Red Lily

  payments aren’t going to sting some.” More, she thought, it had put an ache in her throat when Mr. Tanner had assumed they were a family.

  “If you need some help—”

  “Don’t go there, Harper.” But she reached over to pat his hand, to show she appreciated the offer. “We’ll be fine, Lily and me.”

  “Why don’t I take you out to lunch to celebrate then?”

  “That’s a deal. I’m starving.”

  They had looked like a family, she thought. A normal young family buying a secondhand car, having lunch in a diner, treating the baby to a cup of ice cream.

  But putting them there was rushing it, for all of them. They were a man and a single mother who were romantically involved. Not a unit.

  At home, she decided to take advantage of the rest of her day off by curling up with Lily for an afternoon nap.

  “We’re all right, aren’t we, baby?” she murmured as Lily played with her mother’s hair, her big eyes heavy, her pretty mouth going slack. “I’m doing right by you? I’m sure trying.”

  She snuggled down a little closer. “I’m so tired. Got a million things I ought to be doing, but I’m so tired. I’ll get them all done sooner or later, right?”

  She closed her eyes, started to calculate her finances in her head, juggling funds, changing weekly deposits. But her brain wouldn’t focus.

  It drifted back to the used-car lot, and Mr. Tanner shaking hands with her before she drove off. How he’d smiled at her and wished her and her charming family well.

  Drifted to sitting out on her terrace with Harper, drinking cold wine in the heat-soaked night.

  Dancing with him in the shimmering romance of the suite at the Peabody.

  Working with him in the grafting house.

  Watching him lift Lily onto his shoulders.

  It should be easier to be in love, she thought sleepily. It should be simpler. It shouldn’t make you want more when love was everything.

  She sighed once, and told herself to enjoy what she had, and let the rest come.

  And the pain was like knives in the belly, shocking, sharp, and horrid. Her whole body fought against them, and she screamed at the sensation of being ripped in two.

  The heat, the pain. Unbearable. How could something so loved, so desired, punish her this way? She would die from it, surely she would die. And never see her son.

  Sweat streamed off her, and the utter weariness was nearly as severe as the pain.

  Blood and sweat and agony. All for her child, her son. Her world. No price too dear to pay for giving him life.

  And as the pain sliced her, sent her tumbling toward the dark, she heard the thin cry of birth.

  Hayley woke drenched in sweat, her body still radiating from the pain. And her own child blissfully asleep in the protective crook of her arm.

  She eased free, fumbled for the bedside phone.

  “Harper? Can you come?”

  “Where are you?”

  “In my room. Lily’s sleeping right here. I can’t leave her. We’re all right,” she said quickly. “We’re fine, but something just happened. Please can you come?”

  “Two minutes.”

  She made a wall of pillows around the baby, but knew even then she couldn’t leave the room. Lily might roll off somehow, or certainly climb over and fall. But she could pace, even on her weakened legs she could pace.

  She flung open the doors even as Harper ran up the steps.

  “They told her it was stillborn.” She swayed, and her knees nearly folded. “They told her her baby was dead.”

  sixteen

  IN THE PARLOR where the light was soft through gauzy curtains and the air was sweet with roses, Harper stood by the front window with his fists balled in his pockets.

  “She was wrecked,” he said with his back to the room. “She just sort of folded up when I got there, and even when she pulled it together, she looked sick.”

  “She wasn’t hurt.” Mitch held up a hand when Harper whirled. “I know how you feel. I do. But she wasn’t physically harmed, and that’s important.”

  “This time,” he shot back. “It’s out of hand. All of this is fucking out of hand.”

  “Only more reason for us to stick together, and stay calm.”

  “I’ll be calm when she’s out of the house.”

  “Amelia,” Logan asked, “or Hayley?”

  “Right now? Both.”

  “You know she can stay with us. And if I were in your shoes, I’d want to pack her up and haul her out. But from what I gather, you tried that once and it didn’t work. If you think you’ve got a better shot at it now, I’ll carry her suitcase.”

  “She won’t budge. What the hell is wrong with these women?”

  “They feel connected.” David spread his hands. “Even when they see Amelia at her worst, they feel attached. Engaged. Right or wrong, Harp, there’s a kind of solidarity.”

