Stranger in the Moonlight

  “I’ve only known him for six months,” Kim had said, frowning. “He asked to go with me because he wants some time off from his catering business.”

  “Uh-huh,” Carla said. “You’re forgetting that I know his last girlfriend. He never took off a weekend for her, and they were together for over two years.”

  Kim had said she needed to . . . She couldn’t think of an excuse, but had just left the room.

  “Kim?” Dave asked. “Are you still there?”

  “Yes. It’s just that a childhood friend of mine has shown up and is staying in my pool house.”

  “That must be nice for you,” Dave said, “but, Kim, no playdates this weekend. I want you all to myself. For our own playdate.”

  “Okay,” she said, and after a few more murmurings, Dave said he had to go, as thirty pounds of shrimp had just been delivered.

  She’d put her phone in her pocket and set about cleaning the kitchen—and looking at the clock. It didn’t make any sense that she’d be nervous about how long Travis was spending with his mother, but she was.

  An hour went by, then two. At the start of the third hour she was sure she’d never see him again. When he tapped on the back glass door, she jumped, then gave him her best smile.

  He didn’t look to be in the best mood, which was confirmed when he sat down on a stool by the bar and said, “You have any whiskey?”

  She poured him a shot of McTarvit single malt, a drink she kept on hand for her male cousins.

  He downed it in one gulp.

  “You want to talk about it?” she asked gently. When he looked at her, she saw pain in his eyes.

  “You ever have a feeling that the thing you dread most in life is coming true?”

  She wanted to say that she feared being a fifty-year-old businesswoman with no private life, and so far, that’s where she was heading. “Yes,” she said. “Is that what you think is happening to you?”

  “My mother seems to think so.”

  She waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t say any more. When they were kids he’d always said as little as possible, and it had been her job to pull him out of himself. “So what are you planning to do tomorrow?”

  He looked at her for a moment and smiled. “Not what I’d like to do, but I’m open to alternate suggestions.”

  “What does that mean? That you can’t do what you want to?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “What are you going to do tomorrow?”

  Kim felt the tension in her chest release. She’d been afraid that now that he’d seen his mother he’d say he was leaving. “Work,” she said. “What I do every day. You’re the one with open plans. Did your mother tell you to leave town?”

  “Actually, just the opposite. Is there anything to eat? I burned off a little energy after the mom-talk.”

  Kim had been so concerned that he was going to leave that she hadn’t noticed that his shirt was torn and dirty, and there was a leaf in his hair. Just like when we were kids, she thought. “What in the world did you do?” she asked as she opened the fridge.

  “A little climbing. That’s a nice cliff you have at Stirling Point.”

  “How’d you get so dirty going up that trail?”

  “Didn’t use the trail,” he said as he went to the cabinet and withdrew a couple of plates.

  She halted with a bowl in her hands. “But that’s a sheer face.”

  Travis gave a half shrug.

  Kim didn’t smile. “You had no ropes, and you were alone. That was dangerous. Don’t do it again,” she said sternly.

  “For fear of dismemberment?” he said, and something about the word made him grimace. He put potato salad on the plates. “So what did you do while I was out?”

  “Tried to form wax into moonlight.”

  He looked at her in curiosity. “What does that mean?”

  “Last night at the wedding I thought the moonlight was so beautiful I wondered if I could translate it into jewelry.”

  “What does that have to do with wax?” he asked as he began eating.

  Kim sat down next to him and took the plate he’d filled for her. It ran through her mind that the food had been cooked by Dave and she really ought to tell Travis about him, but she didn’t.

  “I make jewelry by construction, welding on a small scale, or the lost wax process.”

  “Lost wax? Didn’t I see that on TV? Some mysterious method that had disappeared over the centuries.”

  Kim gave a derogatory snort. “Those idiots! It’s called ‘lost wax’ not because the process was lost but because the wax melts and it flows out. The wax is lost in the making.”

