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As they turned on the floor, he caught a whiff of Margo’s fragrance again. It sharpened his senses and he smiled at the woman in his arms. “You’re very perceptive.”
Margo took her due without vanity. Perception was closely interwoven with her other survival skills. “So I’ve been told.”
She was open rather than coy. It was an honest trait. He valued honesty a great deal. “Well, you’re certainly not shy and retiring.”
Oh, but I am. The thought came to her from nowhere, standing like a lost soul in the dark. It’s just something that I can’t allow to take over anymore. Or even be noticed. Very carefully, Margo kept her thoughts from registering on her face. She’d become very good at that over the years.
“You know my daughter,” she reminded him lightly. “Would you really have expected me to be?”
She had a point. They were very alike, mother and daughter. And yet he detected that there were minor differences. For one, Margo was far more worldly than her daughter. And perhaps, he mused, less apt to be hurt. “No, but I have to admit that I didn’t expect anyone quite so effervescent, either.”
“Effervescent?” Delighted, she laughed lightly. “Oh, my dear Mr. Reed, I’m in fairly low gear now.” She looked toward Melanie and felt that same tightening of her throat she’d felt when she’d walked into the change room to see her daughter in her wedding gown for the first time. “I think that realizing things just refuse to remain the same, no matter how much you’d really like them to, is responsible for subduing me.”
Because the same bittersweetness resided within him, Bruce recognized the signs. The feeling of kinship grew as the music around them faded. Bruce hardly noticed. He was hearing another melody, one within his head.
Continuing to move to this silent music, he tried to tease her mood away. “If this is low gear, then heaven help the man who gets you in high gear.”
He really was very sweet, Margo thought. And whether he realized it or not, he was doing tremendous things for her ego. She needed that right now, as the loneliness insisted on closing in no matter how hard she tried to block it.
“Heaven has very little to do with it. Or me.” Her wink was positively bawdy, Bruce thought, feeling its effect as it simmered over his long frame. “Or so my father said the last time I saw him.”
Looking into her eyes, he almost thought he saw sadness there. But everything in her manner belied the discovery. He had to be mistaken.
“Which was?” he prodded.
If she closed her eyes, Margo could still see the cold dark look of disapproval, of condemnation in Egan McCloud’s green eyes as he ordered her to leave. No instrument known to man could have begun to measure the depth of that cold.
She took a breath before answering, her smile never faltering. She’d begun to show at four months. By five, her father no longer believed that it was a weight problem. “Four months before that beautiful young woman in the bridal dress was born.”
As she spoke, Bruce could feel her body stiffening. It was infinitesimal, but he was positive he detected it. Having gone through his own schism with Lance, he would have thought his sympathies would have been with her father. They weren’t “You haven’t seen him since then?”
She shook her head, wishing the memory didn’t hurt so much. She was a grown woman, for heaven’s sake, with a grown child of her own. When did she finally cease regretting that she’d never been allowed to be Daddy’s little girl, not even for the space of five minutes?
“Not alive.” She strove to say the words without emotion. She’d returned for the funeral. And never shed a tear. She’d refused to. “He wanted nothing to do with me.” The shrug was careless, as a creamy white shoulder rose and fell beneath his glance. “He was a very God-fearing man, and I think he saw me as a terrible failing on his part.”
She believed that, Bruce realized. His sympathies stacked themselves completely on her side. He knew what it was like, aching for someone’s acceptance. In his case, it had been his son’s that he had sought. Lance’s acceptance and his forgiveness. Both had been a long time in coming.
Not that he blamed Lance. Feeling as if he’d been cast adrift after his wife died, he’d left Lance to be raised by Bess. He hadn’t realized how his leaving had affected his son.
Unconsciously, Bruce gathered her a little closer to him as they danced. “I might be out of place saying this, but seems to me that your father would have done a lot better by you as well as himself if he were a God-loving man instead.”
The smile she offered him reminded Bruce of fireflies lighting up a June sky. And, if he didn’t know any better, he would have sworn there was a tinge of gratitude in her eyes.
For a tongue-tied man, he certainly did know how to turn a phrase, Margo thought. “For Melanie’s sake, I do hope Lance takes after you.”
