Authors: Keri Stevens
“Pretty, I guess.” Isobel had sniffed. Unlike her more affable sister, she was difficult to impress.
“Delia, is that you?” Annabel’s face looked down on the Bible, so she had a limited view of the goings-on in the cemetery.
“Yes, Annie.” Delia braced her hands on the cool stone of the thigh-high base and slid one knee up on the Bible. As a professional she knew better, but she’d been clambering up on this monument since she was eight and tall enough to reach. They’d be insulted if she didn’t sit with them and give them something besides the Bible to look at.
“About time you came for a visit,” Isobel muttered from Delia’s left. She glowed orange and pink in the setting sun. “How long has it been? Two weeks? Three?”
The wind cut through Delia’s sweater. She clenched her jaw, not correcting Isobel.
“You look different, Delia. Are you different?”
“Not really, Izzy. Older.” She crossed her legs. The cold seeped in through the weathered seat of her jeans.
“What brings you?” Annabel asked.
She didn’t look right. It took Delia a moment to figure out why.
“Oh, Annie, what happened?” She stroked the stump where one of Annabel’s pigtails had been snapped off.
“Kids did it,” Isobel explained.
“I don’t miss it,” Annabel said. “I see more without it blocking my vision.”
“You look silly,” Isobel said.
They were carved from pink Tennessee marble, so it would be easy to replicate the pigtail. Delia could mold a reasonable facsimile from marble dust and compound. She might even hire a real sculptor to carve a new pigtail for Annabel. When she signed the stupid check, she would be able to afford it.
“Come here,
chère,
” ordered a high, soft voice.
“
Oui,
Grandmère,” Delia replied, and took a strengthening breath. She had come here for this—to speak to the
pleurant,
who was not her grandmother, but was as close to one as Delia had ever known.
She slid off the edge of the tomb and curled up on the ground between Grandmère’s skirts and the mausoleum, where she couldn’t be seen.
“Did you come to sing for me?” the
pleurant
asked.
“Grandmère, I don’t feel like singing.” A lump swelled up in her throat.
“What has happened now, Delia?” The voice rose from under the stone folds of the veil high above her head. From this angle Delia could pretend that beneath her veil Grandmère had eyes and a smile.
It wasn’t too much of a stretch because Grandmère was different. The other
pleurants
Delia met didn’t speak. They only wept. But Grandmère had always spoken to Delia.
“I was stupid. I may have lost Steward House.”
“Don’t be silly,
chère.
It’s not as if she can walk away. You’re the one who flits in and out like a moth in the night.”
The cemetery fell as silent as day. Not even the lamb bleated, and Delia was conscious of her voice carrying down the hill. Hugging her arms into her belly, she told the story in fits and starts—how she’d left the house to her father’s care while she attended school and college; how, when she’d broached questions about replacing the carpet or fixing the broken hinge on the back door, he’d brushed them away with his typical brusque dismissals.
“He lived there. I didn’t. I let him be. Stayed out of his way.”
“But it wasn’t his, Delia,” Grandmère admonished. “It never could be.”
“I know that!” Delia wiped her hand down her face. “I know it now.”
“Delia. You’ve always known.”
“No. I didn’t understand the terms of Mother’s will.”
“Pfft. Words on paper. As permanent as fire.” Grandmère’s voice softened. “How bad can it be, Delia? She is granite, solid and strong.”
“Did anyone…did you hear anything about the fire?”
“We don’t get visitors up here so often now with you gone. But no—we’ve heard nothing.”
Delia leaned her wet cheek against the cold stone hem of Grandmère’s veil. The chill had set in deep and she was starting to shiver.
“I have to sell her.”
“So you sell her.”
Delia looked up in surprise. “You don’t understand. After tomorrow, the estate will no longer belong to me.”
“Delia. You are but silk and bone dust. Steward House was here long before you, and she’ll be here long after you are resting inside with your mother.”
Grandmère didn’t mean to be callous. None of them did. But tact and diplomacy had no hold in hearts of stone. They spoke their truths with neither apology nor restraint. “Don’t you see, you silly child? Steward House does not belong to you. You belong to Steward House.”