  “You’ll have to show me. Maybe you could—”

  “Travis!” Kim said, “I want to know what’s going on. You said you needed my help and I’m sure it’s not to give you a course in jewelry making.”

  He hesitated. “I have three weeks,” he said.

  “Three weeks until what?”

  “Until I have to face my father with the news that his wife wants a divorce.”

  “Then what happens?”

  “Legal battles,” he said. “Dad will fight and I’ll fight him. It will be a war.”

  “But once it’s done, will you be free?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “I don’t know what I’ll be free to do, but I will no longer have an obligation to either of my parents. Except morally and ethically, and through affection, and . . .”

  “But what are your plans for now? For these three weeks?” Kim asked.

  “Maybe I’ll harness some moonlight so you can put it in wax and lose it.”

  Kim smiled. “That would be nice. I need some new ideas. I’ve always been inspired by organic forms and I’ve pretty much run through the ones I know.”

  “What about those flowers you used to tie together?”

  “They grow from clover, and they’re considered weeds.”

  “I liked them,” he said softly and for a moment their eyes locked. But then Travis turned away and picked up the empty plates and put them in the dishwasher.

  “If you’re going to be here for three weeks we need to tell people who you are.”

  “People?” he asked. “Who would that be?”

  “Travis, this is a small town. I’m sure they are all talking about how I picked up some dark stranger and took him home with me.”

  “Has your mom called you yet?” he asked, smiling.

  “Last I heard she was in New Zealand so the news will take—I hope—another twenty-four hours to reach her. But my brother is here. And so is my cousin Colin.”

  “The town doctor and the sheriff. You are a well-connected young woman.”

  “What’s our story going to be? Will you tell people Lucy Cooper is your mother?”

  “She asked for a week to break the news to Layton that she’s married and has a kid.”

  “If she says it like that he’ll be expecting a nine-year-old.”

  “How old does your mother think you are?” Travis asked.

  “Five,” Kim answered, and they laughed. “What if we tell the truth but leave out that the lady who sews, Lucy Cooper, is the same as Mrs. Merritt? You visited as a child, we met, you grew up, and have now returned to Edilean for a three-week holiday.”

  Travis’s eyes lit up. “If I can get Mom to postpone telling Layton, I could get to know him before she tells who I am.”

  “I think we have a plan,” Kim said and they exchanged smiles.

  Four

  Joe Layton unlocked his office and grimaced at the sight of the papers on his desk. Yet again he wondered what the hell he was doing starting over at his age. The old feeling of resentment welled up in him. He’d thought he was going to spend his life in New Jersey running the hardware store his grandfather had started. He’d never thought of it as wildly ambitious or something that anyone would covet. But then his son, Joey, got married, had kids, and his wife had seen Layton Hardware as a gold mine, something that she’d kill to have.

&nb
sp; If she hadn’t wanted it all for Joe’s grandkids he would have fought her with all he had. But Joe’s heart wasn’t in the battle. In fact he rather liked that the woman was ambitious for her children.

  When his daughter, Jecca, decided to marry some man in little Edilean, Virginia, Joe saw it as a way out of the whole mess. At the time, it had seemed simple. He had money in the bank, so he’d use that to open a store in Virginia. His daughter-in-law, Sheila, had screamed that Joe had “no right” to take what he’d earned over the years, that he should “leave” it for them. She spoke as though Joe’s death was imminent. Joe had reached his limit of generosity. He knew his daughter-in-law wanted to buy one of those big houses in something called a “gated community.”

  “Gated?” he’d said with a smirk when he’d first heard the term.

  “Yeah!” Sheila had said with her usual belligerence. Unless she was trying to sell someone something, she let people know she was ready to fight. “With a guard out front. For protection.”

  “From what?” Joe asked in the same tone. “From all the photographers hounding you? They want a picture of Joe Layton’s daughter-in-law?”