The remark struck a chord that had, until recently, been very painful. “Lance went out of his way for a long time to be the exact opposite of me.” Bruce placed the blame where it belonged. With him. “I wasn’t a very good father.”
Margo swept past his remorse, a spring breeze traveling through a ripening orchard. There was nothing so useless as regret over things that couldn’t be changed. “I’m sure that if there’s any basis for your feelings, there were extenuating circumstances.”
There were very far-reaching, painful circumstances. But this was Lance’s wedding. It wasn’t a time to talk about death and the way it had burned out his heart, leaving only ashes in its place.
“Tell me, are you always this broad-minded?”
She inclined her head. “Some people say it’s my best feature.”
Holding her close to him, Bruce wasn’t so sure about that. If asked, it would have been difficult for him to say just exactly what Margo’s best feature was. She was beautiful in a warm, welcoming sort of way rather than in the precise features of an ice princess.
Looks weren’t supposed to matter. He’d learned a long time ago that transient outer beauty was hardly important, but he had to admit Melanie’s mother was a feast for the eyes. And her manner, open, warm, sensually charming, enhanced that feast tenfold.
“I wouldn’t exactly say that,” he told her.
She liked the way he smiled. “Oh?” Her eyes delved straight into his soul. “And what would you say. Exactly?”
Compliments really weren’t his forte. Neither was conversation, but he had the heartening feeling that he was at least holding his own. “That I have the comfort of knowing that I wouldn’t be the only tongue-tied man around you.”
But she shook her head at his assessment of himself. “For a ‘tongue-tied’ man, you’re doing very well, Bruce. And for what it’s worth, I really do hope Lance is exactly like you.”
The compliment, sincerely rendered, touched him. It had been a long time since he’d thought of himself and Lance as a unit.
“Thanks to Melanie, I’ll get to find out if he is or not firsthand.” He saw the question enter Margo’s eyes. “It’s because of Melanie that Lance and I reconciled. From what I hear, she kept after him about it, making it easier for me when we finally did talk.” He could see a great deal of Margo in her daughter. “You did a wonderful job raising her:”
She hadn’t raised her so much as just been there to oversee the process. Melanie had never really needed guidance. She was inherently savvy, inherently good. Other than a bout with the croup, Margo had never given her even a moment’s concern. She’d always been the kind of daughter every mother dreamed about.
But Margo had no intentions of playing the gushing mother and boring Bruce to tears. She gave him the short, unannotated version. “I had help.”
Bruce made the most logical assumption. “Your husband?”
Husband, now there was a joke. Margo shook her head. “My aunt.”
“We have that in common, I guess. Lance was raised by his aunt Bess, my sister. That’s her over there,” he said, pointing her out, “dancing. I’ll introduce you to her later. She took over with Lance when my wife died.”
If he was going to be family, Margo decided, there would be no secrets. Any shame attached to the situation had long since been burned away in the glow of Melanie’s smile. “Melanie’s father did a very impressive vanishing act as soon as he knew that fifteen minutes of pleasure resulted in something that was going to require an eighteen-year commitment.”
The revelation surprised him. Bruce couldn’t picture any man in his right mind walking away from Margo. “I take it he was blind?”
She laughed softly. “No, just heartless and stupid.” Whenever she thought of Jack, there was nothing there anymore. No pain, no anger, nothing. It had taken her a long time to arrive at that juncture. “To be blind he wouldn’t have been able to see his way out of my life, which he did. Quickly.” At the time it had taken her breath away just how quickly. Taken her breath and her heart.
“But Jack was very stupid because he missed out on a hell of an experience. I wouldn’t have traded being Melanie’s mother, not even a minute of it, for anything in the world, including a fantastic marriage.”
She’d talked enough about herself, she thought, steering the conversation onto a new road. “Which, by the way, I’m sure Melanie and Lance are going to have. She’s crazy about him.”
That was very evident and it made Bruce’s heart glad. “And he about her. We both are. Lance is convinced she’s brought out the best in him, and, even though I’ve only known her a few short months, I certainly can’t argue with that.”
Melanie was surprised that neither her mother nor Bruce seemed to notice her as she came up to them. But the fact that they were still dancing told her that they were well on their way to slipping into a world of their own.
