Authors: Nancy Martin
She wiped her eyes with the terrycloth belt of the bathrobe. “I’m okay. Just—sorry—I hate thinking I caused this.”
“You didn’t.” He petted her hair, cupped her face. “Just—Take it easy, okay?”
She sniffled, feeling ridiculous. “Is there any more champagne?”
“We finished it hours ago. I’ll order another bottle.”
“No, don’t bother.” Grace snuggled down against him, her head on his shoulder. “Let’s just be alone. I don’t want anybody to bother us today. We’ll eat strawberries and spend the day in bed, what do you think?”
“Great.” He got comfortable with her again. “Except—your phone. It’s been buzzing for the last hour. You weren’t supposed to show up at a bookstore this morning, were you?”
She shook her head. “I have a cocktail thing late this afternoon. Maybe I could cancel? Fake a sick day? And a radio interview after that, but I do the interview by phone.”
“What about tomorrow?”
She sighed, her fingers laced into the hair on his chest. “Tomorrow I go to Baltimore, then Washington. I have a train ticket.”
It was as if a cloud suddenly blotted out the sun. Luke was silent as they linked their fingers and gazed together at their joined hands. Grace had places to travel. Luke had a life to return to. That was the reality of morning.
Gently, Luke tightened his hand on hers. Against her ear, he murmured, “Let me drive you. The whole tour.”
Grace tried to smile. “You’ll be my chauffeur?”
He kissed her forehead. “And partner in your sexual adventure.”
“What about your own life?”
“I can put almost everything on hold.”
“Almost everything.”
And then what? Grace almost asked the question. For now, it felt good just to be in his arms, to laugh, to indulge, to have fun. But she had a book to sell. If she didn’t do a good job of that because she was deliciously distracted by him, the last year of work was going down the drain. Mama would be terribly disappointed if the book failed. Dear Miss Vanderbine would be dead in the water, and Grace would have to accept the blame. And start her professional life over again.
She should have spent last evening on Twitter and Instagram. Not to mention a dozen other publicity chores she’d ditched in favor of going on a date and making hot love most of the night. Now was the crucial time to be selling her book. Could she afford to spend a few days indulging in the pleasures Luke offered?
Across the room in her handbag, Grace’s phone jingled again. It seemed to be answering her unspoken question.
She sighed. Time was slipping away fast. “What’s for breakfast?”
Luke didn’t force her to respond to his offer. He said, “Manny said he’d bring us a little of everything. I’m starved.”
Grace let her fingertips trail down his chest, the taut muscles of his abdomen, and further. She smiled. “Do we have a few minutes--? Before the food gets here--? You did say that you liked mornings.”
His lips found her temple, her brow, the bridge of her nose. Against her mouth, he murmured, “I do.”
“I’ve been thinking about the bathtub.”
“What about it?”
Grace told him what she had in mind, and before she finished whispering, Luke had untied her bathrobe and was exploring her softest parts.
But then the hotel’s phone rang on the desk, and they couldn’t ignore it any longer.
Exasperated, Luke clambered up from the sofa and went over to the desk. He picked up. “Hello?”
Languidly, Grace covered herself and watched him, musing she’d never seen such a beautiful male body.
“Yeah, she’s here. Who’s calling?”
His face went blank, and he might have turned pale.
Grace sat up, thinking the worst. Another threat from thugs determined to keep a murder secret? “Who is it?”
Luke held the receiver out to her. “It’s your mother.”
As if electrocuted, Grace leaped up from the sofa. She rushed over and snatched the phone from Luke. Her hands were shaking as she put the receiver to her ear. Disbelieving, she said, “Mama?”
“Grace, dearie, are you decent?”
Grace belatedly grabbed her bathrobe closed and clutched it with one hand against her throat. “Whatever you do mean, Mother? Of course I’m decent.”
“Good,” said the familiar voice. “I’m downstairs. I’ll be up in a minute. What’s your room number?”
Luke was laughing when she hung up the phone. “What?” he asked, watching Grace’s started expression morph into horror as she revealed the room number. “Don’t tell me she’s downstairs.”
“She is.” Grace could hardly force her voice to obey. Her heart was pounding. “She’s on her way up!”
“Now?” Luke demanded, eyes going wide.
“Right now, this minute.”
He cursed and fled for the bedroom, backtracking only when he remembered his shoes. He grabbed them off the floor and ran for cover.
