“Furthermore, you have no standing in this matter, Mother. You are not related by blood.” Steel flashed in his tone, almost daring his mother to say he wasn’t related to Miss Trudi by blood, either, then it was gone. “Nor are you among Miss Trudi’s trustees or her immediate neighbors.”
“I care about the Corbett name that she is connected to and—”
“No one doubts that. But this is a town matter. Now, if you’ll excuse us, Annette and I have a meeting.”
He used his grip on her arm to start Annette down the steps. It was a good thing her feet operated on automatic pilot, because her head was elsewhere. Like in shock. She would never have believed someone would dismiss Lana that way. And for it to be Steve…he didn’t seem to think it was unusual. She studied his profile. A faint frown, as if in concentration, but nothing more. Certainly nothing that prepared her for his abruptly stopping and catching her staring.
His mouth twitched, but he wisely did not let a grin unfold. Instead, he said, “Where’s your car? Where’d you park?”
Boy, she was out of it. They’d gone half a block past the lot. He turned around and headed back with her.
“Sorry about Mother,” he said unexpectedly.
“You’re not responsible for your mother.”
He looked at her, but she kept her attention straight ahead. “You didn’t used to think that way.”
“I’ve grown up.”
“Yes, you have. We both have.” He took her hand and drew it around his arm as if he were escorting her into a ball. It should have been a ridiculous gesture with both of them bundled up for the cold. She wondered if tingling could be considered a normal response to ridiculous. “C’mon, I’m taking you up on that offer. Let’s go talk to Miss Trudi.”
He was going to accept her help. She wanted to throw her arms around him and hug him. Not a good idea.
“Right now? What about the highway maintenance chief?”
“If he doesn’t know how to handle snow after all these years in Wisconsin there’s no hope. Besides, setting up an appointment to talk to Miss Trudi would just give her time to fret.”
“Okay, but I want to know one thing. Who are the reasonable people convinced that Miss Trudi and her home should be left as they are?”
He grinned. All-out, devil-may-care and totally un-Corbett-like.
“Nell.”
“I’ll leave you two to it, then.”
Annette’s smile took them both in, but Steve seriously doubted it had the same effect on Miss Trudi that it did on him.
The door closed, leaving him with Miss Trudi and a stack of bad-news financial reports. The study smelled of damp and old paper. A blowtorch couldn’t have ignited the aged photo albums and scrapbooks that lined the walls.
“Such a lovely person, our Annette.” Miss Trudi twitched a pink chiffon scarf. Her eyes, though red-rimmed, were sharp and bright on him.
Our Annette. Would she let him claim a share of her?
She’d impressed him during this conversation with Miss Trudi. Impressed him? Hell, she’d saved him.
As soon as he’d tried to make Miss Trudi see her situation realistically, she started weeping and, yes, wailing. Fearing she would stop listening entirely, he’d rushed to get in all the hard facts. It wasn’t pretty.
Annette stepped in, soothing Miss Trudi and shushing him.
“Stopping her crying is great, but she’s got to hear this,” he’d said.
“She can’t hear it if she’s crying,” she’d retorted.
Annette had spent a good thirty minutes listening to Miss Trudi’s laments and memories. It took him half that time to recognize how she was bringing the older woman around by acknowledging her feelings, then gradually leading her to accept that she couldn’t go back to the past and had to think of the future.
The last five minutes he’d barely heard what Annette and Miss Trudi said.
How many never-acknowledged feelings had piled up in him in seven-and-a-half years? Had he truly accepted that they couldn’t go back to the past? Or deep down, had he thought he could rewrite it, now that Annette was in Tobias?
When Max heals, I’ll be leaving.
She’d said it enough that it should have sunk in. Apparently he still needed the reminder—he’d be a damned fool to let himself fall again for a woman who wasn’t going to stick around. And then there was the matter of the things he hadn’t said to her in the past and the things she had said to him.
