“He hasn’t wanted anything to do with the farm since he was five years old. Hank and Noreen are lucky he didn’t run away and join a circus. Unless you give up farming and move to D.C., there is no future in that man. You can hear it in his voice.”
Lois’s words highlighted something about Trey that had bothered Max from the moment he’d spoken to her. Trey had no Southern accent. Kelly didn’t have much of one, but Trey’s was nonexistent. His voice was completely flat—as if the drawl had been purged from his soul. And he must have grown up with one, as Max had yet to meet a Harris other than Trey without a y’all lingering somewhere on the lips.
And if he’d eradicated the accent, why hadn’t he started going by some name other than Trey, which was a constant reminder that he was the third Henry William Harris? Max tried to look at Trey in his charcoal-gray suit out of the corner of her eye, but the side view gave her a headache. Miss Lois was watching her with raised brows when Max pulled her eyes away. “I’m not watching him for any future, Miss Lois—or any future beyond him being my new landlord, but...he doesn’t seem all that upset.” That wasn’t right; something was clearly wrong with Trey. “Or at least not upset about the death of his father.”
“Trey and his daddy never did rub along, and Hank didn’t care until it was too late.”
Was Trey thinking about his lost relationship with his father as he stared at the cold body lying on satin? Or was he irritated that he was saddled with a farm he didn’t want left to him from a father he had no affection for?
Reading any emotion beyond stress into the tightness of Trey’s eyes was nearly impossible.
“So long as he doesn’t try to sell the farm out from under me, his relationship with Hank doesn’t affect me.” But even as she said those words, she couldn’t take her eyes off the tension evident in Trey’s neck as he ducked out the door. Max told herself that Miss Lois wouldn’t notice and slipped out the door behind him.
* * *
TREY TURNED AROUND at the sound of someone stumbling and swearing under their breath behind him. The voice was soft, so he’d figured it was a woman, but he had expected his cousin Nicole to offer up another slippery round of tears, not solid, stable Max. She hesitated a little, then put her hand on his shoulder, her palm warm even through his suit jacket. He shivered. He should have grabbed his coat.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“You already said that.” He struggled to keep the anger in his voice in check. He wasn’t angry with her. In truth, he wasn’t even angry at his father right now, but the pressures of pretending to be sad were wearing on him. And then there were the pokes from stories people had about his father. When he’d made a face at one such tale, Aunt Lois had given him a look and told him not to speak ill of the dead.
Max’s fingers curled around his shoulder, their strength pressing into his collarbone. Somehow, the simple gesture was more reassuring than any enveloping hug he’d received from his relatives. “And I’m still sorry—for Hank’s death and for whatever drove you outside.”
“My cousins were beginning to tell stories of going to the Orange County Speedway and what a grand time they all had, especially after my dad got really drunk and his insults got both creative and unintelligible.” Trey could picture the scene, including his father throwing beer cans until he was tossed out.
“I imagine what seems like a funny story among cousins is less funny to his children.” She hadn’t moved her hand from his shoulder, so he could feel her step closer to him in the movement of the joints in her fingers. Even in the dark, through his shirt, her fingers felt sturdy. Solid. Stable. He wanted her to press up against him so he could feel her strong, purposeful body up against his. To be able to go home with her and draw patterns in her freckles as he forgot himself in her body.
But she was his tenant and he was at his father’s funeral, so his thoughts would remain thoughts only.
“You say that like there could be something funny about the belligerent drunk.” Unexpected sexual frustration made the words come out with more anger than he’d meant.
“When I knew him, he was only belligerent.”
The bald honesty of her statement forced a laugh out of him. “And yet you still have some affection in your voice.”
Her fingers tensed on his shoulder. “I won’t force it on you.”
“Why?”
“Why won’t I force it on you?”
He turned to face her and her fingers slipped off his jacket. He wished she had kept them there. “Why the affection?”
She shrugged. “For five years we shared the farm, and worked together some. He wasn’t a very good farmer, but Hank liked to have a cup of coffee with me in the mornings and hear what I was doing to the land. He even came to the farmers’ market occasionally. It’s hard not feel some measure of affection.”
“I lived with him for eighteen years and I managed.” Even in the dark, he could tell he’d startled her again. And again, he had the inkling that he’d said something he shouldn’t have, yet knowing the words that would come out of his mouth next would make him sound like a petulant child didn’t stop him. “Despite what you and every person in that room want to think, my father should have been tossed into an unmarked grave with a bucket full of lime and forgotten about.” Max’s mouth fell open, but Trey wasn’t going to back down. “And if I was in control of this funeral instead of Aunt Lois and Kelly, that’s exactly what would happen.”
Trey turned on the hard heels of his dress shoes and stomped back to the viewing, away from one person who had pleasant memories of his father and toward a crowd of them. He would shake hands, accept hugs and look sad as was required, but there would at least be one person who would know the truth of how he felt. And somehow, it was important that the one person was Max.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE FUNERAL WAS just as awful as Trey had imagined it would be, although in ways he didn’t have the creativity to have foreseen. First, there was the knowledge that he’d had a near temper tantrum at the viewing and the bland look Max gave him wasn’t enough to pretend it hadn’t happened. Second, the church was packed, and not just with family members. The mayors of Oxford and Roxboro were both there, along with one Durham County commissioner, proving that you could be a drunk and an asshole and still have dignitaries at your funeral so long as you were from an established family. The mayor of Roxboro was perfectly polite, but the mayor of Oxford was determined to talk with Trey about upcoming legislation and its effects on small towns. Trey had been prepared to talk with family members he had no interest in and express sorrow he didn’t feel to people whose names he couldn’t remember, but feigning interest in a rider on a farm bill had not been on his agenda.
The preacher droned on and on about our reward in heaven—though Trey wondered how many people were picturing his father someplace more tropical—until finally a cell phone ringing in one of his great-aunt’s enormous purses and the subsequent digging through said purse derailed the preacher’s lack of train of thought. “God bless both the phone and the purse that ate Atlanta,” Aunt Lois muttered to Uncle Garner, then gave Kelly a dirty look when he snickered.
A slight black man with glasses and a trim beard was waiting by his car with what appeared to be a pie in his hands when Trey made it past the crowds of mourners. “Jerome, buddy, I didn’t expect to see you here. Thank
