A Holiday Secret by Suzanne Brockmann

Author:Suzanne Brockmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 1999-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

“I’ve decided to get my nose pierced.”

Trey nearly dropped his fork. “Like hell you will!”

“I think that’s probably the kind of decision you really need to ponder for quite some time,” Katherine interjected smoothly. If she had been sitting closer to Trey, she would have given him a swift kick, but the dining room table was too big and she was too far away.

The conversation had deteriorated right from the start, right from the raspberry sound Stacy had made when Trey mentioned there had been something in the newspaper about trouble at the shopping mall she liked to visit. Kids carrying guns, he’d told them. Stacy had rolled her eyes and made that extremely rude sound and Katherine had watched Trey grit his teeth.

“She’ll have plenty of time to ponder this decision,” Trey returned. “As in five years. Because it’s not going to happen while she’s living in this house.”

“Then maybe I should just leave!” Stacy stood up, and somehow managed to knock her glass of milk over.

It was purely accidental, Katherine could see that. But Trey didn’t see the flare of embarrassed remorse in his daughter’s eyes. He only saw the staunch defiance it quickly transmuted into.

“Don’t just stand there,” he ordered his daughter in exasperation. “Get something to mop it up with!”

Doug kept his head lowered as Stacy got a towel from the kitchen and cleaned up the spill, her movements jerky with anger. Then, picking up her half-finished plate of food and her empty glass, she purposely looked at Katherine instead of Trey. “May I please be excused?”

Doug jumped up, too, even though he’d eaten even less.

Trey opened his mouth to speak, but Katherine beat him to it. “Yes,” she said. “You may. Both of you. Go on up to the playroom and finish your homework. I’ll be up in a bit.”

As the door to the kitchen swung shut behind them, Trey sat back in his chair and rubbed his forehead and eyes.

“Why do I do that?” he asked, tipping his head to look across the table at her. “I know she’s only trying to bait me, and I sit here and watch myself fall off this giant cliff of manipulation. I react exactly the way she wants me to react. But it gets to the point where I feel if I don’t say anything, I’m letting her get away with being incredibly rude.”

Katherine didn’t know what to tell him.

“You’re right about that anchoring thing, though,” he continued. He looked exhausted. “Both Stacy and I have forgotten how to simply sit in a room together without fighting.”

Katherine turned to look at him. “Maybe that’s it.”

“What?”

She stood up. “I have an idea. Come with me.”

* * *

The piano.

It was in the rear parlor—the one Trey thought of as the piano room. He’d bought the enormous grand years ago, when he and Helena were fixing up the place, when they had lots of empty rooms to fill, when he’d had the first of a still continuing series of very, very good financial years.

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