Moonlight Masquerade (24 page)

How to get her back? was the only thought in his head. Was there any apology that she'd listen to? He doubted it.

As he started to put his phone back into his pocket, he thought of his college roommate. Reede checked his contacts list and pushed the button.

“Hey old man,” his former roommate, Kirk, said. “Still trying to get someone to move to glorious Edi-lean and take over for you?”

“No,” Reede said. “I need something else. Didn't your brother get a degree in engineering?”

“Yeah. He works for NASA now. You planning to go to the moon to get away from your hometown?”

Reede winced that he'd made someone think he hated Edilean so much. “Didn't you tell me that when he was a kid he liked to make up codes?”

“Yeah, he did. You planning to become a spy and need some help in your code class?”

“Actually, I am. Sort of.”

“Count me in!” Kirk said. “Who do you need spied on?”

“Can't tell you that,” Reede said. It was one thing to blab too much to his cousin, but he wasn't about to give the Treeborne name to anyone outside the family. Instead, he lied. “My aunt found her grandmother's old cookbook and she wants to use it, but it's written in some sort of code. Think your brother could break it?”

“If he can't he has the entire space industry to help him. But I can tell you that if it's one of those codes based on the order of words in a book and you don't have the book, there will be a problem.”

“It could be,” Reede said. “I have no idea, but maybe I could scan it and e-mail it to your brother. Think that would be okay?”

“I just prescribed for his athlete's feet so he owes me. I still have my old e-mail address so send it to me. I'll get it to him.”

“I will. I'm in Williamsburg now but as soon as I get home I'll send it to you. And thanks, Kirk. I'll owe you.”

“Actually, I've been having hemorrhoid problems and—”

“Call a specialist,” Reede said and hung up on Kirk's laughter.

He left the hospital and drove home. It was late and the office was dark and empty—and his apartment was even worse. Tired as he was, he took the time to scan his copy of the Treeborne cookbook into his computer, then sent the pages to Kirk. When that was done, he sent an e-mail to Al's wife and told her he'd take the house Sophie had seen and he'd be moving in tomorrow. He couldn't bear staying alone in the apartment that Sophie had made into a home.

“Tomorrow,” he kept saying as he showered. Tomorrow he'd work on making Sophie forgive him. And maybe helping her with what that jerk Treeborne had done to her would work in his favor. On the other hand, Sophie probably now considered Reede as bad as Treeborne.

When he got out of the shower, Reede pulled all the Treeborne food out of his freezer and threw it in the trash.

“Tomorrow,” he said aloud and went to bed.

Carter Treeborne felt
his father's anger before he heard it. The man was pounding down the hallway so hard and fast that the big vases on the tables trembled.

Carter lay on the bed in his room, the only light being the HD TV. He was drinking a beer—his fifth—and didn't so much as glance up as his father stormed past the open door. A raging father was nothing new or even remarkable, as Lewis Carter Treeborne the Second's anger was legendary. He'd inherited it from his father, the man who started Treeborne Foods right after World War II. One evening he'd said—in his usual tone of anger—“Damned women today don't want to cook, so I'll give them meals to spend their husband's hard-earned money on.” It was the beginning of an empire.

Carter's mother used to say the idea had been “planted in rage and fertilized by it.”

The first two Treebornes were alike, but the grandson was different. He was like his mother, a gentle, sweet woman who had been chosen for her connections
to “society.” She used to say, “Your father chose me for my education, my ancestors, and my good taste. Of course he now hates me for those same reasons.” Gentle she might be, but she was also a realist.

She'd put all her energy into protecting her only child, her beloved son, from her husband. Even though it hurt her and took away the only thing she truly loved, she sent Carter to his first boarding school when he was just seven years old. But even at that age he understood. If he'd stayed home his father would have had him working in the family business by the time he was nine.

Because of his mother's protection, Carter almost had a life of his own. He was liked at school and invited everywhere, and his mother encouraged him to go. Anything to keep him away from his domineering father.

He and his mother met whenever they could and used every available method to communicate. He didn't let his friends know how much he shared with her, how often he asked for her advice, or how he loved to entertain her with stories of his life. She encouraged him to do charity work, to travel to faraway places, to see and do. Carter wrote her about all of it, sent thousands of photos, and included her in his life as best he could.

She told him of his father, but Carter didn't realize how much she was sugarcoating everything. To Carter his father was a man rarely seen and to be listened to when he did see him. While it loomed over his head that someday he was expected to return to Texas and take over Treeborne Foods, he didn't think
about it much. His father was healthy and still working full-time, and he had no desire to turn over an ounce of his power to anyone else, certainly not to a son he barely knew—and didn't seem to like very much.

The one thing his mother didn't share with Carter was that she was ill. To him, her death was sudden and unexpected. He went tearing back to Texas and was told that his mother had been fighting cancer for years. Long bouts of chemo had left her weak and fragile, but she'd never told her beloved son about any of it.

Carter wavered from being angry at her because she'd cheated him out of seeing her, and angry at himself for not caring enough to figure out the truth. He'd looked to his father to share the grief at her passing, but all Lewis Treeborne had said was, “You can't be a Momma's Boy any longer.”

