Kane by Jennifer Blake Page B

to stay longer in Turn-Coupe, he would have a stroke. Regardless, she was driven by an attack of fairness she didn’t quite understand. She almost hoped, in a way, that Mr. Lewis would take her up on her offer so she would no longer have an excuse for trespassing on his hospitality.
    â€œNow, now,” he said, easing the bread plate and biscuit toward her again, “there’s no need for such a rush. You’ll give yourself ulcers, you don’t watch out. Just try a bite of this, then tell me what else you and Vivian found to talk about.”
    Regina had no intention whatever of eating the biscuit. As she told the older man about the visit with Kane’s aunt, however, she reached out idly to pick up a bit of light brown biscuit crumb with the pressure of a fingertip, then put it on her tongue. A few minutes later, she picked up another. Then she broke a little of the crisp biscuit crust and ate it with the sliver of hamthat was attached. Before she realized, the whole biscuit was gone.
    â€œHungry and didn’t know it,” Mr. Lewis said, slicing another biscuit, then reaching for ham. “All you young people with your juice and granola don’t know what good food is anymore. A bite here, a snack there, eat on the run, never slow down to savor the flavors or enjoy a nice, quiet conversation, and you wonder why you’re tired all the time. You’re not really living, just going through the motions.” He shook his head as he passed over the biscuit. “Pitiful.”
    He had a point. Regina leaned back in her chair, sipping the perfectly brewed coffee in its fragile china cup. It was amazingly quiet in the breakfast room. No traffic noises or other hints of the mechanized world intruded on the old house on its hill. Blue jays, cardinals and mockingbirds called back and forth in the garden beyond the bay window. She could even catch the sandpaper rasp of the cat’s tongue as it groomed itself.
    â€œI just might be able to get used to your way of doing things,” she said with a whimsical smile. “It’s so restful.”
    â€œNot much happens to make it otherwise. Usually.”
    He was thinking of the suit, she thought, which was a subject Regina was suddenly reluctant to explore. She asked instead, “How long have you lived here—or is that a silly question?”
    â€œThe only silly question, so they say, is one unasked. If you mean how long I, personally, have lived here, the answer’s all my life. If you’re talking about my family, well, my great-granddaddy came from North Carolina in the 1830s. He and his wife and apack of children traveled in a wagon pulled by oxen, along with a caravan of six other families. They stopped for a few years in Alabama, where a couple of the older kids got married, but they left the newlyweds behind and came on. Because of that, there are Cromptons scattered all across the South.”
    â€œWere the Benedicts one of the families in the caravan?”
    He shook his leonine head. “They were already here when my folks made it. Nobody really knows how long they’d been holed up out on the lake, but it’s a while.”
    â€œYou’re talking about the Native American bloodline, as long ago as that?”
    â€œWhat? Oh, only Luke’s bunch have Indian ancestors, but the rest were here anyway. Story goes, there were four brothers who left England in a hurry back in the 1700s. Something to do with the death of a sister’s snake-mean husband, as I understand it. They tried their hands at piracy a couple of years, but finally landed in New Orleans. Not caring particularly for the strict Spanish government in power at the time, they pushed inland and wound up here.”
    â€œFascinating,” she said, leaning forward to pick up the second ham-filled biscuit. Then she paused and tilted her head. “Unless you’re pulling my leg?”
    â€œWould I do that?” he asked, his eyes