Emma picked up her spoon and pointed at her bowl. “This is a good one.”
Speaking of Zoe, it seemed a little suspicious of her to run off without eating with them. Maybe she was trying to orchestrate something. While she was pleased with the idea, she was uncertain where it might go, so she shifted her thoughts to a safer topic.
“I’ve been thinking about the grand entrance.” Emma spent a lot of time planning it, actually. She wanted it to be perfect. This was the opportunity of a lifetime—what she’d spent years in school dreaming about. That, and she wanted to wow her new employer. “Want to hear my ideas?”
“Of course.”
Emma loved how Theo’s eyes lit up. Over the last few days, he’d become so encouraging, so supportive of anything she had to say.
“I’m much better with sketches.” She got up from the table and went into the office to scrounge for a sheet of paper, and came back with a pen and a flyer for the Bon Mange Festival in the community a couple of weeks prior. Taking the chair next to Theo rather than her previous one across the table from him, she rearranged the dishes so she could have room.
“When I was online, I saw an aerial view of Indigo Pointe from, I don’t know, the forties or fifties, and there was a teardrop-shaped drive from the gate sweeping around the front of the house.” As soon as she started talking, their eyes locked and she hadn’t been able to look away, despite their closeness. With desire flickering in her chest, she was grateful to have an excuse to look down at the paper, and she began to sketch the outline of the house with the proposed drive, ending with the gate. “The shape makes sense, of course, since there’s only one opening.”
She waved her pen tip over the entire area. “First, there is a drainage problem we’ll have to address.” It was pretty much the entire lawn, but that was okay. The weed-infested grass needed reseeding. “Then we can put in the drive.” She started shading the drive again, but looked up in anticipation to what she’d say next. “At the top of the teardrop, what do you think of a flowerbed that mimics the stained-glass rose window in the church?” She swiftly started sketching the details the best she could in the limited space and with only black ink. “The different shades of flowers and landscape rock will create the design.”
A circular section emerged from her pen tip at the wide end of the teardrop near the front door. “A person standing next to it might not notice, but from the upstairs gallery, it will be more recognizable.” The rightness of it gave her chills. “I think a marble fountain, while not what the original owners ever had, would be a nice addition to the center of the flowerbed.”
At her pause, Theo jumped in. “This is amazing, Emma.”
Her heart soared at the look of awe on his face. “I’m really looking forward to infusing the property with color—especially blue, given the plantation’s name. Speaking of which, do you realize there isn’t one surviving indigo plant anywhere?”
Theo looked surprised. “I hadn’t thought about it,” he said, “but being able to point out actual indigo plants would be a nice addition to the tour script.” He ran a finger over the stained-glass flowerbed. “It’s great.”
She couldn’t wait to draw out a more detailed sketch so he could get a better idea of her full vision. “I need to figure out the details, materials, that kind of thing.”
“We have an account at Contrary Mary’s Nursery. Suzette can order whatever you need, and I’ll check with her about finding a good crew.”
“Hmm … on a first-name basis with the proprietor of a local nursery …” Emma couldn’t keep herself from chuckling. “She wouldn’t know anything about garden gnomes, would she?”
Theo seemed to suck in the corners of a smile. “She seems to be quite knowledgeable in many aspects of Louisiana gardening. Certainly a resource, should you find you need some local expertise.” He stared eating his gumbo again.
“I see.” The fact that Theo made an excuse to look away almost made Emma laugh. She didn’t need to have him admit it.
She slid back into her chair across from him to eat a few more bites of dinner, and Theo shifted in his seat, looking up with a new twinkle in his eye. “If you’re not too tired after working all day, there’s something in the rose garden I want to show you.” A cautious excitement in Theo’s voice caught Emma off guard.
“And it is …” She waited for him to fill in the blank.
“A surprise.” He looked pleased with himself. She’d walked into his trap, but how could she not?
“Is it another gnome?” She narrowed her eyes at him. The gnomes were cute, and she enjoyed the unexpectedness of them, but she didn’t want to get her hopes up for something exciting if that was all it was.
Theo shook his head, mischievousness in his expression. “Not telling.”
“A plant?”
He shook his head again.
“I like the way you ‘don’t tell.’” Emma took her last bite, savoring the spicy Cajun seasoning before throwing out another guess. This one hopeful. “A lead for my family mystery?”
The guy couldn’t hold a secret in two hands. His face told her everything.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me earlier!” She wanted to whack him, but settled for a playful glare.
“I couldn’t! I was too hungry.” He took another bite as if to prove it.
“You better eat fast, then, mister, or I’ll take off without you.” It wasn’t like she actually could, considering she had no idea what it was or where she would find it. Her heartbeat quickened in anticipation.
Theo responded by obediently gulping his last bites of gumbo, swiping his French bread through the bowl to mop up the rest, and shoving it all into his mouth. Emma rolled her eyes. So much for manners, but she appreciated how he matched her excitement with his own.
They rinsed their bowls and loaded them in the dishwasher, stowed the leftovers in the fridge for the next day’s lunch, and headed toward the churchyard.
“Spill it.” Emma poked him in the ribs as they walked side by side. “What did you see?”
