When we all left the room, Carrington and Gretchen went first and Liberty stopped me with a light touch on my arm. “Haven,” she whispered, the bracelet jingling, “were you supposed to have this someday?”
“Oh, no, no,” I said at once. “I’m not a fan of charm bracelets. They catch on things.”
We walked downstairs, while Gretchen and Carrington waited for the elevator.
As we got to the bottom step, someone approached in a long, relaxed stride. I looked up and saw a pair of startling blue eyes. A thrill of alarm ran through me as he stopped beside the newel post and leaned against it comfortably. My face turned aspirin-white. It was him, the guy from the wine cellar, Mr. Blue-Collar-in-a-Tux, big and sexy and as cocky as a junkyard dog. He gave me a brief and impersonal glance, his attention focusing immediately on Liberty.
To my astonishment, Liberty regarded him with no awe or curiosity whatsoever, only a resigned grin. She stopped and folded her arms across her chest. “A pony, for a wedding present?”
A smile touched his wide mouth. “Carrington liked him when we went riding.” His accent was a little more pronounced than it had been in the wine cellar, melting into the hot-tar drawl you mostly heard in small towns or trailer parks. “Figured you already have everything you need, so I got a little something for your sister.”
“Do you know what it costs to stable that ‘little something’?” Liberty asked without heat.
“I’ll take him back if you want me to.”
“You know Carrington would never forgive us. You’ve put my husband in a difficult position, Hardy.”
His smile turned gently mocking. “You know how I hate to hear that.”
Hardy.
I turned my face away and closed my eyes sickly, just for a second. Shit. Just . . . shit. Not only had I kissed someone other than my boyfriend, he also happened to be an enemy of the family. My brother’s worst enemy, who had deliberately ruined a huge biofuel deal that had meant a lot to Gage personally and professionally.
From what little I knew, Hardy Cates had once been in love with Liberty, but he’d left her and broken her heart, and now he’d come back to make trouble.
That kind always did.
It was humiliating to realize that he hadn’t been attracted to me at all, that his proposition in the wine cellar had been designed as another strike against the Travises. Hardy Cates wanted to embarrass the family, and he had no problem using me to do it.
“Haven,” Liberty said, “this is an old friend of mine. Hardy Cates, this is my sister-in-law, Haven Travis.”
“Miss Travis,” he said softly.
I braced myself to look at him. His eyes were an astonishing blue-upon-blue in his sun-cured complexion. Although he was expressionless, I noticed the tiny laugh lines that whisked outward from the corners of those eyes. He extended a hand, but I couldn’t take it. I was actually afraid of what might happen, how I might feel, if I touched him again.
Smiling at my hesitation, Hardy spoke to Liberty while his gaze remained locked on mine. “Your sister-in-law’s a mite skittish, Liberty.”
“If you’re here to make a scene—” she began calmly.
His gaze moved to her. “No, ma’am. Just wanted to give you my best wishes.”
Something softened in her face, and she reached out to clasp his hand briefly. “Thank you.”
A new voice entered the conversation. “Hey, there.” It was my brother Jack, looking relaxed. But there was a glint in his hard black eyes that silently warned of trouble to come. “Mr. Cates. I’ve been told you weren’t included on the guest list. So I have to ask you to leave.”
Hardy gave him a measuring glance.
In the silence that followed, I went tense in every muscle, praying silently that a fistfight wouldn’t break out at Gage’s wedding. Glancing at Liberty, I saw she had turned pale. I thought vengefully that Hardy Cates was a selfish bastard, turning up at her wedding like that.
“No problem,” Hardy said with soft insolence. “I got what I came for.”
“Let me show you out,” Jack said.
Liberty and I both let out our breaths as they departed. “I hope he’s gone before Gage sees him,” Liberty said.
“Believe me, Jack will make sure of that.” Now I understood why she had chosen my brother over that rascal. “Cates is obviously a guy on the make,” I said. “He could probably sell butter to a cow.”
