Wisconsin Wedding (Welcome To Tyler, No. 3)

“I couldn’t think of any decent way to tell you.”

“Of course not. Decency isn’t your style.” She tilted her chin up, hanging on to the last shreds of her dignity. “Does Cliff know about us?”

“He knows you don’t like me.”

“But I never indicated…”

Byron grinned. “You aren’t as good at hiding your emotions as you think, Miss Gates. But you can relax. He doesn’t know why you dislike me so much. I haven’t told him anything.”

Nora exhaled at the blue autumn sky. “I could strangle you, Byron.” She looked back at him. “And that’s only the half of it.”

“I’m sure,” he said. His tone was neutral, but she saw the lust—the damned amusement—in his eyes.

“Don’t you get any ideas, Byron Sanders Whoever. You don’t mean any more to me than a bag of dried beans.”

“Remember your fairy tales, Nora.” Byron smiled. “Jack’s beans turned out to be magic.”

Dear Reader,

Welcome to Harlequin’s Tyler, a small Wisconsin town whose citizens we hope you’ll soon come to know and love. Like many of the innovative publishing concepts Harlequin has launched over the years, the idea for the Tyler series originated in response to our readers’ preferences. Your enthusiasm for sequels and continuing characters within many of the Harlequin lines has prompted us to create a twelve-book series of individual romances whose characters’ lives inevitably intertwine.

Tyler faces many challenges typical of small towns, but the fabric of this fictional community will be torn by the revelation of a long-ago murder, the details of which will evolve right through the series. This intriguing crime will profoundly affect the lives of the Ingallses, the Barons, the Forresters and the Wochecks.

Renovations have begun on the old Timberlake resort lodge as the series opens, and the lodge will also attract the attention of a prominent Chicago hotelier, a man with a personal interest in showing Tyler folks his financial clout.

Marge is waiting with some home-baked pie at her diner, and policeman Brick Bauer might direct you down Elm Street if it’s patriarch Judson Ingalls you’re after. Nora Gates will make sure you find everything you need at Gates Department Store. She’s helping Liza Baron prepare for her wedding, but is having great difficulty handling the unexpected arrival of the groom’s brother! So join us in Tyler, once a month for the next ten months, for a slice of small-town life that’s not as innocent or as quiet as you might expect, and for a sense of community that will capture your mind and your heart.

Marsha Zinberg

Editorial Coordinator, Tyler

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

EPILOGUE

W
ITHIN THE SEDATE
, mahogany-paneled president’s office of Pierce & Rothchilde, Publishers, Byron Forrester pitched a sharp-pointed dart at the arrogant face of his latest traitorous author. The dart nailed Henry V. Murrow smack in the middle of his neatly clipped beard. Byron grinned. He was getting pretty good at this! Now if Henry had been in the office in person instead of in the form of an eight-by-ten glossy publicity photo, Byron would have been a happy man. Only that morning Henry had called to notify him that he’d just signed a mega-deal with a big New York publisher.

“For what?” Byron had demanded.

“A technothriller.”

“What, do you have a dastardly villain threatening to blow up the world with a toaster? You don’t know anything about advanced technology. Henry, for God’s sake, you haven’t even figured out the telegraph yet.”

“Research, my boy. Research.”

Pierce & Rothchilde didn’t publish technothrillers. Its specialties were expensive-to-produce coffee-table books, mostly about art, geography and history, and so-called literary fiction. Some of the latter was deadly stuff. Byron found Henry’s books depressing as hell.

Technothrillers. From a man who’d been utterly defeated by the locks on Byron’s sports car. “How does one exit from this contraption?” he’d asked.

Now he was calling himself Hank Murrow and planning to make a bloody fortune. Probably had shaved his beard, burned his tweeds, packed his pipe away in mothballs and taken his golden retriever to the pound.

“I wonder how much the fink’s really getting.”

Byron aimed another dart. Henry—
Hank
—had said seven figures, but Byron didn’t believe him. He’d yet to meet a writer who didn’t lie about money.

A quiet tap on his solid mahogany door forced him to fold his fingers around the stem of the dart and not throw it. He really wanted to. Henry had offered to send him a copy of his completed manuscript. Byron had declined. “It’ll be more fun,” Henry had said, “than anything that’ll cross your desk this year.” A comment all the more irritating for its probable truth. Byron had wished the turncoat well and gotten out his darts.

Without so much as a by-your-leave from him, Fanny Redbacker strode into his office. Trying to catch him throwing darts, no doubt. She regularly made it clear that she didn’t think her new boss was any match for her old boss, the venerable Thorton Pierce. Byron considered that good news. His grandfather, whose father had cofounded Pierce & Rothchilde in 1894, had been a brilliant, scrawny old snob of a workaholic. He’d vowed never to retire and hadn’t. He’d died in that very office, behind that very desk, five years ago. Byron, although just thirty-eight, had no intention of suffering a similar fate.

“Yes, Mrs. Redbacker?” he said, trying to sound like the head of one of the country’s most prestigious publishing houses.

