“What I sleep in,” Tess said, glancing down at her white silk nightgown with the matching lace-trimmed robe.
“Well, put some clothes on.”
“If I’m turning you on and it’s too much for you, then I suggest you never again barge into my place in the middle of the night.”
“Am I going to be billed extra for getting turned on?” Ramsey asked sullenly.
“No, but that’s a thought.”
“You have anything to drink?”
“Lots,” she said, “but you’re not getting any. You have to drive home, remember? Besides, I’m expecting company later.”
“Who?” he shot at her.
“One of your cousins.”
“So help me, if it’s Luke, I’ll—”
“What?” she asked. “Forbid me to see him? Luke is better looking than you and he isn’t developing a spare tire around his middle from sitting at a desk all day. And I’m beginning to think he’s smarter than you are.”
Ramsey just stared at the floor. “So marry him. I wish you would.” He paused. “I like this woman.”
“Which one?” Tess asked as she sat down across from him. She had a whiskey in her hand, and she sipped it while she looked at him.
“You know which one,” he said. “Jocelyn. Miss Edi’s protégée.”
“Ah, that one. Is it her or her house you like? It would certainly look good to the men in Colonial Williamsburg if you lived in a house that looked like a Founding Father built it. They might even give you more of their legal work. It would mean more money for you.”
“You can be really funny sometimes. Ha ha. I’m laughing my head off.” He got up and went to the cabinet on the far wall. “Don’t say anything, I’m just having some tonic water. You have any ice?”
“You know where the kitchen is.”
“You certainly know how to make a man feel welcome.”
“If he’s invited, I do,” she called after him as he disappeared into her kitchen.
Moments later, he reappeared with a bowl full of ice. “I hate your kitchen,” he said. “It’s worse than Sara’s. Worse than Joce’s.”
“So put in a new one for me,” she said, brushing her long hair out of her eyes.
“And what? Write it off on expenses? Maybe if you were my mistress…” He looked at her over his drink. He’d never before seen her in her nightclothes and she was better looking than usual—if that was possible. Her almond eyes were heavily darkened and her lips reddened.
“You keep looking at me like that and I’ll throw you out. In fact, why don’t you go home right now?”
Ramsey sat back down in the chair and looked away from her. “I know her.”
“What?”
“I know her. Jocelyn. I never told anybody this, but Granddad used to let me read the letters he and Miss Edi exchanged.”
“Wasn’t there one of those Southern feuds or secrets or some such rubbish involved with your mother and the rest of them?”
“My mother came from Oregon,” Ramsey said. “And, no, there was no feud concerning my parents’ generation. Whatever happened involved my grandparents. As always with you, you have things in this town mixed up.”
“I’m charging you an extra hour for that remark. So what’s the problem? And remember, the clock is ticking. You read some old letters, then what?”
“Miss Edi was a consummate letter writer. I think she corresponded with people all over the world, and my grandfather was one of them. He visited her several times, and I think my grandmother was a bit jealous. She said he used any excuse he could come up with to fly down to Florida and spend a few days with Miss Edi.”
“And?” Tess said quickly. “Could you please hurry up with this story? I told you, I have a date.”
“It’s ten o’clock at night, everything is closed, and, besides, you’re in your nightgown. For what reason could you be meeting—” He paused, his eyes wide. “Oh.”
“You know, I think you should sit down with your sister and let her tell you how babies are made. Or at least how people practice to make them.”
“I’m trying to tell you something that’s important to me, something I’ve never told anyone else, and you’re making fun of me.”
“Did I ask you to come over here at night and tell me all about your bad date with little Miss Prim and Proper?”
“Did you meet her?”
“No, but I saw her, and Luke told me about her.”
“Is he who you’re waiting for?”
“I’m waiting for the local high school football team.”
“You know, Tess, you could use a little of Jocelyn’s ladylike manners.”
“If I had them, I wouldn’t have let you in here tonight to bellyache about your new girlfriend.”
