Moonlight Masquerade

  Reede had figured what was important to him right after he’d met Sophie, but he couldn’t help a sense of déjà vu because he’d felt like this before. He’d been a teenager when he’d first seen Laura Chawnley, and he’d decided right then that she was for him. He’d felt the same way since he’d seen . . . no, since he’d talked to Sophie. There was a vulnerability about her, a feeling that she, well, maybe she needed him, that appealed to him.

  He would never let her know it, but her story about the cookbook had shocked him—not because she’d stolen it, but because she was probably going to be in serious trouble. Treeborne Foods was big. Huge. Nationwide. Reede didn’t think they’d smile and say her theft was justifiable revenge for the way the heir apparent had treated her.

  Reede had admired Sophie’s sense of remorse and he’d liked her idea of returning the cookbook via a foreign country. But he didn’t trust the Treebornes—which is why he’d gone to so much trouble to keep a copy of the book and to have it decoded—something he was still waiting on.

  The night after Carter came to Edilean, Reede asked Sophie about the cookbook, and she’d told him what Carter had said, that there’d be no prosecution.

  Reede urged Sophie to push Carter further to make absolutely sure there would be no retaliation. The next day Carter had called the family housekeeper and asked her to tell him when the package arrived. A few days later Carter told Sophie that the cookbook was now under a pile of papers on his father’s desk. “He’ll never know it was missing,” Carter said.

  Still, Reede wasn’t satisfied. He called his former roommate again and asked how his brother was doing with the decoding.

  “Broke his leg skiing, but I’ll see that he gets right on it. The book, not his leg,” Kirk said.

  Reede didn’t tell Sophie that he was still working on the deciphering, and she didn’t ask, and later when Kirk called and said his brother had reported that the code was probably based on a book, Reede didn’t tell Sophie that either. He didn’t want to worry her.

  For Thanksgiving they went to Sara and Mike’s old house, and Jecca and Tris came home for the long weekend.

  “How miserable are you in New York?” Reede quietly asked his cousin Tristan.

  “If I start to tell you I’ll weep like a baby,” Tris said. “Not a pretty sight.”

  Reede didn’t miss the irony that Tris hated being out of Edilean as much as Reede disliked being in it.

  Although Sophie had helped calm Reede’s restlessness, and had made him more content, he still itched to leave, to travel, to go.

  It was at Thanksgiving dinner that Tris’s nine-year-old niece Nell handed Sophie a lump of modeling clay and asked if she could make a centaur.

  Sophie smiled. “A centaur, huh? Like in Harry Potter?”

  Nell, her beautiful eyes serious, nodded. To her, her aunt Jecca was a true artist, but Jecca said that 3D was Sophie’s field of expertise. “She can make anything.”

  Sophie’d always loved horses and had made many of them in several media, so that was easy.

  By the time she’d formed the animal, every child who could walk was around her and staring with wide eyes. Sophie stopped when she got to the man part of the creature and held it up.

  “So who do you think looks most like a centaur?”

  Instantly, every face in the room, over twenty people, looked at the sheriff, Colin Frazier. He was a huge man, his body covered with powerful muscles.

  Everyone, and especially Colin, laughed.

  After that, Sophie got no rest. She was asked to sculpt every adult male there into an animal. Tristan was a gazelle, Ramsey a bear, Luke a scholarly-looking badger, while Mike was a fox. Reede came last and she put his face onto a lion.

  Sara took all the figures and put them into a glass-fronted cabinet. She wouldn’t let the children touch them, but Mike gave them a flashlight so they could look at them.

  After the dinner cleanup, Reede caught Sophie in the hallway, pulled her into his arms, and kissed her. “That was very nice of you. The kids really appreciated it.”

  “I enjoy doing that kind of thing. The kids in the forest and now these.”

  “Better than Henry?”

  Sophie laughed. “Oh yes! He is so very serious about all of it. He wants to win awards and prizes, and I think his goal is to have a piece of his work put in a museum.”

  “And what about you? You don’t want awards?”

