“No. It wouldn’t.”
His sincerity seemed to have no discernible impact on her. She marched off to the kitchen, leaving him to fend for himself. The front bedroom was the guest room and always had been, from the time Aunt Ellie had had the house built. Nora had moved into the back bedroom overlooking the gardens and yard when she was thirteen. It was where she and Byron had made love, after Aunt Ellie had gone into the hospital. She’d made it home to die. By then, Byron had left Tyler.
The guest room hadn’t changed, the senior Eleanora Gates’s fussier taste in evidence. The curtains were filmy lace, the bed a four-poster with a lace dust ruffle, lace coverlet, lace pillow shams. There was a tiger-maple bureau with a matching mirror, and an Oriental rug of vivid roses and blues.
Byron couldn’t resist: he went across the hall and had a peek. Nora obviously had moved downstairs, and her old room was completely different. It was as if she’d wanted to exorcise the girl she’d been there, the woman she’d become. She’d installed two twin beds, covered with utilitarian quilts, and painted chests, a painted trunk and a children’s table and chairs set up with teddy bears at a tea party. Nora had said she’d make a great aunt. Apparently not having any nieces and nephews of her own hadn’t stopped her. What had Liza said? People in town were already starting to call her Aunt Ellie. That was fine, if it was what Nora wanted.
He thought better of tossing his duffel up on the lacy bed and instead shoved it into the closet, which had potpourri sachets hanging from hooks. He’d unpack later, if at all. If worse came to worst, he’d find himself a park bench.
Down in the kitchen, Nora had set the table with a simple but tempting meal of roast turkey breast, baked acorn squash and tossed salad. Byron could smell apples baking in the oven. His stomach flip-flopped on him; he hadn’t had anything like this in his life in years. Ever since his return to Pierce & Rothchilde three months ago, he’d found himself relying on Providence restaurants and take-out gourmet.
“You didn’t have to go to any trouble on my account,” he said.
“I didn’t. I always make proper meals for myself, and I set the table every night. Just because I live alone doesn’t mean I don’t lead a civilized life.”
“Whoa, there. Don’t forget that I live alone, too.”
“In a tent,” she sneered.
Byron raised a brow. “You’ve been keeping track of me?”
“The store carried your last book. Naturally I couldn’t resist a peek at your bio—which I presume wasn’t all lies?”
A year ago, he’d had a slender volume of his photographs published by a small press—he’d refused to pull any strings at Pierce & Rothchilde. The distribution was nil and there wasn’t a chance that it would have been accidentally or casually picked up by a department store with a small book section. It would have had to have been special-ordered. But giving that Nora was putting him up—and had a carving knife in her hand—Byron decided not to press the issue.
“It wasn’t any of it lies,” he said, sitting in the chair she pointed at with her knife.
“Your name—”
“I used Byron Sanders as a pseudonym, that’s all. It’s a common practice.”
“The bio said you’d spent the previous two years crisscrossing the country and some of Canada and Mexico, living out of your van and a tent.”
“Pretty much true.”
She set down her knife and laid slices of steaming turkey on a small platter, which she set in the middle of the table. “Byron Sanders is ‘pretty much’ your own name, too, but it hardly tells the whole story.”
“Do you ever let anything go?”
“Seldom.”
“By ‘pretty much’ I only mean that I also had the family place in Providence.” He lifted half an acorn squash, dripping with butter and brown sugar, onto his plate. “My mother’s away frequently, and it’s…spacious.” Telling her it was a mansion, he decided, would further undermine the myths Nora had created about him and would not, given the timing, be wise. “So it’s not as if I had no place to go but my van and tent.”
“I see. Can’t let life get too tough, huh?”
He frowned. “Nora, if you don’t lighten up you’re going to get indigestion. And give me indigestion while you’re at it.”