  “And it’s her home,” Mitch added. “As much as yours now, or mine. She won’t walk out of it and leave this undone. Any more than you, or I, or any or us.” He glanced around the room. “So we finish it.”

  Logic, even truth, didn’t settle Harper’s anger, or his worry. “You didn’t see her after it happened.”

  “No, but I’ve got the gist from what you told me. She matters to me, too, Harper. To all of us.”

  “All for one, great. I’m for it.” His gaze shifted to the parlor doors, and his mind traveled upstairs, to Hayley. “But she’s the one on the line.”

  “Agreed.” Mitch leaned forward in his chair to draw Harper’s attention back to him. “Let’s look at what happened for a minute. Hayley was taken through childbirth, and a traumatic aftermath when Amelia was told the baby was dead. And she went through this while she was napping with Lily. But Lily wasn’t disturbed. That tells me that there’s no intent to harm or even frighten the baby. If there were, how long do you think it would take Hayley to head out that door?”

  “That may be true, but to get whatever it is she wants, Amelia’s going to keep using Hayley, and using her hard.”

  “I agree.” Mitch nodded. “Because it works. Because this way she’s feeding us information we might not ever be able to find. We know now that not only was her child taken from her, but that she was told, cruelly, that it was dead. It’s hardly a wonder that her mind, which already seemed to be somewhat imbalanced, shattered.”

  “We can assume she came here for him,” Logan suggested. “And died here.”

  “Well, the kid’s dead, too. Dead as she is, dead as disco.” Harper slumped into a chair. “She’s not going to find him here.”

  UPSTAIRS, HAYLEY WOKE from a light doze. The curtains were pulled so the light was dim but for a thin chink. She saw Roz sitting, reading a book in that narrow spear of light.

  “Lily.”

  Roz set the book aside and rose. “Stella has her. She took her and the boys over to the other wing to play so you’d have some quiet. How are you feeling?”

  “Exhausted. A little raw inside yet.” But she sighed, comforted when Roz sat and stroked her hair. “It was harder than when I had Lily, rougher and longer. I know it was only a few minutes, really, but it seemed like hours. Hours and hours of pain and heat. Then this awful muzzy feeling toward the end. They gave her something, and it made her kind of float away, but it was almost worse.”

  “Laudanum, I imagine. Nothing like a shot of opiate.”

  “I heard the baby cry.” Struggling to relax, Hayley curled on her side, tilting her head up to keep Roz in her line of sight. “You know how it is, no matter what’s gone on in those hours before, everything inside you rising up when you hear your baby cry the first time.”

  “Hers.” Roz took Hayley’s hand. “Not yours.”

  “I know, I know, but for that instant he was mine. And that horrible tearing grief, that crazy disbelief when the doctor said it was stillborn, that was mine, too.”

  “I’ve never lost a child,” Roz told her. “I can’t even
imagine the pain of it.”

  “They lied to her, Roz. I guess he paid them, too. They lied, but she knew. She heard the baby cry, and she knew. It drove her crazy.”

  Roz shifted on the bed, angling so she could rest Hayley’s head on her lap. And sat in silence, staring at that thin lance of light through the curtains.

  “She didn’t deserve it,” Hayley started.

  “No. She didn’t deserve it.”

  “Whatever she was, whatever she did, she didn’t deserve to be treated that way. She loved the baby, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “It wasn’t right, the way she loved it. It wasn’t a healthy sort of thing. She wouldn’t have been a good mother.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I felt . . .” Obsession, she thought, hunger. Impossible to describe the vastness of it. “It had to be a boy, you see? A girl wouldn’t have mattered to her. A girl wouldn’t have been just a disappointment, but an outrage. And if she’d had the boy and kept it, she would’ve twisted it. Not on purpose, but he wouldn’t have been the man he was. He wouldn’t have been the one who loved his dog and buried it with a marker, and loved your grandmother. And none of this would be the way it is.”

  She turned her head so that she could look up at Roz. “You, Harper. Nothing would be the same. But it doesn’t make it right. It still doesn’t make what happened right.”

