Wisconsin Wedding (Welcome To Tyler, No. 3) Page 7

  Long-lost rugs, sawdust, a rambling, run-down lodge—near chaos seemed to suit Liza Baron, which, Nora thought, was so unlike herself. She preferred order and stability. But in the kitchen, freshly renovated, she saw another side of her new friend, because its unexpected coziness—the rag rugs, the splashes of color, the chipped pottery teapot filled with autumn wildflowers—had to be Liza’s doing. She’d added character and charm to what, with its long stainless steel counters and stark white cabinets, could have been an institutional-looking kitchen. Nora could imagine Liza and Cliff having dinner together at the battered pine table. The two of them, she suddenly saw, were completely right for each other.

  “Hey, what do you say to a cup of hot coffee on this chilly autumn morning?” Liza offered cheerfully, already pulling two restaurant-style mugs down from an open shelf. “I tried to talk Cliff into building a fire to take the nip out of the air, but he was off like a bat out of hell at the crack of dawn. That man. I’ll never figure him out.” She grinned over her shoulder, reaching for the coffeepot. “Guess that’ll make our life together all the more intriguing.”

  Nora smiled. “You have a way of jumping headfirst into the future, don’t you?”

  “It’s the only way I know how. Cream and sugar?”

  “Just black,” Nora said absently, sitting down at the table. She herself plotted and plodded and eased her way into the future, tried to predict it as much as possible, relied on short-term and long-term goals.

  Liza set the steaming coffee in front of her and sat down. Nora finally became aware of her probing, curious stare. “Is something wrong?” Liza asked.

  “No! No, not at all.” Nora sat up straight and tried the coffee. “Hazelnut, isn’t it?”

  “Hope you like it. I only make it when Cliff’s not around. He hates it.”

  “It’s lovely. You and Cliff are so different—”

  “Yep. Keeps life interesting. Nora…” Liza squinted, her expression a reminder of her astuteness. Given her rebellious, outrageous side, people often tended to underestimate her intelligence. “Nora, did Cliff put you up to coming out here?”

  “Actually…”

  “I’m not going to get mad. I told you, he thinks highly of you. He’s that way—makes up his mind quickly about people.”

  Nora sighed. Naturally. People generally did think “highly” of her. But wasn’t that what she wanted? If she had a choice, she’d prefer to inspire respect, not passion. Why not both? That was dangerous thinking, the sort in which she’d indulged when Byron Sanders came to Tyler for the first time.

  “Well, yes,” she said, “he asked me to give you a hand in whatever way I could, but I was going to do that anyway, especially after I saw you in the store the other day. I gather with everything going on you haven’t really had much chance to touch base with your old Tyler friends.”

  “Not really, no,” Liza said, dumping a heaping teaspoon of sugar into her mug of coffee. “My best friend from high school lives in Chicago these days and the rest…” She shrugged. “As you say, there hasn’t been time. I suppose a few will turn up at the wedding. Mother handled most of the Tyler invitations. RSVPs keep pouring in….” Shetrailed off, looking uncharacteristically preoccupied and unsure of herself. “Do you think we’re overdoing it? Or at least me? None of this wedding stuff’s Cliff’s doing—the hoopla, I mean—but I’m trying to pull it off in no time at all. It’s a lot to handle.”

  “Yes, it is, but if a big wedding is what you want,” Nora said diplomatically, “then it’s what you should have.”

  Liza groaned, throwing up her hands. “I don’t know anymore if it is what I want. Maybe I’m trying to please too many people. You know what I mean? Mother’s lassoed one of her friends into having a bridal shower for me. Can you imagine? It’s supposed to be a surprise, but when I started yapping about how relieved I am there wouldn’t be time for that sort of thing, she told me.”

  Liza shook her head, and Nora refrained from comment as she drank more of the hot, flavorful coffee. She would just let her new friend articulate her worries and frustrations…before she found a subtle way to introduce the subject of Cliff’s fellow Rhode Islander.

