Blue Willow (46 page)

She reached a widening apron of pavement that curled off in a spur to the estate’s gate. The gatehouse, once an empty shell with the leaded-glass windows broken out and kudzu covering the walls, had been fully restored. Dark blue shutters ornamented the new windows. The stonework had been cleaned of graffiti. The kudzu was gone.
The majestic old iron gate, with its matching patterns of willows, had been repaired and painted. It stood open.

A stocky gray-haired man in a security-guard uniform exited the cottage’s side door quickly and planted himself in front of the open gate, watching as if he expected her to roar through like a lunatic, which, she realized, she’d given him some reason to expect. He even rested one hand on the heavy pistol holster on his belt.

Lily lifted a hand in greeting, but drove past. She wasn’t going to
ask
to be announced, like some goddamned stranger.

The old hardwood forest closed around her. She crossed MacKenzie Creek at the stone bridge, which had been cleaned and freshly mortared, the banks around it cleared and planted with ivy.

When she reached her mailbox and driveway, she pulled onto the secluded road and parked, then got out and started through the woods. She could find her way to the estate’s main road blindfolded.

The land had not emerged yet from decades of neglect. The walk took her along an eerie pathway of fallen trees and tangled undergrowth. A mile inward the one-lane road split and formed a circle. She looked at the majestic, gnarled willow at the center of the circle, standing alone in what had once been a small park. Lily averted her gaze from it, remembering how she’d considered it her own, how she’d claimed it that day as a child, the pockets of her overalls bulging with soft brown apples, and how Artemas had stepped underneath, an unsuspecting victim who had terrified and then enchanted her.

The undergrowth and the ground around the thick, sinewy roots had been cleared. The commemorative plaque that had been there when she was a child was gone.

She walked faster. The land rolled and dropped, and the road followed its contours, taking her deeper into the Colebrook world with every second. Newly graveled service roads curved out of the woods to meet the main drive. She knew them by heart. They led to the lake, the guest houses, and across the river to the estate’s dairy barns,
fields, and stables. A small fiefdom had existed here, self-absorbed and self-sufficient.

Her palms were clammy and her chest tight with emotion. The strain of the past months had taken its toll. She knew that, and struggled to keep calm.

The road rose and curved up the side of the big ridge that ran through the heart of the estate. She came to a pair of granite boulders fifty feet tall guarding either side of the road, with willows carved into their rugged contours. The craftsmanship was so expert that the carvings seemed natural. Decades of wind and weather had softened them. They might have been drawn by rivulets of rain rather than human hands.

A hundred yards beyond them the road uncurled suddenly at the top of the ridge, emerging from the woodlands with an abruptness that made her heart rise in her throat. Sunlight burst onto raw red earth—the old meadows, fanning out from either side of the road. They had grown up in pine forest when she was a child, but were now cleared again, and waiting to be replanted.

She looked into the distance, and her breath caught. Rising from the far side of the ridge, the estate house lifted steep, gabled roofs of weathered blue slate against a dark blue sky with curls of pink clouds above it, shot through with beams from the descending sun. Long shadows were creeping over the land.

Keeping to the road, she strode past the cleared foundations where collapsed greenhouses had been, cracked foundations, and piles of construction debris. The house was surrounded by scaffolds. Any workers who had been there were gone for the day. Toward the south end, the curving glass roof of the palm court, once dotted with gaping holes, was covered in black plastic.

Utility poles had been jabbed into the lawn. Heavy electrical cables stretched from them to open windows on the main floor. With all the lines and equipment around it, the mansion resembled a surgery patient receiving intensive care.

She halted in the wide cobbled courtyard in front of
the main entrance and considered the enormous front doors. Their stately glass and wood, covered in intricate patterns of black wrought iron, belied the mansion’s disarray. Was there a butler still to command those doors? She ran up the steps and pressed a buzzer set in the stone wall on one side. If it worked, the chimes were too muffled to hear. Tapping a heavy brass knocker, she felt insignificant and angry.

The doors were locked. She beat on them with both fists and yelled for Artemas to let her in. She wanted to scream that he couldn’t buy back the past.

