Taste of Honey by Eileen Goudge Read Free Book Online

off.
    She was about to hang up when a voice came on. “Mom? Is that you?”
    Gerry felt her heart lurch into her throat. How had Claire known who it was? She felt almost delirious with the wonder of it. But before she could reply, Claire—she was almost certain it was Claire—went on breathlessly, “I was just about to put the pie in the oven. I’ll be there no later than five, okay?”
    Oh, God. What now? Gerry forced her voice past vocal chords that felt like old rusted pipes. “Is this Claire? Claire Brewster?”
    Silence at the other end, then the voice asked cautiously, “Who is this?”
    For a panicked moment Gerry couldn’t quite catch her breath. Then her heart dropped back into place, and a voice she hardly recognized as her own replied calmly, “I’m your mother.”

CHAPTER TWO
    “F ORGET PEACE ON EARTH . I’d settle for peace right here at home,” Claire said with a sigh.
    Byron smiled. “Don’t hold your breath.”
    “I mean, they’ve been at each other’s throats for so long it’s gotten to be a joke: the Montagues and Capulets of Seacrest Drive. Do they even know what they’re fighting about anymore?”
    It was Christmas Day, minutes before the call that would change her life, and she was enjoying a quiet hour alone with her boyfriend. The irony of the fact that her parents lived next door to Byron’s wasn’t lost on either of them.
    Byron laughed his easy, uncomplicated laugh. He sat slouched on a stool at her kitchen counter, watching her roll out dough for an apple pie. “It’s fundamental. One sees white, the other sees black. The only thing they have in common is a fence.”
    “And us.”
    “Well, we’re out of it, at least,” he said with a shrug. Byron refused to take any of it very seriously.
    Claire paused in the midst of what she was doing to give him a long searching look. She took in his frizzy brown hair tied back with an elastic band, his speckled green eyes in the sharp-featured face that in childhood had made him look brash and a bit of a know-it-all (a whippersnapper, her mother had called him, and still did), which he’d grown into like he had the hand-me-downs of his well-heeled older cousins. His flannel shirt looked as if it’d been plucked straight from the dryer, and in place of a wristwatch he wore a braided leather thong. Byron was everything her parents abhorred, and she loved him all the more because of it.
    “Which is why,” she said dryly, “we’re forced to sneak around behind their backs.” She’d spent the morning at her parents’, opening gifts, and as soon as she could, she had made her getaway. Byron had made his own escape, timing it so he arrived a few minutes after her.
    “Who’s sneaking? We’re merely exercising our rights as freethinking adults. Speaking of which …” He arched a brow, giving her a suggestive look.
    “You’ll have to wait until the pie is in the oven,” she told him, holding up arms dusted to the elbows in flour.
    “In that case, I’d better give you a hand.” He unfolded from the stool and stepped around the bar, all six feet of him—long in the shank and wide across the shoulders—catching her about the waist from behind. He nibbled at her neck, pushing a hand up under her sweatshirt to cup a breast.
    “Since you’re so free with your hands,” she said, ducking out from under his arm, “why don’t you make yourself useful?” She handed him a peeler and pointed him toward the bowl of apples by the sink.
    He cocked his head. “You really get off on this, don’t you?” It wasn’t a question.
    “I find it relaxing, yes,” she said.
    “Tarts over torts?” he quipped.
    Another sore subject: the long hours at the office tending to real estate transfers and tax shelters and inter-generational trusts when she could be poring over cookbooks and trying out new recipes. She envied Byron’s certainty. All he’d ever wanted was to be a doctor. Even with a year of residency under his belt and two and a