The Gems of Vice and Greed (Contemporary Gothic Romance Book 3)

by Colleen Gleason

Leslie hadn’t forgotten the legend about Red Eye Sal’s supposedly hidden jewel cache, and though she didn’t put much stock in rumors like that, she was curious. What if?

  Suddenly a little more enthusiastic, she hurried off to find a hanger. She was halfway to the kitchen when there was a loud crash from the foyer. The sound made her heart catapult into her throat and her head go light before she realized it was probably the broomstick she’d hastily shoved against the wall, falling over.

  Jumpy much, Les?

  Nevertheless, her knees were still a little weak and her insides a bit tumultuous as she continued into the kitchen—which was probably why, when she saw the face at the door, she shrieked.

  ~ FIVE ~

  * * *

  Declan didn’t leave his house until after seven, which made it almost dark. He’d showered and shaved, then he had a few voice mails to return (one was a weekly call from Cara, checking in on how things were going—he had to give her credit and gratitude: she’d turned out to be a great mother), and an order for fifty more iron rods to post online so he could make the cutoff for delivery this week.

  He was just finishing when he received a text, this one from Steph.

  U should come by and watch pom practice tonight.

  Curious, and more than a little relieved she didn’t seem to be mad at him anymore, he replied: Any particular reason?

  Her reply, almost immediately: Mrs. Danube is here. Followed by three winky smileys and one with its tongue sticking out.

  Declan laughed, and felt his cheeks flush a little even though no one was around. Emily Danube, the mother—the divorced mother—of one of the other girls on the pom team had managed to sit next to him during the last two football games, and she’d also invited herself in on the night she drove Steph home from practice. He’d ended up sharing a beer with her at the kitchen table while their daughters did something on the computer.

  She thinks ur hawt.

  Speaking of hot, his cheeks—really?—were getting there. Thank goodness no one was around. Honestly, it was too weird and creepy that his daughter—whom he really hardly knew—was trying to set him up. Wasn’t that supposed to be weird for kids, to think of their parents hooking up with someone?

  Not that Emily Danube was someone who’d send him running in the other direction. She might be a few years older than he—after all, he’d only been eighteen when Cara got pregnant—but she looked good. Though she was always well dressed and neat, she didn’t have that brittle, try-too-hard aura that divorcees sometimes got once they became single again and began to focus on dating. From what he understood, she co-owned a spa and salon on the edge of town that offered everything from hair styling to massages to nails—and something called mud wraps. Not something that sounded appealing to him.

  But the massages…most definitely. He wondered idly whether Emily Danube was a massage therapist, and the thought settled in his mind. That would be…interesting.

  Well? Stephanie texted back.

  Aren’t you supposed to be practicing? How can you be climbing onto the top of a human pyramid if you’re texting me?

  The response was an angry smiley followed by three exclamation points, and Declan laughed again. It was an ongoing joke between them—for apparently, only cheerleaders climbed into human pyramids and did flips in the air; the pom squad danced and shimmied. Heaven forbid a dad should mistake one for the other.

  See you when you get home, he replied, and tucked the phone into his pocket. He’d see Emily Danube soon enough—probably at the Homecoming game Friday night. Although if it rained like it was supposed to, he wondered if she’d even come and risk having her hair and makeup ruined.

  Declan left the house, locking it behind him and wishing—not for the first time—they had a dog. He hadn’t had a dog since he was a kid, and something about living back here in Sematauk made him want to have a soft-eyed canine that would always be happy to see him.

  He’d been lucky getting this particular bungalow on one of the main streets just outside the touristy area of the town. It had a second, detached garage, which the previous owners had used to store their two boats: a sailboat and a speedboat. This meant the outbuilding was perfectly suited for him to set up his forge. The exterior of both buildings had dark red wood shingles, big black shutters, and a white picket fence that surrounded the tree-studded lot. Stephanie had loved it—called it a doll house, to his dismay—and wanted to replace the shutters with white ones that had cutout hearts on them to match the cutout one on the swinging gate.

