Justine covered her grin with her juice glass, but her dark eyes flashed wickedly at him. A soiree to welcome him home? What an abominable thought.
He glanced at Margaret, hoping for an ally. Surely she would agree it was impossible for him to return to Lyoncrest. She stood.
“More coffee, Paul? Some for you, Mother Lyon?” She poured for them both, then placed her hand on Minna’s shoulder. “Mother Lyon, Paul and I will be away for a few days. Perhaps he could think about this while we’re away....”
Minna stared at her daughter-in-law. “Away? The two of you?”
She seemed unsure whether to be delighted or aghast.
“We’re going to Philadelphia, Mother Lyon. There’s a station up there we need to see.”
“Oh, business. How nice of you to help Margaret, Paul.”
Paul looked at Margaret, not daring to glare at her, which is what he felt inclined to do. “Mother, I—”
“There will be plenty of time to finish our discussion when you return from Philadelphia.”
Margaret glanced at her watch. “We should run, Paul. The train leaves in an hour.”
Minna patted his hand. “Run along, dear. I’ll have Lena prepare for your return.”
Paul discovered he simply couldn’t argue with his mother, and he didn’t really want to argue with his wife. An hour later he was at the Southern Railway Station at Canal and Basin with Margaret, wondering what he would wear tomorrow.
And where he would sleep tonight.
THE TRAIN RATTLED and hummed its way north to Philadelphia, the vibration resounding through Margaret’s body. The air in the crowded car became cooler, but Margaret grew warmer. She flattened herself against the window, but Paul still seemed to take up an inordinate amount of space. His elbow brushed her arm; his scent invaded her nostrils.
This had been a bad idea. How could she deal with it for two whole days? How could she deal with it if Mother Lyon had her way?
“Will you move back to Lyoncrest?” she asked, shifting once again to take her arm out of contact with his.
“Is that a proposition?”
“I don’t have to proposition you. I’m your wife.”
Now he shifted away, as well. “You could remedy that.”
Is that what he’d hoped for by staying away? That she would end things despite all the teachings of the Catholic church? “Father Flynn tells me that isn’t part of the divine plan,” she said wryly.
He matched her tone, except he did it better. “It hasn’t exactly been divine.”
That almost made her chuckle. “Mother Lyon had gallbladder surgery last year.”
“Is she all right now?”
“And her bones are brittle, they say. A fall...”
“She should stay off those stairs.”
“You tell her. She won’t listen to any of us.”
He grew silent. “Was this your plan all along? To drag me off to Philadelphia with you?”
“Of course.”
“You’re so sure you’ll convince me.”
Didn’t he realize he was more than half-convinced already? Aunt Ella was right. Men were hardly a challenge.
“You’ll never change their minds.”
She smiled. “First I’ll change yours. Then you’ll change theirs.”
After a moment’s hesitation he laughed out loud. Margaret thought it was worth putting up with his irritating ways just to hear one of his rare laughs. That sobered her enough to send her back to the window.
She took in the passing scenery—clouds of smoke over the iron mills in Birmingham, rag-tag farms and dense pine forests in Georgia, the rolling hills of Virginia. Time moved slowly in the company of a man she knew intimately, yet not at all.
They were on the outskirts of Baltimore when a woman in the seat behind them tapped Paul on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but hear your voice earlier and, well, please forgive me for being so bold, but aren’t you Paul Lyon? The man on the radio?”
Margaret stifled a grin. She glanced at him, saw the struggle on his face. Should he be polite or should he brush her off? Margaret decided to help him out. She smiled at the woman.
“Oh, no, ma’am. The man on the radio is really quite a dashing figure. Nothing at all like my husband.”
The woman smiled and nodded. “I thought so.”
Paul looked inclined to protest, but the woman settled back into her seat.
It wasn’t the last such incident during their trip.
Of course, neither of them was surprised when it happened at the television station they toured in Philadelphia. Paul Lyon was a legend in their profession, a candidate for the broadcasting hall of fame, had there been such a thing. His voice was as well-known as FDR’s had been, his reporting as revered as General Patton’s battle strategies.
Everyone at the station wanted to shake his hand. A few got his autograph—“For the wife. She’s crazy about you, Mr. Lyon.” And because of him, everyone was eager to share the secrets of successful television broadcasting.
Margaret greedily made notes of everything.
By the time they’d wrapped up their afternoon tour, Margaret was so excited she felt as if she could sign on and send a signal without bothering to build a signal tower. Her excitement faded only when she came back from powdering her nose and overheard the words of the station manager, who had taken Paul aside in the lobby.
“We’re an established station,” he said. “We’re affiliated with one of the networks. If you want to do television, you’re wasting your time down there. Come to Philadelphia. We can take you places, Paul.”
Margaret held her breath and checked the impulse to dash in and snatch Paul away from the thieving little rat.
“I’ve been places, Mr. Lovatt.”
There it was, that same hollow tone he’d used when he told her the old Paul Lyon was dead.
“Begging your pardon, Lyon, but not the kind of places television can take you. Television will create the next American royalty. Clark Gable on a small screen. I can see it now. And you could be the first.”