10.
Caroline Vanderbine entered every room as though she owned it.
She swanned into the hotel suite with her little white dogs Puffy and Humper straining at their rhinestone leashes—one pink, one blue.
Mama threw her arms wide. “Grace, dearie! How lovely to see you looking so---good heavens, what have you done to yourself? Where’s your lipstick? Have you lost your hairbrush? And what’s that mark on your neck? It looks like a bite of some kind. Good heavens, I hope this hotel doesn’t have bed bugs!”
Grace clapped one hand over the spot where she remembered Luke nibbling just hours earlier. Fortunately, her mother couldn’t see the other places that still stung just a little bit. “I just got out of bed, Mama. I haven’t had time to--”
But Mama wasn’t looking at Grace anymore. She saw the tray on the coffee table and pounced like a starving raptor. “Strawberries! You don’t mind if I have one, do you?”
“Help yourself to whatever--”
“Puffy, stay off the furniture, please. And Humper, my precious boy, what are you doing?”
Mama’s lapdogs were either Maltese-Lhasa mixes or some exotic breed Grace could never remember, but the two of them were obnoxious little beasts that Grace would like to send to the countryside to live out their days chasing rabbits. Or rattlesnakes. One of them jumped onto the sofa and began excitedly sniffing exactly the spot where Luke had just vacated a minute earlier, and Humper made a beeline for the bedroom door through which Luke had disappeared. The dog began to furiously dig at the carpet as if he could excavate his way to the other side.
Mama ignored them. She waltzed around the room as if taking inventory while she munched a fat, juicy strawberry. Grace sent a silent thank you to Emmanuel, who must have cleared away Luke’s beer bottle during the night—that, and all other trace evidence that he had ever been in the suite.
“What a view you have from up here! And a billiards table—such an ingenious amenity in a hotel room! My stars, publishers spare no expense to send authors on tour anymore, do they? In my day, I had to sleep on lumpy futons in the apartments of old friends. And I ate stale tuna sandwiches from the Automat.”
“Mama, the Automat went out of business before pantyhose were invented.”
Grace’s mother pretended not to hear that, but spun prettily around to give her daughter a more thoughtful inspection.
Grace did the same. She couldn’t help noticing that her mother wore her highest boots, her favorite, slimming Armani coat with the fox fur collar fetchingly turned up to frame her still uplifted face, and multiple ropes of pearls that caressed her bosom--which needed no surgery or sturdy undergarment to stay as perky as they had always been. Mama religiously spent twenty minutes a day exercising to the chant, “I must, I must, I must improve my bust!”
Underneath the coat, Grace caught a glimpse of flowered silk—probably the Dior dress kept in its own special garment bag in Mama’s closet. It was her battle outfit.
Twirling around the room, Mama patted her hair—still bright blonde and worn ravishingly disheveled. Her diamond earrings—inherited from the first Dear Miss Vanderbine—glinted from inside tufts of that carefully arranged hair. The diamond rings—gifts from admirers Mama still refused to reveal—flashed on her fingers.
“Why don’t you sit down?” Grace said, feeling dizzy. “Make yourself comfortable.”
“I’ve been sitting on the train all morning, dearie. I could use a little stretch of the leg.” Mama picked up a pool cue and twirled it like a baton.
“You look like Sherlock Holmes searching for clues,” Grace muttered under her breath.
Mama stopped twirling. She had excellent hearing. “Clues to what?”
“Mama,” Grace summoned her most authoritative tone, “what are you doing here?”
Caroline put the cue back down on the table. “Can’t I come to visit my only daughter while she’s on her first book tour?”
“I mean, how did you find me? How did you know I was in this hotel?”
“Are you hiding out for some reason?” Mama demanded. “What’s the big secret?”
“I asked first.” Grace managed to remain calm. “How did you track me down?”
“I called Nora,” she admitted. “After you refused to take my increasingly frantic calls, what choice did I have? And if you must know, I practically had to torture the information out of her. Nora is a very tough nut to crack.”
Grace could hardly blame Nora. Withstanding the onslaught of Dear Miss Vanderbine required razor-sharp survival instincts. Lately, Nora had been weakened by her search for her sister Emma. No wonder she caved.
“And to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” Grace inquired.