  “I—” She broke off because the children had found her. Nell was trying to herd them around the house but they were escaping her.

  “Miss Sophie!” one of them yelled, as she was now their favorite person on earth.

  They grabbed her hands and pulled her away with them.

  Sara came out of the bedroom, one of her twin baby boys in each arm, and handed one to Reede. “You should keep that girl.”

  “I’m trying,” he said.

  “Whatever you have to do, you should do it,” she said to him, and there was no humor in her eyes. “You’re not exactly a man who falls in and out of love easily. If you lose Sophie you’ll be an old man before you recover.”

  “Thanks for telling me what I already know,” Reede said.

  “Any time,” she answered as she went back to the kitchen.

  Every day Reede and Sophie grew closer, their lives intertwining. It quickly got to the point where Reede couldn’t imagine a life without Sophie.

  But Roan had told him that Sophie was staying only until the middle of January. “Think you’ve changed her mind?” Roan asked. “Think you’ve talked her into moving into your house and the two of you settling down in Edilean? What are you going to do when Ariel comes back and Tris does? Aren’t three doctors too many for little Edilean? Or are you hoping for a spread of cholera?”

  Reede glared at his cousin. He didn’t have an answer to any of the questions. Ariel was Sheriff Frazier’s sister, and as soon as she finished her residency in California she was going to return to Edilean and work with Tristan—when he got back from New York, that is. Ariel was married to Mike Newland’s best friend, and the two men planned to open a big gym that would have members from Edilean to DC.

  It was all family, Reede thought. It was all cozy and warm and friendly. And it was maddening to Reede! Just last night he’d seen a TV show about a doctor who equipped a boat as a hospital, and he went to remote areas of the world to help people.

  If Reede could get the funding he’d love to do something like that. But what kind of life was that for a woman? And by that he meant Sophie. How could she do her sculpture while moving around the world?

  And then there was her growing love for Edilean and the people in it. They’d accepted her quickly. And why not? She was kind and thoughtful. If someone told of a favorite sandwich, the next day it was on the menu.

  Sophie had become friends with the young woman Kelli. They were an unusual pair, Sophie so pink and blonde, Kelli so dark with her heavy eye makeup.

  Sophie had shown him Kelli’s sketches of her plans to cut into the building next door and make a real bakery. Since Roan owned both buildings, it was all up to him. Sophie laughed at how Kelli was working hard to make desserts to please Roan. Pears with almond cream and chocolate. Apples with a rice custard, orange with cardamom. There were savory tarts of pumpkin with garlic, potatoes with ham on puff pastry.

  “Kelli takes them out of the oven and hand feeds them to Roan while he’s at the cash register,” Sophie said, laughing. “One day I thought Roan was going to faint in ecstasy over Kelli’s apricots and cream, and he asked where she came up with all the things she made. She said”—Sophie grinned at Reede—“Kelli said she had an old cookbook from her French grandmother. Carter and I looked at each other and burst into laugher. Kelli and Roan knew we were laughing about the famous Treeborne cookbook but, as you know, there was a lot more to it than that.”

  She smiled at the memory. “But what’s best about it all is seeing Carter’s face get red with rage every time Kelli feeds Roan. P
ersonally, I think Carter’s anger is why she does it.”

  Reede turned away so Sophie wouldn’t see his frown. He couldn’t help the jealousy he felt. She’d gone from hating Carter to laughing with him. Every time she said, “Carter thinks we should . . . ” or “Carter says . . . ” Reede had to swallow his jealousy. She was spending most of the day near him.

  One evening after dinner and a couple of glasses of wine he said, “I thought you were angry at Carter. Hated him, even.”

  “I was,” she said. “I was furious. When I drove to Edilean I was so angry I could have torn a bronze statue apart with my teeth.”

  “Sounds interesting,” he said, smiling, preferring to hear this than whatever Treeborne had said at work that day.

  “No, I’m not kidding.” She paused for a moment. “I know Carter cared about me. I was sure of it, and when he talked about having to make the ‘most important decision of his life,’ I still think he meant us.”

