Carolina Moon

precious minutes to steady himself. Strange he hadn’t realized until now how much it had unnerved him to see her again. She’d been right that he’d paid scant attention to her when they were children. She’d been the little Bodeen girl his sister had run with, and beneath the notice of a twelve-year-old boy.
    Until that morning, that horrible morning in August when she’d come to the door with her cheek raw and bruised and her wide eyes terrified. From that moment, there’d been nothing about her he hadn’t noticed. Nothing about her he’d forgotten.
    He’d made it his business to know all there was to know about where she’d gone, what she’d done, who she’d been long after she left Progress.
    He’d known, nearly to the hour, when she’d begun making her plans to come back.
    And still he hadn’t been prepared to see her standing in that empty room, the color leached out of her face so that her eyes stood out like pools of smoke.
    They’d both take time to settle, Cade decided as he got to his feet. And then they’d deal with each other. Then they’d deal with Hope.
    He walked back to his truck, drove out to check his crops and his crew.
    He was hot, sweaty, and dirty by the time he turned between the stone pillars that guarded the long, shady lane to Beaux Reves. Twenty oaks, ten on either side, flanked the drive and arched over it to make a green and gold tunnel. In between their thick trunks he could see the flowering shrubs in bloom, the wide sweep of lawn, the ribbon of a bricked path that led to garden and outbuildings.
    When he was tired, as he was now, this last stretch never failed to reach out to him, to stroke at his fatigue like a loving hand. Through drought and war, through the ripping apart of one way of life and the making of another, Beaux Reves stood.
    More than two hundred years the land had been in Lavelle hands. They had tended it, nurtured it, abused it, and cursed it, but it survived. It had buried them, and it had birthed them.
    And now it was his.
    Perhaps the house was one huge eccentricity in the center of elegance, more fortress than house, more defiant than graceful. The stone caught sparks from the dying sun, and glinted. The towers lanced arrogantly into a sky going the color of a fresh bruise.
    There was a huge pool of flowers in the oval centering the circular drive. Some long-ago ancestor’s attempt to soften the arrogantly masculine lines, Cade had always thought. Instead, the sea of flowers and shrubs served as a sharp contrast to the massive front doors of deeply carved oak and the straight spears of windows.
    He left the truck at the far curve of the drive and walked up the six stone steps. The veranda had been added on by his great-grandfather. A bit of civility, Cade mused, with its shading roof and twining vines of clematis. He could sit, if he chose, as those of his blood had sat for generations, and look out over grass and tree and flower without smudging the view with the vicious and sweat-soaked work of the fields.
    Which was why he rarely sat there.
    He scraped the soil off his boots. Inside those doors was his mother’s domain, and though she would say nothing, her disapproving silence, her cool-eyed stare at any trace of the fields on her floors, would be worse than a blistering lecture.
    Spring had been kind, so the windows were open to the evening. The scents from the gardens spilled in to mingle with the perfumes of the flowers that had been selected and arranged indoors.
    The entrance hall was massive, the floor marbled in sea green so it felt as though his feet would simply sink into cool water.
    He thought of a shower, a beer, and a good hot meal before he tackled the evening’s paperwork. He moved quietly, listening, and felt no guilt at the hope he could avoid any contact with his family until he was clean and refueled.
    He’d gotten as far as the bar in the main parlor, had just popped the top on a Beck’s, when he heard the feminine click of heels. He winced, but his face was composed and relaxed when Faith swirled into the room.
    “Pour me a white wine, darling, I got some rough edges need smoothing.”
    She stretched herself out on the sofa as she spoke, with a fussy little sigh and a finger brush of her short bob of blond hair. She was back to blond. There were those who said Faith Lavelle changed her hair color nearly as often as she changed men.
    There were those who relished saying it.
    She’d been divorced twice in her