The Chesapeake Diaries Series 7-Book Bundle: Coming HOme, Home Again, Almost Home, Hometown Girl, Home for the Summer, The Long Way Home, At the River's Edge (160 page)

Grace looked down at her right hand and opened it. Shiny gold shards were embedded in her palm.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she muttered. “Would you look at that? I wonder how I managed to do that …”

“Miz Grace, your hand is bleeding,” Clay told her. “I’ll get some towels from the kitchen.”

“There are paper towels in the restroom right through that door.” Grace pointed to a door directly across the hall. “If you wouldn’t mind …”

“Not a bit.” Clay went into the bathroom, grabbed some paper towels, and held a few under cold running water in the sink. He returned to the library and asked, “Do you think you got all of the glass out?”

Grace nodded. “I’m pretty sure. Here, give me those.” She reached for the wet paper towels and cleaned her palm of the blood that had puddled there. “I don’t know what I was thinking to have broken that ball like that.”

Grace wrapped one of the paper towels around her hand and cleared her throat. “Well, then, I suppose I should probably get a bandage of some sort, shouldn’t I?”

“Would you like me to—”

“No, no. I’m fine, dear. I’m sure there’s a first-aid kit in Daniel’s office …” Her voice trailed away as she passed through the door and into the hall beyond.

Clay gathered up the discarded shards of broken glass that had fallen onto the floor, wondering what had spooked Grace back then that had been so powerful that it still frightened her just to think of it, all these years later.

Lucy held the phone between her shoulder and her ear. It kept slipping, and every time it did, she dropped the place cards she was trying to artfully drape over the miniature orchids in their little pots. Tomorrow’s bride had been very specific: her calligraphied seating cards had to be hung by thin silver cords from the stems of tiny white orchids in little terra-cotta pots spray-painted silver. The paint job had gone to Ava, but since Bonnie had taken their assistant with her for tonight’s event, the job of making the cards work perfectly fell to Lucy.

“So it sounds like the inn is decked out to the teeth,” Lucy replied to her mother’s lengthy description of what had gone where in preparation for the Christmas Tour.

“And then some. Oh, I do wish you could see it, Lucy. The old place has never looked so elegant.” Grace paused before adding, “Well, excluding the MacGregor-Wyler weddings.”

“It all sounds grand, Mom. Make sure Danny takes lots of pictures. I’m glad you had so many volunteers to work with you.”

“Yes, but we could have used your touch. You always know how to make things look special.”

“Hey, I learned everything I know from you.”

“That’s very sweet of you, dear, and I appreciate the thought, but I’ve never had your artistic touch.”

“Nonsense. I remember how you always came up with something new, every year, for the mantels and the tables. How you used whatever was still green in the garden and how, when there wasn’t anything left that was green, you sprayed whatever you could find—twigs and pinecones and ivy and acorns—silver or gold and put them in glass bowls with those vintage Christmas decorations.”

Hmm
, Lucy thought.
Vintage Christmas decorations …

“Well, I’ll send you some pictures so you can see how pretty everything is,” Grace told her.

“I can’t wait. Tell Danny to email them to me.” Lucy opened a storage closet and began to look for the box of old decorations she’d bought at an estate sale a few years ago. If there were enough of them, they’d add just the right touch to the two-foot Christmas trees her Christmas Eve bride had wanted for centerpieces. Lucy had plenty of silver ornaments on hand, but a few of the very delicate glass balls could lend a special touch. She found the box on one of the top shelves and had a dickens of a time getting it down without dropping the phone or her train of thought.

“I’ll have him send the pictures from the Enright mansion, too. I hear it’s magnificent. Barbara from the bookstore stopped in there for a peek before she came here. She said Brooke and Jesse are doing an amazing
job. I just may have to sneak over there tomorrow and take some pictures for the
Gazette
.” Grace yawned, then excused herself for having done so.

“You sound tired, Mom.”

“It was a long day,” Grace admitted. “But it wasn’t too bad. I had a lot of help from the Historical Society and, of course, some friends stopped by to lend a hand. Oh, and Clay came by and he—”

“Clay?” Lucy made it to the conference room table with the box, which she tried not to drop. “Clay helped you with the Christmas decorations?”

