Even if what they had built felt like a sandcastle.
By the time the Scott mansion folded Freesia inside its staggering square footage in the grand foyer, she felt like an imposter. Straight up, nappy-assed, subterranean imposter. The gatekeeper had insisted she leave Elias’s Ford parked out under the centuries-old magnolias and accompany him in a well-appointed golf cart to the main grounds. Along the way, he explained that Jameson was indisposed but that someone named Kitty would receive her. Right about that time, Freesia was certain she had driven the battered old truck straight off the end of the world and into an alternate universe where people dropped silver-chimed words into conversations and where women with pet names received guests like parcels shipped from exotic lands.
Or a ring meant for a woman named Peyton Habersham.
Still, the scenario was better than running into Jay.
By now, he likely knew that she had made several unsuccessful attempts to return the hospital equipment and had yet to contact medical services to care for her mother—if his numerous unanswered calls to her cell phone were any indication. He never left a message. Maybe that was the way of the wealthy. No scraps would substitute for the real deal. If real was even a thing at this end of the world.
According to Jay, not so much.
The servant left her alone in the receiving room, an opulent three-story expanse with marbled floors, buttery wall color between layers of sculpted moldings that looked like a stacked lemon-iced cake, and a Baccarat chandelier surrounded by frescoes. She knew the lighting by name only because a similar gorgeous monstrosity had made an appearance in the hall at New York fashion week, had even garnered a special plaque to commemorate the generous donators. The dripping crystals would be the best light to show off the hand beading in her creations, should they ever see the light of a New York day.
In this room, with these appointments, her dream did not seem as far away as it had that morning while bathing her mother.
Freesia sank into the warmth of that notion and fully availed herself of the scent of lilies erupting from a nearby vase. She perched on the edge of a sofa that looked like it had once belonged to a French king and took comfort that the ring still rode heavy on her finger, fisted in her pocket.
For once—well, more than once—she was glad Charlotte had butted her nose in and offered her opinion. “Go out there dressed like a polecat, that’s how you’ll be treated. You’re a designer. Wear an original because you are.” Freesia had chosen her strapless, tailored jumpsuit, mainly because it had a deep pocket for the ring, but also because she couldn’t yet bear to part with the matching scarpin luxury heels Jon Yu had sent as a welcome gift. The designer had told her he understood, that mothers are special, that she would still have a place in his New York studio when she was ready. She hadn’t had the heart to tell him that she questioned all three sentiments.
Kitty’s heel clicks against the marble preceded her.
Freesia popped to her feet.
Kitty was nothing like Freesia had conjured in her mind. The name alone summoned a peach-colored suit dress with floral-embroidered cuffs, jewel-studded broaches, French perfume that lingered in a room. This Kitty was a spitfire of a compact woman, decked out in a denim shirt and equestrian pants, polished boots to her knees, and a polo cap in tow.
That she had clearly been summoned, mid-ride, put Freesia at even more of a disadvantage, though she couldn’t say why she cared. It wasn’t as if they were keeping score.
“Miss Day?”
“Please, call me Freesia.”
“After the flower?”
The truth was messy for a receiving parlor. “Yes.”
“Lovely. I’m Kitty Scott, Jameson’s mother.”
They exchanged handshakes. Kitty’s grip was tight, like she still handled a crop and reins; her smile was much the same.
“I’m told you have something for me.”
For the first time since Freesia had released the pickup truck’s steering wheel, she pulled her fist from her pocket and stretched her fingers. After scouring the house for a respectable ring box, to no avail, a snug fit on the hand seemed safest. It just so happened the best fit came on the third finger of Freesia’s left hand.
Kitty’s expression seemed at odds—relief in her smile; confusion in her eyes. Freesia wondered what the woman knew of the scene at the bridal shop, of her son’s car idling in a rainstorm, of her.
