Charming Grace (42 page)

“You got business here?” Roarke asked.

The stranger ignored Roarke and kept his laser-look on me. “You must be Boone Noleene.”

Cary Grant had an up-coast Rhett Butler accent. I got a sinking feeling. I sat up straighter, big and ball-bearing and bare-chested, with a blood-speckled bandage on my forehead and pieces of river trash in my hair—not a respectable image. I debated whether to be girly and pull the bedsheet up to my armpits. Debated whether to say
Yeah, I’m Noleene, so who wants to know?
like a punk or
Yes, sir!
like a suck-up. I finally just sighed and gave up. “I’m Boone Noleene, sir. And I’m bettin’ Grace is your daughter.”

“You’re betting correctly, then.”

James Bagshaw—rich man, lawyer, estranged papa,
mad
papa—took a step toward me. Roarke blocked his way again. Two big mo-fo’s, from different worlds, but with the same king-dog attitude. “Do you have a problem with Boone?” Roarke asked.

“Not if you get out of my way, Roarke.”

“Sounds like you got a problem with
me
, then.”

Bagshaw stared hard at the man who was sleeping with his mother. “No. My mother likes you. She rarely makes a mistake in her judgment of men, and since I’ve already checked out your business references, I trust you not to swindle her. Beyond that, I have no interest in you right now. So step aside.”

“Let him by, Jack,” I said. “I’ve got nothing to hide and nowhere to hide it.”

Roarke frowned but moved away.

“Thank you.” Bagshaw now looked at the man who was sleeping with his
daughter
. “I came here,” he said to me, “to thank
you
for saving my daughter’s life.”

One, two, three.
Breathe.

Take the sophisticated road.
It was my honor, sir.

Take the selfish road.
Good. At least you don’t hate me like you hated Harp.

Or just wander off the road completely.

“I love her,” I said.

Whatever James Bagshaw expected, it probably wasn’t that. He scrutinized me as if watching for liar’s blood to seep through the bandage on my head. I noticed Roarke’s satisfied nod.

Love makes you want to live.

Bagshaw blew out a long breath. “I will never make the mistake of not supporting my daughter’s choice of men, again. Besides, I’ve already learned everything I can about you, and you
seem
to be
reformed
, at least. If that’s damning you with faint praise, it’s the best I can do right now. Except promise to welcome you into our family if the day ever comes when my daughter asks for my blessing.”

My little devil voice whispered,
See? He likes you better than he liked Harp.

A better me said,
Tell him the truth.

So I did. “Sir, I love Grace and I’ll always love her and I swear to you on everything holy I’ll never do anything to hurt her. But I don’t think you have to worry about welcoming me into your family. I’m leaving here when the movie’s done. Besides, I said I love her. I didn’t say she loves me back.”

Bagshaw frowned harder. Behind him, Roarke threw up both hands. I didn’t know when to shut up.

The door bounced open again. “Where’s my Cajun public-relations gold mine?” Stone boomed the gleeful question as if I might be hiding in the toilet. He strode in, rubbing his hands and grinning. When he saw two pissed-off strangers staring back at him, he halted and frowned. “Who started a party and forgot to invite
me
?”

Roarke took the bull by the Stone horns. “Jack Roarke,” he said. “Glad to meet you.” He thrust out a hand as big as Stone’s own wrestler-sized mitts. “You’re a good man, and I know why you think there’s no way but
your
way. You grew up hard in New Jersey, fighting a mean stepdaddy, but you’re a grown man now and the stepdaddy’s dead and so you need to stop trying to control the whole world. You
don’t
know what’s best for everybody, and sometimes, you’re just full of
shit
. Now, look, here’s the deal. I plan to hire Boone away from you eventually and give him a job doing what he’s really
meant
to do—designing and building the best damn houses in the country. Let’s you and me agree to that plan for his future, and shake on it.”

Stone gaped at him. Speechless. Stone.
Speechless.
It was the weirdest thing, how Roarke, a big, leathery non-Hollywooder graybeard who was nothing and nobody in Stone’s world, swelled up in size while Stone just stood there, getting smaller and younger and hypnotized—just a kid again—pretty much the way I felt, too, looking at Roarke. Neither one of us had known our papas. We were sentimental marks for a papa lecture.

In the meantime,
Grace’s
papa didn’t wait for niceties. “Senterra,” he said in a low voice. The deadly tone snapped Stone’s attention to him. James Bagshaw stepped in close. “My daughter wouldn’t let me help her fight you in court over the past two years, and she refuses to ask for my help now that you’re here making this asinine movie, and she didn’t ask me to come here tonight, and in fact, she’d be mad if she
knew
I’d come here on her behalf. But the fact remains that she’s my daughter and today she almost drowned because of
your
goddamned movie. And so I’m here to do the one thing I
can
do for her, as her father.”

He punched Stone in the mouth.

Stone wobbled. Roarke shoved his way between the two men, caught Stone by one arm, and helped him sit down in the armchair. “Bend your knees. Head up. Ass down. There. You got it.”

I was half out of bed by then, trying to do what a bodyguard is supposed to do even when he’s off-duty, dressed only in my underwear, with a sheet tangled around my legs. Bagshaw waved me to a stop. “I’m done, so relax,” he ordered. “Tell Grace I made a fool of myself, but it wasn’t your fault.”

He cast another disgusted look at Stone, then walked out.

