Authors: Gwynne Forster

Whatever It Takes (13 page)

BOOK: Whatever It Takes

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“Who
is
that guy?” Kellie asked Lacette the next morning. “Where on earth did you meet him? That brother is a number ten and change. Whew!” She pretended to mop her brow.

“Maybe I should ask you why you tried to give him the impression that I impersonated you, that you are the only “Miss Graham' who lives in this house?”

“Oh, for goodness sake, Lace. You get uptight about the damnedest things.” Typical Kellie, Lacette thought. If you got too close to the truth, she either became angry or got out of the way.

Around noon on Christmas day, less jubilant than a person looking forward to a family Christmas dinner should have been, Lacette hurried across the street to her aunt Nan's house.

“You didn't have to come so early, child, but I'm glad for the company. My, but you look so nice, just blooming.”

Lacette opened her arms and enveloped her aunt in a warm greeting, grateful for the woman's presence in her life. “I brought something to wear while we're cooking.”

Nan had already stuffed the turkey and rubbed it with oil and spices. “It tastes best when you cook it real slow,” she said, and put the bird into the oven. “Not muchâif anythingâfor you to do.”

“What you so quiet about?” Nan asked Lacette. “You haven't said twenty words since you been here. We aren't preparing for a funeral, girl. We cooking Christmas dinner. You stop worrying 'bout Marshall and Cynthia. It's not like they gone. You still have both your parents, but you have to stop thinking of them as a couple. Marshall told me that that marriage is history, and I believe him.”

“I know. Daddy's intractable when he makes up his mind about something. I sure wish I knew what it was.” She finished setting the table, made a centerpiece of red poinsettias, holly, and candles and stood back to admire it.

“Now, that's a work of art,” Nan said. “You better dress. It's a quarter to six. I'm gonna run upstairs and put on something right now.”

Marshall arrived first, and Lacette relaxed; she had expected him to call saying that he had decided not to come. She went with him to the living room where an old black urn full of mulled cider exuded a mouthwatering aroma.

“Want some cider, Daddy? Aunt Nan put it here to give us something to talk about. It's not fermented, and it's delicious.” At least, she hoped it was. She hadn't tasted it. As she poured the cider for her father, the doorbell rang, and seconds later Nan walked into the room with Kellie and Cynthia.

Kellie greeted her father, whirled around and advanced on Lacette. “When you left the house, you could at least have said where you were going. You got a phone call, but I can't remember his name.”

“Try Smith,” Lacette said, her tone dry and matter-of-fact.

Nan walked over to Kellie and locked her hands to her hips. “This is Christmas, and everybody is going to be nice so I can enjoy my dinner. You hear?” Kellie opened her mouth as if to speak, but bit back the words.

“Thank God, she's planning to show some sense,” Lacette said to herself, for she knew that if the evening soured with unpleasantness Kellie would have instigated it.

They took their seats at the dinner table, and it did not escape Lacette that her aunt had to urge her father to sit at the head of the table. “Do it because you're the only preacher here, then,” she heard Nan whisper.

He sat down, bowed his head and said, “Dear Lord, we thank you for the blessing of this food and for the hands that prepared it. Amen.”

Lacette's eyes flew open, and she stared at her father. No mention of the glory of Christmas and what it meant. And what about the prayer of grace that he always said when they ate? He couldn't have chosen a more pointed way of reminding them all that their lives had changed. Cynthia and Kellie ate with gusto, but she, Nan, and her father hardly tasted the food.

“I hear you're gonna be teaching next year,” Nan said to Cynthia.

“Yes, seventh grade, as before.”

When no one commented on that topic, Nan asked Lacette, “How're things at the hotel? I have to get over there and buy a bread making machine.”

“You can't make biscuits in them,” Lacette said, “or cornbread, either.”

“I like light bread once in a while,” Nan said, “and I'd just as soon make it fresh myself. A machine will save me time.” Hearing the desperation in her aunt's voice, a hope that one of the other three would comment, Lacette fought back the tears. Her mother focused on the food, and she could see from her father's demeanor that he would leave as soon as they finished the meal. Nan stopped trying to make conversation, and for the next twenty minutes, Lacette thought that that dining room was filled with the loudest and most jarring silence she had ever been present at.

When at last dinner was over, Marshall stood, placed a small package beside the plate of each of his daughters and handed one to Nan. “A blessed Christmas, everyone. Good night.”

Marshall left them to exchange gifts among themselves, but the joy of Christmas eluded them, and after Cynthia and Kellie went home, Lacette and Nan cleaned the kitchen in silence, each dealing with her own thoughts.

When Lacette spoke, her own voice startled her. “Dinner by myself would have been preferable to this. If I learned nothing else tonight, I learned not to try to make pearls out of fish scales.”

Nan nodded assent. “It was worth trying. Still, it don't hurt to remember that you can't get blood out of a turnip.”

“No, I guess you can't. But you can bet I'll think long and hard before I attempt another family dinner.” Later, when she got home, she went directly to her room and closed the door. The last thing she wanted was an encounter with her twin sister.

For the next six evenings, Jefferson Smith courted Lacette in the manner that she'd dreamed of during her adolescent days. He lavished her with attention, sent flowers each morning and telephoned her during the day. It occurred to her more than once that he might have invented the art of seduction, although it seemed natural, as if he automatically treated women in a courtly manner.

“If I don't see you before I go out,” Lacette said to Kellie in the afternoon of New Year's Eve, “Happy New Year.”

