Here in My Heart: A Novella (Echoes of the Heart) (7 page)

“I didn’t . . .” Half an hour later, Dru still couldn’t wrap her mind around Vivian’s real reason for asking Dru to have Brad come to the house tonight.

She turned back to the parlor from where she was staring out the side windows again. Vivian and her nurse had left. Horace had excused himself to the kitchen, saying he’d give Dru and Brad a moment together to collect their thoughts. Brad, still sitting on the couch, had been just as silent as Dru since Vivian’s bombshell.

“I didn’t know what your grandmother was up to,” Dru insisted. “I wouldn’t cause that kind of trouble between the two of you.”

Vivian intended to leave the house to Dru and the Dream Whip to Brad—
if
they lived under the same roof and worked together successfully at the restaurant until Vivian’s death.

What had gotten into the old bat?

“This isn’t going to happen,” Dru pressed.

As much as she’d miss working at the Dream Whip, Vi had gifted her with five years of managerial experience. Wherever Dru landed next, she’d be fine. And she suddenly realized she
would
be working somewhere else, whatever Brad decided to do with the house and the restaurant. After her reaction to him at the Y, her working for him, their working together, wasn’t an option. Even if he still spent most of his time in Savannah and left her in charge of the Whip, he’d be back. And if she stayed on as manager, she’d have no choice but to deal with him in person every time.

“I didn’t expect Vivian to remember me in her will,” she insisted. “Don’t worry. I’ll help you talk her out of it.”

Brad stood up and walked toward her. His gaze was unfathomable. He could be furious, or feeling nothing. Dru couldn’t decide which would be worse.

She held her ground.

Barely.

“I expected it.” He squeezed her arm. His touch was gentle. His expression was more than sad, nothing close to angry. Mostly, he looked . . . resigned. “Some of it, at least. I wondered if she might, a couple of years ago, after . . .”

He shook his head and returned to the couch. He looked enormous, without Vivian’s frailness sitting beside him. He leaned forward, his forearms on his knees.

“After what?” Dru asked.

Horace came back from the kitchen, a bar glass in his hand, sipping amber liquid from it. He’d helped himself to Vivian’s brandy stash—the bottle she kept behind the powdered sugar on the pantry’s baking shelf. He took the same chair as before and motioned with his glass for Dru to join him.

“Vivian’s been planning this for a while.” Horace glanced at Brad. “I wasn’t under the impression that you were entirely in the dark about your grandmother’s intentions.”

Dru stayed on the other side of the room.

“Tell me you’re talking her out of this,” she said to the lawyer. “Tell me you’re not encouraging her.”

“She thinks she’s helping.” Horace set his drink on the coffee table and opened one of his files. “She’s determined to help both of you.”

“Vivian’s already . . .” Dru began to pace, keeping an eye on Brad, who sat still as stone. “Your grandmother made it possible for me to stay in Chandlerville. I have a life here because of her, when I was just one more kid working weekends at the Whip, dipping ice cream and dropping fries and whipping sloppy shakes all over her kitchen. I—”

“Shut up, Dru.” Brad pinched the bridge of his nose and leaned back, his arm propped on the couch. It was long enough for his fingers to nearly reach the other side. He studied the rug between them. “You were always more than that. And if whatever Vi’s decided to do is okay with me, why would you fight it?”

Dru moved across the parlor until she was in front of him.

“It’s
not
okay with you.” It was infuriating, the thought of him going along with Vivian’s plans. “This is your house. The Dream Whip is your family’s business. Whatever scheme Vivian’s concocted with Horace because she’s feeling obligated to do more for me is a mistake.”

Not to mention the fractured fairy tale that he and Dru could live and work peacefully together.

Brad laughed, wry, humorless. “Vivian—feeling obligated to do anything she doesn’t already want to do?”

“I don’t care what she thinks she wants.” Dru gestured at Horace. “I don’t care what this guy’s let her talk herself into, while they’re spending practically every evening having dinner together here. Your grandmother seems to think,” she said to Brad, “that I don’t know about their dates the nights I’m working. The Dream Whip is a gossip wormhole, between dinner rush and closing prep. I hear everything about everyone in this town, at least the things people think I’m dying to know. I don’t care—”

“You should care, my dear.” When Horace was irritated, his drawl grew even more distinguished and Baptist-tea sweet. “She—”

“No,” Dru said to Brad. “
You
should care. You should be spitting mad about this. And you should know better than to think it’s going to work.”

She looked around her at the mismatched, dated décor and furnishings that spoke of history and roots and generations of belonging, of permanence, no matter how strained Vivian’s relationship had sometimes been with her grandson.

“This is yours.” Why couldn’t he be a selfish ass again, now that she needed him to be? “It’s all you’ll have left of your mom and grandfather and Vivian.
You
should want this. You should fight me and Horace and even your grandmother to keep this in your family. Don’t let some leftover idea of making up for our past be an excuse for not giving a damn about things in Chandlerville.”

“But he already gives a damn about things here.” Horace studied Brad’s silence. “He has for quite some time, haven’t you, son? It’s just that Vivian’s finally of a mind to get you two to deal with your problems out in the open. ‘Enough,’ and I’m quoting here, ‘with that boy wasting time being a silent champion. He’s either ready to own up to whatever he feels for Dru Hampton and me and this house and the Dream Whip, or I’m selling the lot of it and setting them both free.’”

