Persuasion (20 page)

“It will,” Pru said.

“When I told you about the idea and said it should be more like a private party, I meant the menu, too. We could greet people with champagne on the dock when they first arrive, and serve bite-size hors d’oeuvres at different stations on the path up here to the porch.”

“Why the porch? It wouldn’t be as magical. The garden has the twinkle lights laced through the trees. . . .”

“There are lights on the underside of the balcony, and we can add more. Not to mention the candles and lights on the water. We could still have dessert and dancing by the fountain, too, but having the tables up here would give people less time to wander around unsupervised.”

Pru pushed back her notebook. “I do love that idea.”

“It would be like throwing a dinner party three nights a week, instead of serving the same thing every night. We’d get to cook something different all the time. That was what Mark and I loved best about trying out the new restaurant recipes we made. Every meal was a surprise.”

Barrie thought of Eight as she said the words. Remembered dancing in the rain with him. Remembered floating through the air not seeing where she was going, not needing to see.
Sometimes, not knowing how things would turn out was half the fun.

A night scene in the garden snapped into focus in her mind: the path, the trees, and the river all lit up. She was hunched over her sketchpad with her pencil, feverishly drawing a logo when Eight and his sister knocked at the kitchen door a scant second before letting themselves inside.

Kate Beaufort looked very little like Eight or Seven. Her enormous brown eyes filled her narrow face, and her mouth was always on the verge of laughing. Everything about her was edged with barely contained energy, like a coiled-up spring. Her movements, though, had the same athletic grace as Eight’s, and like him, she was sun-browned as if she spent innumerable hours outside.

“It’s great to meet you finally,” she said to Barrie, plopping herself down at the table and picking up the various notebooks to have a look. “Daddy and Eight have been talking about you nonstop. It’s like they don’t even care that I’m home, and then Daddy spent half the morning calling around trying to find a satellite dish and someone to put it in so you could have Internet. It was starting to give me a complex.”

“Ignore her, Bear. Kate’s been a natural whiner and a daddy’s girl since the day she was born.” Eight reached for a plate and scooped out one of the last pieces of apple turnover.

“Trust me.” Kate grinned and shook her head. “I’m the last person who’s going to whine about Daddy managing someone besides me for a change.” She snatched a piece of the turnover off Eight’s plate and popped it into her mouth.

He swatted her hand away. “Get your own, would you?”

“Borrowed calories don’t count,” Kate said. “If I take some of yours, I’m saving you from getting fat, and I’m not endangering my own waistline.”

“There’s genius thinking for you.”

“I prefer to think of myself as a nonlinear thinker.”

“That’s on the rare occasions when you bother to think.” Eight stuffed the rest of the turnover into his mouth to keep Kate from taking any more.

A flutter of envy hit Barrie low and hard. Cassie should have cured her of wanting a sister, but she wondered if she would ever stop feeling a twinge every time she ran into a relationship as easy and trusting as this. But then she remembered that nothing was ever as easy as it seemed. Even before their mother died, Pru must have been in Seven’s heart, casting a shadow across their seemingly perfect family.

Was it possible to love two people at once? Or did Seven only remember he wanted Pru when he was near her? Barrie
wondered if that was another consequence of the Beaufort gift. Maybe his wife wanting him had made him forget about Pru. Maybe he had wanted to forget.

Or had it been simpler than that? When Lula had run away and Emmett had told everyone she was dead, Seven must have believed Pru was going to inherit the Watson gift.

Had he given Pru up the same way he wanted Barrie to give up Eight?

The thought knocked Barrie back into her chair. Feeling fractured, she tried to consider the implications. Had Seven married someone else because he’d assumed Pru was out of reach?

If that was the case, then there wasn’t any reason they couldn’t be together now.

Listening absently as Pru and Mary explained the new restaurant idea to Eight and his sister, Barrie found Eight watching her. He edged closer and said, “You all right there, Bear? You look a little shell-shocked.”

“Shocked” was a good word for it, and mad, and hurt for Pru. Because Seven had just given up.

But she couldn’t say any of that to Eight.

“I’m going to have to give you a quota of how many times a day you’re allowed to ask me that,” she said instead. “I’m thinking ‘none’ would be a good starting number.”

He laughed and held up his hands. “I promise, I won’t bring it up again.”

“You keep making promises, and yet no results. . . .” She smiled at him fiercely and climbed out of her chair. “I need a ride into town, baseball guy. Mary wants us to pick up her granddaughter so she can do the website.”

Leaving Kate to help Pru and Mary, Eight followed Barrie out into the corridor and grabbed the keys to Pru’s ancient boat of a Mercedes off the side table in the foyer. Outside, he caught Barrie’s arm, spun her toward him, and pulled her close while her pulse sped up with dread and excitement.

He bent his head and slowly kissed her.

Barrie wanted to fall into him, her lost to his found, her need to his want. Kissing was like the physical form of magic, all potential and the sense that anything might happen. When she was kissing Eight, she felt as if she could fly.

His hands slid to her back, and his thumbs, uneven and warm against her skin, seemed to center all sensation there, as if the slight roughness from his calluses made the contact that little bit more dangerous.

Pulling back, she was glad he was breathing hard, too. “What was that for?” she asked.

“I can’t be happy to see you?”

His voice held an odd note. She tilted her head and studied him. “Are you?”

“Of course. I’m also mad as hell that you didn’t tell me you were going to the funeral.” His eyes deepened to a darker green.

