Sunburst (7 page)

“That’s all very nice,” Morgan drawled suddenly. “But the point is that you’re here. A little country town in the middle of nowhere. A lot of trees and your business, and a drive-in movie on a Saturday night—more power to you, if that’s what you want.”

“Shane, why the hell don’t you say what you want to say?” Kyle said wearily.

There was another silence. “For how long?” Morgan asked finally.

“I don’t know.”

“One year? Ten? The rest of your life?”

“I don’t know.” He spoke so quietly that Erica had to strain to make out the words. She stood up suddenly and folded her arms instinctively across her breasts in a protective gesture she couldn’t explain.

“It’s not right. You know it isn’t.”

“It’s none of your business, Morgan.”

“I wonder whether you even asked her ahead of time if she wanted to come here after your father died. She talks it up real well, McCrery, but I don’t think you’re so sure. I’ll even bet that you didn’t consult her before you borrowed from the bank for that building. Did you?” There was a short silence, and then Morgan barked out a laugh that sounded triumphant.

As quietly as possible, Erica closed the door on them. She felt a wave of nausea flood through her. She hated arguments. She had grown up in a houseful of them, although her parents claimed to have a happy marriage. It was just their way. Because of “their way,” she had nightmares so terrible that her mother had taken her to a psychologist when she was eleven. He had sent her home after the first visit. A very bright girl, he had said, certainly not in the least emotionally unstable. She was simply oversensitive, at a difficult age. She would outgrow it.

She hadn’t. She closed her eyes, hearing the muted sound of voices raised in anger, and then, shortly afterward, a door slammed. Morgan going to his trailer.

She didn’t understand. Vaguely, she was aware that Morgan was trying to champion her. That thought brought about a massive sense of distress inside. She didn’t need champions, didn’t want one…but so much
more
than that she hadn’t understood. They were sniping at each other, not at all like the friends they had always been. Yet Morgan had come here solely to help; Kyle had seen Morgan through crises so many times… It made no sense.

Nor did destroying a friendship of long standing because of a thirty-minute argument, no matter what the cause.

Erica headed downstairs. It was tomb-silent below. Kyle was standing next to the couch, amber liquid in the glass in his hand. When she approached his side, his eyes met hers, hooded blue, and he took a sip from the glass. He had retreated inside himself and was as different from her lover of the afternoon as the sun from the moon.

“I couldn’t help hearing,” she said hesitantly.

“I heard you close the door. You missed the best part.”

She took a breath. “Kyle, I don’t know what it was about, but it doesn’t matter,” she said carefully. “Morgan…maybe he shouldn’t have brought up your father. Maybe it sounded as though he was questioning you, Kyle, but…surely you know that he’s really always been jealous of you? No matter how much he has, he never seems to have the…inner strength that you have. He’s always challenged you. He comes to show off his toys; he comes…”

“What a good defender you make for him,” Kyle snapped. “As he does for you. A mutual admiration society.”

The comment stung. “I wasn’t trying to defend him,” she said quietly. “I just don’t want the two of you to destroy a friendship that’s important to you. I know he came here to help you, but I still have the feeling that things are really the other way around—that Morgan needs something from you right now, Kyle—”

“That’s my Erica,” Kyle interrupted wearily. He emptied the contents of his glass in a long gulp and stared at her. “You
do
like underdogs, lady. The only problem is that I’ve never been willing to play that role. Not for anyone.” He refilled his glass with straight scotch from the sideboard cabinet. “And you’re as loyal as they come,” he added broodingly. “You’d stick with me through thick and thin and never tell a soul it was tearing you into little pieces.”

“What are you
talking
about?” she said unhappily, feeling awkward as she stood frozen to the spot.

“Loyalty, Erica. The difference between loyalty and love. You’ve dug in with me; I know exactly what that feels like. I’ve been there,” Kyle said harshly.

