Moonlight in the Morning Read online

  “I take it this is your sister-in-law? The one who wants to take over your dad’s store?” Tris was pretending he wasn’t watching her drive, not scrutinizing her every movement. But she was at ease with the big, old vehicle. Smiling, he relaxed back against the seat.

  “That’s Sheila.” Jecca was pulling onto the road.

  “Looks like she and your dad were fighting. He wrote SUNDAY AT THE LAYTONS.”

  “My dad never loses his sense of humor.” She told him about taking Lucy’s photo and sending it that morning and what she’d written. “It looks like it’s getting worse between them.”

  “You want to pull over and call him?”

  “He would only tell me that everything is fine.”

  “What does your brother say about this?”

  “Joey is as tough as they come, but he won’t take sides between his wife and his father,” Jecca said. “When Dad and Sheila go at it, Joey runs away.”

  “How do you handle an argument?” Tris was looking at her in speculation.

  “Trying to find out what I’d do if you and I got into a fight?”

  “I want to know anything I can find out about you.”

  Jecca glanced in the rearview mirror at Nell.

  “She’s asleep. Put her in a moving car and she passes out. Turn left at the next road. How do you argue?”

  “Fairly,” she said. “My dad said he didn’t mind a fight just so it was fair. He doesn’t believe in below-the-belt punches, physically or verbally.”

  “So if we disagree you won’t bring up something I said three years ago?” Tris had meant it as a joke but it fell flat. In three years Jecca would be living in another state. He tried to recover himself. “Think there’s a solution to the problem with your dad?”

  “Not that I see. He’s stubborn, and Sheila is wildly ambitious.”

  “She’s fighting for her children’s future.”

  “That’s what Lucy said.”

  Tris reached to the back to pull a quilt over his niece and Jecca couldn’t help watching him. He would make a magnificent father.

  He sat back in the seat, his right hand massaging his left arm. The muscles had weakened. He smiled at Jecca’s profile, pleased that she’d noticed.

  “How do you get on with your brother-in-law?” she asked.

  “Perfectly. He laughs at me because I don’t know a piston from a transmission, and I get him back by saving his life now and then.”

  “That seems to be an equal balance. Does he say thanks?”

  “He changes my oil for free, and he lets me have Nell for whole weeks at a time.” He lowered his voice. “This week they’re trying to make a baby.”

  “Did you put on the doctor act and tell him how it’s done?”

  Tris laughed so loud he glanced back to see if Nell woke up. “That’s exactly what I did. How’d you guess?”

  “I grew up in a male household so I know about male rivalry.”

  Reaching across the ng " width="gearshift, Tris squeezed her hand. “Tell me about your art training,” he said. “And what’s this about your boss? Kim said she’s a bad one.”

  “Andrea is rich, spoiled, selfish, vain, and exasperating.”

  “Not your best friend, huh?” Tris tried to hide his smile. He liked hearing that her life in New York wasn’t perfect. He settled back in the seat and listened as Jecca told him about herself, and he asked a lot of questions.

  He was glad to hear that she had many acquaintances in New York but no real friends. She saved her confidences and even her complaints for her frequent calls with Kim.

  By the time they got to Roan’s cabin, Tris was smiling. It looked like only Jecca’s job was in the way of her living somewhere else. That and the proximity to her father. And all those stores that women so loved.

  Not much, he thought as she pulled up in front of the cabin. Just insurmountable obstacles, that’s all.

  Fourteen

  The cabin was just as Jecca had imagined it—and would have been disappointed if it hadn’t been. It was quite wide, with a deep porch across the front. There were chairs and stacks of logs on the porch, plus an old washtub hanging on the wall. The steep roof had a chimney in the middle, and a tendril of gray smoke drifted out.

  “Perfect,” Jecca said, looking out the windshield.

  In the back, Nell woke up, saw where they were, then scrambled between the front seats and over her uncle to get out the door. When her foot hit him in the stomach he grunted in pain.

  “I guess she’s glad to be here,” Jecca said as she watched Nell run toward the porch steps.

  Tris reached across her to give a quick blow of the horn.

  “Inside watching his soaps?” Jecca asked.

  “That would be fun. He’s trying to write his novel.”

  The front door flew open and out came a big, burly man wearing beat-up dungarees and a blue flannel shirt over a dark green T-shirt. His heavy boots clomped on the wooden floor.

  “He looks the part,” Jecca said. When he got to the ground, she saw his face. He was a handsome man, with three-day-old whiskers, and his thick hair had a decided touch of red in it. “Named for his hair?”

  “When he was a kid it was like fire,” Tris said as he opened the car door.

  “And I guess you guys told him that often.”

  “Oh yeah,” Tris said, laughing as he got out. “We called him Burn Boy.”

  “And what did he call you?”

  “Roan was really nasty. He called me Ken,” Tris said as he shut the door.

  For a moment Jecca didn̵ng " >

  Chuckling, Jecca watched Roan pick up Nell and swing her around while she squealed in delight.

  Jecca got out of the big car, but she stood back, watching. She wanted to give them time to say hello. Besides, as far as she knew, Roan didn’t know she was coming.

  The three of them were talking on top of each other. Tris and Roan had exchanged bear hugs and were now pantomiming boxing moves.

  The two men were about the same height, but that’s all the similarity there was. Roan was huskier than Tris. They were both attractive men, but Tristan’s features were refined, elegant even, while Roan looked like someone in an old photo titled Buffalo Hunters.

  All in all, Jecca much preferred Tristan.

  As she watched she thought about how now with Tristan, this part of a new relationship was always interesting, when you got to know each other, when you found out the strengths and weaknesses of the other person. She liked learning what a person liked to eat, read, how he reacted to different situations.

  Later, when she began to see things she didn’t like about the person, she’d realize that everything had been there in those first few days. There was the way one boyfriend had snapped at a waitress, then told Jecca he was sorry but he hadn’t slept well and that made him short-tempered—which he swore he never was. At the time she’d paid no attention to it, but later she saw that he always treated clerks, waitpersons, mechanics, etc., with contempt. She realized that he’d always been rude, but she’d just not wanted to see the truth.

  Maybe she was deluding herself, but so far she’d seen nothing about Tristan that she didn’t like. But then, isn’t that what Kim had warned her about? That Tris made a woman feel like she was a princess, then he . . . What? Dumped her? Maybe Jecca was his favorite date because he knew it could never be permanent between them.

  At the end of the summer, would he kiss her on the forehead and tell her he’d had a good time?

  She reminded herself that she was the one leaving, not him. She retrieved her jacket—one of her boss’s castoffs—from the back, walked around the front of the car, and waited for one of them to notice her.

  “Jecca’s going to paint flowers,” Nell was saying.

  “And your playhouse,” Tris added.

  “She’s going to teach me how to paint,” Nell said.

  “She sounds like a nice new friend,” Roan said. “What is she? The babysitter?”

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