Wisconsin Wedding (Welcome To Tyler, No. 3) by Carla Neggers Page A

cared and understood, but experience had taught her otherwise. “I’ll take full responsibility for my actions,” she said tightly, “but don’t you judge me, Byron Forrester. I’m not the one who talked a dying old woman into spending so many of her last days having her picture taken. I’m not the one who cynically swept a vulnerable small-town girl off her feet. I’m not the one who said Tyler wasn’t for him and slithered out of town. I’m—” She stopped, staring at him. “What’re you looking so incredulous over?”
    “You,” he said.
    “Me? Byron, aren’t you listening? ”
    “Yeah. I’m hearing every word, sweets. Just one question—what vulnerable small-town woman did I cynically sweep off her feet?”
    Nora called him something that, coming from her, would have raised Liza Baron’s eyebrows and dropped the jaws of half the people in Tyler. Aunt Ellie wouldn’t have been shocked; it was her favorite thing to call randy neighborhood dogs who ran amok in her bushes.
    Byron Forrester just laughed.
    It was the same laugh that had awakened her from too many dreams over too many months. A laugh that she hadn’t made up, but was real. Byron wasn’t a fantasy.
    “Relax, Nora,” he said. “Lots of women fall for cads.”
    “I don’t.”
    “You did. At least for a little while.”
    If she stayed there, she would skin him. Or fall for his roguish charms all over again.
    “But I promise,” he went on, “that I won’t tell anyone you were human once for a few weeks. I’ll keep your secret, Nora.” Then his eyes darkened, and he added, “Until you decide you want to tell the whole world yourself that you’re human after all.”
    Spotting Cliff and Liza out on the lodge’s veranda kept Nora from an appropriately physical reaction. She wasn’t a violent person. She wasn’t even remotely homicidal. She just wanted Byron Sanders Forrester out of her life.
    But his brother was about to marry one of Tyler’s first citizens.
    Byron, Nora thought miserably as she trudged up the path, pretending she hadn’t heard that last gibe, would haunt her forever.
    * * *
    A S B YRON WATCHED N ORA in full retreat, a sudden, brisk wind blew off the lake and chilled him to the bone. It was like a parting shot from the owner of Gates Department Store, warning him to keep his distance.
    Well, he thought, too late.
    “Coffee’s ready,” Liza Baron yelled from the porch. “Lunch’ll be ready in a bit.”
    Byron was torn. Given his reception, he wished he’d ignored Liza’s invitation to the wedding and had waited to hear from Cliff himself. The least he could have done was to have worked up the guts to tell Nora the truth last night. Not that she’d given him the chance. There’d been the book of Beethoven sonatas, the beefy piano student. His own unexpected reaction to a woman he’d slept with for a couple of weeks one past summer—which was how he’d tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to think of her the past three years.Standing in her dining room last night, watching her just now in the cold light of day, he’d remembered how very much he’d loved her. Leaving her with so much unsaid, with all the promise of what they could have been together unfulfilled, had been one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do. And also one of the most important. If he’d stayed, he’d have risked destroying any hope for Cliff.
    “What to do, what to do,” he mused, watching the sunlight catch the cool shades of Nora’s hair, making it shine.
    He wondered if he would be doing everyone a favor—including himself—if he just headed back to his campsite, packed up and got the hell out of Tyler.
    “Are you coming?” Liza yelled.
    “In a minute.”
    And he trotted back to his musty tent, threw things into his nonexecutive-looking duffel in a flurry of purpose and action. Then came the cry of geese and another chilly gust off the lake, and he collapsed on Cliff’s rock and thought, the hell with it. What was