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

precarious balance his brother had established for himself. But if Cliff needed him, if he was in any danger of hurting himself or anyone else, Byron felt he had to know. If necessary, he would have intervened.
    His first stop in Tyler had been the square, his first stop on the square, Gates Department Store. He’d wanted to get a feel for the town in which his brother had taken up residence, if as a recluse.
    Nora had been in the window, working on a back-to-school display that featured Tyler’s original settlers heading across the fields to their one-room schoolhouse. Already Byron had been feeling a little better about where his brother had landed. Tyler, Wisconsin, wasn’t a weird, gritty, hole-in-the-wall town where he’d find Cliff living in some gutter. It was picturesque and homey, a real community, with farms, businesses, schools, a hospital, a sense of history and pride. The people ran the gamut from the working poor to the well-to-do; it wasn’t just an upper-class or a working-class town. Those things mattered to Byron, although, even now, he couldn’t have said why.
    Nora had worn her hair longer then. With a thick braid trailing down her back, and wisps of ash-blond hair poking out, she’d looked as old-fashioned and fresh-faced as her nineteenth-century figures.
    She’d spotted him and smiled politely. He could tell she’d already pegged him as a stranger.
    That night, pretending to be a free-lance photographer, he’d had dinner with her and Aunt Ellie at their twenties house a couple of blocks from the square. Things had snowballed from there. Although still technically the sole owner of Gates Department Store, Ellie Gates was ninety and infailing health, and left most of the day-to-day management up to her grandniece. And, to his delight, Byron had discovered that Nora was hardly an eighteen-year-old kid. In fact, she was thirty, unmarried and determined to stay that way. He’d admired her independence, her spirit, her energy, her devotion to her hometown and her sense of humor and tolerance. He hadn’t, however, expected to fall in love with her.
    He hadn’t guessed she was a virgin. And she hadn’t told him until the last moment, in the tent at the lake outside town where he’d camped. Afterward, she’d insisted she had no regrets. It might not even have been a conscious lie. Byron’s own regrets had nothing to do with making love to Nora Gates, of having loved her and dreamed of having a life with her, but everything to do with having himself been so damned blind to what was going on in her life. He’d been preoccupied with his own problems—Cliff, their father, his own pain and guilt over their suffering. He hadn’t seen, until it was too late, that Nora Gates was letting go of the last person she had in the world, a woman who’d meant everything to her. That Aunt Ellie was ninety and had never pretended she’d live forever wasn’t the consolation Byron, in his blindness, had anticipated. She had been a force in Nora’s life, and Nora had been trying to find a way to carry on without her.
    They’d picked a hell of a time to fall in love.
    Two weeks after that first night together, he’d left Tyler, knowing Nora thought him, incorrectly if not unreasonably, a cad and a heel and a scurrilous East Coast rake. Nora Gates was as inventive in her insults as in her window displays, only a good deal less charming. But he’d known her anger toward him had been, in a peculiar way, a relief to her. A consolation. She’d fallen—blindly, temporarily—for the wrong man. In her odd world, that was better than having fallen for the right man.
    “This isn’t your first trip to Tyler,” a quiet, familiar voice said next to him.
    Byron turned slowly, and for the first time in five long years, he faced his brother. Cliff seemed to have materialized out of the darkness. For a moment, Byron wondered if he was just imagining him. But the lines in his brother’s face were too real—the dark,