But she smiled suddenly, her entire face brightening. It was the way he most liked to remember her, when she was at her most captivating. He’d never really understood what made Nora Gates smile. “Byron, I was kidding. A bit sensitive about this family place, hmm? Must be something. But I don’t care if it was designed by Charles Bulfinch, has the best view of the Atlantic in Providence and is the next fanciest thing to the Ritz on the East Coast. As Aunt Ellie used to say, it makes no never mind to me.”
Byron chose not to tell her how damned close she’d come to describing the Pierce house on Benefit Street in Providence, Rhode Island.
Her expression turned serious. “The book…your photographs were wonderful, Byron. I mean that.”
“Thank you.”
Despite its modest sales, his book had won a couple of prestigious awards, individual photographs other smaller rewards. His subject had been fathers and sons. He’d traveled from small town to big city, in search of the extraordinarily ordinary. And he’d found it, time and time again. His work, his years of being on the road, neither a Pierce nor a Forrester, had helped him make himself whole again.
“When you came to Tyler,” Nora said, sitting across from him, “you weren’t a professional photographer, were you?”
“I’m still not.”
“Then what did you…what do you do for a living?”
She asked the question as if she already knew she wouldn’t like the answer. Anyone else, Byron thought, would have squirmed having to face those incisive eyes. But Nora Gates didn’t intimidate him; none of the little ways she kept people at a comfortable distance—or men, anyway—worked with him.
Which still didn’t mean she’d like his answer.
“I was president…I am president of Pierce & Rothchilde, Publishers.”
She didn’t throw anything. She just leaned back, fork in hand, and narrowed her eyes at him.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Trying to picture you in pinstripes.”
“Oh, pinstripes are much too racy for P & R.”
“But…” She scooped a piece of squash onto her plate, stabbed some turkey. “Then I assume you have a business background or some sort of training.”
He nodded matter-of-factly. “A Harvard M.B.A. Being the great-grandson of Clifton Rutherford Pierce—P & R’s founder—hasn’t hurt any, either.”
She inhaled, and he could see her revising her thoughts. First, she’d had to adjust to his being the younger brother of the reclusive man up at Timberlake Lodge. Now she had to adjust to his not being the disreputable, uneducated, incorrigible heel of a photographer she’d imagined he was three years ago. Mostly it had been her imagination; he’d never told her all that much about himself. He hadn’t lied so much as omitted pertinent details.
“You quit to do your book?” she asked.
“I took a leave of absence after I came to Tyler.”
“For how long? I mean, are you going back?”
“I have gone back,” he said.
“So you’re president of one of the most prestigious publishing houses in the country?”
There was no way around it. “Yes.”
“Well,” she said, and muttered something about having forgotten the cranberry sauce. She got a small bowl from the fridge and sat back down, changing the subject to the fate of the Tyler Titans, the high school football team, in their latest game, and how Ricky and Lars Travis were both talented pianists but so different. Finally, she looked at him and said, “Harvard, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Well, that makes everything easier.”
“How so?”
“You’re not the man you were three years ago. You’re someone else. You�
�re Byron Sanders Forrester, East Coast blue blood, amateur photographer, president of Pierce & Rothchilde, Publishers—I don’t know. You’re just not the Byron I saw staring at me in Gates’s window that summer. I guess…” She paused, swallowing a piece of turkey. “I guess in a way that Byron doesn’t exist.”
He leaned back. “Nice try, Nora.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“It won’t work. You can’t erase me. You can’t press a damned delete button and just eliminate me.” He pushed back his chair and leaned over the table, so that he could almost feel her breath on him. “I am the same man who slipped your bra off that night in the tent. It was lace—it had a front clasp. I’m the same man who kissed the little mole on your stomach. I’m the same man who went skinny-dipping with you in that swimming hole in the stream—”
“Stop!”
“I’m the man who made love to you, Nora Gates.”
She jumped to her feet. “Leave the dishes. I’ll—”
“I’m not a dead file you can just clear out of your cabinet.”
“I’ll do them when I get back. I take a fitness walk most evenings.”
He turned around in his chair so he could see her sneak across her kitchen. “I’m not somebody you made up one summer.”
