Hidden Treasures (26 page)

It was crazy. She’d known him such a short time. He was a junk dealer who’d never been to college, while she’d earned herself two Ivy League degrees. He was a small-town boy who’d chosen the big city, and she was an urban girl who’d chosen the small town. She had no idea if he liked Dave Matthews or the films of Almodóvar.

The cab double-parked. “This is it,” the driver called through the partition.

Erica passed him the fare plus a two-dollar tip and got out of the cab, dragging her suitcase behind her. Jed might panic when he saw the bag, but he didn’t need to. She had a room reserved at the midtown Marriott. She’d intended to check in and wash up before attempting to track Jed down, but the instant Derrick had handed her his card with the address of Jed’s store written on it, she hadn’t been able to think about anything else but finding him, seeing him, forcing herself to acknowledge how crazy it was for her to be in love with him. Before she made any more life-altering decisions, she needed to find out whether she’d made the biggest mistake of her life by giving up on Rockwell and all her old dreams.

“You haven’t given up,” she whispered to herself as the cab drove away. “You’ve chosen something new.”

She turned to survey the building. It was huge, occupying a corner, the first floor consisting of showcase windows filled with household furnishings—wood pieces, upholstered pieces, lamps and accessories, some apparently vintage and others merely tacky. She’d expected his store to be smaller and more modest. Actually, she’d expected it to be something along the lines of the town dump in Rockwell, where Jed’s father worked.

This emporium was no town dump. Through the windows she saw the silhouettes of people moving around inside—customers and staff. City Resale was no one-man operation.

But one man had created it. Jed. He’d taken junk and turned it into something valuable.

Anxiety seized her. What if Jed was too busy to see
her? What if he
said
he was too busy because he didn’t want to see her?

“Stop it,” she ordered herself. “You’re strong. You can handle this.”

Reminding herself she wasn’t the sweet, gentle earth mother she’d once aspired to be, she squared her shoulders and steeled her spine. No matter how hard she’d tried, she had never come close to that ideal. Her garden was a disaster, a war between weeds and extremely militant zucchini vines. Her cooking skills remained pathetic. Her last attempt at baking bread had nearly set her house on fire. After that, a new cricket had taken up residence in her oven. Whenever she’d turned it on, the cricket had screeched. She’d viewed that as a sign.

She would never be an earth mother. All the L.L. Bean apparel in the world wouldn’t turn her into a rural native. She was what she was—a nice Jewish girl from Brookline who’d earned degrees at Harvard and Brown, who could take on a classroom filled with eight-and nine-year-olds and emerge victorious—and she might as well stop running from her identity.

Bracing herself with a deep breath, she wheeled her bag around the corner to the front double doors. Above them a sign read City Resale. She pulled the door open and went inside.

The showroom resembled a cross between a furniture store and an antique shop. Sofas, chairs, tables and armoires were arranged in semicoherent groupings around rug remnants, then piled high with afghans, vases, old leather-bound books, dinged and scratched chess sets and assorted other tchotchkes. Framed mirrors, lithograph prints and portrait paintings of dreary, forgettable ancestors hung on the walls.

Erica meandered through the showroom until she found an available clerk. A young, pretty blond clerk. Jed worked with this woman. He worked with lots of women and lived in a city filled with lots more. He’d slept with Erica only because she’d been the new girl in Rockwell, the most convenient female in that tiny town. In New York, every female was convenient.

Stop it
, she silently scolded herself. If Jed didn’t consider her convenient enough for his purposes anymore, well, she didn’t want to be convenient, anyway. She wanted…She wanted to accept the life she was designed for, she wanted to accept herself, and she wanted, if possible, Jed to accept her.

“Excuse me,” she said, claiming the cute blond clerk’s attention. “I’m looking for Jed Willetz.”

“He’s upstairs,” the clerk told her.

Erica surveyed the store in search of a stairway or elevator. “How do I get upstairs?”

“You’re not allowed up there. It’s not open to the public.”

Erica wondered whether the clerk was being deliberately difficult or was merely dense. “Then how can we get Jed downstairs?” she asked.

