Wintergreen

Chapter 12

Lorna’s heels made small indentations in the carpet as she hurried away from Richard Whitaker, Sr., toward the basement steps. She stopped there and put trembling fingers to her temples, deciding a quick touch-up of her makeup and hair was in order before she faced Matthew and Johnny.

Smiling brightly in the kitchen at Mrs. Harris, who had prepared such a marvelous Christmas dinner, Lorna wended her way around the table and closeted herself in the pink-tiled bathroom off the foyer. A pinched, ashen face stared back at her in the mirror. Haunted silvery eyes, huge and wild. She applied lipstick, washed her hands, brushed her hair, then washed her hands again. The repetition of the motion reminded her of Lady Macbeth and she smiled grimly to herself. She did not need all the perfumes of Arabia-or even a fresh dousing of Lily of the Valley-to sweeten her little hands. She was innocent of any wrongdoing, she didn’t care whatever Mr. Whitaker thought. Johnny had gotten along all this time without a grandfather; he didn’t need one now.

She didn’t feel like crying.

Everything was fine. She understood all the subtleties of her conversation with Richard Whitaker, Sr., Master Attorney, Ret. Matthew would never guess that his father harbored any negative feelings for Lorna, because those feelings would never show. In front of Matthew. Mr. Whitaker valued his son too much. And maybe at some level he realized that his elder son had a great deal more strength and character than his younger son had possessed, that Matthew would never allow his wife to stray down the decadent path to other men’s beds.

Stop it, she told her reflection in the mirror furiously. What do you care anymore? Why can’t you just put it behind you?

She returned the makeup items to her purse. Just be very sure you do nothing to hurt my son. She straightened her skirt, smoothed down the front of her blouse, checked her stockings for runs, pasted a brilliant smile on her face and unlocked the bathroom door.

She descended the steep stairs to the basement slowly. Below she could hear the chortle of Johnny’s laughter and the steady hum of the electric train. Pausing at the bottom of the stairs, she leaned back against the white-painted wall and folded her arms. Her head was aching and her heart was still beating in a terrible, painful rhythm that she refused to define, yet she could not help relaxing a little at the sight that greeted her.

Matthew was on his hands and knees, as was Johnny; their rear ends faced her. The train was more than a few decades old; the engine was a good foot long and made all kinds of authentic old-time noises. The tracks led from the huge main storage room of the basement through the laundry rooms and pantries, and pack to the game room where she was standing now. It had to have taken Matthew days to set it up. Tunnels and crisscrossed tracks and flashing lights, makeshift hills and valleys and switchyards… She shook her head, debating who was the happier child of the two.

Matthew moved and caught sight of her. She decided abruptly that she was mistaken to label him a child. His dark eyes seared hers, assessing so perceptively that she felt stripped and laid bare; she saw a flash of anger in those depths, and knew she had to do a better job of covering up her emotions. She would not be responsible for a rift between father and son, nor could she blame Mr. Whitaker for her own desperately unhappy mood.

“Misha.”

She smiled brightly, stepped over the track and crouched between the two of them. “I don’t believe this!” she said enthusiastically, eyes thanking him for the trouble he had gone to for Johnny.

“Mom! This thing can go a zillion miles an hour. Just watch!”

She watched. It seemed to run smoothly at a million miles per hour, but cracked up in a terrible pile at a zillion. Johnny burst into chuckles, and crawled along the floor on his knees to fix it. “On the curves, you have to go a little slower,” he explained.

“I don’t suppose you’d let a female run it,” Lorna wondered idly.

Johnny’s head was down. “Some females, yes. You, no.”

“Johnny!”

Johnny’s eyes darted up at Matthew’s stern admonition. “You just don’t know her that well. You can’t let Mom near things like this,” he explained. “I wasn’t being fresh, Matthew.”

“I do believe we can allow her one turn at the controls, even if she isn’t particularly mechanical,” Matthew said dryly.

