The Bad Luck Wedding Cake (34 page)

Trace waited a full twenty seconds before he said, “You blockhead. So you let Constance fool you. You let her lead you along by the pecker. That was years ago. It no longer matters. Constance is dead, and we need to leave her that way.”

“I know. It’s just…”

“Listen to me, Tye. I’m happier now than I’ve ever been before. Jenny has given me that gift. Last winter you saved her life and the life of the child she carries, and got yourself shot up in the process. This spring you saved my daughters from a fate almost as deadly, and got yourself tied up in matrimony in that process. Don’t you think that’s enough? Don’t you think you’ve atoned? I sure as hell do. You’ve more than made up for the hurt you caused.”

Absolution and atonement. It’s what he’d wanted for so very long. “You
are
happy now, aren’t you, Trace?”

“With my girls and my Jenny and a new baby on the way? Damned right I’m happy. I’m ecstatic. And it’s due in a big part to you. Can’t you see that?”

Yes, he could. And it terrified him. He had his absolution, he’d made his amends.

But the guilt and shame that had weighed him down for years still clung to his back like a stone coat.

Trace continued, “I’m happy, Tye, and I believe that if you’ll let yourself, you can be happy too. Claire Donovan could do for you what Jenny has done for me. If you’ll let her, that is. If you’ll let go of the guilt.”

Tye didn’t acknowledge him because he barely heard him speak. Trace’s absolution. His own atonement. It wasn’t enough. Goddammit, it wasn’t enough.

Cold to the depths of his soul, Tye shuddered. For him, redemption obviously wasn’t in the cards.

***

CLAIRE WAS a good cook; adventurous with spices and methods of preparation, and always willing to learn from the various people who passed through her life. As a result her personal collection of favorite recipes spanned a dozen different cuisines, from French sauces to Italian sausage, Indian curried rice to Mexican retried beans, and many others in between.

While she’d grown up baking for business, when it came to cooking she tended to plan her menus according to mood. Weather affected her choices, as did her emotions. She made thick, spicy Louisiana gumbo on rainy days. She fried chicken when she was in pain. High moods and happiness meant soufflés and meat sauces; confusion, corn tortillas and vegetable sauces.

Tonight, as she voluntarily prepared the welcome-home celebration dinner for Jenny and Trace McBride, she dredged chicken pieces in flour and waited for her grease to heat. It was a fried-chicken kind of night.

Unwilling to intrude upon the family reunion, she had retreated to her room until Tye came to get her, hours after Trace’s return from the not-quite dead. He’d acted strange, happy for his brother’s safe homecoming, but detached and distant in a way different from ever before.

For their part, both Jenny and Trace accepted her warmly, welcoming her to the family and thanking her profusely for the help she’d given Tye in caring for the girls. When Claire suggested moving out of Willow Hill and leaving the family to their reunion, Trace wouldn’t hear of it. “You are family,” he told her. “You and my brother move one bag out of my guest room and I’ll just send my Jenny to fetch you back. Believe me, y’all don’t want to mess with Jenny, especially not these days.”

Uncomfortable in the face of their graciousness while her husband acted with such reserve, Claire had seized upon the idea of fixing dinner, which allowed her the opportunity for escape. Or so she’d thought.

Five minutes earlier Jenny McBride had waddled into the kitchen begging for a before-dinner snack. She now sat at the kitchen table, her feet propped on a pillow on a second chair, eating an apple and half a roast beef sandwich even as she eyed the chicken Claire added to the heated grease in the skillet.

“Mmm…I love that smell,” Jenny rattled on. “I can’t wait. I haven’t had fried chicken since long before we left home. For the first half of this pregnancy, greasy food made me sick. In fact, most food made me sick.” She paused to take a bite from her apple, then sighed. “I’m afraid I’ve more than made up for it since. I fear I’ll never get my figure back, that I’ll never fit back into my clothes.”

“I wouldn’t worry if I were you. I don’t doubt caring for four children will whittle your waist away in no time.”

“I do hope you’re right.”

Claire waited a moment before saying, “Speaking of clothes, I should confess I made free with one of your creations. Tye and the girls…well, never mind, that doesn’t matter.” She paused, took a deep breath, and said, “I’m afraid I wore your wedding gown when I married your husband’s brother.”

“You did?”