Merely dense, she decided when the clerk frowned for a minute, then nodded enthusiastically, as if Erica had just come up with a brilliant idea. “I’ll phone upstairs and ask him to come down,” she said.

“Thank you.” Erica followed her to a small office off the showroom, convinced that if she didn’t walk the clerk through each step of this task, it wouldn’t be successfully completed.

The blonde’s ponytail swayed saucily as she reached across the desk for the phone, punched in three num
bers and listened. “Hi, Jed? Some woman in the store wants to see you.”

Some woman
, Erica thought, pinching her lips. She’d never thought of herself as
some woman
before. Derrick had treated her like a returning hero, not just
some woman
.

The clerk listened for a minute, then hung up. “He’ll be down in a couple of minutes,” she reported.

Erica thanked her again and moved away from the office, wheeling her bag behind her. She paused to inspect a cherry sideboard, which wore a few nicks but looked warm and graceful, and a set of four ladder-back chairs with a dark walnut stain, and a Deco-style vanity table with a cloudy three-paned mirror. That people actually discarded such furniture astonished her. It was good solid stuff.

Maybe it hadn’t been good solid stuff when Jed had obtained it. Maybe it had been splintered and teetering, and he’d repaired it like a surgeon mending a broken body. Maybe these pieces looked so good only because of Jed’s talent and labor.

He would probably be friendly when he saw her, she prepped herself. He’d ask how she was doing, and he’d be surprised when she told him. Perhaps he’d ask her if she was free for dinner. Possibly he’d even invite her back to his bed. They’d had quite a spectacular time that one night.

But she cautioned herself to lower her expectations. He could be involved with someone, already claimed. He could be a whole lot different in the city than he was in his hometown. She’d come to New York to learn about herself, not because he was here.

Yeah, right.

“Hey,” his familiar voice rolled over her from behind. She spun around and saw—a surgeon.

No, he wasn’t a surgeon. He had a surgical mask dangling by its ties around his neck like a surgeon emerging from the operating room, but he was dressed in a T-shirt, jeans and a leather bib apron. Clear plastic goggles perched on the crown of his head and his shoes were covered in pale dust.

“Great T-shirt,” he said.

She smiled hesitantly.

He lifted the neck strap of his apron over his head, managing not to dislodge the goggles, and let the bib fall to his waist. His T-shirt read, Rockwell—the Town of Hidden Treasures. “You got one, too?”

“Just before I left. Glenn Rideout was so scared of my supposed shark of a lawyer, he sold it to me for ten bucks.”

“Ten? I paid eighteen for mine at the Superette!” She tried to muster the proper indignation at this gross injustice.

Jed chuckled, a deep, sexy sound. “What are you doing here?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got time.” He motioned with his head toward a hallway near the office. “Leave your bag here and come on.” The blond clerk stared at them, as if to object to Jed’s taking some woman where customers weren’t allowed to go, but she belatedly seemed to remember that Jed was the boss, and she fell back a step and let them pass.

The hallway led to a freight elevator. Jed pulled a key from the pocket of his jeans and used it to activate the elevator.

He still hadn’t touched her. He hadn’t kissed her
cheek, let alone her mouth. He hadn’t even spoken her name. Maybe he couldn’t remember it.

That was all right. She’d refresh his memory, tell an abridged version of her long story and catch a cab to the hotel. She would survive. She wouldn’t fall apart until she was locked safely inside her hotel room, where she could wail and moan and curse his soul to hell.

The elevator rumbled to a halt and Jed shoved open the hinged metal grating. Not surprisingly, the car was enormous. He could fit an entire bedroom set inside it if he had to. In his line of work, he probably had to on a regular basis.

They stepped into the car. Jed shoved the door shut and yanked a lever to make the elevator rise. His eyes narrowed on her, silvery cool and beautiful. Abruptly, he shoved the lever to stop the car. “In case you were wondering,” he said, “I’d be jumping your bones right now if I didn’t have sawdust all over me.”

Well. That had to mean something.

“Sawdust has its drawbacks,” she said, feeling slightly more confident than she had minutes ago.

