known as Auntie Od, was all ruffles and gathers and eye-popping prints, her white hair curling softly about her ears, which currently sported enamel daisies the size of teacups. Auntie Od was known for her outlandish earrings and her sweetness. The latter imbued both her smile and her eyes as her gaze lit on the newcomer.
“Reeves!”
He could not help laughing at her delight, a patent condition for the old dear.
“Hello, Aunt Odelia.” Going at once to kiss her temple, he held out a hand to Mags, who sat beside her sister on the prized Chesterfield settee that Grandma Augusta had brought back from her honeymoon trip to London back in 1932.
“Surprised to see you here this time of day,” Mags stated.
Swiveling, Reeves bussed her forehead, bemused by the strength of her grip on his fingers. “Honeybees,” he offered succinctly.
“What about them, dear?” Hypatia inquired calmly from her seat in the high-backed Victorian armchair facing the door through which he had entered. Its twin sat facing her, with its back to that door.
He leaned across the piecrust table to kiss her cool cheek, Mags still squeezing his hand. “They’ve invaded my attic.”
He quickly gave them the details, how the nanny had phoned in a panic that morning, shrieking that she and Gilli were under attack by “killer bees.” Racing home from his job as vice president of a national shipping company, he had found both of them locked into the nanny’s car in the drive. Inside the house, a dozen or more honeybees had buzzed angrily. Nanny had climbed up on a stool to investigate a stain on the kitchen ceiling. Hearing a strange hum, she’d poked at it. Something sticky had plopped onto the counter, and bees had swarmed through the newly formed hole in the Sheetrock.
Reeves had called an exterminator, who had refused even to come out. Instead, he’d been referred to a local “bee handler,” who had arrived outfitted head-to-toe in strange gear to tell him more than he’d ever wanted to know about the habits of the Texas honeybee. A quick inspection had revealed that thousands, perhaps millions, of the tiny creatures had infested his attic. It was going to take days to remove them all, and then his entire ceiling, which was saturated with honey, all of the insulation and much of the supporting structure of his roof would have to be torn out and replaced.
“Oh, my!” Odelia exclaimed, gasping. “The bees must have frightened Gilli.”
He spared her a smile before turning back to Hypatia, the undisputed authority at Chatam House. “Hardly. She wanted to know if she could keep them as pets.” Gilli had been begging for a pet since her birthday, but he didn’t have time to take care of a pet and so had staunchly refused.
“What can we do?” Hypatia asked, as pragmatic as ever.
“What you always do,” he told her, smiling. “Provide sanctuary. I’m afraid we’re moving in on you.”
“Well, of course, you are,” she said with a satisfied smile.
“It could be weeks,” he warned, “months, even.”
She waved that away with one elegant motion of her hand. She knew as well as he did that checking into a hotel with a three-year-old as rambunctious as Gilli would have been sure disaster, but he’d have chosen that option before moving in with his father, second stepmother and their daughter, his baby sister, who would soon turn four.
“There is another problem,” he went on. “Nanny quit. She’d been complaining that Gilli was too much for her.” Actually, she’d been complaining that he did not spend enough time with Gilli, but he was a single father with a demanding job. Besides, he paid a generous salary. “I guess the bees were the final straw. She just walked out.”
“That seems to be a habit where you’re concerned,” drawled an unexpected voice. “Women walking out.”
Reeves whirled to find a familiar figure in slim jeans and a brown turtleneck sweater slouching in the chair opposite Hypatia. A piquant face topped with a wispy fringe of medium gold bangs beamed a cheeky grin at him. His spirits dropped like a stone in a well, even as a new realization shook him. This was not the Anna Miranda of old. This Anna Miranda was a startlingly attractive version, as attractive in her way as Marissa was in hers. Oh, no, this was not the same old brat. This was worse. Much worse.
“Hello, Stick,” Anna Miranda said. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
“I’m so sorry, dear,” Hypatia cooed. “We forgot our manners in all the excitement. Reeves, you know Anna Miranda.”
Reeves frowned as if he’d just discovered the keys to his beloved first car glued to his locker door. Again. Anna smiled, remembering how she’d punished him for refusing her a ride in that car. Foolishly, she’d pined for his attention from the day that she’d first met him right here in this house soon after his parents had divorced. Even at ten, he’d had no use for an unhappy rebellious girl, especially one four years younger, and she had punished him for it, all the way through her freshman and his senior year in high school. While she’d agonized through her unrequited crush, he had pierced her hardened heart with his disdain. High school hadn’t been the same after he’d graduated. Despite his coolness, she had felt oddly abandoned.
In the twelve or thirteen years since, she had caught numerous glimpses of Reeves Leland around town. Buffalo Creek simply wasn’t a big enough town that they could miss each other forever. Besides, they were members of the same church, though she confined her participation to substituting occasionally in the children’s Sunday school. In all those years, they had never exchanged so much as a word, and suddenly, sitting here in his aunts’ parlor, she hadn’t been able to bear it a moment longer.
Reeves put on a thin smile, greeting her with a flat version of the name his much younger self had often chanted in a provoking, exasperated singsong. “Anna Miranda.”
Irrational hurt flashed through her, and she did the first thing that came to mind. She stuck out her tongue. He shook his head.
“Still the brat, I see.”
The superior tone evoked an all too familiar urge in her. To counter it, she grinned and crossed her legs, wagging a booted foot. “Better that than a humorless stick-in-the-mud, if you ask me.”
“Has anyone ever?” he retorted. “Asked your opinion, I mean.”
His response stinging, she let her gaze drop away nonchalantly, but Reeves had always been able to read her to a certain extent.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
Before Anna had to say anything, Odelia chirped in with a reply to Reeves’s tacky question. “Why, yes, of course,” Odelia declared gaily, waving a lace hanky she’d produced from somewhere. “We were just asking Anna Miranda’s opinion on the announcements for the spring scholarship auction. Weren’t we, sisters?”
“Invitations,” Hypatia corrected pointedly. “An announcement implies that we are compelling attendance rather than soliciting it.”
Anna’s mouth quirked up at one corner. As if the Chatam triplets did not command Buffalo Creek society, such society as a city of thirty thousand residents could provide, anyway. With Dallas just forty-five miles to the north, Buffalo Creek’s once great cotton center had disappeared, reducing the city to little more than a bedroom community of the greater Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.