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if everything balanced in the world? If right came out on top and wrong was punished. It sure would be simple.”

  Hayley’s lips curved. “Then Justin Terrell, who cheated on me in tenth grade, would be fat and bald and asking people if they want fries with that instead of being part owner of a successful sport’s bar and bearing a strong resemblance to Toby McGuire.”

  “Isn’t that just the way?”

  “Then again, maybe I’d go to hell for not telling Lily’s biological father about her.”

  “Your motives were pure.”

  “Mostly. I guess doing what’s best isn’t always doing what’s right. It was best for that baby to be raised here, at Harper House.”

  “Not the same thing, Hayley. No one’s motives were pure, or even mostly, in that case. Lies and deceit, cold cruelty, and selfishness. I shudder to think what might have become of that child had it been a girl. You feeling better now?”

  “Lots.”

  “Why don’t I go down, fix you something to eat? I’ll bring you food on a tray.”

  “I’ll go down. I know Mitch wants to record all this. I know Harper’s probably told him by now, but it’s better if I give it to him firsthand. And I think I’ll feel better yet when I do.”

  “If you’re sure.”

  She nodded as she pushed herself up on the bed. “Thanks for sitting with me. It felt good knowing you were here while I slept.”

  She glanced in the mirror, winced. “I’m going to put on some makeup first. I may be possessed by a ghost, but I don’t have to look like one.”

  “That’s my girl. I’ll go let Stella know you’re up and around.”

  HAYLEY FIGURED SHE owed Roz another one when she realized everything had been arranged so that just she and Mitch would sit in the library to document the experience.

  It was easier, somehow, to talk only to him. He was so smart and scholarly, in a studly kind of way. Sort of Harrison Fordish, in hornrims she decided.

  With the leading edge of the fatigue and the shock dulled by a little sleep and a lot of TLC, she felt steadier, and more in control.

  In any case, she loved this room. All the books, all those stories, all those words. Gardens outside the windows, big cozy chairs inside.

  When she’d first come to Harper House she’d sometimes tiptoe down at night, just to sit in this room—her favorite of all of them—and marvel.

  And she liked the way Mitch approached the whole Amelia project. With his work boards, his computer, his files and notes, he made it all rational, doable, grounded.

  She studied the board now, with its long lists and columns that comprised Harper’s family tree.

  “Do you think, after all this is over, you could do a family tree for me?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Sorry.” She glanced back at him, waved a hand. “Mind’s wandering.”

  “It’s okay, you’ve got a lot on it.” He put down his notebook, focused his attention on her. “Sure I can do that. You give me the basics you know—father’s full name, date and place of birth, your mother’s, and we’re off and running.”

  “I’d really like that. It’d be interesting. Harper and I cross a couple generations back, sort of over to the side. Is he awful mad at me?”

  “No, honey. Why would he be?”

  “He was upset. He wanted to scoop me and Lily right up and haul us to Stella’s. I wouldn’t go. I can’t.”

  Mitch doodled on a pad. “If I could’ve gotten Roz out of this house a few months ago, I’d have done it—even if it had taken dynamite.”

  “Did you fight about it?”

  “Not really.” Amusement danced in his eyes. “But then I’m older, wiser, and more in tune with the limitations a man faces when dealing with a stubborn woman.”

  “Am I wrong?”

  “That’s not for me to say.”

  “It is if I’m asking you.”

  “Rock and hard place, kid. That’s where you’ve shoved me.” He pushed back, took off his glasses. “I understand exactly how Harper feels and why, and he’s not wrong. I respect how you feel and why, and you’re not wrong either. How’s that?”

  She managed a wry smile. “Smart—and no help at all.”

  “Just another benefit of that older and wiser phase of life. But I’m going to add one thing as a potentially over-protective male. I don’t think you should spend a lot of time alone.”

  “Good thing I like people.” When his cell phone rang, she rose. “I’ll go on, let you get that.”

  Because she’d seen Harper outside, she went out the side door. She hoped Stella wouldn’t mind a little more time on Lily patrol. She wandered the path toward where he worked in the cutting garden.

