son’s employer, and our gracious hostess, now that his home is gone.” Antonia Banner’s emphasis on employer, and the swat she levelled at her husband’s midsection, struck a painful chord in Margaret’s chest.
She hated the power imbalance the word employer implied, especially as she was finding it more and more difficult to think of their son as anything other than the man she wanted in her bed—and in her life. A man with whom she could enjoy the kind of intimate and loving relationship that these two shared—one in which she could take a swipe at him and earn a chuckle as he grabbed her offending hand and raised it to his mouth to kiss the fingertips, the way Daniel Banner did with his wife, his gaze still on Margaret.
“I apologise, Mrs. Sweeny,” he said gravely as he lowered his wife’s hand without releasing it, perhaps to pre-empt another strike, “on behalf of my knuckleheaded son, who clearly doesn’t know the difference between a five-star general and a five-pointed star that belongs in the heavens to shine its glorious light down on all of us.”
His sincere tone completely contradicted the amusement sparkling in his eyes and made it all but impossible for her to know if he was serious or in jest.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Daniel.” Antonia Banner tugged her hand free of his to give him a light shove. “Can’t you just say hello like a normal person?”
He winked at Margaret before grasping one of her hands to lift and apply a peck on the back of it. “I am very pleased to make your acquaintance, Mrs. Sweeney,” he said as he looked up, all teasing and humour gone from his face and eyes. “I can’t thank ye enough for taking in our son and granddaughter as you have.”
The creases at the corners of his eyes and mouth flattened further as his ruddy salt-and wind-weathered face melded into a look of lethal promise, reminiscent of his son’s when Barrister Griffiths had tried to shoot her. “If I ever get my hands on the bastard that burned down their home, you’ll never have to worry about him causing trouble again. Nobody else will, either.”
Margaret swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry, because this time, she was certain he was not in jest.
“Oh, stop, Daniel.” Antonia Banner’s hushed voice revealed she too feared her husband meant what he said. “Miss Alma said it could have been an accident. No one’s been accused of anything.”
“She also said that our son believes it was arson.” Daniel Banner released Margaret’s hand to step back and look at his wife. “And I believe in our son.”
“Are you implying that I don’t?” Her dark eyebrows pulled over her strong nose in a glare Margaret was certain had prompted immediate obedience from the Banner children when they were young. It inspired no such deference from her husband.
His shoulders, though not as chiselled as his son’s, flexed heavily with muscle built over decades of hauling fish-filled nets from the sea. He eased them back, straining the fabric of the perspiration-dampened white shirt he wore untucked over beige trousers, while his chin came up another notch and his gaze hardened to match the challenge in his wife’s eyes.
Being shorter than average, Margaret had grown quite adept at estimating other people’s heights. Allowing for the half-inch heels on Daniel Banner’s leather shoes’, she pegged him at five feet ten inches. His wife was wearing white flats and still topped him by an inch, so she was closer to five-eleven, or an inch or so shorter than her son—not that their height would save him should he invite their combined wrath.
Only five minutes in their company and Margaret already knew them to be a formidable pair, quite without reservation, or patience for each other’s differing opinions from the looks of it. Not that she believed Antonia Banner disagreed with her husband’s support of their son. Only with his decision to join their son in leaping to conclusions formed without hard evidence.
If she’d ever thought to wonder where Mr. Banner came by his stubbornness, hot temper, and near-fearless willingness to act in the defence of others without regard to his safety, or even irrefutable proof, she was quite without doubt now.
Hiking a breath to disperse the paralytic discombobulation that had overtaken her upon finding her lover’s parents in her foyer so unexpectedly and seeing in them physical attributes she found so attractive in their son—his dark Grecian athleticism and sharp cheekbones inherited from his mother, and those wolf-like green eyes and daredevil smile he’d clearly gotten from his father—she flapped a hand.
“Why don’t you two head out to the patio, and I’ll join you as soon as I’ve changed clothes. Then we’ll enjoy a bite while we get to know each other. And please, you both must call me Margaret—” She jerked her gaze to the front door when the latch rattled.
Mr. Rufus opened it, and Maisie burst through.
“Grandma? Grandpa?” she shouted. “I’m home.”
“Maisie,” Margaret said, frowning at Miss Lisette, who followed Maisie in through the door. “How’d you—?”
