Twins Included

He followed the aroma of roasting beef and found her in the kitchen, pouring gravy into a gravy boat.

“Hi,” he said. “We’re back.”

She turned, and he saw that her face was flushed from the heat of the oven. She set the gravy boat on the table, and said, “You’ll never guess what happened on my way home!”

“You got a ticket for speeding?” he teased.

“If I did, it would be a first! No, Matt. I was driving along Fourth when I spotted a friend I hadn’t seen in…oh, must be close to sixteen years! She’d changed a bit…but I knew her by the way she walked…that hadn’t changed. And her legs, of course! Beth Rossiter always did have the most fabulous legs. In high school, we were all pea-green with envy! Anyway,” she said, beaming at him, “you’ll meet her soon because—”

“I’ve met her, Molly.”

Molly did a double take. “You have? But…where?”

He should have told her yesterday and he could kick himself now that he hadn’t. It wasn’t as if there hadn’t been plenty opportunity. They’d been together all day—first at the baseball game, then after Iain’s chess lesson he’d driven them all the fifty miles to Crestville for the Farmers’ Fair, and they hadn’t got back till late evening.

“Matt? Do you know Beth Rossiter?”

“Honey, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

Her brow wrinkled, and she looked at him as if she didn’t quite understand what he’d said.

“At the church,” he reminded her. “When I told you I needed to talk to you? It was about—”

“About Beth?”

He couldn’t understand why she suddenly looked so disappointed. What had she thought he wanted to discuss with her?

“Liz,” he said. “She goes by the name of Liz now. She turned up at Laurel House on Friday night. She didn’t know her father had died…didn’t know he’d sold the family home.”

“Oh, my! What a dreadful shock she must have had when you told her—although, as I recall, she and her father didn’t get along at all well. He was a frightful man, prone to the most awful rages. So…is she here on holiday? And where is she staying? Did she book in at Sandford’s Inn?”

“I believe the move’s permanent. And no, she’s not booked in at Sandford’s. She’s staying at the house.”

“You surely don’t mean Laurel House?”

“Yeah,” he said. “She’s there. With me. For the present, at any rate, till we sort things out.”

“But…what things?”

“She says she has papers that prove her father had no right to sell the property—”

“But everything was legal, wasn’t it? I mean, you’re a lawyer, for heaven’s sake! You’d have checked everything out—”

“Oh, it’s legal all right. No question about that.”

“Then…she’ll have to leave. Find another place to stay. Won’t she?”

“It’s not all that simple, Molly—”

Matt broke off as he heard the boys clattering downstairs.

He put a hand on Molly’s shoulder.

“Let’s leave it for now,” he said quietly. “We’ll talk some more, after lunch.”

Liz had always loved Laurel House.

She knew it was partly because the rambling old place had such character, but it was also because of the memories it held of her mother, and the love they had shared until her mother’s death when Liz was twelve.

Now on this Sunday afternoon, knowing Matt wouldn’t be back for a while, Liz was free to roam around the place at will—not that she wanted to poke around among his things; she just wanted to reacquaint herself with her old home.

On the night of her arrival, she’d noticed the new appliances in the kitchen; and in the morning, she’d seen that the cupboards were new, too. But apart from that, everything seemed much as she remembered. And on her tour of the main floor, she found little had changed there, either. Even the furniture was the same. Matt’s deal with her father must have included the contents of the house.

A deal which, she had already decided cynically, had probably been very sweet indeed. For Matt.

Upstairs, she found the first of the two guest rooms had obviously been taken over by the new owner, and it had been refurbished with a king-size oak bedroom suite, cobalt-blue drapes and a blue-and-cream striped duvet.

From there she moved on to the other guest room, where she found that the twin beds were draped with sheets, and the floorboards were bare, the bay window uncurtained. Three pristine cans of paint were stacked by the closet, along with paintbrushes, a roller and a paint tray.

Matt, it seemed, was planning to redecorate.

It hurt, to have an outsider brashly take possession of her home. And added to the hurt, was a spurt of anger. By rights, this house didn’t even belong to Matt.

She marched into her own bedroom and irritably gathered up a pile of clothing that needed to be washed, items she’d accumulated during her cross-country car trip.

The laundry room was in the basement, and she found it just as tidy as the rest of the house. The white-tiled floor was spotless, the washer and dryer gleamed and a pile of folded but unironed clothing sat on the ironing board.

