Amanda (9 page)

“I was twelve—and I remember enough. But I spent most of my time with the horses even then, and I was away a lot showing. I didn’t know or care very much what the adults were up to, but I don’t recall anything unusual about that summer or that day. Like I said—We’ll probably never know what really happened.”

“Maybe that’s true.” Amanda managed a shrug, wondering why she didn’t quite believe Sully was as disinterested in that summer twenty years ago as he claimed. Something in his tone, maybe, or the guarded look in his expressive face. “But I can still find out
more than I knew about my family by being here. Do you begrudge me that?”

Sully smiled another humorless smile. “I don’t begrudge you anything—Amanda. So far, anyway. In fact, if you can keep the old man happy and off my back for the time he’s got left, I’ll owe you one.”

“The time he’s got left?” She felt peculiar all of a sudden. “What do you mean by that? Maybe he’s old, but he looks fine.”

“Some people look healthy right up till the end, I’m told,” Sully said, his narrowed eyes intent on her face. “Oh, come on, don’t ask me to believe you didn’t know. According to Walker, the last woman claiming to be you certainly knew all about it. We’ve been able to keep it out of the papers, but it’s common knowledge around here—and easy enough for anyone investigating the family to find out.”

“Find out what?”

“That Jesse has cancer. His doctors say He’ll be dead by Christmas.”

Amanda was glad she still had a hand on the newel post. She knew she was staring at Sully, but she didn’t really see him.

“Very good, the perfect reaction of a loving granddaughter,” Sully observed in a sardonic tone. Then, a moment later and in quite a different voice, he said, “Hey, are you all right?”

She blinked, seeing his sudden concern even as she became conscious of his large hand gripping her arm. Had she swayed on her feet? But the sudden and unexpected dizziness was passing now, and with an effort she was able to meet his eyes steadily. “Yes, thank you. I’m fine.”

Sully released her arm and stepped back, still watching her critically. “You really didn’t know, did you?”

“No.” She cleared her throat. “No, I really didn’t know.”

“Well … sorry to break it to you like that, then.” Sully was abrupt, but seemed sincere. He hesitated, then said, “Jesse doesn’t like to talk about it, but it’s pretty clear he believes the doctors—this time. He’s been fighting this thing for more than two years now, and at first he thought he’d beat it. But not anymore.”

“And the doctors say—?”

“Six months, if he’s lucky. He might make it to Christmas, but nobody’s counting on that.”

“I see.” She wanted to think about this, because it meant things were different, that time had become even more important than she’d realized, but her thoughts were confused and she couldn’t seem to make them come straight.

Sully gazed at her for a moment, then looked briefly at his watch. “it’s after five. In case nobody told you, we usually gather in the front parlor before supper.”

She had been told. And she wanted to change clothes first, to put on a dress or at least something less casual.
Armor, I wish it could he armor.

Nodding, she turned back toward the hallway that led to the main house, with Sully on her left and both dogs pacing along silently on her right. And even though she didn’t see or sense the same fury in Sully that he’d exhibited earlier today, she had a hunch he was both more dangerous and a lot more complicated than the dogs could ever be.

“What are you doing in here?”

Amanda looked quickly toward the door of Jesse’s study to find Walker McLellan observing her narrowly. Caught by surprise, she said, “I came down the
back stairs from my room and passed by … I hadn’t been in here yet.” I
sound guilty. Damn the man.

“Jesse usually keeps this room locked,” Walker told her, his lazy voice still not overly warm. He came into the big, book-lined study and joined her before a marble-faced fireplace, where a large oil painting hung above the mantel.

She was disturbingly aware of his nearness, and told herself firmly that it was only because he was less formal than she’d yet seen him, in an open-necked white shirt with the sleeves turned back casually, and dark slacks. No tie, no jacket. But the same unrevealing face and sharp green eyes, she reminded herself. The same suspicious lawyer.

“I don’t think he’d mind me being in here,” she said, trying not to sound defensive.

“No, probably not.”

Avoiding his gaze, she turned her own back to the painting. Beautifully done and amazingly lifelike, it was a much-photographed portrait of Brian Daulton, his wife, Christine—and a wide-eyed and sweet-smiled three-year-old Amanda. The little brass plate on the bottom of the frame proclaimed that it had been painted in 1969.

“I don’t look much like my mother,” Amanda said, determined to say it before he did.

The woman in the portrait, dark-haired like Amanda, was obviously much taller—though she was very slender and delicate, almost fragile. Her flawless skin was tanned gold, which made her black-lashed, pale blue eyes appear even lighter and more striking, and her faintly smiling mouth was unusually lush, explicitly erotic.

Christine Daulton was …
more
than Amanda knew herself to be. Of the three in the painting, as
lifelike as all of them were, she stood out, captured more completely than her husband or child. If the artist had not been completely captivated by her, he had certainly been fascinated.

He had painted her soul.

Spirited, vibrant, the intensity almost radiating from her, she seemed about to move or laugh aloud or beckon with a slender finger. She was a coquette; in the arch of her eyebrows there was provocative humor, and in the curve of her lips there was playful seduction.

She didn’t look like a mother. Like anybody’s mother.

Like Glory, the woman in the painting was magnificent and curiously overwhelming to the
senses
, and though she was not at all voluptuous, there was about her a physical carnality that was conspicuous, a blatant sexuality neither she nor the artist made any effort to hide.

A woman who would never be forgotten, particularly by any man who had ever known her.

“She was very beautiful then,” Walker said dispassionately. “I’m told Brian took one look at her and proposed—and he was barely twenty, still in college.”

“That couldn’t have made Jesse very happy,” Amanda ventured, deciding not to comment on whether his statement had been intended as a tacit agreement with her own. “I mean, his only son eloping with a waitress two years older and hardly … from the same background.”