“I’m making sure my daughter is safe, of course. I was worried. I heard about the snowstorm in Peoria and—“
“Pittsburgh.”
Mama waved her hand. “One of those outer provinces. I feared you were trapped in a snowbank, dear, or perhaps you were being chased by starving wolves. From the looks of your neck, maybe that’s exactly what happened.”
“As you can see, I’m perfectly fine.”
Her mother cast another glittery eye on Grace. “Then you can explain who answered the telephone when I called up here a few minutes ago.”
Grace rubbed her neck, not sure how to respond without risking an agonizing cross examination that would no doubt end—she knew from long experience--with slamming doors and a wounded exit. Meltdown mode seemed inevitable.
Grace was saved by a soft knock on the door. She dashed to open it and found the butler standing at the helm of a large catering cart laden with fragrant dishes and a gently steaming pot of coffee. Puffy and Humper bolted to the doorway and began to yap.
“Brunch, miss?”
“Thank you, Emmanuel. You’re just in time.” Grace held the door wide for him. “My mother has arrived.”
The butler kept his face bland, but Grace caught the flick of his eye and knew he understood. Whatever Luke had tipped Emmanuel, Grace owed him double. He was a jewel.
Emmanuel wheeled the cart into the dining room and set about arranging the feast on the table. Puffy and Humper followed, yipping for attention.
Mama peeked after him, but whispered to Grace, “Who is this charming man?”
“The butler,” Grace whispered back. “Don’t frighten him.”
Affronted, her mother stalked back to the sitting room. “I don’t know what you think of me, Grace, but it’s very offensive to come to see my daughter and not be welcomed with open arms.”
“My arms will be wide open,” Grace said. “As soon as you tell me what you’re up to.”
Mama took off her coat and dropped it on the sofa. “All right. I am here to rescue you.”
“Rescue me? From what?”
Mama sank down on the sofa and folded her hands in her lap, the picture of gracious attention. She mustered a doe-eyed expression of solemn sympathy. “I read the review in the paper, dear. That scathing bit of work inflicted on you by Pamela Waldrop-Hicks.”
“Oh.” Grace sat in the armchair and prepared herself for a lecture. She had pushed her mother for approval to heavily revise sections of
Miss Vanderbine’s Modern Manners
, but Mama had resisted. The book had been a success for generations, why meddle with perfection? But Grace had felt addressing some truly modern issues was the only way for the book to be taken seriously now, so she’d gone ahead and made the changes despite her mother’s howling to the contrary. Now, it seemed, Mama had been right.
But Mama wagged her head. “Don’t take it personally, Grace. That awful woman has always had a grudge against me. Despite that saccharine act she puts on any time she sets foot outside the ugly Main Line manse she calls home, she is a reptile underneath the mask. A snake with poisoned fangs.”
“I haven’t read the review. I hear she hates the book.”
“She hates me, dear, not the book.”
“She hates you?” Grace was surprised. “So she wrote a bad review?”
“She doesn’t hate me, exactly. She
envies
me. Big difference.” Caroline selected a strawberry from the tray on the coffee table and nibbled it. “You see, her mother also tried to write an etiquette book, but it was a dismal failure. Let me tell you, the Waldrop book was a total bore. Who wants to be lectured
ad nauseum
about good manners? Dear Miss Vanderbine has a fresh approach—we engage in an entertaining dialogue with friends! It’s a totally different concept and the secret to our success. Pamela Waldrop-Hicks wouldn’t know an entertaining dialogue from drowned cat.”
“So you’re saying … ?”
“That review was bogus. Don’t take it to heart.” Mama swallowed her strawberry, dabbed her fingertips on a napkin, and reached for her daughter’s hand. She patted it comfortingly. “Grace, I haven’t been able to tell you, but now I can be completely honest. You were right. The book needed to be updated, and you did a wonderful job.”
If the Queen of England had suddenly admitted colonizing America was all a big mistake, Grace wouldn’t have been more astonished. But surprise quickly faded into a funny squeeze in her throat and the sting of tears in her eyes.
“Mama, that’s---that’s so nice of you to day.” Grace could hardly find the words. “Thank you.”
“But you’re paying the price now,” Mama said seriously. “The likes of Pamela Waldrop-Hicks are going to try to make you feel like some kind of coarse bumpkin who deserves no respect.”
“Well, I don’t quite feel that bad, but--”