The Summer of Sunshine and Margot(45)

There was a second of silence, then Bianca started to laugh. “Well, that’s perfect,” she said, and kicked off her shoes. She set the tureen on the sideboard and held out her hand to Connor. “Come on. Take off your shoes and socks. It’s a Slip ’N Slide. I’ll bet you love those!”

Connor hesitated. He looked at Sunshine, who looked at Margot, who shrugged. No doubt she wanted to see how this played out. Wesley wasn’t the least embarrassed, if his beatific smile was anything to go by.

It only took a few seconds for Connor to pull off his shoes and socks and join Bianca in the green soup. They slid around the dining room for several minutes, laughing and shrieking and creating a massive mess that was going to make Edna give him a stern talking-to come morning.

When they were done, Bianca turned to Wesley. “Would you get us a couple of towels so we don’t track this everywhere?” She hugged Connor. “When it’s safe for us to walk, we’ll run upstairs to my bathroom and wash our feet in the bathtub.”

Connor looked at the floor. “What about the mess?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. Everyone else will take care of it.”

And there it was, Alec thought as he rose to get cleaning supplies. His mother’s life philosophy in a nutshell. Someone else was always around to clean up the mess.

  The next morning Bianca kept Margot waiting an hour before she finally joined her in the guest lounge. Margot had already decided that her client was either going to be late or a no-show, so she wasn’t surprised. She’d used the time to think about how to handle the previous evening’s, ah, events.

After the soup incident, Bianca and Connor had returned to the table and the dinner had gone on as if nothing had happened. Despite everyone else pitching in to clean the floor, the faint smell of avocado and cucumber had lingered. Margot had left a note for Edna, explaining what had happened and then had tried to figure out what, if anything, had gone wrong.

She knew a case could be made that Bianca had turned lemons into lemonade by inviting Connor to play with her. While it wasn’t appropriate behavior for a formal dinner, it wasn’t as if she’d dropped her dress or given a visiting dignitary the middle finger. Still, it wasn’t exactly a normal reaction. What she didn’t know was how much normal was good for Bianca.

Now her client settled on the sofa opposite Margot and raised her eyebrows.

“Go ahead and yell at me,” she said, her tone light. “I can take it.”

“Why would I yell?”

“Oh please. I danced in soup. That’s hardly allowed.”

“Technically you used soup to slide around on the floor. I’m not sure that qualifies as dancing.”

Bianca didn’t smile. If anything her expression turned wary. “You think what happened last night is funny?”

“What do you think it was?”

“A moment of fun. The unexpected happened and I turned it into a party. That’s what I do. Everyone will remember last night and isn’t that the point? To be memorable? Connor loved it.”

“He did.” Margot kept her voice gentle. “He had a terrific time and he adores you. How could he not?”

Bianca wore a loose-knit sweater over a tank top. She had on leggings and her feet were bare. She drew her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs. The defensive position could not have been more clear.

“But?” she asked. “Because there is an obvious but.”

“I just wonder what you were thinking,” Margot told her. “Not just with the soup, but before. You latched on to Connor immediately. You’re so good with children, by the way.”

“I wanted to make sure he was comfortable. Having dinner with a bunch of stuffy adults was going to be boring.”

“I think it’s great you were concerned about him. Your natural affinity with children is going to be an asset for you as you help Wesley socially.”

The arms stayed firmly locked around her drawn knees. “I know that’s not a compliment.”

“It is one hundred percent a very sincere compliment. However—”

“Here it comes.”

Margot smiled. “However, last night was about you and Wesley. We’ve talked about how you want to be an asset to him and his career, and how you’re concerned about being a liability. Our goal was to help you get comfortable with formal dining and an eclectic group of guests. It was about mastering the various forks and glasses and a long evening with different courses and following the conventions of conversation. We’d talked about that—we had a strategy.”

Bianca rolled her eyes. “I remember. Spend fifteen minutes talking to the person on my right, then switch to the person on my left. Or I can be like the queen and change with the courses. Whatever. I wanted to have a good time.”

“I appreciate that,” Margot said calmly. “But if you want to learn the rules, you have to study them and then practice until they’re second nature. When you’re comfortable with the rules, you don’t have to think about them and then the fun happens naturally.”

“Rules are boring.”

You’re boring. Bianca didn’t say it, but Margot would swear she heard it all the same. There were always difficult times in what she did, and she had just reached the first one in this relationship.