To Claire’s surprise, delight painted Jenny McBride’s face.

“That’s wonderful. Now your marriage will be blessed with good luck just like mine.” She paused in the midst of biting into her sandwich to sweep Claire with a critical, dressmaker’s measuring gaze. “The dress must have fit you to a tee. I bet Tye’s eyes all but popped out when he saw you. Where did you marry?”

“St. Paul’s.”

“Oh, that’s a beautiful church. If only you had waited a few more days, Trace and I could have been there. I hate it that we missed it.”

If they’d waited a few days, Tye wouldn’t have needed to marry her
, Claire thought. Her family would still be in financial trouble, and she’d be preparing to marry Reid Jamieson. “Life is all about timing, I guess,” she finally replied. Good timing and poor timing.

“Do you love him?”

The personal question caught her off guard. “Love him?” she repeated, turning the sizzling chicken. “I uh…well…it’s complicated.”

“Actually, it’s not.” Jenny McBride licked her fingers. “It’s a very simple, yes-or-no answer.” She waited, watching Claire expectantly, until Claire surrendered.

“Yes, I love him. I love him very much. But it’s—”

“Obvious the two of you belong together,” Jenny interrupted. “This is truly the best news. We’ll all be so thrilled to have Tye here in Texas. You are going to stay here, correct? He won’t move you back to Charleston?”

“I don’t know what Tye plans to do.” She feared his plans had little to do with her beyond ending this marriage.
Oh, why couldn’t we have had more time
.

Claire could tell by the look on her sister-in-law’s face that she had plenty more questions to ask. Thankfully Maribeth and Katrina arrived with an offer to set the table and do any other dinner chores Claire might have. “I’ll do Emma’s share,” Maribeth said. “I don’t mind. She’s having a hard time letting Papa out of her sight” Lowering her voice confidentially, she added to her mother, “I think she’s been scared that Uncle Tye was wrong about you and Papa being alive.”

Katrina stood in front of the growing platter of fried chicken and sniffed deeply. “Yummy, yummy. That smells almost as good as your raisin muffins, Auntie.”

Jenny agreed. “Between the chicken and whatever it is you have baking in the oven, Claire, my stomach is growling out loud.”

“The baby is growling?” Katrina asked, her voice sounding intrigued.

“No, silly,” her sister replied. “Babies can’t growl in their mommy’s tummy. All they can do is grow.”

Katrina pursed her lips and nodded. ‘“That’s something I’ve wondered about. How does it get started, Mama? What makes a baby start growing in the first place? Emma didn’t tell me that.”

Jenny sent Claire a panicked look, and for the first time all afternoon, Claire laughed. “Don’t look at me, she’s your daughter.”

While Jenny stumbled around trying to provide an answer appropriate for a seven-year-old, Katrina pondered her mother’s big belly, then switched an appraising glance toward Claire. “How about you, Auntie Claire? Do you have a baby in your tummy, too?”

Her gaze scuttled over Jenny McBride’s belly and yearning gripped her.
A baby. Tye’s child
.

Katrina said, “I want a cousin. I hope you do have Uncle Tye’s baby in your tummy.”

Tye, demonstrating his infinite ability for poor timing once again, walked into the kitchen just as Katrina made the last observation. His gaze flew to Claire’s, and the emotion lurking in the fathomless green of his eyes struck her like a fist.

Dread.

And that
, Claire thought, dusting the longing from her heart like flour from her hands,
was that
.

Hours later, when they retired to their room for the night they lay side by side in the darkness without touching. Claire was tense, certain that at any moment he would speak, bringing up the subject of ending their marriage. Instead, he remained silent Even when he finally reached for her, pulling her into his embrace, he did it without so much as a word.

She sensed the war in him immediately.

This was no patient seduction, but a desperate claiming. His hands tore down her back, over her thighs and hips and buttocks. They swept up to her breasts, where he caught her taut nipple between thumb and forefinger, tugging it. Twisting. Sending pleasure spearing through her. His mouth plundered, teeth nipping and lips sucking. Demanding.

And Claire leapt recklessly into the chaos he created.

She matched him, frenzied movement for frenzied movement. Her hands stroking, pressing, possessing. Her tongue impatiently thrusting, spearing into his ear, licking down his neck, lapping at his small round nipples. They battled across the bed, every moan he uttered her victory, every cry he wrested from her a glorious surrender.