Deep inside the house came the quick, soft thud of feet on stone. The doors cracked, shuddered. One swung inward abruptly. Artemas stood with his feet braced apart, centered with overwhelming physical command before the vast height of a great, empty entrance hall. He was dressed in soft brown trousers and a loose shirt, with the sleeves rolled up. His large, intense eyes were astonished and somber, raking her with intentions that seemed anxious, welcoming—or victorious. As he judged the look on her face, he arched a brow and asked, “Jehovah’s Witnesses? Avon calling? Taking donations for the Daughters of Nazi Stormtroopers?”

His careless dismissal broke the dam. Lily flung herself at him, grasping the front of his open-collared shirt, jerking at it, slamming into his chest so forcefully that he staggered back several steps as he grabbed her by the shoulders.

“You bought that damned teapot back,” she yelled. “You couldn’t keep from interfering in one of the few free choices I had left, could you?”

“You had no right to sell it,” he answered, his voice brutal. “That silly teapot represents something important to both of us, something I won’t allow you to forget.”

“You won’t
allow
me?” She kicked him in one knee, and his leg buckled. They went down in a heap on the cold stone floor.

He cursed and forced her hands into balls inside the hard grip of his own, then wrestled her furiously contorting body as she drew up her knees and jabbed the heels
of her thick leather shoes into his thighs. His sharply inhaled breaths conveyed pain and shock, and with a sudden growl of fury, he rolled away and wound one hand into her tangled hair. He got to his knees and held her at arm’s length, while she tore at his hand and tried to writhe upright. He pinned her head to the floor. She couldn’t see him. His ragged breaths came between muttered obscenities and warnings that finally trailed off into “Crazy … absolutely certifiable … I’ve never … God!”

She made a keening sound and dug what was left of her work-torn fingernails into his wrist. “If I have to be a bitch to make you leave me alone, I can do it!”

“Thank God for one thing,” he said with another deep breath. “You’re fighting like the woman I remember.”

She wrung her head and struggled against the fistful of hair, the side of her face mashed painfully into the rough stone floor. “You want everything to be the way you remember it! But that means pretending Richard never existed!”

“I wish to God he never had. My sister would be alive, and there’d be no guilt and duty to keep you and me away from each other.” He let go of her. She bolted upright and crouched, heaving, her hands clenched on her knees. They felt raw against the hard floor, even through her jeans, and her head ached at the crown. Through a haze of rage and frustration she saw Artemas kneeling in front of her with undaunted anger on his face.

Lily shook her head fiercely. “Julia is dead because she bullied and threatened people unmercifully.” She curled a hand to her chest. Misery hunching her over, she cried, “You think you can coax me into forgetting that. You’ll always protect your family, even if it hurts me!”

He caught her by the shoulders and made a bitter sound deep in his throat. “If I felt that way, I would have turned my back on you from the moment I knew Richard was incriminated. Every time I try to help you, I risk losing my family’s respect. But that doesn’t stop me from trying. Dammit, Lily, you have to believe that.”

She pushed herself to her feet. “When I was nineteen,
I wanted to believe you loved me more than anyone or anything else in your life. I learned a hard lesson then. I’ve never forgotten it.”

She whirled around and started out the door, her legs shaking. Behind her was the sound of swift movement, then his footsteps on the stone. “We need to have one helluva long talk about my motives and your attitude,” he said softly. A hand latched onto the back of her shirt.

Lily yelled and twisted, but by then he’d already enveloped her with his other arm. He pinned her arms to her waist and lifted her off the floor. Her back and hips were crushed against his torso. “Come and see the house,” he said, his voice tight with exertion. “You always wanted to see it.”

He half carried, half dragged her through the dim, cavernous hall. It opened on one side to a court with a small fountain in the center, on the other to a grand marble staircase, and flowed through a wide arch into a huge main-floor gallery—stark, empty except for a baby-grand piano near rows of towering glass Palladian-style doors that opened onto the loggia. The walls were stripped of paper, the enormous wooden floor unstained. But the bare, stately house was magnificent, and the gallery simmered with late-afternoon light that poured through the doors.