  Declan had firmly declined. But he had allowed her to choose the color for the living room walls (thankfully, a reasonably easy to live with light blue) and the curtains for the kitchen (not quite as easy, due to the colorful owls splashed all over them). Their only real battle had been over the shared bathroom, which she’d wanted to do in Mickey Mouse (black, white, and red—with Mouse accents) and he’d been happy with just the black and white. They’d compromised—no Mickey tissue holder, shower curtain, or toilet cover, but a Mickey toothbrush stand. And one picture of the Mouse.

  “Be thankful I didn’t want the Little Mermaid,” she’d told him cheekily.

  She was a great kid. She really was. How the hell more lucky could he be?

  He frowned as he began to walk briskly down the street. He still had to deal with this Leslie van Dorn hiring Stephanie problem. The thing that burned his ass the most was the fact that she’d done so without even mentioning it to him yesterday. She was a seasoned businesswoman. She should know better. Hell, she’d even been on the cover of Fortune magazine (yes, Declan had looked her up after Stephanie mentioned it).

  In fact, there was a lot of information about Leslie van Dorn on the Internet, including several articles about the initial public offering for her company InterWorks, press releases about the company’s successes, and even a few photographs of her at various Philadelphia events. In some she was with a handsome, dark-haired man named H. Gideon Nath III—an attorney who was clearly a personal friend, not a business associate.

  Nath sounded like a real tool, Declan sneered mentally, with his ever-present initial H, and the pretentious “the Third” designation following his name. He probably wore monogrammed boxers with all three initials and a big III on them to hide his unimpressive cock. He and Leslie were well suited to each other: the celebrity CEO and the slick, Armani-suited lawyer.

  In those pictures, the sleek, perfect Leslie van Dorn sure as hell didn’t look much like the disheveled, dust-covered woman he’d met yesterday, wearing a ball cap and baggy clothes. True, he’d seen the cool determination in her eyes under the casual jokes and conversation, and he hadn’t been lying when he mentioned she didn’t look like she scared easily, but she was a far cry from the hotshot exec (“Twenty-five Women Ready to Shake Up Their Fields” was the name of one Fortune article in which she’d been featured) he’d seen online.

  But unkempt as she’d been, van Dorn sure as hell knew what she was doing, hiring people. And that made him even more irritated with the situation. Why did she think she needed a fifteen-year-old girl to work for her? And why would she be hiring her without talking to her parents?

  He had a bad feeling about it. A very bad feeling. He didn’t want Stephanie to be taken advantage of. He had visions of her slaving away doing all sorts of menial labor—clearing out moldy debris (without a face mask), climbing on a tall, rickety ladder to reach the ceiling in the foyer in order to scrub the plaster design around the chandelier, carting asbestos-ridden insulation to the Dumpster out front—while Ms. van Dorn sat in her office and filed her nails and did press interviews via Skype or those fancy star-shaped conference-call phones.

  The more he thought about it, the more irritated he became. He’d just spent the better part of his day working on iron spindles for her main staircase, trying to do it as quickly and inexpensively as possible (that was before he realized he was dealing with a woman who’d made a couple million in a public offering). And now she wanted t
o take advantage of his daughter as well?

  These thoughts fueled his stride as he made his way down three blocks past the main drag—by Orbra’s Tea House, The Balanced Chakra Yoga Studio, and numerous clothing stores, jewelry shops, and restaurants. He sniffed longingly when he passed Trib’s, the best restaurant in town, with killer pizza and a beer list that went on for five pages.

  The brisk air and energetic stride eased some of his annoyance with Leslie van Dorn’s high-handed employment move. By the time Dec had walked past all the shops and up the hill of Shenstone House’s residential street, the sun was down and the only light, though generous enough, was an occasional passing car and the streetlights along the way. But the drive leading up the hill to the house was dark, and as it was shrouded by thick trees and bushes—almost a forest there, really—he was walking more by faith than by sight, guided only by the faint glow through the windows ahead of him.

