A Rather Lovely Inheritance (37 page)

“Well,” said Rupert, looking a bit fusty, “Harold said
you
told him that you were going to share your inheritance with ‘the one man in the world I can trust most’—your exact words.”

I groaned. “Drat that Harold,” I said. “The soul of discretion, until now.”

Rupert said, “So, naturally, when this bloke showed up he rather gave the impression that you’d summoned him as soon as the estate was settled and you’d got your money.”

Bingo. The money. That explained it. Erik had warned me that Paul knew why I’d gone to London. And the story of the painting had been in all the Euro press. Oh, Christ, I thought. This must be what it’s like to hit the lottery or something, and have all your friends and relatives come out of the woodwork, suddenly impressed with you.

“Did Jeremy say anything to you about me when he left?” I asked. Rupert looked up as if he’d finally made a decision to spill the beans, but he still couldn’t quite look me in the eye.

“Oh, you know,” he said. “He went about muttering about the treachery of women. Men do that among men. It doesn’t mean anything,” Rupert assured me. “It’s just that Jeremy truly fancies you, and it kind of looked as if once you got what you needed from him, you called up your real boyfriend. He said this was the fellow who’d broken your heart and for whom you still carry a torch. So—you didn’t tell this man to meet you here, then?” he inquired.

“Of course not!” I said hotly. “Invite that creep back into my life? Share money with that bum? Never! He came here all on his own.”

“Ah,” said Rupert, looking as if he wished we would stop talking about it. “That explains the whole kerfuffle.”

“No, it doesn’t,” I said.“Who told Paul that I was going to be here in the first place? And let him in this morning?”

Something made me look up then. At the far end of the corridor was Severine, watching us closely.When she saw the look on my face, she darted toward the ladies’ room.

“Pardon me, Rupert,” I said. “And don’t disappear on me. I’ll be right back. Keep Paul as busy as you can.”

I chased that snake-woman right into the ladies’ room and cornered her at the mirror, where she was very cool and casual, smoothing her hair and applying blood-red lipstick. All the while we spoke, her eyes were on my reflection in the mirror.

“Well?” I demanded.

When I didn’t say anything more, she said, “Congratulations on your engagement.”

“There is no engagement,” I said hotly. “And suddenly Jeremy’s gone, too. Would you like to explain why you took it upon yourself to arrange this little fiasco?”

From the look on her face I knew that she was the one who did it, all right.

“Don’t worry about Zheremy,” she said, patting her shiny hair in that perfect twist. “He always gets what he wants from women.” Her eyes looked hard, but bright. I knew she meant that he’d lost interest in her. I might have even felt sorry for her—except for what she said next.“Especially now zat he has his villa . . . and a generous allowance from
you
.” She shook her head scoldingly, as if I’d played the war of the sexes all wrong. “You make it too easy for him. Now he can stay independent, even from you,” she said on her way out.

I stood there alone for a moment.Well. Someone had just told me that a man had seduced me only for my money. Now that was truly a new experience.

When I came out of the ladies’ room Paul was in the hallway, waiting to pounce.

“Okay, Penny, let’s find somewhere beautiful and expensive to have lunch,” he offered, as if he’d made up his mind for both of us. I was amazed that he still thought he could impose his strong will on my uncertain one. “You and I have a lot of catching up to do,” he murmured softly. “For the rest of our lives.”

I stared at him. I could remember a time, not that long ago, when such attentiveness, fidelity and affection from him would have filled me with joy. Now, well . . . I could see from the hard little sparkle around those loving eyes, that I was simply, in his mind, the rich woman he’d been searching for all his life—and, as an added bonus, I was also sweet Penny Nichols, who he always thought would make a nice, loyal, compliant little wife.

“Sorry, Paul,” I said calmly. “I’ve got to track down a certain lawyer. And by the way,” I added, “do stop going around introducing yourself as my fiancé.You and I both know that our little moment in the sun together ended a long, long time ago.”

 

On my way out, I caught up with Rupert, who was going out to lunch. “It was Severine who did the deed and put Jeremy and Paul in the same cage together,” I announced.

Rupert looked nonplused and said, “Really? I’m quite surprised at Severine. She’s usually so professional. I don’t know why she would do such a thing.”

