Night Music

by Linda Cajio

  “If I were actually looking for someone for Devlin …” she continued slowly.

  “You are and you know it,” Ellen said.

  “Maybe. Mmmm. I don’t know Hilary very well. But let me think about it.”

  After she had hung up, Lettice allowed herself to take a deep breath of relief. Sixty years was a long time to love someone. But she had. If only she had been braver.…

  She hadn’t, though, and she could never make up for that. But she could make a new beginning, even as she got the last of her grandchildren settled. Devlin, who clung so tenaciously to his pain, would not be nearly as easy as the others. That was why she’d saved him for last.

  Transparent grandchildren. She wondered how far they would go.

  She picked up the telephone to find out.

  “Dinner at Lettice Kitteridge’s?”

  Hilary paused in wiping off a counter in her grandfather’s kitchen and smiled innocently at him. It had been a week since Devlin Kitteridge’s bizarre visit to her home. As he had predicted, his grandmother had called her a few days later to invite her to dinner.

  “Nothing formal,” Lettice had said, which Hilary knew meant she needn’t wear a long gown. “I’m only having a few close friends over. But it will be a wonderful business opportunity for you, Hilary, because I know every one of my friends is desperate to find a new and excellent caterer.”

  “Sounds like a marvelous idea,” Hilary had said. “Thank you for thinking of me, Mrs. Kitteridge.”

  “ ‘Mrs. Kitteridge’?” Lettice had repeated, sounding amused. “Oh, no, my dear. You must call me Lettice.”

  And with that she’d said good-bye, and hung up, without once mentioning her grandson.

  Now, having idly told her grandfather about her dinner engagement for the following evening, Hilary noted how his fingers tightened around his coffee cup. It was the first sign of emotion she’d seen in months. Certainly it was the first one this night, at one of their regular twice-weekly dinners at his house. Interesting, she thought.

  “Yes,” she said, “Lettice Kitteridge. How was the orange-poppyseed dressing on the apple salad?” she added, deliberately changing the subject to see how intrigued he was by her mention of Lettice. “I’m experimenting.”

  “Almost too sweet. What are you catering for Mrs. Kitteridge?”

  Bingo, she thought, smothering a grin. “I’m not catering. She asked me to dinner as a guest.”

  Her grandfather set his coffee cup down in a too-careful manner. It spoke volumes.

  “Moving up in the world, aren’t we?”

  His tone was nearly as sarcastic as Devlin’s, she thought, and that surprised her.

  “I thought we were already there,” she said.

  “Once, maybe. It’s amazing to discover what people are really like when you lose all your money.”

  “That was sixty years ago in the Depression, Grandfather,” she reminded him. He was certainly in his cynical mood tonight. “Besides, you made it all back in the pharmaceutical business.”

  In his first years as a surgeon in the mid-1930s, he had invented a technique using sulfa and antibiotic drugs to make them more effective. He’d sold the technique to the Walters-Stevens Pharmaceutical Company just before World War II began, thereby helping save thousands of lives.

  “Yes, I might have made it all back,” Marsh said, “but more importantly, I was a better person for it. But now I’m nouveau riche. I get to look at their bladders instead of their Monets.”

  “That’s only because you like their bladders better,” she said.

  He laughed, and saluted her with his coffee cup.

  Her grandfather might still be bitter, Hilary mused as she turned back to her cleaning up, but her mother, if she were there, would be ecstatic about the dinner invitation from Lettice. For as long as Hilary could remember, her parents had moved on the fringes of the old Philadelphia families’ intimate social circle, desperately clinging to it, trying to reestablish the Rayburns’ position in it, and getting almost nowhere. They tenaciously followed all of the archaic societal rules, even planning vacations around the movements of the best families, rather than their daughter’s school schedule. Their annual jaunts to Palm Beach in the winter and Cape Cod in the summer were funded by the generous salary her father received for his mostly figurehead position as a vice president with Walters-Stevens. When Hilary was younger, they had casually left her, their only child, with her paternal grandparents. She’d considered that a much more preferable fate. Life with her parents was rigid with social customs of dos and don’ts, while Marsh and Elise’s home was filled with laughter, fun, and love. At least, Hilary thought as she wiped the last counter, she put all the rigmarole—as well as the contacts she made through her parents’ avid social climbing—to excellent use with her business.

