Moonlight Masquerade (26 page)

Carter looked through the glass doors at the cartons and memorized what Sophie had said.

“How do you know so much about . . . the products?” He'd almost said “our” products.

“Everyone who works for your family knows.”

“So why don't
we
know?” He said it lightly, as though it were a joke. They paid a fortune for market research for people to cook the products and taste them.

“You don't hire locals for positions where anyone will
listen
to them. Remember?” She pushed the cart down the dairy aisle.

He drove her home and wanted to carry the groceries inside, but she refused. When he tried to arrange a second date, she brushed him off by saying that she had a lot of work to do and didn't have time for going out. She stepped inside without so much as a good night kiss.

When Carter got home he called his father's chauffeur, woke him up, and told him to take care of filling Sophie's car with gas. “It needs to be done by five a.m.”

“Yes, sir,” the man said.

Carter hung up, then typed out all that Sophie had told him about the frozen foods. In the morning he called a meeting of the department heads, said he'd been researching Treeborne Foods for months, and this is what he'd found out. He tossed papers on the table and told them to fix the problems. Carter then turned and left the conference room.

Without exception everyone looked at him in open-mouthed astonishment. Carter had never before taken the initiative on anything.

For the rest of the week, Carter was waiting for Sophie every day after work.

At first she ignored him, got into her own falling-apart car, and drove away. For days he tried the usual things of flowers, candy, even a gold charm bracelet, but she turned them all down. It was on the eighth night, when he showed up with no gift, that she talked with him. Or rather, she listened.

Just hours before Carter had had a fight with his father. An argument with Lewis Treeborne consisted of his yelling and his victim standing there in submission. “Rather like in a wolf pack,” one employee said.

That day Lewis had taken the rage that festered inside him out on his son. There didn't seem to be any reason, just that Carter had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Lewis, like all abusive people, felt better after he'd spewed out his venom, but his victim, Carter, was devastated.

He'd driven into town and parked in the lot out of what had become almost habit. When Sophie came
out he'd barely noticed her. Usually, he had planned out a speech of why she should go out with him, but that night he couldn't think of anything to say.

Sophie had said good night to him, then got into her car and started the rattling old engine. But then she looked at Carter, still leaning against his car, still staring into the night.

She turned off the motor, got out, and asked him what was wrong.

“Nothing,” he said and opened his car door. “Sorry I didn't bring you a gift tonight, but . . . ” He waved his hand. “I won't bother you anymore.” He had one leg inside before she spoke.

“I need to go to the grocery and I want you to drive me there,” she said loudly.

He didn't understand. “Your car quit again?”

“No.” She seemed to consider her words carefully before she spoke. “I heard that today your father took out his temper on you. Want to talk about it?”

Carter collapsed into the leather seat as though he had deflated. “Does this town know
everything
about us?”

“If it happens in public, yes we do.” She didn't tell him how everyone in the restaurant had laughed about Lewis Treeborne's attack on his son. Everyone saw Carter as a pampered, spoiled wimp. “Too afraid of his old man to stand up to him” was the consensus.

Sophie thought that was probably true, but she knew a lot about being in situations where other people had control. She knew she shouldn't get involved, since this young man was a Treeborne, but he was also a human being, and right now he looked so sad she couldn't leave him alone.

“On I-40 there's a tavern. It—”

“I know the place well,” he said. “Get in.”

That was the beginning. For the first time in his life, Carter had a friendship with a woman. Over the next few months he told her about his life, about his mother, and how she'd protected him from his father. And Sophie told how she had kept her stepfather away from her sister.

This mutual bond, this sense of sharing, led to friendship, which led to sex, and they led to love. That summer was the best of Carter's life. His father was gone most of the time, there were competent people to run the company, so he spent a lot of time with Sophie.

Her refusal to take money from him was, at first, a problem. Lisa got a job at the local Dairy Queen so Sophie could cut down from three jobs to two, but that still took up too much of her time. Carter began devising ingenious ways to get money to Sophie. Tourists came through and left twenty-dollar tips. The feed store where she worked on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons did so much business her boss gave her a substantial raise.

By the end of the summer she was doing so well that she could afford to take whole days off to spend with Carter.

That they rarely left town, but never went anyplace where Carter might be known, didn't bother Sophie. The two of them spent their hours together in a ramshackle summerhouse hidden on the Treeborne estate. They had a boat, a lake, and a forest to walk through. They spent lazy afternoons together reading, talking, or just being
quiet. They made love often, but always quietly and tenderly.

For the first time since his mother died Carter felt that someone cared for
him,
not his money, but for him.

The only blemish in his life that summer was that he knew he was to marry someone else. In September, he tried to talk to his father about what he saw as a life sentence. But Lewis Treeborne wouldn't listen. “You can
not
marry a local girl!” he said in anger, then his face changed to one of concern and he calmed down. “You may think you're in love with her but that's only because you two hide out in the woods together and eat with your fingers. How would you feel if you showed up at the opera with her? Would she fall asleep? Or would she stomp and yell like she was at a figure eight race?”