  He knew better than to go to the front door; by the time he’d finished with their meeting yesterday, he’d realized Leslie lived in the back of the house by the large, sunny kitchen while the rest of it was being worked on—so that was where he headed. It occurred to him at that point that, first, he probably should have called (who knew if she was even home), and then, as he came up and around the bend that opened into a large, flat parking area, that there was the same dark blue Mercedes that’d been there yesterday. So she was probably at home.

  A figure moved inside the kitchen—Leslie—and he went directly to the door. He was just about to raise his hand to knock when she screamed.

  He didn’t really think; he just lunged for the door and yanked on it. It swung open just as she came toward him, her hand over her chest as if she was attempting to prevent a heart attack.

  “Oh my God, you scared the crap out of me!” she said in a high-pitched voice. “All of a sudden you were there—why didn’t you come to the front door?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said automatically. “I saw you here, and— Well, I was about to knock. I wasn’t just looking in.”

  “Right. It’s all right. Come in.” She was wearing gloves and had her shiny black hair hanging loose. But this time, she wasn’t coated with dust, and she was wearing a snug t-shirt and bottoms that Declan had recently learned were called yoga pants. And, he noticed via his natural sweep of a glance, her feet were bare and decorated with grape-colored toenails. “It’s just so dark and lonely up here, and something fell down in the front room, so it made a loud noise that startled me—and then I looked up and there was a face in my window.”

  Leslie laughed, and Declan got the impression she was more than happy he was there to defuse whatever had given her the willies a moment ago.

  “I should have called,” he said, looking around the kitchen.

  It was his first good look at it; he’d had a glimpse yesterday when he was looking around for Leslie. He was impressed by the size and homeyness of the place. Clearly, it had been recently remodeled, for the appliances were sleek and modern, and the island in the center was covered with a thick slab of bronze and black granite, and yet the overall feel of the space was warm and inviting.

  “Well, calling’s generally a good idea. I might not even have been home—I wasn’t all last night. In fact, I’m supposed to meet Aunt Cherry for dinner in a bit,” she said as she glanced at the wall clock above the stove. “But I’ve got time. Have a seat.”

  Declan obeyed, selecting one of the mismatched (purposely, he was sure) chairs at the battered wooden table. It was thick and solid, and probably over a hundred years old—an eclectic touch in a granite and stainless steel kitchen. The scars gave the table character, and the vase of fresh flowers and dried autumn cuttings sitting in the center of it let him know Leslie might be in the middle of a renovation, but she was still enjoying her new home. On the table was yesterday’s local newspaper.

  “You’re on the front page,” he said, picking it up. The large photo just above the fold was of Leslie—without the ball cap and looking almost CEOish—standing in front of the dismantled stairway. She was holding swatches of fabric and an antique light fixture.

  “Yes, you just missed being in the photo yourself,” she said. “They did a nice job on the article.”

  “I guess you’re used to dealing with the press.” He set the paper down.

  She smiled slightly. “A hometown lifestyle reporter is a lot easier on the nerves than a room full of AP journalists, I’ll admit. Especially ones from the financial papers. They’d wait to catch us after the board meetings, and it could really be brutal—especially as we got closer to the public offering. Give me a hometown newspaper over the Wall Street Journal any day.”

  Yes, they certainly came from different worlds. Declan’s mood soured a trifle. Boardrooms, press conferences, executive meetings, private jets…Leslie van Dorn was way out of her league here in touristy little Sematauk, hiring teenaged girls and flannel-garbed blacksmiths to do her bidding. He wondered how long she’d last before she got bored and decided to head back to her uptight lawyer in Philadelphia. H. Gideon Nath. The Third.

  “So, did you need to see something in the foyer?” Leslie said, jolting him out of his thoughts. Her unspoken question was, What are you doing here?

  “Uh…no. I’m here for a different reason.”

  Leslie lifted one eyebrow, and he recognized wariness filtering into her expression. Her body language shifted: she eased back a little, and her eyes narrowed with subtle suspicion.

  What, did she think he was going to attack her or something?

