by Nora Roberts
“If you’d wanted to talk about it, you would have.”
After a moment Susan nodded. “All right. All right, that’s true.”
“I just needed to know, for certain. Then I tried to put it aside. I tried, Aunt Susie, to forget it, to bury it. Maybe I could have, I don’t know. But then, all of a sudden, I was in the middle of this. The discrepancy of funds from my clients’ accounts, what was my explanation, internal investigations, suspension.” Her voice broke like glass, but she made herself go on. “It was a nightmare, like an echo of what must have happened to my father. I just couldn’t seem to function or fight back or even think. I’ve been so afraid.”
Kate pressed her lips together. “I didn’t think I could tell you. I was ashamed to tell you, and afraid that you might think—even for just a second you might think that I could have done it. Because he’d done it. I could stand anything but that.”
“I can’t be angry with you again, even for such foolishness. You’ve had a rough time of it, Kate.” Susan gathered her close.
“It’ll come out,” Kate murmured. “I know it will, and people will talk. Some will assume I took money because my father took money. I didn’t think I could stand that. But I can.” She sat back, scrubbed away her tears. “I can stand it, but I’m sorry. I’m so sorry it touches you.”
“I raised my children to stand on their own feet and to understand that family stands together. I think you forgot the second part of that for a while.”
“Maybe. Aunt Susie . . .” She had to finish, finish all of it. “You never made me feel like an outsider, not from the first moment you brought me home. You never treated me like a debt or an obligation. But I felt the debt, the obligation, and wanted, always, to be the best. I never wanted you to question whether you’d done the right thing by taking me, by loving me.”
With her own heart still aching, Susan folded her arms. “Do you think we measure our love by the accomplishments of the people we care for?”
“No. But I did—do. It’s my failing, Aunt Susie, not yours. At first, I’d go to bed at night wondering if you’d change your mind about me in the morning, send me away.”
“Oh, Kate.”
“Then I knew you wouldn’t. I knew you wouldn’t,” she repeated. “You’d made me part of the unit, part of the whole. And I’m sorry if it makes you angry or hurts you, but I owe you for that. I owe you and Uncle Tommy for being who and what you are. I’d have been lost without you.”
“Did you ever consider, Kate, what you did to complete our lives?”
“I considered what I could do to make you proud of me. I couldn’t be as beautiful as Margo, as innately kind as Laura, but I could be smart. I could work hard, plan things out, be sensible and successful. That’s what I wanted for myself, and for you. And . . . there’s something else you should know.”
Susan turned to switch off the spurting kettle, but didn’t pour the hot water over the waiting tea. “What, Kate?”
“I was so happy at Templeton House, and I would think that I wouldn’t be there with you, with everyone, if the roads hadn’t been icy that night, if we hadn’t gone out, and the car hadn’t skidded and crashed. If my parents hadn’t died.”
She lifted her eyes to Susan’s. “And I wanted to be there, and as the years passed, I loved you so much more than I could remember loving them. And it seemed horrible to be glad I was with you instead of them.”
“And you’ve nurtured that ugly little seed all these years.” Susan shook her head. She wondered if parents and their children ever really understood each other. “You were a child, barely eight years old. You had nightmares for months, and you grieved more than any child should have to. Why should you go on paying for something over which you had no control? Kate.” Her fingers stroked gently over Kate’s temples. “Why shouldn’t you have been happy? Would you have been better off clinging to the pain and the grief and the misery?”
“No.”
“So you chose guilt instead?”
“It seemed that the best thing that had ever happened in my life had grown out of the worst. I could never make sense of it. It was as if my life began the night they died. I knew if a miracle had happened and my parents had come to the door of Templeton House, I would have run to you and begged you to keep me.”
“Kate.” Susan shook her head, smoothed Kate’s hair back from her face. “If God Almighty had come to the door, I’d have fought Him tooth and nail to keep you with me. And I don’t feel the least bit guilty about it. What happened wasn’t your fault or mine. It doesn’t make sense. It just is.”