Walker shrugged. “I suppose you read that in one of the newspaper or magazine articles about the family; there were plenty of them, easily available. So you must know that however mad Jesse was, all was forgiven when Brian brought Christine home. I don’t remember myself, but they say she charmed men
completely and with no apparent effort. And nobody ever claimed Jesse was immune to feminine charm. As for her background, she seemed to fit in here well enough.”

His tone was the lazy, dispassionate one that had become familiar to her, but Amanda found it abruptly irritating. Thinking, the man was always
thinking.
That cool, rational mind of his probed her every word and distrusted most of them even while he held himself aloof, observing her with detached interest, and it was really beginning to bother her.

Amanda looked at Walker just in time to intercept a glance, and realized he had looked at her diamond heart necklace—which matched the one Christine Daulton wore in the portrait.

“Yes, it’s the same one,” she said, lifting one hand to briefly touch the little heart. “Of course, I can’t prove it. After all, I could have seen this painting reproduced in some of those magazine and newspaper articles I read, and then had a matching necklace made easily enough.”

“Yes,” he agreed, undisturbed by her mockery, “you could have.”

She made herself look away from his shuttered eyes and back at the painting, this time fixing her gaze on Brian Daulton. She concentrated on him. He’d been twenty-seven when the painting was done, but looked considerably older. Dark and gray-eyed like virtually all of the Daultons, he had been inches shorter than most at barely six feet, and wiry rather than massive. But he’d had his father’s face, without doubt, a dramatic handsomeness that already, even then when he was so young, showed the first signs of dissipation.

“Did he drink?” Amanda asked suddenly.

“Brian? No more than on social occasions, I believe. If it’s all those lines on his face you’re looking at,
chalk it up to about eighty percent heredity and twenty percent a life spent outdoors in the sun. And his temper probably contributed.”

Amanda hesitated, then said, “Before I came here, I did read some things about the family.” She glanced warily at Walker to find him looking at her, and rushed on before he could pounce on this admission of deliberate study. “All the Daulton men tend to have bad tempers, don’t they? Going back hundreds of years.”

“So they say.”

“I don’t remember my father having a temper.”

“Don’t you?” Walker apparently considered and rejected an urge to remark—no doubt suspiciously— on the point of what she should and shouldn’t remember, then shrugged and added, “I don’t think his temper was too bad.”

Amanda wanted to ask him to elaborate on that a bit, but decided to let the subject drop. Instead, she looked at the little girl in the painting, with her short black hair done up in careful curls embellished with a pink ribbon and her wide gray eyes filled with innocence and that sweet smile.

As surely as if she turned her head and saw him, Amanda knew that the tall man beside her was also looking at the little girl in the painting and, as surely as if he spoke aloud, she knew what he was thinking. She wasn’t very surprised to hear herself respond to the doubts that lay heavily between them.

“People change so much from toddler to adult. But, still, you’re convinced I was never that little girl. My hair is straight, not curly like hers. My mouth isn’t bow-shaped. And look—aren’t her ears set just a fraction higher than mine? That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it, Walker?”

After a long moment, he said, “More or less.”

She looked at him then, turning so that she faced him squarely. His face was hard, and she wondered if she had imagined, earlier today, that he might feel a twinge of sympathy or compassion for her. If she hadn’t imagined it, it had certainly been a fleeting thing.

Quite deliberately, she made no attempt to assuage his disbelief. Instead, in a mild tone, she merely said, “Aren’t we supposed to meet in the front parlor before supper?”

“That’s the custom,” he said, as matter-of-fact as she had been.

But when he stepped back and gestured for her to precede him, she was virtually certain she caught a spark of anger in his eyes. It was, she decided, the first crack in his armor of imperturbability.

Now all she had to figure out was whether it would be a good thing or a bad one to annoy, needle, and otherwise provoke Walker McLellan until he felt about her instead of merely thinking about her.

“A
PARTY IS WHAT WE NEED,” JESSE SAID
decisively, after the salad and before the entree. “Reintroduce Amanda to our friends and neighbors. Maggie, Kate, you see to the arrangements. Make it a week from this Saturday night.”

“All right, Jesse,” Kate said.

“it’s getting hotter,” Maggie said practically as she helped Earlene serve the main course around the formal dining table. “Why not something casual like a cookout?”

“Japanese lanterns by the pool?” Reece suggested. “I have a show,” Sully said.

Walker was watching Amanda, who sat across from him on Jesse’s right. The idea of a party to meet the neighbors, he decided, didn’t suit her at all. Not that she was frowning or clearly upset, but there was definite
wariness in her eyes and a tinge of uneasiness in her expression.

“Jesse, maybe—” she began, but her soft voice was unintentionally drowned out when Jesse snapped at his younger grandson.

“there’s no reason why you have to go to that show—or any other, for that matter. It isn’t like you’re riding.”

Sully’s already militant expression darkened even more, and he shot a flinty look at his grandfather. “I trained those horses and I’ll damned well be there when they’re shown. It’s a three-day event, for God’s sake—and two of my riders have never been over the course.”

“So? The others have. And stop making noises like it’s an Olympic trial. It’s sponsored by a
barbecue
house.” Jesse laughed derisively. “The prize money stinks, and—”

“And it’s experience for the horses and riders,” Sully reminded him harshly. “I have to be there.”

“No, you don’t. You have to be here. Understand?” Jesse waited a moment, then repeated very deliberately, “Understand, Sully?”

A dull flush crept up Sully’s face and his gray eyes were stormy. But he gave in. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Yeah, I understand.”

Nobody at the table spoke until Maggie slid into her place after the serving was done and remarked, “With a dozen new young horses to start training this summer, Sully, I’m surprised you even want to leave.”