On a shelf above the ironing board was a box of Tide. Liz moved over to get it, but when she glanced absently at the pile of folded clothing, she came to an abrupt halt.

And with lips compressed she glared at the wispy lace bra so brazenly snuggled up to a pair of navy cotton boxer shorts.

It didn’t take an Einstein to figure out what this meant. It couldn’t have been more obvious, Liz reflected scornfully, if Matt had put a sign above his bed that read:

Molly Martin Has Slept Here!

Matt leaned against the veranda railing and looked down at Molly, who was lounging back in one of her Adirondack chairs. “You never mentioned,” he said, “that you and Max Rossiter’s daughter had been school friends.”

“It just never came up.” Molly put a hand over her eyes to block out the sun as she squinted up at him. “After Dad was transferred and our family moved to Vancouver, she and I did keep in touch a while but our letters eventually dribbled off. It wasn’t till after my Dave was posted here four years ago that I really thought about her again. I did mean to get in touch once we were settled, but then I heard that after high school her dad had sent her off to some fancy college back east and she’d never come home again. Nobody seemed to know where she was…so…I let it slide.”

Beth’s father hadn’t sent Beth off to college—at least if he had, it hadn’t been straight away; but he’d come up with that story because he hadn’t wanted his family name besmirched. The truth was, he’d sent her somewhere else, and though he’d refused to tell Matt where, he’d taken a vicious delight in telling him why.

“Did you think,” Max Rossiter had shouted at him on that black, never-to-be-forgotten autumn night, “that I would allow my daughter to let her pregnancy run its course so she could give birth to a child by the likes of you? You think I’d have let you ruin her life, her future? She’s a Rossiter, boy, and you’re nothing. You’re nobody!”

Matt would never forget the hatred in the man’s eyes. It had reminded him of the bloodshot frenzy of a raging bull.

Molly had been right, though; none of the townsfolk knew where “the rich Rossiter girl” had gone. And as far as he was aware, only four local people had ever known of her pregnancy—Beth, himself, his mother…and Beth’s father.

“Matt?” Molly prodded his ankle with the toe of her sandal. “What is it? What are you thinking?”

He dragged his thoughts to the present. “I knew her, too, Molly. I knew Max Rossiter’s daughter years ago…when she was seventeen.”

“But…how? You would have been away at law school!”

“I came home to work in Judd Anstruther’s law offices in the summer break and I met her a few weeks before she graduated from high school. In early June. And we hung around together, till I went back to UBC in the Fall.”

“You and Beth Rossiter…you dated?”

“Yeah.”

“But…nobody has ever mentioned it—you’d think that in all this time somebody would have mentioned it to me.”

“Nobody knew. We had to keep it quiet, meet in secret. Because of her father. He didn’t think any of us locals were good enough for his daughter. He had bigger—and better—plans for her.”

For a minute or two, neither of them spoke. From down the street, Matt could hear Iain and Stuart shouting as they played with their friend Jamie.

Finally Molly said, “If you let her stay on at Laurel House, I’m afraid you’re going to have your hands full.”

“I’m not sure I…know what you mean…”

“I’m a nurse, Matt—or at least I was, and I know all the signs. I know that…look.”

He stared at her, and felt a growing sense of dread that chilled him. “She…Liz…she isn’t ill, is she?”

Molly closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the slats of the chair. “No, she isn’t ill, Matt…She’s pregnant.”

Pregnant!

The word was still rolling around in Matt’s head when he left Molly’s an hour later.

But maybe Molly was mistaken. He latched onto the possibility…then reluctantly dismissed it when he recalled the confident tone she’d used when she’d added that she was very rarely wrong in such matters.

So Liz was—very likely—pregnant.

What should he do? Should he ask her outright if she was expecting a baby? Or should he give her an opening and wait for her to volunteer the information?

By the time he got back to Laurel House, he still hadn’t made up his mind what to do, so in the end he decided to play it by ear.

He parked the car and went inside. He was shutting the front door behind him when he heard her footsteps on the stairs. And by the time he’d walked into the foyer, she was almost at the bottom.

She stopped on the last step and looked at him warily.

“Hi,” he said, assessing her with new eyes in light of what Molly had told him. “How’s it going?”

She was all skin and bone and long arms and longer legs, but if her waist had thickened at all he had no way of telling because the pink silk blouson top she was wearing over her cream miniskirt gave nothing away.

