Sailing to Capri (6 page)

From his mentor Montana had also learned the art of living each day as it came. Here in the quiet comfort of Sneadley Hall, where tradition still ruled, he realized he had almost lost that art. Mostly, now, he worked. There was no space and no time in his life for a dog like Rats, or for a real home, though
that was not something he’d ever wanted. His nomadic ways were too deeply ingrained.

He walked to the window and held back the curtain, staring out at the snowy landscape. He hadn’t expected a storm so late in April and nor apparently had the weather forecasters. You’d have thought with all their Doppler radars and global weather patterns they’d have managed to predict this one. He should have been back in London by now; he had a date waiting. Taking out his cell phone, he dialed her number.

“Sorry, babe,” he said when she answered, “I’m stuck up north in a snowstorm.” He listened to her grumble for a bit, apologized again, said it was unfortunate but there was nothing he could do about it. She bitched some more, and, impatient now, he said abruptly, “Honey, that’s showbiz. I’ll call you later.” She was cute, sexy and way too demanding. He didn’t need a demanding woman in his life. In fact he didn’t need any woman in his life. He was quite happy the way he was. Owned by no one.

The Red Room was beginning to get to him. Red was not his favorite color. Taking a large manila envelope from his case, he left the red silk behind and walked back downstairs. Rats was still hunched in front of the hall fire. The dog rolled an eye at him, snuffled wearily then glanced away. “Poor old boy,” Montana said gently.

He put the envelope on the hall table then picked up the long iron poker, shifted the logs around a bit and stood with his back to the fire, hands thrust into the pockets of his jeans, thinking about the reason he was here. With his death, Hard
wick had presented him with a mystery, one Montana was determined to resolve. Plus he’d been entrusted with a mission he would take care of tonight. It was part of his job and the reason he had been at the funeral and not back at his London apartment with the cute girl who drove him crazy. Analyzing things, he wondered if he wasn’t better off after all, in the Yorkshire snowstorm, facing the emotional storm that he knew was about to get even worse.

Of all Bob’s homes, Sneadley was my favorite, though I had not yet seen his villa in Capri. Somehow we had never gotten around to that. Bob said he was too busy to take a true vacation, though that was the reason he bought the Villa Belkiss in the first place. I sat on my bed and pulled off my damp socks, looking around at the familiar room that soon would no longer be mine.

Sneadley was the house Bob had brought me to the day after he offered me a job. After the dingy bed-sitter in Bayswater, this room looked like paradise, and when he told me I could decorate it any way I wanted, I drove into the nearest small town where I bought cans of paint and brushes, then came back and painted the place myself.

“You’re a competent lass,” Bob had said, standing in the doorway watching me perched on a ladder running a roller over the ceiling. “I could have had the lads in to do it, y’know, you’d no need to go to all this trouble.”

“Trouble?” I cried, elated. “This is the best thing that’s happened to me in years. I’m loving it. Besides, I used to do it when I was married. I decorated our home myself, every room.”

“And what was your house like?” He expressed curiosity about my past life for the first time.

“Suburban. Boring. Lonely. I’d hoped for children but it didn’t happen.”

“Probably because you weren’t getting enough,” he said drily, making me laugh. And anyway, he was right.

I sponge-painted the walls of that beautiful room a pale terra-cotta, until it looked the way I imagined an old Tuscan villa might, sort of faded by the years and the weather. Maybe sponge painting is now a designer cliché, a bit passé, but every time I step into that room, it welcomes me. I simply love it.

The frames of the three tall casement windows are set deep inside paneled embrasures, with interior shutters that actually shut. I painted them a dull white and had curtains made in a heavy taffeta striped in bronze and muted gold, then put in a creamy soft carpet. The furniture was thirties, pale burled walnut. There was a sleigh bed with a plump cream silk quilt and a dressing table with little shaded silver sconces on either side of an ornate Venetian mirror. By the window was a chaise lounge in pale chenille, piled with velvety pillows, where I liked to sit and read on summer evenings with the scent of new mown grass wafting in and the faint bleats of the sheep coming from the hills.

I put on a Diana Krall CD, went into the bathroom, went to the tub, turned on the faucets, threw in some jasmine bath oil and lit a couple of candles. Thankfully, I stripped off my funeral
clothes. I left them where they lay and stepped into the bath’s soothing warmth, closing my eyes, soaking away the memory of the awful day, of the bitter cold and of my despair.

The sound of Krall’s soft voice singing old standards drifted toward me. What lay in store for me now, I wondered, now there was no Bob Hardwick to save me? There were a lot of decisions to be made. Would I stay here in England? Go back to Chicago? Maybe try my luck in L.A. the way everybody else seemed to? My sister Lavender was married with three kids and lived in San Francisco. She was older by seven years, and the age gap was too big for us ever to be really close. My other sister, Vi, also had a busy life, and though we all cared about each other, I knew it wasn’t fair to my sisters to impose myself suddenly on them. And that, as no doubt Bob would have said, left me free to do whatever I wanted.

“Always look on the positive side,” I could hear him saying now. “You’re not at a dead end, you’re simply at a crossroads. It’s up to you to choose your route.”

I needed a hug. I picked up my cell phone and dialed the Chicago number of my best friend, Bordelaise Maguire. I know Bordelaise is an odd name but her pregnant mother happened to be taking a French cooking course when she unexpectedly went into labor.
Bordelaise
was the first word she’d uttered after the baby was born. Which is how my friend came to be named after a French sauce.

