As Bad As Can Be (7 page)

“Don't be so sure,” Shay disagreed. “From what I understand, they actually had it pretty tough. One son died of smallpox, another in a freak carriage accident. Their twins died when the Titanic went down, and the great flu epidemic took a couple more. Even Daddy DeVasher only lived about six months after the house was done. He stayed here once.”

“You think being poor with your family around you would be better?”

His nod was quick and certain. “Absolutely. You can always make more money. You can't replace family. It's fundamental.”

Mallory gave a derisive snort. “I think you've led a very sheltered life.”

He studied her. “Or maybe you've led a challenging one.”

“Nothing worth talking about,” she said lightly, “so don't waste your time asking.”

“You might just find it worth talking about one of these days,” he said slowly, locking eyes with her.

For a heartbeat, she couldn't look away. Then the moment passed and she shook her head briskly. “Don't bet on it, pal.” Sex and sex alone, she thought. She was the only person she needed inside her head.

They stopped to stare out over the emerald-green lawn that framed the house, and to the blue sea beyond. “How many people do you think it took to run a place like this?” Mallory asked idly.

Shay flicked a glance at her that was as blue as the waves beyond them. “I think it was forty or fifty by the time you count the outdoors and the stables. The house covers something like an acre.”

“It would have been like a little city, with its own rules and pecking order,” she mused. “Have you ever seen any of the old costume dramas, where all the servants were called by the name of whoever they served, like in
Gosford Park?
There'd have been all sorts of little intrigues and jealousies going on. Imagine, an illicit affair between the coachman and the girl who ironed the sheets.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Ironed the sheets?”

Mallory drew herself up and looked down her nose at him. “Eunice DeVasher does not sleep on unpressed sheets, Worthington. If your coachman continues to trifle with my maid and interfere with her work, I shall be forced to make mention of it. I suggest that you see to your staff, sir.”

“I am the butler, Mrs. Tibbets,” Shay returned in an equally snotty tone. “Such outdoor services are below my notice. The housekeeping staff is your duty, madam, and I suggest you see to it.”

“Don't presume to tell me my duties, sir.”

“Nor you, me.”

Mallory laughed in delight as they began walking again, past the formal gardens that led to the front door. “She'd have worn discreet skirts and pulled her hair back into this tight little bun without a single hair escaping.”

Shay grinned at her. “He'd have worn a suit without a single wrinkle or speck of dust, and his hair slicked back within an inch of its life.”

“And of course you know there would have been all that repressed sexual desire between the two of them the whole time they were sniping.” She walked through the door he held open for her.

“Power is an aphrodisiac,” Shay said as they fol
lowed the guard's direction to join the tour group at the end of the entrance hall. “Running the house for a powerful family would have been power by proxy.”

“When you're controlling fifty people, it's not proxy at all. It's real powe—good God.” Mallory stopped. They stood at the point where the main hallway opened into the central atrium of the building. Sheets of green and gray marble sheathed walls that rose sixty feet to the gold-leafed crown moldings. The ceiling soared overhead, painted with puffy clouds on which Greek gods dressed in togas reclined.

Dressed in a sweater, skirt, and sensible heels, the guide cleared her throat and began her cool, practiced pitch. “The Shoreline is a Renaissance revival building. Note the ceiling, which depicts Zeus, Apollo and Artemis.”

Mallory leaned toward Shay. “Where's Eros?” she whispered in his ear.

“On the ceiling of Mr. DeVasher's bedroom.”

Mallory snorted a laugh.

They followed the tour along the grand staircase to the upper floor, past an enormous Greek-style tapestry. Commodore DeVasher stared down at them imposingly from a portrait on the wall, his epaulets and gold buttons gleaming.

“The Commodore has complained of fingerprints on his buttons, Mrs. Tibbets. Please take care that the laundry staff shines them properly.”

“I suggest that the fault lies with the person hanging them up, Worthington,” she returned. “The buttons are perfectly polished when they leave our laundry room.”

