“It really wasn’t anything,” Maggie said. “Just took him into the hospital.”
“Details,” Kee demanded. “Before Mother comes out.”
“Really, it was nothing.” Maggie glanced into the house. Kemble seemed to be trying to reassure Mr. Tremaine.
“Don’t think you’ll get out of answering.” Devin grinned.
“So you might as well give in gracefully.” Lanyon shrugged with a laugh. “We’ll give you no peace otherwise.”
Maggie pushed a breath out of pursed lips. Well, what could she do? If she had a brother, she’d sure want to know. “Okay. Well, it was about one in the morning out on Highway 50, maybe forty miles west of Fallon.” And suddenly she was back there—the tumbleweeds glaring white in the headlights, Chris Young’s baritone sliding out of the radio. “A big rig started passing me just as I saw Tris on his bike coming my way. He had nowhere to go. I braked.” She could hear the brakes squeal. She blinked, her breath coming faster. “He swerved but the semi still clipped him.” She saw the flash of the cycle and Tris’s body flying over her hood. She swallowed. “The semi just barreled straight on through. No one around. I got a flashlight and hiked back along the road. He was down a bank and his leg....” She shook her head. She couldn’t tell them about that. “He vomited, from pain and the shock I guess. I cleaned him up while I thought what to do. Cell phones don’t work out there. I figured an hour and half at least to go get an ambulance. Then more than an hour to an ER. And I’d have to leave him alone out there. The only other choice was to take him in myself. But I wasn’t sure he could get up the embankment. I made him choose whether to try for the truck or wait for an ambulance.” Her laugh was shaky as she ran her hand over her forehead and pushed a stray lock of hair behind her ears. “He’s got guts. He chose the truck. I pulled his good arm over my shoulder and got him up. It must’ve hurt like crazy, but we made it up the bank, and he hoisted himself into the cab with his good arm while I pushed....”
The horrible night dimmed. She blinked. Fading light showed rapt Tremaines sitting forward on their seats. “That’s it,” she said, embarrassed. “I took him into Washoe Med as fast as I could go.” She omitted using her horse voice on him, of course, or how scared she’d been.
Silence greeted her words. Finally Kee said, “Wow.”
“Stupid,” Maggie whispered, shaking her head. “What if he’d had some kind of neck injury?” Just thinking about what could have happened made her anxious.
Jane came from somewhere and perched on the arm of the sofa and took her hand. “Shush, now. You did what you had to do. Leaving him out there alone for more than an hour would have been worse. And Tristram will be fine, thanks to you.”
“He could have died out there in the middle of nowhere,” Lanyon said, his face truly serious for perhaps the first time since Maggie met him.
Maggie felt a shiver run down her spine. She turned, knowing what she would see.
“But I didn’t, thanks to Maggie,” Tris said. “I’m grateful for that.” He wasn’t looking at his family. He was looking straight at Maggie. And in spite of the cast and the sling, he was just ... just beaming with life and vitality. It felt like she was seeing him for the first time. His scabs must have washed off finally. He still had the old scars and some pink skin marking the places where his face had been scraped. But he still looked almost inhumanly handsome with his fair skin, the dark comma of hair, and those green, green eyes. She should look away, but she couldn’t. The energy that seemed to emanate from him shot through her body and straight to her core. It was like she’d never really been aware of her body before. Now, it filled her senses. Or maybe he filled her senses. She dragged in a breath. It sounded loud in the silence.
Behind Tris, Mr. Tremaine took off at a run from the room that overlooked the deck.
“Then we are too,” Drew said, and lifted one brow quizzically at Tristram.
Maggie couldn’t suppress her blush. They must have seen her going gaga over their brother. Like a million girls before her. Just pathetic.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Tris was in trouble. Big trouble. He felt fine, of course. Better than he’d felt in a long time. But he’d barely been able to resist Maggie when he was broken and drugged. How would he resist her now?
“Mother?” Drew asked.
