“Lots of room for your things,” she said, then pointed to his small suitcase. “Though you don’t seem to have brought much. Didn’t like the French designer’s clothes?”
He laughed lightly. “I did. He gave me these, in fact.” He plucked at the sleeve of his sweater. “I’m just generally not much of a fashion plate. I’m used to denim and cotton. I have a few other sweaters in the bag, and I brought along some old clothes I used to wear skiing so I can explore the countryside.”
Liza liked his lack of pretension. In fact, she was thinking that she liked a lot of things about him, and found herself wanting to do something she seldom felt inclined to do—flirt.
But he thought she was married.
There was little comfort to be found in the knowledge that she’d put herself in this position.
“I…I’m flattered,” she said, maintaining her position near the dresser, “that it was my fa—” She stopped abruptly, smiled to distract him from her near gaffe, then added creatively, “My apricot-glazed ham that inspired you to make it home. I’ve put it on the Christmas dinner menu.”
The tension in the room was palpable. Oh, God, she thought. He knows I almost said that my face had drawn him home. He thinks I’m married, and that I’m hitting on him!
A current of energy crackled between them, and though she clung to the corner of the dresser, she felt it trying to pull her toward him, drawing him toward her.
But he took a step backward and leaned a hip on the windowsill. “Actually, Sylvia was watching you, and I passed through the room and thought how delicious the ham looked compared to the healthy pasta I’d just had.”
“Sylvia?”
“My fiancée.”
“Ah.”
Okay. Well. Just because he fits the role of Prince Perfect in your fantasies, she told herself sharply, doesn’t mean he hasn’t fulfilled his own fantasies long ago. The fact that you’ve been waiting for him for a lifetime doesn’t mean he’s been waiting for you. Damn it.
She sighed theatrically, closing herself off and drawing in the little robot arm of sensors with which every single woman was equipped to analyze the single male for suitability as a mate.
“You’re telling me that you don’t really love my cooking, but that it was just preferable to the dull meal you’d just had?” She pretended injured feelings. Actually, her feelings were injured, but not because he preferred ham to pasta.
He grinned. “Don’t tell your boss, or we’ll be out on our collective ear, looking for a Christmas meal.”
She forced herself to return his grin, thinking it sad that they didn’t really have a collective ear. Or a collective anything.
“Your secret’s safe with me,” she said, going to the door. “Rest well.”
He nodded. “Thank you.”
Liza went to Bill’s room, where he’d installed her the night before in the big oak four-poster. He had slept in the dressing room on a small sofa that opened. into a single bed.
She went to the window and looked down at the same view Jeff saw from his window. The hills rolled away from the house toward distant mountains, a picturesque dotting of bare, lacy oaks against the heavy gunmetal gray of the sky. She wondered wryly if Ben Whittier had arranged to make it. snow for Christmas.
Jeff James was engaged. She absorbed that fact with a resentment she was disappointed to find in herself but indulged anyway. She would have to stop thinking about him and concentrate on the special. He belonged to someone else, but fifty-five minutes of prime time belonged to her, and she had to pull it off for the sake of her own career, for Edie’s, and to get the inn for Sherrie.
It was the mature thing to do.
Maturity, she thought, studying the stark landscape, certainly bit the big one.
“How’s it going?”
Liza turned from the window as Bill came into the room, closing the door quietly behind him. He looked concerned. “Something happen?”
“No,” she assured him. “Everything’s fine.” She made a self-deprecating face. “Thanks for saving me with Betsy. I don’t know why she hates me.”
Bill smiled. “She doesn’t hate you. But you’re tense every time you pick her up and she feels it, so she screams.”
“The boys never reacted to me that way.”
“Everybody’s different. Even at one year old. I put her down in Sherrie’s room, but I should probably bring her crib in here. It’ll look more natural if anybody wanders by.”
Liza leaned a shoulder against one of the foot posts. “Have I told you how much I appreciate your doing this?”