“The Commodore's room,” the guide announced, leading them into a space Mallory calculated was
roughly twice the size of her entire apartment. DeVasher had liked surrounding himself with luxury, she thought, staring at the heavy, dark walnut furniture. The old-fashioned carved four-poster bed sat up on a dais as though DeVasher were emperor of all he surveyed. And so, in this place, he was, she supposed.

The tour guide waved the group along. “And here is the DeVashers' shared bathroom. You can see the marble tub that was the Commodore's favorite.”

Fashioned with carved columns and acanthus leaves along the outside, the translucent marble tub was about eight feet long and big enough for two. “Now that's a bathtub,” Mallory said reverently. All it needed to be perfect was champagne, the warm light of afternoon sun shining in the windows, and a pair of slippery, naked bathers. “Do you think Worthington and Mrs. Tibbets ever sneaked in while the DeVashers were away?” she whispered in Shay's ear.

Shay coughed and they followed the tour group into Mrs. DeVasher's private space. If the Commodore's room was luxurious, Mrs. DeVasher's was frankly opulent. Lace streamed down from the half tester to drape over a bed piled with fringed satin pillows. Faded tapestries in muted pastels covered the walls, silk draperies framed the windows. On the marble mantle sat a Fabergé egg.

Mallory leaned closer to Shay. “I bet the Commodore liked to hang out in the bathroom with the door open just a crack and watch Mrs. DeVasher undress.”

“You think?”

“Oh, yes, and then he'd sneak in the room like an intruder and toss her down on the bed and ravish her.”

Shay regarded her with interest. “Do you think society matrons liked to be ravished?”

Mallory sent him a look from under her lashes. “Sweet pea, every woman likes to be ravished.”

He held her eyes for just a beat, his stare full of helpless heat. Then the tour guide led them out of the bedroom and back downstairs.

“Do you want to walk out over the grounds?” Shay asked when they were finished.

“Wouldn't miss it,” she said following him.

The wide swath of lawn galloped from the back porch of the house toward the water, separated from the blue of the sea and the tumble of boulders along the shore by a waist high wall of carved marble.

“So do you think that eventually Worthington and Mrs. Tibbets broke down and gave in to their mad attraction?” Shay asked as they wandered up to the marble wall.

“People generally do,” she said, her eyes lingering on him for a beat before she turned to stare at the waves beyond.

“They would have had a lot to lose,” he observed, watching her profile.

“Eventually you hit a point where that doesn't matter anymore, don't you Shay?” Her eyes locked with his and he felt it like a punch in his gut. He didn't want to want her, he had a lot to lose over it, but he wondered how long he could hold out before he hit that point where it didn't matter to him, either.

Mallory raked her hair back and leaned against the fence to look back at the house.

“It would make you different to live this way, don't you think?” She narrowed her eyes at the palace in front of them. “Actually I expect that after a while the reality of having that much money would make
you a little barmy. Especially if all you did was lay around and get waited on hand and foot.”

“I doubt they ever thought about it.” It interested him that she did, though.

“Maybe not consciously, but I think everybody has a need to be productive.”

“It depends on how you define productive. Back then, if you threw a good party you were toasted as a hugely successful society hostess. Even if all you did was approve the menus and preside graciously over the whole thing.”

Mallory pushed her hair back out of her eyes. Shay struggled not to remember how it had felt in his hands.

“I think doing nothing would still make me feel shiftless,” she argued. “And the idea of having live-in servants… I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd be thrilled if I never had to clean house or cook again, but the idea of having people constantly in the house would make me crazy. How could you live without privacy?”

The sea breeze carried more than just a salt tang. It carried her scent. “I don't imagine the DeVashers and their guests even noticed them. They'd grown up with servants, remember.”

“How can you ignore a living, breathing person? Could you? So what if I were trotting around in a maid's outfit. I wouldn't be any less there.”

Unbidden, an image bloomed in Shay's mind of Mallory dressed as a saucy French maid, in short black dress with a little white apron. “Servants back then were taught to be invisible.”