“Lying down.” Tris had forgotten his guilt in the flush of seeing Maggie. He tore his gaze from Maggie, his brows drawn together. What could he say to his family? That he hadn’t come home to get healed? That he hadn’t meant to get hit by a semi and he wasn’t drunk at the time? That he was sorry his mother had to pay the cost to heal him? Not likely.
“Well, children,” Drew said, rising. “Let’s see if we can’t get dinner on and save Mother some effort, shall we?” Everyone rose at once, studiously not looking at either Maggie or Tris. That was bad. Maggie was blushing furiously.
“If I wash up, you think maybe I could help?” she asked.
“Where are my manners?” Drew asked no one in particular. “Kee, take Maggie upstairs to freshen up. She’s had a long and no doubt annoying drive.” Here Drew shot a disapproving look at Tris before she turned back to Maggie with a smile. “Then you can supervise from a seat at the bar with a glass of wine. Uh, or a beer if you like. The whole thing will probably be chaos and we can use all the supervision we can get.”
Kee took charge of Maggie and marched her off toward the staircase.
“You, to the kitchen,” Drew ordered, waving at all of them. “Jane, see if Mother put the menu she had planned on the fridge.”
Tris hung back to avoid the rest of the group. No such luck. Drew descended on him. “So, a little electricity between you and the cowgirl?”
“Not my type.” He was lying, of course. Five days ago he would have been one hundred percent sure she was not his type. But now he thought she was both absolutely right for him and absolutely wrong.
“I don’t know,” Drew said with mock airiness. “After I got over the plaid shirt and the hole in the knee of her jeans, she rather grew on me. Certainly she’s got courage.”
“Yeah. She’s got that.” He absolutely did not want to talk about Maggie to his sister.
“And you never cared whether they went to Harvard, unlike our esteemed older brother.”
Was she criticizing Maggie? “Doesn’t need Harvard. She’s got street smarts. And you should see what she can do with horses.” Uh-oh. Did that sound defensive?
“We saw. She rode Cally within an inch of his life. Did you know he could dance?”
Tris swallowed and looked away. “Uh, no, I didn’t.”
“Neither did Tammy. But apparently Maggie did.”
Jane was assigning everyone work in the adjacent kitchen. Drew turned when Tris hung back. “Look, Drew, I ... I know I screwed up, leaving when I did.... Tammy was upset. But I couldn’t stay with Tremaine Senior going on about....” He trailed off.
Drew softened. “I know. We all patched it up as best we could for her. Told her you’d been called away.” She took his arm. “Sometimes I wonder what it’s like to be you, brother mine. You’re the only one who doesn’t believe in your destiny. It drives Father nuts.”
“I’m not like you all. Or hadn’t you noticed?”
Drew chuckled under her breath. “Really? Stubborn? Check. Wicked smart? Check. And far too handsome for the good of the opposite sex at large. A Tremaine registered trademark.”
Tris snorted. “Smart? I didn’t go to Harvard like Kemble, or Brown like you.”
“Neither did Father.” He started to protest, but she interrupted. “I know. He’s an Adapter. But you’re more like him than you think.” Tris made a face and looked away. “You could have had MIT easily and don’t give me any of that stuff about not knowing math. José says....”
“José says?” Damn José. “You been talking to José?”
She waved a hand airily. “Of course I talk to José. And he says you do all the calculations for grinding parts
, and you have some process or something that required all sorts of figuring. All this without even taking high school math classes.” She quirked an eyebrow.
“I read a few books ... just enough to get by.”
Drew pursed her lips. That surprised Tris. He should have recognized that look on Maggie when he first saw it. He’d been seeing it on his little sister for years. “You undervalue yourself as a kind of protection, before anyone else can do it,” she accused. “Father would be pleased if he knew what you’d done.”
Tris snorted. “But he doesn’t know. Because he’s never asked.”
“Maybe he can’t recognize it, because you’re too much like him.”
“Stop.” Tris held up a hand. Enough of this nonsense. “I’m not the son he wants. He’s made that abundantly clear.” His voice was rawer than he wanted.
Drew smiled and patted his cheek. “As long as you’re who you want to be. That’s what counts. And when you realize who that is, that’s when it will happen.”