“Hardy’s ambitious,” Liberty admitted. “But he came from nothing. If you knew some of the things he had to overcome . . .” She sighed. “I bet within a year, he’ll marry some River Oaks debutante who’ll help take him to the top.”
“He’d need a lot of money for that. We River Oaks debutantes are expensive.”
“Of all the things he wants,” Liberty said, “money’s the easiest to get.”
Carrington ran up to us, having finally emerged from the elevator. “Come on,” she said in excitement. “Everyone’s going outside. The fireworks are about to start!”
Just what I need, I thought. More fireworks.
THE NEXT MORNING I was packing a suitcase in my room when Nick came in. We had occupied separate bedrooms during our stay in River Oaks, which Nick had said was just fine because there was no way he was going to touch me when we were under the same roof as my father.
“He’s old, and he’s only half your size,” I had told Nick, laughing. “What do you think he’s going to do, beat you up or something?”
“It’s the ‘or something’ that scares me,” Nick had said.
As soon as Nick came into the room, I knew he had talked to my father. The stress showed on his face. He was hardly the first to come away looking like that after a heart-to-heart with Churchill Travis.
“I told you,” I said. “Dad’s impossible. He wouldn’t accept you no matter how wonderful you were.”
“Were?” He gave me a comical look.
“Are.” I put my arms around him and laid my head on his chest. “What did he say?” I whispered.
“Basically a variation on the ‘not a plug nickel’ theme.” Nick eased my head back and looked down at me. “I told him I was going to put you first, always. That I will earn enough to take care of you. I told him I just wanted his approval so there wouldn’t be conflict between you and your family.”
“Travises love conflict,” I said.
A smile entered Nick’s hazel eyes, all green and gold and brown. There was a touch of color on his high cheekbones, a remnant of the confrontation with my bulldog of a father. The smile vanished from his eyes as he smoothed my hair back, his hand curving gently over the back of my skull. He was handsome, grave, concerned. “Is this what you want, Haven? I couldn’t live with myself if I did something to hurt you.”
Emotion made my voice unsteady. “The only thing that would hurt is for you to stop loving me.”
“That’s not even possible. You’re the one, Haven. You’re the one for me, always.” He bent his head, his mouth taking mine in a long, slow dream of a kiss. I responded avidly, lifting against him.
“Hey,” he said softly. “What do you say we get out of here and go get married?”
CHAPTER THREE
CONTRARY TO MY EXPECTATIONS OF ELOPEMENT AS a furtive Elvis-supervised ceremony in Las Vegas, there were hotels in Florida, Hawaii, and Arizona that offered “elopement packages” including the wedding service, the hotel stay, massages, and a meal plan. Gage and Liberty paid for our elopement to the Keys—it was their wedding present to me and Nick.
Having taken a stand against my marriage to Nick, Dad went through with his threat to cut me off entirely. No money, no communication. “He’ll come around,” my brothers told me, but I said emphatically that I didn’t want Dad to come around, I’d had enough of him and his controlling ways for a lifetime.
Liberty and I had our first argument when she tried to tell me that Churchill still loved me and always would.
“Sure he does,” I told her curtly. “As a pawn. As a child. But as
an adult with my own opinions and preferences . . . no. He only loves people when they spend their lives trying to please him.”
“He needs you,” Liberty persisted. “Someday—”
“No he doesn’t,” I said. “He’s got you.” It was unfair of me to lash out at her, and I knew it, but I couldn’t stop myself. “You be the good daughter,” I said recklessly. “I’ve had enough of him for a lifetime.”
It was a long time before Liberty and I spoke again.
Nick and I moved to Plano, north of Dallas, where Nick worked as a cost estimator at a construction firm. It wasn’t something he wanted to do forever, but the pay was good, especially the overtime. I got an entry-level position as a marketing coordinator for the Darlington Hotel, which meant I assisted the director of communications with PR and marketing projects.
The Darlington was a sleek, modern hotel, a single elliptical-shaped structure that would have looked phallic enough, except it had also been covered in a skin of pink granite. Maybe that subliminal suggestion was partly responsible for the Darlington having been voted as the most romantic hotel in Dallas.