She stared at him blankly. He made loyalty sound like something sick. Emotions clogged her throat, hearing him talk to her this way after the afternoon in the wheat field a few hours before. She could easily have told him why she had dug in with him, could have said love
and
loyalty, but she was suddenly achingly certain that he would throw her feelings back in her face. Confused, she tried to back up. “I don’t know what this has to do with your argument with Morgan…”

“Don’t you? Morgan’s got it all, Erica. Security, wealth, the kind of position in life you have a right to.” His eyes were like ice as he forced a drink into her hand; she took it and gulped. It would have spilled if she hadn’t. Her hands were trembling.

“What Morgan has or is has nothing to do with us. He’s
your
friend, Kyle.” She hesitated. “God in heaven, if you don’t want him here, why don’t you send him away?”

Kyle’s brooding eyes settled on her. “Do you want him to go?”

Erica hesitated, afraid anything she said would be wrong.

“You find that such a difficult question?”

“No.” She flushed, adding awkwardly, “And no, I don’t want to see him leave. Not right now.” Not when the two of them were at odds; not when their separating in anger would destroy the friendship. Nor did she want to be responsible for severing the tie between the two men.

“I didn’t think you did.”

His sarcasm wounded her. She turned away, feeling how stilted her movements were, and bent to turn out the light between the two chairs, setting down her drink. The shading darkness was better. All she wanted was to go back upstairs before he could say any more…

Suddenly, he was behind her, his hands on her shoulders spinning her to face him, her chin uptilted as she was trying to gulp for air. His fingers closed around her upper arms as if he wanted to shake her.

“Please, Kyle,” she protested.

“What the hell are you
thinking.
Erica?” A desperate frustration seemed to explode inside him. He was a stranger, a strong man with too many feelings she could barely understand pent up inside him. “You’re shaking like a leaf; you think I don’t know you can’t stand the sound of raised voices? Lord, Erica, I’d never hurt you, but I’ve got to know what you’re feeling. I have to know you have the courage to make a choice for yourself, even if it means hurting people. You’ve got to take a stand,
not
from loyalty but from what you genuinely feel, what you need in your life. There’s no love when there’s no free and open choice with it—do you understand?”

How could he expect her to understand anything when he was shouting at her? Confusion and fear pulsed through her; all circuits crisscrossed inside. Then the confusion cleared, and she was left with a very clear picture in her mind of their lovemaking that afternoon, of the rain falling on them and her own whimpered pleasure, of his laughter, his mastery of her, of the moment she had given every vestige of herself in loving him. The man towering above her, shouting at her, made a mockery of that. Her hand reached up and cracked like lightning across his cheek.

The blow must have stung like fire. His cheek was red, his eyes dulled with shock. She had never felt so deadly calm. “You wanted me to express how I was feeling?” she asked evenly. She nodded for him when he didn’t answer. “Fine,” she said flatly. “You got what you wanted, Kyle.”

Erica woke before the sunrise, to a scratchy little tongue trying to wend its way into her ear. Her hand automatically reached outside of the covers to stroke the cat. A thunderous purr resulted.

Unsmiling, she opened her eyes. The room was gray in the predawn light, lifeless and silent. She had locked the door to the loft; she had no idea where Kyle had slept.

The air was chilly, and a crisp breeze stirred the draperies at the open windows. The cat nuzzled insistently, uncaring of the early hour, the chill, anything so irrelevant as heartache. Nuisance wanted food, and to go back out on the prowl. In a few minutes, Erica was dressed in a short, loosely knit topaz top and dark brown jeans. She tried applying makeup to hide the shadows under her eyes, but the effect looked painted; she wiped it off, brushed her hair vigorously, and headed downstairs, the cat leading the way.

Kyle and Morgan were both in the kitchen nursing their coffee, their shoulders hunched and weary. The sun was peeking through the kitchen window; the men for the building project would be arriving soon. Kyle and Morgan were talking in low, morning voices, but she felt both pairs of eyes on her as she prepared a bowl of milk for the cat and then poured a cup of coffee for herself.