  Whenever Sheila and he got into it, Joey left the room. He refused to be drawn into their arguments. But Joe knew his son wanted to run his own business. Sometimes Joe wondered if his son had married Sheila because he knew she’d stand up to his father. There were even times when Joe thought maybe his son had put his wife up to taking over the store. Heaven knew Sheila didn’t have enough brains to figure out how her father-in-law could leave his own business.

  One afternoon when Sheila had been on Joe’s case about selling some damned curtains in his hardware store, he received a text message from some man he’d never heard of. The man said he was in love with Jecca, wanted to marry her, and how could he win her?

  Love was the last thing Joe was thinking of. Between Sheila shouting, Joey skulking off in the next room, and hearing that some guy wanted to marry his daughter, Joe cracked. On impulse—something he never gave in to—he replied to the man by asking if that little town had a hardware store. If Joe’s dear, sweet daughter was going to move there, he might as well go too. He was about to push send when he added that he wanted more photos of the pretty woman, Lucy Cooper, who Jecca had sent pictures of and who she’d raved about.

  At the time, Joe had only thought how the woman had been the mother Jecca had never had. Joe’s wife, the love of his life, had died when Jecca was little more than a baby. After that he’d been too busy with earning a living and raising two kids to try to find another bride. He’d made do with a few dates now and then, and even one sort of serious affair, but all the women came up short. Jecca said he wanted a clone of her mother, not a real person, and Joe knew she was right.

  But then, Jecca almost always was right. Not that he would ever tell her that, but that’s how he felt.

  When he’d heard she was marrying a doctor, he was sure she was making a big mistake. Jecca came from a solidly blue-collar background. How would she deal with a la-di-dah doctor? But Dr. Tris—as people called him—had turned out to be okay. More than okay. He was mad about Jecca and gave up a lot to be with her.

  It was through Tristan that Joe was going to be able to open the hardware store in Edilean. Tris pretty much gave him the old building. That it needed a massive renovation was beside the point.

  In New Jersey, over the years Joe had helped out a lot of men. When they were out of work, he’d found them jobs. When they needed supplies for a job, he’d let them have credit. When they didn’t get paid, Joe held their notes for as long as it took.

  They’d repaid him in loyalty, by going to him instead of the big franchises, but even with that, Joe’s business was going down. He would have died before he admitted it, but Sheila’s idea of opening a design department might have been a good one.

  He also would never have admitted that he had less money than he said he did. He didn’t lie exactly, just sort of rounded off the numbers.

  He and Jecca had had one of their big fights when Joe said he was bringing in construction guys from New Jersey to do the remodeling. He’d said the reason was because he trusted the men. The truth was that Joe collected on a lot of favors. He called men he hadn’t talked to in ten years. With few exceptions, they drove down to little Edilean and put in one, two, or three days of work. Some men had been with Joe so long they sent their grandsons—or daughters, an idea Joe had no problem with. His daughter had always worked for him.

  For the most part, they worked at their own expense. Joe paid some of the younger guys, but his old friends refused any payment.

  “See that Skil saw?” one man asked. “You sold that to me seventeen years ago this June. It’s been repaired by your two kids more times than I can count. I figure I owe you the money I saved by not buying new every time the old one broke.”

  Joe had acted as the contractor on the job and had overseen the men who came in at all hours of the day or night. Some guys needed no direction, but some of them were so green he had to show them which end of a nail gun to hold.

  Joe’s expenses had been for materials. The I beams for the roof and the crane to put them in place had nearly cleaned him out.

  There were a dozen times when he thought he’d give it up and go home to fight Sheila for what was his. But that meant fighting his son and his grandchildren. What was Joe to do, go back to New Jersey and throw out Sheila’s curtain display? Would he try to take the hardware store back to what it was when his kids were little?

  It was an absurd idea, but he would have done it, except for one thing: Lucy.

  Lucy, he thought as he stared at the papers on the desk. His whole life was coming to revolve around her.