Mrs. Redbacker, of course, knew better. Stepping forward, she placed an envelope on his desk. Byron saw her eyes cut over to Henry Murrow’s dart-riddled face. Her mouth drew into a straight line of disapproval.

“It’s tacked to a cork dartboard,” Byron said. “I didn’t get a mark on the wood paneling.”

“What if you’d missed?”

“I never miss.”

She inhaled. “The letter’s a personal one addressed to you and Mrs. Forrester.” Meaning his mother. Byron wasn’t married. Mrs. Redbacker added pointedly, “The postmark is Tyler, Wisconsin.”

Byron almost stabbed his hand with the dart, so completely did her words catch him off guard. Regaining his composure, he set the thing on his desk. Fanny Redbacker sighed, but didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. It had been three months, and Byron still wasn’t Thorton Pierce. He didn’t even look like him. Where his cultured, imperious grandfather had been sandy-haired and blue-eyed and somewhat washed out in appearance, Byron took after the Forresters. He was tall, if not as tall as the Pierces, and thick-boned and dark, his hair and eyes as dark as his father’s had been. For a while everyone had thought that despite his rough-and-ready looks Byron would step neatly into his grandfather’s hand-tooled oxfords.

But that was before he’d ventured to Tyler, Wisconsin, three years ago. After that trip, all bets were off.

“Thank you, Mrs. Redbacker.”

She retreated without comment.

Byron had forgotten his annoyance with Henry Murrow. Now all he could think about was the letter on his desk. It was addressed to Mr. Byron Forrester and Mrs. Ann Forrester, c/o Pierce & Rothchilde, Publishers. At a guess, the handwriting looked feminine. It certainly wasn’t Cliff’s.

“Oh, God,” Byron breathed.

Something had happened to Cliff, and now here was the letter informing his younger brother and mother of the bad news.

Nora…
Nora Gates had found out who Byron was and had decided to write.

Not a chance. The letter wasn’t big enough to hold a bomb. And the scrawl was too undisciplined for precise, would-be spinster Eleanora Gates, owner of Gates Department Store in downtown Tyler, Wisconsin. She was the
last
person Byron wanted to think about now.

He tore open the envelope.

Inside was a simple printed card inviting him and his mother to the wedding of Clifton Pierce Forrester and Mary Elizabeth Baron the Saturday after this in Tyler.

A letter bomb would have surprised Byron less.

There was a note attached.

A hoax? This Liza character had neglected to provide a return address or a phone number, and the invitation didn’t request a reply. The wedding was to take place at the Fellowship Lutheran Church. To find out more, presumably, Byron would have to head to Wisconsin.

Was that what Liza Baron wanted?

Who the hell was she?

Was
Cliff getting married?

At a guess, Byron thought, his brother didn’t know that Miss Liza Baron had fired off an invitation to the sedate Providence offices of Pierce & Rothchilde, Publishers.

Byron leaned back in his leather chair and closed his eyes.

Tyler, Wisconsin.

A thousand miles away and three years later and he could
still feel the warm sun of a Midwest August on his face. He could see the corn standing tall in the rolling fields outside Tyler and the crowd gathered in the town square for a summer band concert. He could hear old Ellie Gates calling out the winner of the quilt raffle, to raise money for repairing the town clock. First prize was a hand-stitched quilt of intersecting circles. Byron later learned that its design was called Wisconsin Wedding, a variation on the traditional wedding ring design created by Tyler’s own quilting ladies.

And he could hear her laugh. Nora’s laugh. It wasn’t her fake spinsterish laugh he heard, but the laugh that was soft and free, unrestrained by the peculiar myths that dominated her life.

He’d gone to Tyler once and had almost destroyed Nora Gates. He’d almost destroyed himself. And his brother. How could he go back?

Please come….

Byron had waited for years to be invited back into his older brother’s life. There’d been Vietnam, Cambodia, a hospital in the Philippines, sporadic attempts at normality. And then nothing. For five years, nothing.

Now this strange invitation—out of the blue—to his brother’s wedding.

A woman named Alyssa Baron had helped the burned-out recluse make a home at an abandoned lodge on a lake outside town. Was Liza Baron her daughter?

So many questions, Byron thought.

And so many dangers. Too many, perhaps.

He picked up his last dart. If he or his mother—or both—just showed up in Tyler after all these years, what would Cliff do? What if their presence sent him back over the edge? Liza Baron might have good intentions, but did she
know what she was doing in making this gesture to her fiancé’s estranged family?

But upsetting Cliff wasn’t Byron’s biggest fear. They were brothers. Cliff had gone away because of his love for and his loyalty to his family. That much Byron understood.

No, his biggest fear was of a slim, tawny-haired Tylerite who’d fancied herself a grand Victorian old maid at thirty, in an era when nobody believed in old maids. What would proper, pretty Nora Gates do if he showed up in her hometown again?

Byron sat up straight. “She’d come after you, my man.” He fired his dart. “With a blowtorch.”

The pointed tip of the dart penetrated the polished mahogany paneling with a loud
thwack,
missing Henry Murrow’s nose by a good eight inches.

