Harlequin Desire September 2015 - Box Set 1 of 2: Claimed\Maid for a Magnate\Only on His Terms (38 page)

“I'm surprised to see you here,” Gus said. Somehow, though, Gracie couldn't help thinking that the subtext of his sentence was something along the lines of “I thought by now one of the Sages would have suffocated you in your sleep.” “I hope you've been enjoying your stay in the Hamptons.”

“I have,” she said, surprised to realize it was true. In spite of the weirdness of the situation and the wariness of the sort-of truce that seemed to have developed between her and Harrison—at least for now—her stay had been reasonably pleasant and abundantly enlightening. “Long Island is beautiful, and I'm learning all kinds of things about Harry I never knew before. Vivian and Harrison have been very accommodating.”

“Vivian and Harrison.” Gus echoed her use of their first names in the kind of speculative tone he might have used if he were conjecturing about the identity of Jack the Ripper. “I see.”

Gracie supposed it was only natural that he would be skeptical. After all, the last time she'd seen him, Harrison had been accusing her of giving his father an STD and robbing him blind. Now that she thought about it, she, too, wondered why she wasn't still mad at Harrison.

In a word, hmm.

“I'm glad to hear it,” Gus said. “And you'll be glad to know—as will you, Mrs. Sage—that the paperwork on the Long Island house and the Manhattan penthouse is in progress. We should be able to courier the papers to you in Amagansett Thursday or Friday, right on schedule.”

“That is wonderful news,” Vivian agreed. “Thank you again, Gracie.”

“No thanks are necessary, Vivian. I'm sure Harry knew I would return the houses to you and that it's what he wanted.”

“Yes, well, that makes one of us, darling. Oh, look, there's Bunny,” Vivian said, lifting a hand in greeting to their hostess. “You'll all excuse me.”

She hurried off without awaiting a reply, leaving Gracie to be the buffer between her son and the law firm that was her son's biggest antagonist.

“So, Gus,” she said, grappling for some benign subject to jump-start the conversation. “How did you get into the long-lost-relative business?”

“Tarrant and Twigg recruited me when I was still at Georgetown law school. I was in my last year of probate law and wrote a paper on how to better employ the internet for heir hunting for one of my classes. My professor was a friend of Bennett's and thought he'd find it interesting so he passed it along to him. The next time Bennett was in DC, he and I met for lunch, and he offered me an associate position.”

“So have you guys reunited lots of families?” she asked.

“Or split a lot of them up?” Harrison interjected.

Gracie threw him an irritated look, but Gus only chuckled.

“No, it's a fair question,” he said. “Family estates can be very contentious, especially when they're large. Fortunately for us, we most often deal with single heirs to estates. Ones who are the last in a line, so there's no one to contest the terms.”

“Well then,” Harrison said, “aren't my mother and I lucky to be among the few, the proud, the contested.”

Again, Gus smiled. “Well, we do seem to have had an unusual run lately of clients who could be wandering into some potential conflict. Once we find them, of course.”

“And I'm sure you'll find them,” Gracie said.

“We always do,” Gus assured her. Then his expression changed. “Well, except for that once.”

Gracie was about to ask him more about that, but someone hailed him from the other side of the room. So Gus bid her and Harrison a hasty farewell and made his way in that direction, leaving the two of them alone. And although they had been alone together pretty much all day with fairly little uneasiness, Gus's departure left Gracie feeling very uneasy indeed.

Harrison seemed to share her discomfort, because the moment his gaze met hers, he quickly glanced off to the right, and then turned his entire body in that direction. In response, Gracie turned away and shot her gaze in the opposite direction. Then both of them looked back at each other again, turning their bodies back a little, then a little more, until they were standing face-to-face again. For one long moment, they just stood that way, their gazes locked, their tongues tied. And then...

Then something really weird happened. It was as if some kind of gauzy curtain descended around them on all sides, separating them from everyone else in the room. Everyone else in the world. The clamor of the chattering people tapered to a purr of something faint and almost melodic. The gleam of the chandelier mellowed to a blush of pink. The chill of the air conditioning ebbed to a caress of awareness. And everything else seemed to recede until it was nothing but shadows and murmurs.

