Lori’s Little Secret Read online

  “Sure.”

  As Brody unscrewed the gas cap for her, Lori told herself she didn’t need to even think about Tucker again—not until after the wedding.

  Not until she made herself call him and set up a time to tell him what she should have told him years ago.

  It happened again the next day. Sunday.

  In church, of all places, which just made Lori feel guiltier and more cowardly than ever. Her eleven-year deception seemed all the more reprehensible when she had to confront it while sitting in the Billingsworth family pew with those two big pictures of a dewy-eyed Jesus behind the altar looking down on her reproachfully.

  In church. It was the last place she’d expected she might see him. The Tucker Bravo she remembered from all those years before never went to church.

  Organ music filled the high-ceilinged sanctuary as folks settled into the rows of pews. To Lori’s right, beyond Brody, Lori’s mother, Enid, and her dad, Heck, nodded and murmured hellos to the friends and neighbors who filed past on the way to their own seats.

  Lena sat to Lori’s left, with Dirk on her other side. Lena’s auburn hair fell in soft waves to her shoulders and her face seemed to glow with happiness. She and Dirk were holding hands, constantly turning to look at each other, sharing secret smiles and goo-goo-eyed glances of mutual adoration.

  Lori probably wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t seen it for herself. But now she had seen it. She knew it was true: for the first time in her mostly self-absorbed twenty-eight years, Lena Lou Billingsworth was in love. Not since high school, when Lena was so gone on Tucker, had she ever lavished so many bright smiles and enchanting glances on a man. And with Tucker, there had always been as many scowls and pouts as there had been smiles.

  With Dirk, Lena was all shining eyes and happy grins. Dirk Davison, no doubt about it, was the man Lena had been waiting for all her life.

  Lena’s fiancé was thirty-five, big and beefy and gruffly good-natured—a whole lot like Heck Billingsworth, as a matter of fact. Both men had broad, always-ready salesman smiles. They both laughed too hard and talked too loud and sometimes made you wonder if they actually heard a thing you said.

  “He’s just like Daddy,” Lori had whispered to her twin the day before, after being introduced to the jovial Dirk.

  “He is,” said Lena, looking pleased as a little red heifer in a field of tall alfalfa. “Exactly like Daddy.”

  Lori just didn’t get it. How could her twin fall so hard for a man so much like their dad?

  But then, Lena didn’t have the issues with their father that Lori had. Lena, after all, hadn’t gone and gotten herself pregnant at the age of seventeen by a mystery lover whom she staunchly refused to name.

  Heck had blustered and ranted and delivered all kinds of scary threats and ultimatums when he learned that Lori was pregnant. But Lori never did tell him who her baby’s father was. She couldn’t bear to tell anyone—for a number of reasons.

  And when he finally realized she would never tell him, Heck had packed her off to stay with his sister, Lori’s dear now-deceased Aunt Emma, in San Antonio—as if they were all living in the dark ages or something. As if it was the ultimate shame on a family, for a daughter to have a baby without getting herself a husband first.

  Eventually, Lori had found happiness in San Antonio. She’d gone to work for Henry and married him and Henry had always treated Brody as his son. Though Lori didn’t make it home to Tate’s Junction much, she and her father had pretty much made peace with each other.

  But that didn’t mean she’d ever marry someone like Heck. Uh-uh. No way. Never in a hundred million years.

  But Lena was doing just that and apparently couldn’t have been happier about it.

  Lori found Lena’s love for her car salesman fiancé truly weird—as well as yet another example of the many ways she and her identical twin were nothing alike. She slid a glance at the two love birds to her left just as Dirk raised the hand he had twined with Lena’s and pressed his fleshy lips to it. The two gazed deep into each other’s eyes.

  Just as Lori was reminding herself not to stare, Tucker appeared in the aisle, directly in her line of sight. Her stomach did a nasty roll. She blinked. Tucker spotted her—and he winked.

  Why? she wondered, feeling sick and suddenly desperate. Why would he wink at her?