Johnny shook his head and shrugged. “It’s your train.” He brought the controls over to his mother and explained in nauseatingly exact detail what to do. If Matthew hadn’t been biting his lip to keep from laughing, Lorna might have been tempted to rearrange her adorable son’s nose. She started the train by pulling the lever, and watched it zoom and curve until it was out of sight. It was chugging along perfectly, tooting and smoking at interesting intervals, switching and backing up…until her heel caught on one of the electric wires and all the lights went out.

When they went on again, she saw that Matthew had put his head in his hands. Johnny looked only at Matthew. “I’m not going to say I told you so because you’re a grown-up,” Johnny informed Matthew. “I have better manners than that.”

“Let’s take her home,” Matthew suggested.

“Couldn’t you just send her back upstairs again? She can talk to Mr. Whitaker.”

Matthew stole another glance at Lorna. She thought she’d had him fooled, because she knew her own laughter had been real in those few short minutes. There had been honest pleasure just in being with both of them. Yet Matthew continued to stare intently at her, and seemed to see beyond her smile and the banter with her son. “It’s getting late,” he insisted quietly to Johnny. “I guarantee you can come back and see this another day.”

By the time they got home, Johnny and Matthew were hungry again. It was dark, and Lorna put out some of the feast she’d intended to serve for Christmas dinner for herself and her son. Lopsided Christmas cookies, gaily decorated; a green molded salad with cherries and tiny candies inside; dips with crackers and fresh vegetables… It was not exactly a nutritious snack. Certainly not served with sparkling Burgundy and Johnny’s Boston Cooler.

Her towheaded urchin, never one to let a subject die a natural death, brought the two Zoids to the kitchen table. His own lurched and threatened in terrible menace from its four-inch height, while hers fell over with every third step. Matthew just looked at her.

“There are many, many men who aren’t in the least mechanical,” she informed both of them.

“He’s only nine years old,” Matthew reminded her.

Johnny had a few more choice bits of information to impart before Lorna finally got him to bed, kissed him seven times, hugged him for a while and left him to his almost-ten male-chauvinist solitude.

By the time she returned to the living room, Matthew had lit a fire in the fireplace, pushed most of the debris behind a chair and removed his sweater; he was reclining, shoes off, on the couch. “Come over here,” he suggested, patting the inch and a half of empty space next to him.

She smiled, curling at the bottom of the couch instead with her feet tucked up under her. “For some unknown reason, I’m so tired I can hardly move,” she admitted.

He nudged her calf with his foot, and when she failed to respond simply sat up and took her back down with him, not content until her head was tucked into the crook of his shoulder and her legs were captured beneath one of his. She couldn’t move. She had the feeling that was exactly what Matthew had intended, that he had watched her exhibition of restless energy since they had come back from his father’s and correctly interpreted all of it.

With his hand on her hip, he kissed the crown of her chestnut hair. “I think you’re wine-tired,” he whispered teasingly. “Two glasses, Misha. You’re quite a drinker.”

“Don’t you start.”

“Johnny tells me that you can swear in several languages. Can you?”

“I have never sworn in front of that child in my entire life.”

“Except in German. And Russian.”

Lorna sighed, curling closer to him, rubbing her cheek against the soft white shirt fabric near his shoulder. “What else did the little monster tell you?” she murmured dryly.

“We don’t much like men who touch our mother, now, do we? And we’re more than capable of taking care of you all on our own. We like friends to take us both out on outings. For example, hockey games. Seeing toy trains. Maybe tobogganing…” Matthew sighed. “I didn’t touch you throughout dinner, did I? Not even when we were downstairs together. I can’t imagine why I like the little imp. I know darn well he’s waging war.” A wry smile touched Matthew’s features, but his eyes told her he was serious. “It is a war, Misha, but not to worry. It will just take some time to convince him he can’t lose for winning. I’ll be patient.”

She thought fleetingly how typical that was of Matthew, to let her know he understood Johnny’s possessive instincts, and by treating the subject lightly to also let her know that she could trust his handling of it.