“I sent for her.” Antonia Banner drew Maisie in front of her and slid her arms protectively over Maisie’s shoulders from behind as she offered Margaret a proprietary smile. “If that’s all right?”
Whether it was or wasn’t was Mr. Banner’s decision, not hers. Willing an amenable smile, she swallowed.
“Maisie, darling,” she said, “why don’t you take your grandparents and Miss Lisette through to the rear patio, and I’ll join you all in just a few minutes?”
JOE SET HIS SUITCASE and parcels on the platform and, straightening, uttered a sigh as he rolled his shoulders.
He’d almost caught the first train home following his visit to the cemetery until he remembered it was Maisie’s birthday the following week. So he opted to use the remainder of the week he’d advised everyone he’d be away to replace his scorched wardrobe and buy up as many new dresses, hair ribbons, and books as he could find for Maisie, even though he’d given Miss Lisette money enough to resupply both their wardrobes. The dresses he’d ordered for Maisie were at least a size larger than she wore now—that way she’d still have something to wear in six months.
“Someone’s going to be very happy.”
He turned. And smiled.
“Miss Lyons. We’re on the same train.”
“We are,” she said and, smiling, glanced down. “You look like you’re taking home a good haul.”
He surveyed the beribboned boxes crowding his feet. “I definitely got more than I bargained for on this trip.”
“I’m glad you see it that way,” she said, her eyes lighting with approval similar to that she’d offered in her father’s office a few weeks prior.
“Me, too,” he said.
“Well...” She glanced over her shoulder. “I’d best powder my nose before the train arrives. Might we sit together?”
He nodded. “I’d like that.”
No sooner had she vanished into the powder room than someone pressed up behind him.
“Don’t turn around,” a man said in his ear. “I said, don’t turn around.” The man’s coffee-scented breath came from slightly above Joe’s ear, meaning he was taller than Joe by at least two inches. His clamp-like grip on his elbow implied physical strength—and no qualms about applying it as needed—so Joe did as commanded and held still and silent, unwilling to cause a scene that might draw Miss Lyons into a dangerous situation.
“Mr. Emerson has no quarrel with you,” the man murmured, “but he wants you to know that he knows about you, and the little girl. Has for a long time, and he’s left you both alone. But come back here again and bother Mrs. Emerson, and he can’t promise your safety.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“I said, listen.” The man nudged something hard into Joe’s lower back—maybe the knuckles of his other hand, maybe a gun. Either way, Joe wasn’t keen to find out, so he resisted the urge to turn and drive a fist into the man’s gut. “Like I said,” the man continued, “Mr. Emerson has no quarrel with you, and he wants to make sure you have none with him. He thinks wha
t you’ve done with the little girl is admirable, and he wants her to grow up happy. For that to happen, he needs your promise that you won’t ever contact Mrs. Emerson again. And you won’t tell the little girl about her, or him. Ever.”
Joe licked his lips. “I—”
“It’s a yes or no answer, Mr. Banner. Yes, you’ll stay away and be a good father to your little girl. Or no, you’ll not stay away, and then...I can’t say what’ll happen.”
“Yes,” Joe said. “I’ll stay away, and I won’t say anything. I was intending—”
“Goodbye, Mr. Banner. Oh, and...you’re being followed.”
A squeak of shoe leather and the man was gone, heading out the terminus door by the time Joe thought it safe to look after him.
He wore an overcoat with the collar turned up, no doubt to shield his face from view, not that Joe felt a searing need to chase after him and discover what he looked like.
Shocked as he’d been by the man’s sudden presence at his back and icy threats in his ear, he’d managed to retain enough sense to recognise that the man meant every word he’d uttered. From his promise of harm should Joe defy his instructions to his vow of no harm provided Joe followed the rules, he’d spoken truthfully. That last bit was what helped Joe find enough equilibrium to remember to breathe. And that opened his chest enough for a spasm of chagrin to tear through as he recalled his irritation at Miss Lyons when she’d warned him what kind of man Andy Emerson was.
A dangerous man, indeed. But apparently a principled one, too. He could have had him killed as easily as warned him, and Joe wouldn’t be alive now to appreciate the fact he was alive—or that Andy Emerson had known about him and Maisie for years. Yet he’d left them alone. It seemed the best thing Joe could do was reciprocate.
My One True Love Page 29