“Several times,” he said, going to the closet for a blue-and-black buffalo plaid jacket. “But my motives are purely selfish. If seeing me go to bed several nights in a row with another woman doesn’t shake Sherrie loose from her position on marriage, I give up.”
Liza shook her head. “But she knows it’s all an act, and that I’d never…”
“Well, don’t let her know that you’d never,” he warned, a devilish glint in his eye. “If I’m right and she really does want me, she’s too possessive a woman not to let jealousy take over.”
“How do you know that?”
“I’ve seen her with her children. A protective mother is usually a possessive wife.”
“But she’s not your wife.”
“Are you paying attention?” he asked with feigned impatience, pulling the jacket on. “That’s why we’re here. I’m going out to get more firewood. See you later.”
Liza wanted to correct him and explain that she was here because she wanted to get to know Jeff James. But Bill was already out the door and Jeff James had a fiancée, anyway.
So she was here strictly to do a television show. A national television show.
She’d noticed earlier that Sherrie had planned a menu for the next few days as well as for the show, and listed for tonight was something called Mandelbrot.
Since Liza had no idea what it was, much less what was in it, she squared her shoulders and headed downstairs to investigate.
Chapter Four
Bill’s kitchen smelled like a fine restaurant. The table in the dining room had been laid with a red-and-green-plaid tablecloth shot with gold thread, and a set of white, gold-rimmed china dinner plates stood in a stack on one end of the table. Beside it was a spray of tableware. A white poinsettia in a clay pot stood in the middle of the cloth.
Liza went through into the kitchen and found Sherrie and Dora hard at work. Dora was putting a roast into the oven while Sherrie peeled and chopped vegetables. Bing Crosby crooned Christmas carols from the CD player.
Liza felt as though she’d walked onto the set of Holiday Inn.
“Roast and vegetables,” Liza said, watching Dora close the oven door on the large pan. “So Mandelbrot’s the bread?” she guessed, trying to think back to her one year of German in college. “Brot? Bread?”
Sherrie dropped a handful of chopped potatoes into a large bowl of water. “You’re right about the bread part, but it’s for dessert. Sort of like a biscotti. You’ve asked me to serve it with pudding, Miss De Lane.” She took on a subservient tone of voice. “Or should we call you Mrs. McBride?”
Liza came to stand beside her and look into her face, searching for signs of antagonism. But Sherrie smiled. It wasn’t genuine, but it seemed intended to dismiss her concerns.
“How’s Betsy?” Sherrie asked, working a peeler expertly over a fat little carrot.
“Bill got her to sleep. He said we’d have to move her into our room on the chance that Whittier or Jeff walks by.”
Sherrie’s hand froze for an instant over the word our, then continued to peel. Liza stored that information to tell Bill.
“You’d better give me something to do,” Liza said, “in case one of them comes down.”
“You could set the table.”
“I will. But besides that. I have to look like I know what I’m doing.”
Sherrie and Dora exchanged an amused look.
&nb
sp; Liza put her hands on her hips, laughing. “Look, I came down here to help, not to be insulted.”
“You helped make the hamburgers,” Dora reminded her, giggling all the while, “when Mr. McBride invited you all for the Fourth of July.”
“I remember.”
“We sliced them very thin and sold them to the high school’s art class for charcoal.”
Liza threatened her with a look. “Ha, ha. Not funny. There must be something I can’t screw up.”
Sherrie handed her a divided bowl. “There are olives and peppers and pickles and that kind of stuff in the fridge. You could put them in here.”
“Okay. I can handle that.” Liza went to the refrigerator and carried bottles back to a corner of the counter.
Bill walked into the kitchen with an armload of wood and dropped it into the brass wood bin. Then he pulled off his jacket and poked at the dying fire with the end of a log.
“Hey, wife,” he said with a wink in Liza’s direction, “what are the chances of getting a cup of coffee?”
Liza glanced at Sherrie’s back, but couldn’t assess her reaction to the playful taunt.
“I’ll get it for you, Mr. McBride.” Dora made a face at him and went to pour him a mug.