Barrie suddenly found her shoes very interesting. “Gossip on Watson Island is very efficient.”

“Our housekeeper is Pastor Nelson’s second cousin. Dad’s livid that Pru didn’t tell him before she went over there.” Eight walked down the steps and waved the white peacock off its usual perch on the hood of Pru’s Mercedes.

“Seven doesn’t know everything—and Pru doesn’t have to tell him what she’s doing. She’s done just fine without him for twenty years.”

Something cracked behind Eight’s eyes, leaving him vulnerable. He looked away, but not before Barrie saw it. “He does like to think he knows what’s good for people. But that’s how he is. No one’s going to change him.”

“Did you two have a fight?” Barrie asked warily, and when he didn’t answer, she pressed him again, feeling guilty but, at the same time, justified. Because Seven needed to come clean. “Was it because you asked him about the gift?”

“He’s been lecturing me nonstop about going to California. Like I’m too stupid to figure out what’s best for my future.”
He started to slide his hands into his pockets, then raised them in a helpless gesture of exasperation instead. “All this time he’s been pushing me to stay, wanting me to stay, and suddenly he says I need to get away from Watson Island, and I’m supposedly the one who doesn’t know my own mind? Sometimes I really hate him.”

Barrie laid her palm against his cheek. “I know he doesn’t think you’re stupid. No one could think that—”

“He told me he won’t pay for school at all unless I go to California. Also, he told Pru
he
would help with the restaurant so you can keep it going all year round, since I won’t be here.”

The dullness in Eight’s voice and the brokenness of his expression brought an ache to Barrie’s throat. The words all tangled together as she searched for how to explain Seven’s motives in a way that wouldn’t hurt Eight even more.

“You know what? Do me a favor and don’t let’s talk about him,” Eight said. “I need some time or I’m going to implode—Thank God you, at least, are finally getting it. You are getting it, right? I’m not leaving, Bear. I don’t want to. I know I don’t want to.”

Numbly, Barrie nodded. Eight kissed her palm, then went around to slide into the driver’s seat of the Mercedes.

The car had been parked in the sun, and the air inside was scalding. It seared Barrie’s lungs, but maybe it wasn’t the
heat that made it hard to breathe. It was the fact that she had missed another perfect opportunity to tell Eight
why
Seven had changed his mind.

She had to find a way to make Seven tell him.

She and Eight talked about the archaeological dig as they drove, and about Berg, and Cassie’s flashback, and the horses and the details of the restaurant plans. Eight told her about Kate arriving back from camp with less than half the clothes and things she’d started with, because somehow people had needed them, or borrowed them and never given them back to her.

“Dad about had a conniption. She’s always giving things away,” Eight said.

“Didn’t she know the people didn’t want to return them?”

“Of course, but that’s Kate. She doesn’t care. She’d give the shirt off her back to anyone who asked her for it. Reminds me a lot of
you
. You’re both good at ignoring the fact that people are up to no good, and
you both
insist on giving them the benefit of the doubt.”

Flushing, Barrie rubbed her temple and stared out the window as they drove into a part of town she hadn’t seen before. The clapboard houses were smaller and closer together, low single-story homes set on pocket bits of lawn shaded by old pine trees that overshadowed the buildings beneath them. Pine needles made the grass spotty and sparse, but lawn sculptures and window boxes of potted geraniums and big clumps
of bougainvillea provided bright pools of color against the starkly painted wood and brick.

At the house where they pulled over, the front door opened as Eight cut the engine, and Daphne came out onto the stoop wearing shorts and a loose gray College of Charleston T-shirt. Her smile as wide and elfin as before, she put up a finger to signal them to wait and turned back toward the house, where a girl in a motorized wheelchair waved through the darkened doorway at them.

Barrie waved back, but before she could get out of the car, Daphne was already bounding down the steps in a flash of limbs. “Sorry.” She dove into the backseat and shut the door behind her. “Jackson has ball practice, so I had to wait for someone to come and stay with Brit. Also, Eight, Jackson says if you’re sticking around, he wishes you’d come coach Little League, because the coach they had last year sucks. That’s an exact quote, by the way.” Leaning over, she grinned at Barrie. “I’ve got to tell you, this restaurant idea is brilliant. I haven’t seen Gramma Mary this excited since she first heard you were coming home.”

Eight backed down the driveway, and after the initial burst of small talk had dwindled into a slightly awkward silence, Daphne pulled a laptop out of her backpack. “So, you have a design you want to do for the website?”

Barrie called up a mental picture of the logo she had
drawn. “I want it to look like a paper cutout. A gray background with dark branches illuminated with fairy lights, and a big, round moon across the banner. And the name ‘Magical Nights.’ ”

Eight glanced at Daphne in the mirror. “I didn’t realize you’re a web designer.”

“A programmer.” Daphne didn’t look up from the laptop screen. “At least, that’s what I want to be if I can figure out how to get through school. Gramma has her heart set on me being the first college graduate in the family no matter what.”

Daphne didn’t specify, but Barrie suspected “no matter what” had to do with money. That was a legitimate reason for Mary and Pru to push so hard for the restaurant to stay open and be successful.

“What if we opened the restaurant on Thursday nights, too? Would that help?” Barrie asked, feeling guilty for having been selfish.

“I’m not sure anything would ‘help,’ ” Daphne said. “Every time I think we’ve got ourselves figured out, something else goes wrong.”