“You Dallasites and your architecture,” I told Nick. “Every building in town looks like a penis or a cereal box.”
“You like the red flying horse,” Nick pointed out.
I had to admit he was right. I had a weakness for that neon Pegasus, an iconic sign that had perched on top of the Magnolia Building since 1934. It lent a lot of personality to an otherwise sterile skyline.
I wasn’t sure what to make of Dallas. Compared to Houston, it was squeaky-clean, cosmopolitan, tightly hinged. Fewer cowboy hats, much better manners. And Dallas was a lot more politically consistent than Houston, which had drastic public policy swings from election to election.
Dallas, so tasteful and composed, seemed to feel it had something to prove, like a woman who was too concerned about what to wear on the second date. Maybe that had something to do with the fact that unlike most great cities of the world, it had no port. Dallas had become a player in the 1870s when two railroads, the Houston and Texas Central and the Texas and Pacific, both met and crossed at a ninety-degree angle, thereby making the city a big commercial center.
Nick’s family all lived in or around Dallas. His parents had divorced and married other people when he was still a kid. Between all the stepsisters and stepbrothers, and half sisters and half brothers, and the full-blood siblings, I had trouble figuring out who belonged to whom. It didn’t seem to matter, though, because none of them were close.
We bought a small condo with two parking spaces and access to a community pool. I decorated the condo with cheap, brightly colored contemporary furniture, and added some baskets and Mexican ceramics. In our living room, I hung a huge framed reprint of an old travel poster, featuring a dark-haired girl holding a basket of fruit beneath a huge banner reading, VISIT MEXICO: LAND OF SPLENDOR.
“It’s our own special style,” I told Nick when he complained that our furniture was crap and he didn’t like Southwestern decor. “I call it ‘Ikea Loco.’ I think I’m onto something. Soon everyone will be copying us. Besides, it’s all we can afford.”
“We could afford a fucking palace,” Nick replied darkly, “if your father wasn’t such an asshole.”
I was taken aback by the flash of animosity, a lightning strike that had come out of nowhere. My pleasure in the condo was an irritant to Nick. I was just playing house, he told me. When I’d lived like middle-class people for a while, he’d like to see if I was still so happy.
“Of course I will be,” I said. “I have you. I don’t need a mansion to be happy.”
It seemed at times that Nick was a lot more affected by my changed circumstances than I was. He resented our small budget for my sake, he said. He hated that we couldn’t afford a second car.
“I really don’t mind,” I said, and that made him angry because if he minded it, so should I.
After the storms had passed, however, the peace was all the sweeter.
Nick called me at work at least twice a day just to see how things were going. We talked all the time. “I want us to tell each other everything,” he said one night, when we were halfway into a bottle of wine. “My parents always had secrets. You and I should be completely honest and open.”
I loved that idea in theory. In practice, however, it was hard on my self-esteem. Complete honesty, it turned out, was not always kind.
“You’re so pretty,” Nick told me one night after we’d made love. His hand moved over my body, coasting up the gentle slope of my chest. I had small breasts, a shallow B cup at most. Even before we were married, Nick had laughingly complained about my lack of endowment, saying he’d buy me implants except a pair of big boobs would look ridiculous on a woman as short and slight as me. His fingertips moved up to my face, tracing the curve of my cheek. “Big brown eyes . . . cute little nose . . . beautiful mouth. It doesn’t matter that you don’t have a body.”
“I have a body,” I said.
“I meant boobs.”
“I have those too. They’re just not big ones.”
“Well, I love you anyway.”
I wanted to point out that Nick didn’t have a perfect body either, but I knew that would start a fight. Nick didn’t react well to criticism, even when it was gentle and well meant. He wasn’t used to anyone finding fault with him. I, on the other hand, had been raised on a steady diet of critiques and evaluations.