Lily’s dazed attention focused on the piano. The blue-and-white teapot sat there. She struggled until they were both panting. He wound a hand into her hair and held her still. She felt his heart hammering against her back. “I’ve dreamed of taking you on a more genteel tour, but this is the best we can do.” He pushed her against the piano. “Pick it up,” he ordered, shoving her toward the teapot.

“I’m beginning to feel I should wear it around my neck on a chain. Like a porcelain albatross.”

He flattened her against the keyboard. A discordant crunch of sound echoed through the room. “Pick up the damned teapot with one of your claws,” he repeated. “Or by God we’ll stand here until the F-sharp goes flat.”

He had her pinned just above the elbows. Lily maneuuvered one hand up and finally managed to grasp the
delicate little vessel by the handle. Bending his head beside hers, he said grimly, “We’re going to sit on the loggia with our albatross and enjoy the sunset.”

His arm still around her, they stumbled out a pair of the open doors to the windswept loggia into the long, soft rays of the sun, which hung just above the distant mountains. “Sit,” he ordered, when they reached the loggia’s marble steps. When she stood rigidly, her feet braced apart, he shoved one of her legs out from under her with his foot. They both sat down hard on the wide steps, her sliding down between his legs to the step just beneath his. She cradled the teapot in her lap protectively.

His arm mashed her breasts as she tried to get up, then released her. His hand sank into her hair again. She twisted between his thighs and stared up at him.

They traded a violent, searching, bewildered look. His face was flushed; the tiny mole beneath his right eye stood out on the tight skin. His black hair hung over his forehead in disarray, and a muscle popped in his cheek. He lowered his hand from her hair. She didn’t move.

“Truce,” he said sharply. “Please.”

She searched his eyes and tried to assess the heated, vital roar of blood through her body Afraid of that feeling, she turned and faced forward. The air was cool and bracing on her flushed skin. Below the loggia’s stone steps sat the trio of old fountains. The ground around them had been chewed by workers’ feet, and all that remained of the pine forest was a patch along one side of the corridor, a dark and secluded spot draped in wisteria.

“How do you like it?” he asked, his tone grim. “It needs your attention.”

“I don’t belong here—not as someone you hire to rebuild the gardens, and not as a guest.” Her hands curled tightly around the old teapot. She exhaled wearily, got to her feet, and hugging it against her stomach, went down the stairs, toward the fountains. He followed.

The warm, prickling sensation in her muscles whispered that she was alive and vital, not the helpless shadow she’d felt like for so long. It was seductive and frightening
to realize he was the source of that energy. She walked to the balustrade at the end of the fountains’ terrace.

“Does restoring it mean so much to you anymore?” she asked tersely. “How can it be worth the price you’ve paid to save it?”

“It means even more to me now than before. Maybe it’s become a symbol of my family’s survival.” He paused. “And yours. Because even after all that’s happened, you’re here.”

“This place is not a sanctuary for either of us anymore.”

“I’ll never accept that, Lily.” He gripped her shoulder and forced her attention back to him. He swept a hand toward the section of garden that hadn’t been cleared yet, where the scrub pines had been enveloped by wisteria. The fat vines were full of leaves, and they cascaded down in shady umbrellas over the matted grass. Someone had cut a narrow space under them. It was shadowy and private.

“There was a wooden arbor there when I was a boy. I used to hide inside the wisteria when vacation ended and I had to return to New York. Of course, my grandmother or her servants knew exactly where to find me, but I never stopped hoping that I’d become invisible.” He added gruffly, “You see, if I’d been invisible, I could have stayed here forever and done exactly as I pleased.”

“You’re still not invisible. You have responsibilities to everyone who depends on you, everyone who trusts you to do what’s best for your family and your businesses.”

He scowled. “There has to be room for what’s best for me. And for you. That could start right now—today—if we agree to stop tearing each other apart over the past.”

“All I want from you is respect for what I had with Richard, for the son I loved dearly, and for what I believe about Richard’s integrity. Until I have that, there’s nothing else.”