Freesia worked the ring past her knuckle, handed it to Kitty, and savored a deep breath—possibly the first since she placed the freakishly mutant diamond on her finger inside the bank vault.
“Thank you. I can’t tell you what this means to our family. It belonged to Jameson’s great-grandmother, on Edward’s side.”
“It’s exquisite.”
“Rowena Scott was quite a woman. Hair down to her waist, rarely put it up. African safaris, Hollywood stuntwoman, scuba diver, patented an invention to improve the hoisting system on an offshore oil rig—that’s where she met her husband.” Kitty circled the couch, opened a drawer in an elaborate oak sidebar, and placed the ring inside, all while continuing her story. “Edward Senior was a hired hand, couldn’t afford much more than a cigar band at the time they were married. But he promised her when he made it big that he would buy her the biggest diamond he could track down. And do you know what she did?”
A rhetorical question. Still Freesia shook her head.
“Rowena put this ring away for the rest of her days. Said the original was the only one she ever wanted.”
“She sounds like a special woman.”
Kitty circled back to Freesia. “I suppose there’s one in every family.”
Camille, her only family to speak of, was a chasm. But Charlotte? She was the one in the March family. The one to see past everything, the heart of everything. And then there was Freesia, neither here nor there inside a family.
“Did Jameson tell you anything of the engagement?” Kitty’s words were pointed now, the tip of a drill bit. “Broken off, I suppose.”
Beneath her skin, Freesia squirmed. “It isn’t my business.”
“One might think a man as accomplished, as well-versed, as generous as Jameson might have his choice in affairs of the heart. But this life is rather isolating, all its burdens and responsibilities, never knowing the motives for the women who enter your son’s life. Peyton and Jameson have been friends since childhood. Sometimes it’s best to look to the past for reassurance.”
All the past had ever given Freesia was an unreasonable case of anxiety. Given the present conversation, not so unreasonable. Kitty was issuing a warning.
Freesia’s politeness bristled.
“Sometimes the only reassurance in the past is pain,” said Freesia.
Kitty’s lips trembled; her gaze plummeted before she recovered. Years on, the pain of burying her oldest son was clearly fresh, clearly raw.
Freesia should go. She wasn’t welcome here. As sure as she was that someone like Rowena, with her unconventional appearance and perspective, might be shown out of the present-day Scott receiving parlor, Freesia was certain to be seen as a woman with ulterior motives. She turned to leave but paused. The reprisal of pain, even in Kitty Scott, deserved kindness. It’s what Charlotte would have done.
“I’m sorry for the loss of your son.”
Kitty lowered herself to the sofa, as if the mention of her son and her capacity to stand were mutually exclusive. Her slow crawl back to awareness, back to manners and decorum, ending on a whispered statement, “I understand you’ll be feeling a loss soon,” unsettled the roles into which Freesia believed they had been cast.
“Jay told you?”
Her smile hadn’t yet crawled from under the remains of grief. “Jameson entrusts me with most confidences.”
All but how unhappy he was.
“Unexpected is the cruelest of goodbyes,” said Kitty. “For you, there’s time.”
“Time for what, Mother?”
Freesia’s heart t
urned over. Like she was caught, not in a moment of wrongdoing, but in a state of hyperawareness whose grip may never leave her.
Jay’s voice held the notes of a welcome disaster. He kissed Kitty on the cheek, then took up arms beside her. His weapon of choice, a smile. Not just any smile. A gloating, can’t-ignore-me-when-I’m-in-front-of-you smile.
Her pulse failed in its recovery. God, but he was beautiful, damaged goods.
Go, Free. Before he has a good hold of your senses.
“Time to…take in the grounds before dark.”
Kitty had scrambled. She wanted Freesia gone.
“I should run.” Far, far away. Freesia wished Kitty a good day and took off in a direction she hoped was the way out of the gilded maze, where flowers erupted and twelve-carat rings were cast into parlor drawers and nothing at this alternate end of the world was as it seemed.