His words made Carter feel some of the legendary Treeborne rage, but he was no match for his father. The day after his mother's funeral, Carter's trust fund money was cut off and he was given an office in the big, ugly Treeborne building. His father gave Carter so much work to do that he hardly had time to breathe. He was told that he had to make up for lost time. What he should have learned as a child had to be taught to him as an adult. The packaging, distribution, and preservation of food took over his life. There were meetings that seemed to last for days. He had to taste new concoctions and decide whether or not to spend millions on them.

Carter wasn't good at the job. What he was good at was hiring young, ambitious people who wanted to
learn how to run the business. By his third year with the company, he began to have some time to himself. He had four people working for him who eagerly did his work, and as long as he paid them well, they didn't mind that he took the credit. They knew that someday Carter would inherit the company, and they wanted to be there when that happened. They knew that he would put them in charge while he ran back to his other life. The only question all of them had was how long they were going to have to wait.

It was that third summer when “the Frozen Boss,” as Carter liked to call his father to his private staff, was flying around the country, looking for a place to open a new plant, that he met Sophie. His father had already told his son that he was to marry the daughter of a business rival.

Carter had laughed at the idea. “This isn't the eighteenth century where the parents choose their son's wives. I don't love that girl.”

“All that schooling I paid for and you still don't know anything. I don't care whether you ‘love' her or not. Her father owns the Palmer canning plant, and I want it.”

“Then
buy
it!” Carter said.

“He wants to tie up his daughter's future.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Carter was on his third Scotch and soda and it was only 4:00 p.m.

“She's been in trouble in the past and . . . ” His father looked away.

“What kind of trouble?” Carter's eyes were wide and his stomach was beginning to hurt.

His father waved his hand. “Who knows? Who cares?
Maybe you'll luck out and she'll be a nymphomaniac. Not like
your
mother, with her pristine, pure bedroom ways and her—Get back here!” his father shouted, but Carter kept walking.

He drove into the little town, hot, dirty, no liquor served anywhere. He thought of driving on but decided not to. After all he'd had to drink he shouldn't be behind the wheel of a car. If something bad happened in the town owned by the Treebornes he'd be forgiven, but the outside world was another matter.

The only restaurant in town had a screen door and ceiling fans. The wooden floor was sandy from the grit outside. He sat in a booth that had names and initials carved on it and picked up a plastic-covered menu, but he couldn't see it. It was one thing for his father to decree how Carter had to earn his living, but who he was to
marry
?! It wasn't possible.

As he stared at the menu his mind filled with arguments that he was sure would make his father change his mind. He came up with reasonable, logical persuasions that would show how an arranged marriage would be bad for everyone.

As Carter planned and plotted, he looked up and saw an incredibly pretty young woman taking orders from four high school boys who were giving her a hard time.

One of them was asking her out. “It's just a dance,” the kid was saying. Carter recognized him as the local football hero: big, handsome, with an arrogance that said he'd never failed at anything. He'd probably never before had a female say no to him. “Please. I'll buy you
a corsage of any flower you want and Dad says I can have the limo.”

Carter knew the kid's father owned the only car dealership in town. His mother worked for Treeborne Foods.

“If you think I'm going to get in the back of a limousine with you, Jason Dailey, I think you need to go back to school. There's a big hole in your education. Now, do you guys want the usual or do you want the escargot and calamari special?”

Carter put his head down to hide a smile. He liked the way she talked, not the local “gonna” interspersed with casual profanity. Who was she? he wondered. For years his mother had kept him informed of the local gossip. She'd established a garden club, a book club, and had brought in a dance instructor. His mother had written him about everything, even that the little girl dancers wanted to name themselves the Chicken Frieds.

Even though Carter had spent little time in the tiny Texas town that was pretty much owned by his family, he knew a lot about the residents. So who was this gorgeous girl who was so deftly turning the lustful teenagers away? He guessed her to be in her mid-twenties, natural blonde, eyes like sapphires—and a figure that should be a pinup.

“Sophie!” one of the boys called out. “Give me extra fries.”

“I always do,” she answered.

Sophie, Carter thought. Of course. Sophie Kincaid. His mother had written about her. She'd gone away to
college and majored in . . . He couldn't remember what it was, but his mother had said Sophie was “talented.”

Carter knew that when kids left the town to go to college, they didn't return. Treeborne Foods was the only real business, and they only hired locals for the menial positions. “You can't make a kid boss of his dad who's on the conveyor belt” was his father's reasoning. Carter thought it was more likely that his father liked thinking of the locals as his serfs and he was their master.

Carter watched the girl as she poured the iced tea. When he'd arrived, the owner had come out and asked to serve him, but Carter had said he wasn't ready to order. In this town whatever a Treeborne wanted was law.

Twice Sophie had glanced at him, but he'd put his head down and hidden his face. Wasn't there some tragedy connected to her? What was it his mother had written about her? Something about Sophie's mother. Did she die?

Carter couldn't remember. His mother had written to him of so very many families. What she hadn't mentioned was how extraordinarily pretty this girl was. He couldn't help wondering if his mother's omission was on purpose. If so, had she known that someday her son's wife would be chosen for him? Did she know that her son wouldn't be strong enough to stand up and say no?

He didn't like to think any of those things, but it did seem odd that his mother hadn't told him about pretty little Sophie Kincaid who'd gone to college but had returned home. Had she graduated? Probably not
or she never would have returned to her two-bit Texas hometown.