Wisconsin Wedding (Welcome To Tyler, No. 3) (15 page)

“She never wanted marriage or children, but I came along—”

“You came along and enriched her life. She was already close to seventy when your parents died. She had the store and many, many friends, but you were her only close relative. She taught you what she knew about business. Don’t you think that gave her tremendous satisfaction and solace? And you gave her constant companionship and true devotion in her old age. You were never a burden, Nora. How many times did she tell me you kept her young? You made her keep moving—she couldn’t give up.”

“She’d never have given up.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Nora swallowed, her throat tight. “I used to think she’d live forever.”

“At one time or another I think we all thought that of Aunt Ellie,” Alyssa said, smiling wistfully. “I remember when I was a little girl— I must have been tiny because Mother was still around. She took me to Gates Department Store to buy handmade chocolate angels Aunt Ellie had special-ordered for Christmas. She was standing behind the glass counter herself and she seemed old even then.” Alyssa paused, her expression warm and nostalgic. “Not old, really. Timeless.”

They’d come to the house Aunt Ellie had had built for herself, back even before she was officially an old maid. Alyssa pulled her Mercedes alongside the curb.

“Honoring Aunt Ellie,” she said, “doesn’t mean you have to become her.”

“Thank you, Alyssa. You’ve been awfully kind, considering the stress and strain you must be under. I know I can be hard on people—”

Alyssa laughed softly. “Oh, Nora, you’re so much harder on yourself. People in this town look up to you and you try to fulfill all their expectations. But Aunt Ellie dared to be herself. Let that be an example to you.” She shifted the car into neutral, her foot on the brake. “I had dinner tonight with Byron, Cliff and Liza. Actually, Byron and Liza. Cliff didn’t stick around.”

Nora could hear the concern in her older friend’s voice, but withheld comment.

“Liza’s my first child to get married. I want her to be happy and to have a memorable wedding.” Alyssa hesitated. “And I know she believes in trial by fire. She thinks I’ve been too protective of Cliff and that he needs to jump feetfirst back into society. But a big church wedding…”

“You’re worried Cliff might have a relapse,” Nora said.

Alyssa’s nod was almost imperceptible. “He hasn’t been around people in a long, long time.”

“Do you think Byron’s being here is a help or a hindrance?”

“I don’t know.”

“And their mother—she’s arriving on Thursday.”

“Yes.” Alyssa sighed, her foot slipping off the brake; the car rolled forward. “He desperately wants to see her again.”

“But…”

“But I’m worried. Liza, the renovations, the—the discovery at the lodge. Now the wedding and Byron… It’s a lot for a man who only a few weeks ago most people in Tyler thought was a burned-out recluse beyond redemption.”

The past weeks, Nora thought, couldn’t have been easy
on Alyssa Baron, either, and perhaps she was projecting some of her own anxiety onto her daughter’s fiancé. Discovery of the Body, whatever the ultimate results, had to have stirred up memories of Alyssa’s mother’s departure from Tyler when she was just a little girl. Nora had lost both her parents at a young age, but at least she’d known what happened to them. Alyssa didn’t have that small consolation. For all she knew, Margaret Ingalls could still be alive.

Or, Nora thought dismally, lying on some slab in a morgue, awaiting identification.

“I’ll talk to Byron,” she offered.

Alyssa smiled her sweet, nonjudgmental smile. She was too kind a person, Nora thought, to suffer. “Thank you.”

* * *

B
YRON HAD A FIRE
raging in the study. Nora could feel its warmth from the doorway. She sank against the painted doorjamb, and it occurred to her that she’d never really wanted to live alone. Until she was thirteen, she’d had her parents. Then there’d been Aunt Ellie. For a few weeks—or days, really—she’d had the promise of a life with an itinerant photographer. Only since Byron’s departure from Tyler and Aunt Ellie’s death had she lived alone. They’d been fulfilling years. She’d coped with plumbing problems and a foot of snow in her driveway and the odd bat swooping into her bedroom. But she liked coming home to a warm fire and a warm body in the house.

Spotting her, Byron smiled. “You look done in.”

“It’s been a long day, but I like to keep busy.”

