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"Minn's downstairs?" Amused, Susan flicked her fingers through her boyish hair. "I'll go add my charm. She'll walk out loaded down with bags and won't know what hit her." She paused at the doorway to rub a hand over Laura's back. "You girls have a lovely place here. You've made a good choice."
"We're worrying her," Laura murmured when her mother's greeting to Minn floated upstairs. "You and I."
"I know. We'll just have to show her how tough we are. We are tough, aren't we, Laura?"
"Oh, sure. You bet. The disgraced celebrity and the betrayed trophy wife."
Temper snapped into Margo's eyes. "You're nobody's trophy."
"Not anymore. Now, before I forget—why was Candy looking at me as if she was hoping to grind up my liver for pate?"
"Ah." Remembering the scene put a sneaky smile on her face. "I had to tell her whose idea it was to call Mr. Hansen when she was trapped naked in her locker."
Laura closed her eyes, tried not to think of the next meeting of the Garden Club. She and Candy were co-chairs. "Had to tell her?"
"Really had to." Margo smiled winningly. "She called you 'poor Laura.' Twice."
Laura opened her eyes again, set her teeth. "I see. I wonder how difficult it would be to stuff her bony butt into a locker at the club?"
"For tough babes like you and me? A snap."
"I'll think about it." Automatically she checked her watch. Her life now ran on packets of time. "Meanwhile, we're having a family dinner tonight. A real one this time. Kate's meeting us at the house, and I left a message for Josh."
"Ah, Josh." As they started for the stairs, Margo linked her fingers together, pulled them apart. Wished desperately for a cigarette. "There's probably something I should tell you."
"Mmm-hmm. Look, Margo." Chuckling, she leaned on the rail. "Dad's playing with the cash register and Mama's packing boxes. Aren't they wonderful?"
"The best." How could she tell Laura she'd spent the night ripping up the sheets at Templeton Monterey with her brother? Better left alone, she decided. In any case, the way they had parted, it was unlikely to happen again.
"What did you want to tell me?"
"Um… only that I sold your beaded white sheath."
"Good. I never liked it anyway."
Margo felt she'd made the right decision when Josh arrived at Templeton House. He joined the family in the solarium, exchanged warm embraces with both his parents, then helped himself from the hors d'oeuvres tray. He entertained his nieces, argued with Kate over some esoteric point of tax law, and fetched mineral water for Laura.
As for the woman with whom he'd spent the night committing acts that were still illegal in some states, he treated her with the absent, vaguely infuriating affection older brothers reserved for their pesky younger siblings.
She thought about stabbing him in the throat with a shrimp fork.
She restrained herself, even when she was plunked down between him and Kate at the glossy mahogany table at dinner.
It was, after all, a celebration, she reminded herself. A reunion. Even Ann, who considered it a breach of etiquette for servants to sit at the family table, had been cajoled into joining in. Mr. T.'s doing, Margo thought. No one, particularly if it was a female, could say no to him.
Surely part of Josh's problem was that he resembled his father so closely. Thomas Templeton was as tall and lean as he'd been in his youth. The man Margo had frankly adored for twenty-five years had aged magnificently. The lines that unfairly made a woman look worn added class and appeal as they crinkled around his smoky gray eyes. His hair was still thick and full, with the added dash of glints of silver brushed through the bronze.
He had, she knew, a smile that could charm the petals off a rose. And when roused, a flinty, unblinking stare that chilled to the bone. He used both to run his business, and his family, and with them he incited devotion, unswerving love, and just a little healthy fear.
It was rumored that he had cut a wide, successful, and memorable swath through the ladies in his youth, romancing, seducing, and conquering at will. Until thirty, when he'd been introduced to a young Susan Conway. She had, in her own words, hunted him down like a dog and bagged him.
Margo smiled, listening to him build stories for his goggle-eyed granddaughters of herds of elephants and prides of lions.
"We have the Lion King video, Granddaddy." Kayla toyed with her Brussels sprouts, hoping a miracle would make them disappear.
"You've watched it a zillion times," Ali said, tossing her hair back in the way she'd seen Margo do.
"Well, we'll have to make it a zillion and one, won't we?" Thomas winked at Kayla. "We'll have ourselves a moviethon. What's your favorite video, Ali?"