“That’s the problem! She isn’t my girlfriend, and if I don’t do something better than what I did tonight, she never will be.”
Tess refilled her glass, then sat back down across from him. “I take it that I can’t get rid of you until you cry enough in your beer to get it all out.”
“Beer? That’s a good idea. You have any?”
“Luke keeps a six-pack in my refrigerator.”
Ramsey raised his hands as though in frustration, then got up and went to the kitchen. When he didn’t come back to the living room, she went to him.
“What are you doing in my refrigerator? There’s nothing in there for you to eat.”
“You have eggs.”
“Only because Sara gave them to me. They have blue shells,” she added in wonder.
“Ameraucanas.”
“What?”
“Ameraucanas are the breed of chickens Sara’s family raises, and they lay blue and green eggs,” Ramsey said patiently as he took the bowl of eggs from the refrigerator and a container of butter. It was labeled SHAW FARMS, as was the loaf of bread. “I’m starving. Want some toast and scrambled eggs?”
“I thought you could only cook that pasta dish of yours.”
“I don’t think scrambled eggs count as cooking.”
“If I could scramble an egg I’d go on TV as a cook.”
Ramsey glanced at her as he pulled a skillet from a cabinet. Last Christmas he’d bought her a complete set of pots and pans. A month later, when she still hadn’t opened them, he took them out, washed them, and put them away. Whereas the other men in the office gave Tess gifts of considerable value in gratitude for all she did for them, Ramsey gave her things he knew she needed. But then, he was the only one who’d seen the inside of her apartment and knew what she didn’t have. For the most part, his gifts had stayed to the kitchen, as he gave her knives, dishes, glassware, and small appliances. Luke said it gave Ramsey a reason to go to Tess’s apartment and unpack everything, but that wasn’t true. He wanted her to be comfortable, and also, he wanted her to stay in tiny Edilean. Since she’d arrived, his life had run much smoother—and best was that she was a friend he could talk to. A real friend, not a blood relative. One thing about Tess was that whatever she heard, it stayed with her. He could tell her the most intimate things about his life and he knew she’d never tell anyone.
“So?” he asked. “You want some eggs or not?”
“Will it get rid of you faster if I eat something?”
“Yeah,” he said, giving her a one-sided grin. “What’s your date going to think when he arrives and I’m here?”
“That you want some work done,” she said as she took a seat at the little table against the wall.
“Okay, so don’t tell me,” he said as he broke eggs into a bowl, mixed them with a fork, then dropped them into the hot skillet.
“One thing about you is that your ego is always intact. No matter what I say, you still think that I want to be with you.”
“Tess, whether you like it or not, you and I are friends.” He paused as he searched through a drawer for a spatula. “You need some pot holders and some new dishtowels. I’ll pick some up for you at Williams-Sonoma.”
Tess shook he
r head at him. “What am I? Your maiden aunt who you have to take care of? Would you please tell me what you have to say, then leave? I have—”
“Yeah, I know, a mysterious date who hasn’t shown up yet even though it’s after ten.” He divided the eggs, put them on two plates, and set one in front of her. “Eat,” he ordered. “I think you’re losing weight.”
“Sex burns a lot of calories. Speaking of which, I take it you didn’t score with your little Alice.”
“Alice?”
“Luke said she dresses like Alice in Wonderland.”
“When did you see him?”
“A couple of hours ago. Jealous?”
Ramsey snorted in derision. “Of Luke? You must be kidding. Anyway, as I was saying, my grandfather let me read Miss Edi’s letters when I was growing up. She wrote a lot about this little girl, Jocelyn Minton, who she was half-raising.”
“Let me guess, you fell in love with her through the letters and now you want to make her your wife and live happily ever after. Good! Now that that’s done, you can leave.”
“Finish your eggs,” Ramsey said when she stood up. “I don’t know why you have to be so cynical about everything.”