  “This is good coffee,” Marsh said, interrupting her musing. “I don’t suppose it’s out of ajar, like in the commercials.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “African-grown, and freshly ground right before brewing.”

  “Don’t you ever eat at McDonald’s, instead of having this fancy cuisine all the time?”

  She laughed. “Once a week, and I’ve been known to hit a Taco Bell upon occasion. Happy now?”

  “Indubitably.” He got up, taking his cup with him. “Have fun at the dinner.”

  Not exactly the response she’d hoped for, Hilary thought. But there had been a definite spark of something.

  She still couldn’t believe her conversation with Devlin Kitteridge. It felt so unreal. Even more unreal was her willingness to do it. She must be nuts. But her grandfather needed something to snap him out of his fog.

  She wondered if she should have told him about Devlin. She had a feeling more than a spark of interest would be the result. It was certainly the result with her. Her reaction to Devlin was dangerous. Maybe she ought to skip the dinner. If she were smart, she would. If she were the perfectly correct daughter her parents had always wanted her to be, she would. But “perfectly correct” had never interested her, and she was intrigued to see just how far Devlin Kitteridge was willing to go to save himself from his grandmother.

  After his granddaughter had left, Marshall Rayburn sat down in front of the TV for another mindless round of the boob tube. Lately it appealed to him more than he cared to admit.

  He thought of Hilary’s surprise announcement that night. He had set Lettice Kitteridge aside decades ago, nurturing his anger and bitterness until Elise had come into his life … and until she died. Now that the future was gone, he seemed to prefer being lost in memories of the past. He couldn’t stop it. It was the curse of an old man.

  Damn that woman, he thought. She was treacherous, fickle. She’d broken their engagement because his family had lost all its money in the 1929 stock market crash. He hadn’t forgotten that in sixty years, and he didn’t like it at all that Hilary was going to dinner there.

  Worse, Hilary had her hopes up. He frowned, wondering why she was so eager. He’d have to keep an eye on her—to keep her from being hurt.

  There was no other reason he was interested, Marsh told himself firmly. Absolutely none.

  Dev tugged at his tie, silently cursing the restricting noose around his neck. And noose was the right word, he thought. He felt hung at this dinner of his grandmother’s. Who wouldn’t, with eight elderly blue-rinsed ladies sitting around the formally set dining table cackling like scrawny hens in a chicken coop? The food was so rich, it made him ill. The talk was of people he barely remembered and didn’t care to know better, and the atmosphere was laden with social-registry etiquette. He hated it. Why the hell had he told his grandmother he’d come to dinner? He should have stayed home on his boat. It was amazing to think that all the shallowness he saw now had once meant everything to him.

  And then there was Hilary.

  She sat across from him looking poised and serene. Nothing broke through that brittle shell of hers. She could be the all-time queen of the debutante
s. She was chatting easily with his grandmother and her friends. In forty years, he guessed, she’d be one of them and just as ludicrous.

  Gazing at her, he wondered if the hint of shadow under her pale-yellow silk dress was the aureole of her nipples. He’d been wondering that all evening, ever since she’d walked in the door. Just once he’d like to see her flesh tighten and betray her through the sheer fabric. It would give him satisfaction to know something got through her icy exterior—and he wanted that something to be him. Why? he asked himself. Why her?

  He nearly jumped when the lady sitting next to him touched his arm. She was smiling. “I said, I understand from your grandmother that you’re a sport fisherman.”

  “Hell, no, lady,” he said, grinning. “I just take those guys out on the Madeline Jo and watch ’em puke over the side.”

