you always sidle out the door like a shadow?” Adams lips tilted in the smallest of smiles. “Strange. Of all the things I remember about you, that isn’t one of them.”
Eden cast a startled look at Adams, but saw no hint of double entendre. “I wasn’t sidling. I wasn’t escaping.” Still caught in his embrace, she drew herself up to her proudest posture. She had grown taller through the years, but Adams was still taller. “I wanted to give you privacy with your family.”
By the suddenly solemn look that gave a hard edge to his features, she knew he realized she’d caught the fleeting moment of tension with Jefferson. In the same look she saw that an explanation would be a long time coming. If ever.
Secrets. There were secrets where once there had been only open trust. Perhaps it was another manifestation of the changes prison had wrought? The wedge a hard and alien life could drive into the heart of a family? Yet why with only Jefferson and not with Lincoln and Jackson?
It made no sense. But Eden knew it had been all too real.
“Stay, Eden,” Adams insisted. “My brothers and I will have plenty of time later for private talks. Being together as we are is like old times. I know better than anyone that what’s been done can’t be undone, and I know the choices of youth have changed all of us. For now, let’s not think of choices and what can’t be changed. Instead, let’s remember the way things were.”
“Hear! Hear!” Lincoln said quietly, but with his piercing gray gaze meeting his brother’s curiously.
“Yes,” Jackson joined in. Catching the spirit of Adams’ wishes, he snatched up his half-filled coffee cup. Holding it aloft as if it were a flute of champagne, with a slanted grin, he proposed a toast. “To the way things were.”
For a startled instant, no one moved. Then, one by one, with Eden leading the way, Adams and Lincoln and Jefferson each took up his own cup. Over a rumble of chuckles and the clatter of converging cups, Adams recalled another tradition from their past. “One Cade for all, and all Cades for one.”
In a continuation of that single move, he turned to Eden, his gaze touching hers, keeping it, and he added as he always had in the last of those youthful years, “And for Robbie.”
“For Robbie,” the younger Cades exclaimed, turning in concert, bowing with a natural gallantry rivaling that of their fictional heroes, Alexandre Dumas’ musketeers.
Adams called her Robbie now, and it seemed only fitting for the mood and the time it recalled. Eden hadn’t forgotten the hours she’d spent lying on sandy dunes basking in the sun, while Adams read the wonderful adventures aloud. No matter how many times they heard the stories, neither she nor the Cades ever seemed to tire of them. For her, the fascination was the beauty and the pageantry, and Adams’ voice. For the brothers, she always felt it was the camaraderie, the honor and the loyalty. And, perhaps, a gentle dream that offered shelter from a stringent, demanding life and the volatile wrath of their father.
She accepted their homage with learned grace. As she accepted, a look at Jefferson had her wondering almost sadly if changes wrought by choices and by deeds that could never be undone would make recapturing that innocent loyalty impossible.
“To Eden.”
Adams’ voice drew her from thoughts bordering on morose. Thoughts she mustn’t let color his homecoming. Looking up from her mesmerized study of the dark liquid in her cup, she found herself held in the snare of his fascinating eyes.
“Once our Robbie,” he said, lifting the cup higher. “Now the beautiful and exquisite Eden Claibourne.”
“To Eden,” the Cades called out in unison, with smiles alight and cups held high.
A twinkle in Jackson’s glance made her fearful for the safety of her cups. But instead of sending the delicate china crashing into the fireplace, he returned his to the silver tray. “Enough,” he declared with a wink at Eden. “If I drink any more of the River Walk brew, I won’t sleep for a week.”
“Since you met Inga the indefatigable, you haven’t slept in a week, anyway.”
Lincoln’s droll remark drew a spate of laughter and a comment from Jefferson. “By the way, Lincoln, what happened to sleepless in Belle Terre? With Alice, was it?”
With that bit of nonsense, the familiar wrangling began. For Eden it was truly like stepping into the past. A glance at Adams made her realize that even though he knew too little of his brothers’ lives now, he was nevertheless enjoying the banter.
For this short time memories of his exile and his father’s threatened health could be put aside. But all too soon, as she knew it must, the teasing lost its verve, and one by one the younger Cades fell as silent as their brother.
Leaving her place on the sofa, Eden wandered away, intent on setting herself apart as she sensed a time of serious discussion. Discussions in which even Robbie would be an intruder. She’d taken a seat at the window when the quiet ended.
It was Adams who brought to a close the thoughtful pause that threatened to stretch into an uncomfortable silence. “I called the hospital this morning.”
“Then you know.” Jefferson looked up from his intent study of the intricate patterns of the aged Persian carpet.
“That Gus will be released tomorrow with a team of nurses to care for him?” Adams nodded and raked a hand across the back of his neck as if he would rub away the tension. “Yes, I know.” Bleakly, he met his brother’s waiting gaze. “It was disturbing to be required to prove I have the right to ask.
“My first thought was that Gus knew I was coming, and it was by his decree that I would be denied information. Then I realized that none of the names of the staff were familiar. Doc Wilson has retired?”
“Three years ago,” Jackson supplied with regret in his tone. “One of us should have remembered to tell you.”
“In the scope of all that’s happened, it doesn’t matter.” Adams shrugged aside the oversight. He knew that in the thirteen years he’d been away, there would have been many changes he couldn’t know about. “From what the doctor told me, Gus really isn’t much improved, and there’s nothing more the hospital can do for him that the nurses can’t do at…at Belle Reve.”
Eden saw in his brothers’ faces that each recognized Adams’ reluctance to call Belle Reve home. The sorrow she saw spoke of the memory that it was the eldest of Gus Cade’s sons who loved their father and their home the most.
Adams, Gus’ whipping boy. The devoted son who bore his father’s wrath without comment or rancor. The gentleman brawler, who laughed his way through countless battles and never held a grudge. Adams, the unexpected and tender lover who, on the night of her debut, had risen from their sandy bower to ride into Rabb Town, the isolated settlement of the Rabbs, the Cades’ most bitter rivals. The beloved brother and friend who had inexplicably beaten Junior Rabb within an inch of his life, then silently endured five years in prison, the eternal damnation of his father and exile from his family.
An act without recent provocation and far too costly. None of it made sense, and Adams had never offered any explanation, never claimed any defense. Instead, for a night of strange retribution, he had lost all he loved and all that mattered in his young life.
“I couldn’t believe it then,” Eden murmured on a low sigh.