One look at Bruce and she knew that her mother was weaving her magic again. Maybe this time, Melanie hoped, she’d get tangled in the threads herself.
But that wasn’t her mother’s style.
Melanie placed a hand on each of their shoulders, securing their attention. Bruce looked surprised to see her, her mother only looked amused. “Hey, did anyone tell you two that the music stopped two minutes ago?”
Margo merely smiled at her daughter. There was music and then there was music. Melanie would learn, she. thought. Someday. “Just the music you can hear, dear.” Very slowly, she disengaged her hand from Bruce’s. “But we don’t want to give them anything to talk about, do we?”
Bruce found himself reluctant to break contact. He slipped his arm around her shoulders, escorting Margo from the floor. “That depends on what they’re saying.”
Melanie looked from Bruce to her mother. Just the slightest flutter of uncertainty traveled through her before disappearing. She’d never interfered in her mother’s life before. She owed everything to her mother, and there was no one she loved more dearly, except for Lance. But Bruce was her father-in-law now. More like a father, really, than just someone the law claimed was related to her. Though she’d known him only four months, she felt protective of him. At bottom, Bruce was a sweet man who might misunderstand her mother’s ways. She didn’t want to see either of them hurt.
Melanie took her mother’s hand in hers, making her apology to Bruce. “Can I steal my mother for a minute, Dad?”
The question amused him. Margo wasn’t his to give away. “I have a distinct feeling that your mother is very much her own woman.” The smile he received told him Margo appreciated his recognizing that fact “She’ll only be stolen if she wants to be. What someone else has to say about it doesn’t enter into the picture.”
Margo’s smile widened. And grew sexier, in Bruce’s estimation.
Oh boy, Melanie thought. She took her mother’s hand and tugged ever so gently. “Just a minute,” she promised again.
This wasn’t like Melanie, Margo thought. Her daughter looked almost worried as she led her off. “Okay, out with it,” Margo ordered when they were barely out of Bruce’s earshot. “What’s wrong?”
Where to begin? Heaven knew, Melanie didn’t want to hurt her mother’s feelings. But she didn’t want to see Bruce’s feelings hurt, either. She plunged in, beginning with a declaration. “Mama, you know I love you.”
Years of experience warned Margo what was coming next. “There’s a lecture attached to that proclamation, isn’t there?”
This was all virgin territory for Melanie. She wouldn’t presume to tell her mother what to do. She wet her lips. “Not a lecture, but...”
Margo didn’t need subtitles to tell her what was going on. “You’re afraid I’m going to lay waste to Lance’s father.”
Melanie took her mother’s hand between her own. “Not exactly waste, but—”
Gently slipping her hand away, Margo cupped Melanie’s cheek. Was she really worried? “Sweetheart, he’s a very charming man without meaning to be, which makes him even more so. But charming or not, all we’re doing is just swapping old in-law stories.”
Melanie arched an eyebrow. The word old had never had anything remotely to do with her mother. “Neither one of you is an old anything.”
Margo’s eyes sparkled. “That’s what makes swapping so much fun.”
Maybe, Melanie thought, Bruce could do with a dose of her mother. A small dose to make him feel vital again, but not enough to drown him. “What else are you going to swap?”
“Well, not clothes,” Margo teased, slipping her arm through Melanie’s, “he’s way too tall.” Margo studied Melanie’s face. She was concerned. The realization took her slightly aback. “Honey, just what are you worried about?”
There had never been any lies between them, not even half truths. Melanie couldn’t set a precedent now. “Bruce isn’t exactly a sophisticated, experienced man as far as women are concerned, Mama. I don’t want to see him hurt.”
The fact that Melanie’s loyalty lay with someone else stung her a little before she banked it down. Her smile remained intact as she asked, “How about me?”
Melanie laughed, giving her mother’s hand a quick, firm squeeze. “You can handle yourself. You always have.”
That was the price she paid for being strong, Margo thought. No one thought for a moment that she might be the one who could be hurt.
Which was, she reminded herself quickly with no patience for her momentary lapse, just the way she wanted it and just the way she always kept it. Never mind that it wasn’t true. That wasn’t anyone’s business but hers.
