Kristin Hardy
Page 16
“Are you sure of that?”
He looked at her for a long time. “It’s different than I remember. I don’t know if it’s because there’s no Pierce or that it’s changed. Or that I have.”
“You’re different than I remember,” she said.
“What do you remember?”
“Surly, brooding. Hostile. Bradley always said you were trouble.”
His lips twitched. “I am trouble.”
“You did a good job of looking like it. You always made me a little uncomfortable.” More than a little, she remembered, but maybe it hadn’t been uncomfortable at all. Maybe it had been some part of her recognizing the first stirrings of the attraction that would exist between them, an attraction she had been in no way ready to face at fourteen.
“I remember you, always in your tennis skirt, always with your hair brushed. You’re different than I remember, too.” Mischief glimmered in his eyes. “The girl I knew was headed for the Junior League and a lifetime of fancy lunches.”
“Funny what happens when you lose your money.” Her tone was flippant.
“My mom told me about that,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. We survived and I think my parents are happier for it.”
“What about you?”
“I survived, too.”
“How old were you when it happened?”
“A junior in high school.” She rolled onto her back. “My dad spent his time back then just managing our money. He did well during the bubble with day trading. Then again, everyone did. When the bottom dropped out, it was awful.” She swallowed. “I remember coming home every day to worse and worse news until I started to dread walking through the door. Just the atmosphere was toxic. Eventually, he wouldn’t even come out of his office, just stayed there all night doing after hours trading and trying to get ahead.”
“Like trying to gamble your way back from a loss.”
“Kind of,” she agreed. “It was brutal. In a way, it was almost best when everything hit rock bottom and stayed there. When he finally gave up, that was when he was able to start the recovery.”
Lex stroked her hair. “It must have been tough on you.”
She remembered the strain in the faces of her parents. She remembered weeping over the sale of the chateau in Provence where they’d spent August for as long as she could remember. She remembered the friends who’d melted away, talking about trips and things that were no longer a part of her world.
Like Lara and the friends who’d melted away in New York.
“It wasn’t the money and things, so much,” she said slowly. “What was hardest was that everything changed.” Her place in the world, in her community, was different. The security she’d always taken for granted was suddenly gone, and if that could happen, what could she depend upon? “For as long as I could remember, things just were. I trusted that. And then it all fell apart beneath me. Like stepping on granite and finding quicksand.”
Like with Bradley, she realized in sudden shock.
“Did I mention,” Lex said casually, “that my brother is a punk?” His gaze was steady on hers. “Since he’s not here to say it, and probably wouldn’t if he were, I’ll say it for him—I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what he’s done and what he’s put you through.”
She stared at him, and suddenly it was as though every line of his face assumed some special importance. Suddenly his gaze seemed to widen to encompass her entire universe. Time and breath stopped, as though the two of them existed between ticks of the clock, between worlds, between heartbeats. And the knowledge shivered through her, solid and undeniable.
She was in love with him.
Chapter Eleven
“You don’t have to do this, you know.” Darlene stared at Keely across the bakery counter, exasperated.
“I know I don’t have to. I want to. I can do it faster than you can and quite frankly, it’s in my own best interest. You might forget about it or mess it up and the IRS will come haul you off in shackles and then where will I be? A cruller junkie without a supplier.” Keely folded her arms in imitation of Darlene. “I’m not leaving here until you let me into your office. Unless you’re worried about the legal thing.”
“I’m not worried about the legal thing.”
“Then deal with it.”
Darlene rolled her eyes. “All right, all right. Come on in.”
Keely skirted the counter and walked through the swinging door that led into the bakery itself. “You know, in all the years I’ve been coming here, I don’t think I’ve ever made it into the back,” she commented as they passed the white counters and the wall of ovens. One of Darlene’s assistants turned a cake on a rotating pedestal while she spread on chocolate frosting with a long, thin spatula. Another pulled a pan of muffins from the oven. “I didn’t know you had elves. I thought you did it all by magic.”
“There are only so many crullers one woman can make,” Darlene said. “I had to hire help to keep up with you.”
“I can see how that might be.”
They stopped before open door on the far wall of the room. “Okay, brace yourself,” Darlene said as she flipped on the light. “Welcome to my lair.”
It was more closet than office, with barely enough room for a desk, a chair and a green plastic trash can. Notes on orders and ship dates covered an oversized wall calendar. On a white board, Darlene had inked the week’s staffing schedule. An old fashioned monitor and keyboard sat on the desk, amid teetering stacks of paperwork.
Darlene leaned down and flipped on the CPU. “The printer’s behind the desk. I’ve got basic accounting and payroll software.” She clicked to start the program and punched in the password. “The file the accountant gave me is right here. You want coffee?”
“Yes, please,” Keely said.
