Wisconsin Wedding

Anne Forrester didn’t speak for the next two minutes. Although the call was overseas long distance, Byron hadn’t rushed her. She needed to regain her balance. Rational and not prone to jealousy, she nonetheless had had a difficult time facing the fact that Cliff had allowed another woman to at least try to help him, where he’d only run from her. Even if Alyssa Baron was on the periphery of Cliff’s life, she was at least in a small way part of it. His mother wasn’t. But that, Byron knew, was precisely the point: far away, Cliff couldn’t cause his mother—or his brother—further pain and suffering. Or so he thought.

“Maybe there’s hope yet,” she said finally, in a near whisper. “Oh, Byron, if he’s happy…if he’s trying…”

“I know, Mother.”

“I can’t get out of here until at least the first part of next week. What’s your schedule like? I’m not sure we should both barrel in on Cliff for the wedding if we’re not entirely certain he wants us there.” She was thinking out loud, Byron realized, and he didn’t interrupt or argue. “Unless there is no wedding and this is Cliff’s way…well, that would be ridiculous. Not like him at all. He’d never play a trick like that on us, would he?”

“No,” Byron had said with certainty.

“Would this Liza Baron?”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

“It’s just all so…sudden. What if someone’s using the wedding as a ploy to get us out there? You know, upset the applecart and see what happens?”

“It’s a possibility,” Byron had allowed, “but not a serious one, I would think.”

Anne Forrester sighed heavily. “Then he is getting married.”

In the end, Byron had agreed to go to Tyler ahead of time and play scout, find out what he and his mother would be walking into in ten days’ time. None of the myriad excuses Byron could think of to keep him in Providence would have worked, so he didn’t even bother to try. The truth was he’d do anything to see his brother again, even go up against Nora Gates. Hell, they were both adults. She’d just have to endure his presence in Tyler and trust him to keep quiet about their “tawdry affair” three years before.

She’d only, he recalled, talked like a defiled Victorian virgin when she was truly pissed off.

He’d half hoped she’d forgotten all about him.

Of course, she hadn’t. Eleanora Gates wouldn’t forget anything, least of all the man who’d “robbed” her of her virginity. She’d conveniently forgotten that she’d been a more than willing participant. And he hadn’t told her he’d thought he loved her.

He exhaled slowly, trying to look on the positive. The shattered man his brother had been for so long—too long—seemed mostly a bad memory. For that, Byron was thankful. But Nora…

Before he could change his mind, he popped open his seat belt and jumped out of the car. She’d already gone back inside. Except for the masses of yellow mums, the front porch was unchanged from his last visit, when Aunt Ellie had still reigned over Gates Department Store. She’d been a powerful force in Nora’s life. Maybe too powerful. Ellie had sensed that, articulating her fears to Byron.

“The store will be Nora’s,” she’d told him. “It’s all I have to give her. But I don’t want it to become a burden to her—it never was to me. If it had, I’d have done something. I never let my life be ruled by that store. Nora knows, I hope, that I won’t roll over in my grave if she decides to sell. The only thing that’ll make me come back to haunt her is if she tries to be anyone but herself. Including me.”

A perceptive woman, the elder Eleanora Gates. Byron remembered feeling distinctly uncomfortable, even sad, although he’d only known the eccentric Aunt Ellie little more than a week. “What’s all this talk about what will happen after you’re gone?”

Gripping his hand, she’d laughed her distinctive, almost cackling laugh. “Byron, my good friend, you and I both know I’m on Sunset Road.”

It was her self-awareness, her self-acceptance, that had drawn Byron to the proprietor of Gates Department Store—what he’d tried to capture in his photograph series on her. Aunt Ellie had been a rare woman. Her grandniece was like her—and yet she wasn’t.

The front door was open.

Byron’s heart pounded like a teenager’s. Three years ago, Ellie Gates had greeted him with ice cold, fresh-squeezed lemonade and a slice of sour-cherry pie. What could he expect from her grandniece?

A pitcher of lemonade over his head? A pie in his face? Nora Gates didn’t forget, and she didn’t forgive.

Hard to imagine, he thought, reaching for the screen door, that she hated him as much as she did. She didn’t even know who he was.

“Well, my man,” he said to himself, “here’s mud in your eye.”

And he pulled open the screen door, stuck in his head and called her name.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_0c2fc69b-5d70-5da4-8044-8eb1e49a269c)

“NORA,” HE CALLED softly, only half-fearful for his life now that he was putting it on the line. “Nora, it’s Byron.”