The Nora Gates effect.

He was probably the only man on earth who knew that she wasn’t anything like the refined, soft-spoken spinster lady she pretended she was. For that, she hated his guts. Her parting words to him three years ago had been, “Then leave, you despicable cad.”

Only Nora.

But even worse, he suspected he was the only man who’d ever lied to her and gotten away with it. At least so far. When he’d left Tyler three years ago, Nora hadn’t realized he’d lied. And since she hadn’t come after him with a bucket of hot tar, he assumed she still didn’t realize he had.

If he returned to Tyler, however, she’d know for sure.

And then what?

* * *

“M
ISS
G
ATES
?”

Nora recognized the voice on the telephone—it was that of Mrs. Mickelson in china and housewares, around the corner from Nora’s office on the third floor. For a few
months after Aunt Ellie’s death three years ago, the staff at Gates Department Store hadn’t quite known how to address the young Eleanora Gates. Most had been calling her Nora for years, but now that she was their boss that just wouldn’t do. And “Ms. Gates” simply didn’t sound right. So they settled, without any discussion that Nora knew about, on Miss Gates—the same thing they’d called her aunt. It was as if nothing had changed. And in many ways, nothing had.

“I have Liza Baron here,” Mrs. Mickelson said.

Nora settled back in the rosewood chair Aunt Ellie had bought in Milwaukee in 1925. “Oh?”

“She’s here to fill out her bridal registry, but…well, you know Miss Baron. She’s grumbling about feudalistic rituals. I’m afraid I just don’t know what to say.”

“Send her into my office,” Nora said, stifling a laugh. Despite her years away from Tyler, Liza Baron obviously hadn’t changed. “I’ll be glad to handle this one for you.”

Claudia Mickelson made no secret of her relief as she hung up. It wasn’t that Nora was any better equipped for the task of keeping Liza Baron happy. It was, simply, that should Liza screech out of town in a blue funk and get Cliff Forrester to elope with her, thus denying its grandest wedding since Chicago socialite Margaret Lindstrom married Tyler’s own Judson Ingalls some fifty years before, it would be on Nora’s head.

Five minutes later, Mrs. Mickelson and the unlikely bride burst into Nora’s sedate office. Mrs. Mickelson surrendered catalogs and the bridal registry book, wished Liza well and retreated. Liza plopped down on the caned chair in front of the elegant but functional rosewood desk. Wearing a multicolored serape over a bright orange oversize top and skinny black leggings, Liza Baron was as stunning and outrageous and completely herself as Nora remembered. That
she’d fallen head over heels in love with the town’s recluse didn’t surprise Nora in the least. Liza Baron had always had a mind of her own. Anyway, love was like that. It was an emotion Nora didn’t necessarily trust.

“This was all my mother’s idea,” Liza announced.

“It usually is.” Nora, a veteran calmer of bridal jitters, smiled. “A bridal register makes life much easier for the mother of the bride. Otherwise, people continually call and ask her for suggestions of what to buy as a wedding gift. It gets tiresome, and if she gives the wrong advice, it’s all too easy for her to be blamed.”

Liza scowled. There was talk around town—not that Nora was one to give credence to talk—that Liza just might hop into her little white car and blow out of town as fast and suddenly as she’d blown in. Not because she didn’t love Cliff Forrester, but because she so obviously did. Only this morning Nora had overheard two members of her staff speculating on the potential effects on Liza’s unusual fiancé of a big wedding and marrying into one of Tyler’s first families. Would he be able to tolerate all the attention? Would he bolt? Would he go off the deep end?

“Well,” Liza said, “the whole thing strikes me as sexist and mercenary.”

Liza Baron had always been one to speak her mind, something Nora admired. She herself also valued directness, even if her own manner was somewhat more diplomatic. “You have a point, but I don’t think that’s the intent.”

“You don’t see anybody dragging
Cliff
down here to pick out china patterns, do you?”

“No, that wouldn’t be the custom.”

It was enough of a shock, Nora thought, to see Liza Baron with a catalog of Wedgwood designs in front of her. But if Liza was somewhat nontraditional, Cliff Forrester—
Well, for years townspeople had wondered if they ought to fetch an expert in posttraumatic stress disorder from Milwaukee to have a look at him, make sure his gray matter was what it should be. He’d lived alone at Timberlake Lodge for at least five years, maybe longer. He’d kept to himself for the most part and, as far as anyone knew, had never hurt anyone. Nora had long ago decided that most of the talk about him was just that: talk. She figured he was a modern-day hermit pretty much as she was a modern-day spinster—by choice. It didn’t mean either of them had a screw loose. Cliff, of course, had met Liza Baron and chosen to end his isolation. Nora had no intention of ending hers.

“If I were in your place,” she went on, “I’d consider this a matter of practicality. Do you want to end up with three silver tea services?”

Liza shuddered. “I don’t want
one
silver tea service.”

Nora marked that down. “When people don’t know what the bride and groom want, they tend to buy what
they
would want. It’s human nature. It’s to be a big wedding, isn’t it?”