“I don’t know what she needs, or how to give it to her.”
“And why not?”
“I’ve been at the hospital.” Her teeth chattered. “And the lawyer’s office.”
“Delia. The truth won’t change just because you refuse to face it.”
In spite of the knots in her stomach Delia laughed. How many times had she huddled at the base of this statue as a young girl and listened to Grandmère lecture her? What kind of a nut job was she, to take comfort in the scolding of a piece of carved stone?
“I’d rather move in here with you,” Delia said, not for the first time in her life.
“
Alors
, soon enough,” Grandmère replied, not for the first time in Delia’s life.
Delia sighed and stood, bouncing on her the balls of her feet to warm up. “Okay,” she said. “It is time to see my house.”
“Bah! It is time for the house to see
sa fille.
”
***
Steward House sat at the end of a gravel drive through an
allée
of trees. By day, she was pale gray stone, with a blush of pink. Now she was just a dark shadow.
Grandfather Algernon had quarried the granite in the 1850s and had it cut into bricks. He’d built Steward House back when the ten acres of property had been nestled on the plateau above the river valley that cut through dark virgin forest. Since then, Stewardsville had grown up around the estate and spread like fingers up the ridges and into the narrow southern Virginia valleys.
In the darkness at the bottom of the circle drive, Delia saw no evidence of anything wrong. She was coming home, and her heart lifted as she closed in on the house, which stood sturdy, tall and proud, its two sides opening like arms from the arch of the central entryway. Delia’s shoulder blades eased down her back, just as they had the first day her father had brought her and her still-young, still-healthy mother to live in the house inherited from the mother-in-law he despised. Remembering her childhood here was like pushing her tongue against a sore tooth, and yet Steward House called to her, welcomed her, and gave her a sense of peace and place.
Her heart dropped a little as she stepped out of the car at the top of the circle drive and smelled the oily, thick miasma of smoke and sour chemicals. In the moonlight she saw the blackened scraps of fabric fluttering in the ground floor window and smudges of soot coating the east walls. She picked her way carefully over the yellow tape the volunteer firefighters had strung in a limp garland around the perimeter of the house and unlocked the front door. When she stepped inside, the funk of burnt oil, melted plastic and smoke coated her tongue with the flavor of guilt. Someone else—
Father?
—had set fire to Steward House, but it was her fault.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, wishing the walls would speak to her, wishing someone would forgive her. Before her parents had stripped the house of its statuary, Bert might have comforted her. The Victorian hare had stood in the front left corner of the entry, opposite the umbrella stand, but now Bert was gone. All the statues had been stripped away. Whether he’d set the fire or not, her father’s desecration of Steward House had begun years before, when she still had an excuse for behaving like a child.
The wallpaper of the formal parlor was scorched. The blackened archway in the back of the room stood like a gaping wound, an open mouth screaming the house’s pain.
She could leave. She didn’t want to see any more damage, and she could fix nothing in the house tonight. She hadn’t had anything to eat for hours, and she was tempted to back out the front door and go—where? To the caretaker’s cottage back in the trees? She couldn’t sleep in here.
But she owed it to Steward House and to herself to bear witness to the damage. Before she gave up, before she gave in and took Wolverton’s money, she needed to see for herself the crime committed in her absence—and the true cost of her neglect.
Delia stepped into the west library, which the fire hadn’t reached. It looked the same, except the books were ruined. Smoke and water had soaked into the leather and paper.
In the room beyond sat her mother’s grand piano, one of the few heirloom pieces Mom hadn’t allowed Father to sell. It was covered with dusty snapshots of a young couple and a laughing toddler who only superficially resembled the woman Delia had become. The red toile wallpaper was dark with water stains, the figures fuzzy shadows in the faint moonlight. But Delia knew the pattern well and doodled the nymphs and shepherds in idle moments. She’d never seen the paper on anyone else’s walls, but for once her degree in interior design might come in handy. Surely she knew someone who knew someone who could reproduce the paper?