She felt Morgan. He radiated concern. She didn’t want it.

Kyle looked—the problematic Celt he was. He had not brushed his black hair yet, and he had probably slept in his T-shirt, but he had the kind of good looks that were enhanced rather than obliterated by hollows beneath his eyes. He was straddling the stool, his jeans stretched taut over his lean thighs, all hard muscle and no waste. He had the look of a very strong and complicated man, who could wear his melancholy like an air of mystery, and whose dishevelment implied sensuality to her, even now.

The cat lapped up the milk. Erica found a breakfast roll for herself, and as soon as Nuisance was done drinking, she opened the back door and followed the cat outside.

“Erica?”

She heard Kyle’s quick step, but she closed the door behind her quietly, deliberately. She wasn’t giving him the silent treatment, nor was she sulking. She simply had nothing to say. What could she possibly say when he had all but told her he no longer loved her?

Her mind was still spinning webs of anger and hurt just as it had through the long night. It was not the kind of morning on which she noticed the crystal gleam of sunlight on dew-soaked grass, or the bright chatterings of cardinals and blue jays above her head as she walked toward the old shop. She just kept remembering the sting of her palm, the cold look in his eyes, the nauseating realization that her love and loyalty meant nothing to him…

Absently, she tossed the unfinished breakfast roll to a trio of squirrels waiting hopefully at the edge of the woods. Kyle seemed to have been trying to tell her last night that it was over. There’s no love without an active choice, he’d said.

But there
was
love without choice: the feeling a parent had for a child; the sensations one felt on seeing an attractive person of the opposite sex; the feeling one had when the sun was out on a certain kind of day. But the kind of love that mattered in a marriage was not free at all; it involved commitment, an
active
choice day after day, just to live through those days when the sun wasn’t shining, the days after a spat over a good-looking man who had made a pass, the days when one of them had the flu and courtesy was the only thing that helped them get through the hours. One made that choice to muddle through because the love was worth it, because the relationship was worth it…because the man was worth it, she thought achingly. And she’d made her choice; it just increasingly seemed that Kyle was choosing differently.

Leave? she wondered wrenchingly. Was that what this was all about? Did he want her to leave? Toss away nine years of marriage… She couldn’t. She just couldn’t, no matter how he felt—or what he didn’t feel for her any longer. Not this minute, not just like that, like the blind turn of a card…

What she needed, she told herself, was work. And the work was there, waiting for her in the shop. The new building was almost finished; very soon everything would have to be moved, which meant packing all the small items… There were bills to pay and invoices to make out, orders for materials to check through…

She sat at the ancient desk with her coffee cup and buried herself for almost two hours—succeeding, almost, in putting a share of her problems on hold until she felt better able to cope with them. Weary finally, she stood up and stretched, then wandered idly to the window.

Her eyes widened in surprise. A pickup was pulling up outside the door, a decrepit old thing that had been painted a shiny yellow and was decorated with decals shaped like bright orange-and-green flowers. In the back was a huge table secured with ropes. Beside it stood a monster of a dog, woofing, his nose jutting out precariously to catch every last vestige of wind on his dark, furry face. In spite of herself, Erica managed a smile and hurried outside.

“Hi there!” The speaker was a little sprite of a woman, with brownish-gray curls fringing her forehead and snapping gray eyes. Perhaps forty, the lady had the kind of wrinkles on her face that said she’d never been as careful about staying out of the sun as she should have been and a smile that never did quit. “Down, you ornery old thing, and stop all that barking!” she scolded the huge shaggy dog, then turned to Erica. “I’ve got a problem I’m hoping you can help me with. You’re Kyle’s wife, aren’t you?”