Gracie had no idea if Harrison felt it, too, but he stood as still and silent as she, as if he was just as transfixed and didn't want to move or speak for fear of ruining the moment, either. Time seemed to have stopped, too, as if nothing but that moment mattered. Then a woman somewhere in the room barked raucously with laughter, and the entire impression was gone.

Leaving Gracie—and possibly Harrison—feeling more awkward than ever.

“I'll go get us a drink,” he said suddenly, sounding almost panicky. Yep, he felt the awkwardness, too. “What would you like?”

Like? she echoed to herself. How was she supposed to answer that? Her brain was so scrambled at the moment, she barely knew her own name, and he was asking her what she wanted? Well, okay, maybe she had an idea of what she, you know,
wanted
at the moment, but there was no way she was going to tell Harrison she wanted
that
. And how could she want
that
from him in the first place? Not only had she known him a mere matter of days, but she also wasn't even sure she liked him enough for
that
. And she was pretty sure he didn't like her, either, even if he was sharing weird, gauzy-curtain, shadow-and-murmur moments with her.

“Um, whatever you're having is fine,” she said. “That will be fine. It's fine.”

It was all Gracie could do not to slap a hand over her mouth to keep herself from further babbling. For one terrifying second, she honestly thought she was going to tell him that what she wanted was him. Then for another even more terrifying second she thought he was going to tell her that that was good, because he intended to have her. There was just something about the expression on his face just then that—

Thankfully, after one more panicky look, he bolted toward a bar in the far corner of the room, where a group of people had congregated, leaving Gracie alone to collect her thoughts. Unfortunately, her thoughts had wandered so far off that she was going to need an intergalactic mode of transportation to bring them all back.

By the time Harrison returned with their drinks, she had managed to gather herself together enough that her brain and other body parts were reasonably under control. At least until she went to remove her right glove so she could accept her cocktail, because that was when her fingers suddenly wanted to fumble all over the place. Possibly because he seemed unable to peel his gaze away from hers, and then seemed unable to peel it away from her fumbling fingers. After she finally wrestled off the glove, she made a tight fist to halt the trembling of her hand before accepting her drink. But it still trembled when she took the glass from him, enough that he cupped his hand over hers for a moment after transferring the drink to her, to make sure she didn't drop it.

And damned if that weird gauzy-curtain thing didn't happen again. This time, though, they were making contact when it did. She was able to feel how gently he was touching her, and how warm his hand was over hers, and how she wished more than anything he would never let her go. But he did let her go, finally, and up went the curtain again. Somehow, she was able to mumble her thanks, though whether her gratitude was for the drink, the way he touched her or the fact that the strange episode had come to an end, she couldn't have said.

Harrison's gaze met hers again, and he was smiling the same sort of smile he'd smiled when he'd told the butler she was with him. She lifted her drink for a sip and—

Wait. What?
The import of that finally struck her. Harrison had been smiling when he told the butler “she's with me.” Therefore something about her arrival at the party had made him happy. And something about telling Ballantine she was
with him
had made him happy, too.

Now he was smiling that same smile again, which must mean that he was viewing her less as an enemy. But that was good, right? It meant he was starting to believe Harry left his fortune to her for philanthropic reasons, not because she took advantage of him. So why did Gracie suddenly feel worried again, and for entirely different reasons?

For a moment, they only sipped their drinks in silence—bourbon, not Gracie's favorite, but it was okay—and looked around the room. Then Harrison fixed his gaze—that blue, blue, good God, his eyes were blue gaze—on hers.

And very softly, he asked, “Earlier tonight, why did you ask if you should leave?”

It took her a moment to remember what he was talking about. Back when she first arrived at the party, when it was obvious he didn't like what she was wearing. “I thought you wanted me to leave because I was going to embarrass you and Vivian.”

He looked surprised. “Why would you think that?”

She was surprised by his surprise. Wasn't it obvious why she would think that?

“Because I'm not...sophisticated,” she said. “I'm not...elegant. I'm not...” Now she made an exasperated sound. “I don't know how to act around people like this, in situations like this. I don't
belong
here. Not that it ever mattered before, you know? I never needed to be sophisticated or elegant. I never wanted to be. But tonight...”