  Summer still had her world in its sweaty clutches, but the heat was strong and vital. Real. She’d take all the reality she could get. Mammoth blue balls of hydrangeas weighed down the bushes, daylilies speared up with their elegant cheer, and passionflowers twined their arbor in bursts of purple.

  The air was thick with fragrance and birdsong, and through it rode the frantic wings of butterflies.

  Around the curve Harper stood, legs spread, body slightly bent as his quick, skilled fingers twisted off deadheads, then dropped them in a bag knotted to his belt. At his feet was a small, shallow basket where daisies and snapdragons, larkspur and cosmos already lay.

  It was, somehow, so sweepingly romantic—the man, the evening, the sea of flowers—that her heart floated up to her throat and ached there.

  A hummingbird, a sapphire and emerald whir, arrowed past him to hover over the feathery cup of a deep red blossom of monarda and drink.

  She saw him pause to watch it, going still with his hand on a stem and his other holding a seed head. And she wished she could paint. All those vivid colors of late summer, bold and strong, and the man so still, so patient, stopping his work to share his flowers with a bird.

  Love saturated her.

  The bird flew off, a small, electric jewel. He watched it, as she watched him.

  “Harper.”

  “The hummingbirds like the bee balm,” he said, then took his sheers and clipped a monarda. “But there’s enough for all of us. It’s a good spreader.”

  “Harper,” she said again and walked up to slide her arms around him, press her cheek to his back. “I know you’re worried, and I won’t ask you not to be. But please don’t be mad.”

  “I’m not. I came out here to cool off. It usually works. I’m down to irritated and worried.”

  “I was set to come out here, argue with you.” She rubbed her cheek
over his shirt. She could smell soap and sweat, both healthy and male. “Then I saw you, and I just don’t want to argue. I just don’t want to fight. I can’t do what you want when everything inside me pulls the other way. Even if it’s wrong, I can’t.”

  “I don’t have any choice about that.” He clipped more flowers for the basket, deadheaded others. “And you don’t have any say about this. I’m moving in. I’d rather you and Lily shift over to my place, but it makes more sense for me to move into your room for now since there are two of you and one of me. When this is over, we’ll reevaluate.”

  “Reevaluate.”

  “That’s right.” He’d yet to look at her, really look, and now moved off a few paces to cut more blooms. “It’s a little hard to figure out where we’re going, what we’re doing under the circumstances.”

  “So you figure we’ll live together, under the circumstances, and when those circumstances change, we’ll take another look at the picture.”

  “That’s right.”

  Maybe she did feel like arguing. “Ever heard of asking?”

  “Heard of it. Not doing it. At the nursery, you work with Stella, Mama, or me, at all times.”

  “Who suddenly made you the boss of me?”

  With steady hands, unerring eye, he just kept working. “One of us will drive back and forth with you.”

  “One of you coming with me every time I have to pee?”

  “If necessary. You’ve got your mind set on staying, those are the terms.”

  The hummingbird whizzed back, but this time she wasn’t caught by its charm. “Terms? Somebody die and make you king? Listen, Harper—”

  “No. This is how it’s going to be. You’re determined to stay, see this through. I’m just as determined you’ll be looked after. I love you, so that’s the end of it.”

  She opened her mouth, closed it again, and took a calming breath. “If you’d said that—the I love you part—right off, I might’ve been more open to discussion.”

  “There is no discussion.”

  Her eyes narrowed. He’d yet to stop what he was doing and face her fully. “You sure can be a hard-ass when you put your mind to it.”

  “This didn’t take much effort.” He reached down, gathered the flowers in the basket, tucking their stems into a casual bouquet. Now he turned, and those long brown eyes met hers. “Here.”

  She took them, frowned at him over them. “Did you cut these for me?”

  The slow, lazy smile moved over his face. “Who else?”

  She blew out a breath. He’d added nicotiana to the bouquet, and when she inhaled, she drew in its rich perfume. “It’s exasperating, I swear, how you can be pushy one minute and sweet the next. They’re really pretty.”

  “So are you.”

  “You know, another man might’ve started off with the flowers, the flattery, and the I-love-yous to soften me up for the rest. But you go at it ass-backwards.”

  His gaze stayed on hers, steady. “I wasn’t worried about softening you up.”