Carolina Moon

prove I could. I expected to pay for it. To quiet the restlessness inside me, but to pay for it. I never expected you.”
    She turned back. “I never expected you, Cade. And I don’t know quite what to do with all of this feeling I have inside me for you.”
    He got to his feet, crossed to her to brush her hair back from her face. “You’ll figure it out.”
    “This is so easy for you.”
    “I guess I’ve been waiting for you.”
    “Cade, my father… What he is. Part of that’s in me. You have to consider that. You have to weigh it in.”
    “Do I?” He gave her a considering look as he turned her to walk toward the bedroom. “You’re probably right. I suppose I should give you the same opportunity to weigh in my great-grandfather Horace who engaged in a long, lascivious affair with his wife’s brother. When she discovered it, and in what you can imagine was her shocked distress, threatened to expose him, Horace, along with his lover, displeased by this reaction, dismembered her and kept the alligators fat and happy for several days.”
    “You’re making that up.”
    “No indeed.” He drew her down on the bed. “Well, the business about the alligators is family legend. There are some who say she simply fled to Savannah and lived to the age of ninety-six in mortified solitude. Either way, it isn’t a proud footnote in the Lavelle family history.”
    She turned to him, found the curve of his shoulder, and rested her head there. “I suppose it’s a good thing I don’t have any brothers.”
    “There you go. Sleep awhile, Tory. It’s just you and me here. That’s what matters now.”
    While she slept, he lay wakeful, listening to the sounds of the night.

28
    “I ’m asking you to indulge me.”
    Tory looked up at the peaks and lines of Beaux Reves. “You’re putting me between yourself and your mother again, Cade. That’s not fair to any of us.”
    “No. But I need to speak with her, and I don’t want you driving into town by yourself. I don’t want you alone until this is over, Tory.”
    “Well, that makes two of us, so you can rest easy there. But I’d as soon wait in the car while you do what you have to do inside.”
    “Let’s compromise.”
    “Oh, when did that word enter your vocabulary?”
    He slanted her a slow and very bland smile. “We’ll go around back. You can wait in the kitchen. My mother doesn’t spend a lot of time there.”
    She started to object again, subsided. He would, she knew, simply roll over her excuses and she was too worn out to fight about it. Too many dreams in the night, too many images sliding into her head in the day.
    When it was over, he said. As if it would be. As if it could.
    She got out of the car, walked with him around the garden path, through the wildly blooming roses, past the glossy-leafed camellia where a young girl had once secreted her pretty pink bike, wound through the hills of azaleas with their blooms long since spent, and fragrant spires of lavender that would scent the air all the way into winter.
    The world was lush here, full of color and shape and perfume. A lazily elegant place of bricked paths and lovely benches set just so among the beds and shrubs with overflowing pots of mixed blooms tucked artistically among the stream. The result was like a painting, meticulously executed.
    Margaret’s world again, Tory realized, just like the studied perfection of the rooms inside. Nothing to mar it, nothing to change it. How wrenching it would be to have some invader burst in and skew the balance of it all.
    “You don’t understand her.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “Your mother. You don’t understand her at all.”
    Intrigued, Cade laced his fingers with Tory’s. “Did I give you the impression I thought I did?”
    “This is her world, Cade. This is her life. The house, the gardens, the view she sees out the windows. Even before Hope died, it was the center for her. What she tended and preserved. And continued to after she lost her child. She could keep this,” she said, turning to him. “Touch it, see it, make certain it didn’t change. Don’t take this from her.”
    “I’m not.” He cupped Tory’s face in his hands now, holding it up to his. “But neither will I tolerate her using it, or the farm, as a threat to hold me under her thumb. I can’t give her more than I’ve already offered, not even for you.”
    “There has to be a compromise. Just as you said.”
    “One would think.” He laid his lips on her brow.