She kicked off her shoes and walked across the thick carpet in her stocking feet, then hiked up her skirt a bit and sat cross-legged in front of the fire. Byron had his shoes off, too. His feet were bare, his toes almost touching the flames. He had his ankles crossed. She noticed the length
of his legs, the snug fit of his jeans on the hard muscles of his thighs. He had his shirt pulled out, the bottom wrinkled where it had been tucked in. He’d pushed up his sleeves. There was something inordinately sexy, Nora thought, about the man’s forearms.

“I made a couple of long distance calls on your phone,” he said. “Seems Pierce & Rothchilde can’t get along as swimmingly without me as they believed.”

“Do you find that reassuring?”

“Not in the least.”

Leaning back on her elbows the way he was, she stretched out her legs, but because they weren’t as long as his they didn’t quite reach the fire. “Does it worry you, then?”

“Nope.” He seemed confident of his answer. “I do my job. So did the woman I replaced. If I stay, I’ll continue to do my job. If I leave, someone will take my place. It’s a mistake to believe you’re indispensable.” He shrugged. “It’s also arrogant.”

“I’ll bet your great-grandfather didn’t feel that way.”

“Good ol’ Clifton Pierce? He wasn’t nearly as married to the company as his son, my grandfather, Thorton Pierce, was. The old bastard never even retired. Died at his desk.”

“Aunt Ellie died at home,” Nora said, “but she never officially retired.”

“Big difference.”

Nora stared at the flickering flames, failing to see his logic.

“Aunt Ellie didn’t live to work, Nora. She worked to live. Gates Department Store was her life’s work and she loved it, gave it her all. But she also loved Tyler, and you. She had her friends, her hobbies. She was a whole person. That’s what my series of photographs on her was all about.”

“This,” Nora said, not too nastily, “from a man who knew her all of two weeks.”

“Two and a half weeks,” he corrected amiably.

“She never knew you’d misrepresented yourself.”

For a full minute, Byron said nothing. Nora listened to the crackling of the fire and the soft ticking of her cuckoo clock, keeping her eyes on the man stretched out beside her. Finally, he said, “Yes, she did.”

“You told her you were Cliff’s brother?”

“She guessed. Said we had the same eyes.”

Nora rolled over and rose up on her knees, peering into Byron’s eyes. “You do. But how would Aunt Ellie have known what Cliff’s eyes looked like?”

“She’d seen him a couple of times around town. She was a highly observant woman. She was also a tad suspicious.
And
she’d badgered Alyssa Baron into telling her what she knew about the weirdo living out at her father’s abandoned lodge. So I was already neck-deep before I’d even opened my mouth.”

Not certain how to react, Nora sat down again. “She never told me a thing.”

“Like the younger Eleanora Gates, the older Eleanora Gates didn’t repeat gossip or confidences.”

It wasn’t in Nora to be angry with Aunt Ellie for not having shared with her all she’d known and deduced. But
Byron
could have told her! She glared at him.

He got the message. “Nora, I know what you’re thinking. It was up to me to tell you the truth about myself and I didn’t, simple as that. If it’s any consolation, Aunt Ellie understood my decision to leave Tyler when I did, if not the way I did. Cliff had his demons. I had mine. You had yours. We all needed the past three years. We weren’t ready for each other.”

“And now?”

“Now,” he said, turning to her, his eyes reflecting the orange glow of the fire, “Cliff has found Liza. And I’m not letting him off the hook this time— I’m not backing off, no matter how hard it is for either or us. He’s my brother. As for you, Miss Nora…” He smiled, moving closer. “I’m very ready for you.”

It was another of his deliberate, incorrigible remarks designed to make her aware—intensely aware—of the way she’d responded to his kiss the other night, the boundless passion they’d shared three years ago. She was not unmoved.

“Is this,” she said, refusing to inch away from him even as he inched closer, “your way of distracting me from demanding reimbursement for your phone calls?”

His eyes danced, or else it was the flickering of the flames. “I think you’re the one trying to do the distracting.”

“Do you miss Providence?”

“No.”

“Do you feel the same way about Providence as I do about Tyler?”

“No.”

“But you’ve been there two hundred years,” she said.

He laughed, the flames still dancing in his eyes. “I haven’t.”

“You said the Pierces…”

“Actually, the Pierces have been in Providence for more than three hundred years. They’ve had their house on Benefit Street for only two hundred.”

Nora tried to imagine it. “Those are serious roots.”