Margaret could see it, too. She wondered a moment if it was fair to ask Paul to limit himself to a little station in New Orleans when he could have the world at his feet. But frankly, she didn’t care about fair. She cared about WDIX-TV.
And she cared about giving André back his father. With Paul in Philadelphia, that would never happen.
“I appreciate your interest, Mr. Lovatt. But the family’s already promised I can be the Humphrey Bogart of the small screen and, well, I guess that’s more my style.”
They spent the evening in a Philadelphia appliance store that had four television sets for sale, watching the programming and tuning out the appliance salesman’s pitch on the merits of each set. They soaked up what each station did—how they announced their programs, the background music some of them used, what drew the attention of the people watching and what bored them so that their eyes strayed to the next set, the next network.
By the time they were sitting in a little bar across from the train station, they were full of ideas, their conversation animated. Margaret sipped a rum toddy and he had coffee while waiting for the midnight train headed south.
“Did you notice how their voices faded every time they looked at the people they were talking to?” she said.
“Because they were turning away from the microphone,” he said. “The microphones were set up all wrong—you have to be looking right at the camera for them to pick you up.”
“But don’t you want to be looking at the camera?”
“Not if you want it to look like you’re having a conversation with the other person on the set.”
She nodded. “And the camera work outside the station. This station uses a movie-newsreel company. Do you think we can find a company like that close enough to New Orleans to get our film for us?”
“No,” he said. “And you don’t want to.”
His conviction stirred her. He wa
s involved, whether he knew it yet or not. Seeing the opinionated Paul of old warmed her far more than her toddy. “What do you mean, you don’t want to? That’s the way it’s done.”
“If you want to do it the way it’s done, we may as well keep feeding them a radio signal,” Paul said. “Television is a revolution. Isn’t that what you keep telling me? Who says we have to do it the way they’re doing it everywhere else?”
“Then how would you do it?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“But you’ll let me know when you’ve figured it out?”
He sat there fiddling with a matchbox and his cigarette pack, rattling the matches, rolling an unlit cigarette back and forth between his fingers, occasionally striking a match but forgetting to light the cigarette while an idea held him captive. Funny how little he’d changed. He had the same mannerisms, the same expressions. And yet...
“Was it bad over there?” she asked softly, regretting the question as soon as she saw the shift in his expression.
He shrugged, an attempt at nonchalance his rigid expression belied. “Bad enough.”
She plowed on despite his obvious reticence. “It changed everybody.”
“Yeah. If you were lucky, you only got killed. The rest of us had to come back and...”
His voice trailed off. He lit another match and this time brought it to the tip of his cigarette. Smoke swirled around him.
Smoke screen, she thought. “Come back and...?”
“Live with it.”
“Are you? Or are you hiding from it?”
“No, Margie.” He stubbed out his cigarette, then reached across the small table and twirled a finger in her hair. “That’s not what I’m hiding from.”
Words caught in her throat. His knuckles whispered against her cheek. She forced herself to smile, to play the tough broad to his tough guy. As long as he thought they were playing, maybe he wouldn’t run again.
“But I found you.”
He grinned, a wry, brittle grin. “How far are you willing to go, Margie, to get me?”
Still a game, she reminded herself. Play along. “You don’t expect me to play all my cards right up front, do you?”
“I guess not. You’re a pretty good bluffer, as I recall.”
André. He meant André. She resisted the urge to explain, to tell him the whole truth. Now wasn’t the time. Not unless she wanted to take the train back to Louisiana alone and leave him in Philadelphia to become Clark Gable of the small screen.
“Let’s approach it this way, Paul. What’s it going to take to get you?”
He studied her then, the way a man studies a woman when he’s trying her on for size. His eyes on her made her warm. She’d managed to forget the feeling over the years. But it came back to her now; she’d begin to bubble and boil inside, until her knees melted out from under her and her eyes could barely focus. She realized too late that she couldn’t play these games with Paul, because she wanted to win too badly. And for all the wrong reasons. Not because she wanted him for the station. Not even because she wanted him for André.
But because, deep down in a place she hadn’t allowed herself to visit since he’d left, she wanted him for herself. She wanted him to make her a woman again.
Longing froze the breath in her chest.
He slugged back the last of his coffee and stood. “Nobody gets me, sweetheart. And if I want anything you’ve got, you’ll know the minute I come after it.”
MARGARET PRETENDED that the train ride home, through moonlit countryside and sleeping cities, wasn’t awkward. They spoke little, feigned sleep, studiously avoided physical contact. She pretended that it didn’t even matter what he meant, although the image of him coming after what he wanted stayed with her, no matter how many times she banished it.
When they reached New Orleans, he hailed two taxis.
One took her to Lyon Broadcasting, the other presumably took him back to the bayou. She didn’t even ask when—or if—she would see him again. She rode off in the taxi without looking back.
But she thought about him the rest of the day. And at home that night she had a pickle of a time making sure the rest of the family understood that it wasn’t time to talk to André about his father’s return. They acquiesced only when she told them of her fear that Paul would disappear again if too much was forced on him. Minna, in particular, was hard to convince.