“Be right back.”
Keely pulled out the chair and opened the file to begin reviewing the payroll documents that she knew by heart. It wasn’t just that she wanted to help Darlene or to keep busy; she was glad to have something to focus on because she was spending way too much time dwelling on Lex.
She’d fallen in love with him. Bad enough she was sleeping with him but, no, she’d gone for the big kahuna. What in God’s name was she thinking of? She’d fallen in love with a man who had no known address. Whose places of work generally featured AK-47s and shoulder-mounted missile launchers. Who was in town only to take care of his mother’s legal problems and who evinced every desire to leave immediately thereafter.
And despite all that, despite her better judgment, she’d gotten hung up on him. Not just hung up. In love. The big “L.”
“Great, Stafford. Brilliant,” she muttered. Fall in love with a guy who was never around, who spent his time on assignment dodging bullets. Hadn’t the fiasco with Bradley taught her anything? Hadn’t she learned better than to get herself tangled up with another Alexander?
And yet being with Lex felt so right.
Like she knew anything about it, she thought, punching in numbers bad temperedly. She’d been sure it was love with Bradley, too, solidly, rock-hard sure of it, and she’d been wrong. Who was to say this was any different? Maybe she just confused lust with love. Except that it had never been lust with Bradley, but something less, and it wasn’t just lust with Lex, but something much more.
Or was it? Once the situation was corrected, once they were no longer on a desperate search for vindication, would that strange link between them still exist? Or would they just be two people who had scratched a momentary itch with one another?
Keely sighed and picked up the coffee Darlene had left on the desk. Lydia would probably tell her to go with it. Keely wasn’t sure she had a choice. It wasn’t smart, it probably wasn’t healthy. It simply was. She loved him and she couldn’t just stop because she wanted to. Yes, she was setting herself up to get hurt, without a doubt, because he was leaving. Without a doubt.
And all she could really do was enjoy the time they had.
Keely stabbed viciously at the enter key and the printer began to hum.
“You got home late last night,” Olivia observed at the breakfast table, stirring her tea.
Lex glanced over. “It’s true.” Not by his choice. All things considered, he’d have preferred to spend the night with Keely, to wake with her in the morning. But she’d wanted to get home and there was little he could do but respect that. He couldn’t blame her for not wanting to face a lot of questions about their involvement. Given the Bradley connection, it would raise more than a few eyebrows.
In the case of Olivia, it would more likely raise hell.
So maybe discretion was the ticket for now but he wasn’t crazy about it. He’d given up trying to live by other people’s rules and standards the day he’d walked away from Chilton. Since then, he’d taken his lumps for various interesting screw-ups but he’d kept his promise to himself to be what he was and who he was.
An ongoing struggle since he’d returned.
“Your father’s tuxedo came back from the tailor’s yesterday.” Olivia spooned up some of her boiled egg. “Be sure to try it on as early as possible to make sure the alterations are all right.”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
“But how can you be? If something needs fixing, there’s still time this morning. By afternoon, it’ll be too late. We’ll need to leave for the gala at around three.”
Lex resisted the urge to protest. If she needed him to help her at the gala, she needed him to help her at the gala.
The Christmas gala was the event of the town social season, an annual holiday gathering for some five hundred of the Chilton glitterati. Ostensibly, it was a fund-raiser for cancer research and the local medical center, but it was as much as anything a see-and-be-seen event.
As chair, Olivia worked for the better part of the year to pull it all together. It was a holiday bash for a good cause. Hard to be too down on it.
He just wished he could get out of going.
But Olivia needed an escort and with Bradley gone, it fell to Lex once again to step into his father’s shoes—in this case literally. He knew all the reasons for it, but it still made him chafe. Just as he knew that it was the emotional upheaval that Olivia had been through—losing her husband, being betrayed by her son—that made her so dependent on him.
It was still suffocating.
He could only hope that something on the list of possible passwords Keely had compiled would get them into Bradley’s machine. They could get the information, clear Olivia and Keely, and duty would be discharged. The threat to Olivia would be gone and Lex’s life could go back to normal. Before he went nuts.
Before he got in too deep to walk away.
“Okay,” he said. “You want to be there at three, we’ll be there.”
Small, Chilton might have been, but it was one of the wealthiest enclaves in Connecticut—indeed, in the country—and it had a country club to match.
Two of them, actually, but the one that really counted, the only one, was the Chilton Racket and Leisure Club. Built in 1902, the Club, as it was simply known, sprawled across three hundred acres of rolling terrain with emerald golf courses, woods, tanbark riding trails and red clay courts. Its membership was among the most exclusive in New England. It was rumored that some of the biggest Wall Street acquisitions and mergers over the past century had been negotiated from the deep, leather club chairs around the tables in the bar.