She smiled coolly, distantly. “Make yourself at home—I won’t be long.”
She was already at the kitchen door. Byron tilted his chair back on two legs. “You know,” he said, not cool, not distant, “you should be thanking your lucky stars I do exist. In fact, you’re damned lucky I turned up in Tyler again.”
Only her eyes—as always—betrayed her intensity. “I fail to see why.”
“Because, Miss Gates,” he said, “you’re trying to become something you’re not.”
“And what, pray tell, is that?”
“Your Aunt Ellie.”
He could see her swallow. “You’re wrong.”
“Am I?” he asked gently.
“Yes.” She looked away. “Anyway, we’re not discussing me. Three years ago, you tried to be something you weren’t. Don’t try to resurrect Byron Sanders now. It won’t work.”
“I don’t know,” he mused, setting his chair back down on four legs. If she wouldn’t talk about Aunt Ellie, he couldn’t make her. “That haughty way you talk…I think you’ve been spending too much time rereading Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters.”
“You can be such a jerk, you know that?”
“That’s better. Thought you might call me an ‘incorrigible rake’ or a ‘dastardly fellow’—”
He didn’t see it coming. He was still thinking Jane Austen when he noticed the cookbook flying through the air; she’d snatched it from a shelf by the door and launched it before he could react. It missed by far fewer inches than the Beethoven had.
Byron laughed, reassured. He’d thought for a second that mentioning Aunt Ellie had only reminded Nora that she wasn’t behaving the way she figured she ought to behave. But if she was back to throwing things, she was at least letting her emotions, however raw, rip. “Look at it this way—my being here will improve your aim.”
And she was off, wishing out loud that her life did have a delete button so she could send him into the electronic ether. Byron was unreasonably glad that she at least wasn’t neutral on the subject of her ex-lover.
Suddenly he was ravenous. Reaching across the table he grabbed Nora’s plate and finished off her dinner. Then, half to annoy her, half because he’d been taught to be a proper guest, he did up the dishes.
But that wasn’t the only reason he did them. Washing the dishes was one way of staking out territory in whatever relationship they were to have in the days until Cliff and Liza’s wedding—and beyond. He wasn’t just Nora’s guest. He wasn’t an old friend. And he sure as hell wasn’t somebody who hadn’t existed one August three years ago. He was a man who’d loved her, and there was no way either of them could deny it.
There was no way, either, he thought, scrounging in her kitchen drawers for aluminum foil, that he could deny it would be all too easy to fall in love with Nora all over again. What was it about the woman?
He found the foil, then tripped over the book she’d pitched at him. It was a low-fat, low-everything cookbook. Snatching it up, he grumbled aloud that there wasn’t anything about that unforgiving prude that should attract a solid, reasonable, nonself-destructive man such as himself. Was she just a challenge to him? Did he want her only because she’d made herself so damned unattainable?
“You are out of your mind, my man,” he muttered. “You’ve no business wanting that gray-eyed witch.”
But then he could see those gray eyes fill with unspoken pain, with loss and grief, and love, when he’d mentioned Aunt Ellie, and nothing, he knew, would ever be simple or easy when it came to his feelings for Nora Gates.
* * *
AFTER HER TENSE and over-long day, Nora returned from her brisk three-mile walk relaxed, if also tired and cold and a bit chastened. She could warm her hands in a pan of dishwater and soothe her soul with a good book and an early lights-out. But Byron had already done the dishes. He’d even slipped her cookbook back into its slot on the shelf. Looking at its torn cover reminded her of her fit of anger, but that was over now. She wouldn’t let him get to her like that again.
She found him in the study, where he had a fire going in her brick fireplace. He was sitting on the carpet in front of the fire, his long legs stretched out in front of him, just staring at the flames. He seemed unaware that she’d come in.
“Thank you for doing the dishes,” she said.
He glanced up at her; she hadn’t moved from the doorway. “You don’t have to thank me. How was your walk?”
