“How’s your father doing?” Sandy asked, remembering her own dad’s comments about how hard Emil Lawson was taking the loss of his flamboyant wife.
“Hanging in there,” Sheila said softly.
Sandy struggled to come up with words of comfort, but everything seemed so inadequate. “I’m so sorry about your mom,” she said lamely, squeezing the other woman’s arm.
Sheila’s smile was wan but sincere. “Thanks. I’m keeping busy at the lodge. That helps.”
“New jobs are never dull,” Sandy said.
Sheila looked grateful for the change in conversation. She wrinkled her nose playfully and said, “Except in the dating department. This town has a dearth of eligible men. Britt didn’t tell you that when she offered you the job, did she?”
The association was automatic. At the mention of eligible men, Drew Stirling’s face came to mind, sparkling eyes, teasing grin and all. Sandy forced a casual reply. “No, she didn’t.”
“Of course, there is Drew Stirling,” Sheila said, causing Sandy to wonder if her old acquaintance could read minds. “You’ll probably work pretty closely with him. Say, maybe you could wangle an introduction sometime.”
“Sure. I’ll tell him you want to set up an account with Yes! Yogurt.”
“Ooh, smart girl. I’m counting on it, okay?”
Sandy made a note on the survey and frowned each time she saw the note the rest of the day.
She saw Liza Forrester and her sister-in-law, Cece Baron, with their three children, preschooler Margaret Alyssa Forrester, and the twins, Annie and Belle Baron, named for their grandmother, Annabelle Scanlon. Sandy cooed and complimented the children in return for a couple of completed surveys and all the gossip she could handle, most of it delivered in Liza’s typical full-speed-ahead manner.
Sandy even set up shop one afternoon at TylerTots, the day-care center her sister, Angela, ran, and interviewed parents as they came for their children. She found out who bought yogurt and who didn’t, who would sheepishly admit to buying a brand other than their homegrown label, and why. She discovered that a surprising number of people in Tyler had only sampled the cheesecake or cheese Danish at Marge’s Diner, and knew nothing of the other Yes! Yogurt products.
She also found out more than she wanted to know about the hard times a lot of families in Tyler were experiencing.
“Sandy, until Ingalls F and M reopens, we’re doing well to keep milk in her bottle,” confided an old friend from high school as she shifted her daughter from one hip to the other. “My Rick spends all day every day looking for work, but no luck. Yogurt is a luxury that’ll have to wait.”
Sandy heard similar comments all afternoon and mentioned it to her sister when they locked up at the end of the day. “What’s going to happen to people if the F and M doesn’t reopen soon?”
Angela shrugged and shook her head. “Good question. Some people are already talking about moving.”
“You mean leaving town?”
“People have to have work.”
“But if people start leaving town, other businesses will suffer, too, won’t they?”
Angela smiled wryly. “Thanks for the reminder.”
Glenna McRoberts, who hurried past in search of a pair of missing mittens, interjected, “We’ve already lost four families. And the impact is spreading.”
All evening Sandy mulled over what she had learned. On the surface, she thought, this looked like the worst time in the town’s history to expand Yes! Yogurt. On the other hand, if they could create a few jobs...
Alone in her room that night, she fired up the laptop computer she had used all through college and stared at the screen. Report-writing time. The success of an outlet store was too closely linked to the town’s economic status for her to address one without the other. She had even made it a point to gather as much data as she could on sales trends in other small businesses around town. The fire had happened only a few months ago, so the effects were just beginning to be felt. And plenty of people didn’t want to say anything, for fear of fueling a slowdown in the economy with gloom-and-doom talk.
As she began to tap out her report, Sandy saw only one way to justify such a significant expansion into the local market. They would need to add jobs to ease local unemployment. And that was going to be a tough sell.
Especially to Drew Stirling, who didn’t seem inclined to buy anything Sandy had to offer.
* * *
DREW CHECKED HIS watch. Two hours before he needed to head out for the ninety-minute drive to Chicago to bring Grandpa Stirling back. This time he was determined to leave on time so he wouldn’t be returning long after dark.
He stood, intending to track down Jake and remind him that he would be leaving early. But he passed his office window just as Sandy Murphy pulled up in front of the house, and he paused.
He’d barely seen her all week, ever since he’d been such a jerk at the staff meeting on Monday morning. She’d avoided him. Drew couldn’t say he blamed her. Bringing up her intention to change the logo had been unconscionable. He’d told himself a million times he should apologize. But she hadn’t been around.
He didn’t know what had happened when she walked into the conference room Monday morning. He’d had no notion whatsoever of mentioning her plans for the logo. Then he saw her and rational thought had ceased.
Sandy Murphy in her prim wool suits and her slicked-back hair looked not only competent, she looked formidable. How a twenty-five-year-old woman could look formidable, Drew wasn’t able to explain. But the truth of the matter was whenever he saw her he felt vulnerable. As if whatever she said he would simply agree with and to heck with the consequences. He felt like the hapless hero in some bad sci-fi flick from the fifties who fell under the spell of the alien disguised as a beautiful woman. One look in her eyes and he was mesmerized, bewitched. Sunk.