“Yes, he stopped by to see if I needed a hand, and it was perfect timing on his part. I have to admit, I was starting to fade, but he took over in the library so that I could grab a quick cup of tea and put my feet up for a few minutes.”

“Huh.” Lucy opened the box and started to unwrap a few of the ornaments.

“He brought in the tree for the library and put it up,” Grace continued, “hung the lights and the ornaments on it. Hung the wreath over the fireplace, cut some greens for the centerpiece on that old library table. Wasn’t that nice of him?”

“Huh,” Lucy said, then realized it was her second “huh” in less than thirty seconds. She knew she could do better. “Well, yes, that was very nice.”

“Very nice indeed. He’s such a nice boy.”

“Clay’s not a boy anymore, Mom.”

“He’ll always be a boy to me, dear. Just like you’ll always be a girl in my eyes.”

“Mom …” Lucy sighed and hoped her mother wasn’t working herself up into trying to sell her on Clay again. Lucy got it. Her mother wanted her to
give up her business, move back to St. Dennis, marry someone local—Clay would do nicely—and have babies.

“Oh, I’m going to have to run,” Grace said. “We have guests who want to check in and Andrea is not at the desk. Good luck with tomorrow’s wedding, dear. I’m sure it will be a smash.”

“Thanks, Mom. You, too. I know the inn will be …” Lucy heard her phone disconnect but finished her thought aloud anyway. “… the star of the show tomorrow.”

She slid her phone back into her pocket, trying to process the fact that Clay had spent the afternoon helping her mother decorate the inn. The concept raised a number of reactions. On the one hand, it really
was
nice of him to pitch in and help her mother. Grace might not want to admit it, but she wasn’t as young as she used to be, and between the newspaper that she ran almost single-handedly, and whatever she got involved in at the inn—not to mention all of her community projects—she could very easily run herself into the ground. So for Clay to just stop in and offer to help, well, Lucy had to admire him for that. On the other hand, the fact that anyone else in town had to give of their time to help get the inn ready for the holidays only reinforced the feeling Lucy got every once in a while—like now—that she—not Clay, not family friends or members of the Historical Society—should be the one taking on those tasks for her aging mother.

And how, Lucy wondered, would Grace react if she knew her daughter thought of her as “aging”?

Putting aside her guilt and all thoughts of being an
unworthy daughter, Lucy focused on counting the old ornaments in the box only to find there weren’t enough. As nice a touch as the antiques would have been, she’d have to be content with the ones she’d purchased for the occasion. Unless, of course, she could find others. Making a mental note to check a few online sites, she started to rewrap them, then paused.

She really should thank Clay for helping her mother.

Call, or email? She pondered the choices. A phone call is more personal, would require a different level of engagement than email. If she called him, she’d have to say something other than thank you. What else did she really want to say to him? Knowing Clay, he’d want to talk. He’d ask her how things were going, and then she’d have to be polite and ask him how things were going for him, and before she knew it, they’d be engaged in conversation.

Better to just reply to his email. No chitchat necessary. No polite inquiries. Just a short and sweet “thank you.”

She went into her office, opened her laptop, and began to type. But once she’d typed “thank you,” she realized it wasn’t enough. It was too cool, too impersonal. The words looked too lonely on the screen. She deleted what she’d written and tried again.

There, she thought. That should be just fine. She reread it, reconsidered, and added, Hope you have a wonderful holiday.

She reread it again, then grumbled, “For crying out loud, you’re thirty-five years old. Just send the damn thing and be done with it.”

She hit send, vowed to not second-guess herself again, and was on her way back to the conference room when she heard the
ping
that announced incoming email. She stopped, then went back into her office and turned the laptop around to face her.

My, that was fast.