By the time Margaret was tucking André into bed that night, she was exhausted from battling her family and her own wayward thoughts.
“I missed you, Mama,” her son said sleepily, his cheek resting against the teddy bear he insisted could not sleep alone.
Her heart contracted. A thousand Pauls weren’t worth this. She would remember that next time she saw her husband. If there was a next time. She kissed André’s forehead. “I missed you, too, mon cher. I miss you every single minute we aren’t together.”
“I read two stories in class today,” he said, then yawned.
Margaret knew she should turn off his light and urge him to sleep, but she hated to end these moments with her sweet boy. Besides the station and her own mother, he was all she had now that her own papa was gone. “Did you?”
He nodded, his eyes drifting shut. “One was about a bear and one was about a brother and sister.”
His words were barely audible. He would sleep soon. She smiled at his dear face, a face that would one day be just like his father’s. If Paul would only open his eyes, he would surely see that. Even Mother Lyon insisted that André was the very image of her son. For a moment Margaret’s heart broke at the realization of all that Paul had missed.
She remembered when she’d seen André for the first time, his eyes squeezed shut, his face tiny and red and round. Dark fuzz stood up all over his head and he shook his fists at everyone. A Lyon, she’d thought at the time, no question about it. She remembered his first clumsy step and her apprehension mixed with pride when he’d toddled off to school in his crisp little uniform. Too small to spend the day away from home, she’d thought, and yet so big, this little baby who could no longer be cuddled in her arms.
“When can I have a brother, Mama?”
Margaret’s heart grew heavy, as it always did when Andre asked questions that were impossible to answer. Why don’t I have a daddy? But if he’s not dead, why doesn’t he live with us? Doesn’t he love us, Mama?
“Not everyone has a brother, mon cher.”
“Then a sister? That would be fine, too, as long as we could climb trees together. Can sisters climb trees, Mama?”
Margaret smiled at his sleepy words. “Of course they can. But...”
He was asleep. That fast, his eyes closed, his breathing fell into a pattern, and the hand clutching his teddy bear slackened. Margaret didn’t move. She didn’t want to give up the warmth of him pressed to her side. If there were any way to give André the brother or sister he wanted, she would do it, as she had always done everything she could for him. She had sacrificed college for him. She’d given up years at Lyon Broadcasting to concentrate on caring for him, only going back to the world she loved when he started school.
And, as determined as she had always been to be a career woman, she had never regretted a moment devoted to André. She would do it all over again—except for one thing.
She should never have tried to deceive Paul.
Finally she tiptoed out and down the hall to her room. She was exhausted. It had been a long trip, with only catnaps on the train throughout the day and night. She could already feel the feather pillow, the quilt pulled up under her chin. Sleep. And tomorrow she would be revived and able to figure out what to do without Paul Lyon.
She opened the door to her room.
There stood Paul, an old army duffel bag at his feet.
Heart skittering, she thought immediately of his arrogant boast the night before. If I want anything you’ve got, you’ll know the minute I come after it.
CHAPTER FIVE
IF MARGARET’S PRESENCE in t
he bedroom that had been his for almost thirty years was intended as a sign that coming home was a bad idea, Paul was convinced. “What the devil are you doing in my room?”
“Your room?” Outrage shuddered through her voice. “This has been my bedroom since 1941!”
“Since you married the heir apparent and took possession, is that it?”
“Since you walked out!”
She grabbed the drawstring of his duffel bag and started dragging it toward the still-open door. He put a hand on top of hers and stopped her. Her fingers were cold. He felt suddenly warm.
“If I’m coming home, I’m certainly not giving up my own bedroom,” he said.
“Don’t use that menacing tone with me.” She snatched her hand away and backed away a couple of steps. “You gave up your room seven years ago. It’s too late now.”
He thought for a moment of showing her that it was never too late. He wondered what she wore beneath those prim and proper dresses that covered her from neck to wrist to ankle. He wondered if she was still as passionate at twenty-seven as she’d been at nineteen.
He wondered if she’d learned any new tricks along the way.
That thought revived his anger. He stood by the open door and pointed to the hallway. “Get out.”
She stared at him, her chest beginning a rapid rise and fall. She gave his bag a kick. “You get out.”
“You haven’t learned a damn thing, have you, Margie?” He slammed the door before she could get his belongings into the hallway. “You know, nobody likes a stubborn woman.”
“Women have to be stubborn to stand up to pig-headed bullies.”
“You’re not being reasonable.”
She took a deep breath, then marched over to the chiffonnier, flung open the carved door and rattled the clothes hanging there.
“See this?”
She snatched a silky robe off the hook on the back of the door and stalked over to wave it under his nose. A sweet scent assaulted his senses. His body responded.
“This is my robe. Those are my dresses.” She threw the robe over his shoulder and went to the dresser, where she snatched open drawers and began tugging lingerie out. It spilled over the lip of the drawer, little bits of white, lace-edged and probably as sweet-smelling as the silk she’d left lingering against his neck. “These are all my clothes, Paul.” She pointed at the duffel bag. “In that bag—reeking of the swamp—are yours. Now you tell me whose room this is.”
The Lyon Legacy Page 5