Bill rolled his eyes at Liza, silently bemoaning his botched attempt to annoy Sherrie.
Liza had five of the six partitions in the condiment bowl filled when Sherrie tensed and stopped her work to listen. Bill had gone into his office with his coffee, and Dora was ironing linens in the laundry room.
“Was that Betsy?” she asked Liza.
Liza, too, stood quietly to listen but heard nothing. “I don’t think so. The boys are playing in the back. It must have been them you heard.”
Sherrie went back to work.
A few moments later footsteps sounded on the stairs and Jeff appeared in the kitchen with Betsy riding his arm and clinging to his neck, her curly blond head resting on his shoulder.
“Look who’s awake,” he said.
“I thought I heard her,” Sherrie said, moving as though to take the baby from him. Then, remembering her role, she remained with her vegetables and simply blew Betsy a kiss. “Hi, baby,” she said.
Bracing herself, Liza went to take her.
Betsy started screaming the moment she approached. Determined not to let the baby ruin the scenario she’d created, Liza took her anyway and began bouncing her. She took her to the condiment bowl to try to distract her with the colors and shapes, to no avail.
Liza tossed her in the air and she screamed harder. Then she remembered the baby bottle of apple juice Sherrie had put in the refrigerator earlier that morning.
It plugged the noisy cavern for a moment, but just when Liza was about to congratulate herself on having saved the moment, Betsy threw the plastic bottle at her nose.
What must Jeff think, Liza wondered, frustrated and in pain, of a woman who couldn’t appease her own baby?
Jeff took a banana from the fruit bowl on a corner of the counter, then came to Liza. Betsy reached out for it greedily.
“I think she blames me,” Liza joked weakly, “for all those months of colic.”
He laughed lightly, handing Betsy the banana. “One of my friend Abdul’s twins was just like this. She just preferred men to women. Me, particularly.”
Liza found that easy to believe.
Betsy shook the banana. When no rattling sound resulted, she explored it with baby fingertips, concentrating on the knobby black top.
The room was wonderfully quiet, except for Sherrie’s chopping.
Jeff went to look over her shoulder. “Roast and vegetables?” he asked.
“Yes,” she replied, handing him a carrot stick. “Liza thought you’d like real heart-of-America cooking tonight”
He smiled at Liza. “Thank you. Nothing in the world smells quite as good as that. But why aren’t you cooking?”
It happened again. Liza opened her mouth to give him the excuse she and Sherrie had agreed upon, but no sound would come out. It was so hard to look into those wonderful blue eyes and lie.
“I volunteered,” Sherrie finally said, “so she could have more time with her guests. She makes it look easy, but there’s a lot of preparation time in some things, and…you weren’t invited here to sit around and watch her chop vegetables and knead bread.”
Liza breathed a sigh of relief and shot Sherrie a grateful look.
JEFF DIDN’T KNOW if it was the months of foreign cuisine followed by ten weeks of nothing but rice and other things he never analyzed too closely, but he’d never tasted anything quite as wonderful as Sherrie’s roast and potatoes.
He and Bill and the boys were left at the table over second helpings while Sherrie and Liza went into the kitchen to get dessert. Dora had left on her night off, and Whittier had excused himself to make a phone call.
“More wine?” Bill asked.
“Please.” Jeff watched him top up his wineglass and still manage to quell his boys, growing rambunctious after the long meal, with a glance down the table.
“Dessert looks really good,” he said amiably. “You don’t want to risk missing it. Either finish up, or carry your plates into the kitchen.”
The boys picked up their plates and bolted for the swinging door, energy exuding from them even at seven o’clock at night.
“Nice boys,” Jeff said, thinking it strange that he wanted to resent this man because he had precisely what he wanted—or who he wanted—but he was so amiable that it was impossible.
Bill smiled and leaned back in his chair with his glass. “Thank you. Their mother’s mostly responsible. I leave them alone a lot.”
“You travel in your work?”
