Bess, being one of them, who couldn’t take more than a few sips of anything remotely alcoholic without feeling compelled to make a clean breast of any and all past sins and transgressions, whether minor or major. He had no idea which category Margo fell into, although he had his suspicions.
The best way to handle this, he decided, was gracefully. He just hoped he remembered how. “You’re that much older than she is?”
The guileless remark caught her off guard. And then she laughed, completely charmed by a man she could tell wasn’t trying to be charming. Despite the very handsome figure he cut in his tailor-made tuxedo, Bruce Reed was very obviously just struggling not to commit any unforgivable social error on this very important day in his son’s life.
Here was a man, she decided, she’d really love to spend some time with.
“Oh, Bruce, you are good for me.” When her eyes swept over him, Bruce felt a good deal warmer than he had just a moment earlier. “The truth is, I’m seventeen years older than Melanie.” Margo paused, quickly subtracting the months that separated her birthday from her daughter’s. “Seventeen and a half, to be precise.”
The figure struck very close to home. It occurred to Bruce that they had an unofficial bond, Margo and he, both becoming parents before they reached their twentieth birthday.
“My wife was almost nineteen when Lance was born. She was five months older than I was.” He was unaware of the fond smile that took possession of his lips as he allowed himself, for the space of a heartbeat, to be transported to another time and place.
But Margo wasn’t. What she didn’t understand was why his smile sent such a ripple of bittersweet longing through her.
“I always told her I had a fondness for older women,” Bruce said. A ream of memories tumbled through his mind and he laughed. “She never cared for that remark.” And then he sobered slightly as the sadness, even after all this time, came to embrace him. “But she never got to be old enough for that to become an issue.” And then he realized he probably sounded as if he were rambling. Margo deserved an explanation. “My wife died while she was still very young.”
And he was still in love with her. Margo was touched by the sentiment she saw in his eyes.
She supposed that the appropriate response to his revelation was something along the lines of offering her condolences, but somehow she had a feeling he didn’t want to hear empty words from a stranger. They wouldn’t change what was.
Instead she told him what she felt. “Your wife was a very lucky woman.”
Surprised, Bruce raised a brow. How could a woman who died too young to see the autumn of her years, too young to see her child reach his destiny, be considered lucky? “What makes you say that?”
“The way your face lit up when you mentioned her.” She couldn’t help but envy Lance’s mother. Though gone, the woman still retained her husband’s love. It said a lot about the woman. And a lot about the man who loved her. “The most important ingredient in a person’s life is love, and it appears to me that she had it in abundance.”
Yes, he thought. Ellen had. He couldn’t remember a day when he hadn’t loved her. It seemed to him that they had always been together, right from the very beginning. Whatever had come before that time was a blur. Just like life without her had become.
As they turned on the floor, he caught a whiff of Margo’s fragrance again. It sharpened his senses and he smiled at the woman in his arms. “You’re very perceptive.”
Margo took her due without vanity. Perception was closely interwoven with her other survival skills. “So I’ve been told.”
She was open rather than coy. It was an honest trait. He valued honesty a great deal. “Well, you’re certainly not shy and retiring.”
Oh, but I am. The thought came to her from nowhere, standing like a lost soul in the dark. It’s just something that I can’t allow to take over anymore. Or even be noticed. Very carefully, Margo kept her thoughts from registering on her face. She’d become very good at that over the years.
“You know my daughter,” she reminded him lightly. “Would you really have expected me to be?”
She had a point. They were very alike, mother and daughter. And yet he detected that there were minor differences. For one, Margo was far more worldly than her daughter. And perhaps, he mused, less apt to be hurt. “No, but I have to admit that I didn’t expect anyone quite so effervescent, either.”
“Effervescent?” Delighted, she laughed lightly. “Oh, my dear Mr. Reed, I’m in fairly low gear now.” She looked toward Melanie and felt that same tightening of her throat she’d felt when she’d walked into the change room to see her daughter in her wedding gown for the first time. “I think that realizing things just refuse to remain the same, no matter how much you’d really like them to, is responsible for subduing me.”
Because the same bittersweetness resided within him, Bruce recognized the signs. The feeling of kinship grew as the music around them faded. Bruce hardly noticed. He was hearing another melody, one within his head.
Continuing to move to this silent music, he tried to tease her mood away. “If this is low gear, then heaven help the man who gets you in high gear.”
He really was very sweet, Margo thought. And whether he realized it or not, he was doing tremendous things for her ego. She needed that right now, as the loneliness insisted on closing in no matter how hard she tried to block it.
“Heaven has very little to do with it. Or me.” Her wink was positively bawdy, Bruce thought, feeling its effect as it simmered over his long frame. “Or so my father said the last time I saw him.”
Looking into her eyes, he almost thought he saw sadness there. But everything in her manner belied the discovery. He had to be mistaken.
“Which was?” he prodded.
If she closed her eyes, Margo could still see the cold dark look of disapproval, of condemnation in Egan McCloud’s green eyes as he ordered her to leave. No instrument known to man could have begun to measure the depth of that cold.
She took a breath before answering, her smile never faltering. She’d begun to show at four months. By five, her father no longer believed that it was a weight problem. “Four months before that beautiful young woman in the bridal dress was born.”
As she spoke, Bruce could feel her body stiffening. It was infinitesimal, but he was positive he detected it. Having gone through his own schism with Lance, he would have thought his sympathies would have been with her father. They weren’t “You haven’t seen him since then?”
She shook her head, wishing the memory didn’t hurt so much. She was a grown woman, for heaven’s sake, with a grown child of her own. When did she finally cease regretting that she’d never been allowed to be Daddy’s little girl, not even for the space of five minutes?
“Not alive.” She strove to say the words without emotion. She’d returned for the funeral. And never shed a tear. She’d refused to. “He wanted nothing to do with me.” The shrug was careless, as a creamy white shoulder rose and fell beneath his glance. “He was a very God-fearing man, and I think he saw me as a terrible failing on his part.”
She believed that, Bruce realized. His sympathies stacked themselves completely