Her step was as sprightly as the brilliant orange blouse she wore, never minding the arm encased in a heavy plaster cast. She offered her left hand for Erica to shake instead of her right, which obviously couldn’t do the job. Her hand was warm and welcoming, her handshake firm. “I’m Martha Calhoun; we’re neighbors. Got a dairy farm about five miles down the road. We were friends of Joel McCrery’s once upon a time. He used to stop for dinner once a month and take us all at poker. All right, get down,” she shouted to the whining animal. “But don’t go scaring everyone all over the place!”

Erica blinked when the dog promptly vaulted over the side of the pickup. “He’s half horse?” she questioned dryly.

The lady laughed. “He’s half rabbit. Likes raw carrots. Intimidates half the countryside with the look of him. I never did know whom he belongs to, but he’s got a thing about riding in my truck. We call him Lurch.”

“I can see why.” The dog had a loping, crooked gait as if his legs didn’t quite know how to accommodate his size; he also had ears that flopped, the soft eyes of a spaniel, the tail of a setter and the thick, soft coat of a St. Bernard.

“He’s the stud of the neighborhood,” Martha Calhoun said disgustedly. “If I were a female dog, I’d take one look at him and turn my nose in the air. But I know of four litters in the last two years, and one of the bitches was a prize English setter. Nancy Chase hasn’t talked to me since.”

Erica gathered that Nancy Chase owned the setter. The dog bounded close enough to sniff her, and she extended her palm for him to check out. The dog promptly washed her whole hand, sitting down next to her to do a most concentrated job of it.

“He doesn’t like people,” Martha offered sadly.

“I can see that.”

Martha laughed, motioning to the bed of the daisy-yellow pickup. “I should have come over here to meet you before! Come and look, would you, while I tell you all about my aunt Beatrice.”

With Lurch dogging her heels, Erica made her way to the back of the truck. The table was mahogany and had perhaps been intended to stand in someone’s castle hall a century or so earlier. The legs were intricately carved, an
N
in an upholstered wreath dominating one drop leaf, a carved eagle on the other. At one time, the top must have been faced with leather, but sometime in the recent past it had simply been finished and varnished—and, unfortunately, all but destroyed. Huge whitish rings, apparently caused by potted plants, scarred the wood…

“I’m sure it’s very valuable,” Erica said tactfully.

“Very. The
N
is for Napoleon. The period is Empire French, just so you can avoid it in the future. I covered it with plants so I wouldn’t have to look at it, but now you can see what I’ve done.”

Erica nodded with another glance at the water spots.

“It’s all right,” Martha said cheerfully. “Go ahead and say it.”

“I never thought a table could actually look
pompous…
”

Martha laughed again. “But then, you’ve never met my aunt. And I got a letter from her this morning saying she’d be here in ten days from England—”

“So you’ve got ten days to get the table back in shape?” Erica viewed the piece with a critical eye. Finally, she shook her head. “I’d love to help you, honestly. But the antiques I’ve been working on have all been American, nothing this old or valuable. Kyle would know what to do, but he’s so tied up—”

“Honey.
I
know what to do; it’s this broken arm that won’t let me do it. I can see you’re not dressed for messy work at the moment, but…”

No, she wasn’t; however, Martha’s eyes were bright with pleading. Just seeing her gave Erica enormous pleasure. How long had it been since she’d chatted with another woman?

“We might not even have to refinish it,” Martha coaxed. “Have you got a smoker around the house?”

“Smoker?” Erica asked blankly. “No…”

“Well, we need ashes.”

Within an hour, Erica had found laughter she had never expected to find that morning. Ashes and lemon juice were what Martha had in mind for removing the water spots, spurning all the scientific preparations stored in Kyle’s shop. While Erica changed her clothes, Martha made coffee for both of them. Then they discussed the ashes…and along the way, hair styles, clothes, living on a farm, cooking and animals. Martha had a lively sense of humor, and by the time they headed back outside they were chattering like friends of long standing.

