Читать книгу Rescued by a Wedding: Texas Wedding / A Marriage Between Friends - Kathleen O'Brien - Страница 10

IT WASN’T EASY to sleep that night. Every noise Susannah heard, even the familiar oak branch that had scratched against her window since she was six, made her heart race. Outside, the night seemed to go on forever, the mushroom-colored moon caught in a soup of gray clouds. Inside, every creaking floorboard, every snap, groan or sigh from the old house, sounded like Trent coming to find her.

Trent, coming to lie beside her in the darkness and, with his angry lips and determined hands, somehow force her to keep her promise.

She woke up feeling wrung out and muddy-headed. And oddly lonely. In some ways, she missed Nikki. It would have been nice to have someone to talk to. But sitting around gabbing was a luxury she could rarely afford—and it wasn’t something Nikki enjoyed much, anyhow. So she tried just to be glad she didn’t have to make breakfast for Nikki and nag her out the door to school.

She did have to get up, though. She was due at the burn center by nine, and there was no way to avoid it. She went in only two mornings a week during peach season, and Rachel, her gung-ho administrative assistant, would undoubtedly have scheduled a dozen meetings, phone calls and interviews.

So Susannah put on her best spring suit and extra lipstick, and made her way across town. She sent up a little prayer that no big problems would present themselves today, and that maybe she could get home early.

No such luck.

“Susannah, thank God you’re here.” Rachel stood up from her chair when she saw her boss. “You’re not going to believe what Dr. Mahaffey’s wife did.”

Susannah moved into her office and put down her purse, trying to refrain from pointing out that she didn’t care what Dr. Mahaffey’s wife did. Obviously, she couldn’t say such a thing. Dr. Mahaffey was the retired chief of surgery for the burn center, and his wife had organized some of their most successful fund-raisers. So what Mrs. Mahaffey did was always important.

Especially to the executive coordinator of donor/volunteer affairs. And that was Susannah.

“What did she do?” Susannah managed a smile, because she knew the answer would be something hilarious. Spunky, opinionated, energetic Maggie Mahaffey was eighty-two, nine years older than her exhausted husband, and most of the time she lived on Mars.

Rachel stood in the doorway between the offices and held out a plate heaped with pie. “She sent in a recipe for the peach book.”

Susannah set down the stack of color-coded phone messages she’d just grabbed and stared at the plate, as if she expected it to explode. “Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes.” Rachel nodded, her full lips pressed so tightly you almost couldn’t see her signature-red lipstick. “Taste it.”

Susannah laughed and took a step backward. “I’ll take your word for it. What’s wrong this time? Six pounds of sugar? How that woman has managed to avoid diabetes is a mystery to me.”

“No sugar. This time she added mint.” Rachel widened her eyes dramatically. “Mint. And…cashews.”

Susannah’s mouth just hung open, seemingly unable to respond to her order to close. “Cashews in her peach pie?”

“Yes. Cashews.” Rachel wasn’t easily rattled, but this clearly had shaken her. “What are we going to do, Susannah? It’s indescribably gross. I brushed my teeth twice, and I still taste it.”

Susannah sat on the edge of her desk, suddenly tired. Given what she was going through back at Everly, a disgusting peach pie simply didn’t seem important. “I’ll just have to create a typo. The line about the cashews will mysteriously drop off.”

“Again? You did that last year, with the sugar! Mrs. Mahaffey tried to get you fired then. If you do it again, she’ll have your head.”

“She’s welcome to it.” Susannah reached one more time for the phone messages. Red meant “urgent” and the stack was about ninety percent red. “Did the volunteer training session go all right?”

Rachel set the pie down on her desk, giving it one last grimace and a shudder. Then she turned back to Susannah, putting on her professional face. “Yeah, it’s going great. They’re on day two now, and it’s a pretty big group this time. Ten volunteers…no, wait, eleven.”

Susannah looked up. This was unusual. Rachel certainly had the authority to slip a latecomer into the training program without clearing it with her boss, but she didn’t often do it. The volunteer application had a box for Susannah’s signature, and Rachel wasn’t comfortable with empty boxes.