“Champion?” Dru swallowed the dread climbing up her throat. She stared at Brad in disbelief.
Whatever he feels for Dru Hampton . . . 
“You’ve hardly been home in seven years. You stay with Travis when you’re here. Even over Christmas, you act like a visitor in this house. You never stay for more than a single night, while I go out of my way to give you and Vivian space. You’ve hardly stepped foot in the Dream Whip since you left for Savannah. You and your grandmother speak like once a month over the phone. Where on earth would she get the idea that you care—”

“He’s the one who asked Vi to put you up here.” Horace leafed through another set of notes. “It was his idea at first for his grandmother to give you a room and a full-time job when you turned eighteen, so you would stay in town.”

Dru dropped into her chair. Brad stared at the pattern on the rug between them, as if it held the answers to the world’s mysteries.

“You . . .” She didn’t know how to say it, any more than he seemed to. “You asked Vivian to help me?”

And if she didn’t miss her guess, that wasn’t all.

Those invisible handcuffs closed a little tighter, as she recalled Brad’s skill as a radKIDS instructor.

He’d said he’d been involved with the program in Savannah almost as long as she had here. Which suddenly made it seem much less random—Vivian’s agreement to be the first business owner in Chandlerville to fund Dru’s training, and to cover the expense of starting and running the nonprofit program.

All these years, Dru had seen herself and Vivian as a team. Vi had paid her to work her butt off at the Whip. She’d backed Dru putting so much time into their community, helping the local kids. They’d done a lot of good together. Dru had thought maybe Joe and Marsha had gone to bat for her at first, hitting up their unpredictable neighbor for help on Dru’s behalf. And she’d tried to repay every cent of the confidence they’d all placed in her.

The last seven years absolutely
couldn’t
have been about Brad’s guilt instead, over his starring role in Oliver’s leaving. Brad was supposed to be the villain in this story, not her silent benefactor.

Horace had lost himself in his documents, leaving Dru and Brad to figure things out. Dru willed the quiet man sitting in front of her, a man she’d once thought would be the love of her life, to look at her. To tell her that this was all a misunderstanding. When Brad finally lifted his eyes, he flinched at whatever he saw on her face.

“Why?” she asked.

The room spun. Why would he do something that would keep her from hating him as much as she needed to, and wait until now to let her know? The life she’d made for herself in Chandlerville was reshaping itself into something she didn’t recognize, far faster than she’d expected.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Chapter Five

“I was trying to do the right thing,” Brad said to Dru the next morning at the Dream Whip. “Every letter I sent you after I left was returned unopened. You blocked my calls and texts. Even if you hadn’t, and I’d told you years ago that I’d asked Vi to give you a job and a place to stay, we’d have fought over it, and—”

“And we couldn’t have that, could we?” Dru said.

She’d left him high and dry last night. She’d calmly walked out of the house before he could answer her question, and before Horace could finish going over Vivian’s will. Brad had spent a sleepless night trying to figure out how to help both her and Vivian now, without causing Dru more pain in the process.

“I was staying out of your way,” he said. “In Savannah. And I was happy to do it. I was building my own new life, while Chandlerville’s clearly worked out for you. If a small part of that was me asking Vi to help you, what’s the harm?”

“You’ve stayed away from Chandlerville all these years . . .” She looked as if she might laugh. Or cry. “For me.”

“That’s not what I said. I—”

“That’s what you did.”

“I did it for me, Dru.” At least at first he had. “I had a lot to prove to myself. It took years, and I’m still paying my dues on the force. We’re understaffed and underfunded, just like everyone else these days. There’s very little chance to take time off, except for personal emergencies. At least that means I have several weeks of leave banked now, so I can be here as long as Vi needs me.”

Dru didn’t look like she was completely buying it. Truth be told, neither was he. He could have come home more. He would have, except eventually running into Dru would have resulted in exactly the kind of drama they’d endured yesterday afternoon at the YMCA, and last night at the house.

He’d never expected to be put on the spot like this—Dru discovering that he hadn’t been the complete bastard she’d thought he was.

“You’ve been pulling strings with Vivian,” she said, “asking her to help me. Because you feel guilty about Oliver?”

“Can the bullshit, Dru. Stop overreacting.”

He told himself to cool it, too, even though blowing off steam would be a hell of a lot more satisfying.

“Vivian and I haven’t been colluding to control your life. You have no reason not to take what she’s offering you seriously, as crazy as she’s gone about doing this. And you know it, or you’d have stayed and finished working this out last night.”

It was early—too early yet for him to visit Vivian at the hospice center. By the time he’d made it to Harmony Grove last night she’d been asleep. And when he’d returned to the house, Dru still hadn’t been there. According to Travis, she’d turned up at their parents’ and slept on Marsha and Joe’s couch. Travis had mentioned that she got to the Dream Whip before dawn on Saturdays, prepping for a day of burgers and fries and shakes, as well as the farm-to-table organic salads she’d convinced Vivian to begin selling a few years back.

Vivian had let it slip once that she’d fought the idea. But within a week of being added to the menu, the healthier options had been selling well, and she’d begun trusting Dru’s instincts. The resulting menu expansion, according to the financials Brad glanced at on Vi’s home computer each time he was in town, had become the most profitable segment of the Dream Whip’s business. All of which he’d be happy to share with Dru if she’d let him—instead of looking as if she might smack him with the same enthusiasm she was currently using to flatten her hamburger patties.