Tris rolled his eyes. “True love. Magical powers in our DNA. Drew, I don’t believe in that fairy tale any more than I believe in virgin births.”
“I do.”
“I know. And I’m not getting down on you for it. But don’t try to convert me.” He tried to lighten it up. “Anyway, you can’t believe I’m a candidate for true love with my track record.”
“You’re just looking harder for true love than we are. Every night of the week, so I hear.”
“True love was the last thing I wanted.”
“All I’m saying,” she said, whirling toward the kitchen so that the full skirt of her sundress fanned out around her, “is keep an open mind.”
He sighed. “At least Mother didn’t have time to line up candidates with Celtic names.”
Drew turned back, laughing. “The meat market. Remember those awful social climbers at her party last year?”
“They fade into the long line of potential brides she’s been parading through here since Kemble turned twenty-one.”
“Nine years of parades,” Drew drawled. “No wonder you left town.”
And then they were into the chaos of the kitchen.
The house had an actual, honest-to-God library. And a music room with about every kind of instrument you could imagine. Each doorway revealed new treasures as Maggie trailed Kee down the hall toward the guest suite. When they got there, Maggie found that somebody, maybe Mr. Nakamura, had brought up her backpack. Maggie wondered why a family this rich didn’t have a whole staff to do for them. Maybe they had a housekeeping service.
Kee pointed out the bathroom and told Maggie to come down when she was ready.
The privacy was welcome. At least she’d have some time to gather herself before facing them all again. She walked to the window. It looked out over Catalina. A freighter was making its slow way north. The big bay was dotted with triangular sails tipping into the wind. The room itself was as big as Elroy’s shack and elegant, with Chinese carpets in blue and beige. What looked like an old tapestry with scenes from a medieval hunt, full of men on horses and dogs and a stag, hung on the wall. Its faded tones matched the room exactly. And the bed had more pillows than she’d ever seen, in all the colors of the carpet. This was what Tris came from.
And she didn’t. Maybe she’d fit in a little better if she took a shower and changed her shirt. That was about all she could do.
The shower felt delicious. The water pulsed into the enclosure of marble and glass from two shower heads. An assortment of shampoos and gels sat in a little rack in the corner. The towel was huge and white and fluffy. But all she could think about was that Tris would be there when she went down to “supervise” the making of dinner. Even now, as she soaped herself, remembering how he’d looked coming out onto the deck, her body got hopelessly out of hand. She cut short her shower before she started trying to relieve the tension herself. That might help, or it might push her over some edge where she had no control at all.
She was going to have to avoid looking at Tris entirely if she didn’t want to risk being reduced to goggling insensibility. A few minutes ago she regretted that he might not be there. Now the prospect that he would be was frightening. The Tremaine kids at least had turned out to be pretty nice, except for the imposing Kemble. And Drew was a little too perfect. Still, she wouldn’t care about facing the family if she didn’t have to worry about betraying her hopeless feelings for its black sheep at every turn.
She changed into her red rodeo shirt with the pearl snaps, and regretted that she only brought the jeans she was wearing (with the hole in the knee) and a change of underwear. And boots. Not much choice about the boots. It was either the ones for dress or the ones for working. That’s what she owned. She hadn’t even brought her dress boots. She dragged a brush through her hair and snapped the elastic band around it. That was as good as it would get.
At the top of the stairs, she heard laughter drifting upfrom below. When she got to the kitchen, Kee was doubled over and had flour in her hair. Lanyon was red in the face, ditto for hair. Tammy was shrieking like the fourteen-year-old girl she was. Tris’s broad back was seated at a bar overlooking the workspace, where he could rest his cast on a kitchen chair someone had provided. His shoulders were shaking, too.
Drew was grinning, though she didn’t appear to be actually incapacitated. “Maggie! You’re just in time to make this crew straighten up. They can’t possibly be so silly in front of a guest.” That meant Jane wasn’t considered a guest? “Sit there, next to Tristram, and keep him company.” She turned on Lanyon. “You! You are cutting vegetables with Devin. Hop to it.”