Susannah wondered who the new recruit was. Nell Bollinger had been promising to sign up, but word was the Bollingers had just found pinkeye in their cattle, so this probably wasn’t the week she’d finally decide to follow through.

“Eleven is excellent. Who is the new one? Do you remember her name?”

A stupid question, actually. Rachel was so detail oriented she undoubtedly knew the names, addresses, telephone numbers and shoe sizes of all eleven newbies by heart.

“Yes, of course! In fact, she said she was a friend of yours. Let’s see. That one was Missy Griffin.” She frowned slightly. “No, wait. She said she’d just gotten a divorce and gone back to her maiden name. Missy…Missy Snowdon. That’s right.”

Missy Snowdon…

Her chest suddenly tight, Susannah stared down at the telephone messages. She struggled to keep her face impassive.

Surely she’d heard wrong. Or else Rachel had remembered wrong.

For one thing, Missy Snowdon had left Texas years ago. She’d gone to Hollywood, or maybe Vegas…one of those cities that act like magnets on women who are mostly made of collagen and silicone and bleach.

For another, Missy Snowdon wasn’t the volunteering type. She was a player, not a worker. A taker, not a giver.

“Um…” Rachel tilted her head, obviously unsettled by something she saw in Susannah’s face. “I hope I didn’t do the wrong thing. I never would have let her sign up if she hadn’t said she was your friend. If that’s not true—”

“It’s okay,” Susannah said. “It’s true. We were…we went to high school together.”

She couldn’t bring herself to speak the word friends. Once, she’d thought so, but…

As she’d said, Missy Snowdon was a taker. And what she’d taken from Susannah was Trent.

Rachel still looked worried, her brow furrowed. “Are you sure? The class is observing in Restorative this morning. I could go over and pull her out—”

“No, no, don’t be silly. We don’t have so many volunteers that we can afford to chase one away.”

Rachel nodded. She knew what a struggle it was to fill the positions.

Susannah managed a smile. “I should get to these phone messages, I suppose. I can’t stay long today.”

“Oh, of course, what was I thinking? Call Dr. Grieve first. Then Mrs. McManus. Be sure to leave Des Barkley at the Daily Grower for last. He wants an interview about the peach party, which is good, but you know how he talks.”

Susannah nodded. She knew.

It wasn’t easy, but somehow she got through the stack by noon. Some of it really was urgent. Some of it was downright boring. But at least it kept her mind off other things.

Like Trent.

And Missy Snowdon.

Susannah wished she’d had the nerve to ask Rachel how Missy looked. Back in high school, Missy had been the fairy princess, with a waterfall of blond hair and round, lash-heavy blue eyes. But the looks had been deceiving. Underneath all that innocent beauty beat the heart of a tiger.

For Missy Snowdon, a day without risk was a day without sunshine. She shoplifted trinkets she could easily afford, cheated on tests she was sure to ace anyhow. She ignored stop signs and streetlights, even when she had all the time in the world, gaily waving her beer can at every policeman she passed.

And boys…she could have had anyone in the school, from the greenest freshman to the married principal himself. But she had been picky. She wanted only the best. And only the ones who were already taken.

Like Trent.

Susannah tapped her pen against the calendar blotter. Finally, she stood up, unable to resist temptation any longer. Forget playing it cool. She had to see Missy for herself.

It would probably make her feel much better. Surely another decade of bleaching, boozing and bed-hopping had taken its toll. If there was any justice in this world, Missy probably looked a rode-hard fifty, and that would be a sight for sore eyes.

Susannah made her way to Restorative, passing from the relative quiet of the administrative wing to the noisy corridors of the clinic. Though she hurried, it was the lunch hour, and the trail was a bit of an obstacle course.

When she reached the small room where special restorative nurses were feeding the patients, she realized she was too late. The volunteers didn’t hang out in any of the working areas. They would be intruding. They just stood to the side, observed quietly, then moved to a classroom for further discussion.

Darn. Susannah had lost her chance to do this the easy way. Of course, as the coordinator of volunteers, she had every right to poke her head into the training classroom and summon Missy Snowdon up for inspection any time she wanted. She had the power around here, not Missy. For once.