“Maybe it comes from spending my days with lawyers. It makes me see the world as one long lawsuit.”
“The way I see it, I help people.”
“Yeah, like with the Berners’ divorce? You and I both know that man hid his income to keep his wife from spending him blind. He bought her that big house he couldn’t afford just to try to please her, but all she does is nag him. If you had any conscience, you’d tell her she gets nothing and has to earn her own living. But no, thanks to your cleverness, she’s going to walk away with it all, and he’s going to get the debt. He’ll be seventy before he’s back on his feet again.”
“So maybe that isn’t a good example of my helping people.”
“So what is?”
“How about Miss Edi?” he asked.
“Rich old woman who paid your firm a fortune. What a hero you are! Are you here tonight to ask me to help you get closer to this house’s new owner? For what? Marriage? A hot affair?”
“What is your hostility toward her?”
Tess pushed her empty plate away. “I don’t know, maybe it has to do with having two—not one but two—men come to me today to go on and on about her. What is her secret? I saw her, and she’s not a great beauty. I haven’t heard that she’s brilliant, so what’s the hold she has over you men?”
Ramsey was looking at her with his mouth open. “You’re jealous of Jocelyn, aren’t you?”
Tess threw her hands into the air and stood up. “That’s it. I want you to leave now. And for your information, I am not jealous of her or anyone else. If I wanted either you or Luke I could have you.”
Ramsey snorted. “I know you too well to feel romantic about you. Is that what your problem is? That a man comes over late at night and isn’t dizzy with the beauty of you?”
“You’re sick, you know that?” She practically stomped to the front door and opened it. “Go home. Now.”
“All right,” Ramsey said. “I apologize. I thought it was going to be a great night with Jocelyn, but…”
“But what?” she asked impatiently, holding the screen door wide.
“We ran out of things to talk about.”
At that, all the anger left Tess. If there was one thing Ramsey McDowell could do, it was talk. She couldn’t help smiling. “Did you ask her what she planned to do with her life now that she’s a stranger in a town where everyone not only knows one another but they’re related? Your cousins have to marry from outside here or they’ll give birth to morons. Did you ask her about her plans for the future?”
“No,” Ramsey said. “I guess I didn’t think of it that way. Edilean is home to me, so I…” His head came up. “She likes to make cupcakes.”
“Cupcakes. You had a first date with her and that’s all you found out about her? That she likes to make cupcakes?”
“I’m not a complete idiot. We talked about other things.”
“Like what?”
“For your information, we talked about marriage.”
Closing her eyes, Tess shook her head. “I don’t know how you got through law school. You have no brain.”
He was standing in her doorway, and she knew that her apartment was filling with mosquitoes, but she also knew that if she didn’t give him some advice he’d never leave. “Create a cupcake emergency.”
“A what?”
“Make up something where cupcakes are needed immediately and she’s the only one who can make them.”
“How can cupcakes be an emergency?”
“I don’t know. Talk to your sister. Kids and cupcakes go together. Let Viv work it out. And from now on, talk to anyone but me about your love problems. Got it?”
“Yeah, maybe,” he said.
Tess could see that she’d given him something to think about, so she pushed him out the door and closed it behind him.
Saturday night, she thought. This is what Saturday night in a small town was like. While she was pretending to wait for some man who didn’t show up, she’d had to deal with a lovesick boss who didn’t know what to say to his new girlfriend. “What does he expect me to do?” Tess mumbled. “Hold his hand and listen, then give him advice on how to win the woman?”
And how was she supposed to do that? Tess had no idea what this woman Jocelyn Minton was like. Sara liked her and Luke seemed to be mesmerized by her, but that didn’t tell much.
The truth was, that as far as Tess could tell, she didn’t like the woman. Or maybe it was as Ramsey said, and she was jealous. But not jealous as he thought she was. Tess had read the legal papers in Ramsey’s office and she knew that Jocelyn had been given everything all her life. As a child she’d been befriended by a rich old woman who’d died and left her everything. It was straight out of Dickens.
