Chapter 14 #2
“Am I?” She looked at than coolly. “Well, this time you’re going to have to humor me. I intend to cook all the meals that Mrs. Morse isn’t here for.” She smiled sweetly, turning back to her labors. There was a moment of annoyed silence, and then Aunt Ermy stomped into the dining room.
What with clearing off their messy dishes, resetting the crumb-strewn table, and dashing back and forth between recipe book and stove, the lunch was more than an hour in coming, a fact which bothered her not one bit.
When it was almost ready she started out the back door to look for Patrick, who’d disappeared somewhere in the vicinity of the barns.
Molly saw her before she came up to him.
Lisa Canning was dressed all in pale lilac, the pants fitting her perfect legs with nary a bulge or wrinkle, a scarf tied carelessly around her throat.
Molly ducked behind some hay bales, then edged closer, eavesdropping shamelessly on their conversation.
It was wrong. It was an invasion of privacy. It was irresistible.
“Where were you yesterday?” she was asking in her low, attractive voice. “I waited and waited. I thought we had decided we were going to meet.”
Patrick’s withdrawal was clear even before he spoke. “I had things to think about, Lisa,” he answered shortly, with less sympathy than he usually seemed to direct toward her.
“What things?” she demanded, pressing her lithe body closer to him until Molly wanted to scream. “I thought we’d made all the decisions that had to be made.”
“You made the decisions, Lisa,” he answered. “I neither agreed nor disagreed.”
Lisa moved away then, and from Molly’s vantage point she could see the anger in her beautiful eyes.
“I never thought you’d be like this.” Her voice was petulant.
“I’m not used to being jilted, Pat. If that’s what you’re doing.
Ever since that baby-faced little bitch of a wife came back you’ve been making excuses for not seeing me.
It wasn’t like that before she went away.
” She moved back to him, her slender body swaying seductively.
“Come on, Pat. You don’t love her. You’re just piqued that she’d have nothing to do with you, and you know it.
She’s a child, darling, and a spoiled one at that.
Why don’t you send her off to get a divorce and put an end to this charade?
And then we’d have time to learn whether there might be something for us? Don’t you think we deserve it?”
He pulled away from her. “I suppose it would be too much to ask if you’d leave me alone?” he asked coolly.
“Yes, it is! You can’t do this to me, playing the devoted lover one minute, the model husband the next. I want to know where I stand in your life! Are you going to divorce her?”
Molly held her breath, an impossible hope building inside her, but it was useless.
“Yes, I’m going to divorce her,” he said.
“But it doesn’t have a damned thing to do with you.
Look, Lisa, it’s been over a long time, and it wasn’t much to begin with.
We were both lonely, you and I, but we both know it was a mistake. ”
She stared up at him. “That brings me to the second question, though it sounds like you already answered it. Are you going to ask me to marry you?”
There was a long pause, and Molly almost felt sorry for her. “Lisa, I couldn’t afford you, and well you know it.” His voice was suddenly gentle.
She laughed unhappily. “How very flattering of you, Pat. The truth of the matter is that you don’t want to marry me.
And I think, if you were really honest with yourself, you’d admit that you don’t want to divorce that unfaithful wife of yours either.
There’s nothing you’d like better than to play love’s young dream with her, regardless of the fact that she’s ten years younger than you and she’s cheated on you with every man she could lay her greedy little hands on. ”
“She doesn’t have anything to do with you and me, and I’m not about to discuss her with you.”
“But there is no you and me. There hasn’t bear really, since before you married her. And there never will be.”
“No,” he said with great finality. “There never will be.”
She stared at him for a moment longer, then she reached up and ran her hand along Patrick’s face with a longing gesture.
“It’s a shame, darling,” she murmured. “It could have been marvelous.” She sauntered out the door with more self-assurance than Molly knew she possessed, and she felt a moment’s compassion for the woman.
Without another word Patrick turned and started toward the door.
Molly ducked back among the bales of hay, but she needn’t have bothered.
His mind was on other things, and, as she watched his closed face, she wondered what she had done to him, why things had gone so terribly wrong in that shadowy past, and she could have wept with frustration and nameless guilt.
It took her a moment to compose herself. She couldn’t very well spend the rest of the day out in the stable, and the conversation she had just overheard was having a belated effect on her. If he didn’t want Lisa Canning, then there might, just possibly, be a chance. For the future. For them.
She entered the kitchen close on Patrick’s heels, unable to keep a little bounce out of her steps.
“Oh, there you are,” she said blandly. “Lunch should be ready. We’re eating in the dining room for the time being.” She gestured to the table littered with dirty bowls, cutting boards, and cookbooks.
A brief smile lit his forbidding face. “You cooked it?”
“I did, indeed. And very tasty it will be, if I haven’t burned it looking for you.” She pulled the cast iron skillet out of the oven and noted with satisfaction the golden crust.
“I was in the barn,” he said, looking at her curiously and not without suspicion.
“Really?” she said ingenuously. “Well, that’s where I should have looked, I suppose. Would you call the others?”