  Jecca had met her when she’d rented an apartment in Mrs. Wingate’s house. The three women had hit it off so well that every e-mail Jecca sent him had been about those two women. Later Joe found out that Jecca was covering the fact that she’d met a man. She knew her father would ask a lot of questions, so she’d left him out of her correspondence.

  Jecca didn’t realize that her letters—and photos—of Lucy, and Lucy, and, well, Lucy, had intrigued her father. Lucy Cooper had come to remind Joe of what he’d missed in life. Now that he’d lost his son, and was about to lose his daughter and his business, thoughts of Lucy filled the void.

  When Joe drove down to Edilean to see the building Dr. Tris was offering, he’d reminded himself that Miss Cooper knew nothing about him. He couldn’t greet her as though he knew her from the hundred or so photos he’d seen of her and all that he’d conned Jecca into telling him. He had to be reserved, cool. Play James Bond, he told himself, not be the New Jersey guy who was so old-fashioned he refused to use an electric drill to put in screws.

  By the time Joe got to Edilean, Jecca and Tris had had a big fight. She’d run off to New York and Dr. Tris was frantic that he was going to lose her.

  Right away Joe saw that everyone was giving the young man lots of sympathy when what he needed was a kick in the pants. Joe gave it to him. He was astonished at the curse words that came out of the man’s mouth! And Joe changed his mind about a doctor being too prissy for his Jecca. Over the course of one long night, Joe gave the boy a piece of his mind and lots of advice about Jecca.

  It took the boy three days to get over his hangover—Joe was up by nine the next morning—then he started doing what he’d been told he needed to do to get Jecca back.

  After Joe got Tristan straightened out, he found Mrs. Wingate’s shop in Edilean and asked to rent a room in her house. She was a tall, elegant lady—not his type at all—who looked him up and down and said she didn’t have any vacancies.

  When he told her he was Jecca’s father, she softened. She had some customers then, so he asked if he could go see the house. She hesitated. “I hear you need some repairs,” he said. “Maybe I could look at them.”

  That had made her give in and she had quickly drawn a map. “I’ll call Lucy and tell her you’re comi
ng,” Mrs. Wingate said, again looking him up and down.

  He knew that look. Ladies like her didn’t want to meet men like him in the dark.

  He’d taken his time driving down Aldredge Road to Mrs. Wingate’s big old house. He was seriously afraid of meeting Lucy. He had a feeling that he could like her. But what if he’d misjudged what he’d heard about her and she was as snooty as that Mrs. Wingate? She’d looked at him as though he were a tradesman using the wrong entrance. If Lucy looked at him like that too . . .

  “I’ll go to a motel,” he told himself.

  The house was big, and as Jecca had said, it was set in a beautiful garden. The house needed a bit of work here and there, but it was in good shape.

  He got his old suitcase out of the truck, took a deep breath, and went inside. The house was so girly inside he felt like he was entering a harem—and he sure as hell wasn’t the sheik.

  He stood at the foot of the stairs a moment and listened. Just as Jecca had said, he could hear a sewing machine running. It was a sweet sound to a man like him whose whole life had been about tools.

  He slowly climbed the stairs and when he got to the top a pretty woman with her arms full of what looked like dresses for baby angels ran smack into him. Hard. She would have bounced off his chest and landed on the floor if Joe hadn’t caught her arm and pulled her up. He was pleased to see that she had strength in her legs, good reflexes, and she was very flexible. She came up so fast her soft front was pressed against Joe’s wide, hard chest.

  For a moment time stood still. They looked into each other’s eyes and they knew. Just plain knew.

  “I assume you’re Joe and I need your help,” Lucy said as she stepped away from him. “Harry’s acting up and a table leg is wonky and I need help cutting. Put your suitcase there and follow me.”

  She bent over to pick up the little white dresses, and he admired her lithe, firm figure. She stopped in the doorway. “Come on. We haven’t got all day.” She disappeared into the room.