He seemed to handle a great many things well. Her temples, for instance, where a headache raged tense and tight; his thumb rubbed caressingly back and forth, soothing away the pain she had never even mentioned to him. And her lips, for another. When his mouth sank deliciously on hers, she felt something give inside her that had been knotted up for hours. Feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, a residue from the past she thought she’d managed to get rid of; the wounds that had seared open again after her encounter with his father.

Her hands rippled through his hair, and her aching breasts nuzzled deliberately against his chest as she curled closer to him. He tasted so sweet; she wanted to lose herself in that sweetness. Before, she had forgotten everything else when he touched her; she courted that kind of explosive passion now, her hands rippling down his shoulders and arms, then to the front of his shirt, suddenly in a desperate hurry to get past buttons.

Buttons? To get past pain, past thought, past this strange aching ball of hurt inside her that refused to ease. She wanted to love Matthew, to promise him that she would never make him suffer, to wrap him up in silk arms and satin smoothness. She could feel his dark, soft eyes watching her, and paid no attention. Her already turbulent emotions had been set on a roller coaster. There was no getting off. She felt panic at the thought of getting off. She needed Matthew so badly, now, this minute, instantly, an hour ago…

Her lips pressed fierce kisses on his throat, down into the furred mat on his bare chest. Her leg curled between both of his, firing his arousal. In some other world she felt his hands smoothing back her silky hair, his feather-light kisses trying to soothe. She didn’t want to be soothed. She kneaded the flesh of his back, willing every other thought to fade in her head, willing that drumbeat of desire to flood her ears, block out everything but Matthew. It could happen; she knew it could. She felt his body respond to her, his muscles tightening in promise, his skin taking on warmth, his breath shortening. Yet when her hands reached for his belt buckle, she found her fingers stolen by his, her arms placed around his neck.

His mouth reached for hers, in a single dominating kiss meant to stop her frantic movements. It did. He cradled her head in his palms to touch her lips again, his dark eyes gentle on hers. “Stop crying,” he whispered. His thumbs lightly brushed away the moisture beneath her eyes that she hadn’t even known was there.

“I want you to make love to me,” she whispered back fiercely.

“Do you?” He pulled her close, once more raining kisses on her closed eyes, on her cheeks, on her temples. For no reason at all, she was suddenly trembling all over, gasping to keep from crying. “Dammit. Tell me, Misha.”

She shook her head.

“Tell me,” he insisted beseechingly.

She closed her eyes painfully, feeling more vulnerable than spun glass. “I’m sorry. I…”

“Just tell me.”

With her head still cradled in the crook of his shoulder, Matthew shifted both of them, so that by the time she’d brushed away those few mortifying tears she was cradled on his lap and held in a protective cocoon. Or were those arms steel bars? Because he was not letting her get away.

“He wasn’t in any way…unkind, Matthew,” she said miserably, needing to reassure him immediately of that. There was no reason for either of them to say Mr. Whitaker’s name out loud; they both knew what was wrong. “I never expected him to believe me about Johnny, anyway. I never even expected he would be as…civil as he was. It was just…”

“It was just that you wanted him to acknowledge his grandson,” Matthew said softly. “Or did you, very badly, want to hear from him that he just might have been very wrong about you, Misha? Can you dare acknowledge such feelings?”

“I…” She took a breath, then another, her whole body still violently shaking. “You just don’t know…what it was like. Being condemned without a trial. Without even a hearing. Feeling judged, feeling guilty and ashamed when it wasn’t like that… I went to see him back then, to ask him for help, and he treated me with such contempt…”

The words spilled out, one after another. Words she had never spoken out loud before, feelings she had never expressed. What Ron Stone had really been like, her inability to cope with the situation at the time, that awful afternoon, Richard’s reaction, then his father not even making the attempt to listen…

“But I would have listened, Misha,” Matthew scolded fiercely. “I tried to talk with you. You shut me out. Why couldn’t you let me help you?”