“An ivy pattern in the metalwork.” The air shimmered around them in the approaching sunset.
“Seriously? Where? How did I miss that? Is it the same as the one I saw upstairs? I mean, I guess it probably is if you’re telling me about it—”
“Take a breath,” he teased.
Theo chuckled and Emma realized she had, indeed, been asking too many questions too quickly. She exhaled long and slow, but it was now her turn to pick up the pace.
Chapter 15
“Over here.” Theo was pleased to have discovered something to share with Emma. If only they could figure out if the randomness of the ivy motif actually meant something. There had to be a pattern, a reason, a key to figuring out the anomalies.
In all the pruning, fertilizing, and “training,” as Emma referred to it, they’d been winding rose branches around a simple fence that ran the length of the old church. All of the iron posts had been unadorned, except for one. On the fourth post from the north end, he’d felt a design under his leather-gloved fingertips. Knowing Emma would want to see it, he’d held on to this nugget of information until just the right time—which he hoped was now.
“What do you think?” he asked, giving her a chance to examine the design.
He waited patiently, noticing the crickets’ chirping in the background. Theo watched Emma, captivated by her graceful movements. Her slender frame bent to study the design, the soft skin of her arched neck pale despite her time in the sun. She pushed a lock of hair behind her ear, something he’d noticed she did frequently. The motion was endearing in its normalcy. Emma was completely comfortable with herself, unaware of how beautiful she was, and that was more attractive than anything else.
“I think it matches.” She crouched in front of the post, but looked up at him with those hazel eyes wide with question. “Why here?”
He spread his hands helplessly. With no answer or guess, he allowed the words to float on the air
.
“It has to mean something.” She stood and crossed her arms over her chest. “The church.” She dropped her arms and ran to him, grasping both of his hands. He couldn’t breathe for listening to her, feeling her excitement telegraphed through her trembling fingers. “Can we go inside the church? I bet there’s more; there has to be.”
Theo gave her a weak smile. He would give her anything, but this … this would be a disappointment. “Sure, but I have to warn you. It’s a mess inside—completely awful. Even if there was something at one time, I doubt there’s anything left to find.” She started to object, but he stopped her. “Let’s take a look.”
The three concrete steps leading to the front door of the church were cracked and crumbling. Fishing the key ring from his pocket, Theo located the correct one and forced the stiff tumblers inside the lock to move. Opening both wooden doors wide released a potpourri of horrible smells: stale air, acrid wood ash, and the dank hint of mold. Theo gave it a few seconds to air out before taking a deep breath and heading for the bank of side windows, eager to open them wide. The trapped air vented through the windows like steam from a pressure cooker.
“Oh.” Emma stood, looking disappointed on the doorstep.
“Could you catch the light switch to your right?”
Emma would have been expecting more and he should have prepared her. But seeing it was the only way to truly take it in.
At some point in the last century, someone had removed all of the church pews from the open sanctuary and had laid some clunky, off-white ceramic tile, stripping the character from the building. In a few places, drywall had been nailed to studs, but the handyman hadn’t made much progress before abandoning the project, leaving it a strange mash-up of nineteenth-century charred church and twentieth-century horrible handyman. It wasn’t even clear what the renovation plans had been.
Emma flicked on the temporary bulbs that barely illuminated the space and took a few tentative steps to Theo’s side. “I guess I don’t have to ask what happened here.” She slowly took in the room—probably looking for metalwork. “My great-grandfather’s journal mentioned a church fire in his journal, but sort of in passing, as if he expected everyone to know what happened. Do you know any of the details?”
“I don’t know for sure. I think it was near the end of the Civil War.” He recalled tidbits in the research he’d done on the place, but not much. “I don’t know if it pertains to your mystery, but it would be interesting to find out more.” He fell into step beside her as she surveyed the room.
“The good news is, it won’t take long to see everything,” she joked.
“The bad news is that there’s nothing to see,” he quipped back.
“Your optimism is astounding.”
And her sarcasm was spot-on. Her quick-wittedness was one of the many things that attracted him.
Emma halted in the center of the room near the front where the preacher’s lectern would have been, but instead of looking down for markings on the floor, she looked toward the stained-glass window that would have lit up the room behind the speaker. Weakening sunlight fought its way through the colorful glass, illuminating it enough that it glowed. “The colors are so much more vibrant from the inside.”
“We’re really lucky the window survived.” He looked to the east where a few of the arched gothic windows had once been, but had since been boarded up with plywood, splitting and engorged with decades of sunshine and rainwater. “It alone is worth renovating the building.”
After getting their fill of the rose window, they took a few more careful steps around the perimeter, finding nothing of value. Emma stopped at one of the arched windows on the side opposite the rose garden. A bramble of blackberry bushes with fruit that wasn’t yet ripe encroached toward the windows. “Why is it there’s no cemetery on the property?”
Theo’s mind scrambled for a plausible explanation. How had he never wondered that himself? “Perhaps it has something to do with the high water table and all that? You know, the reason there are all those mausoleums around New Orleans.”
“Yes, but all the way out here? It doesn’t make sense that people in 1790 would take their loved ones miles and miles away from home when their church was here.”
