Moonlight Masquerade (37 page)

By Thanksgiving they had a routine that Reede picked Sophie up by six and they made dinner together. She was very interested in the countries he'd visited and she liked to try to re-create the food. They scoured the Internet for recipes and ordered little out-of-print, local cookbooks on the regions Reede knew best. Several times Sophie served foreign soups in her shop. The yam and raisin had been a big hit, the lamb and garlic less so.

“Well, I liked it,” Sophie said and he agreed with her.

After they'd had dinner with Colin and his wife, Gemma—their infant son was being babysat by his brother, Shamus—Reede and Sophie took their advice about buying furniture. The next Saturday they went to a big warehouse and spent a day choosing everything from cookware to a sofa.

But no matter how involved they became, Sophie didn't move in with him. Every night she stayed in her apartment. He knew he'd made it clear that he wanted her to live with him, but she said she needed time to think about her life and what she wanted to do with it.

They spent a lot of time talking, telling each other
things they'd told no one else. It took some work on Reede's part, but he got her to talk about her stepfather.

“Sometimes I think he leered at Lisa just to make me stay there and take care of everything. I cooked, cleaned, and kept a job. And I think Lisa was grateful for someone to use as the bad guy. While I was in college she got mixed up with the wrong crowd and didn't know how to get free. When I got there she told them I wouldn't let her go out with them. One of the kids very angrily told me that I'd threatened to send Lisa to juvenile detention if she didn't stop seeing them.”

“Did you?”

Sophie smiled. “I said that's where she was heading if she didn't get away from that gang. The town gives me credit for straightening her out, but I had three jobs. I didn't have
time
to do much in the way of discipline.”

“Maybe your sister saw what you sacrificed for her.”

Sophie was thoughtful for a moment. “You know something? I don't feel that I did sacrifice, not as though I gave up everything anyway. I was never like Jecca and Kim, where my career was everything to me. I tried to be, but it wasn't all that difficult for me to give up that first job offer and go home to my sister. I think that if Jecca couldn't spend her life doing some form of art she would have jumped off a building.”

“And I can assure that my sister is the same way,” Reede said. “As much as she loved Travis I think if he'd said that it was him or jewelry she would have chosen the diamonds.” Reede looked at her. “But you know,
Sophie, you might feel differently once you get back into your sculpture. This man Belleck might open some doors for you.”

“Ah yes, Henry,” she said.

Two afternoons a week she worked with Henry in his garage. The man was a scholar of the American Revolution and he wanted to do figures of the most important people.

Sophie made sure his armatures were correctly proportioned, then forced him to really
look
at the portraits of the men and women. She taught him to see tiny differences in facial features. He would form George Washington's face in clay, then Sophie would show him why it didn't look like the man. With a few pushes with her thumbs, a scrape of a knife, a bit of clay added, in seconds she changed it to look like the former president.

Henry marveled at her talent. “I don't understand why you didn't pursue this.”

“There are things more important,” she told him, and Henry had looked at her oddly.

Later she'd told Reede about it. They were snuggled on his new couch together, a big bowl of popcorn between them, and watching a DVD.

“What's more important?” he'd asked while pretending that her answer wasn't of utmost concern to him.

But he didn't fool her. “I haven't figured it out yet,” she said and looked back at the movie.

Reede had figured what was important to him right after he'd met Sophie, but he couldn't help a sense of déjà vu because he'd felt like this before. He'd been a
teenager when he'd first seen Laura Chawnley, and he'd decided right then that she was for him. He'd felt the same way since he'd seen . . . no, since he'd talked to Sophie. There was a vulnerability about her, a feeling that she, well, maybe she needed him, that appealed to him.

He would never let her know it, but her story about the cookbook had shocked him—not because she'd stolen it, but because she was probably going to be in serious trouble. Treeborne Foods was big. Huge. Nationwide. Reede didn't think they'd smile and say her theft was justifiable revenge for the way the heir apparent had treated her.