Lanyon gave a salute, which cascaded flour over his eyebrows and convulsed Tammy and Kee in peals of laughter all over again. Maggie slid up on a stool she surreptitiously moved a little away from Tris. Couldn’t be so obvious as to sit at the other end of the bar, but she didn’t dare be too close to him. She might just spontaneously combust.
“You got your just deserts, Lanyon,” Tris called. He had a beer called Pilsner Urquell in front of him. What the heck kind of beer was that?
“I was a victim,” Lanyon said with mock severity. “It’s not nice to make fun.”
“You should talk!” Kee said. She turned to Maggie. “Lanyon is the practical joker of the family. We are all his hapless victims.”
“Tris, tell the one about Lanyon’s ferret and the barrels of used oil,” Tammy pleaded.
“A long, sad tale,” Tris mourned. But he launched into it with relish as Jane quietly put a glass of white wine in front of Maggie. She apparently hadn’t heard Drew’s fear that Maggie drank only beer. “My brother’s devious plan was meant to ruin my livelihood.”
They all hooted. Apparently, Lanyon might be a practical joker, but it wasn’t malicious.
Tris shook his head in mock weariness. “It was January, which makes the oil especially viscous....”
Maggie watched as Jane murmured directions to the crew. She was so modest and apologetic they didn’t even realize she was organizing them. Drew had Tammy in hand and they were making salad or something on the back board. Kee was making pies over near a huge Subzero refrigerator. Devin and Lanyon chopped vegetables with the zeal of pirates at the center island. Jane browned batches of chicken in several large skillets. And Tris fit right in. No matter what he’d led her to believe. Even if he had difficulties, this was where he belonged.
They may have thought he hit her, but they obviously cared for him.
As Tris’s story unfolded, Kemble appeared. Tris broke off. “Mother?” he asked. He tried to make it gruff, but Maggie knew him well enough now to hear the anxiety in his voice.
“She’s fine,” Kemble reassured him. “She’ll be down for dinner. Father’s with her.”
Maggie felt Tris deflate.
Kemble cleared his throat. “Are you to the part where José...?”
“Not yet,” Tammy interrupted. “We’re just up to Tris opening the washroom door.”
“W
ell, then you’d better get cracking, brother,” Kemble said. It was sort of an order. But Maggie thought Kemble meant it to thaw the tension between them.
Tris glanced around and realized he didn’t have any choice. He heaved a sigh. “Well, the ferret darted out. And two of my guys started screaming in Spanish....”
Jane gave Kemble a list and whispered something about assembling spices. The way Jane kept glancing up at him.... Was she blushing? Maggie thought he must make Jane nervous or something. For a bossy kind of guy he took directions surprisingly well from the shy girl.
The room filled with wonderful smells as the Tremaine show rolled on. Now that she wasn’t the focus, Maggie was mesmerized. This was what a family was. Everybody pitched in because Mrs. Tremaine wasn’t feeling well. They all cared about each other, even Kemble and Tris in their own way. Tammy finished her assignment and was taking candid pictures of everybody with her very pink cell phone, which drew protests from Drew that she didn’t want horrible photos of her recorded for posterity, and lessons in composition from Kee. The room felt so alive, so ... full. This was what she’d never had.
“Uh, can I set the table?” Maggie asked. She wanted to be some use.
“Sure,” Drew said, opening a drawer and beginning to collect silver. Maggie saw her put back some forks.
“I know you put the fork for the pie above the plate,” Maggie said dryly. “I took Home Ec.”
Drew reddened. “Of course you do.”
Maggie scooped the silver onto a platter and carried it into the dining room. Jane followed with a stack of plates covered with large flowers. They looked hand-painted. Maggie and Jane set the table in silence. Jane got glasses out of a huge, rustic buffet. Jane was a restful sort of girl.
“Guess I shouldn’t have been testy about Drew making assumptions,” Maggie muttered.
Jane smiled. She really had a lovely smile. “Drew is very sure of herself.”
“Must be nice.”
“Right up until you aren’t sure anymore.” Jane straightened. “Well, maybe that will never happen to Drew.”
01 Do You Believe in Magic - The Children of Merlin Page 16