  “Probably did,” Reede said but didn’t add his opinion. He wanted her to go on.

  “But it all changed in one evening. Instead of having what I had seen as my glorious future, I ended up with a dead car and a stolen cookbook, and standing in the middle of a highway trying to get a cell signal. Then some jerk ran over the phone and the cookbook.” She looked at Reede with wide eyes. “Sorry. Maybe not a jerk. I’m sure you—”

  He was coming toward her with the eyes of a predatory animal. “Say all that again.”

  Sophie backed away from him and there was a look of almost fear in her eyes. “Reede, I didn’t mean anything bad. I thought you were a jerk. I’m sorry I said that but—”

  “Not that part.” He was advancing toward her. “About the highway and the phone.”

  She didn’t understand what he meant. “I was trying to find a signal.”

  “And where were you?”

  “On the way to Edilean.” She backed up more. “I told you that.” Her back was against the kitchen counter; she could go no farther.

  “You just said ‘There I was, standing . . . ’ And what was the rest of that sentence?”

  Finally, she understood, and she tried to keep her face from turning red. She moved to duck out from under his arm, but he wouldn’t let her. “Well, maybe I was . . . uh, sort of . . . ”

  “Standing in the middle of the highway?” His face was nearly touching hers. “A busy highway with vehicles doing sixty miles an hour and you were smack in the middle of it trying to get a cell phone signal? Is that right?”

  Sophie’s pretty face lost its look of fear and was replaced with guilt. “Well, you see, my car had stopped and I really needed to call someone and my phone—”

  “The one I ran over?”

  “Uh, yes. It didn’t work and I had to—”

  Reede turned away.

  As he’d hoped, her guilt made her shower him with kisses. Their lovemaking that night had been special. Reede hadn’t realized it but he’d been carrying a heavy burden of guilt about nearly having run over someone. While it was good that the incident had shocked him into changing his driving, he still felt bad about it. Sophie’s confession relieved him of that guilt.

  From now on he had something to balance out the fact that he and all of Edilean had lied to her. In fact, the next day Heather had referred to the beer-pouring incident.

  “She was standing in the middle of the highway to get a signal for her phone,” Reede said as he looked at a chart.

  “Did you just find that out?”

  “Yes,” he answered.

  Heather had smiled. “So now you have something to get back at her. That’s the way all marriages work.” She left the exam room before Reede could reply.

  Three days before Christmas everything changed. At five Heather said, “There’s some man here to see you. He says it’s personal.” She was frowning as though she didn’t like the man.

  Reede looked into the waiting room and there was his old friend Tyler Becks. They’d spent years together in school, had played soccer and drunk many beers together. Tyler was tall, blond, blue-eyed, and always had a long list of girls’ phone numbers that he never minded sharing. At the time Reede had been so attached to Laura Chawnley that he’d felt almost fatherly as he watched the others arguing over who got what number. In Reede’s mind he might as well have been a married man.

  Reede smiled at Tyler and led him back to his office. Once they were out of sight of his nosy employees the two men hugged in the way of old buddies.

  “Sit down,” Reede said. “How have you been?”

  Tyler practically collapsed into a chair. “If you’d asked me that a month ago I would have said I was in heaven. I had a wife, I was in partnership in a growing practice, had a big house, and was thinking about starting a family. What about you? I bet you have at least three kids by now. Home and family as well as saving the world one village at a time?”

  Reede didn’t smile. It had been years since he’d talked to Tyler and they’d shared news about their lives. “No wife, no kids.”

  “Right. I forgot. That girl you were so faithful to dumped you, didn’t she?”

  “That was a long time ago,” Reede said. “Since then I’ve done a lot of traveling, but now, as you can see, I’m back here in my hometown. Are you just passing through? This area is beautiful at Christmas. It—” He broke off because tears had come to Tyler’s eyes.

  Reede grabbed some tissues from the box on the desk and handed them to him.