I’m tired of having my feelings scheduled so they’re more convenient for the Corbetts to ignore. This isn’t going to work.
“Steve?”
Annette’s hand on his arm jolted him upright. Both women looked at him, Annette quizzically and Miss Trudi with growing speculation.
After that he’d followed Annette’s lead by giving Miss Trudi smaller doses of reality than he’d first tried and letting her digest them before serving up the next batch. By the end, they had agreed Steve and Miss Trudi would go over the details of her finances right now. Annette would watch Nell when she arrived from school.
They had also agreed that Max would give Miss Trudi a realistic appraisal of needed repairs and costs as soon as possible.
“Such a pity it didn’t work out for you and Annette,” Miss Trudi said.
Steve gave her a warning look. Some people thought she was harmless. Some people also thought poison ivy was an attractive plant. Having known her all his life, he’d felt the itch too often to fall for the mild-looking leaves.
“But past mistakes can often be remedied,” she added.
“Don’t even think about it, Miss Trudi.”
She fluttered her eyelashes. “Why, whatever do you mean? I’m simply referring to my lamentable lack of attention to Bliss House. Shall we start?”
He answered by arranging the financial reports in front of her.
Nell arrived as Annette lit the balky burner on her third try and put the kettle on to make tea. Nell immediately set out on a Squid hunt.
Where had Steve gone to in those moments she’d been helping Miss Trudi come to terms with the reality that faced her? It had been nearly impossible to concentrate on Miss Trudi when he sat there with the color of his eyes changing like a sky with wind-driven gray clouds coming and going.
The gray won out. Not like thunderclouds. But like a raw, chilled rain. A day that clamped down on your spirits, making them as listless as the sky.
“Can I ask you somethin’?”
Annette started, more from the realization she’d been staring into space contemplating the intricacies of Steve’s eyes than from his daughter’s return.
“Okay.”
“Why didn’t you marry my daddy? You had the dress and everything!”
Annette sucked in air super chilled by surprise and choked on it, coughing and gasping.
The girl considered her gravely, then whacked Annette on the back with the heel of her hand—Annette’s lower back, because that was as high as Nell reached.
“Okay!” Annette managed to speak between gasps. “I’m—okay.” Whack! “No more!”
“Because I’m pulverizing you?”
“Yes!”
Nell peered at her, nodded in satisfaction and went to her favorite chair. The instant Annette drew one steady breath, Nell pounced. “You were gonna marry my daddy, weren’t you? So, why didn’tcha, when you had the dress and everything?”
“I, uh, I’m not sure what the dress has to do with it.”
Nell frowned. “Laura Ellen’s big sister said the reason to get married is for the dress and presents and party. Caitlin said you can do the other stuff without getting married. And Caitlin’s sixteen. They said you were dressed up and at the church with flowers and all the people, but you left him right in the middle because you changed your mind. Why’d you change your mind?”
You left him. Underneath the little girl’s directness, Annette heard a vulnerability that reverberated in her memories. Daddy’s not coming back, Annette. He’s left. B
ut why? Why did he leave?
“Sometimes you make a decision you think is right. But then you realize you made a mistake. So I…we decided we wouldn’t get married. Because two people who get married should truly love each other.”
“But you musta thought you loved each other, right?”
“Well, yes, when we decided to get married, we thought…but it wasn’t…” She was not going to get tongue-tied by a seven-year-old. “Not getting married was right. Your daddy married your mommy and had you. And I’ve been very, very happy building my company. So you see? Everything turned out fine.”
The kettle whistled, and Annette tended it gladly. She even welcomed a minor crisis over not enough lemon in Nell’s tea.
Then Nell said, “Can I ask you somethin’?”
Annette remembered Steve’s advice—Be careful how you answer this. “You decide if it’s a good question to ask, I’ll decide if it’s a good question to answer.”
Nell’s blue eyes bored into her. Sitting still under that gaze was a greater challenge than sitting across a table from the toughest negotiators.