But she didn’t want to use it. What would be the point? If she treated Missy badly, it would only prove that she still held a grudge, which would make her look pathetic. Their troubles had happened nearly eleven years ago, practically in another lifetime. They’d barely been out of high school, for heaven’s sake. High school dramas had no power here, in the real world.

Just when she almost had herself convinced, a low, throaty laugh came from the west wing. The sound went right through her brave facade, like a dart busting a cheap balloon.

It had to be Missy. Because Susannah suddenly felt insecure and jealous and angry as hell.

She looked down the hall and saw a blonde woman moving toward her, flanked by two handsome, white-coated doctors who bent over her as solicitously as they would any critically ill patient in their care.

Susannah instinctively turned her head away, pretending to read a flyer at the nurses’ station while the trio floated by, still laughing. She caught only a momentary flash of Missy, but that was enough.

Damn it. The woman was more beautiful than ever, still a princess in her candy-pink pinafore, still sashaying her hips as if she walked to secret salsa music. Still flashing the wide white smile that dazzled quarterbacks, traffic cops, algebra teachers—and apparently surgeons—into instant enslavement.

“Ms. Everly?” Evelyn Marks, the charge nurse, had returned to the station and sounded surprised to see Susannah standing there. That made sense. This wasn’t Susannah’s part of the building.

“Sorry…I mean Mrs. Maxwell.” Evelyn smiled. “I guess I gotta get used to that.”

Susannah looked up just in time to see Missy and the doctors disappear onto the elevator. She turned to the nurse, who had been a casual friend for years. “Me, too, Evvy.”

Evelyn, a bouncy, round mother of six daughters, three of whom were also nurses at the center, grinned. “You look tired. How’s married life treating you?”

Susannah hesitated. But, like everyone else, Evvy knew the situation, so there was no point pretending to be a dewy-eyed bride.

“Well, it’s…tricky,” she admitted, opting for at least a degree of honesty.

Evvy laughed, but Susannah’s ears were tuned to the tinkling sound as the elevator doors slid shut.

Missy was gone. For now. But even as Susannah breathed a sigh of relief, she knew she’d been a coward. And it was only a temporary reprieve. Sooner or later, she’d encounter her old nemesis face-to-face.

More importantly, so would Trent.

* * *

TRENT HAD his bulky work gloves on, and he’d just arranged the chain saw, pole pruner and baling cord under one arm and the old wooden paint ladder under the other, so naturally his cell phone chose that moment to ring.

He glanced back into the garage, where Zander was working on a broken hedge clipper.

The old man laughed. “Women,” he said with a snort. “They have the devil’s timing, don’t they? Want me to tell Trixie Mae Sexpot to get lost for you?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

Trent wasn’t expecting any calls from females, but he stood still as Zander reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the phone. He would have let it go to voice mail, except that he was stealing these last few hours of daylight from the Double C and using them to cut back the worst dead branches on Everly’s old oaks. If the Double C had a problem, he was honor bound to deal with it.

“Trent Maxwell’s phone. Zander Hobbin speaking.” Zander listened for a few seconds, during which his teasing expression soured into one of real annoyance. “No, Maxy isn’t available. You can tell by how he didn’t answer the phone. See how that works, sugar?”

Trent felt his eyebrows draw together, and the chain saw slipped an inch under his elbow. Maxy? No one called him Maxy. Not anymore. Not since high school. And the only one who’d done it, even then, was…

“Who?” Zander cut a strange look toward Trent. “Missy Snowdon? Oh, you bet I remember you. Sure, I’ll tell him. But just between you and me, don’t hold your breath on that callback. Trent got married last week. You been gone a long time, so I’ll just assume you didn’t know, or you wouldn’t have called, right?”

Trent could hear the high, quick voice still talking on the other end as Zander snapped the phone shut. The older man glowered at Trent from under his bushy eyebrows.

“I heard that little minx was back in town, but I didn’t think she’d have the nerve to call you, just like that.” He ran his upper lip through his teeth, as if he were trying to comb the mustache that tickled down over it. “Unless…you didn’t make the first move, did you, son?”