  Oh, please, she argued with herself, as she actively resisted the powerful urge to leap to her feet and stumble along the pew away from him, not caring whose feet she stepped on as she made her escape. Why shouldn’t he wink? What does it matter? He’s just being friendly, for heaven’s sake.

  “Mom.” Brody’s skinny elbow poked into her ribs. “Look,” Brody whispered. “It’s the guy with the cool dog. Tucker.”

  She almost—almost—turned and snapped at her son to be quiet. But she caught herself just in time. “Yes,” she said, with marvelous calm, considering the tangled, frantic state of her emotions at that moment. “It’s Tucker.” She raised her hand and gave Tucker a wave.

  He waved back—and then he moved on by.

  “Sure did like that dog of his,” said Brody wistfully. “Hope I see that dog again…”

  Lori stared after Tucker, though she knew she shouldn’t, admiring in spite of herself the wide set of his shoulders, the proud way he carried his tawny brown head. He slid into a pew near the front, with his older brother, Tate, and Tate’s pretty blond wife of ten months, Molly. Molly’s family was also there: her mother, her mother’s husband, her grandmother and a tall, thin old fellow that Lori didn’t recognize.

  After church, the Billingsworths went to Jim-Denny’s Diner for sandwiches. Tucker showed up there, too—with Tate and Molly. The Bravos and the Billingsworths ended up in adjoining booths.

  Molly leaned over the seat and gave Lori a grin. “Hey. Good to see you, Lori Lee.”

  “Hi, Molly.”

  Molly had been three years ahead of Lori and Lena in school—and one year ahead of Tucker. Molly grinned at Brody. “This your boy?”

  “Yes. Molly, this is Brody.”

  Tate Bravo’s wife reached right over the seat, grabbed Brody’s hand and shook it. Molly owned a hair salon. She was the mayor of Tate’s Junction and the mother of twin babies, a boy and a girl. She was also the most unlikely person ever to have married someone like Tate Bravo.

  On his mother’s side, Tate—and Tucker, too, of course—came from the most important family in the area, the Tates. For generations, the first born Tate son had been given the name Tucker. Since Tate and Tucker’s mother, Penelope Tate Bravo, was the only child of the last in a long line of Tucker Tates, she’d named her first son Tate and her second, Tucker, keeping the family name alive in her children. Everything had gone to her sons when she passed on. The Bravo boys now owned at least a part of just about every business in town, not to mention a sprawling ranch called the Double T on which stood a ranch house the size of a king’s palace.

  Molly had been born in a double-wide trailer. She came from two generations of single-mother O’Dare’s. She was, truly, the last person anyone ever expected Tate Bravo to marry.

  But Tate had married Molly, last summer. Their romance had been rocky, to say the least. According to the stories Lori’s mother and sister had told her, Tate and Molly had the whole town buzzing there for a while. But now they were blissfully happy together.

  Lori was happy for them.

  She only wished they hadn’t taken the booth next to the one her family sat in—at least not if they had to bring Tucker along.

  And why did she have to end up sitting directly opposite him? She actually had to make a conscious effort to keep from looking straight at him.

  Molly asked about the wedding. And Lena—with Enid chiming in now and then—launched into a long list of things that had yet to be done, from more floral consultations to final fittings of bridesmaids’ gowns to a few changes in the menu for the sit-down dinner for three hundred at the local country club. Molly would be doing the bride�
�s hair. Lena wouldn’t have it any other way.

  As the women talked wedding preparations, the men discussed Cadillacs. Evidently, Tate, who owned a fleet of them, was buying a new one from Heck. Dirk was contributing his expert advice.

  Tucker sat silent, as did Lori and Brody, the three of them outsiders in the two current topics of conversation—looking right at each other, but too far apart to start up a conversation of their own.

  Which was just fine with Lori. What would she say to him? Talking to him, making meaningless chitchat, seemed so evil and wrong when there was Brody right beside her, the son he didn’t even know he had.

  Tucker kept sending her glances—and she kept glancing back.

  Well, how could she help it? Unless she stared at the table, he sat square in her line of sight.