Delia opened the piano lid, recoiling from the stench of smoke in the wires. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. She pressed on low C, but it made no sound, so she tapped it again. She heard only a muffled thud. Settling on the bench, she laid her forehead against the wood and ran her fingers along the bubbles in the finish. Rosewood was virtually extinct, and finding pieces the size of the piano would require an international search. She couldn’t begin to estimate the cost.
Sighing herself upright, Delia returned to the entry and mounted the stairs. Her fingers dragged a trail of greasy soot up the banister to the second floor. Her room was between the bathroom on the east side and the back guest room above the kitchen, where the fire had begun.
Moonlight poured in through the gaping hole that had been her bedroom window. Much of the wood floor was gone, exposing huge virgin timber beams charred black. But the fire had been short and the beams might not have burned through. She gripped the crumbling molding on either side of the doorway, which was still wet from the firefighters’ hoses, and pushed her foot down experimentally on the beam. Although gaps in the flooring exposed the dining space below, her twin bed still teetered in its place along the back wall. Yellow mattress foam streaked with black bled out of the scorched rags of fabric that had once covered the mattress.
Delia inched her right foot forward along the beam and bore down. No movement. She debated lifting her left foot, but behind her a floorboard creaked. Her foot slipped, her sneaker hanging over a gap in the floor. Her fingernails clawed the molding and an iron bar clamped around her belly. The blood pounded in her ears, even as she was enveloped in the scent of pine and spice. She closed her eyes and leaned back into the strength of his body, Grant’s body—the same body that had sheltered her once before, so long ago.
“Mr. Wolverton.” She gulped. “You scared me to death.”
He laughed, his breath tickling her hair, her ear. “You’re not so good for my nerves either, Miss Forrest. It’s dangerous in here.”
Oh, was he ever right.
Her fantasy-made-flesh held her in his arms as she’d dreamed he would do when she was a girl. Young Delia would have twisted to him and pressed up against his solid chest, would have slid her hands up his neck so she might feel whether the dark curls there were thick and wiry or silky smooth. In the midst of her smoky, half-starved reverie, however, Delia had a chilling thought.
“How long have you been following me?”
“I haven’t. I’ve been waiting here.”
“For how long?”
“Since you left. Gave me more time to assess the damage to the house.”
He hadn’t followed her. He hadn’t seen her talking to the graveyard statues.
He might be lying. He was fully capable of lying. Delia pushed back against his chest and thighs, but Grant didn’t give. Instead, he tightened his grip. Her breasts, sweaty and swollen, were resting on the corded muscles of the back of his arm. Thank God it was dark because, damn it, she was blushing.
Grant slid his arm out from under the swell of her breasts, and her nipples sprang to attention. She closed her eyes, clenched her jaw, and his large hands encircled each of her upper arms. He lifted so she could shift back off the beam through the doorway. Then he steered her toward the stairwell.
Delia turned to look up at him, “How did you know I would come here?” Her breath was shallow, fast. She struggled to bring it under control.
He shrugged in the moonlight, and his teeth flashed. “It’s what I would have done.”
He was here, with her. Grant Wolverton was touching her again as she’d always hoped and never believed he would do. She was delighted—and she was disgusted with herself.
He released her arms. Delia stepped back and gestured. “After you.”
“No.” He swooped down, his face inches from hers, and she could feel the warmth of his breath on her cheek. “We can’t have you breaking your neck.”
She held herself rigid to keep from giving into impulses she couldn’t name.
“It’s not safe here, Delia. Let’s go.”
Grant steered them out of the house. Delia felt fragile in his hands, ephemeral, and as she stepped out onto the front patio, he walked faster, consumed by the irrational fear she would lift her arms and flutter away.
He knew what was wrong with him. The buzzing in his blood had only grown since she’d opened the door to that stuffy little room and brought with her light and energy and air. He’d kept himself under control in the lawyer’s office. He’d focused on listing the needs of the house while he sat on the back bench, waiting for her. But when he had his arms around her body, when her soft curves pressed into him, he’d become as hard as the brick itself. He was confusing his sense of
click
with horniness born of a dry spell, because he’d been spending too many hours doing too much of the wrong work. It was nothing more than that.