She trailed off without finishing, and Harrison looked as if he had no more idea what to say than she did. So Gracie sipped her drink again, finding the smoky flavor a little less disagreeable this time. See? People could learn to like things they didn't like before. They just had to give them a chance.

She looked at Harrison again. Harrison, who was so far out of her league, even intergalactic modes of transportation couldn't connect them. No way would he ever consider her sophisticated or elegant or think she belonged in a place like this. She wished she didn't care about that. She wished it didn't matter. She wished...

The irony of the situation was staggering, really. For the first time in her life, Gracie could—technically—afford anything she wanted. And the one thing she was beginning to think she might want was the only thing she would never be able to have.

Six

T
he morning after the Dewitts' party, Harrison lay in bed with barely four hours of sleep under his belt, staring at the ceiling and wondering why he couldn't stop thinking about Gracie, who for some reason now seemed exactly suited to that name. Mostly, he couldn't stop thinking about the moment he'd glanced past Ballantine to see her standing at the front door, looking like something that should have been under glass in a pastry shop.

He still didn't know what the hell had happened to him in that moment. He only knew that his stomach had pitched, his mouth had gone dry, his brain had fizzled and his...well, never mind what some of his other body parts had done.

And there had been nothing about her to warrant such a blatantly sexual reaction, which was all his reaction to her had been, he assured himself. Sexual. Even if it had felt like something different. Something more. It couldn't have been anything
but
sexual. She'd just looked so... She'd just seemed so... And he'd felt so... And he'd really wanted to...

He turned onto his side, toward the open window, and glanced at the chair draped with his discarded clothing of the night before. Ah, dammit. He didn't know what he'd wanted when he saw her standing there. Okay, yes, he did know that. What he didn't know was why. Okay, maybe he knew that, too. It had been a while since he'd acted on a sexual attraction. Probably because it had been a while since he'd felt a sexual attraction. All the women he knew were women he
knew
, and once he got to
know
a woman, he pretty much stopped being sexually attracted to her. There wasn't much point in continuing with something once you knew what it was like, and it stopped being challenging. Or interesting. So although Harrison knew
why
he found Gracie attractive, what he didn't know was why he found
Gracie
attractive.

Why her? He'd seen a million pretty girls in a million party dresses in his life. Hell, he'd helped a million pretty girls
out
of a million party dresses in his life. And Gracie wasn't even the kind of party girl he normally went for—the kind who wore lots of makeup and little clothing. What makeup she'd worn last night had whispered, not screamed, and there'd been nothing revealing about her dress. For God's sake, she'd even worn gloves.

Although, now that he thought about it—not for the first time since the night before—her collarbone had looked pretty damned lickable. As had the nape of her neck. And the line of her jaw. And her earlobes...

Really, all of her had looked pretty damned lickable.

He tossed to his other side, punched his pillow, closed his eyes and commanded his brain to grab another hour of sleep. Instead, his brain etched another vision of Gracie on the insides of his eyelids, this one of her looking dashed and asking him, “Should I leave?” He'd been stunned later when she told him she'd asked the question because she thought she was embarrassing him. Because she wasn't sophisticated or elegant and didn't belong in high society.

And all the while Harrison had been thinking how she was more elegant and sophisticated than any of them.

Just who was Gracie Sumner?
Was
she a con artist? Or was she something else?

Harrison bit back a groan. Why was he doubting her? Why was he doubting himself? She
couldn't
be anything other than what he'd suspected since he'd heard the particulars of his father's will. Okay, maybe she wasn't as predatory as he'd first thought, but his father had had too deep an appreciation for money—too deep an obsession with money—to give it all to a stranger and insist that she give it to even more strangers. Harrison Sage, Jr. had been the most calculating, close-fisted man Harrison III had ever known. Philanthropy was the last thing he'd thought about when he was alive. He wouldn't have felt any differently when thinking about his inevitable death. He would have made sure his fortune stayed with the family, where it would grow more obscene, even after he was gone. So what had happened to him to change that?

His father couldn't have been in his right mind when he put Gracie in charge of his personal estate. He had to have been mentally diminished, and she must have taken advantage of that. Maybe she'd convinced him to give his money to charity, and to put her in charge of the funds. And the moment the spotlight was off of her, she was going to take the money and run.