  Every time he caught her eye, she would picture herself standing straight up in that booth and announcing, Okay. All right. The truth is, it was me, on prom night eleven years ago. Me and not Lena. You made love to me. And it’s not some stranger, like everyone thinks, who’s Brody’s dad. It’s you, Tucker. Brody’s your son.

  Of course, she did no such thing. But the urge to do it was there, and it was powerful. It burned beneath her skin. It was that scary, exhilarating feeling you get standing on the edge of a cliff, wondering, what would it be like?

  To stretch out your arms and slowly fall forward, to let yourself soar right off the edge…

  The waitress—not Molly’s mother, Dixie, who had worked at the diner since long before Lori left town, but was apparently off that day—brought the food. Though her stomach seemed tied in a series of permanent knots, Lori had never been so grateful to see a cheeseburger in her life. It gave her something to do, something to look at—other than Tucker’s velvety-brown eyes and handsome face.

  Brody took a couple of bites of his grilled cheese sandwich and then set the sandwich down. “So where’s Fargo?” he asked Tucker, loudly, turning in his seat, causing the parallel conversations of Cadillacs and weddings to stop.

  Heck laughed. “Fargo.” He frowned. “The boy mean that ugly mutt of yours, Tucker?”

  Tucker nodded. “’Fraid so—and Brody, Fargo’s not welcome at church, or here at the diner. I haven’t got a clue why not. He loves a good sermon as much as the next dog.”

  “His table manners aren’t so hot,” suggested Tate.

  “I sure liked that dog,” said Brody, sending Lori a calculating glance.

  “Kid wants a dog,” Heck said to Lori, as if she hadn’t already figured that out for herself.

  She looked at her father. “Got it.” It came out too sharp. Between the state of her nerves after ten minutes of sitting straight across from Tucker, and the way her father always made her feel as if she wasn’t quite the mother she ought to be…

  Well, she was getting a little bit edgy.

  Her dad spoke gently—and with clear reproach. “Now, Lori-girl, a boy should have a dog.”

  “Yeah,” said Brody eagerly, and launched into the arguments all kids have ready when it comes to getting a pet. “I’m ten now. I’m old enough. Like I said, I could take care of everything, Mom. I’d feed him and walk him and clean up all his messes. You wouldn’t have to do anything.”

  Lori set down her fork without eating the bite of potato salad at the end of it. She sent her father a narrow-eyed, not-another-word kind of glance and she told her son, “Brody. We’ll discuss it. Later.”

  “But, Mom, I—”

  “Later.”

  Brody got the message. At last. He picked up his sandwich and dutifully bit into it.

  There was a moment or two of awkward silence. Then the men went back to their talk of fancy cars and Lena returned to the subject closest to her heart—her upcoming wedding.

  “I just cannot believe that it’s almost here. All our planning and hard work, and in two weeks from yesterday, I’ll be walking down the aisle at last….”

  Heck stopped talking Cadillacs long enough to remark, “’Bout damn time, too. My checkbook can’t take too much more of this.”

  Lena laughed her bright, bubbly laugh. “Oh, Daddy. Just you wait. I’m gonna make you so proud.”

  “You already do, baby. You always have.”

  Lori looked down at her barely touched food and knew there was no way she could eat another bite. The conversation ebbed and flowed around her—and she didn’t want to look up.

  But she couldn’t stare at her plate forever.

  She lifted her gaze.

  And found Tucker waiting, looking right at her.

  The corner of his beautifully shaped mouth quirked up, a half smile that was also, somehow a question.

  She felt the answering smile lift the edges of her own mouth.

  This couldn’t be happening.

  And yet, somehow, impossibly, it was.

  Tucker Bravo was flirting with her.

  Chapter Two

  That night, Tucker made a clear and calculated effort to get his sister-in-law, Molly, alone.

  He had dinner with the family in the original central part of the Double T ranch house, where Tate and Molly and their twins made their home. After dinner, Tucker and Tate relaxed over a couple of snifters of good brandy while Molly went up to nurse the babies. Then the brothers joined her for the important job of putting the twins to bed.