“Because…” But she didn’t know why. She had been ashamed at the time, embarrassed, mortified, proud. Because Matthew had controlled a strange little corner of her life, even then. His respect had always mattered. All of it. None of it. She didn’t know why.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” he murmured, and held her close until the need to cry eased and she laid her cheek against his shoulder. “There’s more, I think, Misha. There’s more that you have to let go of. But not now. Not now,” he repeated, brushing his fingers through her hair over and over. “Just let it be with my father,” he murmured gently. “It will happen, sweet, about Johnny. If you want to know the truth, I think my father knows already that Johnny is Richard’s son. I watched him when he first set eyes on the boy… I see the Whitaker in Johnny more and more, and my father isn’t obtuse, either. He simply finds it hard to admit that he could conceivably make a mistake. My brother never could admit such a thing.”

She heard the slight trace of bitterness in his voice. Lorna looked up at him, wanting to respond, but he gave her no chance. Kissing her gently on the forehead, he stood up and set her on her feet, pausing long enough to hug her close yet again. “I don’t want you worrying about it anymore. You, Misha,” he whispered, “you matter. When you’re troubled, tell me about it. You had to bridge that silence with my father alone, but that’s done now. The rest we can handle together. Make no mistake about one thing-you’re not going to elude me, love. I want you, all of you… I love you, more than those three words can express…”

She looked up into his eyes. He was so sure, so absolutely sure; she saw love, strong and determined, and possession. A love so deep it almost frightened her. He wanted her; he loved her. She was the one who had erected barriers, which he seemed to understand more than she did herself. And if she wasn’t going to work on pulling down those fences herself, he would force her into action, so he could have what he wanted.

Had she ever really thought he might only want an affair? This man wanted to possess, body and soul.

When she awoke in the morning, she sensed that something was different. Before Lorna even opened her eyes, she tested out that feeling. Early-morning brightness came in the appropriate window; she recognized the faint, familiar scent of Johnny’s gift cologne, and the kind of silence that existed only in the morning before her son was awake. The room was on the cold side, exactly the way she liked to sleep, the comforter tucked around her just so. Absently frowning, she readjusted her pillow and closed her eyes again for one more tiny catnap.

Something hard and small brushed her cheek. She was thinking of Matthew. He’d put her to bed last night because she was exhausted, only by then she hadn’t been exhausted. Nor had she wanted to be separated from him. He was a bewilderingly complex man. He’d stopped her from making love so they could talk, but they’d stopped talking just as abruptly so he could make love to her…a slow, lazy seduction that began on the way to the bedroom. His caresses had been deliberately arousing, leaving her sleepy and wanting him and loving him. It had slipped out then, so naturally. “I adore you, Matthew. I never thought I could love as I love you…”

Those beautiful brooding eyes had captured hers. “That’s all I’ve been waiting for, Misha…”

But they hadn’t made love. He had left. It made no sense… She stirred again, and felt an odd, sharp little scrape on her cheek. Grudgingly opening her eyes, she squinted down at the offending object, and her heart stilled as she stared at her finger.

There was something different this morning. A ring. She wore no rings to commemorate her commitment to Richard. Certainly not a single brilliant marquise diamond, set exquisitely in antique gold. Certainly not on that finger. But she wore it now…

“Let’s see it once more,” Freda insisted.

The mall was packed with throngs of tired people returning presents and hustling toward the after-Christmas sales. It just wasn’t that easy to stop every five minutes, readjust all the packages and find enough space so they could both stare at the ring again.

“It’s probably the most beautiful ring I’ve ever seen in my life,” Lorna said absently.

“I’m not sure we need to go that far,” Freda began.

“Should have such taste.”

“You’re probably right.”

They picked up next year’s wrapping paper and bows, exchanged Johnny’s sweater for a larger size, Brian’s boots for a smaller size; both bought nightgowns on sale and debated whether to risk looking into the dress sales even though neither of them wanted to spend any more money. Useless friend that Freda was, she talked Lorna into buying a lavender sweater and a lavender and pale blue plaid skirt, then didn’t buy a thing herself.