Kellie had been blow-drying her hair. She spun away from the mirror nearly dropping the dryer. “You're going out with Jefferson Small tonight? New Year's Eve?”

“His name is Smith, and I'm going out with him tonight.” What was more, she had bought a green-chiffon, figure-revealing evening gown for the occasion.
I don't know when he will leave or how far he intends to take our relationship. I just know that I've been queen for a week, that I no longer have to wonder what it's like to be the object of a man's unqualified admiration and pursuit. I'm not going to worry about tomorrow or what his intentions are. He's what I need right now.

You were quick to find out whether Lawrence Bradley had a wife and family, but you haven't dared to ask Jefferson whether he's married,
her conscience needled. She pushed the thought aside.
I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. He's not wearing a ring, and there isn't a print of one on his ring finger.

Halfway through the evening, it became clear to Lacette that Jefferson Smith had planned an evening guaranteed to seduce any woman. Their round, linen-covered candle-lit table bore a centerpiece of tea roses and stood near a waterfall and beneath a crystal chandelier.

“You order,” she said to him when the waiter handed her a menu without prices. “Anything except brains, rabbit, and rhubarb.”

She hadn't heard him laugh often, and never with such gusto. “Believe me, those are three things I would never order, because I can't stand them, either.”

After a gourmet dinner topped off with champagne, he took her dancing at the hotel's New Year's Eve gala, where guests welcomed the New Year in colorful party hats and amidst blaring horns and showers of confetti.

“Happy New Year, sweetheart,” he said. “Kiss me.” He hadn't previously called her by anything except her name, and she wondered at the change and its significance. She gazed up at him with what she knew was an inquiring expression, but his answer was the pressure of his lips on hers, the flickering of his tongue at the seam of her lips and the pressure of his fingers on her naked back. Gently, he stroked her spine, and then locked his arms around her and shifted from side to side until her nipples erected beneath the sheer fabric of her dress.

With a knowing and satisfied expression on his face, he slipped an arm around her waist and headed out of the ballroom to the elevator. Although heady with wine, champagne, and the dazzle of New Year's Eve, she hesitated nonetheless and told herself to slow down, that the time wasn't right. But as if he read her mind, or perhaps because he understood women better than she understood herself, his voice caressed her ears with the words, “Don't you need me?” Tempting. Tantalizing. His woodsy cologne teased her nostrils, and his voice, dark and urgent, assaulted her senses.

They entered the elevator, he unlocked the top level floor stop with his passkey, and brushed his hand against her already erect nipple. “Come with me.”

She told herself to get off at the second floor, leave him and get a taxi home, but there he stood, sexiness personified and mesmerizing in his maleness. The elevator stopped, and she saw that they were on the top floor. He braced himself against the edges of the open door to prevent its closing and smiled at her.

“All I want to do is to please you,” he said.

She needed what he offered, needed to come alive, to bloom in a man's arms, and dispel the loneliness that had depressed her since a week earlier. The pain of it flashed before her mind's eye, waving before her the tragic figure who had hoped in vain for a glance of appreciation from a bell boy.
I deserve warmth and affection,
she thought, pushed reason aside and stepped out of the elevator.

He came to her with skill and patience, loving every inch of her body, heating her until she thought she would go insane waiting for the moment when he would thrust into her. Once he entered her body, he shocked her with his wildness.

“Am I hurting you?” he asked when she stopped moving.

“Oh, no. It . . . I can't keep up with you.”

“I'm starved for you. I've been half crazy waiting.” He rolled over on his back. “Maybe we can slow it down this way.”

“I don't want to slow it down. I want to burst wide open.”

He flipped her over on her back, put an arm beneath her hip, the other one under her shoulder, sucked her left nipple into his mouth and drove her to climax. Seconds later, he shouted his own release.

She lay beneath him panting for air and exhausted, but not sated. The thought that he had not uttered one word of endearment or affection, roared in her head. He'd given her physical relief, but that was all. Wondering if there could be anything else for them, a binding relationship, she stroked his hair.

“I'd ask how you feel,” he said, “if I hadn't felt you wringing me practically out of socket.”

“You may still ask,” she said. “How do
you
feel?”

“Wonderful. You're some woman. Can you spend the night with me?”

She sat up, remembered her nudity and threw the sheet across her chest. “Jefferson, I can't go into my house Saturday morning, the morning after New Year's Eve, wearing an evening dress. This is a small town, and the chief pastime here is gossip.”

He eased an arm across her and deftly let the sheet slide downward, uncovering her breasts. “What do you care about the gossips?”

His words had the impact of an alarm clock at five in the morning, and she eased out of bed dragging the sheet with her. “What time . . . ?” She stared at the two photographs on the table beside his bed, one of an attractive woman and the other of two boys about three or four years old.

“Who are they?” she asked, although she knew without his telling her.

He braced himself on one elbow and faced her. “They're my family.”

She sat on the edge of the bed, clutching the sheet around her. “I should have known that a man like you would be married, and I should have asked you, but I suppose I didn't want to know.”

“If you had known . . . ?”

“I wouldn't have gone out with you the first time. Where are they?”

“They're in Germany. My wife is German. I married her while I was a soldier stationed in Wiesbaden with the U.S. Army. My mother-in-law is very sick, and my wife took the children and went to be with her.”

“How long has she been in Germany?”

“A little over two months.”

BOOK: Whatever It Takes

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