Yes, that was it. One look in Sandy Murphy’s smoldering dark eyes and he was in over his head.
Why else would he have pulled such a lamebrained stunt after dinner Friday night? Talking about kissing, for crying out loud! He knew better than that. A sane man in today’s business climate didn’t go near things intimate or personal. That way lay professional suicide.
Yet in another moment, he would have been kissing her.
The kiss of death, Stirling. Remember that.
He’d spent the entire weekend trying to convince himself how lucky he’d been that she had backed away when she did. That she hadn’t started screaming for the harassment patrol right there on Second Street.
Then she’d walked into the conference room and Drew had been sucked into a momentary flight of fancy when he’d realized instantly and with no uncertainty that, given another chance, he wouldn’t let Sandy Murphy slip away unkissed.
That was when he’d gone on the offensive. If he made sure she despised him, there would be no question of engaging in the kiss of death. Right?
Except that now, as she mounted the steps to the porch, Drew knew he still faced an uphill battle. The legs were long, the lips were lush, and Sandy Murphy looked tastier than anything Yes! Yogurt would ever crank off the assembly line.
He decided to give her time to reach her office—blessedly at the other end of the hall—before he went in search of Jake. He stood at the window, listened for the front door to open and close, watched snow from the evening before drip from the eaves in the January sunshine. With any luck, the roads would be clear and dry by the time he left for Chicago.
He heard a tap on his office door and turned. Sandy peered in, looking bright and fresh as she peeled off her coat.
“Just wanted you to know I’ve got the report ready for Monday morning,” she said. “If you want a copy now, to study over the weekend, let me know.”
Another surprise from the woman who could unbalance him with only a smi
le. Why would she give him the opportunity to study her report and arm himself against it before she had a chance to make her presentation?
“Sure,” he said, already mentally adjusting his plans for the weekend, which had included plenty of time both to check on the progress of the house he was having built and to help his grandfather settle in at Worthington House. “That would be a big help.”
She nodded. Drew wondered what her smooth, dark hair looked like when she freed it to spill over her shoulders.
Off-limits, Stirling.
“There might be a few...surprises,” she said. “It didn’t seem fair to catch you off guard first thing on a Monday morning.”
The bite in her words was subtle, but he caught it. She was chiding him for doing exactly that to her this week, just as he had been chiding himself. He winced. “I’m sorry.”
Her expression said she doubted it.
“I was a jerk, blindsiding you like that at the meeting,” he said, taking a step in her direction before he realized it was a dangerous move. “I’ve wanted to apologize all week. But you’ve been hard to find.”
“Can you blame me?”
“No. Can you forgive me?”
She walked into his office and tossed a sheaf of papers onto his desk. “I don’t know. Ask me again after the staff meeting Monday.”
Then she disappeared down the corridor to her office. And despite the challenge in her final words, she left him smiling.
* * *
THE SUNSHINE HUNG around long enough to melt most of the ice from the streets and sidewalks. So Sandy talked her grandmother into walking over to Marge’s Diner with her for dinner that night. She told herself she had no ulterior motive, that there was no reason to suppose that simply because a person had dinner at Marge’s Diner one Friday night, he would do so the next.
She also told herself, as she paid the tab and they walked back to Worthington House, that she was most certainly not disappointed that Drew Stirling had decided not to eat at Marge’s again this week.
On the whole, the evening had been successful. Mag had talked to half the people in the diner, reveling in the attention of old friends she hadn’t seen since her move to Worthington House. She flirted with Phil Wocheck, who had stopped in for coffee and pie. She taught the toddler at the next table a rhyming chant she said all the children had loved during the Depression. And she spotted Marie Innes and negotiated a rental agreement for the schoolteacher’s garage apartment before Sandy could protest.
“All in all, a very pleasant dinner,” Mag said, her arm linked through her granddaughter’s as they reached the front steps of Worthington House.
“Thanks for your help with Mrs. Innes,” Sandy said. “Mother isn’t going to be happy.”
“Your mother will cry,” Mag said. “And Franklin will grunt and purse his lips. You’re growing up. They don’t want you to. They’d be doing those things no matter what, so you might as well make yourself happy.”
“Gran, I’m not growing up,” Sandy insisted as she held open the big front door. “I’m already grown up.”
“I know, I know. But not everybody else does yet,” Mag said as Sandy helped her out of her coat.
“Don’t I know it.” She turned to hang up her coat and heard her grandmother gasp.
“A weapon, Alexandra! A weapon! Hand me that umbrella!”
Concerned, Sandy looked around, saw murder in her grandmother’s eyes. She followed the venomous glare until her own gaze landed on Drew Stirling and a lean, elegant-looking, elderly man who seemed as if he might be in the throes of a heart attack.
CHAPTER SEVEN
CLARENCE CLUTCHED THE air beside him until his hand connected with his grandson’s arm. There he clung for dear life.
His worst nightmare had just come true. Magdalena stood before him. And here he sat, stuck in a wheelchair like a decrepit old man. Where was justice? Why had the gods turned on him? Why the Sam Hill was she staring at him as if he were something she’d like to come after with a flyswatter?
