Butterfly Madness [Loving in Silver 3] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (14 page)

“But she didn’t pass away all that long ago. How did you manage so soon afterward?”

Marley’s lips twisted. She felt the familiar surge of anger and a touch of loathing. “Our mother made the decision for me. She tried to take Callie’s paintings. She was going to sell them to some second-rate art dealer for a few thousand dollars. She was quite pleased when she made the announcement. I went in with a few friends and emptied Callie’s rooms of everything she owned, of every painting or drawing she had ever done.”

Nick looked impressed. “And what did your mother do?”

“She couldn’t do anything. Callie was an adult when she made her will. She left everything to me. I only went in while our mother was gone so I didn’t have to deal with her fake tears and her bemoaning the fact that both her daughters were ungrateful bitches.”

“Cold. Will she try to fight it?”

“I doubt it. My mother has an image she tries to maintain for equally vacuous friends.” She shrugged. “She can try to fight the terms of the will, but I’ve already got a lawyer ready to head her off if she tries. If she does, I can provide enough proof to those she considers important to make her undesirable as a spa buddy or a dinner guest.”

Nick was looking around at the finished gallery. “It’s looking good in here. The old gallery looked like it hadn’t been touched since the fifties. The owner never did much in here the last ten years or so.”

“I believe it will work out very well. I needed a place to display Callie’s art and I wasn’t going to kiss anybody’s ass to do it.” Marley smirked. “I’m now getting calls, begging me to let certain people show her work. It’s so not happening. It’ll happen here, in the kind of place she dreamed of living. People who already have some of her work will come to get something to add to their collections. It’ll be a good thing because I’ll raise the money for the charities which were near and dear to her heart.”

When Nick left, Marley took a moment to collect her emotions. She hadn’t talked about Callie so much to anyone but Colt since her arrival. But she had never said anything to him about her mother. She wanted to leave Doreen in the past. Of course, if she decided she could have a relationship with Grayson and Roarke, she would have to tell them about the coldhearted woman, but there was still time before she had to take out that skeleton again.

Breathing slowly in and out, she relaxed then began looking around. The electrician had finished putting up the lighting fixtures. Each could be moved to spotlight a painting. He had done an excellent job and she was pleased to see he hadn’t left a mess all over the floor Roarke had polished.

Sniffing, she wrinkled her nose. It would take a few days for the smell of paint to be gone. No wonder Colt didn’t want to stay at his house while it aired out, she thought with a grimace.

As she moved along the walls she imagined where each painting would be hung. She would build up the anticipation gradually, working the guests to the rear where Callie’s very best work would be featured.

Marley was filled with satisfaction as she locked the front of the gallery then went out through the back where she had parked her SUV. She stopped dead when she saw a very large brown bear sniffing along the space between the door and the body of her vehicle. Darn! Though there was no human food in there, not even a gum wrapper, there was a box of dog treats.

Backing slowly toward the gallery, she tried not to disturb the animal. It had been a long time since she had encountered a bear and that hadn’t been a pleasant situation. Just because this one was inside the town’s limits and snooping around her SUV, and not turning over rocks along a path in the back country, didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous. And it was big.

No, it was
really
big.

Taking her eyes off of it long enough to unlock the rear door on the gallery, she got inside and closed the door between them. She called the sheriff’s office.

“Sheriff’s office, how can I be of assistance?”

“This is Marley Jacobson. There’s a bear in the parking lot behind my gallery.”

“We’ll send someone right over. Are you in any danger?”

“No. I got back inside the gallery. It’s snooping around my SUV.” When she heard the screeching of metal, she corrected, “No, it’s now breaking into my SUV.”

Groaning, she shook her head. She dared to open the door a crack to look out and groaned again. The bear had half of his huge body shoved through the opening he had created when he had essentially peeled the door off the body.

“A deputy will be sent, as well as the wildlife officer, who happens to be in town at the moment. Please stay inside. You’ll hear a blast of a horn. It’s a warning that there’s a bear in town. Don’t be alarmed.”

Well, she wouldn’t be alarmed, but she was going to be bored and she was already beyond irritated. She would be without a vehicle until the damage could be repaired. Hopefully the thing would take the box of dog biscuits and leave without doing too much damage to the interior of the SUV.

A very loud horn blasted and she peeked out again, hoping the animal would be startled enough to leave. No such luck. He did leave, however, when a deputy drove his cruiser into the parking lot. There was a shout from the direction the bear took in his attempt at an escape. She stuck her head out of the door to see a tall, thin man with a tranquilizer gun shoot the bear as it was cornered against a building. They backed off until the sedative took effect, which wasn’t long. She came out as a huge trailer with a bear trap was backed in. Several men appeared to help the deputy and the wildlife officer move the huge bulk quickly into the corrugated cylinder. During the time this was happening, three Karelian bear dogs were being held on leashes close by, all but barking and growling in the bear’s face, nipping at huge clawed paws and muscled haunches. She knew the bear was likely only immobilized by the tranquilizer and not completely out of it, so he would be aware the dogs were there to torment him. It would be good memory reinforcement. Bears were incredibly intelligent animals and he would associate his time in town with unpleasant experiences. Good, she didn’t want to see it again. She wondered how much a bear dog cost and if she could get one. She smiled at her own nonsense and walked out to examine her poor SUV.

“Are you okay, baby?” a deep male voice asked. Marley turned around to see Grayson walking quickly toward her.

Marley smiled up at him, glad to see the tall, handsome sheriff. “I’m fine. The bear didn’t pay any attention to me.”

“Did you have food in there?”

She grimaced. “Dog biscuits. We missed them this morning. They were on the front seat.”

Grayson laughed. “Clever. Spread the responsibility around evenly.”

