by Ken Casper
“Welcome home,” he murmured into her silken hair.
She looked up at him, a come-hither expression playing on her face.
Blood rushed to his nether regions. Their eyes met and suddenly their mouths joined with a wantonness that had them both gasping for air.
“I’ve missed you,” he said softly, his forehead glued to hers, their breaths mingling.
“Me, too.”
“Good trip?”
“Really good.”
She reached inside the car and snagged an oblong makeup case. “The llamas were an overwhelming success. The sponsor wants to use them as a symbol of their new line. They’re going to bring me a lot more business.”
“Congratulations.” He meant it, but he also couldn’t help asking, “Does that mean you’ll be going away again?”
“Probably, but that’s the way this business works.” She stepped inside the house.
Jed didn’t wait until the door was closed to pull her into his arms once more. He kissed her slowly, intensely, with a hungry need that had her pulse skipping.
“Mmm,” she sighed. “It’s good to be back.”
He tipped her chin up. “Let’s get you unpacked, then there’s dinner at my place. June left another of her carefree meals.”
“God bless her. She deserves a raise.”
He smirked. “I already gave her one.”
She grinned, pleased their minds thought alike.
“The house has been awfully empty without you.”
Tongue in cheek, she said, “Yeah, I missed the old place, too.”
He took her hands, held them by her sides and backed her against the kitchen counter, his hips hemming her in. “Only the house?” he asked, one brow raised precipitously.
The feel of him against her sent electric waves of lustful desire shimmering through her. “Well, I did think about its owner a few times.”
“Only a few?” He sounded disappointed. “And what did you think about him?”
“I wondered if he might give me another tour of his upstairs. It was so dark the other night I didn’t get to see too much of it.”
“Upstairs?” He dotted kisses along her forehead. “A private tour?” He skimmed his mouth along her collarbone. “There are secrets in Beaumarais.” He nuzzled the soft skin between shoulder and neck. “Hidden recesses I haven’t shown you yet.”
Secrets at Beaumarais. The phrase sent adrenaline pumping through her. Or maybe it was the way he curled his tongue along the lobe of her ear. She sucked in air and held it. “I’d love to learn more about your secrets.”
“Shall we begin?” He brought his mouth to hers and captured it. A teasing, coaxing tangling of tongues, filled with temptation, implying greed.
“I need to shower first.” She was panting from his siege on her senses. “I’m all grungy.”
The gleam in his eye said he hadn’t noticed or didn’t care.
“You can shower over at my place while dinner is heating in the oven,” he suggested. “I’ll wash your back.”
The thought of his hands on her skin had her knees going weak. She gripped the edge of the counter behind her. “You will, huh?”
Gently, he began kneading the muscles at the base of her neck. His hands whispered down her chest just far enough to make both of them aware how close he was to the tips of her breasts, before he moved up again. “Might even work in a bit of massage therapy,” he murmured.
She needed to concentrate to keep her eyes open and focused. It would have been so easy to lose herself in the ecstasy of his touch. She stroked his cheek. “I didn’t know you were a therapist.”
He cocked his brows. His lips curling into a devilish grin, he brushed back a wispy strand of her vagrant hair. “I can see you still have a lot to learn about me.”
She tilted her head into his hand. “So much to discover.” She dragged a fingernail along his jaw. “This could develop into a challenging quest.”
His eyes continued to smile into hers as he kissed the tip of her nose. “Just might. I’m a very complex person, you know.”
“Are you?” She slid her hand down the front of his pants and watched his eyes widen. “Seems to me you’re pretty straight forward.”
“Um,” he groaned on an indrawn breath, “maybe we should stay right here.”
She laughed and pushed him away. “Nope. I’m a lousy cook, remember.”
“Hmm.” He reached for her, but she ducked to the side. “I’ve never tasted your cooking.”
She picked up her cosmetic case and carried it to the bedroom. “Be thankful.” He followed with her suitcase. Instead of unpacking, however, she grabbed some clean clothes from the closet and her chest of drawers and rolled them up hastily. “Ready?”
He arched an arm over her shoulders. “Willing and able.”
As they strolled hand in hand through the piney woods to the stately home on the hill, a phrase kept echoing through Gwyn’s mind.
Secrets at Beaumarais.
Chapter Twenty
JED HAD RESOLVED not to let articles in the National Tabloid get to him, but that Thursday morning it took an exceptional amount of willpower to keep his cool.
“Simon Sezz has an interview with Amanda Jennings,” he noted as he passed the paper across the breakfast table to Gwyn.
Nothing in the scandal sheet was going to be complimentary, Gwyn realized, but interviews from “friends” felt like a stab in the back. She accepted the paper, neatly folded to the article about the recent events in Uncertain.
“I remember the day poor Frannie disappeared,” Amanda was quoted as saying. “She was such a nice, friendly lady. Everybody loved her.” Gwyn frowned, suspecting that if the perky flirt ever thought of Frannie as “poor,” it was with condescension rather than affection.
“Jed didn’t come to school that day. He was always so conscientious, got straight As, and he was the best basketball player on the team. That was the only time I ever remember him being absent.”