  Wrinkling up her face, Liza continued, “I hate the idea of going through with a shower. Every nosy old prune in town’ll be there—you know, those women who’ve never even had a man but feel free to offer advice.” She stopped herself all at once, blushing furiously, something not a few in Tyler would have paid to see. “Nora, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s quite all right.”

  “No one ever called your aunt Ellie a nosy old prune, and I’m sure it’ll be the same for you—oh, God, I’m just making it worse.”

  But Nora, who’d never minded being compared to Aunt Ellie and who well understood the ramifications of being an old maid, started to laugh, imagining what Liza Baron would have to say if she’d been privy to Tyler’s youngest spinster’s steamy dream just a few hours ago. Liza stared at her, obviously confused and embarrassed, and then sputtered into laughter, too.

  “Look,” Nora said finally, really liking Liza Baron as a person, “why don’t I talk to your mother and find out what she has in store that she wouldn’t want you to know? If it’s anything dreadful—and I’m sure it isn’t—I’ll do what I can to spare you any unpleasant surprises. I’ll also offer to lend a hand, since this can’t be all that easy on her, either.”

  “Oh, Nora, I couldn’t let you go to all that trouble—I was just going to put my foot down with Mother and tell her to cancel.”

  “What, and spoil everyone’s fun?”

  “Showers are so—”

  “Sexist and mercenary,” Nora supplied, recalling Liza’s forceful opinions on bridal registries. “Another feudalistic ritual.”

  Liza’s bright, pretty eyes were glistening with amusement. “Right. And I don’t intend to have any bridesmaids, either.”

  “I’m sure that’s a perfectly legitimate decision. Traditions sometimes need a fresh look—or even to be abandoned altogether. But I like to look upon bridal showers and bridesmaids not as being about pots and pans and male power and dependence and such, but about sisterhood.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Sure. When these things work, they’re a celebration, an affirmation of who we’ve been as a community of women in the past and the possibilities and hope for what we can become in the future, as individuals, in our roles as wives, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters.”

  “I’ll have to mull that over,” Liza said dubiously. “You do have a way of putting a nice spin on things, Nora Gates.”

  Nora shrugged. “Everyone loves a wedding.”

  “I know, and I’ve been thinking of so many of these wedding traditions as a burden—you know I’m a rebel at heart. It’s my nature to question everything that’s ‘expected.’ But it’s refreshing to consider the meaning behind all these traditions. You don’t have to talk to my Mother, however.”

  “But I want to. Really.”

  Liza narrowed her eyes. “You mean it, don’t you?”

  Nora smiled. “I wouldn’t mislead you on something this important. A bridal shower shouldn’t be an imposition and it shouldn’t be trivial—it should be fun.”

  “You’re right.”

  “And a shower would help you get your feet wet—so to speak—before the wedding. You know, see your mother’s friends and some of your old friends before you and Cliff—”

  “Are waltzed up the aisle,” Liza finished, grinning suddenly. “Okay, I get your point.” But her grin vanished, her beautiful eyes darkening. “Do you think Cliff and I are rushing things?”

  “It’s not my place to say—”

  “I don’t mean about falling in love. That’s happened. Nothing and nobody can undo that. I mean the wedding. People have hardly had time to adjust to my being home, never mind to my marrying the town recluse. And they don’t know Cliff.”

  “Look,” Nora said, comfortable in her role as co
nfidante, “everyone in Tyler knows you do things in a whoosh. A couple of weeks’ notice for your wedding is about all anyone who knows you would expect.”

  Liza downed half her coffee in a big gulp. “You wouldn’t do it this way.”

  “I’m not you, Liza.”

  But Nora couldn’t help thinking—again—of Byron Sanders. If their short-lived affair hadn’t been a spontaneous whirlwind of lunacy, she didn’t know what was. And there’d been a time when she’d thought nothing and no one could have pulled them apart. But that was over, an incident she didn’t care to repeat because it wasn’t her way of doing things. Whirlwind love affairs—even one that endured—were not her style.

