Olivia took a breath. “Bill said that between Kit and me doing so much work, he and his wife were having time for a second honeymoon. ‘Nina really wants another baby,’ he said. The old men laughed at that, but I was embarrassed.”
“Who won?” Kathy asked.
“Neither of us,” Olivia said. “It ended when we slept together.”
“Ah...good ole sex,” Elise said with a sigh.
“No, not sex. Sleep. And we didn’t know we were together. We’d had weeks of no rest and masses of work. We were exhausted. We didn’t know it, but we both collapsed under the big magnolia tree, one of us on each side, and fell asleep. Everything would have been all right if the kids hadn’t seen us.”
Olivia laughed. “By that time I’d fed all of them so much butter-laden food that they were having digestive problems. They were getting homesick for the bland food they usually ate. And the kids were refusing to eat anything with anchovies or garlic and absolutely no chicken livers. They wanted canned tomato soup and grilled cheese—and nothing green added to either one. ‘Like the old days,’ they said.”
Olivia smiled. “Years later, Dr. Kyle—that’s who Ace grew up to be—told me that Uncle Freddy said that if Livie and Kit didn’t stop fighting his heart was going to burn up. Poor softhearted Ace started to cry. He’d never heard of heartburn and didn’t know it wasn’t fatal. He just thought Uncle Freddy was going to be taken to the hospital where his mother was.”
“What did they do to get you two together?” Kathy asked.
“Weaving.” Olivia’s eyes were sparkling in memory. “While we were asleep, those loud, boisterous children tiptoed around Kit and me on fairy feet and tied us inside spider’s webs. I think they thought that if they tied us to one spot we’d talk and become friends. At least that’s my guess. Shall we go sit in the living room?”
“Only if you tell more of the story.” Elise stood up.
“I agree,” Kathy said as they left the kitchen.
Chapter Sixteen
Summer Hill, Virginia 1970
Olivia woke when a bunch of pebbles rained down on her body. They were followed by the muffled giggles of two kids, then the sound of their running away.
She didn’t open her eyes. She knew she was lying under the big magnolia tree and that she’d been sound asleep. A stick was poking her in the back, but she didn’t mind. The air was heavy with warmth and fragrance. For weeks now she’d rarely left the kitchen and she was sick of it! Onions, tomatoes, cucumbers. She wasn’t sure she ever again wanted to see any of them.
And it was all the fault of that boy! The way he’d raised gravestones without any help. Tore away briars with his bare hands. Built things. Restored. Repaired.
It was all totally disgusting—and she’d had enough of him.
With a sigh, she opened her eyes and looked up at the underside of the big, beautiful tree. Uncle Freddy said his mother had planted it and that’s why there was a statue of her under it. The kids said she was the queen of a planet called Athena—they’d heard the name from Uncle Freddy—and they made flower garlands to drape on her.
Olivia knew she had to get up. She had jam to make. Soup to cook. Chickens to roast. “Wonder what phenomenal things he’s done while I was sleeping,” she muttered.
When she started to lift her hand, she couldn’t. “What in the world?” She tried to sit up, but she seemed to be tied to the ground.
She gave a sharp tug to her arm and it broke away. Lying still, on her back, she held up her arm and looked at it. There were about a dozen strands of various colors of sewing thread over her arm.
Slowly, she sat up. Each movement pulled threads away from where they were tied to clothespins that had been pushed into the soft ground.
Her annoyance changed to amazement. How in the world had the children done this Lilliputian task? She’d seen a big, illustrated version of Gulliver’s Travels in Letty’s room. Had the children tried to copy it?
“What the hell?”
It was “his” voice coming from the other side of the tree.
“I can hear you breathing,” he said, “so get over here and cut these off of me.”
She knew he thought she was the children. “It’s me.” They were the first words she’d addressed to him that weren’t hostile. “Are you tied down?”
He gave a grunt of pain. “Yeah. You?”
Olivia gave a few kicks, then rolled her body to the side, and the threads broke. She stood up and walked around to the far side of the tree.
Kit was sitting on the ground, untying his ankles from purple knitting yarn. As always, he was as naked as he could get without being arrested, and there was yarn hanging off all of him.
A bit of a laugh escaped Olivia.
He looked up at her in disgust. “I know. More ridicule of the worthless boy.”
Olivia held out her arms and multicolored threads hung down from them. “It’s a bat wing fringe. Think the style will catch on?” Threads were also on her dress and around her ankles.
At her joke, Kit leaned back on his hands and his face softened. “Looks like they got you too.”
Bending, she used her nails to loosen the knots in the yarn around his ankles. “How do you think those children did this without waking us?” She sat back on the ground a few feet away from him and began pulling threads off her clothes.
Kit was tugging at the pink yarn around his wrist and when he couldn’t loosen the knot, he held his arm out to Olivia. “Hovering spacecraft. I’d believe anything of those two. I have to put cracked corn around the blackberry vines to keep them out of there. Warning them that the thorns will make them bleed doesn’t do it.”