She rolled and writhed, losing herself in the wondrous war they fought. Desire consumed her doubts and passion devoured her pain.

At least for now, for tonight
.

Spiraling rapidly to the heights, she gasped as his relentless fingers worked Tye’s own brand of magic, urging her higher, forcing her ever upward toward the climax. She hung there forever, sweetly suffering, while exquisite sensations teased her to the point of pain. Then she shouted and shattered, dying and flying in a shuddering free fall of pleasure. Calling out his name.

As she lay panting, gasping for breath, he claimed his prize. His growl of satisfaction as he filled her echoed in her womb, and when he drove himself hard and deep into her, she answered with a blissful moan. Eyes closed, he bent his head and savaged her mouth while his body took hers, plunging again and again. Mindlessly, she matched his pace and lost herself to the rhythm of movement as old as time.

Low groans escaped him with every thrust of his hips, driven by throbbing, elemental need. Then his muscles coiled, went taut. He thrust once more. Twice. He threw back his head and shuddered his release.

Grasping, Tye collapsed on top of her, his muscles quivering, sweat dampening his flesh. As Claire basked in the languorous afterglow, stretching sensuously against him, she thought she heard him whisper her name. She thought she heard the echo of love.

But she feared it was only a dream.

***

HELL WAS a cold place, Tye decided as dawn broke over the eastern horizon. A fellow always expected heat, but in truth it was a frigid, icy emptiness.

Seated in a wicker rocker on the veranda outside his bedroom, his bare feet crossed at the ankles, he held up the whiskey bottle and studied the rich, amber color of the liquid inside. Like a ghost from his past it called to him, promising warmth. Promising forgetfulness.

Tye had been to hell before; battle and its carnage playing gatekeeper for the devil. He hadn’t minded the actual fight so much; it was the stumbling over bloody pieces and parts of neighbors and friends afterward that had sucked the man right out of him, leaving behind the fear, the weakness, the grief.

He’d warmed up with whiskey then—or tried to, anyway. The bottle hadn’t rescued him from hell, just took him to a different level—one just as cold. Trace had been the one to rescue him the first time. Yanked him out of the cold amber ocean, dried him out, and bullied him into wanting to live again, until Constance McBride led him back to the devil a few years later.

Katrina, or more specifically, the lie that he’d fathered a child, had made him claw his way out of his whiskey-walled perdition. Then Trace disappeared with the baby, the daughter Tye had thought was his, and anger had kept him warm for years.

Finding out it was all a lie had been tough, but it had also been a relief. Fool that he was, he’d thought he could start over. He’d thought the slate had been wiped clean, that redemption waited just around the corner.

But the goddamned cold simply wouldn’t go away.

He held the bottle by the neck and turned it in a circle, until its contents swirled in a little whirlpool of manmade misery. He could dive in so easily, drown himself. Fill the hollowness, the emptiness inside him with liquid death.

But however appealing, whiskey was a coward’s way to hell. If this was his existence, he should at least attempt to accept it like a man. Claire deserved that much.

Claire deserved so much more, which was why he was getting an up-close, personal look at Hades all over again.

For a brief shining moment he had thought it might happen. Claire his wife. A home. Someday maybe even a family.

With that thought, Tye brought the neck of the bottle up to his nose and inhaled the malty scent.

He’d been working on his redemption, thinking he could earn back the right to be happy.

“Bullshit.” He licked the mouth of the bottle and the taste of whiskey stung his tongue. He’d finally learned the truth. Trace was wrong. He hadn’t done enough. Yes, he’d rescued Jenny. Yes, he’d protected the children. But that hadn’t done it. Nothing would ever be enough. Nothing absolved him of the deed. No atonement was powerful enough.

He had betrayed his twin brother by bedding his wife and making possible the lie Trace ran from for seven years, the lie that Tye was Katrina’s true father. Actions beyond redemption.

Tye’s grip tightened like a vise around the bottle. He rose to his feet, reared back, and flung the whiskey as hard and as far as he could. It crashed against an oak tree. Shattered.

Shattered. Like his heart.

Waves of pain rolled through him as he finally admitted the truth. He loved Claire. He loved her with every fiber of his being. He loved her too much to condemn her to an icy cold pretense of a life with him.