Trent raised one eyebrow. That tone might have worked if Trent had been ten and had got caught with his hands in the wrong cookie jar, but not now. Trent wouldn’t have telephoned Missy Snowdon if she were the last woman surviving this side of Saturn, but frankly, who he called or didn’t call wasn’t Zander’s business.

“What’s wrong, Zan? She is pretty hot. You jealous?”

Zander started to bluster, but he must have noticed the tucked corner of Trent’s grin, because he ended up grunting and shaking his head.

“Jealous about Missy Snowdon? Hell, no. I wouldn’t dream of going barefoot into that particular mud puddle.” He slipped the phone back into Trent’s jacket with two fingers, as if Missy Snowdon had infected it with something disgusting. “And neither should you, my friend. Neither should you.”

“I don’t go barefoot anywhere.” Trent smiled. “Your generation might not have learned that, but ours has.”

Zander grunted again, clearly aware he wasn’t going to get anything but sardonic deflections, no matter how long he probed. Trent had mastered this technique in grade school. He could bat away Zander’s curiosity all day long.

The two men were friendly colleagues, as managers of adjacent spreads tended to be, but they weren’t confidants. Forty years stood between them, and so did Trent’s natural preference for emotional privacy.

Zander slapped his hands against his overalls, raising dust in the sunbeams that angled into the dim garage like transparent gold two-by-fours. “So go on, then. Light’s fading. Don’t you have some limbs to cut?”

He did. It was one of many chores that desperately needed doing around here. He had been spending a lot of time at Everly over the past few days, ever since Harrison’s weird warning about Peggy. He didn’t really believe Peggy could pose a threat to anyone, but still…he didn’t like the thought of Susannah here in this big old house, all alone.

Besides, the place could use an extra pair of hands, especially ones that came without a salary attached. He hadn’t noticed just how run-down the place had become since old man Everly had died.

He propped his ladder up against the first oak. This one had a couple of dead branches that, given the right amount of wind, could easily fall right on the east porch roof. As he snapped the ladder’s hinged stays into place, he noticed Eli Breslin over by the barn, slouching against the wall, staring at Trent.

Little bastard. He never did a lick of work around here, did he? He might as well be dipping his hand into Susannah’s wallet and lifting out the cash.

“Hey, Breslin,” Trent called. “If you’re not busy, why don’t you come cut some branches?”

Eli straightened, though the insolent look didn’t drop from his face. He shook his head, the blond curls catching the late-afternoon sunlight. “Can’t. Got to work on the shaker.”

And then, as if he’d been planning all along to do so, he sauntered toward the back drive, where the old machine had been dragged yesterday after it died in the south forty. He glanced back at Trent, then picked up a wrench and proceeded to peer under the open hood.

Well, that was at least half an hour’s work Susannah would get out of the brat today.

Trent went back to setting up his tools. Zander was right. The light was fading fast. He wouldn’t get much done today. The older man had been right about another thing, too. Trent should have waited until he could have borrowed a good extension ladder from the Double C. Though Everly probably owned about a hundred ladders, they were all in use for the thinning, which would continue right up until harvest.

This old stepladder—the only one Susannah had kept for private use—was a mess, with half-mangled feet that wouldn’t settle level on the root-braided ground.

But the branches were his excuse for hanging around Everly this afternoon, so he needed to cut a few. Susannah would have laughed out loud if he’d admitted that Harrison Archer’s comment had spooked him. She would have countered in her typical dry way that if she needed a guard dog, she’d buy one at the pound.

He looked toward the house. He could just barely make out Susannah’s silhouette at the window of the sunroom. She’d been in there for a couple of hours now, going over estate details with Richard Doyle, the arrogant twit who was the executor of her grandfather’s will.

Doyle might have been one of the reasons Trent had felt the need to stick around. Trent didn’t like him, but that didn’t mean much. Trent never liked guys like Doyle—guys who bought handkerchiefs to match their ties, which they’d bought to match their eyes, which they’d faked up with tinted contact lenses.

And he might as well be honest. He’d never liked any guy who dared to buzz around Susannah. It was habit, he supposed, but it clearly was a habit he wasn’t going to break. Not after twenty-one years, ten with her and eleven without her. He was more likely to break the habit of breathing.

