Moonlight Masquerade (38 page)

“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, Reede 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.

“That makes one of us,” Reede murmured as he collapsed onto his desk chair.

“What are you
doing for Christmas?” Henry asked Sophie.

They were in his big garage working on a three-foot-wide sculpture of the Battle of Bunker Hill. The two of them had found a way to work that consisted of Henry trying to form the clay to look like some photo he'd found on the Internet, then he'd step back and Sophie would redo it for him.

In the last weeks she'd come to know Henry well. For all that he was a quiet man, he was a powerhouse. She could see how he'd been able to rule a couple of very big businesses.

He surrendered only to his small, round wife.

“Henry! If you don't get that mess out of my garage you're going to find yourself living alone,” she'd said one day.

The next time Sophie went to their sprawling estate, construction on a huge studio had begun.

“Now you'll be able to do your own work,” Henry told Sophie happily. “Come and see what I did yesterday.”

He'd made an ugly little man sitting on a horse that had one leg a half inch shorter than the other. Worse was that if the man stood up he'd be a foot taller than the horse. Henry's ambition was much larger than his talent.

Repressing a sigh, Sophie tore Henry's work apart. She tried to be gentle, but her bad mood wouldn't let her. She pushed and pulled at the clay, then picked up a stainless steel tool and started gouging.

Henry, rather than being offended, laughed. He was a man who knew how to delegate. “So what about Christmas?” he asked again.

“I don't know. Reede and I put up a tree and we went shopping and bought his family and friends gifts. It was fun.”

“What are you getting him?”

“He showed me some pictures of his travels and I'm going to make a sculpture of one of them. I'm hoping to have it cast in bronze, but it won't be ready before Christmas.”

Henry was watching her as she rearranged the clay man he'd made. He could always see when his sculptures were wrong. He just couldn't figure out how to make them right. “You're upset about something.”

“No, I'm . . . ”

“I have three daughters, remember? I know when things aren't right.”

Sophie wiped her hands on a cloth. “Yesterday a man came into the restaurant. Seems he'd been sent there by Reede's nosy threesome.”

“The women who work for him?” Henry was careful to keep his opinions to himself. If he'd learned
nothing else from raising daughters it was that if he spoke against someone, they would take the opposite side. His middle daughter had almost married a kid with a record for armed robbery because Henry had talked to her “for her own good.”

So Henry stood in silence and waited for Sophie to tell him whatever she wanted to. His personal opinion was that Reede Aldredge was suppressing Sophie's magnificent talent. That she was wasting her time in that dreary little sandwich shop bothered him. His plan was that for Christmas he was going to offer her a full-time job. She'd have a good salary, benefits, and a great place to work. No more spending her days making tuna salad sandwiches.

“His name is Dr. Tyler Becks and he wants to take over Reede's practice,” Sophie said.

Henry had heard a bit of the gossip around town, how Reede had given up his flamboyant, daredevil career to return to Edilean to help his friend. But then, Reede had been trapped here. “What did Reede say?”

“Nothing,” Sophie said and there was frustration in her voice. “He didn't even tell me about this doctor. Roan did. But then, I
never
know what Reede is thinking. We practically live together but I don't know any more about him today than I did months ago.”

“Everybody in town says he's mad about you,” Henry said softly.

“I guess.” Sophie looked away for a moment. In the distance she could hear the thump of a nail gun as the men framed Henry's new studio. She had an idea that he was going to offer her a job in it, and she didn't know what she was going to say.

The truth was that she had no idea where her life was going. Roan teased her about leaving on the fifteenth of January as she'd said she was going to do. But where could she go? Lisa was quite happy at college now and was even planning to spend Christmas with friends. She no longer needed her big sister. Sophie knew she couldn't go back to her hometown. To what? The only person she really cared about there was Carter, and he was here in Edilean.

Sophie knew Reede was deeply jealous of Carter and there was a part of her that liked that he was.

“Does any of this have to do with young Treeborne?” Henry asked.