  Everyone gasped. He didn’t care. This damn dinner was as ridiculous as everything else in the haughty social milieu the Kitteridges were a part of.

  “Thank you, Devlin,” his grandmother said. “That was most descriptive.”

  The conversation began again, though he noticed Hilary was gazing at him instead with a faint smile. She was the only one, he realized, who hadn’t been shocked by his answer. Finally she lowered her gaze. He watched in fascination as she scooped up some of her parfait dessert. Slowly she licked the creamy froth from the spoon, the action completely unconscious and incredibly sexy. His blood slowed and pounded its way through every inch of his veins. It buzzed loudly in his ears, drowning out the chicken cackle of the older women. Hilary’s lips pursed slightly, almost like an invitation, then her tongue touched the corner of her mouth to catch an errant dollop of ice cream. She looked up and caught him staring.

  Her eyes widened as she stared back. He couldn’t look away. A tenuous thread, invisible but there just the same, seemed to sew itself between them, pulling them together like two pieces of matched fabric.

  With a mighty effort he tore his gaze from hers. He was almost panting for breath, and realized his own spoon was poised halfway to his parfait glass. Dammit, he thought, and shoved the spoon into the stiffened cream. He was behaving like a moonstruck ass. No woman should be allowed to exert that much control over a man.

  He watched Hilary glance at his spoon, then back to his face. She calmly scooped out another spoonful of her own parfait and ate it. She wasn’t even fazed, he realized with growing annoyance.

  He caught his grandmother smiling gleefully at him. Obviously she thought things were moving right along at her little matchmaking dinner party. Fury rose up in him at the idea that he was actually responding to this game he and Hilary were playing, and Hilary wasn’t.

  He decided to teach Ms. Prim Hilary Rayburn a lesson in sexual manners. He smiled charmingly at her and finally took a bite of his dessert. Everything appeared nice and normal.

  Under the table was another matter. He slipped off his shoes, then stretched his leg across the space to rub her calf with his foot.

  The woman next to Hilary jumped suddenly.

  Dev snatched his foot back.

  The elderly woman looked at him, then smiled knowingly.

  Wonderful, he thought. Now he’d turned on someone old enough to be his grandmother. He kept his head down to hide the heat on his face as he finished his dessert. So much for lessons.

  Still, he couldn’t resist the temptation. He stretched his leg out again, and this time his aim was true. Hilary’s eyes widened the moment his foot slid against her ankle. She glanced up, and he grinned at her.

  She never flinched; she just moved her leg away. Other than that one look, she did not reveal any reaction to what he was doing. It made him all the angrier, and he rubbed his foot against her leg again, riding it high on the inside of her calf.

  He knew she couldn’t move her leg any farther away without everyone discovering what he was doing. It would be interesting to see how she’d handle him this time.

  Hilary stared across the table at Devlin Kitteridge, willing herself not to betray the fury inside her. With the dining chairs nearly butted up alongside each other, she had no room to get her legs out of the way, and he knew it. The man was despicable. And if he were a few inches shorter, he’d never be able to do this to her.

  His foot slowly caressed her calf, like a leisurely kiss. A sensual heat radiated outward from the source, pulsing along her thighs. She pressed her knees more tightly together to try to rid herself of the unwanted sensation. And to keep him from going any higher.

  His foot pushed against her closed knees, attempting to force them open. She kept her gaze straight on his smirking face and let her hand drop below the tabletop. She smiled intimately at him. He smiled back. Then she ever so intimately jabbed him in the foot with her spoon.

  Devlin jumped, knocking over his parfait glass. It shattered his empty coffee cup. Too bad, Hilary thought. He needed some cooling off, and scalding-hot coffee would have done the trick.

  “Dear, dear,” she said.

  “Sorry,” he apologized, shrugging ungraciously to his grandmother. He then glared at Hilary. She smiled sweetly.

  Lettice reached over and righted his glass. “Dev, why don’t you take Hilary out into the garden while I have this cleaned up? Besides, the two of you must be bored to tears with our old-lady conversations.”