Lewis put his hand on his son's shoulder, a rare gesture. “I've seen this girl and she's a knockout, I'll give you that, but she's a local and that's all she'll ever be. Believe me, if you married a girl like that, within six months you'd be ashamed to be seen with her. And think about her! All those fancy friends of yours would make fun of her until the girl would want to slit her wrists. Do you want to do something like that to her? Is that your idea of love?”

Lewis gave his son's shoulder an affectionate squeeze and when he turned away he was smiling. Damn! but the boy was easy to manipulate. Palmer was holding out for his druggy daughter to marry “a good, clean young man,” and Carter was going to do it no matter
what had to be done. If Lewis had to, he'd make the local girl disappear.

Still smiling, he left the room.

As he'd planned, Lewis's words planted a seed in Carter's head and he began to watch Sophie, put her under a magnifying glass. She knew she was being scrutinized and she asked him why. His reply was that he was about to make the biggest decision of his life. Sophie, correctly thinking he was contemplating marriage, looked down to cover her blushes. She had incorrectly begun to believe that she would be the bride.

In the end, Carter had gone with his father. To stand against the man took more courage than Carter had. One night he met with Traci at a formal dinner party put on by her father. He sat across from her and couldn't help noticing that she used a fish knife correctly. And she wore a gown that cost a normal person's yearly wage, and diamonds sparkled on her ears and her wrists. He had a vision of Sophie and him sitting on the summerhouse floor eating barbecued spareribs, sauce all over their faces. How would Sophie do at a dinner like this one? he wondered. Would all the cutlery and glassware confuse her?

After that night he began to pull back from Sophie, but he worked to not let her see it or feel it. By the time what he knew was their last night together came, he had convinced himself that his father was right. But some part of him felt bad enough that he showed her the Treeborne cookbook. Maybe she would tell her grandchildren that she'd seen it. Maybe . . .

What Carter hadn't foreseen after the breakup was how miserable he'd be without Sophie. After he'd spent some time alone with the woman he was to marry, all he did was compare her to Sophie.

It took only days to realize he'd made a big, big mistake. He went to Sophie's house and was told by her stepfather that she'd left town. “Took the car and went away,” Arnie yelled. “Now how the hell am I supposed to pay for this place?”

If Carter hadn't been in the same situation he would have told the man to get a job.

Now, after Halloween, Carter was to the point where he hated his life so much that he didn't want to leave his bedroom. The last time he'd seen Traci she'd offered him what she called a “particularly fine line” of cocaine.

When his phone buzzed he almost didn't answer it. But then he thought maybe it could be Sophie.

It was his father calling to tell him to get twenty-five grand out of the office safe and give it to a man who'd be there in thirty minutes. “Can you get off your rear long enough to do this?” Lewis sneered into the phone. He was disgusted with his son's depression, something Lewis had never come close to feeling.

Carter clicked off the phone, tiredly got up, and went to his father's office. The last time he'd been in the safe was with Sophie when he'd shown her the old cookbook. Tears blurred his vision as he spun the dial with the combination.

He counted out the money, put it in an envelope, and sealed it. It was when he looked back at the safe that he realized the yellow envelope wasn't there.

He tossed the cash his father kept in the safe onto the desk, then all the papers. The envelope, the family cookbook, was
not
there.

With his fingertips on his temples, Carter tried to think of when and where. Maybe his father had taken it. Maybe—

Carter knew that only one person would have removed the cookbook from the safe where it had been for decades. That day, that very last day, he and Sophie had made love on the floor of his father's office. Such a violation of Lewis Treeborne's private space had driven Carter to new heights of pleasure. It was as though he was at last defying the man.

Afterward, Carter had carried Sophie to his bedroom and . . .

He put his hands over his face. He'd carried Sophie out and left the safe standing open. She must have returned to the house after he'd shoved her out the front door. He hadn't meant to be so rough, but he was afraid his father would return and see her. He didn't want her on the receiving end of the man's temper.

Carter flopped down in his father's big leather chair. If that cookbook were lost—if the secrets it contained were made public—it could bring down the Treeborne Foods empire.

He stood up, hastily shoved the money back into the safe, and shut the iron door. Right now there was only one thing he knew for sure in life: he
had
to find Sophie Kincaid before his father found out the cookbook was missing.

“Hi,” Reede said
from the doorway of the sandwich shop.

Sophie, her back to him, was going up and down a step stool as she put away the things she and Roan had bought. At the sound of Reede's oh-so-familiar voice, she smiled, but then she remembered everything and it went away. Before she turned around, she had her face composed to be expressionless.

For all that she'd seen him without a mask, he'd been asleep then and she wasn't prepared for the intensity of his eyes. They were deep blue under thick lashes. They would have been considered pretty if not for the depth of them. Hawks could learn a thing or two from him. Her first thought was that she understood why everyone in town was afraid of him. Her second thought was her memory of being in bed with him, his lips, his hands caressing her, touching her . . .

She turned away before he could read her thoughts. “We're not open for business yet so there's no food.”

“Could we talk?”

She took a breath and turned back to face him. “Sure. What do you have to say?”

“Will any apology work?”

“No,” she said honestly. “But tell me, did you win? You made a fool of the woman who poured beer over you, so does that make you the champion?”

Reede stared at her in shock. “Is that what you think of me? That I'd do something like that?”

Sophie glared at him. “Then why? What other reason did you have for concealing your identity from me?”