Mother had always told me detailed stories about her friends’ daughters, how well behaved they were, how nice it was that they would sit still for piano lessons, or make tissue-paper flowers for their mothers, or show off their latest ballet steps on cue. I had wished with all my heart that I could have been more like those winsome little girls, but I hadn’t been able to keep from rebelling against being miscast as a smaller version of Ava Travis. And then she had died, leaving me with a mountain of regrets and no way to atone.
Our holidays—the first Thanksgiving, the first Christmas, the first New Year’s—were quiet. We hadn’t joined a church yet, and it seemed that all Nick’s friends, the ones he said were his family, were occupied with their own families. I approached cooking Christmas dinner as if it were a science class project. I studied cookbooks, made charts, set timers, measured ingredients, and dissected meat and vegetables into the appropriate dimensions. I knew the results of my efforts were passable but uninspired, but Nick said it was the best turkey, the best mashed potatoes, the best pecan pie he’d ever eaten.
“It must be the sight of me in oven mitts,” I said.
Nick began stringing noisy kisses along my arm as if he were Pepe Le Pew. “You are ze goddess of ze keetchen.”
The Darlington had been so busy during the holidays that I had had to work overtime, while Nick’s job had eased up until after New Year’s. With our unsynchronized schedules, it was frustrating and time-consuming for him to drive back and forth all the time. Nothing was ever finished . . . the condo was always a mess, the fridge was seldom stocked, there were always piles of dirty laundry.
“We can’t afford to take all my shirts to the dry cleaner’s,” Nick said the day after Christmas. “You’ll have to learn how to do them.”
“Me?” I had never ironed anything in my life. The proper pressing of a shirt was a mystery of the universe akin to black holes and dark matter. “How come you can’t do your own shirts?”
“I need you to help. Is it too much to ask for you to give me a hand with my clothes?”
“No, of course not. I’m sorry. I just don’t know how. I’m afraid I’ll screw them up.”
“I’ll show you how. You’ll learn.” Nick smiled and patted me on the backside. “You just have to get in touch with your inner Martha Stewart.”
I told him I had always kept my inner Martha Stewart chained in the basement, but for his sake I would set her loose.
Nick was patient as he took me step by step through the process, showing me exactly how he liked his shirts starched and
ironed. He was particular about the details. At first it was sort of fun, in the same way grouting is fun when you first do it . . . until you face an entire bathroom full of tiles. Or a laundry basket crammed with unwashed shirts. No matter how I tried, I could never seem to get the shirts exactly the way Nick liked them.
My ironing technique became the focus of a near-daily inspection. Nick would go to our closet, file through the row of pressed garments, and tell me where I’d gone wrong. “You need to iron the edges more slowly to get all the little creases out,” or, “You need to redo the armhole seams.” “You need to use less starch.” “The back’s not smooth enough.”
Exasperated and defeated, I finally resorted to using my personal money—we each had the same amount to spend each week—to have Nick’s shirts professionally laundered and pressed. I thought it was a good solution. But when Nick found a row of shirts hanging in plastic coverings in the closet, he was pissed.
“I thought we agreed,” he said shortly, “that you were going to learn to do them.”
“I used my own money.” I gave him a placating smile. “I’m ironing deficient. Maybe I need a multivitamin.”
He refused to smile back. “You’re not trying hard enough.”
I found it hard to believe we were having an argument over something as trivial as shirts. It wasn’t really about the shirts. Maybe he felt I wasn’t contributing enough to the relationship. Maybe I needed to be more loving, more supportive. He was going through stress. Holiday stress, work stress, newlywed stress.
“I’ll try harder,” I said. “But sweetheart . . . is there anything else bothering you? Something we should talk about besides ironing? You know I’d do anything for you.”
Nick gave me a cold stare. “All I need is for you to fucking get something right for a change.”
I was angry for approximately ten minutes. After that, I was suffused with fear. I was going to fail at marriage, the most important thing I had ever tried to do.
So I called Todd, who sympathized and said everyone had stupid arguments with their partner. We agreed it was just part of a normal relationship. I didn’t dare talk to anyone in my family, because I would have rather died than let Dad suspect the marriage wasn’t going well.