  There were baths first, followed by the intricate process of getting little feet and arms into clean diapers and snap-on sleeping shirts. Then came the singing. Tate and Molly sang their children a number of lullabies, Molly in her clear alto, Tate in his slightly off-key baritone.

  Tucker, who thoroughly enjoyed his role of new uncle, chimed in on the songs where he remembered the words. He liked this whole family-life thing. A lot. As far as he was concerned, it was the smartest move his big brother had ever made, to get himself hooked up with Molly O’Dare.

  By eight, at last, the babies were tucked into their cribs in the darkened nursery, their nanny watching over them from the small bedroom across the hall.

  Tate announced what he usually announced about that time in the evening. “Got a few things to tie up downstairs.” Tucker’s brother had a study on the first floor at the front of the house. Tate kept close tabs on the family holdings at the big computer in there.

  Molly moved into the circle of her husband’s arms for a fond, quick kiss and then Tate headed for the main staircase.

  Tucker saw his opportunity and seized it. “Got a moment?”

  Molly shrugged. “Sure. How ’bout some coffee?”

  “Lead me to it.” He fell in step behind her as she turned for the narrow back stairs that led to the family room and kitchen below.

  At the table in the breakfast room, Molly poured him a mug of coffee, brewed herself a quick cup of herb tea and settled into the chair across from him. He watched her fiddle with her tea bag and tried to figure out how to begin.

  Molly knew a lot about what went on in the Junction. She was not only the town’s first female mayor, she also ran her beauty salon, Prime Cut, as a place where all the women in town could gather to talk about things that most males of the species would never dare to think of. At the Cut, the lives and loves of the citizens of Tate’s Junction were dissected and analyzed freely and openly, with no-holds-barred.

  “So what’s up?” Molly set her tea bag on the edge of her saucer.

  Tucker decided he might as well just come right out with it. “Tell me everything you know about Lori Lee Billingsworth.”

  His brother’s wife watched him over the rim of her cup as she sipped her tea. With great care, she set the cup down. “Taylor. Her last name is Taylor. She was married.”

  “But she’s a widow now.”

  Molly gave him a measuring look. “Lucky for you, right?”

  “Molly, damn it. I could use a little help here.”

  Tate’s wife wrapped her fingers with their long, shiny red fingernails around her teacup. “What’s this about? You had one sister and now you
want to make it an even pair?”

  Tucker gaped—and then shook his head. “Molly. You got a mouth on you.”

  “So I’ve been told. Answer my question.”

  “No,” he said, emphatically. “It’s not like that. This has got nothing at all to do with Lena. Lena and I, well, that was a long, long time ago.”

  Molly wore the look of a doubting woman. She asked, each word sharp with suspicion, “Water under the bridge, is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  He nodded. “Lena’s happy now. She loves Dirk. And you know what? I’m nothing but happy for her.”

  “But you did love her. Once.”

  Had he? Tucker wasn’t so sure. “I was crazy over her, yeah. But love? Hell. We were kids. She wanted a life right here, in town. She wanted for us to have that big wedding she’s going to have now and settle down here at the ranch house, where she was going to pop out two or three babies and do her best to help me spend Granddaddy’s money.”

  “You’re still carrying a grudge against her.”

  “No,” he said again, even more strongly than before. “I’m carrying no grudges. I’m telling you how it was, that’s all. Lena wanted a nice life, here in town. And I wanted out. Bad. We broke up—which made it possible for both of us to get what we wanted. It would have been a disaster, Lena and me. She knows it. I know it. End of story.”

  Well, except for that one night….

  Tucker had come home from college—where he was flunking just about every course and soon to drop out—to take Lena to her prom. The night before the dance, she’d told him it was over between them, that they wanted different things and it just wasn’t working.

  He’d agreed with her. He’d been thinking it was time to move on for a while by then, but he hadn’t known how to tell her. Even now, he could remember the feeling of sweet relief that had flowed through him when she said she didn’t want to be his girl anymore.

  And then she’d told him she couldn’t see any way out of the two of them going to the prom together. Tucker, figuring it was the least he could do to pay her back for handing him the freedom he’d been yearning for, had promised to take her.