Reede had admired Sophie's sense of remorse and he'd liked her idea of returning the cookbook via a foreign country. But he didn't trust the Treebornes—which is why he'd gone to so much trouble to keep a copy of the book and to have it decoded—something he was still waiting on.

The night after Carter came to Edilean, Reede asked Sophie about the cookbook, and she'd told him what Carter had said, that there'd be no prosecution.

Reede urged Sophie to push Carter further to make absolutely
sure
there would be no retaliation. The next day Carter had called the family housekeeper and asked her to tell him when the package arrived. A few days later Carter told Sophie that the cookbook was now under a pile of papers on his father's desk. “He'll never know it was missing,” Carter said.

Still, Reede wasn't satisfied. He called his former roommate again and asked how his brother was doing with the decoding.

“Broke his leg skiing, but I'll see that he gets right on it. The book, not his leg,” Kirk said.

Reede didn't tell Sophie that he was still working on the deciphering, and she didn't ask, and later when Kirk called and said his brother had reported that the code was probably based on a book, Reede didn't tell Sophie that either. He didn't want to worry her.

For Thanksgiving they went to Sara and Mike's old house, and Jecca and Tris came home for the long weekend.

“How miserable are you in New York?” Reede quietly asked his cousin Tristan.

“If I start to tell you I'll weep like a baby,” Tris said. “Not a pretty sight.”

Reede didn't miss the irony that Tris hated being out of Edilean as much as Reede disliked being in it.

Although Sophie had helped calm Reede's restlessness, and had made him more content, he still itched to leave, to travel, to
go.

It was at Thanksgiving dinner that Tris's nine-year-old niece Nell handed Sophie a lump of modeling clay and asked if she could make a centaur.

Sophie smiled. “A centaur, huh? Like in Harry Potter?”

Nell, her beautiful eyes serious, nodded. To her, her aunt Jecca was a true artist, but Jecca said that 3D was Sophie's field of expertise. “She can make anything.”

Sophie'd always loved horses and had made many of them in several media, so that was easy.

By the time she'd formed the animal, every child who could walk was around her and staring with wide eyes. Sophie stopped when she got to the man part of the creature and held it up.

“So who do you think looks most like a centaur?”

Instantly, every face in the room, over twenty people, looked at the sheriff, Colin Frazier. He was a huge man, his body covered with powerful muscles.

Everyone, and especially Colin, laughed.

After that, Sophie got no rest. She was asked to sculpt every adult male there into an animal. Tristan was a gazelle, Ramsey a bear, Luke a scholarly-looking badger, while Mike was a fox. Reede came last and she put his face onto a lion.

Sara took all the figures and put them into a glass-fronted cabinet. She wouldn't let the children touch them, but Mike gave them a flashlight so they could look at them.

After the dinner cleanup, Reede caught Sophie in the hallway, pulled her into his arms, and kissed her. “That was very nice of you. The kids really appreciated it.”

“I enjoy doing that kind of thing. The kids in the forest and now these.”

“Better than Henry?”

Sophie laughed. “Oh yes! He is so very serious about all of it. He wants to win awards and prizes, and I think his goal is to have a piece of his work put in a museum.”

“And what about you? You don't want awards?”

“I—” She broke off because the children had found her. Nell was trying to herd them around the house but they were escaping her.

“Miss Sophie!” one of them yelled, as she was now their favorite person on earth.

They grabbed her hands and pulled her away with them.

Sara came out of the bedroom, one of her twin baby boys in each arm, and handed one to Reede. “You should keep that girl.”

“I'm trying,” he said.

“Whatever you have to do, you should do it,” she said to him, and there was no humor in her eyes. “You're not exactly a man who falls in and out of love easily. If you lose Sophie you'll be an old man before you recover.”

“Thanks for telling me what I already know,” Reede said.

“Any time,” she answered as she went back to the kitchen.

Every day Reede and Sophie grew closer, their lives intertwining. It quickly got to the point where Reede couldn't imagine a life without Sophie.

