anyway. The case number that Eliza had memorized from the letter that she’d shredded. Taking a bottle of water from the small refrigerator under a counter across from them, Mrs. Carpenter handed it to Eliza, asked if she’d be okay for a few minutes and, at Eliza’s nod, left the room.
Eliza wasn’t okay. Her fingers shook so badly, she dropped the cap of the water bottle after opening it. And in her black pants and white cropped jacket, Eliza dropped to her knees to reach under the desk it rolled under.
Back in her seat, she pulled out her phone. Read Pierce’s text telling her that he was home and that everything was on course for social hour.
He didn’t include any silly emoticons or anything that could indicate how very much in love he was with his wife.
But those words, reassuring her, read like an avowal of undying love.
Longing for the life she’d built, the adrenaline rush of being in her own parlor with guests who were happy with her accommodations, happy with the hors d’oeuvres she’d served them, Eliza wished she’d stayed home. Auditioning, traveling across the country like this...it had been a mistake. She should be home, basking in the knowledge that when her guests retired for the night, she’d be going to bed with Pierce. To fall asleep in the arms of the only man she’d ever loved.
She wanted to answer the text. Typed. Deleted. Typed. Deleted. She couldn’t lie to him. Couldn’t tell him where she was. Or why she was there.
She hated not being able to tell him.
Fear shot through her as she considered the Pandora’s box she’d opened.
But she hadn’t opened it.
Her baby boy had opened it. He’d asked about her.
There was no way she could ignore any possibility that he needed her.
No way Pierce would want her to.
And no way she could tell him that she’d given away the only child he would ever father.
LILY ELIZABETH MCCONNELL had been married thirty years. “Not long enough,” the fifty-something, salt-and-pepper-haired woman told Pierce as she stood, a china plate holding a couple of Eliza’s miniquiches in her hands. “You take it for granted, you know?”
Her eyes were glassy with emotion, but her voice was calm. Pierce respected the control. “I do know,” he said wholeheartedly. “Sad, isn’t it, that you have to lose something to realize what it meant to you?”
He hadn’t meant to speak that last bit out loud. But the woman’s need tapped into the vulnerability he normally had buried so deep he could pretend it didn’t exist.
He was always a bit off when Eliza was gone.
The well-dressed widow tilted her head. “You’ve lost someone, too?” she asked.
He’d walked right into that one.
Music played softly from good-quality speakers resourcefully hidden among the genuine antiques that filled—and garnished—the room. Classical piano. He recognized Pachelbel’s Canon only because it was Eliza’s favorite and she had what seemed like a million renditions of it.
He didn’t want to offend the guest, but he wished the couple in the corner enjoying the free wine were more open to socializing. Or that the families he’d been told had checked in would come downstairs.
“I have,” he told Mrs. McConnell, taking a sip from the glass of iced lemon water he’d poured before leaving his and Eliza’s private section of the mansion to do his duties as host.
There. They could have mutual understanding, as the strangers they were, and move on. Glancing over her shoulder, he noted the still-empty stairway. No families coming down yet.
Lily Elizabeth McConnell seemed as interested in his hand as he was in the staircase.
“You’re wearing a wedding ring,” she said when she caught him noticing her stare.
Awkward. And the reason he hated these things.
“Yet you’re here alone. Did you lose your wife?”
He knew how to parry a come-on. And did. Every single time he was faced with one. This wasn’t a come-on. If the woman’s tone hadn’t told him so, the pain in her eyes did.
“No,” he said. No playing with fate on that one. “I just assumed everyone here knew... Eliza’s away being a contestant on Family Secrets every weekend this month. This is our home, but the bed-and-breakfast, that’s all her doing. I’m strictly support staff when it comes to Rose Harbor.”
He helped her with the books, too. She ran all decisions by him. But the house was hers. Eliza had been running the successful B and B long before he’d come back into her picture.
Mrs. McConnell nodded. Looked down at her sensible, almost flat black shoes. He wasn’t the most sensitive guy around, but even he could tell that her pain, in that moment, was acute.
“What about kids?” he blurted. People her age relied on their kids. Didn’t they?
She shook her head. And he’d have gladly escaped to keep from saying anything else that didn’t help. “We... Harley and I...we never had kids. It wasn’t that we didn’t want them. It just never happened. And neither of us wanted to pursue other avenues. We figured if we were meant to be parents, we’d get pregnant.”
Were it him, he’d have pursued every avenue there was and any dirt lane, too. But this wasn’t about him. “I get what you mean about not being meant to be a parent,” he said before realizing that they’d ventured outside guest-welcoming territory.
“You and your wife don’t have children?” she asked. And he just stood there. Staring at her.
Eventually he shook his head.
And as though fate had stepped in to save him for once, footsteps bounded down the stairs. Mrs. McConnell took the interruption as an opportunity to move back to the food station that Margie, Eliza’s assistant for the past ten years, had laid out.
Maybe she thought he and Eliza had lost a child. He had, after all, told her he’d lost someone.
Lord knew why he’d said that. He’d never lost anyone he was close to.
His mother had taken off before he was old enough to remember her. His old man was gone, but since he’d been drunk so much of Pierce’s life, that hadn’t been a big surprise. At least he’d been a nice drunk.
Pierce had had no reason to commiserate with the woman’s loss as though he understood. Living without Eliza all those years—that had been his choice. He’d consciously opted not to contact her when he’d gotten back from the war in Iraq, a changed man. One who’d been hit by an explosive device that left him sterile.
After going by her place in Savannah, where they’d grown up, finding out that she’d moved to South Carolina the summer he left and that