Finally, the girl nodded. “Daddy doesn’t want me to believe everything I hear. I asked Miss Trudi, but it’s her song and she thinks it makes sense.”
“Song?”
“The one about the butterfly woman.”
“Butterfly wom— Oh. Madame Butterfly. I thought I heard Miss Trudi playing that. It’s actually many songs put together in a story called an opera.”
“All that singing makes it hard to hear the words. They should just say the words, like on TV. Miss Trudi had to tell me the whole story.”
“Is that your question? About opera? Because—”
“No, Miss Trudi told me all about that. She says I’ll like it better when I’m older.” Her face screwed up in disbelief. “This butterfly woman kills herself because some guy picks another girl. Does that make sense?”
Oh, fine, Miss Trudi got opera. What did she get? Cultural differences. Historical inequities. Issues of a woman’s self-worth and, oh, yes, suicide.
“Um, well…killing yourself is never a solution. But it was a different time.”
Nell nodded “They wear strange clothes on the front of that big CD Miss Trudi plays. But Caitlin says lots of girls have babies when they’re not married.”
Annette closed her eyes, wishing she could get her hands on Laura Ellen’s older sister. Now she was supposed to discuss children who may or may not be legitimate depending on which opera expert you listened to? “That’s something you need to talk to your daddy about, Nell. But even if that were entirely true, it can be very difficult for a grown woman to have a baby alone, much less a girl.”
“But this butterfly woman’s all gooey about the baby. It’s the guy who went away that she gets upset about.”
Annette dived into the sliver of daylight that statement offered. “That’s another part of what the story’s about—losing someone you love. Losing him by discovering he doesn’t love you the way you love him. By counting on him and then having him let you down completely.”
She had no awareness of movement or sound, but she looked over Nell’s head and saw Steve leaning one shoulder against the door frame. His eyes contradicted the ease of his pose.
“And then he comes back, but she’s already dead,” Nell said. “If she’d waited, he wouldn’t be yelling Butterfly! Butterfly!”
“That’s true. That’s part of the lesson, to think hard before you do big things. Because you might regret them for a long, long time.”
Only when Annette met Steve’s gaze did she consider that he might read a subtext from their history into the words—but what subtext? That she lived with regret for leaving or that he should live with regret for betraying her with Lily?
Nell said, “Well, I like the one about the fig guy better.”
“Fig? Oh, The Marriage of Figaro.”
Nell made a gagging sound. “That one’s about marriage, too? Does everybody in the whole world want a dress?”
Steve cleared his throat from the doorway. “Came to get Miss Trudi some tea. She—” his gaze flashed to Nell “—needs time to absorb what’s been said.”
“The water should still be hot. Let me help you.” Standing beside him at the stove to keep her voice low, she added, “How is she?”
“Rocked. It’s a lot of reality to swallow when she hasn’t had to face it before.”
She was aware of him watching her profile as she put tea into another pot then poured the hot water in. He wasn’t talking only about Miss Trudi.
That wasn’t part of the deal you’d signed on for. Sometimes people who say they want—even demand—facts don’t truly want them. They want someone else to take care of them. They want someone else to fight their battles for them.
“Hasn’t had to face it, or hasn’t been allowed to face it? Hasn’t been allowed to grow up.” She put a cup and saucer on a tray. Pink roses twined around the translucent cup, and blue geometric designs ringed the saucer. “Do you want to take the pot?”
He looked at her a moment before saying, “Yeah, that’ll be good. What was that all about—Madame Butterfly and The Marriage of Figaro?”
“Apparently Miss Trudi has been teaching her about opera, and Nell isn’t enamored with the subject matter of love and marriage.”
“Who can blame her?” He took the tray and walked out.