“Only between here and the hospital. I’ve been a pediatrician there for eight years. Fortunately, my partners are working through the holiday so…so I can be in Liza’s show.”
“Is it hard to have a celebrity wife?”
He thought about it a moment. “No. I get to be her tasting panel, so that’s pretty great.” He looked around him. “And it’s hard to complain about her absorption in her crafts when the house ends up looking like this.”
“True.” It was warm and elegant and made you feel as though you’d died and gone to mother-love heaven.
“You’ve never been married?” Bill asked.
Jeff shook his head. “I traveled around a lot as a kid, working all over the world. Then I came home for a while, started my own engineering firm, fell in love…” He swept the air with a hand, trying to express the unexplainable fact of love that didn’t last. “When it all fell apart, I took the job in Beirut. You know the rest of the story.”
“You’ll find love again,” Bill assured him. “With your face all over the news, you’ll probably look up after the first of the year to find a thousand women on your doorstep and more book and endorsement offers than you can handle.”
But not the right woman.
“I understand Sherrie cooked the roast,” Jeff said conversationally, hoping to change the subject.
Bill looked at him for a minute and Jeff could have sworn he saw antagonism in his face and a flicker of temper. In the moment it took him to recognize and wonder at that instant change in mood, it was gone.
“Sherrie’s practically engaged,” Bill said, downing the rest of his wine. “To some bodybuilder in New Haven. His father was in the Mafia, I heard.”
And while Jeff struggled with the image of a Mafia muscleman taking the graceful and competent Sherrie for a wife, dessert arrived, and Whittier returned to the table.
Travis took a bite of the cookie served on the saucer under a goblet of pudding. “Yum, Mom,” he said to Liza. “The cookies are great.”
“They’re called Mandelbrot, sweetie,” she said. “Almond bread. They’re often prepared for Hanukkah.”
“That’s the Jewish Christmas,” Davey told Jeff.
Jeff nodded, finishing a bite of cookie. He swallowed. “Right. These cookies make you wish it was Han
ukkah all year round, don’t they?”
“Yeah. We’re gonna get bikes for Christmas!” the boy announced, his face aglow.
His brother elbowed him fiercely, and there was sudden tension around the table. Davey rubbed his arm, looking stricken. Somebody, Jeff guessed, had found the stash of presents—although he couldn’t imagine there was more than the treasure trove already under the tree.
“How do you know you’re getting bikes?” Whittier asked, leaning toward Davey. “Santa doesn’t come until the day after tomorrow.”
“Well…” Davey turned to his mother.
“Davey’s an optimist,” Liza said, reaching out to touch his cheek affectionately. “He asked for a bike, so he feels pretty sure he’s going to get one.”
“But he won’t,” Travis put in, making a face at his brother, “because he hasn’t been good.”
“I have too!” Davey insisted, half out of his chair.
“Have not.”
“Have too!”
Liza pushed Davey back into his chair and Bill turned that silencing look on Travis, who dipped his spoon into his pudding.
Liza looked across the table at Jeff. “See what you’re missing by being single? You, too, could have squabbles at the dinner table every night.”
“I just told him,” Bill said, “that every woman in the country’s going to be after him as soon as the holidays are over.”
“My secretary just told me that Larry King and ‘Sixty Minutes’ called.” Whittier added cream to his coffee, then looked up at Jeff. “You’re going to have to start thinking about an agent or a business manager.”
Jeff shook his head. “I don’t think so. I don’t like other people in control of my life.”
“That’s what happens when you get married,” Bill observed mildly.
Liza socked him in the arm. He winced theatrically, and the boys laughed.
“But you’ll want to take advantage of your moment in the spotlight,” Whittier insisted. “Fame is fleeting, remember. This is a window of opportunity, but a small one.”
“I don’t want to romanticize what happened,” Jeff said. Even now, in a private moment, he could draw into himself and remember the physical and emotional misery of his captivity, the indomitable courage of Father Chabot, and the absolute, though mad, sincerity of his captors. “I couldn’t capitalize on my experience.”
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