“Intentional or conversational?” Jay called after her.
In the formal garden, Freesia had made it to the third sculpture, a Greek woman on the cusp of a wardrobe malfunction, when he caught up to her.
“What?”
“Your comment back there about running.”
He moved easily, despite the ridiculously windy path of hedges and gravel underfoot. Of course, his zillionaire loafers gave him an advantage. Had Freesia known how to hail the gatekeeper’s golf cart, she might have spared her luxury heels from having to be re-soled and her bare feet from screaming for a steam bath with Epsom salts. Like it or not, she was committed to an autonomous exit.
“I said I had to leave.”
“You said you had to run. Quite different, given our intimate confessions.”
Freesia halted on the word intimate.
Jay nearly crashed into her.
“It was chat on a country highway,” Freesia said. “You make it sound like we sipped wine from each other’s navels and talked bondage.”
His brows peaked. A slight pucker at his lips gave way to a devilish grin. “More a heart-to-heart about vulnerabilities, but I’m all-in for your idea.”
Jameson Scott was treating the moment, her, like a game.
“There was a kiss,” he added.
“Don’t remind me.” Freesia scaled a tiny rock wall to access a runway of carpet grass worthy of Sherwood Forest. Once her feet hit the lush softness, Freesia doubled her escape speed.
“You have to catch your breath sometime,” he called after her. “Your mother has given you that breath.”
For the second time, Freesia stopped short. “Just because you called your people and arranged medical services for her doesn’t mean that you know anything about her or what she has or has not given me.”
“Fair enough. But you presume as much about my life. Why don’t we shed pretense and get back to being the two people who were out on that country road? Refreshing in our honesty.”
“Fine.” She squared her shoulders. Eye contact proved more difficult. “Your generosity overwhelms me. You overwhelm me, make me feel inadequate, like I can’t take care of my mother when we would manage fine and better than she deserves. And your mother looks at me like I’m about to overthrow her kingdom when all I really want to do was forget I ever met you. And I can’t even get that right. I wish I’d never stopped that day on the road, because you confuse me, yet I go back and relive it, all the time. I don’t know how to be around you, near you, and I’m so afraid that taking care of the woman who shaped me by her emotional absence will make me disappear.”
Her lungs protested, as if she’d been mid-sprint and given out.
“Feel better?” His voice was low, gentle.
“I’d feel better if you took a turn.”
A belowground chuckle sounded from deep inside him. “All right.” He took his sweet time and looked beyond her, somewhere near the horizon, before his gaze returned. “Your worldliness overwhelms me. What I know of people came from books and tutors and boarding schools where everyone looked and spoke like me. I don’t appreciate money because I’ve never gone without, but if given the chance, I’d give it all away to feel something real. Your humanity is beautiful. You’re beautiful. I don’t know how to be around you, near you, but I want to try, more than I’ve wanted anything in a long time.”
Goosebumps rolled up her back, her arms, and settled at her shoulders, already warmed in the late sun. He was good. Extraordinary, even. Boarding schools and literature lectures were the breeding grounds for politicians and speech makers with few ties to the real world. At least he owned it.
“Feel better?” she asked.
“Immensely.”
Freesia shook her head. A slip of laughter erupted from her lips. “Always the five-dollar words.”
“Distracts people from the truth.”
“Which is?”
He contemplated the grass before answering. “Take a walk with me. I want to show you something.”
“I can’t.”
“Ten minutes. Then I’ll carry you to the gate if you want.”
The bridal shop would be closed. Charlotte was making Camille’s favorite, shrimp and grits, for supper, just the three of them. Alex had yet to make an appearance.
“I should help Charlotte with dinner.”
“I have the perfect thing,” Jay said. “Ten minutes?”
He was the man from the highway again. She was the one who had stopped. The effortlessness the open road had captured between them tiptoed in, unannounced but magnanimous in presence. A five-dollar word that captured how much he filled her at that moment.
