My Dearly Beloved by Alaina Hawthorne

Author:Alaina Hawthorne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 1995-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

“Well, I can’t say I enjoyed Thanksgiving, Mr. Steinbuck, but it was certainly unique.”

“I appreciate your honesty, Mrs. Sedgewick. Two spades down. Heart up. All this formality is getting to me. May I call you Paulina?”

“Yes, you may...Tom,” she replied, her attention riveted to the cards she held.

It was well past midnight on the Friday after Thanksgiving, and Tom sat in his library with Paulina Sedgewick, dealing her another hand of Sergeant Major. They were in the third game of their sudden-death play-off for house champion and had been playing alone for hours. In the beginning all of Tom’s house guests participated enthusiastically, except Darian who never played cards, but by Wednesday evening the others had become discouraged, and by Thanksgiving Day, no one else would play with either of them.

She tallied their current bids on the pad beside her. “Three diamonds up. Two clubs up.”

“What part did you not enjoy? Dealer takes two this hand, knocks here.” He eyed Paulina over his cards. Thin and tough as a stick with steel-colored hair and eyes to match, she radiated compressed energy and piercing intellect unsoftened by any hint of patience.

From the moment he’d seen her step out of Darian’s car, he knew she was going to be a challenging house guest, and sure enough, within moments she had demonstrated both the range and sting of her bullwhip tongue. By the end of the day, all Tom’s employees treated her as gingerly as an unexploded bomb. Rudy, in particular, after carrying her luggage into the house, disappeared into the barn and hadn’t been seen since.

“Well, I suppose the same things that made it unique and interesting also utterly destroyed the traditional holiday atmosphere—the hot tamales for one thing. Cabrito and mariachis. Fireworks and all those blasted screaming children whacking away at that piñata. It’s just not quite the way I visualize the Pilgrim forefathers giving thanks.”

Tom listened for a moment to the quiet snap of the cards against the table and the soft rattle of ice drowning in his Scotch. “Well, my understanding of the Thanksgiving tradition is giving thanks for what you have with what you have. I believe the traditional foods the Pilgrims ate were just what was available to them and so, in that sense, I believe our Thanksgiving here is the most traditional one I know of. Besides,” he said, totally unintimidated by her. “We had turkey and dressing, too.”

“Fire in the hole,” Paulina said, laying down four hearts, ace high.

Tom raised his eyebrows slightly at the recklessness of her move. Even for Paulina, a bid of one-fifty was extravagant. They played in silence for a few moments, and Tom laid each set of his books in a crisscross pattern. He knew Darian’s mother had been building up to something for the past couple of days, but he had no intention of making it easy for her. She certainly hadn’t made things easy for any of them. Especially Darian.

She cleared her throat. “My grandson really seems to be taken with you.

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