Simon Sezz went on to explain that Amanda Jennings and Jed Louis had gone to school together and been in the same homeroom their senior year at Uncertain High, the year Frannie Granger was murdered. He also didn’t miss an opportunity to remind his readers that the dead woman’s body had been buried right over her property line on a corner of Beaumarais.
“I found out the reason he ditched that day,” Amanda continued in her interview, “was that he’d had a terrible fight with his foster mother.”
“About what?” the interviewer asked.
“I don’t rightly know. But I did hear Will and Jed talk about Jed storming out of the house after accusing Frannie of ruining his life and swearing to get even.”
Gwyn rested her hands on the edge of the table, the paper spread between them, and glanced over at Jed, who appeared to be working the Uncertain Times crossword puzzle.
“How much of what she says is true and how much of it’s hype?” she asked.
Deliberately, he poured coffee from a carafe into her cup and his own. “It’s all true,” he acknowledged. “I did cut classes that day.”
No need to ask the obvious question. He’d tell her what had happened when he was ready. She continued reading the article, but it said nothing that hadn’t already been covered.
June was clearing the table of the breakfast of bagels, cream cheese and jam, coffee and juice when Jed beckoned Gwyn to join him in the library. Once there, he walked over to the stereo and inserted a CD. A moment later the sweet melodic strains of Brahms’s “Double Concerto for Violin and Cello” filled the room. It was beautiful music that Gwyn knew well. She wasn’t particularly surprised at his liking it, having examined his collection of CDs, tapes and old records. His tastes were eclectic. A few Broadway show albums, some rock-and-roll and a curious emphasis
on country western and classical music.
She sat on the couch by the fireplace and remembered she wanted to get a floral arrangement for the hearth. She’d pick one up today. At the moment, however, her attention was drawn to the man resting his arm on the mantel.
“Right after I came to live with Frannie, she wanted me to take music lessons. Piano. I was six years old, in first grade, the perfect time for a child to learn.”
Gwyn watched his face and wondered what thoughts were going through his mind. His mother had just died suddenly and without warning. His uncle had rejected him and now he was in the care of a woman he’d never met. It must have been a very sad and confusing time for him. Alone. Forced to live with a stranger, and told he had to take piano lessons.
“I liked music. My mother usually had the radio on, mostly rock-and-roll, occasionally a little jazz. Except on Sunday morning. Then she’d tune in to Wheeling, West Virginia, and we’d listen to what she referred to as hillbilly music—what we now call bluegrass. That was my favorite.”
There was a childish pleasure in the way he related this. Apparently, all his memories weren’t sad ones, after all. Gwyn bit the inside of her mouth as she contemplated the scene: mother and child enjoying the Americanized version of Irish and Scottish reels and jigs. Spirited banjos, guitars and wailing fiddles.
“I was excited about the idea of being able to make my own music. There was just one problem.” He chuckled softly with a hint of mischief in his eyes. “I hated the piano. Not the instrument. Trying to play it. What absolutely fascinated me, what I really wanted to learn, was the violin.”
He paced in front of the fireplace.
“That created a bit of a problem, though. Frannie had an old spinet I could have practiced on, and one of her clients had agreed to give me lessons in exchange for housecleaning. But Frannie not only didn’t own a violin, the nearest teacher was in Marshall, and he wanted cash. Undaunted, Frannie found me an old fiddle in a pawnshop, took on another client and drove me over to Marshall every week for lessons. During the hour I was torturing the strings, she did her weekly grocery shopping.”
Gwyn smiled, imagining that his playing must have sounded a little like someone dragging fingernails against a blackboard. “What about practicing at home?” she asked. “Where did you go?”
He smirked. “Whenever the weather allowed, to the dock by the lake. I think even the fish fled.” Chuckling at the memory, he took a step toward the couch as if he were going to sit down, but restlessness had him pacing.
“I stuck with it, and over the next ten years got pretty good—good enough that in my senior year I was offered an opportunity to go to the Juilliard School of Music in New York.”
Gwyn would have expected pride in the statement. Instead, she found discontent.
“Naturally, I wanted to go,” he continued, “but when I asked Frannie to sign the consent form as my legal guardian, she refused.”
“Why would she deny you the opportunity to attend so prestigious a school, Jed? I don’t understand.”
He drew himself up, apparently undecided if he still wanted to sit down or pace. He compromised by resting an elbow on the mantel again.
“Her logic was that very few musicians made names for themselves,” he explained, “or even earned a decent living—especially in classical music. I was a fairly good fiddler, she admitted, but even she could tell I wasn’t great, and Juilliard wasn’t going to make me great.”
“Sounds pretty harsh,” Gwyn ventured.
Jed managed a crooked smile. “Frannie could be blunt when circumstances called for it. She didn’t believe in mincing words, especially when it came to right and wrong.”
“And she didn’t think Juilliard was the right thing for you?”
He shook his head. “She wanted me to treat music as a hobby, not a profession. As far as she was concerned, I should be working toward a well-paying occupation.” He stopped and looked at Gwyn. “I reminded her that with my uncle’s inheritance coming to me in a little over three years when I turned twenty-one, I didn’t need to earn a living.” He shook his head. “It was the wrong thing to say, and she let me have it with both barrels. I had an obligation, she insisted, to be self-supporting and self-sufficient, not live off the money someone else had earned.”