That had to be it. It was the only explanation that made sense.

He was through being enchanted by Gracie Sumner.
Grace
Sumner, he corrected himself. And he wouldn't be swayed by her again.

* * *

Gracie was the first to come downstairs the next morning, a not unexpected development, since Vivian had still been at the party last night when she and Harrison left, and Harrison had opted for a nightcap before he went to bed himself. No breakfast had been set up on the patio yet, so Gracie headed back into the house...mansion...palace...most gigantic residence she'd ever seen...to forage in the kitchen herself. She would at least start the coffee, since, as far as she was concerned, a day without caffeine was like a day without precious, life-giving oxygen. As she entered the hall she was pretty sure would lead to the kitchen, however, she crashed into the most gigantic man's chest she'd ever seen.
Oops.

“Whoa,” Harrison said as he wrapped his hands around her upper arms and moved her back a few steps. “What's the hurry? Are we planning to take advantage of everyone's absence to fill our pockets with anything that's not nailed down?”

Ignoring, for now, that neither her red-and-yellow plaid pants nor her red short-sleeved blouse had pockets—and even if they did, no way could she stuff a Louis Quatorze buffet into one—Gracie frowned at Harrison. When they'd parted ways last night, they'd been on pretty good terms. In spite of some of the weirdness that had arced between them at the party, they'd eventually fallen into a reasonably comfortable fellowship that had lasted all the way through the ride home.

This morning, though, he seemed to want to return to the antagonism she'd thought had vanished. Or at least diminished to the point where he had stopped thinking of her as a thief. She took a step backward, removing herself from his grasp, and frowned harder. Not as easy to do as it should have been, because he looked even yummier than usual in casual dark-wash jeans and a white oxford shirt, the sleeves rolled to his elbows.

Instead of rising to the bait he was so clearly dangling in front of her, she said, “And good morning to you, too.”

He deflated a little at her greeting. But he didn't wish her a good-morning in return. Instead, he told her, “The servants get the weekend off. Everyone's on their own for breakfast.”

“Which isn't a problem,” she said, “except that I don't know where the kitchen is.”

He tilted his head in the direction she'd been headed. “You were on the right track. It's this way.”

Gracie may have been on the right track, she thought as she followed him through a warren of rooms, but if he hadn't shown up when he did, they would have had to send a search-and-rescue team after her. It struck her again as she absorbed her grand surroundings just how rich Harry had been, just how much he'd turned his back on when he ran away to Cincinnati and just how out-of-place the man she'd known would have been in these surroundings.

Even the kitchen reeked of excess, massive as it was with state-of-the-art appliances—some of them things Gracie didn't recognize even with her restaurant experience.

“Coffee,” she said, hoping the word sounded more like a desire than a demand, thinking it came off more as a decree. “Um, I mean, if you'll tell me where it is, I'll make it.”

“I set it up last night. Just push the button.”

She looked around for a Mr. Coffee, and then reminded herself she was in the home of a billionaire, so switched gears for a Bonavita or Bunn. But she didn't see one of those, either. When Harrison noted her confusion, he pointed behind her. She turned, but all she saw was something that looked like a giant chrome insect. She looked at him again, her expression puzzled.

“The Kees van der Westen?” he said helpfully.

Well,
he
probably thought it was helpful. To Gracie, a Kees van der Westen sounded like something that should be hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When she continued to gaze at him in stumped silence, he moved past her to the big metal bug, placed a coffee cup beneath one of its limbs, and pushed a button. Immediately, the machine began to hum, and a beautiful stream of fragrant mahogany brew began to stream into the cup.

“Wow,” she said. “That's more impressive than the espresso machine we have at Café Destiné.” Then, because she hadn't had her coffee yet so couldn't be held responsible for her indiscretion, she asked, “How much did that set you back?”

Harrison didn't seem to think the question odd, however. He just shrugged and said. “I don't know. Six or seven thousand, I think.”

She couldn't help how her mouth dropped open at that. “Seven thousand dollars? For a coffeemaker?”

“Well, it does espresso and cappuccino, too,” he said. “Besides, you get what you pay for.”