He wondered if she had the same problem. He wondered, for instance, how she would react to the news that Missy Snowdon had just called him.

Not that he planned to tell her. Missy’s name was radioactive. It would burn his lips to say it and Susannah’s ears to hear it. Maybe it wasn’t fair. Missy wasn’t to blame for their troubles—the tragedy had been Trent’s fault, from beginning to end. But somehow Missy Snowdon had become more than just a trashy girl chasing another girl’s man. She’d become iconic. A symbol.

Doves meant peace, rainbows meant hope, roses meant love.

Missy Snowdon meant betrayal and death.

He hadn’t seen her in nearly a dozen years. He’d heard she was back in town, but, like Zander, Trent had assumed she’d know better than to call.

He and Susannah had little enough chance of making this marriage work without throwing Missy into the mix. You might as well dig up an old corpse, toss it onto the table, then ask everyone to enjoy their meal.

He bent over, set the choke on the chain saw. He gave the cord a yank, perhaps a little harder than necessary. Eli was watching him again, as if the boy hoped Trent would have trouble getting the tool started. But the chain saw zoomed into life, its teeth circling furiously, like a mad dog snapping, eager to chomp into something and tear it to shreds.

Trent climbed the ladder, careful not to ascend any higher than he needed to. Heights and chain saws didn’t mix. But the limb was farther up than it appeared from the ground. Mildly irritated, he put one foot on the fourth step, then reached out with the chain saw and let it sink into the brittle, sapless limb.

The wood cracked, split and tumbled to the ground before the blade sank even halfway through it. It had been ready to go, that was for sure. He needed to get all this dead wood out of here before the summer storms started, even if it meant delegating some of the paperwork at the Double C.

He glanced at the tractor, just beyond the tree’s branches. Eli was gone, the little slacker. Trent scanned the yard, his gaze ending at the back porch. He was surprised to see a man standing there. Would Eli really dare to—

But it wasn’t Eli. It was Doyle. Dapper as ever, the lawyer posed like a GQ model, one foot cocked up against the white scrolled balustrade. His gold silk tie and handkerchief matched his hair.

Somebody should tell the fool that women didn’t like their men to be prettier than they were.

Richard held a cocktail in his hand, a signal that the business part of his visit was over. Though Susannah must have provided the drink, she was nowhere in sight.

The porch was about twenty yards away, so it was hard to be sure, but the lawyer seemed to be staring up at the tree where Trent was working. And his handsome face seemed hard, set with hostile intensity that almost exactly replicated the anger Trent had glimpsed on Eli’s face earlier.

Trent sighed. This could get old.

None of the men in Susannah’s life trusted him. And they were jealous as hell. Okay, fair enough. He got that. The green-eyed monster wasn’t exactly a stranger to him, either.

But too bad. Trent was her husband, at least for the next year, and all the wannabes, the sycophants and the stuffed shirts she’d passed over when making her choice would just have to deal with it.

Suddenly, Doyle raised his drink in a stiff salute.

“Afternoon, Maxwell,” he called. He sipped the drink, then smiled. “Better watch your step up there.”

“Yeah.” Trent nodded. “Thanks.” But he felt irrationally irritated. Naturally, Doyle thought cutting trees was dangerous. It was real physical labor, as foreign to the pencil pusher as scaling the craters of the moon.

Or was Trent just regressing again? Resenting the rich boys who never smelled like wood chips…or sweat?

Get over it, Maxwell, he told himself. That chip on his shoulder was every bit as pointless as Doyle’s gold silk pocket square.

He held the chain saw above the next limb, then let it fall slowly, the blade slicing into the wood, sending off chips like sparks from a diamond cutter’s wheel. But this branch wasn’t completely dead. It resisted, and Trent had to put muscle behind it. He leaned over, adding his other foot to the fourth step for balance.

And suddenly, without any warning he could hear over the roar of the chain saw, the step gave way, the old bolt pulled away from the frame and the plank jackknifed right under his feet.

As he felt himself go, he somehow had the presence of mind to release the chain saw. It died immediately and dropped, whining, like a missile to the ground.

The millisecond after, Trent’s whole body did the same.