Holly

  “No doubt your suggestion is that I spend more time with you.”

  “Or your parents or the dog catcher.”

  “Ultimately, what’s in this for you?”

  “That job I told you about. A nice, steady job with free housing.”

  “Judging by what you did to Lorrie today, I don’t think he’s going to want to hire you. Besides, how could you run the place? You’re a rotten gardener.”

  “I can boss people around and I’m great with numbers. Give me some numbers to add.”

  “Thirty-nine, forty-two, eighty-one, two thousand and six, and seventy,” she said quickly.

  “Two thousand two hundred and thirty-eight,” he answered instantly. “Comes in handy in business.”

  Holly gave a sigh. “I want to register here and now that I don’t believe one word of your reasons for doing whatever it is you’re trying to do. It’s just that I can’t figure out what you’re up to. Yet. However, there is some wisdom in what you’re saying. Today, Lorrie seemed a bit, well, a bit bored.”

  “By you?! He certainly doesn’t know you like I do, does he? I bet if he saw you bare chested and in a concrete pit he wouldn’t find you boring.”

  In spite of her intentions, Holly smiled. “I guess not.” She held out her skirt, then the long, lacy sleeve of her blouse. “Taylor dressed me. She said that this outfit of hers was guaranteed to catch a man.”

  “She’s right,” Nick said solemnly. “She wore it and she caught Charles.”

  Holly shook her head at him. “You are truly wicked. Do you think we could get something to eat? I’m starving.”

  “Cucumber sandwiches for lunch?”

  “And pimento cheese on tiny crackers.”

  Smiling, Nick kicked the motorcycle to life, but Holly couldn’t figure out how to straddle the back. Should she pull her dress up to her hips? Before she could make a decision, Nick reached over and tore the side seam of the skirt from her midthigh all the way down to the hem.

  At first Holly was shocked, then she laughed. At least she’d never have to wear the awful outfit again. She threw a leg over the back of the motorcycle, wrapped her arms around Nick’s back, and they roared off.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “TAYLOR,” LORRIE SAID INTO HIS CELL PHONE, “I know everyone wants me to make mad, passionate love to Holly and to marry her, but she has to be the most boring person I have ever met.” He paused. “Yes, she is very pretty. Beautiful even, and that body of hers is perfect, but she looks at me with great cow eyes and her lashes fan the breeze. I thought I might be sick.”

  Pausing, he listened to Taylor’s ranting, to her threats, to her warnings.

  Lorrie yawned. “By the way, exactly who is this gardener? The one with the motorcycle? I swear, when he rode up, I wanted to leave with him. No, of course I didn’t let Holly know that. Tell me, dear, is Holly a virgin? She certainly acts like one. And dresses like one.”

  He paused. “You put her in that getup? Taylor darling, why don’t you let her borrow your little black leather number, the one with the spiked dog collar? Or is Charles wearing it all the time now?” He laughed at Taylor’s answer.

  “By the way, dear, young Holly said something interesting. She said the Belle Chere treasure was real. Yes, I know that it’s just a family legend, and I know I was to tell the story just to interest Miss Hollander Tools, but she said Nick—that is the gardener’s name, isn’t it?—said the treasure was real. She was so positive when she said it that it made me think they’d found something in the papers in the attic. Has she said anything to you? No? Then perhaps it’s wishful thinking on my part. I’m sure that if there were any treasure at Belle Chere my late father would have found it and used it to buy an underground mountain, or whatever real estate he could lose money on.”

  Lorrie waited. “Okay, I promise. I’ll drag myself out of bed in the morning. She invited herself here for breakfast so I’ll buy eggs—a lot of eggs. She has an appetite like a field hand. Should I make grits, too? Now, now, dear, no need for language like that. Who knows if Daddy is listening or not? And, by the way, couldn’t we reconsider this marriage idea? You should have seen her today. If I’d said another sad word about my ex-wife or the state of my home, she would have whipped out her checkbook. Maybe—”

  He listened to Taylor while looking at his nails, then smoothing his hair. “All right, dear, I understand. We need to be protected by the sanctity of the marriage contract. So be it. Now let me go. I have some people to meet tonight. Yes, it is a private party. Very, very private, and, yes, they are trustworthy. Don’t you have something to go to with Charles tonight? My, my, Taylor, such language. Your rich little baby sister would be shocked.”