But Roan had told him that Sophie was staying only until the middle of January. “Think you've changed her mind?” Roan asked. “Think you've talked her into moving into your house and the two of you settling down in Edilean? What are you going to do when Ariel comes back and Tris does? Aren't three doctors too many for little Edilean? Or are you hoping for a spread of cholera?”

Reede glared at his cousin. He didn't have an answer to any of the questions. Ariel was Sheriff Frazier's sister, and as soon as she finished her residency in California she was going to return to Edilean and work with Tristan—when he got back from New York, that is. Ariel was married to Mike Newland's best friend, and the two men planned to open a big gym that would have members from Edilean to DC.

It was all family, Reede thought. It was all cozy and warm and friendly. And it was maddening to Reede! Just last night he'd seen a TV show about a doctor who equipped a boat as a hospital, and he went to remote areas of the world to help people.

If Reede could get the funding he'd love to do something like that. But what kind of life was that for a woman? And by that he meant Sophie. How could she do her sculpture while moving around the world?

And then there was her growing love for Edilean and the people in it. They'd accepted her quickly. And why not? She was kind and thoughtful. If someone told of a favorite sandwich, the next day it was on the menu.

Sophie had become friends with the young woman Kelli. They were an unusual pair, Sophie so pink and blonde, Kelli so dark with her heavy eye makeup.

Sophie had shown him Kelli's sketches of her plans to cut into the building next door and make a real bakery. Since Roan owned both buildings, it was all up to him. Sophie laughed at how Kelli was working hard to make desserts to please Roan. Pears with almond cream and chocolate. Apples with a rice custard, orange with cardamom. There were savory tarts of pumpkin with garlic, potatoes with ham on puff pastry.

“Kelli takes them out of the oven and hand feeds them to Roan while he's at the cash register,” Sophie said, laughing. “One day I thought Roan was going to faint in ecstasy over Kelli's apricots and cream, and he asked where she came up with all the things she made. She said”—Sophie grinned at Reede—“Kelli said she
had an old cookbook from her French grandmother. Carter and I looked at each other and burst into laugher. Kelli and Roan knew we were laughing about the famous Treeborne cookbook but, as you know, there was a lot more to it than that.”

She smiled at the memory. “But what's
best
about it all is seeing Carter's face get red with rage every time Kelli feeds Roan. Personally, I think Carter's anger is why she does it.”

Reede turned away so Sophie wouldn't see his frown. He couldn't help the jealousy he felt. She'd gone from hating Carter to laughing with him. Every time she said, “Carter thinks we should . . . ” or “Carter says . . . ” Reede had to swallow his jealousy. She was spending most of the day near him.

One evening after dinner and a couple of glasses of wine he said, “I thought you were angry at Carter. Hated him, even.”

“I
was,
” she said. “I was furious. When I drove to Edilean I was so angry I could have torn a bronze statue apart with my teeth.”

“Sounds interesting,” he said, smiling, preferring to hear this than whatever Treeborne had said at work that day.

“No, I'm not kidding.” She paused for a moment. “I
know
Carter cared about me. I was sure of it, and when he talked about having to make the ‘most important decision of his life,' I still think he meant
us
.”

“Probably did,” Reede said but didn't add his opinion. He wanted her to go on.

“But it all changed in one evening. Instead of having
what I had seen as my glorious future, I ended up with a dead car and a stolen cookbook, and standing in the middle of a highway trying to get a cell signal. Then some jerk ran over the phone and the cookbook.” She looked at Reede with wide eyes. “Sorry. Maybe not a jerk. I'm sure you—”

He was coming toward her with the eyes of a predatory animal. “Say all that again.”

Sophie backed away from him and there was a look of almost fear in her eyes. “Reede, I didn't mean anything bad. I thought you
were
a jerk. I'm sorry I said that but—”

“Not that part.” He was advancing toward her. “About the highway and the phone.”

She didn't understand what he meant. “I was trying to find a signal.”

“And where were you?”