Now a long line of vehicles snaked up the hill to the Palladian-style clubhouse. Designed by a famous architect, the sprawling pale limestone building glowed like a beacon. Light blazed from the enormous windows. Holiday garland swagged the facade. Black-jacketed valets dashed back and forth, spiriting away Rolls Royces, Jaguars, Bentleys and Mercedes.
Keely stepped on the red carpet with a sense of unreality. It had been years since she’d been to the Club. Growing up, she’d practically lived there in the summers with her tribe of friends, playing tennis, splashing in the pools, gleefully slicing balls at the driving range, exhausting the saddle horses on the trails.
When the money had gone, they’d given up their membership. It had felt like being excommunicated. Abruptly, she was on the outside looking in, the pleasures she’d taken as part of her world suddenly denied. As a girl, she’d never thought twice about being in a place where every need was anticipated and every request instantly served. Learning that it wasn’t the real world had been a hard lesson. Her parents had joined up again as of a few years ago and her card once again gave her free rein, but she’d never been back. It was different, somehow.
“Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. Stafford.” The tuxedoed greeter nodded at them as they stepped over the threshold. A smiling woman in a black skirt and jacket spirited away their coats. “The gala is in the main ballroom.”
There was something about walking into the ballroom that held an air of expectancy, as though she were walking into another world. It wasn’t just an ordinary door but a gracefully curving archway. Inside, the ceiling soared high overhead, carrying away the hubbub of several hundred people all talking at once. The carpet was plush underfoot. A staggering number of tables filled the space.
Sixty-five of them, to be exact. Keely could say that with confidence because she and Jeannie and Lydia had arranged and transported centerpieces for all of them, as well as the floral cascades around the stage and in the entryway. That afternoon, when they’d put the flowers in place, the light had been mercilessly bright, the tablecloths bare. Now, china and silver gleamed and the enormous chandeliers cast a soft glow over the pale shoulders of jewel-bedecked women. In the corner, an orchestra played “Winter Wonderland.”
“Smile,” Jeannie murmured into her ear, handing her a canapé from the tray of a passing waiter. “You’re having fun.”
And somehow, Keely found herself with a champagne glass in hand, smiling and nodding at people she’d known since she’d been a child.
“Well, Keely Stafford, aren’t you a picture?” an older man with a shock of white hair said to her. “And here alone. The young men don’t have two brain cells among them, these days, do they? Why, if I were forty years younger, I’d take you and run off to Monte Carlo.” He gave her a roguish wink.
“Isn’t that your wife coming, Mr. Lucas?” Keely said, fighting a smile.
“Oh, right. Mum’s the word. Hello, Eloise,” he said to the beaming silver haired woman in lavender who walked up beside him.
“Hello, dear,” she said. “Have you been asking Keely to run away with you again?”
“I think this is going to cost me a diamond necklace,” he whispered to Keely.
Eloise patted his hand. “A nice orange tree for the solarium will do, dear. And a turn or two around the dance floor.”
“Only as long as Keely saves a dance for me,” he said.
“Oh, you must, Keely, or I’ll never hear the end of it,” Eloise said, rolling her eyes. “Come along, Ben, the Prestons are here.”
“Didn’t we just see them yesterday?” he muttered aggrievedly.
“Yes, dear, but now it’s tonight.”
“Don’t forget about that dance,” he warned Keely as Eloise tugged him away.
Keely laughed at his hangdog look and began to enjoy herself.
“Careful,” Jeannie whispered. “You’re smiling.”
The Christmas gala was all the things about the Chilton lifestyle that Lex loathed. He knew how much of the money raised at these events went to cover the food, the presentation, the entertainment, and how little ever made it to the designated charities.
It was the last place he wanted to be.
But he stood in his father’s tux alongside Olivia, resisting the urge to tug at his collar like a small boy. So he wasn’t in the habit of being anyone’s lackey. It was his mother, not just anyone, and it was Christmas. It was little enough to do.
Except that he had the uneasy feeling that it wasn’t just a Christmas thing. Olivia was more subtle than Pierce, but in h
er own way, she was trying to push Lex into that same box. Somehow, he’d become her escort, her accountant, her financial advisor, her investigative assistant. If she had her way, soon enough he’d be her board representative.
“You remember my son Trey, don’t you?” Olivia was saying to an emaciated woman with a designer dress and the permanently surprised expression of a facelift veteran. “Trey, you remember Alicia Smythe.”
He dredged up a smile and held out his hand obediently. “Hello, Mrs. Smythe.”
She gave him the countess squeeze that a certain sort of woman considered a handshake. “Alicia, please,” she said. “Trey, how good to see you again. You certainly look like things have been going well for you.” Her eyes gleamed. “I understand you’ve been working, ah, import/export overseas.”