“Let’s discuss your future,” he said.
But she didn’t respond. She just marched through the unmown grass to the bench behind the house. She smelled sweaty-sweet, and in the moonlight he could see the curve of her neck rising out of her sorry excuse for a T-shirt. The thin cotton bra was worse than useless, emphasizing the gentle swell of her breasts even as her nipples all but pressed through the fabric. But she was only a woman. No one special.
This house, however, was special. Grant had found his home. The picture on the computer had called to him, and when he stepped out of his car this morning Grant had felt the click, the same feeling he got when he discovered a good piece—a dusty old statuette in an English professor’s suburban ranch house or a rare painting of a landscape lying face down on an attic floor. Grant was a success, in part, because he had the knack for digging the jewel out of the trash heap. His senses were singing even now.
Steward House was a grand old dame. She was sturdy, with thick walls and strong beams upon a deep foundation. He would clean away every scar left by the fire until she was radiant. He could protect this house, and she could protect his sister, Randi. He would turn operations at Wolverton International over to Lars and his expansion plans, and he himself would go back to hunting for treasure. With this house as his base, his foundation, Grant would find peace.
But not today. He’d have no peace until he closed the deal and washed his hands of this confusing sprite with her large eyes and wary face. She folded her arms and glared up at from the rusty wrought iron bench. Instead of sitting beside her, Grant stood behind the bench, holding his hands behind his back. She was a means to an end, a bit of unfinished business. He had to stop touching her now.
“You don’t want this mess.” His voice was low and persuasive. “It will cost too much money to make it livable, and a couple months of solid work.”
“Is that all?”
“I have the resources.”
Her small breasts rose and fell as she heaved a sigh. “It’s so easy for you, isn’t it?”
“Easier,” he acknowledged. He saw no need to sugar-coat the truth. Delia wasn’t stupid. She’d been stunned and overwhelmed in Baldridge’s office, but she’d still analyzed the documents before she signed them. She’d twirled a curl around her finger while she asked intelligent questions about obscure clauses in a quiet, low voice. She’d refused to sign anything she didn’t understand—including, unfortunately, his check.
“You get the house, Wolverton.” She sounded tired, which should have pleased him since most negotiations were about wearing the other party down. Instead, however, he felt a twinge of discomfort. “You get father’s business. But you won’t get a thank-you.”
She lifted her chin, glaring at him while she shivered on the bench. She looked vulnerable, young. It hurt to look at her.
“Come on, Miss Forrest, it’s time to go.” He turned his back on her and walked toward the dark sedan sitting at the top of the circle drive.
“Go where?”
“To Blossom’s Folly.” It was hard to choke out those words. The bed and breakfast was every bit as frilly as its name. “You’ll stay with me tonight.”
He was halfway to the car before he realized she wasn’t behind him. He looked back at the empty bench. Had the little fool gone back inside?
She hasn’t deposited the check.
He’d be the fool if he let her out of his sight again before the deed was done.
He wiped his hands down his face, shook himself and scanned the cover of trees. He could sense her in the woods behind the house. The only thing back there was the caretaker’s shack, empty of everything but a few tools.
“Time to go, Delia,” he growled. “I have the top floor of the finest lodging establishment in town. You can have your own room.”
A quiet voice called from between the trees. “Why?”
“You need a shower. You need a bed.”
She blew out an angry breath but did not reply. He scanned darkness for her shadow, and then he heard a heavy thud. “Delia!”
He charged forward, vaulting the bench.
She lay on her side between two trees, a sliver of moonlight glinting off her cheek and chin. He knelt and touched her, smelling the smoky strawberry scent of her hair, resisting the urge to bury his face in it.
She was shaking so hard. He scanned her figure, assessing her physical condition, as he hadn’t had to do for anyone in years. “Delia.”
She didn’t answer him, but lay curled up on the ground in a tight little ball.