They shelved the lemon and ash mixture temporarily in favor of another old-fashioned preparation for removing water stains: vinegar and cold water. Erica sat in the bed of the truck, wearing a halter top and shorts, working there because the table was too heavy for them to lift down. Occasionally, she glanced up to the sound of hammering and sawing where the new building was going up. Lurch was lying in the middle of the fray, being stepped over frequently, completely oblivious.

“He’s unbudgeable,” Martha said ruefully. “I should have left him home. And I never meant to take up your whole morning—”

“No problem,” Erica assured her. She added absently, “The vinegar’s good, but not good enough.”

“I’ve heard a little alcohol on a fingertip rubbed really hard—”

Finally, they gathered paper and a small stack of twigs and crouched over them in the driveway, Erica waving her hands furiously to get the fire going. “This is ridiculous,” she said idly.

Martha agreed.

“No one would go to this much trouble to get a few tablespoons of ashes. Anyone who saw us would be looking for straitjackets on sale.”

Martha agreed.

The ashes were cooled and collected. Martha’s broken arm in no way inhibited her ability to make trip after trip to the kitchen. She fetched more vinegar and water to remove the old furniture polish; then iodine to hide the tiny scratches; then lemon juice to blend with the ashes for removing the water spots. The mixture worked, although Martha had an alternative potion in mind—toothpaste mixed with baking soda.

Erica laughed harder each time Martha brought back something else from the house. “Where did you ever
hear
of all these home remedies?”

“Oh, in any old farming family this kind of lore is handed down from generation to generation. Needs must, as they say. A long time ago, the woman of the house didn’t have a store to pop to every time she needed something. I just wish I could do the work myself; I’ve ended up taking your whole morning. If it were only my
left
arm that was out of commission—”

“What on
earth
is going on?”

Morgan had crept up behind Erica and pressed a kiss on the nape of her neck. The two women had been so immersed in the project that neither of them had heard him approach. Morgan’s hand lingered on Erica’s shoulder as he surveyed the table—and the half of her kitchen that seemed to be on the truck bed, from bowls to spoons to the crazy mix of household supplies.

“This is Morgan Shane, Martha,” Erica said. “Martha Calhoun—she’s a neighbor of ours, Morgan.”

“I take it that’s your dog in the middle of the sawdust,” Morgan guessed dryly. There was charm in his smile for Martha, but his eyes rested on Erica, an intent look at her clinging halter top and the long stretch of midriff below it. “I’ve got to get back to it. Just wanted to tell you I’d be going into town for lunch…and I wanted to see how you were faring this morning.” One finger tapped her cheek, and Erica felt a spark of warmth because Morgan had checked on her, a reminder that he had braved an argument out of worry over her the night before.

Then he was gone, with a wave and a goodbye for Martha, who stared after him with wide-eyed interest. “I’ll have to ask Leonard,” she said gravely, “but that hunk can put his slippers under my bed anytime.”

Erica burst out laughing. She had already formed a very definite impression of Leonard and the kind of life the Calhouns had together. Their dairy herd consisted of sixty cows, just short of good size, according to Martha. They were up at three every morning to be ready to milk at five, and the second milking didn’t end until eleven at night. That left only a few hours’ sleep every night, so a nap was essential every day for both of them. It was the kind of life that took closeness between couples for granted. Without it they couldn’t have survived.

The Calhouns had a teenage son whom Martha dismally labeled immature, and whose sole interest in life, it seemed, was playing drums. Their seven-year-old daughter already needed braces and apparently lived in trees. Martha spent her time alternately worrying that the girl was going to kill herself climbing, or that one or all of them would go deaf from the constant drum practice. Erica pictured Leonard as stocky and steady, probably no better-looking than Martha but just as good-humored. He
had
to be, in a house where shaving cream was mixed with food coloring to make finger paints, and toothpaste was used to clean pewter. That Martha was happily married was as obvious as her clear, bright eyes and her smile that never took a rest.