AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Now he damned himself for being two times a fool, but the truth of the matter was that Bliss Cawthorne, curse her sexy smile and twinkling eyes, had gotten to him all over again.
It had taken less than ten minutes.
So what’re you gonna do about it, Lafferty? his mind taunted as he peeled the label from his beer bottle.
There was only one safe answer—the same as it had always been. Stay away from the woman.
Trouble was, Mason wasn’t known to take the safe path.
* * *
“So this is Bliss!” Brynnie Anderson-Smith-McBaine-Kinkaid-Perez breezed into the Cawthorne house in a cloud of sweet perfume laced with cigarette smoke. Her hair was a deep red beginning to streak with gray, her face tanned, her lips colored peach, her eyelids shaded in a soft pewter color. She wore jeans a size too tight and a white T-shirt that showed off her enviable chest. “Well, John, you’re right again. She’s beautiful.” Brynnie winked at Bliss and extended a beringed, work-roughened hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you. All good, mind you, all good.”
“Same here,” Bliss said, though what she’d found out about this woman had been recent and she wasn’t holding her breath that the story her father gave her was the entire truth. Besides, not only had Brynnie wed more than her share of husbands, but she’d been a married man’s lover. That thought was sour, no matter how hard Bliss tried to swallow it.
John captured Brynnie in a bear hug and, with his arm still slung over her shoulders, led them all through the kitchen and onto the back porch. A sweating pitcher of iced tea and several glasses were waiting on the picnic table.
“Looks like you were expecting me,” Brynnie said.
“All Bliss’s doin’.”
“Thoughtful.”
“Thanks.” Bliss didn’t know what to say. This was, after all, the woman with whom her father had been involved in an affair, the woman who had knowingly cheated on Margaret Cawthorne, the woman who had gotten pregnant with John’s child while he was married.
Forcing a smile she didn’t feel, Bliss told herself that discretion, if she could find it, was the better part of valor. Her mother was dead, had known of the affair and dealt with it in her own way. Somehow Bliss should do the same. But as she poured the tea into glasses, watching the slices of lemon dance, she felt a stinging loss, a pain deep in her heart, and she nearly slopped tea onto the table.
They sat in deck chairs in the shade of a larch tree. A breeze moved across the rolling acres, stirring the leaves and bending the grass of a field of hay not yet mown. The sound of sprinklers jetting water to irrigate the surrounding pastures vied with the distant hum of traffic far off on the highway.
“I know this is hard for you,” Brynnie ventured as she set her glass on the table. Her fingernails were long and squared off and matched the peach gloss of her lips.
“Very.”
“It’s hard on everyone,” John said thoughtfully, a hint of regret in his voice.
“Well, here goes.” Brynnie looked Bliss straight in the eye. “Look, honey, I’m not proud of everything I’ve done in my life. Lord knows, I’ve made more than my share of mistakes and I’ll probably make a few more before they bury me.
“Gettin’ involved with your dad was inevitable, believe me, but our timing was always wrong. Well, maybe there never could have been a good time. But you have to believe me when I tell you that I never meant to hurt your ma.”
Bliss didn’t say anything. Her throat was too tight and her eyes stung with unshed tears.
“From all I’ve heard, she was a good woman. Deserved better.” Brynnie’s brown eyes shadowed with a pain she’d borne for years, but still, Bliss wasn’t completely moved.
“She deserved the best,” Bliss said. She slashed a glance at her father and noticed the hardening of his jaw, the determined set of his chin. Her mother had always said he was a stubborn man.
“I’m making no excuses, Bliss. Never claimed to be a knight in shining armor. Sure, I’ve made my share of mistakes just like Brynnie said. But then, what man, or woman for that matter, hasn’t?”
Bliss cast a mental glance at her own fractured love life. Her first and, really, only love had been Mason Lafferty, and surely that relationship had been doomed from the start. With trembling hands, she lifted her glass and took a sip of tea. The cool liquid slid down her throat as she pushed Mason from her mind and concentrated on her father, who had taken out his pocketknife and was avoiding her gaze as he cleaned his fingernails with a sharp blade.
“Unfortunate as it is, Blissie, your ma’s gone now and Brynnie’s divorced. Seems as if we’re finally gettin’ a break and this time we’re gonna grab it. It’s about time.”
“Amen,” Brynnie said and reached over to pat John’s hand. Her rings sparkled in the sunlight and Bliss couldn’t help but wonder how many of the jeweled bands had been given to her on her various wedding days by her ex-husbands and which, if any, had been gifts from her secret lover.
Brynnie’s smile seemed genuine and for the first time Bliss caught a glimmer of what her father saw in a woman who was so unlike her socially upstanding and rigid mother. Brynnie seemed like someone who could roll with the punches and always land on her feet. Nonjudgmental. No false sense of pride. No matter what challenges life tossed this woman’s way, Bliss guessed that Brynnie handled them and managed to end up grinning.
“I, uh, I hope you’re happy,” Bliss said, more for the sake of conversation than from conviction. In truth, hadn’t everyone suffered enough? Reluctantly she conceded her father his point. It was time to make a stand, to recognize his other daughters, to find a place for all his family. She just wasn’t sure that she could be a part of it.
“We will be happy, won’t we, darlin’?” Her father nodded and his mouth turned up at the corners.