  She went on, “You need to do what’s right for you without—”

  “Without getting myself tarred and feathered and run out of town,” Liza said good-naturedly. “I’m glad Cliff got you to come out here. For one thing, it shows he’s thinking about me—which I know, but it’s always nice to have it demonstrated. For another thing, it’s a relief not to have to go through these wedding ‘traditions’ alone. I know I have Cliff and Mother—and Amanda and Jeffery, of course, but—”

  “But fiancés, mothers and siblings don’t help when what you really need is a friend.”

  Liza nodded. “Sisterhood, right? Honestly, Nora, from anyone but you that kind of talk’d sound downright radical. Hey, you want to say hi to Cliff? He should be around outside somewhere.”

  “If I won’t be intruding.”

  “Not at all.”

  Nora rose to take her empty coffee mug to the sink, as Liza went on, “If you ask me, Cliff needs more intrusion. People in Tyler have been tiptoeing around him for too long, and there’s just no need. You know, he’d had almost nothing to do with the human race for years and years until I barreled into his life.”

  She seemed quite pleased with herself as, standing next to Nora, she dumped out the rest of her coffee. Liza Baron was confident that she and Cliff Forrester were right—meant—for each other. Any of the upheaval their romance had caused for him and for herself was well worth the struggle, the change, the need to adapt and adjust.

  Three years ago, Byron Sanders could have been smug about having barreled into Nora’s life. But there was a difference. Cliff Forrester’s life had needed stirring up. Nora’s hadn’t.

  And it still didn’t, she thought.

  And, she added silently, there was another big difference: Liza Baron and Cliff Forrester loved each other.

  “Come on,” Liza said, “I’ll take you through the back. There’s a path down to the lake. I think that’s where Cliff went.”

  They cut through a small sitting room off the kitchen and went out onto the veranda, which offered one of the old lodge’s many spectacular views of the lake. With her usual boundless energy, Liza made a beeline to a narrow, beaten path that wound through the overgrown yard down toward the lake, as blue and clear as the autumn sky. The grass, knee-high along the path, was dotted with goldenrod and asters, and there were pale birches, the odd gnarled pine and clumps of sumac. All the more brightly colored leaves—the reds, burgandies and vivid oranges—had fallen to the ground, leaving only those of the more muted colors, yellows and soft oranges, clinging to the trees.

  Nora screwed up her courage. “Have you heard from any of Cliff’s family or friends in Rhode Island?”

  “Oh, I only invited family—just his mother and younger brother. His father’s dead. I don’t know any of his old friends.”

  So Byron Sanders hadn’t been invited to Tyler. The lying fink. How had he found out about the wedding? From the Rhode Island Forresters? The mother or the younger brother must have blabbed to someone who’d blabbed…well, Byron would be on the receiving end of any manner of gossip and news. He was that way. If the reclusive Cliff Forrester did indeed come from a prominent East Coast family, Byron could have himself quite a coup if he managed to photograph his wedding.

  “How long has it been since Cliff’s seen his family?” Nora asked casually.

  Liza was getting well ahead of her. “Five years at least,” she said over her shoulder. “Why?”

  “I was just curious. Sorry if I seem nosy—”

  “No, that’s okay. You don’t seem nosy.” Liza stopped in the middle of the narrow path until Nora caught up with her, a matter of thirty seconds. Nora was intensely aware of her new friend’s scrutiny. “You do seem a little…I don’t know, nervous or something.”

  “I’m not—”

  But Nora stopped, feeling her face drain of all color. Up ahead, probably on the same path, or not bothering with a path at all, two men were walking toward them. One clearly was Cliff Forrester. The other, just as clearly, unless Nora had gone completely off her rocker, was Byron Sanders.

  “Hey, there!” Cliff called, waving.

  Spotting him, Liza beamed and waved back. A woman in love. “What’re you up to? Who’s that with you?”

  “I can’t hear you. Wait there and we’ll join you.”

  Liza frowned, her hands on her hips as she peered down toward the lake and the two men. “That’s not one of Joe Santori’s crew, is it?”

  “I don’t think so,” Nora said, gritting her teeth.

  Then the two men came up over the rise and she could see Byron’s dark hair glistening in the sun, the hard edges of his face, his strong, even gait. The prospect of such ignominy, of having to deal with this man again, and in front of two friends—two potential victims of Byron Sanders’s wiles and charms—thoroughly unsettled and annoyed Nora.