He scrutinized her face, searching for whatever tell-tale signs Molly had seen. Was it the heaviness of her eyes? The tightly drawn skin over her nose? The tiny break-out of a rash on one smooth temple?

Dammit, he didn’t know what the first signs of pregnancy were!

Liz put a hand on the newel post and frowned across at him.

“What’s the matter?” Her voice rang with challenge. “Why on earth are you staring at me like that?”

CHAPTER FOUR

MATT saw, with a feeling of disappointment, that she was still in the hostile mood she’d been in last night.

Hoping to ease her out of it, he said lightly, “I was just thinking that you suit that color. What is it? Cherry blossom pink?”

“As I recall,” she said dryly, “the store tag described it as Sunset Blush.”

“Whatever, you look great in it. Elegant,” he added with a grin, “as a pink flamingo!”

“Thank you. I think!” Although her cheeks had flushed two shades deeper than Sunset Blush, her eyes were cool.

“So,” he said, “what have you been doing?”

“Just looking around.” She smoothed a tidying hand down her hair; unnecessarily, since—to him at least—it looked perfect. “Getting the feel of things again.”

“I used to do the same, whenever I came home from UBC in the summer holidays—I always had to wander around, looking, touching—though it didn’t take long, our house being so small!” He saw her pink-glossed lips tighten and realized it had been a mistake to talk about summer vacation from UBC. Quickly he moved on. “Fancy some lemonade?”

She hesitated for a moment, and then with a shrug in her voice, said, “Sure.”

In the kitchen, he took two cans of lemonade from the fridge, poured hers into a glass and handed it to her.

He leaned against the counter, taking a draught from his can, while she perched on the edge of the table.

“Where did you get to this morning?” he asked.

“I went to church.”

“Didn’t see you there.”

“I was late, took a seat at the back. I’d run out of gas, couldn’t get the car started. I had to walk.”

“And after?”

“I didn’t hang around. I’m not quite ready to talk to people yet.” She looked down at her glass, ran a slender fingertip over the rim. Her oval nails were painted the exact same shade of Sunset Blush as her lips. “Although I did have a word with an old friend on my way home. Molly White. Martin now. She said you were going to her place for lunch.”

“She mentioned that you’d met up.” He looked again at her hair, which was full of bits of sunshine from the rays streaming in through the window. It used to be a short curly mop; now it was parted in the center and fell to her breasts, straight as rain. He preferred it like this. Except that it made him ache to run his hands through it, to feel the silky strands slide through his fingers—

“Molly told me she’d lost her husband. How long ago was that?”

“Three years ago. He was a cop. Shot in the line of duty—got in the way of a bullet when he was trying to stop a robbery at the Esso station on Wayberry Road. He and Molly…” Matt shook his head. “They were so right for each other. She took it hard. As did the kids, of course. Stuart and Iain adored their dad. And Dave thought the world of them, too. His family was his life.”

“Does Molly have a job?”

“No. She trained as a nurse, though, in Vancouver. Worked there full-time till the kids came along, then part-time after that. She’d been planning to start full-time again, once both boys were in school…but before she could, Dave was killed. She was shattered, went totally to pieces. She hasn’t worked at all since then. I often think it would be the best thing for her, to go back, but…” He shrugged.

He didn’t tell Liz that he wished Molly would go back to work. It wasn’t that he minded “being there” for her, he didn’t. What concerned him was that instead of becoming less dependent on him as time went by, she was becoming more and more clingy, more and more needy. He’d expected that by now she’d be making moves to reclaim her independence. She hadn’t. But he’d promised Dave to look after her for as long as she needed him. And so he would.

“Liz,” he said, “I want to talk about you. Why did you come back here? Did things go…wrong…in New York?”

“Wrong? What do you mean?”

“You know…problems at work, or with…a man…?”

“That’s my business, Matt. I’d prefer if you didn’t try to pry into my affairs—”

“It’s just that you’re looking a bit…run-down.”

“I was in a stressful job,” she said. “I worked for the CEO of a major stockbroking firm. Busy, busy, busy, with long hours, constant deadlines. It took a lot out of me, I was getting burned out…but now that I’m home, I’ll be fine. And since you’re into making personal remarks,” she added, raking a pointed glance over his face, “it looks as if you finally met your match!”

She was referring, of course, to his broken nose; his scarred lip; his bashed-in cheekbone.

“Yeah.” He managed to keep his tone nonchalant, but his hand clenched around the can and he heard a faint creak as the tin gave way under the pressure. “I guess I did.”

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