Was that what had been bothering him? Had something triggered memories of his marriage to Lily? It ended in divorce, but Annette had no idea why. Could Rob’s situation have opened old wounds? If Lily had left Steve and Nell…
A surge of something like anger hit her. Absurd. The woman had to have been six kinds of fool to abandon her child and husband, but that was no business of Annette’s. It could, however, cause a man to think poorly of love and marriage as the topics for operas, she supposed.
“Can I tell you somethin’?”
Having Nell tell her something had to be easier than answering Nell’s questions—or trying to figure out her father. “Sure.”
“Sometimes my daddy’s not happy. He doesn’t have a special grown-up like Laura Ellen’s mom and dad do.”
Oh. She swallowed twice. “Sometimes when grown-ups get a divorce like your mom and dad—”
The girl shook her head. “He said divorce didn’t scar him. I asked.”
Annette blinked at the image of that conversation—no doubt it had started with Can I ask you somethin’—but Nell was already continuing. “I thought he could marry Fran, but he says he’s not going to marry her.”
So much there to consider—Steve and Fran?—but no time to think about it because Nell had placed her hand on Annette’s arm and leaned forward in the posture of all children telling secrets.
“Sometimes he opens a box in his dresser, and he’s sad. Once he saw me looking and pretended nothing was wrong. But he was sad. So I looked in the box.”
“Nell, you shouldn’t—”
“Daddy says sometimes you have to do things that aren’t fun to protect somebody you love—like making me stay in my room after I crossed the street when I wasn’t supposed to. So I looked in the box.” Her defiantly raised chin dropped abruptly. “But the only stuff in there was some rings and torn gloves.”
“Rings?” Annette felt as if she couldn’t breathe. As if the air in her chest had heated to meltdown temperatures. Yet that single word came out clear and urgent. Rings and torn gloves. The silk had flowed against her skin as she yanked them off, but the sound of ripping had been harsh.
“One’s a diamond and two are just plain gold. I like rubies.”
“Rubies are nice.” But her engagement ring and their wedding bands had been beautiful. Why would Steve keep them? Or maybe he’d given them to Lily and— No. He wouldn’t do that.
The man had conceived a child with another woman while engaged to her. Yet that betrayal—recycling of the most callous kind by giving her rings to another woman—was not in him. She knew it with eve
ry atom in her.
“Shh! Here comes Daddy. Don’t tell him—please? Promise!”
Nell had an obvious case of confider’s remorse, but she didn’t need to worry that Annette would bring this up to Steve.
“Promise.”
Warned by the rattle, Steve opened the back door to let Max and Lenny enter, stamping snow off their work boots. A wad of note-loaded pages stretched the jaws of Lenny’s clipboard. He looked shell-shocked.
Miss Trudi smiled. “Don’t see buildings made like this anymore, do you?”
Max’s injured arm was inside his coat. He was trying to remove the glove from his left hand by rubbing it against his leg when Annette reached him.
“No, ma’am,” he said dutifully, then added in a mutter Steve barely caught, “not standing, you don’t.”
Annette sighed as she pulled off Max’s glove. He backed away before she could reach his jacket zipper. Steve watched her and wondered at his own surprise. He’d understood intellectually that Annette was taking care of Max, yet mild surprise bubbled up at the sight of her looking out for her brother. Maybe he hadn’t given her as much credit for being grown-up as he had thought.
Then she propped her hands on her hips, and intellect took a vacation. She’d slipped her hands under the hem of the bulky cardigan she wore over a white shirt that probably looked plain as sin hanging on a hanger. On Annette it looked like plain sin, sliding over her breasts like a silken sheet after a night in bed. Her gesture pulled up the sweater to reveal her rounded butt in jeans tight enough to—
“Steve, you want to close the door before we all freeze?”
Max’s words and accompanying glare jolted him back to the moment.
They had all arrived an hour and a half ago. They’d agreed Max and Lenny would check the house, ranking what needed to be done based on urgency. Then Max and Annette would work up figures for what the various levels—from necessary to keep the place standing, down to decorative touches—would cost.
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