Freesia nodded.
Jay kept to the grass, whisper-soft and evening cool against her aching soles. They spoke of his job, his role in several of his family’s companies as shareholder and CFO, the same role his brother had before his death, how his parents’ crippling grief necessitated him to step forward, push his grief aside for the good of the thousands of employees around the country that depended on them. She teased him about his spread in Southern Exposure magazine, one of Old South’s most eligible bachelors, and delighted at her deftness in summoning color to his face. Freesia decided she was more kindred to Rowena Scott than she imagined, given Jay’s stories about the charity Rowena had started for women who wanted a fresh start from their men at a time when such liberties were scandalous.
And when talk turned to the future—specifically his—he was nothing like the multimillion-dollar company man and every bit the highway man she had kissed.
“There must be a plan beyond the here and now,” she said. “An exit strategy—isn’t that what’s it called in business?”
“I don’t have one.”
“But filling in for your brother’s job was always just temporary, right?”
Jay shrugged. “I like being a team player. Turns out, I’m not half-bad.”
The shakedown of his answer made her itch. She shook her head. Being good at something and being happy didn’t necessarily track. And hadn’t he told her he longed to travel as she had? “I’m not buying it. Same role. Same car. You trying to settle down even though that someone wasn’t right for you. Three years on, Jay, you are still living his life. No one continues to do that without a payoff. You may not be half-bad, but no one’s that good.”
They walked in silence. Pushing him, challenging him to confess things that made him squirm, putting up unscalable walls, was her way of adding distance. He wanted real; she’d give him an acreage of real.
“Jack had all the answers. Excelled at nearly everything he tried. He was confident and capable and charismatic. There was no comparison. Plenty of people tried.” His maudlin tone suggested an endless Jack versus Jameson plot that only ever ended in defeat. “Jack conquered the world, and I just kept the peace inside it.”
Freesia got it. Subtract one from the sum-of-two equation, through no fault, and one remained.
“Until he was gone,” she said. “Then people cared what you had to say. Is that it?”
“I loved my brother.” To his defensive tone, he amende
d. “Love my brother.”
And there it was. Peacemaker. Supportive to a fault. Sacrificially loyal.
“No one is saying you don’t.”
“You suggest that I’m glad he’s gone.”
“I’m simply trying to understand why it’s easier for you to keep the status quo than to conquer your dreams and let Jack be the peace inside your world. You can love him and honor him without becoming him.”
He frowned, thoughtful. Again, she longed to leave, but they had neared a picturesque and tidy white-framed greenhouse, Jay’s endgame.
“I want to make a difference, help people. Not just the people who pull a decent paycheck and a 401K from our payroll, but people who live in poverty on the very earth over which we draw resources, people my grandmother—and Jack—would have helped. A giving to offset all the taking. A hand up, not a hand out.”
“Sounds noble.”
“I don’t want to be noble. I just want something in this life to feel…”
“Real?”
Jay’s smile came easily. “Precisely.”
“I’ll have the room emptied tomorrow. They’ll move any furniture in the house you wish to make you both comfortable. But keep the medical staff number. The time may come when you’ll need them.”
Freesia wasn’t convinced. But as with most things in his life, Freesia was learning, Jay leaned in to a compromise.
He stopped at the glass house door. His eyes were all business.
“You are a fiercely independent woman. One of the things I like most about you. Appreciating those who make your life easier doesn’t make you any less so.”
She retreated inward. Her reflexes were born of hardship. Nothing about her life had ever been easy and no one had stepped forward to make it so, until now.
His gaze slipped to her mouth and lingered.
She was a night bloom, opening herself. Instincts edged her away from easy. “Your ten minutes are almost up.”
He smiled, treating the moment, her, like a game. A skeleton key above the doorframe fit the lock. He gestured for her to take the first step inside.
The Family Wish (Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book 3) Page 8