  “I’m sorry,” Tyler said. “I have no right to—”

  Reede went to a cabinet along the wall and pulled out a bottle of forty-year-old single malt McTarvit whiskey and poured them both a glass.

  Tyler downed his in one shot. “Sorry,” he said again. “It’s been a bad few weeks. My wife told me she wants a divorce. We’ve only been married three years, but she wants out.”

  Reede sat down across from his friend, sipped his whiskey, and was silent. He knew from painful experience that what a person in this much agony needed most was someone to listen to them.

  “Seems she and the partner in my practice have been having an affair for the last two years.” Tyler downed another shot. “The bastard! He gave me a sob story about how perfect my life was while his was so empty. If we had a late patient or an emergency I was the one who went. He used to beg me to give him time to try to find a woman half as good as my Amy.”

  Tyler looked up with red eyes full of his misery. “He didn’t want a copy of my wife, he wanted the original.”

  Reede was beginning to see where this was leading. Tyler was one of the many people he’d called and offered the job in Edilean to. He’d told of his situation in the most glowing terms he could come up with. Edilean was practically a paradise on earth. Great for families; great for single men looking for a family. Reede had also talked of how he wanted . . . no, needed . . . to go back to being an itinerant doctor, traveling around the world setting up clinics. Some doctors had politely listened; some had nearly hung up on him. But all of them had said no. Tyler’s reaction had been laughter. He’d said that everything in his life was so great he couldn’t think of changing anything.

  Reede leaned back in his chair and listened to Tyler tell about his current horrible situation.

  “I was ready to start a family. Babies. I was talking to Amy about it but she kept putting me off, saying she wasn’t ready yet. Her job as a receptionist was too ‘important’ for her to think about having a baby. What woman doesn’t want a home?! Answer me that. Walls, roses over fences, kids running around? But my wife—”

  Reede’s mind went to Sophie. Not long ago she’d been about to marry Carter Treeborne. She would have had a huge wedding and a home that was a mansion. All that would have happened if Carter hadn’t been such a coward.

  But now Carter was growing a backbone. Every day Reede had to listen to Sophie tell him of ideas Carter had, of plans he was making. For all that Treeborne told Sophie that all he wanted from her was her forgiveness, Ree
de thought the guy was working hard to win her. He wasn’t blatant, but was subtle with his jokes and talks of a future line of baked goods for Treeborne Foods.

  Each day it was getting more difficult for Reede to compete with Carter. If he were to accept what Tyler was leading up to asking, if Reede were to go back on the road, he knew he’d lose Sophie forever.

  “And then I thought of your call,” Tyler said. “Six weeks ago the idea of leaving my practice was a laugh, but now—”

  “The salary is abysmal,” Reede said. “I can hardly feed myself, much less support a wife and kids.”

  “That’s all right. My brother is a lawyer, and he said that by the time I get through with the . . . ” Tyler swallowed. “With dissolving the partnership I’ll have enough to live on for ten years. Right now I just need somewhere quiet to live and work, and your little town looks to be as quiet as it gets in this country.”

  “Yeah,” Reede said, “but we’re far away from everything.”

  “Are you kidding? Williamsburg is just next door. And there are some great places here in this town. And of course there’s year-round sports in the preserve. This place is paradise.”

  Last night Sophie had said almost exactly the same thing, that Edilean was a little paradise.

  “So when do you want to leave?” Tyler asked.

  “Later,” Reede said. “Now I . . . ”

  “Right. I get it. After the new year. I’ve got a lot to do before then.” Tyler stood up and held out his hand to Reede. “Do we have a deal?”

  “I don’t know,” Reede said.

  Tyler dropped his hand. “I understand. My whole life is upside down. How about if we talk again on the fifteenth of January?”

  That was the date Roan said Sophie was planning to leave, Reede thought. “That’s a good idea,” he said, and the two men shook hands. Reede asked him to have dinner with him and Sophie but Tyler said no. He knew some people in the area and they’d invited him out.

  Tyler stopped at the door and looked back. “I feel good about this,” he said, then left.