Nearly believing it, Kate nodded. “Please say you’ll forgive me.”
Susan stepped back, eyed her. Her child, she thought. A gift given to her out of tragedy. So complicated, so layered. So precious. “If you feel you have to owe me for—how did you put it—making you part of the unit, the payment is that you accept who you are, what you’ve made yourself. We’ll be even then.”
“I’ll work on it, but in the meantime . . .”
“You’re forgiven. But,” she continued as Kate sniffled, “we’re going to work on the rest of this together. Together, Kate. When Bittle deals with one Templeton, he’ll deal with all of them.”
“Okay.” Kate knuckled a tear away. “I feel better.”
“I’m sure you do.” Susan’s lips curved. “So do I.”
Eyes wide and a little wild, Margo burst into the kitchen. “Let me see that coin,” she demanded, and thrust a hand into Kate’s pocket before Kate could move.
“Hey!”
“Oh, my God.” Margo goggled at it, then goggled at the matching doubloon she held in her other hand. “I checked my purse. I really thought you were playing some sort of idiotic joke on me. They’re the same.”
And the world somehow settled neatly back into place. “I was trying to tell you,” Kate began, then grunted when Margo grabbed her and squeezed.
“They’re the same!” Margo shouted and held the coins in front of Susan’s face. “Look, Mrs. T! Seraphina.”
“They’re certainly from the right place and the right time.” Struggling to switch gears, Susan frowned over the coins. “You just found this one, Kate.”
“No, this one.” In a proprietary move, Kate snatched the coin from Margo’s left hand. “Mine,” she stated.
“I can’t believe it. All these months since I found the first one. All these months we’ve been searching and scraping and hauling that silly metal detector around. And you just stumble over it.”
“It was just there.”
“Exactly.” Margo crowed in triumph. “Just like the first one was just there. It’s a sign.”
Kate rolled her eyes. “It’s not magic, Margo. It’s luck. There’s a difference. I just happened to be there after the coin got kicked up or washed up or whatever.”
“Hah,” was all Margo had to say to that. “We’ve got to tell Laura. Oh, who the hell can remember where she is with that insane schedule of hers?”
“If you’d bother to look at the weekly schedule I’ve posted in the office, you’d know exactly where she is.” Feeling superior, Kate glanced at her watch. “If memory serves, she’s at the hotel for the next thirty minutes, then she has a meeting with Ali’s teacher. After that—”
“We don’t need after that. We’ll just—” Margo stopped short. “Hell, we can’t just close the shop in the middle of the afternoon.”
“Go ahead,” Susan told her. “Tommy and I can mind the store for an hour.”
“Really?” Margo beamed at her. “I wouldn’t ask, but this is so exciting, and we’re in it together.”
“You’ve always been in it together,” Susan said.
“It perked her up.” Margo loitered in the lobby after their brief contact with Laura. “It’s frustrating to have to wait until Sunday to go back and look, but with her schedule we’re lucky to manage that.”
“Don’t you think she’s taken on an awful lot?”
Kate scanned the s
weeping lobby with its elaborate potted plants, half hoping to see Byron breeze by on some executive mission. Instead she saw wandering guests, bustling bellmen, a group of women standing near the revolving doors with shopping bags heaped at their feet and a look of happy exhaustion on their faces.
“I know she likes to fill her time,” Kate continued. “And it probably helps keep her mind off . . . things. But she barely has a minute in the day just for herself.”
“Ah, you finally noticed.” Then Margo shook her head and sighed. “I can’t nag her about it anymore. When I suggested that the shop could probably swing a part-time clerk and that she could cut back there, she almost took my head off.” Absently she rubbed a soothing hand over her belly as the baby kicked. “I know the bulk of her salary here at the hotel is earmarked for the kids’ tuition.”
“That bastard Peter.” Kate’s teeth began to grind even as she thought of it. “He was a slimy creep for taking Laura’s money, but taking his own children’s . . . that makes him whatever’s lower than slime. She could have fried his sorry ass in court.”