He reactivated the elevator, which crept up to the second floor and bumped to a stop. Pushing open the grating, he gestured for her to precede him into a vast, well-lit workshop jammed with merchandise in various stages of disrepair. Sofas with stuffing oozing from them stood side by side with Chippendale-style highboys, butcher-block kitchen tables, three-legged chairs, tarnished silver trays and a carved wooden rocking horse in desperate need of a competent groom. Bright fluorescent lights stretched overhead, and the room smelled of raw wood, lacquer and solvent.

He led her down an aisle between piles of clutter to
an open area where a long trestle table stood on a canvas drop cloth, its finish sanded off in places and flaked and chipped in others. An electric sander rested on the table. A bench along one wall held an array of carpentry tools, paintbrushes and cans of paint, stains and varnish.

“This is where you perform magic,” Erica said.

Jed snorted. “It’s not magic. It’s a sander.” He lifted the bulky tool, then placed it back on the table and dropped his goggles next to it.

“Do you work here all alone?”

“Not usually. A guy who specializes in reupholstery is here three days a week, and some students come in after school for a couple of hours every day so they can learn some skills and make a little money. Then I’ve got experts like your professor friend, when I pick up a piece I think might be really old. They’ll come in and appraise it, and if it needs work I’ll hire a pro who can repair it without ruining its value as an antique.” He shrugged, untied his apron and draped it over a hook on the wall by his tool bench.

Erica stared at his Rockwell T-shirt because it was easier than staring at his face. He looked a little tired, a little tousled, smudged here and there with sawdust. Even unkempt, he was absurdly attractive.

Did he really want to jump her bones, or was that just his idea of friendly small talk? Whichever it was, now wasn’t the time to renew their sexual acquaintanceship. She wasn’t the person she’d been when they’d last seen each other. He might not even recognize her bones by the time she was done telling him her long story.

Which wasn’t all that long, really. “I’ve left Rock
well,” she began, because he seemed to be waiting for her to say something.

“What do you mean?”

She suddenly felt weary, but she saw no place to sit. A gazillion pieces of furniture filled this workshop, but nowhere for a woman to rest her tired feet.

Jed must have sensed her fatigue, because he dragged over a frumpy armchair that his reupholstery specialist had obviously not gotten around to refurbishing yet. She settled into it, adjusting her bottom on the lumpy cushions, and waited while he hauled over a vinyl dinette chair. He straddled it backward, rested his hands on the back and his chin on his hands, and peered into her face. He looked curious, she decided. Not excited, not eager to jump her bones but willing to hear her out.

“The box turned out to be worth a lot,” she began. “Well, not the box itself. That was worth something, of course. I donated it to Harvard. I also donated two of the coins, which will be included in the display they’re arranging for the box. It’s not as if I’m some sort of altruist—I got a tax break for making the donation.”

Jed nodded slightly. His eyes glowed brighter than the overhead fixtures.

“The rest of the coins I sold to a rare-coin dealer. They were worth almost two hundred thousand dollars.”

“Nice.” Jed brushed the edge of his jaw with his knuckles, loosening some sawdust. “It must’ve made Rideout nuts, your making all that money off the coins.”

“Well, I shared it with him.” She cut off Jed’s scowl by adding, “Actually, not with him. I shared it
with Randy. I set up a trust fund so his father can’t touch a penny of that money. It’ll all be waiting for Randy when he’s ready to go to college.”

Jed appeared mollified. “All right. Just as long as Rideout doesn’t get his greedy paws on it.”

“In a way, he does get his greedy paws on the money, because now he won’t have to pay for Randy’s education out of his own pocket. But I had the feeling that if Randy got into college, his father wouldn’t have paid for it anyway. I set things up so I’m the trustee of the fund. That way I can make sure it isn’t mishandled.” She smiled, still proud of how well she’d finessed Glenn Rideout. “Talk about making Glenn nuts! How could he sue me when I was so generous in sharing my bounty with his son?”

Jed chuckled appreciatively.

“Anyway, that’s the story of the box. Maybe you heard about it from your father.”

“As if I talk to my father on a regular basis,” Jed scoffed. “Every now and then he calls and asks me when I’m going to sell my grandfather’s place and what I’m going to do with the money I make from the sale. That’s about the sum of it.”

“I thought he was interested in the box. He certainly talked to me about it.”