Of course, I had called to weep long distance on her shoulder when Bob died and of course she’d said she would get a flight and be with me the next day, but I wouldn’t allow it. I told myself this time I had to stand on my own two feet, I had
to take care of things the way Bob would have expected me to. He had helped me become this new strong woman and this was my time to prove it. Foolish, I know it now, when I could have benefited from the company of my dearest friend, but when we’re under stress we do foolish things.

Bordelaise had e-mailed me every day since and I told her that I was okay and that I’d soon be leaving Sneadley Hall for good and perhaps I’d be coming back to Chicago after all.

Now Bordelaise answered on the first ring, and without even asking who it was, as though she’d been expecting me to call, she said, “You okay?”

“Sort of.”

“The funeral’s over then.”

“It’s over,” I agreed mournfully.

“So what you do now is go to bed with a large glass of hot whiskey and lemon. Just snuggle under those blankets and get some sleep. I’ll bet you haven’t done that in a while.”

Sleep belonged to the nights before Bob died. “You sound like my mom,” I said.

“Somebody’s got to look after you, even if it is long distance.”

“I’m okay, really I am. I’m taking a long hot bath. There’s a storm here, we’re snowed in.”

“And here too,” she said. “Are you really okay, though?” She sounded doubtful and I assured her I was all right and said I was going downstairs to have dinner with a friend of Bob’s.

“The roads are closed and he’s stuck here for the night,” I explained. “So you needn’t worry, I’m not alone. I just wanted a hug from you, that’s all.”

“You’ve got it, girl,” Bordelaise said softly as we rang off with promises to call tomorrow.

Bordelaise and I had known each other since grade school. Her mom and dad owned the restaurant where my mom worked, and we’d both done teenage stints there as mini-waitresses, washers-up, table clearers, and gossipmongers, speculating about which of the customers we fancied and who was dating whom and which wife was cheating on which husband.

Bordelaise was a bright-eyed pixie of a girl, petite with rough blond hair hanging over her dazzling blue eyes in a too-long shaggy fringe that drove her mother crazy. She swore her daughter couldn’t see through it. Bordelaise attracted men like bees to the proverbial honeypot; all she had to do was run her hands through that blond hair and give them that flirty upward glance and her impish smile and they were goners. She had a track record to prove it. Two husbands down and one about to go. Not that that fazed her; unlike me she was always game for the next adventure.

The bathwater was already cooling. I climbed out and wrapped myself in the luxury of a big soft warm towel, and I stood looking at my reflection in the mirrored walls.

So here I am, I thought, staring at myself, a tall cool drink of water on the outside and still trembling on the inside. I’ve never been a beauty, I was just a freckled, lanky kid who grew up into a freckled lanky woman. My boobs are too small for the current bosomy fashion; my long dead-straight dark red hair has a mind of its own which is why I usually wear it pinned up at the sides or pulled back out of my eyes, which are the color of green olives. My legs are my best feature, long and slender
and I’ve progressed from the S and M stilettos to smarter, more flattering and horribly expensive shoes that are my greatest indulgence. I have a good clear skin under its dusting of freckles, a straight nose and full lips, and I am one of the few women I know who can wear red lipstick—namely Armani No. 9. Actually, I’m not too bad for a woman who doesn’t even try, always hiding my vulnerability behind my black suits.

In fact, I’m a successful fraud. The superefficient, clever P.A., fair but harsh when I need to be; always cool, always in charge. Only Bob knew the true me; he’d seen through me right from the beginning. And Rats knows who I am too; he jumps on my bed at night, ignoring my bed socks (I always have cold feet, which Bob said was “significant”) and my cozy but dowdy nightie. The dog snuggles up to me, a warm living being to whom I pour out my heart just as though he understands. And who’s to say he does not? Anyhow,
I
believe he does, and only Rats and Bob—and my friend, Bordelaise, about whom more later—know the real me.

Now, naked in my pretty bathroom, I felt the same way I had when the For Sale sign had gone up on my house that was no longer mine. Out in the cold. Alone again.

I dressed quickly in a black sweater and loose black velvet pants; then, sitting at my pretty dressing table, I powdered my nose, put on some lipstick and brushed my hair. I dabbed on Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue—a gift from Bob and a far more exotic scent than I would ever have chosen myself—pushed my bare feet into a pair of flat black ballerina shoes, and walked downstairs to have dinner with Harry Montana.

Montana was standing before the hall fireplace, hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans. He looked up when he heard my footsteps, holding my eyes with his as I walked toward him.

He gave me a smile. “Less of the Siberian refugee, more the lady of the house,” he said.

“Think it’s an improvement?” Was I
flirting
with him? How could I? At a time like this.

“Definitely.”

“Anyhow, as you know, I’m not the lady of the house. I’m merely an employee.”

“More than that. You were a friend.”

I smiled. “That’s better than ‘kind of a friend.’”

“I didn’t know Bob well enough to be more than an employee,” he explained. “But—simply because Bob was the kind
of man he was—I had the privilege of becoming a ‘kind of a friend.’”

Of course I wanted to know why Bob had employed him in the first place, but I didn’t ask. Discretion was part of my job. Instead I offered Montana a drink. The dog followed me as I led the way into the drawing room where an array of bottles and glasses arranged on large silver trays on the massive seventeenth-century oak sideboard constituted the bar. I glanced inquiringly over my shoulder at him.