“That burnt orange would have been perfectly beautiful on you,” Lorna scolded, as they stood in line for a seat in the coffee shop.

“Not my style.” Finally, they were ushered to a booth and piled their packages next to them with mutual weary sighs.

“It was, too. Freda, you have a very nice figure. And the color would have been special on you,” Lorna told her as their waitress brought coffee.

“I need to lose weight.” Freda pushed off her coat and crossed her arms on the table. Lorna grinned at her friend’s navy sweatshirt. There Are Only Two Things Wrong With Men, it said, Everything They Say and Everything They Do.

“Let’s see it again.”

Lorna obligingly put her hand on the table.

“Offhand, I’d certainly say he made up for forgetting to give you a present yesterday,” Freda remarked dryly, and then gave Lorna a basilisk stare. “I don’t know what’s brighter. That stone, or your eyes. You have no idea how annoying it is to sit across from someone in love.”

“Will it help if I pay for the coffee?” Lorna asked.

“A little.” Freda shook her head ruefully as she stirred her brew. “I could see it coming. You were either higher than a kite or moping around like a dead sponge. Washing your floor three times last week…” She leaned back, bringing her coffee cup to her lips. “I could have sworn the last I heard you weren’t even thinking about getting married again.”

“I wasn’t,” Lorna said absently.

“You’re being awfully closemouthed about how he staged the whole romantic scene. When did he ask you to marry him?”

“I adore him, Freda.” Lorna’s tone was grave as she changed the subject and abruptly put an end to Freda’s affectionate teasing.

They talked about clothes, bills, jobs and cats. They were still talking as they drove home, stopping to pick up the boys from a playmate’s house along the way. The roads were a potpourri of slush and traffic; Freda kept chattering, and the boys in the back were bickering at high speed.

Lorna had her hands on the steering wheel at ten and four, a position where the ring could continually wink brilliantly at her. Like a silent beacon, the diamond on her left hand gave her messages only she could hear. Matthew loved her.

Pausing at a red light, Lorna touched the marquise diamond, well aware that in fact there had been no proposal; the candlelight seduction Freda had assumed had never happened. He had simply left the ring on the appropriate finger for her to find, and he had left her in silence to think on it, because Matthew was unforgivably, cruelly, disgustingly fair.

The light turned green, and she put her foot on the accelerator. He had hedged his bet, more than a little, by arousing her until the only thing on her mind when she went to sleep was her greedy, aching soul, avid for the kind of fulfilment only he could give her.

He was very good at setting up all the stakes on his side, she thought ruefully, a small, dreamy smile playing on her mouth. He hadn’t just promised her trust; he’d given it, freely, in teasing her about Stan, in believing in her when she’d needed to be believed. He’d respected her feelings for her son; he had put her feelings ahead of those of his father; Lorna knew well he had told Mr. Whitaker straight-out that she came first in Matthew’s life. He was a man she could trust, a man of compassion and strength and sensitivity. A man of the sort she’d never believed had existed. And when he touched her…

Such love… All that morning she’d been exhilarated, restless, giddy, laughing at nothing, not able to think a single coherent thought. She adored him; she needed him; she wanted him…

So why, she thought idly, did she feel so scared?

The ring winked at her again as she made a left turn. She knew why he’d given it to her exactly the way he had. No soft lights and intoxicating seduction. He’d wanted a commitment from the soul, a clear-cut, honest decision that came from love. We’ve tackled Johnny and my father and your feelings about the past, Misha. You were wary when we first met. I don’t want the shadows. I want it to be you and me alone, and I want you to be damned sure.

It was amazing, what an inanimate ring could say.

“Mom,” Johnny said patiently, “how many times are you going to keep circling the block?”

She glanced at her son in the rearview mirror. “One more time. Anything wrong with that?” She couldn’t afford to believe there was a jinx on a second time around.