“You know what else you can get for seven thousand dollars?” she asked, telling herself it was still because she hadn't had her coffee, but knowing more that it was because she wanted to prove a point.

He thought for a minute. “Not a lot, really.”

“There are some cities where seven thousand dollars will pay for two years of community college,” she said. “What you think of as a coffeemaker is a higher education for some people.”

His expression went inscrutable again. “Imagine that.”

“I don't have to imagine it,” she said. “I've done a lot of research. Do you have any idea how many lives your father's fourteen billion dollars will change? Any concept at all? Do you even know what
one
billion dollars could buy?”

Instead of waiting for him to answer, she continued, “One billion dollars can send more than twenty-five thousand kids to a public university for four years. Twenty-five thousand! A billion dollars can put two million laptops in public schools. A billion dollars can buy decent housing for six thousand families in some places. A billion dollars can run seven thousand shelters for battered women for a year. You add up how many lives would be improved. And that's only the first four billion.”

Harrison's expression remained fixed, but something flickered in his eyes that made her think she was getting through to him.

So she added, “Your father's money can bring libraries to communities that don't have one. It can put musical instruments in schools that can't afford them. It can build playgrounds in neighborhoods that are covered with asphalt. It can send kids to camp. It can build health clinics. It can fill food banks. Maybe that was why Harry changed his mind late in life about what he wanted to do with his money. So he'd be remembered for changing the world, one human life at a time.”

At this, Harrison's expression finally changed. Though not exactly for the better. “And what about his family?” he asked. “Did my father have to completely shut us out? You keep talking about him as if he were this paragon of altruism in Cincinnati, conveniently forgetting about how he turned his back on his family here. Not just me and my mother, but my half sisters and their mothers, too. My father spent his life here taking whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it, often from people he claimed to love. Now he wants to give it all back to strangers? Where's the logic in that? Where's the commitment? Where's the obligation? Where's the... Dammit, where's the love?”

His eruption stunned Gracie into silence. Not because of the eruption itself, but because she realized he was right. She'd been thinking of Harry's fortune as an all-or-nothing behemoth, something that either went to charity or to the Sages, and neither the twain should meet. But Harry could have left something to his family. Not just to Harrison and Vivian, but to his ex-wives and other children, too. So why hadn't he?

“I'm sorry,” Gracie said, knowing the words were inadequate, but having no idea what else to say. She didn't know why Harry had excluded his family from his will. Maybe he'd figured Harrison would be fine on his own and capable of taking care of Vivian. Maybe he'd assumed his divorce settlements with his exes were enough for all of them and his other children to have good lives. And probably, that was true. But he still could have left each of them
some
thing. Something to show them he remembered them, to let them know he had loved them, even if he hadn't done that in life.

Because one thing Gracie did know. As rough-around-the-edges and irascible as Harry could be, he
had
been able to love. She'd seen him express it every day. Maybe not in his words, but in his actions. He'd loved his parents and little brother once upon a time, too. And if he'd been able to love a family as fractured as his had been when he was a boy, then he
must
have loved Harrison and Vivian, too, even if he'd never been any good at showing it. Maybe if Harrison had known him the way Gracie did, he would be able to see that, too.

If only she could take Harrison back in time a few years and introduce him to the version of his father she knew. If only he could see Harry in his flannel bathrobe, shuffling around his apartment in his old-man slippers and Reds cap, watering his plants, his favorite team on TV in the background, his four-alarm chili bubbling on the stove. If only he could see Harry's patience when he taught her to fox-trot or his compassion when he filled trays at the shelter or his gentleness showing some kid how to hold a bat.

And that was when it hit her. There was a way she
could
show Harrison those things. Harry wouldn't be there physically, of course, but he'd be there in spirit. Harrison had shown her his version of his father in New York yesterday. So why couldn't Gracie show him her version of Harry in Cincinnati? They could fly there tomorrow and spend a couple of days. She could take Harrison to the storage unit to go through his father's things. They could watch the Little League team Harry coached. She could show Harrison the hospital and shelter where Harry volunteered and introduce him to some of the people who knew him. She could even take him dancing at the Moondrop Ballroom.