  Smiling, he hung up.

  Chapter Sixteen

  One Month Later

  HOLLY AND NICK WERE SITTING ON THE FLOOR OF the attic of Belle Chere. The big window fan was on and there were three more fans sitting on the floor, but the room was still hot. She was wearing a tiny pair of cotton shorts and a halter top, while Nick had on just shorts.

  Between the heat, the humidity, and her exhaustion, it was all she could do to stay awake. For the last four weeks, she’d had no rest. It was as though she’d become the rope in a game of tug-of-war between two men. Lorrie took her days; Nick took her nights.

  Just in the past week she’d been to two dinner parties, a country club dance, a swimming party, a picnic for a hundred, and a flower show, all with Lorrie. Since the six-hour first date, as Nick called it, she’d spent almost no time alone with Lorrie. Instead, they’d entered into a mad social whirl in Edenton, Elizabeth City, and Windsor. Lorrie knew everyone and was invited everywhere.

  True, she’d enjoyed herself—to a point. She’d laughed and talked and eaten well. But every evening, as Lorrie drove her back to Spring Hill, she’d been so tired she could hardly sit up. What was it about all that chatting that drained the energy out of her?

  When they arrived at Spring Hill, Lorrie and she had been alone in his car and there had been time for good night kisses. But every time Lorrie made a move toward her, Holly had turned away—or yawned, or done something to keep him from kissing her.

  “My little virgin princess,” be began calling her.

  At first, Holly had taken offense at the name, but as the days went by and the name kept Lorrie away from her, she began to like it.

  But for all her fatigue, once she was out of his car, energy returned to her. Every night, without exception, she ran through her parents’ dark garden to Nick’s house.

  He greeted her with open arms, never with questions or recriminations. They made love as soon as they saw each other, sometimes in the garden, sometimes in the house. It never mattered where, and each night their passion was renewed, never growing stale or slacking off.

  After their first lust was quenched, they often took a shower together, then they settled down to look at what Nick had found out that day. From the first day, Holly had made a stand: If she was going to go out with Lorrie to every social event within a hundred miles, then Nick was to be allowed to research at Belle Chere—and her father was to give him a fifty percent raise. That the money was Holly’s was something that Nick didn’t need to know.

  Every night, their bodies damp from their showers and momentarily sated from their lovemaking, they shared a bottle of wine and went over whatever Nick had been able to uncover that day.

  How Holly envied him! All day long she’d had to make small talk about her father’s illustrious career, about the celebrities she’d met—and last, but certainly not least, about Hollander Tools. The people were always polite, but they asked endless questions about her and Hollander Tools.

  All her life, Holly had worked to escape the stigma attached to being an heiress, but when she went places with Lorrie she had to smile at all the questions. She often wondered how much Nick knew about “who” she was, but if he did know, he never mentioned it.

  As the days went by, the double life threatened to
break her. During the day she was with Lorrie, the man she’d spent years fantasizing about. No boyfriend had ever come close to being as good as what she remembered about Lorrie. She’d dumped one man after three dates because she couldn’t bear his laugh. She remembered Lorrie’s laugh as being rich and deep, and, by comparison, the man’s was too high.

  But now she was an adult and she saw things as an adult. She now knew with certainty that she did not want to marry Lorrie Beaumont.

  In that summer long ago she’d believed that Lorrie was like her. They’d spent the whole time in isolation and they’d worked long hours on restoring Belle Chere, and she’d enjoyed it so much that it had set the course for her future. It was that summer that she’d found what she wanted to do with her life.

  “Tired?” Nick asked.