She winked at Melanie. “I promise not to skewer any vital, irreplaceable part of Mr. Bruce Reed, including his heart. How’s that?”
Melanie’s expression softened, guilt lightly flicking a finger at her conscience. “I didn’t mean to sound judgmental, Mama, but he doesn’t even date. He leads a very straight and narrow life. The man won’t even let himself be fixed up by any of his married friends.”
A challenge, thought Margo. She always loved a challenge, especially one that was so good-looking. “Then it’s about time he had a little fun, don’t you think?”
Melanie looked at her dubiously. “A little, yes, but—”
Margo raised one hand in a solemn pledge. “I promise not to lead him into Sodom or Gomorrah for at least the remainder of the afternoon.”
This time guilt not only flicked Melanie, it pinched. Remorse was instant. “I’m sorry, Mama, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
The tables turned immediately. Not for the world would Margo give her daughter one moment’s grief or concern. “You could never hurt my feelings, pet. Have you forgotten, I’ve got a hide as tough as a rhino?”
But Melanie saw through that. “It wasn’t your ‘hide’ I was thinking about.”
Margo redirected Melanie’s attention to her groom. “And it shouldn’t be my anything that’s on your mind at all. Not when you have that drop-dead-gorgeous man of yours promising to love and cherish you for the rest of his natural life.” She cocked her head, struggling to keep a grin from her lips. “Don’t you two have a honeymoon to go to?”
Melanie and Lance had discussed that and decided to put it off until they could afford to go to someplace memorable. “We’re not planning on going on a honeymoon until sometime later.”
Margo already knew that. She’d called and taken Joyce into her confidence. It was Joyce who’d secretly packed their luggage. “Take it from me, later has a habit of either slipping away or being used for something else. Go now, you won’t regret it.”
“I’m afraid that we ca—”
Allowing herself a dramatic flourish, Margo produced two airline tickets from her beaded purse. “Two tickets to Hawaii and a two-week reservation at the best hotel on Oahu.”
Overwhelmed, Melanie could only stare at the tickets in her mother’s hand. “Mother, you didn’t.”
Margo pressed the tickets into her hand. “The airline and hotel people seem to think I did.”
Lance joined them, slipping his arm around Melanie’s waist. He noticed the stunned expression on her face. “Everything all right?” He kissed her temple. “I got lonely.”
He couldn’t have been better if she’d handpicked him, Margo thought. Pleased, she took each of their hands in hers and held them for a moment, her heart brimming. “Oh, God, Melanie, he is perfect.”
Recovering, Melanie held up the tickets. “Mother’s sending us to Hawaii for our honeymoon.”
Coming to grips with his surprise, Lance began to demur. Margo recognized pride when she saw it and quickly headed it off. “It’s a wedding present. Two tickets to Oahu, first class, plus you’ll be staying at the best hotel, in the bridal suite.”
That had to have set her back a lot. Lance shook his head. “Mrs.—I mean Ms.—” Neither term seemed appropriate. He took a breath. “We can’t—”
“Call me Margo,” Margo told him. “We’re going to be an informal family. And I certainly can’t go, so you have to. You’re the only bridal couple I see in the room.”
Lance tried again, having the sinking feeling that the effort was doomed to failure. He already knew where arguing with Melanie got him. Nowhere. And he had a strong suspicion that it was a hereditary trait. “This is too generous.”
Money was only good for the happiness it could generate. There was no way she was going to let either one of them turn her gift down. “I have only one daughter, Lance. And, as of one o’clock this afternoon, only one son. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather spend my money on than the two of you. Besides, you can’t refuse a wedding gift, it’s bad luck.”
Melanie placed one hand on her hip, suppressing a smile. When she was a little girl, her mother used to get her to do things by telling her that if she refused, it was bad luck. There was always a legend or fable that reflected the situation attached. She was fourteen before she realized that her mother had made all the fables up. “Another legend I don’t know about?”
Nostalgia surged through Margo. “As a matter of fact, yes.”
Lance opened his mouth, but Melanie stopped him. “Don’t bother. Nobody’s ever managed to talk Mama out of anything once she makes up her mind.”