“Because she’s in love with him, for starters,” I said. “I think they were an item once.”

Rupert mumbled that well, if it were true that Jeremy and Severine had been an item once, it must have been before he, Rupert, had “come on board.”

“Look, Rupert,” I said. “Now I
have
to talk to Jeremy, that moron. You must have a number where you can reach him.”

“Actually, I don’t,” Rupert said, sounding surprised himself. “The guy from Texas is a secretive sort of fellow. He does his deals at some lodge where there are no phones. Jeremy told me he’d try to find a landline somewhere, but I haven’t heard from him yet. Don’t worry. He’ll phone in eventually. He always does.”

“I certainly hope so,” I said. “Meanwhile, I have to go to Italy, to the museum that’s bought the painting.To approve where they’re putting it.”

“I understand, and I’ll tell Jeremy as soon as he calls,” Rupert promised.

S
O THERE I WAS, SITTING ON A BENCH IN THE MUSEUM, STARING AT the Madonna and Child, wondering what on earth I was going to do with the rest of my life.The day was sunny and benevolent, and the walled-in museum gardens were fragrant with lemon and orange trees whose perfume wafted into the corridors through its open windows. I’d been ushered in via a private door, and led to the special wing where my painting had its own glassed-in alcove waiting for it, with a quaint, tiny thermometer that would make sure it always had just the right atmosphere and temperature to protect it.

The curator had been wonderfully kind, and sensed that I was feeling a bit subdued, so after the workman finished the job of hanging the painting, he left me there alone with my thoughts. I could hear his footsteps retreating across the cool marble floors.

I sat there gazing at the Madonna. She gave me a maternal, comforting sort of look. She may have even said,
Pull yourself together, ducky . . . you’re still young . . . more or less . . .

But just as I’d begun to calm down and feel philosophical, a man plunked himself down on the bench next to me and cleared his throat and rattled his newspaper. Irritably I realized that the museum had just opened for the day, and people were already streaming in to get a look at the painting. It was obvious that I needed to be left alone. But this man couldn’t sit still, he harumphed and blew his nose noisily—and still I didn’t catch on.Till finally he spoke.

“For a detective, Penny Nichols, you can be a bit obtuse at crucial moments,” I heard Jeremy’s voice say in amusement. I looked up into his grinning, dopey face.

“I don’t believe it,” I said. “You’re supposed to be on a boat or something. In Texas.”

“And you’re supposed to be winging your way back to America with that uncouth beast,” he said. “According to Severine.You didn’t tell me Paul was still your boss, you know.”

“Nobody’s going to be my boss ever again,” I said.

“Nevertheless,” Jeremy said, “when he showed up at my door, grinning like a monkey, talking about marrying you, I guess I went a bit doolally. God, I just wanted to wring his neck. And yours. I remembered how tortured you looked when you told me about him.”

“That is not, you know, love,” I muttered.

“Yes, well, it almost made a murderer out of me,” he said wryly. “Fortunately I was summoned away, to the sodding wilderness in Canada. On a boat that’s really a car, or else it’s a car that’s really a boat, for Chrissake. All I could see was that smug grin of your wretched ‘fiancé.’ But the farther out to sea I got, the more it occurred to me that I’d been royally duped.”

“Correct,” I said. “He lied to you. But Severine set the whole thing up.”

“Ah,” he said.“Then I see it’s Severine I should strangle. Or maybe you can do it for me, there’s a girl.” He exhaled deeply.“When I finally got through to the office, I heard conflicting reports. Severine said, as far as she knew, you’d signed your papers and gone back to America with that hound. Rupert said you chased the hound out of the office and told Rupert he’d bloody well better get hold of me and tell me you were here. So, here I am.”

“What happened to your client?” I asked curiously.

“Far as I know, he’s still on his boat, but I told him it couldn’t be helped,” he said.

“You came back—just for me?” I said in a small voice. Nobody had ever done anything remotely like that. Crossed an ocean and all . . .