  She opened her eyes and smiled at him. Her happy memories of time with Lorrie had been replaced with happy memories of time spent with Nick. In the evenings they’d pored over his photocopies of Belle Chere documents. He’d used his first week’s salary to buy a copier and had carried it upstairs to the attic. (Lorrie had been willing to allow Holly to remove papers, but the only way he’d allow Nick to touch them was if they remained in the attic.)

  Nick had done an excellent job of researching, finding all he could on the lives of the Beaumonts in 1842. He’d even found photos. They’d laughed at ugly little Arthur, and Holly had pretended to swoon over Jason’s handsomeness. Julia had been sweet-looking, but even at sixteen, when the photo was taken, her eyes had been melancholy.

  Teasing, Nick had made Holly pay in kisses to get to see the photo of Julia’s son. He’d looked exactly like his father, had been in the state legislature, and had six children, all of whom lived to adulthood.

  For all Nick’s research, they could find no mention of the treasure, and nothing in the private papers about Jason’s trial or the hanging. There were boxes of documents left by Jason’s son, but there was never a mention of his father or Arthur, who his mother had married. But then both men had died before the child was born.

  After a week of nonstop socializing with Lorrie and nights spent with Nick, Holly was exhausted. But worse than the exhaustion was her inner turmoil.

  She’d had two fights with Taylor just in the last week.

  “Lorrie really, really likes you,” Taylor had said with enthusiasm.

  “That’s nice,” Holly answered. The night before, she and Nick had made love, read and talked, then made love again. She’d not gone to sleep until 3:00 A.M.

  “You don’t seem too happy about this,” Taylor said, her voice rising.

  “I’m just tired, that’s all.”

  “Maybe we could make it a double wedding,” Taylor said as though it was her dearest wish in the world to be married beside Holly.

  “I don’t think so,” Holly answered, coming awake. “Lorrie and I—I mean, we don’t—”

  What had followed was one of Taylor’s “big sister” lectures about marriage. She said that too many young girls didn’t have the sense to look at the whole picture. They wanted some “hot” guy “like the gardener, Nick, for example,” she’d said. Taylor had ranted for twenty minutes while Holly toyed with a bowl of cereal.

  Before she’d come to Spring Hill, Holly thought exactly like Taylor did, that marriage was a business, a partnership. She’d fantasized hard about her life with Lorrie at Belle Chere.

  It was just that the reality wasn’t living up to the fantasy. First of all, Lorrie no longer seemed to be obsessed with the restoration of his ancestral home. She’d asked him about that and he’d given her a sly look and said, “I’ll leave that to you.”

  Holly had looked away. It was clear that he meant when they were married. In an instant, her dream crumpled. She’d spent years imagining living at Belle Chere with Lorrie and how they’d work together to restore the plantation.

  It had taken only a couple of weeks to realize that the Lorrie she’d seen that summer had been an anomaly. A fluke. A person who was not the real Lorrie. The real Lorrie liked going from one party to another. He said it gathered clients for his new law office, but, as far as Holly could tell, he never went to work.

  As the days went by, Holly began to feel that Lorrie wanted her for something other than herself. Her inheritance, maybe? More than once he’d commented that he wished he could invite people to Belle Chere. “A beautiful Belle Chere,” he’d said.

  Holly had said nothing. Yes, she’d love to restore Belle Chere to what it once was, but then she wanted to do more with her life—and her money—than just entertain people.

  “You’re certainly not here today,” Nick said, bringing her back to the present. “Want to tell me what’s wrong?”

  “Last night Lorrie asked me to marry him.”

  Nick was silent for a moment, then calmly said, “Congratulations. Tell me, is he a great lover?”

  “The best,” she said, then when Nick looked shocked, she grimaced. “You know very well that I’ve never been to bed with him. He calls me his ‘virgin princess.’ ”

  “Is that so?” Nick asked, smiling.

  “I don’t think any of this is funny.”

  “Me, neither,” he said, smiling more broadly. “You know, if you don’t marry him, you could always marry me.”