“Tough lady,” Gwyn commented, “and smart.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t see it that way. You may have noticed I’m a little thin-skinned about my paternity.”
She gave him a confirming nod.
“Instead of interpreting her remark as an incentive, I took it as a reminder that my birth certificate says Unknown where my father’s name should be.”
Something he would have to live with all his life. “So if she didn’t think you had the makings of a great concert violinist, what did she want you to do?” Gwyn asked.
“I’d been offered an athletic scholarship to the University of Texas. She wanted me to accept it and major in something practical.”
Gwyn thought of the many useful things she’d wanted to do that her parents had rejected. She would never have to earn a living, they’d explained, sometimes patiently, more often with exasperation. There was no need for her to study medicine, architecture or engineering. Her role was not to be a scientist but an artist, to be a model of culture. Studying languages, as long as they were the politically correct ones, could advance her future husband’s diplomatic career. Being fluent in the nuances of painting and sculpture likewise—so long as she didn’t dirty her hands actually doing those things.
“So you wanted to go to Juilliard and Frannie wouldn’t let you,” Gwyn prompted.
He pulled away from the fireplace and started pacing again; this time there was anger rather than hurt in his expression. Gwyn waited.
“I won’t tell you I wasn’t furious at her for not signing the paper. I was. We’d had arguments before.” He gave a mirthless laugh. “They were earth-shattering problems to me at the time. It wasn’t until much later that I realized it was typical teenage stuff. I was almost eighteen by then and feeling very independent. I bristled when she’d ask me where I was going, who I was going with, what time I’d be home. I was living in her house and knew I had to follow her rules, but I resented them.”
He stopped in midstride and turned to Gwyn, an ironic grin on his face. “Guess what we argued about most?”
“School? College?”
“Nope. Amanda Jennings.”
“Amanda? Why?”
This time he chuckled with amusement. “She was the head cheerleader in high school and really knew how to strut her assets. I’m not just talking about her pom-poms. Believe me, there was never any question she liked men, liked teasing them and leading them on. She’d bat her eyes and brush up against a guy and he’d turn into a slobbering idiot. Then she’d walk calmly away with a smirk on her face.”
Gwyn’s boarding-school days had been so different. She’d been a wallflower at the arranged dances she’d been allowed to attend. Carefully nurtured poise kept her from babbling or stuttering in an uncomfortable situation, which was exactly how she’d felt when a dance partner took her in his arms. Her demure silence and inability to act spontaneously had earned her a reputation as an ice maiden. Memory of the image still gnawed.
“I think I can tell why Frannie didn’t like her.”
“Frannie was no fool,” Jed insisted. “She could see Amanda was playing me better than I played the fiddle. I wasn’t alone. Amanda worked her claws into Will and Riley as well.”
Gwyn easily pictured the scene. Clarice, her roommate in college, was one of those convivial party girls who seemed to know instinctively what men wanted and how to handle them. Gwyn had envied the striking redhead’s easy rapport with the opposite sex. Their personalities were so different they shouldn’t have gotten along at all. Instead, they’d become the
best of friends and still were.
“Did the three of you fight over her?” Gwyn asked.
Jed rocked his head, obviously amused. “Let’s just say we came close a couple of times.” He crossed one ankle over the other. “But I think secretly we knew we were being used. It’s rare, but sometimes even testosterone-crazed males can use their big heads.”
Gwyn chuckled. “So what happened, as they say, on the morning in question.”
He grew somber. “We were running late. I didn’t even have time for breakfast. I asked Frannie again to sign the admission form, but she still refused, and I lost my temper. Amanda overheard Will and me talking about our fight the following morning. Her version is essentially correct. I accused Frannie of ruining my life.”
Gwyn glanced at the paper she’d brought with her. “It also says you threatened her. Did you?”
“No,” he snapped, his face slightly distorted, color rising. He lowered his voice. “I would never have threatened Frannie, and I would never, ever have harmed her. Gwyn, that woman had been my mother for twelve years, twice as long as my real mom. Sure we argued sometimes. How many kids don’t disagree with their parents, especially during their teenage years?”
Gwyn doubted he could understand how much she envied him. She’d never wrangled with her parents, never been allowed to, until there was no room left for argument. How often she’d wished she could stand up to them, challenge them, make them justify their imperious demands, say something herself that would convince them to change their minds. But she hadn’t. She’d never even sought compromise; she’d simply acquiesced. In the end it had left her no options.
“I can’t remember my exact words,” Jed admitted, “but they were something to the effect that I would show her.”
“What did you mean?”
He hesitated then spoke. “I don’t think I meant anything specific by it. It was just one of those things you yell at somebody when you’re mad. I admit I toyed with the idea of forging her name on the application. I figured once I got accepted to Juilliard, she would keep quiet. Besides, I was going to be eighteen in a couple of months. By then, it wouldn’t matter. I wouldn’t need her permission.”