Jeremy gave me a look that went straight to my heart. “Yes, well, I started to imagine what it would be like to live in a world without Penny Nichols in my life. It seemed unbearable. I couldn’t give you up without a fight. So you see, you’ve made a whole new man of me. An utter lunatic. I never act this way.Thanks a lot,” he said ruefully.

“Yeah, it was pretty lousy without you, too,” I said frankly. “Let’s promise never to let anything come between us like that again.”

“I promise,” he said, and he kissed me. For a long, long,
long
languorous time, as if he had all the time in the world, and yet as if we both thought we’d never have enough time, even in a lifetime, to tell each other how much we loved each other.

Bless Italy, nobody disturbed us as we sat there in each other’s arms. Nobody thought it was strange, or bad, or a violation of the rules for two people to be so happy. People just moved quietly around us, the curators and the patrons alike. Until, of course, it was lunchtime.Then one of the guards gently told us that the museum would be closing for a couple of hours.We rose from our little bench, and I nodded good-bye-for-now to our painting on the wall. As we walked through the museum to get to the front door, Jeremy said regretfully,“I have to go back to London. Pick up the pieces at the office.”

“Are you in deep trouble, mild trouble, or—?” I asked.

“It’ll be okay, mostly,” he said.Then he looked at me and said seriously, “But I’ve been thinking a lot, about what Aunt Pen said in that letter to us. About not letting anyone talk you out of living the life you want. I mean, I could go on being a lawyer in this firm, hoping to make partner, just another rat in the rat race. But I wouldn’t be doing a lot of the things I’d like to do, might never have had a chance to do if it weren’t for Aunt Penelope.”

“I know what you mean,” I said instantly. “I love working with Erik and Tim, but I don’t want to be in thrall to Pentathlon Productions for the rest of my life, and frankly, Paul may just have already decided that I’m history over there. Erik has other clients, I guess, but . . .”

“Penny, dear,” Jeremy said in amusement, “I don’t think you’ve quite grasped the situation.You are now a woman of some means.You could start your own production company if you wanted to.”

“Hmm,” I said, “you’re right. It hasn’t really sunk in yet.”

“The point is, if we just continued as we are, we’d hardly ever see each other,” Jeremy concluded, “flying around on business-as-usual and feeling lucky if we managed to pass each other in airports. I think we can do better than that.”

I tilted my head at him. “Whadja have in mind, pal?” I inquired.

He grinned. “Why, we could start some enterprise of our own. After all, I’m a well-known, fairly respected, high-powered international lawyer—”

“Modest to a fault, too,” I commented. He went on, undeterred.

“You are a rather good historical expert, and, moreover, a natural-born snoop,” he said. “So there must be some way that we can put those two things together. But the point is, we should give ourselves time to figure out what we really love to do, and why, and what it all means to us.”

We were walking through room after room of antiquities, moving past ancient statues of the Roman gods, past spooky medieval displays of armor and golden chalices, through the Renaissance Room, where portraits gazed back at us pensively, watchfully. I drew a deep breath, and somehow in that instant, I knew that the world was opening up for me in ways I’d never dreamed possible, and that my life had just made some fundamental shift. It was as if a veil had been lifted and I was seeing everything for the very first time. I didn’t know exactly what it all meant and where it would all lead, but I knew that my feet were already on the path.

And then my stomach growled. Loud. Jeremy said, “Was that you?”

“Look. I can’t figure out my whole future on an empty stomach,” I said.“All of Italy has stopped its business to eat lunch. Can’t we grab something before the flight back?” Because I had a return ticket for today, too.

“Of course,” Jeremy said.“And tonight, let’s meet at my apartment after I handle things at the office.The doorman will let you in if you get there ahead of me.We could cook dinner together like your parents do. I’ll pick up champagne, to celebrate our good luck properly.”

“Great!” I said.“I’ll shop for some stuff at the market when we get back to London.”

I
HAVE TO ADMIT, I LOOKED RIDICULOUSLY HAPPY WHEN I SHOWED up at Jeremy’s apartment with my arms full of bundles of groceries. A short, middle-aged doorman with big ears sticking out of his uniform cap smiled at me when I entered, so I didn’t expect any trouble when I told him I was going up to Jeremy’s apartment to wait for him. A strange look crossed the guy’s face, and his smile disappeared.