  “I really don’t appreciate your jokes. Did you read all those letters in that pile or just some of them?” She tried to ignore Nick’s eyes, but couldn’t. She turned away, tears in her own eyes. “Nick, don’t do this to me.”

  “Don’t make you choose me over your family?” he asked softly.

  She looked at him sharply, astonished by his insight. “I don’t mean to hurt you. You’re a wonderful man. No, you’re too wonderful, but it wouldn’t work between us. Short term yes, long term, no.”

  “Because of money,” he said softly.

  “No! Because of your pride. You want to live off of me? You want me to buy us a house and cars? You want me to pay to send our kids to private schools?”

  She put her hands over her face for a moment, then looked back at him. “I’ve seen this happen over and over and it never works. Never!”

  “You’re talking about the class system.”

  “No, of course not. I mean, yes! My stepmother, Marguerite, ran off with a man like—I mean—”

  “You mean with a man like me. Motorcycles and high school educations. We might throw our feet on the dinner table and pick our toenails.”

  “You’re being ridiculous,” she said, gathering up old letters and returning them to a shoebox.

  “So you’re going to walk away from us, leave behind weeks of laughter and great sex?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I was a fool to get involved with you in the first place. And you were a bigger fool for coming after me.”

  “I beg your forgiveness. Maybe you’re more worldly than I am, but I’d never met a woman who I could talk with, laugh with, tell my secrets to, and make love to with such gusto. I couldn’t let you go. I wanted to see if we were real. I needed to know!”

  “And?” she asked softly.

  When he looked at her, his eyes were hot, blazing with what he felt for her.

  Part of Holly wanted to run away, but the larger part wanted to leap on him and say that she loved him, too.

  Closing her eyes, she put her head back. Why had this happened to her? She didn’t want to marry Lorrie only because she compared every move he made to Nick. Nick was quieter than Lorrie, more self-contained. Nick made people like him because he listened, and cared. The people around Lorrie looked at him with avaricious eyes. Lorrie owned a plantation that had been in his family for centuries. If there was an aristocracy in the U.S., Lorrie was part of it. But she’d never seen people really like Lorrie; they just wanted him because of who he was. Like they wanted to know Holly because of “who” she was.

  But everyone liked Nick. Even her father liked him. Many times she’d seen the two of them in the garden talking. Once, Nick was deadheading roses whi
le her father was asking his opinion on his latest sermon.

  But it was one thing to like the man who lived in the servants’ quarters and another to want your daughter to marry him.

  When she looked back at Nick, his face had changed, shut down. Closed.

  She wanted to argue with him until he saw reason, meaning that she wanted to make him agree with her. But what did she want? she asked herself. For them to part while tearfully smiling, no hard feelings, just a wise understanding between them? Did she think that someday they’d meet and introduce their spouses to each other? Maybe Nick’s wife could work as a nanny to Holly’s children?

  She began to gather up the papers they’d gone through, but her eyes were so full of tears that she couldn’t see. After a few moments she put her hands over her face and began to cry in earnest.

  “Sssh,” Nick said, gathering her into his arms and holding her. “Don’t cry, sweetheart. I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

  But Holly couldn’t stop sobbing as all her frustration of the last weeks came out.

  Nick recognized her need to cry. Later, he told himself. He’d tell her the truth about himself later and everything would be all right. True, she’d probably be angry, but she’d get over it, he thought.

  Nick kissed her through her tears, and one thing led to another, and soon they were gently making love on the dusty attic floor.

  “I love you,” Nick whispered into her ear. “I love you to the height and breadth of an oak tree.”

  She held on to him, clung to him, but Holly still didn’t stop crying. Somewhere deep inside her, she kept hearing, Last time. Last time. This was the last time they’d make love. With the words “marriage” and “love” having been spoken, things had changed between them. Irrevocably changed. They’d never be able to go back to where they had been.

  They fell asleep in each other’s arms, holding each other tenderly.

  The fans whirled, sending cool breezes over their bare skin, and they slept as bonelessly as toddlers.