Olivia was trying to get the knot undone but it was too tight. She started to break the yarn, but Kit pulled his arm away. “You’ll hurt yourself.” When he broke it, there was a red mark on his wrist.
She was trying to pay no attention to being so close to his nearly naked body. “Why cracked corn?”
“To lure Old Thomas to guard the tunnel I made at the cost of a lot of my flesh.” He stood up.
He was speaking of the hateful, aggressive, bad-tempered old peacock that wandered about the place. Kit’s glorious body was inches from hers, and he held his hand down to her. She took it, and stood up before him. It was the closest she’d ever been to him, and she could feel the warmth of his body. When he reached out as though to touch her face, Olivia instinctively stepped back.
“You have thread in your hair.”
She stood still while he pulled out several strands and took some off her shoulders. He stepped around her, removing pieces of thread from her clothes. Bending, he pulled two long green strands off her ankles.
“There!” He stepped back to look at her. “You are now back to being perfect.”
For a moment they stood in silence, looking into each other’s eyes. “I guess I better get back to work,” he said.
“Me too.”
Turning away, Kit took a couple of steps, then he halted and looked back at her. “Or you and I could call a truce and take the afternoon off. I need to go into town to—”
“Yes,” Olivia said. “Anywhere. Go is my new favorite word.”
Kit grinned. “Come on then, let’s move around the side. If any of them see us, they’ll give us something to do.”
“Or cook,” Olivia said. “What about...?” She nodded at his bare body.
“I keep clothes hidden in the well house.”
“Ah, right,” she said. “Protected by the thorns, which are guarded by Old Thomas.”
“Exactly!”
Olivia followed Kit across the acres, and when he stopped behind big shrubs and tree trunks and looked in all directions, she did too. They were like a pair of comedy spies, racing from one hiding place to another. “The yarn monsters,” he called them as he pulled another piece
off his arm. “How did I sleep through that?”
“Three weeks of sleep deprivation and nonstop work will do that,” Olivia said as she ducked behind a sycamore tree.
He halted beside her. “We ought to stop.”
She knew what he meant. They should stop trying to outdo each other.
When she nodded in agreement, they ran to the huge mass of blackberry vines. Most of the branches had long since stopped producing fruit and should be cut away, but they’d been neglected for years.
“You better wait for me here,” Kit said as he got down on his stomach and started to go through what seemed to be a tunnel.
“Because I’m a girl?” Her hostility was back.
“I was thinking more of your pretty dress.” He rolled over onto his back and motioned to the entrance. “But please, be my guest.”
Olivia didn’t want to go slithering on the ground, but she’d talked herself into a corner. She got down beside him, ignored the smile of delight he gave her, then worked her way through the tunnel.
At the end was a small building with a door that barely opened against the vines. Inside, it was small, with a window at one end. On a hanger on the wall was a freshly ironed, short-sleeved blue shirt and light colored trousers. Slip-on Weejuns were on the floor.
In the corner were half a dozen pillows that she knew used to be on the furniture in the Big House. A few books were on an old shelf. Here and there were artifacts that had probably been found around the plantation: arrowheads, shells, a teacup with a missing handle, a rusty sword that looked to be from the Civil War.
Kit entered in silence and gave her time to look around. “Now you see my secret hiding place. Where I escape.”
She well understood the need for such a retreat. Privacy wasn’t readily available on Tattwell. Between the kids and the two old men, Olivia rarely had a moment alone.
“This is great.” She sat down on a pile of pillows. “I think I could go back to sleep.”
Kit was smiling, pleased that she liked his hideout. “Do you mind if I...?” He motioned to the clothes.
Olivia gave her best I’m-a-woman-of-the-world shrug and picked up a book. It was a history of war from Russia’s point of view. She pretended to read while surreptitiously watching him remove his skimpy shorts. He had boxers on underneath—but she knew that since the fabric often peeped out. Not that she’d looked!
When he turned his back to her, she admired his deeply tanned skin. But when his boxers dipped down on one side, it took her a moment to realize that she wasn’t seeing contrasting white skin. Good heavens! she thought. He’s getting a tan all over. Somewhere on this old plantation Christopher Montgomery was running around naked.
He quickly pulled on his clothes, and when he looked back at her, Olivia was absorbed in the book.
She stood up. “Great,” she said, “you’re clean and I’m a mess. I can’t go anywhere looking like this.”
“I could boost you up the rose trellis to get into your bedroom.” His eyes moved down her in a suggestive way.
Olivia couldn’t help smiling. “Thanks, but maybe when we go into town we could stop by my parents’ house. I need some clothes.”
Kit’s face changed to serious. “You want to introduce me to your parents? The lowest of the low? Aren’t you afraid I’ll contaminate them?”
She had to work not to laugh. “It’s Tuesday afternoon. Dad will be out fishing and Mom is at her bridge club.”
“I should have known.” His tone did make her laugh. “After you.” He motioned to the tunnel.
“How are you going to get out without messing up your clean clothes?”
“That’s a secret.”
Olivia got down and made her way out through the vines. The ground was damp, but her dress was already dirty so it didn’t matter.