“That’s what I’d have done,” Margo agreed. Amused, she noted that two men in one of the lobby’s plush seating areas were trying to catch her eye. “What you’d have done. Laura has to handle this her own way.”
“And her way is to hold down two jobs, raise two children on her own, support a full staff because she’s too softhearted to lay anyone off. She can’t keep working twenty out of twenty-four hours, Margo.”
“You try telling her.” Out of long habit, she sent the hopeful men a quick, flirtatious smile.
“Stop playing with those insurance salesmen,” Kate ordered.
“Is that what they are?” Carelessly, Margo scooped her long hair back. “Anyway, Josh and I have pushed Laura as far as we can push. She’s not budging. Nobody could tell you to take a vacation, could they? To see a doctor?”
“Okay, okay.” That was the last thing Kate wanted to hash over. “I had reasons, and I’ll explain it to you when we have a little more time. I should have told you before.”
“What?”
“We’ll talk about it,” she promised, then baffled her friend by leaning in and kissing her. “I love you, Margo.”
“Okay, what have you screwed up?”
“Nothing. Well, everything, but I’m starting to fix it. Now, back to Laura. We’ll just have to do more to pick up the slack. Maybe take the girls off her hands a few hours every week. Or run some of the errands she’s always got a million of. And worrying about this is spoiling my mood.” She pulled the coin out of her pocket, watched it glint. “Once we find Seraphina’s dowry, the rest will be irrelevant.”
“Once we do, I’m going to open a new branch of Pretenses. In Carmel, I think.”
Surprised, Kate swept her gaze up to Margo’s face. “I’d have figured you for a cruise around the world, or a new haute couture wardrobe.”
“People change.” Margo shrugged. “But I might add in a short cruise and a swing down Rodeo Drive.”
“It’s a relief to know people don’t change too much.” But maybe they could, Kate mused. Maybe they should. “Look, there’s something I want to do. Can you handle the shop until closing?”
“With Mr. and Mrs. T there, I don’t have to go back myself.” With a chuckle, Margo dug out her car keys. “If I could keep them in the shop for a month, we’d double our profits. Oh, say hi to Byron for me.”
“I didn’t say I was seeing Byron.”
Margo sent a sly smile over her shoulder as she walked away. “Sure you did, pal.”
It was demoralizing to realize she was so obvious. Demoralizing enough that Kate nearly talked herself out of going up to the penthouse. She was still arguing with herself when she stepped out of the elevator. When she was told Mr. De Witt was in conference, she decided it was for the best.
At loose ends, she rode back down, but rather than heading to her car, she wandered out to the pool. Leaning on the stone wall that skirted it, she watched the play of the courtyard fountain, the people who sat at the pretty glass tables sipping colorful drinks under festive umbrellas. She spotted name tags pinned to lapels that identified conventioneers taking a break from seminars.
In striped lounge chairs around the curving tiled pool lounged bodies slicked with sunscreen. Magazines and best-sellers were being read, headphones were in place. Waitpeople in cool pastel uniforms delivered drinks and snacks from the poolside bar and grill. Other guests splashed and played in the water, or simply floated, dreaming.
They knew how to relax, Kate thought. Why had she never acquired this simple skill? If she were to stretch out in one of those lounge chairs, she’d be asleep in five minutes. That was how her body was trained. Or if sleep refused to come, restlessness would have her up and gone, with her mind ordering her not to waste time.
Since this appeared to be a red-letter day in the life of Kate Powell, she decided to give wasting time a try. She slid onto a seat at the bar and ordered something with the promising name of Monterey Sunset. She lingered over it for nearly half an hour, watching people come and go, catching snatches of conversation. Then she ordered another.
It wasn’t so bad, this time wasting, she decided. Especially when she felt so hollowed out inside. A good feeling, she realized. As if she’d purged herself of something that had been gnawing at her too long.
It was time to repair those rents in her life, or perhaps to ignore some of them and move on. There was promise in this hollow feeling, in the possibilities of how to fill it.
