“TDH?” Travis asked.
“Tall, dark, and handsome,” Russell said. “This beer is good. I’ve never had it before.” He looked at Travis. “Want one?”
“Only if it doesn’t have hemlock in it,” Travis muttered as Russell, smiling, got a beer out, opened it, and handed it to him.
Travis drank half of it in one gulp, then dropped down onto a stool. He looked back at Kim as though to say he was ready to receive more of her verbal lashes. “I thought I was watching over you,” he said.
“Ah, right, how noble. ‘Watching over me.’ ‘Looking out for me.’ Is that right?”
“I thought so,” Travis said and drank more beer.
Russell started making a sandwich for Travis. Neither of them had eaten since breakfast.
“So now,” Kim said, “you returned to Edilean not for me—oh no, not for me—but because your mother called you.”
“Actually,” Russell said as he cut the bread, “she called my mother and told her.”
“Even better,” Kim said. “Lucy Merritt or Cooper or Maxwell called . . . What is her name?” she asked Russell.
“Cooper and Merritt are made up. Her name is Lucy Jane Travis Maxwell of the Boston Travises. She got the name and education but none of the family’s old money. My mother is Barbara Pendergast of no money and no name. Just hard work.”
“Thank you,” Kim said. She looked back at Travis as he bit into the sandwich Russell had made for him. He looked like a man walking up the gallows steps. “Whatever the name, the point is that you didn’t come back for me, but for your mother.”
Travis got up to get two more beers.
“Because of Jecca’s wedding you happened to see me and . . . one thing led to another.”
Russell looked at Travis in question.
“She means inviting me to stay in her guesthouse,” Travis said.
Russell nodded and looked back at Kim as though to say the floor was hers.
“You moved into my guesthouse and talked to me so much about friendship that I was beginning to think you were gay. And you—”
Russell gave a snort of laughter.
“I never meant—” Travis began.
“How’s Leslie?” Kim asked, letting every millimeter of her anger show.
Travis looked down at his sandwich.
She picked up the ring and looked at Russell. “When I said I had a boyfriend, he almost had a grand mal seizure of old-fashioned jealousy.”
“I did not,” Travis said as he started to defend himself. But every word Kim was saying was true. “I was shocked, that’s all,” he mumbled.
“Shocked that I had a boyfriend?” Kim said. “You are . . .” Her eyes widened in disbelief. “You’ve watched me—stalked me—enough that you knew when I had a boyfriend or not.” It was a statement, not a question.
Travis wouldn’t have answered that if someone had set his feet on fire. That his mother had listened to Edilean gossip and told him about Kim on nearly every call was beside the point. It suddenly went through his mind to wonder if it was a coincidence that she called just when Kim was getting serious about some guy. And she called when there was going to be a wedding next door to her where Kim was a bridesmaid. His mother had called Penny—who she’d always disliked—and it was his secretary who got him to go to Edilean ASAP. Had it been up to Travis, he might have postponed going to Edilean, but Penny set everything up. Right now it seemed as though the two women had worked together to get Travis to Edilean at a time when he was sure to see Kim again. But that couldn’t be true. Surely, all of it was coincidence.
Kim’s hands were in fists and she had to turn away for a moment to catch her breath. “You thought . . .” she said softly. “You thought that since you’re a big city lawyer and you were born into great wealth, that you know more about life than I do.”
“Kim, I never thought that,” Travis said as he put down his sandwich. “It wasn’t like that at all.”
“You assumed that I was a naive, simple, small town girl who was so desperate to get married that I couldn’t see the truth about some guy I was dating regularly.”
“Kim, you’re not being fair,” Travis said as he came off the stool. “Borman was a real bastard. He conned Carla into giving him that ring, saying he was going to give it to you when he asked you to marry him. But then he pawned it. I—we—think that he was going to say he knew nothing about the ring and let Carla take the blame.”