“Cliff and I are the last direct descendants of Clifton Pierce—”

“The founder of Pierce & Rothchilde.”

“Cofounder. There are other Pierces in Providence. We
both love the Pierce house and I guess Providence will always be home, but I’ve traveled too much and have had too many varied experiences to sink down ‘serious roots’ there.”

“Or anywhere else?”

He looked at her. “Not necessarily.”

She smiled. “There, you see? I have distracted you.”

“No,” he said in a low voice, touching her mouth with one finger, “you haven’t.”

His touch, as brief and light as it was, rekindled the desire she’d managed to keep at a slow, quiet burn through her dinner of salad and stringy pumpkin soup and her routine meeting of the Tyler town council. If she’d bypassed the study and gone straight to bed, as common sense had told her to do, she’d have dreamed about him. Now she knew she wouldn’t have to rely on dreams.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I haven’t distracted myself, either.”

“I wondered.”

His lips grazed hers. It was just a small kiss, a taste. It had the effect of a small spark on a very short fuse. Nora sizzled. Unfolding her legs, she sat up straighter than he was, her chest at his eye level. He unbuttoned just one button of her pale lemon silk blouse. She glanced down and could see the lacy edge of her bra, her breasts straining against its stretchy fabric.

“Byron, I don’t want to dream about you tonight.”

He looked up at her. He was propped up on one elbow, turned on his side, his head at a different angle, so that the flames no longer danced in his eyes. “What do you want?”

With a hand that trembled only slightly, she unbuttoned three more buttons on her blouse. They were small buttons, shaped like pearls, and not that difficult to work. In a few seconds, she slipped the blouse from her shoulders. She
could feel the silk drop onto her hips and the heat of the fire on her exposed skin, which glowed in the orange light. Her nipples were hard against her lace bra. She reached around to unclasp it, but Byron stopped her, instead reaching around himself. With one hand, he unfastened the hook. The fabric fell loose. He slipped one strap off her shoulder and then the other, until her breasts were free. She shook the bra off her arms and watched him watching her.

“You have your answer,” she whispered.

And he rose onto his knees, his mouth, already open, reaching hers. His tongue was hot, wet, insistent. She got to her knees as well. He caught her breasts with his palms, moaned softly into her mouth as his tongue plunged deeper. Slowly, he moved his hands down her sides, around to the small of her back. She pressed herself against him, feeling the warmth of his shirt against her bare breasts. Now she, too, moaned.

“I never thought this would happen to me again,” she whispered. “Not twice in one lifetime.”

He answered with her name, spoken hotly against her mouth as his hands slipped into the waist of her skirt, sliding inside her underpants and stockings, down lower until he was cupping her buttocks, lifting her against him. His fingers went lower, deeper, probing, exploring.

They melted together to the floor.

“I want to see all of you,” he said hoarsely. “To touch you everywhere.”

Happy to comply, she unzipped her skirt in back, arching up slightly, but then he seized the hem and slowly, erotically, pulled the skirt down over her hips, her thighs, her ankles. He cast it aside. Breathing hard, he made shorter work of her panty hose. She lay on the carpet in just her lace bikini underpants, her feet very close to the fire. She doubted she looked much like a stern, Victorian old maid.

“I thought I’d never want you more than I did three years ago,” Byron said, his voice low, hoarse with the desire that made him hard and taut all over. “But I do. Nora, there’s never been anyone in my life even remotely like you. I knew when I left Tyler I’d never forget you—and I never did. I never will.”

She helped him with his own clothes then, lifting his shirt over his head, resisting the sweet agony of pressing her breasts to his chest. First things first. He wasn’t wearing a belt with his jeans. They came off with little effort. Underneath he wore deep purple stretch underpants not much bigger than her own; they barely contained him.

“I thought all East Coast blue bloods wore striped boxers,” she said.

“Not this East Coast blue blood.”

And in a matter of seconds, he wore nothing at all.

Hooking his thumbs into the elastic waist of her underpants, he slid them down her thighs, over her knees, down her shins, her ankles and off.

He looked at her for a long time, seeing all of her. And he touched her, tentatively at first, as if making certain they hadn’t plunged together into the same dream. Nora had never experienced anything so deliciously erotic. And he did what he’d said he’d wanted to do, touching her everywhere.