  She thought she saw him smiling.

  The cad. Had he just recognized her? Did it amuse him to know he threw her off balance? Did he enjoy making her miserable?

  I won’t give him the satisfaction, she thought.

  But as the two men came closer, Nora found herself muttering an oath Aunt Ellie certainly had never taught her.

  Liza glanced at her, eyes twinkling. “Gee, Nora, I didn’t think you had it in you.”

  Nora could feel the color returning to her cheeks. “Sorry. I’m just…it’s possible I know this guy.”

  “No kidding?”

  Then they were approaching and Nora gritted her teeth, saying nothing, refusing even to look at Byron Sanders. She felt his presence, though. It was just that way with her and him—one of those uncomfortable realities, like poison ivy and root canals.

  “Hi, Cliff,” Liza said. “Who’s your friend?”

  “He’s not a friend.”

  Nora’s eyes shot up. Cliff was looking pointedly at Byron Sanders. Had he found out what a two-faced weasel his fellow Rhode Islander was? Had he—

  With a brief, dark glance at Nora, Byron stepped forward, stretching out his hand. “Hello, Liza,” he said in his most suave, debonair voice. “It’s a pleasure finally to meet you.”

  “Oh, yeah? Who are you?”

  Only Liza.

  “My name’s Byron,” he said, with no detectable catch in his voice. “Byron Sanders Forrester.”

  Nora’s knees when weak.

  Liza said, “Then you’re…”

  “Yes. I’m Cliff’s brother.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  GIVEN THAT SHE HAD an audience, Nora managed to keep her mouth shut and not go for the bastard’s throat. She prided herself on her ability to make a quick recovery and hold back her emotions under the most trying circumstances, but this was beyond trying. She knew she must look shocked, pale, stiff, furious. But at least she wasn’t in the process of committing a felonious act of violence.

  “It’s great to meet you, Byron,” Liza said, not a little unnerved herself. Nora could see her glancing sideways at her husband-to-be, who hadn’t, of course, known his brother was invited to their wedding. “When did you get here?”

  “Yesterday.”

  Byron, Nora observed, was the only one who didn’t look as if he wanted to strangle someone. He was used to sticky situations, however, and wasn’t a man who could be easily analyzed from his outward appearan
ce.

  “Do you need a place to stay?” Liza asked. “Cliff and I have tons of room at the lodge—”

  “That’s okay. I’ll manage.”

  Her hands locked into fists, Nora struggled to retain her composure. Had Byron squealed to his brother about their affair? There were too many dangers, too many questions.

  Cliff moved close to his fiancée. “I promised Byron something to eat.”

  “Sure,” Liza said. “Nora, would you care to join us? We could have an early lunch.”

  Nora would rather have joined a public snake roasting. “No, thank you.” She sounded hoarse and a bit overcome even to herself. She cleared her throat. “I need to get back to the store. It’s good to see you, Cliff.” She made herself turn to the dark-eyed weasel. “Good to meet you, Mr. Forrester.”

  Because she was trying to be grown-up and not betray her true feelings, the way she said “Forester” was frosty but not icy-sharp.

  Cliff must have noticed. “Come on, Liza. You and I need to talk.”

  “About what?” Liza asked innocently.

  “You know.”

  Never one on whom subtlety worked with any degree of regularity, Liza frowned. “I don’t get it.”

  With a sigh of love and exasperation, Cliff took her by the elbow and hustled her off.

  Nora tried to follow them, but Byron stopped her with one soft-spoken word. “Stay.”

  In the ensuing silence, Nora could hear the rustling of the breeze in the grass and in the woods beyond the path. She could hear birds, the distant honking of geese and the quiet lapping of lake water on the rocky shoreline nearby. Her ex-lover hadn’t made another sound. She would have wondered if he’d slithered off to a sunny rock, but she could see his shadow. She refused to look at him. First she had to get a grip on herself.

  Finally, he said, “I couldn’t think of any decent way to tell you.”