Not for the world did she want to hurt her aunt’s feelings. But Beth had to be made to understand. “I don’t want you encouraging him to stay.”
Beth laughed and shook her head. “He doesn’t need my encouragement, dear. He’s come all this way on his own.” She sighed the way she did when she read the last page of a good romance novel. “Just to see you.”
Agitated, frustrated, Rose began to pace. “But I don’t want to see him.”
Beth gave her a funny little look, becoming serious. Her voice was soft, almost hypnotic in its sincerity. “Yes, you do.”
This was hard enough on her without having to argue about it. “Aunt Beth.”
Beth had no children of her own, aside from a grown stepson by one of her late husbands. Gregory was in Chile on an oil rigger. She’d never had an opportunity to mother him, so she focused all that untapped motherly instinct on Rose.
“Give it some time, dear. Away from the others. There’s a real spark between the two of you. I saw it the second you looked at each other. Hell, I felt it clear across the room.”
Rose didn’t ordinarily contradict anyone in her family, but her own need to survive had changed some of the rules. “You were in the other room the second we looked at each other,” she pointed out.
As with most of her life, Beth shifted course to accommodate the current. “Like I said, I felt it. And the spark went on long enough for me to walk into the room.” She took her niece’s hand between both of hers, forcing Rose to look at her. “Sweetheart, don’t let some silly feud that has nothing to do with either one of you ruin what could be a beautiful future.”
Rose sighed, pulling her hand away. “It’s not just the feud, Aunt Beth. And even if it was, it’s not silly to my father.”
Beth snorted, waving a dismissive hand. “Archy always was incredibly loyal to all the wrong things.” She slipped a conspiratorial arm around Rose’s slim shoulders, reaching up a little as she did so. Rose was a good three inches taller than her. “Darling, do you think that if the woman he loved was a Carson, he’d let some ancient feud stand in his way?” She laughed, remembering the man her brother used to be before stability and age had forced him to bury his wild streak. “Not when he was Matt’s age. Your father was a hellion back then. If he’d fallen for a Carson—”
“But he didn’t,” Rose pointed out. “I did.” And that made all the difference in the world.
Beth smiled from ear to ear, resting her case. “Uhhuh, see, you admit it.”
The woman had tricked her, Rose thought. She might be eccentric, but that didn’t mean Beth wasn’t crafty. “Maybe,” she partially conceded. “But that doesn’t mean that I don’t realize it’s a mistake.”
The look in Beth’s eyes, as violet as Rose’s, became dreamy as she remembered some of her earlier marriages and affairs.
“Love is never a mistake, dear. You’re like Romeo and Juliet.” She gave her a confident look. “Except you’re going to have a happier ending.”
Rose could have sworn Beth was making her a promise, but that was impossible. No one could promise that. She knew better.
“No, we’re just going to have an ending,” she said firmly. “Starting here and now.”
Beth opened the door and was already beginning to walk away. “Can’t hear you, dear. You must be talking into my bad ear.”
Rose raised a suspicious brow. “You told me it was the other ear yesterday.”
Beth turned toward her, unfazed. “These things have a tendency to switch, Rose, honey. You know how eccentric I am.”
Moving quickly, Rose placed herself in front of her aunt. Beth wasn’t going to leave the room until she promised not to interfere.
“Aunt Beth, do you remember the details of the feud?”
“Remember it?” She laughed. “It was drummed into my head almost every day when I was a child. I was ten years old before I realized it wasn’t one of Aesop’s fables.”
Rose took hold of her aunt’s broader shoulders to hold her in place. “All right, then, remember how Jace Carson proposed to the mayor’s daughter just because he thought she was going to have his baby? He didn’t love her, but he was ready to do the honorable thing.”
Beth held up a finger, interrupting. “He didn’t, though. The baby turned out to be the gardener’s. The mayor’s daughter was afraid her father wouldn’t approve of him, so she kept it a secret until she couldn’t contain it any longer, then blamed Jace. But everything turned out all right, except for poor Lou Lou.” She’d always wanted to write a play about the feud and play the part of Lou Lou Wainwright, the woman who committed suicide when she found she couldn’t marry her lifelong sweetheart, Jace Carson, and started off the feud.
Beth was straying off the path. Rose quickly redirected her attention to what she was trying to say. “The point is, Jace was going to marry her to do the right thing.”
Beth looked at her niece, trying to second-guess her. “And you’re afraid that if Matt knows, that’s what he’s going to do.”
“Exactly.”
Funny how two people could be in love, Beth thought, and still be so blind about the other person. It rather reminded her of the way she and Garrison had been about each other.
Beth quickly caught herself before her thoughts took her off in another direction.
“Not that I don’t think your young man isn’t honorable, dear, but I don’t think anyone could make him do what he didn’t want to do.”
“That’s just the point,” Rose insisted. “He’d want to be honorable.”
Beth cocked her head, trying to follow Rose’s thinking. “And you don’t want him honorable?”
“I don’t want him marrying me to be honorable, or to give the baby a name.” She swung around to face Beth as she made her point. “I want him to marry me because he loves me, because he wants a baby with me, not because he accepts me for his wife because I happen to be the mother of his baby. Do you see the difference, Aunt Beth?”
“Yes, I do. And if you don’t think that that boy loves you down to the soles of his worn cowboy boots, then you and I need to have a serious conversation.”
Rose held up her hand. “No, no more talking. Please. I just want him to leave so I can get on with my life.”
Beth was thoroughly convinced that young people didn’t know how to love these days. They kept insisting on getting in their own way.
“Now that I’ve had a gander at that boy, Rose, it doesn’t seem like much of a life without him.”
Before Rose could launch into another argument, Beth left the den and swept majestically into the living room.
She beamed down at Matt, who immediately rose in his seat. Good looking and polite. She knew a great catch when she saw one. The thing of it was, to make Rose realize it, too.
“Sorry to leave you alone for so long, Matt.” Beth saw that he’d opened the gold-bound book on the coffee table and had been leafing through it. She jumped at her opportunity. “Oh, you’ve found my scrapbook.”
Nostalgia had her sinking down beside him on the sofa, ready to page through the book with him.
Only sheer will restrained Matt from doing a double take. The page opened in front of him was of an apparently nude, nubile woman who had strategically arranged feathers to cover all the important places. He looked from