“Invigorating.” She licked her lips, suddenly unsure if she should go any further. She’d done some thinking on her walk. A lot of thinking. “I haven’t been very grown-up about your being back in Tyler. I mean, throwing things is a bit puerile….”
“Puerile? Haven’t heard that word in years. Look, Nora, I don’t mind honest emotion—in fact, I’m glad you can be yourself when you’re around me. And you’d never get so out of control as to hurt me….”
She almost smiled. “You always have been an optimist. I do admire that about you—and your sense of humor. Most of the time, anyway.” She cleared her throat, wondering if launching down the perilous path of being amiable with Byron had been a smart idea. But here she was. “You’ve made it clear that your lying about your name had nothing to do with me—that things you didn’t tell me three years ago were…well, you know. It’s over. I see no reason why we can’t go on from here and at least be civil to each other.”
“I haven’t thrown anything at you.”
He did know how to upset her equilibrium. “That’s true, but you can’t deny that you’ve deliberately tried to provoke me.”
“Okay. I won’t deny it.”
“Byron…” She sighed, breaking off. “Never mind. I’ve had a long day. If you don’t need anything from me, I’d like to turn in, do some reading.”
“Jane Austen?”
“Byron…!”
He smiled. “Sweet dreams, Miss Gates.”
She did not have sweet dreams. She dreamed about him again. Aunt Ellie was still alive, grinning her toothy grin as Nora and Byron made dinner together, laughing and chopping carrots as if the three of them were a happy, if unorthodox, family. Spinster businesswoman, orphaned niece, wandering photographer. The dream made no sense. It took place in the present, although Aunt Ellie had been dead for three years, and she’d seemed to like Byron, enjoy his company, although how could she? He’d lied to her, too. But the discrepancies didn’t strike Nora until she woke up with a start, heart pounding, for the dream had ended—abruptly—with Byron kissing a silver band on Nora’s finger.
“Perish the thought.”
It was rather like coming to amid a nightmare in which one was tumbling from an airplane without a parachute.
Throwing on her chamois
bathrobe, she was out in the kitchen before she remembered that part of her dream was true: Byron was back in Tyler. And in a fit of madness, she’d agreed to have him as her houseguest.
“Oh, Lord.”
He had a pot of coffee on already and was digging in her refrigerator, plaid shirttail hanging out over jeans that after years of wear fit comfortably over the muscular contours of his hips and legs. He was barefoot. He grinned a good-morning over his shoulder, and she saw that his hair was still tousled from sleep. His jawline was a sexy shadow of dark beard. He looked every bit the rakish photographer, but she quickly adjusted her image. He was the president of an East Coast publishing house. He’d been born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. To him, Gates Department Store—Aunt Ellie’s labor of love, her dream, her creation—was probably quaint. Nora realized, with a pang, that she didn’t know this man—that she had no right to hate him.
“Eggs for breakfast?” he asked.
“I don’t eat eggs and you don’t need to make me breakfast.”
“Egad, what’s this? Eggs in a bottle?”
“It’s an egg substitute. Byron, I don’t permit houseguests to rummage at will in my refrigerator.”
He pushed aside her liquid egg substitute as if he’d found a moldy leftover. “What do you usually eat in the morning?”
“Oatmeal and raisins. Now out—”
“Okay.” He rose, making her kitchen seem smaller with his size and the sheer force of his presence. Nora wasn’t used to having anyone around in the morning, not even a cat. When she had guests, she kept them out of the kitchen until she had breakfast ready. “Oatmeal it is. No raisins, though. You use brown sugar?”
She shook her head. He hadn’t buttoned his shirt all the way and what buttons he had done up were crooked. It was impossibly sexy. She could see curls of dark hair poking out. “I’ll cook,” she said.
“Nope. You sit. It’s Saturday morning and I’ve put you through hell the past two nights.” He laughed. “Bad choice of words. ‘Yesterday and the previous evening’ sounds less scandalous, hmm? I won’t judge your nights.”
“Are you making fun of me?”
Wisconsin Wedding (Welcome To Tyler, No. 3) Page 10