Lucy sat on the end of the desk and reread his note. In her mind’s eye, she saw Clay in the library, the room where they had spent so many hours together, the room that had, years later, become her safe place. She thought of the bookshelves that all but reached the ceiling, that held the books in which, as a troubled teenager, she had sought refuge, some books brought there by her great-great-great-grandmother Cordelia when she married the first Daniel Sinclair, the one who’d built the original section of the inn. There were the books Cordelia had brought with her from her native England, volumes of Shakespeare and Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, their leather bindings dry and fragile but always handled with great care. Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift sat beside Longfellow and Hawthorne, and on lower shelves, Hemingway and Faulkner. The Sinclairs had always been lovers of literature, and as a young girl, Lucy had been the beneficiary. She’d loved that room for as long as she could remember, and she recalled that
Clay had loved it, too. Enough, apparently, to have spent a Saturday afternoon helping her mother dress it up for Christmas. Hanging wreaths. Cutting greens. Stringing lights on the tree. She could almost see his tall lanky self dragging in the tree, could almost hear his deep voice humming the Christmas carols she knew would have been playing. Something about the scene brought a lump to her throat.

It’s just nostalgia
, she told herself.
That’s all
.

She sat at her desk, and pulled the laptop closer. Clay’s email was still open on the screen. Lucy hit reply, typed, “It’s a date,” then hit send before she could change her mind.

She closed her laptop and returned to the conference room and the preparations for the wedding that would keep her up for most of the night.

On the second of January, Lucy smacked her alarm clock when it had the audacity to ring at six
A.M
. She’d worked nonstop for the past month, and this morning, damn it, she was sleeping in until at least eight. She rolled over and kept her eyes closed, but the damage had been done. Once awake, she stayed awake, so after twenty minutes of trying unsuccessfully to fall back to sleep, she got up and headed for the shower. Another twenty minutes and she was in the kitchen, towel wrapped around her wet hair, hunting for the coffee beans she knew she’d bought the last time she’d gone food shopping. When that had been, she wasn’t certain, but she did know she’d bought the coffee. When her search proved fruitless, she gave up and put a kettle of water on the stove to
boil for tea. While the water heated, she checked email on her phone.

Most fabulous wedding EVER
, wrote the mother of the New Year’s Eve bride.
Total perfection! Your reputation is well earned!

“Not to mention
hard
earned, after having to deal with you and your nut-bar daughter—not to mention your two sisters and their idiot daughters—for the past eight months,” Lucy muttered.

Gorgeous right down to the last tiny detail
, enthused her Christmas Eve bride.
I’ll cherish the memory of every moment forever!

“Except, perhaps, for the moment your maid of honor found her fiancé on the coat-closet floor with one of the waitstaff.”

The teakettle began to whistle. She poured water into a mug and dropped in a tea bag. When her phone rang, she glanced at the number, then answered the call.

“What are you doing up so early?” she asked.

“Probably the same thing you’re doing,” Bonnie replied. “Old habits die hard.”

“I was thinking of coming in late today,” Lucy told her.

“I was thinking of closing the office completely. What do you think?”

“I think it’s the best idea you’ve had in a very long time. I’m exhausted,” Lucy admitted.

“Me, too, and I didn’t even have to work yesterday. How’d the Palmer wedding go, by the way?”

“Without a hitch, for the most part. But the band the groom insisted on using, the one we weren’t familiar with?” Craving caffeine, Lucy blew on the tea, hoping to cool it. “They lived up to my worst fears.”

“That bad, eh?”

“Just dreadful. I hope we don’t get blamed for them.”

“Of course we will. Live and learn.”

“I learned that lesson a long time ago, but neither the bride nor the groom wanted to hear it. Anyway, it’s done, and we don’t have another gig until Saturday.”

“Hallelujah.” Bonnie sighed. “By the way, have you heard from Mr. Gazillionaire?”

“Robert Magellan?” Lucy took her mug into the living room and eased herself into a chair. “He wants to meet with me next week.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him whatever was most convenient for him was convenient for me,” Lucy replied. “Which turned out to be Thursday.”

“Fabulous. Coming on the heels of Dallas MacGregor’s wedding, this is huge. We’ve enjoyed a great reputation for years, Luce, but these two weddings are the icing. One of the first things I want to do is revise our fees for 2012.”

“One of the first things I want to do is hire a few more people. We just can’t keep trying to do everything ourselves, Bon. Neither of us will make it to forty if we don’t slow down.”