She eyed him. “I don't think I'd be very good at that.”

“I don't think you would be, either,” he agreed.
How could she be invisible when he saw her even in his dreams? She was the sort of woman a man would lose his head over, the kind the gentleman of the house would risk everything to have.

Mallory rose on tiptoe to look over the thick wall at the footpath that wound along its base, seven or eight feet below them. “So what's that?” she asked, spying a narrow, meandering path with her eyes.

“The Cliff Walk. It winds along the coast for a mile or two. They used to promenade along it back in the day.”

“Can we go down there?”

Don't go, he lectured himself. The key was to keep in public, to keep his distance, to keep his head, so the wanting wouldn't take him over.

“Please?” she asked again, her eyes bright. “I love the ocean.”

“Okay,” he said before he could stop himself. “We're right by an entry point.”

She linked her fingers with him to pull him away from the wall. “Take me there,” she demanded.

 

M
ALLORY STOOD ON THE NARROW
trail that wound between the jagged coastal rocks on one side and the mansions on the other, listening to the rush and flow of the water. Waves hit rhythmically, tossing up spume. Shore birds cried out as they circled overhead. On her right, on the inland side, late summer wild flowers still bloomed and green lawns rolled away to impossibly large mansions. To her left, was a poetic violence of pounding surf.

Something about the ocean had always called to her. One of the few bright spots growing up had been the occasional trips to the Jersey shore. Staring at the
waves, watching their ebb and flow, she'd dreamed about freedom.

Now, years later, Mallory took a deep breath and savored the briny scent. “I can't believe I didn't know about this,” she said, threading her way along the deserted path, following the trail to where it dipped toward a pedestrian tunnel that cut through a rocky out-crop.

“I come down here a lot when I need to clear out my head and think. Is this your first time to the shore since you've been here?” Shay held back and let her go ahead of him, dragging his eyes up from the leggy litheness of her walk.

She nodded. “I've been down at the waterfront, obviously, but not to the real coast. I've been pretty busy. I needed this, though,” she said, sucking in a deep breath of ocean air. “Being by the sea always makes me feel, I don't know…recharged, I guess. Like something I didn't know was missing got refilled. Maybe I was a sea witch in a previous life or something.” Mallory laughed and glanced back over her shoulder to Shay and just for a moment something tightened painfully in him. Her eyes were witchy dark, strands of her hair dancing around her face in the breeze. The curve of her mouth could certainly bewitch a man; maybe it had already bewitched him.

He'd braced himself from the beginning to ignore what her face and body did to him. It was a low blow that the truest seduction was coming from her mind, from listening to her husky mellow voice as they walked down the isolated path.

“So how did you wind up in bartending? Why not college?”

Mallory shrugged. “I'd rather study what interests
me than what people tell me I should. Besides, who could afford it?”

“There are a lot of things in between, though.” The trail widened out so they could walk side by side. Ahead of them, the tunnel neared.

“Bartending is a good job for a person who has itchy feet. There are always plenty of jobs in every city, so it's easy to move on.” She gave him a sidelong glance. “It probably seems strange to you. You've lived here all your life, haven't you?”

Shay nodded. His life had been built on the solid absolutes of family and home. There was a sense of history, both global and personal, in every day, in every street he walked down. There was something strangely alluring about the idea of living in a place where every corner of every street was an invitation to a new adventure. The part of him that had felt increasingly stifled of late wondered what it would be like to just strike out, try something different, something unexpected. Someone unexpected.

Like Mallory.

“You're awfully quiet.”

He shook his head to banish the thought. “I was just trying to imagine what it would be like, driving into a town I didn't know from anywhere and setting up shop.”

She considered. “It's a mix. Exciting, because everything is new and you don't know what's going to happen. A little frustrating because you don't know any of the things people take for granted, like where to find the post office or drugstore or bank.” She bounced her fist lightly on the waist-high ledge of concrete that ran on the inland side of the walk. “Exhil
arating, because it's a fresh start and great things could be coming your way.”