Carrying her drink, she wandered through the hotel gardens, reminding herself to enjoy the scents of camellia, jasmine, to appreciate the vivid shades of the tumbling bougainvillea. She sat on a stone bench near a pair of cypress and wondered how people managed to do nothing and not go insane.
It was probably best to try it in stages, she decided. Like exercise, an hour the first time out was probably overdoing. She rose, with the idea of going back to the shop and checking inventory, then she heard his voice.
“Be sure to cross-check the details with Ms. Templeton tomorrow. She’ll need to be aware of these changes.”
“Yes, sir, but it will require more staff—at least two more waitpeople and an extra bartender.”
“Three more waitpeople. We want this smooth. I think Ms. Templeton will agree that this is the best position for the third bar setup. We don’t want staff running through the guests with ice buckets, do we? Now, Lydia, Ms. Templeton has her finger on this particular pulse.”
“Yes, sir, but these people keep changing their minds.”
“That’s their prerogative. It’s our problem to accommodate them. What I wanted to discuss with you, Lydia, is the complimentary coffee setup on the east terrace every morning. We refined that a bit at the resort a couple of weeks ago, and it’s working out well.”
He came around the path as he spoke, caught sight of Kate sitting on the stone bench with a pretty drink in her hand and a quiet smile on her lips. And lost his train of thought.
“Mr. De Witt?” Lydia prompted. “The coffee setup?”
“Ah, right. Check with my assistant for the memo. It’s all laid out. Let me know what you think.” He didn’t precisely push her along, but the intent was there. “We’ll go over all of this with Ms. Templeton in the morning.”
Once Lydia was on her way, he stopped at the bench, looked down at Kate. “Hi.”
“Hi. I’m practicing.”
“Practicing what?”
“Doing nothing.”
He thought it was like coming across a fawn in an enchanted garden—those dark, deep, oddly slanted eyes, the warm and humid scent of flowers. “How’s it going?”
“It’s not as easy as it looks. I was about to give up.”
“Let’s give it another minute,” he suggested and sat beside her.
“I didn’t think the brass worried about little things like complimentary coffee setups.”
“Every detail is a piece, every pi
ece makes up the whole. And speaking of details”—he turned her face toward his, touched his lips to hers—“you look wonderful. Really. I’d say revived.”
“I feel revived. It’s a long story.”
He grinned. “I’d like to hear it.”
“I think I might like to tell you.” She thought he was someone she could tell. No, she realized, she knew he was. “I came by to tell Laura a portion of it, then decided to hang around and try the nothing experiment.”
He struggled with disappointment. The way he’d found her, sitting there, it had been as though she’d been waiting for him. “Want to go into the details, over dinner?”
“I’d love to.” She rose, held out a hand. “If you’re cooking.”
He hesitated. He’d been very careful to avoid being completely alone with her. When he was alone with her he seemed to forget little things like timing and finesse. Now she was standing there, holding out her hand, with her lips curved in a way that let him know she understood his dilemma. And was enjoying it.
“Fine. It’ll give me a chance to try out the barbecue grill I picked up a couple days ago.”
“Tell you what, I’ll bring dessert and meet you there.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Testing both of them, she stretched onto her toes and closed her mouth softly, lingeringly over his. “I’m a terrific planner.”
He stood where he was, his hands firmly tucked in his pockets, while she walked away. He decided one of them was about to have their plans tumbled. It would certainly be interesting to see which one it was.
Flaky, creamy, decadent chocolate eclairs had seemed the perfect choice. Kate set the bakery box on the table in his kitchen and watched him through the window. He’d left the door unlocked, in invitation. She’d accepted it, had come in to a blast of searing Bruce Springsteen, noted he’d added a couple of pieces of furniture to complement the ratty recliner.
The low coffee table with the checkerboard inlay looked expensive and unique, as did the stained-glass lamp and the thick geometric-patterned area rug. She admitted she was dying to see the rest of the house, but she made herself go into the kitchen.