“What are you using, Delia?”
“What?”
Probably pills. He didn’t smell pot. He placed his finger on her collarbone and felt her pulse. Strong, but rapid. He placed one hand on her shoulder and one on her thigh. He fought the urge to squeeze her, to rub his hand down her arm. He was disgusted with himself.
“I’m going to roll you onto your back now,” he told her, but to his surprise, she beat him to it, twisting toward him, her hip rubbing his knee. His breath froze and he gritted his teeth.
“What have you taken, Delia? Valium? Vicodin? What?”
She looked up at him, her lips pressed together, and then she pushed her palms against his chest in a feeble, futile attempt to shove him back.
“Shh.” He shifted his grip in order to hoist her. “It’s been a long day. You needed to take the edge off.”
“What edge?” She sat up and reached for her foot. “Let go of me.”
“You passed out, Delia.” He kept his voice calm and deliberate.
“I didn’t! I tripped in a hole. See?” She pointed at a spot in front of her. She crawled forward, patting the ground, and her hip brushed his groin. “Ha! Right here.”
Sure enough, a trench had been dug into the ground between the trees. It was muddy and full of last season’s leaf mulch but deep enough to be obvious if you looked down.
Delia skirted the hole and pulled up a shovel, turning it in the moonlight and squinting at it. Then she shook her head.
“What on earth?” She glanced back at Grant, her eyes large and dark in the night. “What would he be planting back here?”
Did she expect an answer from him? Grant wanted to laugh. He was sitting in the dirt with an erection while she wielded a rusty shovel and asked him gardening questions. “Why did you come back here, Delia?”
“To get away from you. I’ll stay in the cottage tonight.”
“And sleep on what? The shovel?”
She dropped it and sighed. “A shower, you say?”
“A shower.”
“My own room?”
Grant imagined her, pale and lithe, sliding her naked body down his own as moonlight sparkled over her skin through the open lacework of the curtain. He exhaled forcefully and nodded with effort.
Delia stood up and dusted off her pants. Her hands swiped back and forth across her ass, over her thighs, and down the front of her groin. “I guess I can pay you back.”
Just like that, he was hard again, his mind flashing with images of the many positions her payment might take. But Delia looked at him, her dark eyes filled with disgust, and he remembered the check. Resolutely ignoring the tingling in his palm, Grant took Delia’s elbow and steered her toward his car.
***
The Rose Room was decorated according to its name—not that his suite, “Lily Lane,” was much better. Grant shoved aside his laptop, which was open to Lars’s latest report, and opened Delia’s purse. He tried to focus on its contents, but the sound of the running shower made him itch. She was creamy pale with a light spray of freckles across her nose. Her purse held a pair of gloves, three charcoal pencils and a receipt for three sketch pads. She’d also have freckles in the shadowed space between her breasts. He pulled out a driver’s license, one credit card and $22.53 in cash. She’d have freckles on her thighs. In the bottom of the main pocket he scraped up an empty gum wrapper—and nothing else. No weed, no powder, no crystals, no pills, not even an aspirin. And what about her belly, or the backs of her knees? Any freckles there?
No. She was shy. The sun hadn’t touched her there.
He could hear the water sluicing both her shadowed and sun-kissed skin, heating it, making it pink. She’d panted in the darkness in her smudged T-shirt and her barely there wisp of a bra. He’d bet her nipples were dusky. Although the shower’s steam was contained in the bath, Grant was damp with sweat.
The knock on the door called him back to reality, and he snapped the flap of her old brown leather purse shut. The pizza delivery boy was no boy—he was fifty if he was a day, and his red uniform shirt stretched across his belly as if he’d sampled his fair share of the company product. Grant dug for his wallet, and then he heard her voice coming out of the bathroom, high and sweet. He couldn’t make out the words, but the tune was “Scarborough Fair.”
“Wife’s got a pretty voice.” The guy nodded, his hat slipping in the sweat of his balding head. “Nice to be able to sing like that.”