“Son?” he said, the word coming out a dry croak, the rasp of an old man who he hadn’t even realized occupied the same body he did. “My heart, I think it’s giving out on me.”
Drew knelt beside him. “What? Grandpa, hang in there. I’ll get someone. You just hang in there.”
Hang in there he did. Clarence didn’t release his grip on his grandson’s arm, even when Drew tried to walk away. His heart, he realized, was actually beating superbly. Extra strong, as a matter of fact. Ah, Mag, you witchy woman.
“I thought they had some standards in this place,” he snapped, finally releasing Drew’s arm and regaining his normal voice.
“Grandpa, are you...?”
“Leave it be, son. Leave it be. Now, wheel me out of this sinkhole.”
She advanced on him then, and he felt her aura begin to surround him with each step she took. An aura of fury and passion, an aura of determination and confounded seductiveness. Mag had always been that way. Fifty years hadn’t diminished her power one whit. Good thing, after all, that he was sitting. He felt his knees begin to shake simply from her presence.
“Clarence Albert, I thought I made myself clear,” she spit out like a mean-tempered feline.
The only thing he’d ever had over her had been his charm and he figured he’d better pull it out now. He needed all the advantage he could get. “Still got the golden tresses, I see, Mag.”
“You two know each other?” The young woman at Mag’s side sounded incredulous.
“Grandpa, what’s this all about?”
Clarence ignored Drew and noted that Mag ignored the young one at her side, too.
Mag looked older, of course. But not old. Still had that golden hair, piled up on her head the way he’d always liked it, the way he’d liked to dream about letting it down. She still had that hourglass figure, too. Her wide mouth was still painted red and those blue eyes still flashed. He thought about wrapping an arm around her waist, dragging her onto his lap and taking a spin around the lobby.
It was the kind of thing that would have set his old Mag to laughing. Lord, they had laughed. Before...before her black heart revealed itself.
“I told you never to darken my door again,” she said, her voice still sharp. “I haven’t changed my mind, Clarence.”
“You’re a beauty, you are,” he said. “Too bad you’re rotten to the core.”
The two young people gasped, but not Mag. In fact, she began to smile. “I’ll have your hide,” she said. “Don’t think I won’t.”
Then she took the young woman’s arm, raised her chin and said, “Come, Alexandra. A lady must always choose carefully the company she keeps.”
“But Gran...?”
Clarence watched them disappear down the long corridor. Her back was ramrod straight, but her hips still swayed like the vamp she was.
“Grandpa?”
“Can’t stay here, son.” He began to wheel his chair toward the door. “Come on, get me out of this place.”
Drew put a hand on the chair. “What are you talking about, Grandpa? Your room is ready. The papers are all signed. There’s nowhere else to go.”
Mustering all the dignity he could, Clarence said, “You surely cannot expect me to remain under the same roof as that scrap of female inhumanity.”
Drew shook his head. “You’re getting melodramatic on me, Grandpa.”
“I am setting a healthy boundary.”
Drew started pushing the chair. “We’re going to your room.”
“I will not remain.”
“Fine. Call a cab.”
“This could be construed as abuse of the elderly.”
Drew snorted.
They reached the room, where they had already unpacked Clarence’s bags, and Drew turne
d on the light. “You want to tell me what this is all about?”
“None of your business,” Clarence snapped, then rolled himself to the window. Streetlights glittered on what was left of the ice. What irony. Like diamonds in the night...
* * *
AN ICE STORM had come and gone the day he returned to Tyler, a conquering hero and a broken man. The gray sky matched his mood.
“The parade is tomorrow,” his mother said at the supper table, her troubled eyes not lingering on her only son. “Everyone is so excited.”
“I don’t want a parade,” he said, staring at the roast beef and potatoes and knowing he couldn’t swallow.
His parents kept their eyes on their plates. His mother passed the rolls one more time. “But you’re our first hometown hero, Clarence. Why—”
He stood, although not as swiftly as he would have liked. “I’m not a hero, Ma. I’m a gimp.”
Then he had hobbled out the front door. But he’d realized halfway down the steps that he couldn’t make it. Couldn’t even run away from the things he couldn’t bear to face.
He had been sitting there, backside freezing, feet gone numb, when she walked by and spotted him.
“You’re Lieutenant Stirling, aren’t you?”
She said it in a way that was half shy and half flirty. A jaunty red beret perched on one side of her head, perking up her brown winter coat, which stopped at her knees to reveal very shapely limbs. Her hair drifted around her shoulders like gold dust and she had the kind of smile that struck a man mute. She was a walking, talking Betty Grable poster. He didn’t answer. He couldn’t.
“I’m Magdalena Halston and I want you to know,” she said, walking up the sidewalk toward him, “how proud all of us here in Tyler are of all our fine boys. And we’re glad you’re home safe and sound.”
Not sound, he wanted to shout. But he didn’t. For there was something in her voice that made him want to please her, that made him want to keep hearing it. So sweet and pure it was, it seemed to strike right at his heart. He knew her, of course. She was his father’s partner’s daughter. But when he’d left for Europe, she’d been an adolescent girl. And that she was no longer.
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