  Although…he was here, showing up without calling, well past business hours. He supposed he could cut her a break. A very tiny one.

  “I understand you’ve hired my daughter. I’d like to know exactly what you’re planning to have her do, and I have to tell you, I’m not very happy about the situation. I’m her father—she’s a minor—and I didn’t know anything about it.”

  Her reaction was one of pure bewilderment and astonishment. “Excuse me, but I have no idea what you’re referring to.” The CEO had spoken.

  “Stephanie Lillard is my daughter. You hired her, didn’t you?”

  “Oh!” Leslie’s eyes widened and comprehension washed over her face. “She’s your daughter? I had no idea— She didn’t— You obviously have different last names. And I did speak to her…mother.” Her voice trailed off at the end of the sentence, as if she realized things might not be as simple as she’d thought. “I’m guessing there’s a divorce situation or something going on here, and that’s why you weren’t aware.”

  Declan controlled his irritation—now more with Stephanie and her mother and less with the woman in front of him—and replied. “Something like that. Steph’s mother lives in New Hampshire, and I’m the parent here. So I should have been the one involved in this from the beginning.”

  “I can understand your frustration; had I known, I certainly would have spoken with you yesterday. Stephanie simply didn’t mention that you were her father.”

  “Obviously.” Declan couldn’t control a grimace, nor could he ignore a little twinge that stabbed him in the belly. A guy moves halfway across the country to live with his daughter so she doesn’t have to change schools, and she can’t even remember to keep him in the loop. For having been a father less than six months, it sure as hell hurt more than he’d thought it would.

  “I’m really sorry. And clearly you have questions about the situation—which I’m happy to answer. She is, I realize, quite young. But I was very impressed with her and I wanted to give her the chance to try it out.” Leslie rose from the table. “Would you like something to drink while we talk? Coffee, wine, soda? I might even have a beer. Oh, and I have some tea Orbra gave me as well. Her special autumn blend. She’s going to be sampling it at the game tomorrow night.”

  “Just water. Thanks.” Declan was having a bit of a time trying to release the prick of hurt that still lodged beneath his heart. But it wasn’t Leslie van Dorn’s fault, and he sure as h
ell wasn’t going to say anything to Steph about it.

  “Again, I’m sorry about the confusion. With your different last names…I had no idea Stephanie was your daughter. But you had some questions—and rightly so. What can I tell you to ease your mind?”

  Declan realized he was no longer speaking to a busy, stressed homeowner client—now he was faced with Leslie van Dorn, CEO and millionaire. The tone of her voice, the expression on her face: both had gone completely businesslike and impersonal. Appropriate, but a little unsettling for some reason. He liked her better when she was using words like dastardly to describe a piece of drywall.

  Not that he liked her—or needed to like her—any more than he normally liked a client. Which was to say, no more than necessary.

  His contrary brain immediately reminded him of Bethany Hamberg again—a thought that he shoved away with the force of a sledgehammer on an anvil. “Well, to start,” he said, fumbling for this thoughts, “Steph mentioned her working hours—an hour and a half each day after school—”

  “Except Thursdays, and Fridays if there’s a home football game,” Leslie clarified as she set two tall glasses of water, both with lemon wedges, in front of them.

  “Right. She mentioned that. And then four hours on Saturday afternoon. But I’d like to know exactly what she’s going to be doing during those work times.”

  “Of course. I envision her as a sort of assistant, Jill-of-all-trades for now. Initially, I intend to have her handling social media accounts for the business—her first few tasks will be setting up Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and whatever other social media sites that make sense. I figured a teenaged girl would be more than familiar with how to do that. Additionally, we have a basic website that’s already been created, and she’ll be doing simple updates to it as necessary while we’re going through the remodel process. I’ll have videos and photos of before and after, and on some of the restoration processes—in fact, your work on the stairway was one of the topics I’d intended to highlight. I’d like Stephanie to edit and post the pictures and videos on the site and on social media as a way to generate interest in the B&B before it even opens. There will also be some market research involved too, as well as listing some of the old items left here on eBay or other auction sites.”