His wife? He’d had plenty of women in plenty of suites and no one had ever mistaken them for husband and wife. But this was Stewardsville, where the locals assumed your behavior was clean, upright and honorable. Shaking his head, Grant handed the guy a fifty and shut the door quietly on his effusive gratitude.
The water and the music stopped. Delia stepped through the lavender-scented steam in the doorway, wearing soft gray sweatpants and an oversized Emerson College sweatshirt. Her face was scrubbed pink, and her dark hair curled under her jaw. She looked seventeen, but her lips were full and red.
Grant swallowed. “Nice to be able to sing like that,” he rasped. She dipped her chin, shrugging her arms up into her sleeves so only her fingertips showed.
“Was I? Habit, I guess.” She nodded at the pizza box. “I’m starving. May we eat?”
He extended the box to her, but she paused before his laptop screen. He kicked himself mentally. “I’m just gathering information.” His voice was calculated to soothe.
Delia shifted the pizza box onto her hip and stepped in for a closer look. The scan of the old news clipping of her and her parents standing in front of Steward House was pixelated and blotchy. Her lips thinned and she nodded slowly.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” he said, but it was too late.
“Leave. Now.”
Grant understood the frustrated fury in her voice, but this was business. He closed the laptop and looked into her eyes. Aw, hell. She was going to cry.
His arms rose of their own volition to take her, but she shifted the pizza box back in front of her belly and jabbed at his waist.
“Get out,” she repeated, her voice quavering.
He forced his arms back down to his sides. What was wrong with him? The urge to touch her had only grown stronger, even though they were well away from the real treasure—the estate.
“We’ll start tomorrow at the bank, and then I’ll take you to the hospital. After lunch we’ll meet up with Benson before I go through the shop.”
He saw her freeze mid-breath, her eyes stark with surprise. “I can do the cleanup for you. I need to get his personal things out anyway.”
“It’s no problem.”
“Of course it is. You need to get back to the city.”
“I took some personal days.”
Her lips pressed together and she slapped the pizza box back onto the table. She was trying so hard to stay tough, and Grant was trying so hard not to wrap his arms around her, not to pull her into his chest. He’d dealt with streams of tears from widows trying to manipulate him into raising his bids. He’d been simpered at and pleaded with by the best ex-actresses in the business. But this wisp of a woman with her quivering jaw and her fierce glare was the first to make him feel something uncomfortably like guilt.
“I am sorry again about your mother. And your father. We don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things, but no one deserves what happened to him.”
“Why did you bring me here?”
“You needed a place to stay.”
“You’re not that nice.”
Her words cut. They shouldn’t have, because they were true.
“You haven’t signed the check,” he snapped back, and felt a fresh twinge of shame.
Delia paled and dropped back into the chair. “You don’t trust me.”
“I don’t know you.”
“But you know my father.”
He nodded, not without sympathy.
“He’s not a crook, Grant. He may push the edges a bit, but he’s never stolen from you or anyone else.”
“But he has pushed the edges, Delia.”
“So have you.” She meant for it be an insult, but Grant could only nod.
“Fine.” Delia’s eyes closed and she rubbed a small hand across her wan face. “I’ll start the cleaning job after we’re finished. I have to hunt for an apartment too,” she added as an afterthought.
“You’ll stay here.”
“I will not! I appreciate the room tonight, but I need to get my own place now.”
“You’re staying in Stewardsville?”
“He’s my father.”
He raised one dark eyebrow. “You see him twice a year, at most.”
“I’m all he’s got.” She sucked in a deep breath, her chest expanding so that he could almost see the swell of her breasts under the sweatshirt. “So.” She adopted a bright tone. “I’ll sign it tomorrow, and clean out the shop before I go over to the hospital.”
Why was she so insistent on getting into the store? Cleaning it was a pointless, filthy job.
Delia was hiding something—possibly another good find. She was the daughter of a larcenous old fraud, and no matter how innocent her large dark eyes made her look, no matter how tempted he was to stroke his thumb across those soft red lips, Grant was wary. “I’ll be with you when you do.”