He left off the Sanders and judiciously didn’t add the Forrester. First things first. Remembering the screen door had a tendency to bang shut, he closed it behind him. Nora didn’t come screaming out of some dark corner. So far, so good.

The small entry hadn’t changed. To his right, the cream-colored stairs wound up to the second floor under the eaves. Three steps up, where the stairs made a right-angle turn, a window seat was piled with chintz-covered pillows, musty-looking library books and a well-used afghan. It was the sort of spot where Nora would like to curl up with a murder mystery on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Her idea of bliss. Until he’d come around, anyway. Then, for a little while, she’d preferred to curl up with him.

Calling her name again, Byron moved carefully into the living room, which had changed. The neutral colors, the informality, the American art—they were Nora’s touches. Aunt Ellie’s tastes had been more Victorian. She’d have been comfortable in the formal parlor of the Pierce family’s Providence town house. Nora would have been stifled, even if the late-eighteenth-century mansion had been in Tyler. Of course, Byron had learned early on not to point out the differences between Eleanora Gates the older and Eleanora Gates the younger. Nora much preferred to hear of similarities.

The living room was separated from the dining room by a curved archway. There Nora had added a baby grand piano, definitely her own touch. He vividly recalled Aunt Ellie’s happy amazement that her grandniece had any musical ability whatever. “Didn’t get that from me. Do you play piano, Byron?”

He did. So did Cliff. There’d been years of required lessons. He hadn’t touched a piano in ages. Wondering if he were completely mad instead of just half, he played a C-major scale, right-handed, one octave. As he’d expected, the piano was perfectly in tune. He added his left hand and went up another octave, then down two octaves, chromatically. All that drilling when he was a kid came back to him.

“Ricky?”

It was her voice. Even as his heart lurched, Byron snatched his fingers from the keyboard and readied himself for skewering.

“You really have been practicing, haven’t you?” She sounded pleased and delighted, a mood due to end as soon as she caught sight of who was playing scales in her dining room. “That was wonderful! You’re lagging a bit in the left hand, but—” She stood under the archway. “Oh, no.”

Short of a knife at the throat, it was the sort of greeting Byron had expected. He moved back from the piano. “Hello, Nora.”

If she’d changed, he couldn’t see it. She was still as trim and quietly beautiful as she’d been three years ago, her hot, secret temper smoldering behind her pale gray eyes. She must have been upstairs changing. She had on purple tennis shoes, narrow, straight-legged jeans and an oversize purple sweatshirt—neat and casual, but nothing she’d ever wear to the store. She was, he thought, a very sexy woman, all the more so because she didn’t try to be.

He didn’t fail to notice how she’d balled up her hands into tight fists. Apparently he still possessed the uncanny knack for bringing out the aggressive side of her nature—which she’d deny.

And he didn’t fail—couldn’t fail—to remember how very much this woman had once meant to him.

“You really are a bloodsucker,” she said through clenched teeth. “Did you come here to photograph us small-town folk all aflutter over the Body at the Lake?”

“The what? Nora, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Always so ignorant and innocent, aren’t you, Byron?” If her voice had been a knife, he’d have been cut to thin slices. But that was her way, at least with him, of repressing emotions she distrusted even more than anger—emotions like fear, love, passion. “Well, this time I happen to believe you. I think you’re here for an even more despicable reason: Liza Baron and Cliff Forrester’s wedding.”

Byron almost choked. So she’d figured it out. She knew who he was. Now there’d be no explaining, no chance to plead his case…just his marching orders. Get out and don’t ever come back. Damned without a trial.

But Nora went on in her chilly voice, “Another Rhode Island boy’s getting married, and with his being a recluse from a big East Coast family, you thought you’d nose around. You’re a leech, Byron Sanders. Pure and simple.”

A bloodsucker and a leech. He was getting the point. First, she hadn’t forgotten him. Second, she hadn’t forgiven him. Third, she didn’t know his photography days were over and he was president of Pierce & Rothchilde, Publishers. And fourth, she didn’t know he was Cliff’s brother. He had a chance—if a slim one—of getting out of Nora’s house intact after all.

And an even slimmer chance of making her understand why he’d done what he had three years ago.

“Nora, I’d like to talk to you. Do you have a minute?”

“I don’t have a second for you, Byron Sanders. If you think you can march into Tyler and into my life and expect anything but a frosty welcome, you’ve got your head screwed on upside down. Now get out before I…” She inhaled deeply, and her eyes flooded—which had to irritate her—and he could see the pain he’d caused her. “God, Byron, how could you come back here?”

Might as well get started by coming clean. “I was invited to Cliff’s wedding.”