The Happiness Pact. Liz Flaherty
Even my sense of adventure has limits.”
By the time she had her seat belt unfastened, Tucker was opening her door for her. She stared at him. “What’s this? The last time you opened a door for me was when I fell out of a tree and broke my arm.”
“I had to then. It was our tree and I felt guilty because I might have pushed you a little. Now I’m doing it because it’s part of the adventure.” He led the way to the back door of the huge house and opened it for her, too. “Don’t get used to it.”
The kitchen of the Hall was outdated and gloomy, even more than the one at Seven Pillars had been before Libby gutted it. Frowning at the worn linoleum, she was glad she didn’t have to cook here. “I thought you had the Hall remodeled last year.”
“We did, but we left the kitchen so that whoever ended up buying the hall could oversee its design.” He pushed open a door to their left. “This is the breakfast room, but the dining room is a nightmare in formality, so we’re eating here.”
“Oh.” The space was charming, with yellow walls, white-painted trim and a hardwood floor. A small round table sat in front of the large mullioned window, dressed in white linen and set with what Libby was certain was Royal Copenhagen china and sterling silver flatware. Not that she had anything like it at the tearoom.
“Have a seat.” Tucker pulled out a chair for her, then sat across the table. “Colby, one of the college kids who works summers and vacations at the plant, is studying culinary arts, and this semester is French cuisine. I think today we are his term paper. He was hiding in the pantry when we came in and will be serving any minute now. Wine?” He held up the bottle at his elbow. “It’s not French. I hope that’s not a problem.”
“Not at all.” Libby recognized the label from Sycamore Hill, the local winery. She served their wine at private parties in the tearoom, but beyond the specifications of red and white, she didn’t know one from another. “Actually.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Actually?”
“I’d rather have ice water. With lemon.”
His eyes lit, and his smile broadened. “I thought maybe. Wait here.”
He was back in a couple of minutes, carrying two glasses and a pitcher of ice water garnished with lemon slices. “Colby assured me that drinking l’eau glacée avec citron with our meal wouldn’t lower his grade.”
“Well, I’m impressed. The only French I know is merci beaucoup, which I only know because the French teacher at the high school comes to the tearoom for lunch every Saturday and she says that. Quiche is a French word, too, and I say that a lot. Every now and then someone will say ‘kwitchee,’ and I’ll have to stop myself from doing that the rest of the day.”
“Don’t be too impressed. Colby had to say it to me three times before I got it even close to right—he kept flinching at my pronunciation—and I couldn’t repeat it now. ‘Kwitchee’ works well for me.”
The food and presentation were excellent. The student was earnest in his descriptions of the appetizer, the soup, the main course and the dessert. His service was impeccable. Although he was respectful, he wasn’t obsequious. The experience made Libby wish aloud that she’d taken classes instead of poring over cookbooks and using her friends as guinea pigs when she developed Seven Pillars’s menu.
Tucker stayed her hands when she started to stack dishes. “Leave them. You’re the guest today, and it may be the last time—surely to heaven someone will buy the Albatross soon. Let’s get going on our first adventure.”
Back in the car after heaping praise and a substantial tip on Colby, Tucker headed north and east. “Why didn’t you take classes?” He frowned at the hovering clouds.
She shrugged, thinking back to those putting-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other days. “Jess was out of the navy, but still in vet school. We’d just sold part of the farm’s acreage to the Grangers for the winery and were finally out from under the threat of foreclosure. I was still living on the farm and managing the dairy, but I hated every minute of it. I only intended to stay until he finished school and came back there to live, but one weekend when he was home, he found the realty poster for the house on Main Street. It wasn’t a tearoom then, just a grand old lady who needed some new clothes, but I had all the plans written out for making it one.” She laughed, remembering. “I had a business plan, too, written in longhand in a spiral-bound notebook, and even paint chips for the outside and the trim. I’d never even been inside the house, but it was my dream and Jesse knew that. He suggested we sell the cows and invest the profit in Seven Pillars. Inside of a week, that’s what we’d done. I suppose I should have given things more time and more thought, but it had been rough since my mother died. I couldn’t wait to start a new life.”
She stopped. “Why did I just tell you that? You were there for the worst of it.” Tuck had been there with her the whole way, flying home from wherever he was at the time on weekends to scrape and steam wallpaper until he swore he’d never get either the paste or the moisture-induced curl out of his hair.
“I was,” he agreed. “But you never let anyone see how bad things were. You just kept laughing.”
“That was how I kept going. Jesse just clammed up. I couldn’t do that—I’d have gone out of my mind—so I stayed social and laughed a lot.” She smiled at him. “It’s a tactic you recognize.”
She didn’t have to say more. Of course he recognized it. It was a coping mechanism they shared. There was more to her story, too—things Tucker didn’t know. And she wanted to keep it that way.
“Where are we going?” Libby loved farmland, but she saw it every day—Lake Miniagua sat smack in the middle of it. Driving through it wasn’t all that adventurous.
He reached to place his hand over her eyes. “I’ll wake you when we get there.”
“I never fall asleep in the daytime,” she said scornfully. And promptly did just that.
* * *
TUCKER LOVED DRIVING. It would be fine with him to just keep going until they reached Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where one of the satellite plants of Llewellyn’s Lures was. He flew up there sometimes, if the visit was urgent, but he preferred the drive. It would be a great place to show Libby, even in the dead of winter. They both had their passports with them, so they could go on into Canada whenever they liked. But she would panic if they did that. She was okay with spending the night somewhere, but she needed to be back by Tuesday morning—Seven Pillars was as much a safe haven for her as driving was for him.
Adventure. He’d promised her that, but he had no idea how to deliver on the promise. The lunch back at the Albatross had been great, but he hadn’t made up his mind where to go from there.
While Libby slept, he thought about the young woman she’d introduced him to that morning. In all fairness, Allison had been both attractive and pleasant—he’d enjoyed what little conversation they shared. He didn’t mind her kid being bratty, either. In his experience, most of them were at one time or another. Charlie, Jack’s precocious and hilarious twelve-year-old son, had gone AWOL from his grandparents’ home a few weeks ago—during an ice storm, no less—and had the family and everyone else at the lake in an uproar. Of course, the kid was still grounded. Jack insisted puberty would be a nonissue because Charlie was going to spend the duration in his room.
But, as Tucker had told Libby, the chemistry hadn’t been there with Allison. It was too bad. Really, it was. He’d meant what he said—he honestly did want a wife. A family. A home. But he wanted what Jack and Arlie had, too, that click between them that was both indefinable and undeniable.
He looked over at where Libby slept with her head tucked into the pillow he kept in the car. It would be nice if they could develop that chemistry, because she was pretty close to being his favorite person. But, regardless of what happened in some of the movies she’d dragged him to and he’d pretended he didn’t like, he didn’t believe friends necessarily