“I try. How’s your day going? And why aren’t you at home enjoying your day off?”

“I was called because my woman was being threatened by a huge, saliva-dripping beast.”

Her arched brows shot up. “Really? I haven’t seen Roarke in hours.” Grayson laughed at her joke, hugging her. She loved the feeling of security she got from his arms around her. “They called you because I called about a bear in the parking lot?” she asked seriously.

“After what happened with my former secretary, neither you nor anybody else will be able to get a hangnail without me being informed of it. Everyone wants to keep their job.” He looked her over from head to toe. Marley felt herself blush. When she was in makeup, with her hair styled, and wearing the suit, she felt all grown up. What did he see? Whatever it was, it seemed to please him. “You look like a model,” he told her, heat flaring in his green eyes.

“I’m too short to be a model.” She was only five foot six in her stocking feet. The shoes added another couple of inches, but she was still many inches shorter than Grayson. He made her feel small, fragile, and protected when she was near him. That was a good sign, wasn’t it? “Now that they have the bear,” she said, steering the conversation away from her, “what will happen to it?”

“He’ll be taken out to a wilderness area and released. They’ll make the whole experience as unpleasant as possible. Hopefully the bear will get the message and not want to come back around town.”

“He’s very fat. He’s had a good season feeding.”

“And he’s making that final push, eating everything he can, before he goes to hibernate. Getting him away from town will help him find someplace where he can tuck in without being too close to humans. You should have been at the house the day I wondered why Bailey was barking at something under the porch. Now, mind you, I’ve lived here all my life. But it just never occurred to me that there was a black bear doing its Sleeping Beauty impression under there. I crawled under, its eyes opened, and I got the hell out.”

“And?” she asked when he left it there.

“And it came out in the spring, I fixed the porch where it had squeezed in, and haven’t seen it since.”

Now that the bear was gone, people were showing up to look at the damage the critter had done to her SUV. After getting her personal belongings out of it she was relieved when a flatbed car hauler came in, courtesy of the sheriff, to take it to a body shop for repair.

“I’ll take you over so you can talk to them about the repairs.”

“Thanks, I’d appreciate that.”

By the time they had arrived at the repair shop, spent half an hour there arranging a suitable replacement she could use for a few days, then back to Grayson and Roarke’s house, she was beginning to believe she had imagined the men had any interest in her.

Grayson was acting like just any old friend, a very platonic, very uninterested-in-sex-with-her kind of friend. He didn’t touch her, didn’t tease her with any little sexual innuendoes, nor did he give her any more of those hot little looks she had begun to associate with both men. By the time she had greeted Roarke and gathered her belongings, she was really beginning to wonder if she hadn’t imagined anything sexual between her and the men. It sucked.

If they had been interested before, they sure weren’t now. Unable to identify how she was feeling, Marley politely declined their offer to join them for supper, loaded her dogs into a vehicle they didn’t want to get into, and then headed in the direction of the Redford mansion on the other side of town.

Of course, she drove by the house she hoped would be hers very soon. She parked out on the curb, admiring it. Two stories of pure charm, with a turret, gables, and a porch which just called out for people to sit on it and visit with one another, it sat on a very large yard. Though it had been cared for, the house still needed work. And it definitely needed to be painted. There were four other Queen Anne style houses on the tree-lined street. They were all painted in bright colors, so she knew hers would fit right in. The dozen or so other houses were a mix of styles, some being Craftsman, others Prairie, even one midcentury modern, which was low and angular.

“Well, this is it. How do you like your new home?” Barney saw a squirrel and barked, drooling down the window. Martha woofed quietly, her heavy tail banging against the rear window as she anticipated getting out of the borrowed vehicle and taking a run. “We’ll come look around in a couple of days.”

The fence around the property, a four-foot-high picket, would have to be replaced. Colt had told her she could do so without applying to the improvement board, as long as she made an exact replacement. There was a well-groomed hedge behind it, so it wouldn’t be easy for her dogs to make a total nuisance of themselves to people walking along on the sidewalk.

Oh, it was going to be a very difficult two weeks. She was an action kind of person. She didn’t like sitting around and waiting for things to happen. Thank goodness she didn’t have to wait for the usual negotiations, the financing hassles, and a seller to move out. But two whole weeks of waiting?

Laughing at herself, she pulled away from the curb. Fourteen days of waiting was not going to kill her.

But wondering why Roarke and Grayson had suddenly turned into best buddies instead of potential lovers just might, Marley thought with a curious twinge of sadness over the possibility. What she felt about their lack of interest made her completely forget her own determination not to get too involved until she had settled some things in her life.

She wanted to be with her hot, macho lawman and her dark, fallen angel.

“I don’t think I’m going to be able to hold out,” Roarke confessed to him during supper. “She was looking at us like we had turned into people she had never seen before.”

“Yeah, I know,” Grayson confessed, sounding no happier than his partner. “I don’t have a clue how to do this. If we just keep it to kisses and hugs, she’s still going to know something’s up. Now we’ve treated her like she had some disease and I don’t know how to go on from here. We can’t be blowing hot and cold.”

He stabbed a meatball with his fork, and then slid it around in the sauce. Roarke was a fantastic cook, which was why he ended up doing most of it. They both preferred his cooking.

“We should have dated more women.”

“We need a do-over.” He dropped his fork onto the plate. “How are we going to fix this?”

“How are we going to fix something we don’t know how we screwed up in the first place? We screwed up from the very beginning. We came on too strong.”

Grayson knew his voice was filled with confusion. He’d never had to court someone before. Hell, he’d never dated anybody before. With Roarke, he had just waited until the other man was old enough for what he had in mind. That and to discover whether Roarke was gay or not. It had come as a big relief when the younger man returned his first kiss with unrestrained fire.