Moonlight Masquerade (Edilean 8)

He and his mother met whenever they could and used every available method to communicate. He didn’t let his friends know how much he shared with her, how often he asked for her advice, or how he loved to entertain her with stories of his life. She encouraged him to do charity work, to travel to faraway places, to see and do. Carter wrote her about all of it, sent thousands of photos, and included her in his life as best he could.

She told him of his father, but Carter didn’t realize how much she was sugarcoating everything. To Carter his father was a man rarely seen and to be listened to when he did see him. While it loomed over his head that someday he was expected to return to Texas and take over Treeborne Foods, he didn’t think about it much. His father was healthy and still working full-time, and he had no desire to turn over an ounce of his power to anyone else, certainly not to a son he barely knew—and didn’t seem to like very much.

The one thing his mother didn’t share with Carter was that she was ill. To him, her death was sudden and unexpected. He went tearing back to Texas and was told that his mother had been fighting cancer for years. Long bouts of chemo had left her weak and fragile, but she’d never told her beloved son about any of it.

Carter wavered from being angry at her because she’d cheated him out of seeing her, and angry at himself for not caring enough to figure out the truth. He’d looked to his father to share the grief at her passing, but all Lewis Treeborne had said was, “You can’t be a Momma’s Boy any longer.”

His words made Carter feel some of the legendary Treeborne rage, but he was no match for his father. The day after his mother’s funeral, Carter’s trust fund money was cut off and he was given an office in the big, ugly Treeborne building. His father gave Carter so much work to do that he hardly had time to breathe. He was told that he had to make up for lost time. What he should have learned as a child had to be taught to him as an adult. The packaging, distribution, and preservation of food took over his life. There were meetings that seemed to last for days. He had to taste new concoctions and decide whether or not to spend millions on them.

Carter wasn’t good at the job. What he was good at was hiring young, ambitious people who wanted to learn how to run the business. By his third year with the company, he began to have some time to himself. He had four people working for him who eagerly did his work, and as long as he paid them well, they didn’t mind that he took the credit. They knew that someday Carter would inherit the company, and they wanted to be there when that happened. They knew that he would put them in charge while he ran back to his other life. The only question all of them had was how long they were going to have to wait.

It was that third summer when “the Frozen Boss,” as Carter liked to call his father to his private staff, was flying around the country, looking for a place to open a new plant, that he met Sophie. His father had already told his son that he was to marry the daughter of a business rival.

Carter had laughed at the idea. “This isn’t the eighteenth century where the parents choose their son’s wives. I don’t love that girl.”

“All that schooling I paid for and you still don’t know anything. I don’t care whether you ‘love’ her or not. Her father owns the Palmer canning plant, and I want it.”

“Then buy it!” Carter said.

“He wants to tie up his daughter’s future.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Carter was on his third Scotch and soda and it was only 4:00 p.m.

“She’s been in trouble in the past and . . . ” His father looked away.

“What kind of trouble?” Carter’s eyes were wide and his stomach was beginning to hurt.

His father waved his hand. “Who knows? Who cares? Maybe you’ll luck out and she’ll be a nymphomaniac. Not like your mother, with her pristine, pure bedroom ways and her—Get back here!” his father shouted, but Carter kept walking.

He drove into the little town, hot, dirty, no liquor served anywhere. He thought of driving on but decided not to. After all he’d had to drink he shouldn’t be behind the wheel of a car. If something bad happened in the town owned by the Treebornes he’d be forgiven, but the outside world was another matter.

The only restaurant in town had a screen door and ceiling fans. The wooden floor was sandy from the grit outside. He sat in a booth that had names and initials carved on it and picked up a plastic-covered menu, but he couldn’t see it. It was one thing for his father to decree how Carter had to earn his living, but who he was to marry?! It wasn’t possible.

As he stared at the menu his mind filled with arguments that he was sure would make his father change his mind. He came up with reasonable, logical persuasions that would show how an arranged marriage would be bad for everyone.

As Carter planned and plotted, he looked up and saw an incredibly pretty young woman taking orders from four high school boys who were giving her a hard time.

One of them was asking her out. “It’s just a dance,” the kid was saying. Carter recognized him as the local football hero: big, handsome,

with an arrogance that said he’d never failed at anything. He’d probably never before had a female say no to him. “Please. I’ll buy you a corsage of any flower you want and Dad says I can have the limo.”

Carter knew the kid’s father owned the only car dealership in town. His mother worked for Treeborne Foods.

“If you think I’m going to get in the back of a limousine with you, Jason Dailey, I think you need to go back to school. There’s a big hole in your education. Now, do you guys want the usual or do you want the escargot and calamari special?”

Carter put his head down to hide a smile. He liked the way she talked, not the local “gonna” interspersed with casual profanity. Who was she? he wondered. For years his mother had kept him informed of the local gossip. She’d established a garden club, a book club, and had brought in a dance instructor. His mother had written him about everything, even that the little girl dancers wanted to name themselves the Chicken Frieds.

Even though Carter had spent little time in the tiny Texas town that was pretty much owned by his family, he knew a lot about the residents. So who was this gorgeous girl who was so deftly turning the lustful teenagers away? He guessed her to be in her mid-twenties, natural blonde, eyes like sapphires—and a figure that should be a pinup.

“Sophie!” one of the boys called out. “Give me extra fries.”

“I always do,” she answered.

Sophie, Carter thought. Of course. Sophie Kincaid. His mother had written about her. She’d gone away to college and majored in . . . He couldn’t remember what it was, but his mother had said Sophie was “talented.”

Carter knew that when kids left the town to go to college, they didn’t return. Treeborne Foods was the only real business, and they only hired locals for the menial positions. “You can’t make a kid boss of his dad who’s on the conveyor belt” was his father’s reasoning. Carter thought it was more likely that his father liked thinking of the locals as his serfs and he was their master.

Carter watched the girl as she poured the iced tea. When he’d arrived, the owner had come out and asked to serve him, but Carter had said he wasn’t ready to order. In this town whatever a Treeborne wanted was law.