  Her grandson grinned evilly. “Of course.”

  Hilary repressed a jolt of fear. “It’s really cool out tonight, Lettice—”

  “Nonsense,” Lettice said, waving her hand in dismissal. “It’s August.”

  “Shall we go?” Dev asked with great aplomb as he slipped his shoe back on and stood. Cary Grant couldn’t have looked more debonair, he assured himself.

  Hilary knew she couldn’t make any fuss—not if she wanted any future catering business from these women. And these women could mean a lot of business for her. She never should have jabbed Devlin in the first place. It had been too risky. He could have made a humiliating fuss, and she could have kissed business good-bye. But she had been too angry with him to do anything but react to him.

  She pushed back her chair and stood. “Dinner was lovely, Lettice.”

  “You probably could have done it better,” Lettice said.

  Hilary smiled. “Of course.”

  The other women laughed.

  Devlin opened the French doors that led from the dining room to the back terrace. She preceded him out of the room and waited until they were across the terrace and down the steps to the garden before rounding on him.

  “Don’t ever do that again!”

  “But I had to make it look good for my grandmother,” he protested innocently, “so she would think I’m interested.”

  “You paw a woman on her first date?” she asked, astonished.

  The moon was full, and it was easy to see his frown. “You’ve got a lot to learn if you think that was ‘pawing,’ lady.”

  “And you’ve got a lot to learn if you think that wasn’t.” The man was so crude, it was unbelievable. “Look,” she added, “those women in there mean business to me—”

  “No kidding. But if you think they’ll let a social climber like you into the inner circle—”

  “Social climber!” she exclaimed. She nearly added that he had her confused with her parents, but bit back the retort. She refused to give him any more ammunition. “I mean the catering business, you dolt!” She spun on her heel and strode away from him, furious at his accusation.

  He caught up with her. “Catering? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I have a catering business,” she said. “I do dinner parties, private luncheons. That kind of thing.”

  “A froufrou,” he said.

  She stopped. “What?”

  “You’ve got a froufrou business. Something to keep you busy so you don’t live off Daddy’s money.”

  Hilary refrained from punching him. It wasn’t polite to punch your hostess’s grandson. All the etiquette books said so. “You are a crude, egotisti
cal, Neanderthal snob.”

  “And you are a prissy, cold, social-climbing clinging vine,” he retorted.

  She smiled grimly. “Now that we’ve cleared the air.… If you pull another stunt like that again, I will quit this whole ridiculous scheme.”

  “Not if you want your grandfather happy, you won’t.”

  She paused, then came back with her own ammunition. “And do you want your grandmother off your back?”

  It was his turn to pause. “Yes.”

  “Then you will play by the rules. Are we understood?”

  He grinned. “Perfectly.”

  Hilary relaxed slightly. “Good. Now, let’s just go back inside and get the rest of the evening over with. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  They walked back to the house in silence. Hilary forced away the anger that had arisen in her from his comments. She shouldn’t care what Devlin Kitteridge thought of her. He was a reverse snob, the worst kind.

  They reached the French doors. Through the sheer curtain, she could see the women still at the table, talking. She groaned silently. They had already talked so much, her head ached from listening. But that was part of her business unfortunately. If she didn’t project the social graces all the time, no one would trust her to put together a proper social occasion. Ergo, no business. She was beginning to wonder if she’d lost track of the real Hilary behind the socially polite and correct facade.

  “Still yakking,” Dev said.

  She nodded.

  “Well, we’d better get going on scene two,” he added—and pulled her into his arms.

  Two

  Dev swiftly lowered his head and captured her lips. They were softer than he’d expected, more full and more sweet. She grabbed his arms and tried to push him away, but he kept her tight against him.

  The resistance she was putting up couldn’t mask the unique feel of her. Her breasts and thighs branded his body, giving him a breathtaking taste of what she could do to a man if she weren’t so damn prissy.