If Tess was jealous it was because Jocelyn had been given so much while nothing had been given to Tess. Her parents died when she was young, and she’d been raised by a grandmother who treated hate as one of the four food groups—and she insisted on full servings of it daily. “They ruined my life,” her grandmother used to say. “Edilean Harcourt and all of them took my life from me. I could have done something, been somebody, but that town destroyed everything I had. If it weren’t for what they did to me, you and I would be rich now. Living in luxury. McDowell and Harcourt. They’re the ones who stole everything.”
Tess had to shake her head to clear it of the angry old woman’s voice. She was paying her grandmother back for all she’d received, meaning food, clothing, and shelter, so why wouldn’t the old woman’s voice leave her?
Tess put the dishes in the washer, turned off the glaring overhead light, and went to her bedroom. She took off the itchy white silk gown and robe, and put on the big T-shirt she usually slept in. She’d only put on the new gown when she’d seen Ramsey drive up. From what Luke told her today, she’d guessed that Jocelyn and Ramsey wouldn’t hit it off well.
While Ramsey was having his picnic with the new owner, Luke had returned and visited Tess. “He’s never any good when he’s nervous,” Luke said as he put his long legs on her coffee table and drank beer from the bottle. Luke had never given her oh-so-practical gifts as Ramsey did. In fact, Luke had never given her anything. Tess had a feeling that when and if Luke Connor gave a woman so much as a daisy it would mean a lot.
After Luke left, she wondered if he’d been warning her that Ramsey’s date probably wouldn’t go well—and if it didn’t, they both knew he’d show up at Tess’s apartment afterward. Disappointment coupled with the proximity of Tess would be more than Ramsey could withstand.
So Tess had, in her own way, prepared for Ramsey’s arrival. She put on the white peignoir set that had cost her a week’s salary and some makeup.
She still didn’t know what had made her do that. Was it because before Jocelyn’s arrival, she was all anyone in town
could talk about? Tess had pretended she didn’t know how Ramsay arranged the dinner, but the truth was that three women had told her in detail what Ramsey was doing. “His mother borrowed my quilt,” she heard. “Viv borrowed my best candlesticks. You know, the ones my mother left me.”
By the time Saturday came, she knew in detail what Ramsey was planning for that night. All for some woman he’d never met.
That afternoon Tess had been in the back garden, looking at it with regret because it was no longer going to belong to just her and Sara and Luke. The three of them were a good group, meaning that no one stepped on another’s toes. They knew how to give each other privacy. But now that was all over because the new owner was going to take over the garden as well as the house, and everything would change.
When Tess turned back to the house, she saw “her” for the first time. She was walking across the grass to Sara’s apartment and she had Sara’s sewing basket in her hand. That Sara trusted the woman with her precious sewing basket was another strike against her. Sara certainly never trusted Tess with the thing! But then, to be fair, it was quite possible, even likely, that there would be an emergency at MAW—something catastrophic, such as Ken not being able to find his notes for court or the copier jamming—and Tess would have to go running. Sara’s sewing basket might get left in the rain.
Minutes later, Luke left the workshop and was obviously in such a bad mood that he didn’t even see Tess standing just a few feet away. She watched him get in his truck, then instead of going out the back as he usually did, he turned left and went to the front of the house.
Tess stood still and watched as Jocelyn walked across the lawn. She had on a white dress that a nun could have worn with impunity, and there wasn’t a crease in it. Does she ever sit down? Tess wondered.
Tess couldn’t help herself as she scurried around the house toward the front to see what was going on. Luke and Ramsey were in the driveway, and as usual, they were having a confrontation. When Tess first arrived in Edilean, she’d disliked the way the two of them seemed to spend their lives trying to outdo the other, but she was used to it now. She couldn’t hear them, but she didn’t need to. She knew that one was telling the other what to do and the other one was saying no.
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