“True.” There must be something closer.
“Do you think there’s a cemetery somewhere else on the plantation?” she asked.
“I don’t remember one, but it’s possible. I haven’t actually walked the entire property. I wasn’t allowed to just wander as a kid since the place didn’t belong to us.” Instead of allowing him to roam, his uncle had always put him to work when he’d come, which hadn’t been so bad, as he’d been reminded working with the roses that day.
Emma raised her fingers to touch the window molding and then glanced at him. “I’ll keep an eye out while I work.”
“On second thought, maybe we shouldn’t,” Theo joked, making his eyes cartoonishly wide. “We wouldn’t want to disturb the ghosts. We just might be the only plantation in the area that doesn’t claim to be haunted.”
“Being haunted is ‘in.’”
“True. Would help with marketing.” It was a joke, of course. He’d never noticed anything otherworldly and wouldn’t make something up to draw in visitors. “Oh. You know what? There’s a cemetery down the road a bit. Maybe it was a community one.”
Examining every nook and cranny of the gutted church didn’t take long. The hinges and door handles were the same boring hardware used most everywhere else, and they could find no other metalwork. Theo even examined the charred woodwork in case a similar ivy motif was carved there, but it wasn’t.
“I think we’re out of luck.” That he was disappointed hardly made sense. This was Emma’s quest, not his, yet if the treasure was on his property and the Lamberts felt claim to it … He didn’t want to think about it coming between the two of them. Money maybe didn’t mean much to him, but family and history did.
Emma let out a loud breath. “I don’t know what else to do or where to look. Do you think a local historical library or something?”
“It’s certainly the next step since we haven’t seen anything else around here. At least we could find out more about this fire. When do you think you’ll have a day off from trees and roses?”
“Oh, Theo!” Emma abandoned his side and rushed to stand in front of the horribly dirty windows overlooking the rose garden. A look of awe dawned on her delicate features. The last of the day’s sunlight was slipping into twilight. Only a tinge of lavender remained, seeping into the indigo color of night.
Though he wanted to wrap his arms around her from behind, cradling her to his chest so they could both watch the fading of the light, he said, “Let’s go outside where we can see it better.” He touched her arm, and she took his hand, accompanying him out the door.
Almost immediately Emma gasped and dropped Theo’s hand. She ran through the arbor to the maze of hedges, hurrying toward something other than the vanishing sunset.
“Are those—” She ran to the bush and scooped a speck of light into her hands, cupping the other over the top. “Fireflies!”
Her childlike excitement brought back snatches of memories—long-ago summer evenings spent catching lightning bugs with his cousins. A telltale blink in the bush near Emma caught his eye, and Theo scrambled to beat her to it. “Got one.”
“I’ve never seen them in real life before.” Emma looked down at her clasped hands, lifting the top one enough to see the light blink again before the insect crawled out and took flight. “Shoot. It escaped.”
“They tend to do that.” He remembered losing way too many that way, but then again, it made for opportunities to catch more. “Over there!” He pointed to their left.
She dove to the side, but then twirled mid-air, focusing instead near his shoulder. “There’s one behind you.”
Theo turned out of her way, but he saw it evade her once again, this time landing on her head. “Here.” He laughed as he gently guided it f
rom her hair into his hand.
“You’ve got one too.” She reached behind his shoulder but froze, calling attention to the fact that they were inches apart, their arms around each other.
Realizing for the first time how much taller he was than Emma, Theo leaned down to whisper near her ear, “All we need is a little music.”
His head whirled in a frenzy of joy in her presence. He’d abandoned chasing lightning bugs decades ago; it had never been this fun. But as entertaining as it was, having her in his arms was even better.
“Music?” She looked up at him with wide, trusting eyes.
Emma hadn’t stepped back, and Theo took that as a good sign. The rising moon highlighted the freckles sprinkled like fairy dust across the bridge of her nose.
“Aren’t we dancing?” He put a hand to the small of her back and guided her gently, slowly toward him, never looking away from her sweet, hazel eyes.
Her smile melted him as she dropped a hand to his bicep and held out her other. “Is that what we’re doing?”
He led her through a few twirls, trying his darnedest to think of a few notes of a waltz but ended up instead with the Beatles, singing about places he remembered that had changed. Like the Indigo Pointe of his childhood. He sang softly into the crown of her head, more so there would be music than to convey any particular purpose as he moved her through the maze of hedges. As much as he wanted to restore and protect the plantation, he was starting to realize that, just like the song, it was having Emma in his life that he cared most about. When he could no longer remember the words, he resorted to humming, allowing his movements to slow into a sway. She looked so happy in his arms and he felt content, more at home with her here at Indigo than he’d ever been anywhere with anyone else.
He placed her hand on his chest and tucked that glorious lock of hair behind her ear. How many times he’d watched her do that and wanted to do it himself. Allowing his fingertips to brush her jawline, he dropped his chin slowly, giving her plenty of time to pull back. Instead, she met him halfway. Their kiss was hesitant at first, lips and breath mingling softly, but became more sure.
Beauty and the Billionaire Beast (Destination Billionaire Romance Book 6) Page 9