Turning, she watched Kit come out. He snaked out by using his forearms and his feet. His knees and his clean trousers didn’t touch the ground. It was a movement she’d never seen before and she was startled by it. To do that, he had to be in truly excellent physical condition.
She followed him across the plantation, again going from tree to tree so they wouldn’t be seen, to where the old truck was parked. Kit picked up a rock. Under it was a tin can and inside were the keys.
“The kids haven’t found my hiding place yet, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.”
Smiling, Olivia got into the truck and they pulled out. When they reached the road that led into town, they looked at each other and burst into laughter. They had escaped!
“So why do you have this job?” Kit asked.
Since Uncle Freddy and Mr. Gates loved gossip, she was surprised that no one had told him everything about her. “I grew up in Summer Hill. I’m a small town girl. We take what jobs we can get.”
Kit looked away from the road to glance at her. “You’re about as much a housekeeper as I am a gardener. Why are you here?”
She was pleased with what he’d said, but she didn’t want him to see that. “Actually, I do have another job. But the theater caught fire and it was postponed until the fall.”
“Theater?” When Olivia was silent, he said, “Are you going to make me guess?”
She shrugged one shoulder.
“In Richmond?”
“Not quite.” She put on her haughtiest look.
“Something local. Did you get the lead in a play about the history of Summer Hill?”
“No! I—” She saw that he was teasing her. “On Broadway.”
“Where is that? Virginia? North Carolina?”
She sat in silence while she waited for him to realize what she meant.
His eyes widened in a very gratifying way. “That Broadway?”
Olivia smiled sweetly. “The very one.” For the rest of the drive, she told him how she’d won the lead role at the auditions, shared an apartment with her costar for the rehearsals, and finally, how the fire had caused the delay.
He pulled into the driveway of her parents’ house, turned off the engine, and looked at her. “I am impressed. Really, I am. Now I see why you were so angry when I got there.”
The way he said that made the blood rise in her cheeks. “I guess I was. A bit.”
“Are you kidding? That first day I was so scared of you I couldn’t say a word. I was afraid of what you’d do to me. Anybody who could sail over the cabbages like you did has to be dangerously strong. I was worried you might—”
Her look made him stop. Laughing, he got out of the truck.
Olivia walked away with her nose in the air, but she was repressing a smile. It was so good to hear humor. For weeks all she’d heard about this guy was how hard he worked. And she’d seen his body. She’d never once thought he might have a brain—or a personality.
As it always was, the front door to her parents’ house was unlocked. Inside, she looked around as though seeing it for the first time. She and her mother had decorated it. The current style was for bright colors and wallpaper painted on aluminum foil. But they had stayed with subdued colors of sand and cream and the pink of an early morning sunrise. She still liked it, but she had never before noticed the many photos of her around the long living room.
Kit didn’t say anything but began walking about the room and looking at the framed pictures. Her parents had insisted that she have a professional shot done in every costume she’d worn for a play, whether in high school or college. In one she wore a short pixie cut for Joan of Arc. She wore a nun’s hood for a high school play. Her favorite was a snapshot when she had on a flat-topped newsboy cap, her face solemn. She’d been home from school for the holidays and listening to her dad when her mother took the photo.
Kit picked that picture up and looked at it for a moment before setting it down. “Beautiful and talented,” he said softly, his voice even deeper than usual.
Olivia waved his compliment away as though it meant nothing, but she was quite pleased. “I’ll just get my clothes, then we can go into town and...” She wasn’t sure what they would do.
She hadn’t meant for him to go to her bedroom with her, but he followed her down the hall. Telling him to stay out seemed too provincial. She reminded herself that she’d lived in New York, so middle-class morals were beneath her.
Her room was in the same colors as the rest of the house. The wall behind her bed was papered in a very subtle pink-and-cream stripe. She and her mother’d had a crisp exchange of words about Olivia’s insistence of putting the paper on only one wall. But Olivia had seen it in a magazine and was adamant.
The pictures around the room were prints of Impressionist paintings: Renoir, Matisse, Degas.
As she opened her closet door, she glanced at him. He was standing in the doorway, looking very serious, and seemed to be studying what he was seeing. He looked like a director trying to decide if this was a good set for the scene he wanted to shoot.
With his hands clasped behind his back, he came into the room. “After careful observation, I have decided that in spite of your common ancestry and your family’s lack of prominence in an unremarkable town, I will consider you as my companion for an evening. Perhaps even for dinner.”
Olivia’s jaw dropped nearly to her chest. Of all the—When he picked up a copy of the script of Pride and Prejudice from her bedside table, she realized what he was doing. He was playing a version of Darcy.
She kept the look of horror on her face. “You insult me, my family, even my ancestry, yet you believe I will go out with you? Sir! I will never set foot in your company.”
Kit stiffened. “You say this because of what you have been told about me. Let me assure you that it is the Wicked Children who have taken away my dignity with their purple woolen chains of humiliation.”
“It has taken no chains to show your overweening pride. Your lack of garments, even to fawning about in the near nude brings your own disgrace.”