Swaying in the chair, Stone gulped air and blinked like a big, hoot-impaired owl. Blood seeped from his mouth. In his movies he took head-butts from alien monsters or chin kicks from mutant Ninjas without flinching. But one punch from Grace’s sixty-year-old papa broke his kneecaps, knocked his eyeballs out, and gave him temporary asthma. Roarke, trying not to smile, bent over him. “It always hurts worse in real life.”

“
Grace
,” Candace squealed, then threw her arms around me as if I’d come home from a long war in a distant land. Standing in the elegant faux-European foyer of her and Dad’s big, country-club home at Birch River, she cried and hugged me, and I hugged her back, ashamed of being such a troublemaking stepdaughter for so many years, and for never winning the Miss America crown she had deserved. Small truths had begun coming home to me, like forgotten birds.

Clutching each other’s hands, we made our way to a sunny, enclosed porch filled with dark rattan furniture and silk pillows, overlooking the golf course where Dad never took time to play golf. “I’ll call your father,” Candace insisted. “
Please
wait for him to get home from the office. It’ll mean so much to him that you came to see him.”

“No, I. . .Candace, I don’t want to ruin this moment by talking to him
in person
. One of us would say the wrong thing and the whole meeting would degenerate into another argument about his attitude toward Harp. Just tell him I heard about last night. That I appreciate what he did.”

“Oh, Grace. Of course I’ll tell him. But what are we going to do now? Everyone is talking about the fight. Oh, Grace! Your father isn’t a
thug
who assaults people! He’s a
lawyer
. He
sues
.” My beautifully coiffed stepmother shut her eyes and cried at the thought of Dad slugging someone without even filing paperwork first. While dressed in his best tuxedo, no less. She and Dad had just gotten home from a charity fundraiser in Atlanta when they heard about the river incident and he rushed off to the hospital.

“Ssssh,” I comforted. “G. Helen influenced Dad more than he’ll admit when he was a kid. She taught him the same thing she taught me:
Sometimes you’ve just got to knock an S.O.B.’s teeth out.
”

“But this morning Katie Couric told the whole world that your father is a
monster
.”

“Now, Candace, be fair. She really didn’t say anything like that—”

“Does the specific wording really matter? She said your father
attacked
Stone Senterra. Cute little Katie Couric said your father
attacked
a man. People believe every word she tells them. They even watched when she has her colon examined. She’s on television! If she says so, it is so.
Attacked.
”

“Well,” I said slowly. “Dad
did
attack him.”

The indisputable truth. Candace stared at me, then bent her head into her hands and sobbed. She set great store by image and appearance. She was, after all, a 57-year-old doyenne of beauty queens. Despite the disappointment I’d caused her in the world of pageants, she’d gone on to successfully coach several Miss Georgia’s and a slew of other state queens, including two Miss America runner-ups. If Dad intended to storm around punching famous movie stars and provoking Katie Couric to use dastardly terms like ‘attack,’ it would raise a lot of plucked and lacquered eyebrows in Candace’s world. And, as we all know, raised brows cause frown lines.

I cuddled one of Candace’s hands in mine. “I hate to add to your misery, but you might as well hear it from me. Fox News plans to interview Aunt Tess on their national morning show tomorrow. Aunt Tess offered to defend our family name.”

Candace gasped. “Oh. . .my. . .
god
! She’ll do her ‘dotty old fussbudget’ routine and everyone in the entire country will think we’re a pack of genteel idiots harboring Aunt Pittypat from
Gone With The Wind!
”

“Don’t worry. G. Helen is organizing a hit squad to take her out before air time.”

“Oh,
Grace
. Your father is being made a fool of. The whole Bagshaw family is being made a fool of.”

I winced. “I’m sorry he was drawn into my fight. I never wanted to embarrass him, or the family.”

Candace clucked and looked at me sorrowfully. “He’s not embarrassed. He’s
worried
about you. And depressed. And
lonely
for his only child. Grace, you never even told him you got accepted to law school. He’s
so
proud of you. But he had to hear the news from G. Helen.”

“I just . . . I didn’t want him to think he
inspired
me. That I’m following in his footsteps.”

“But Grace, you
are
following in his footsteps. And he
did
inspire you.”

I wrestled with pride for a moment, then gave up. “Yes.”

“
Please
tell him so.”

“Not today. I just came here to ask you to tell him I. . .”

“Love him? Forgive him?”

“
I appreciate what he did last night
.”

“Because you love him and forgive him. Of
course
. Honey, you’re his only child. He needs you. And you need him. He has no other children. Please don’t keep punishing him for his feelings toward Harp. He regrets how he behaved over the years, and how he misjudged Harp; you can’t imagine how heartsick and guilty he felt when Harp died.”

I looked at her for a long moment. I’d always hidden an agonizing suspicion, never putting it into words, but tormented by the notion. One of my secret miseries. “Candace,” I said quietly, “Why didn’t you and Dad have any children together?”

She fluttered her hands and began to turn red. “What a strange question. Let’s go have a pre-lunch drink. Something with gin in it. A double.”

“Candace, please. The truth. You wanted children of your own. I
know
you did. Please tell me why you and Dad didn’t have any.”

She sagged. Tears melted even more white veins into the perfect cosmetic landscape of her cheeks. “I love him so much. Please don’t blame him. He told me his terms when he asked me to marry him. I agreed to them.”

“Terms? What. . .terms?”

“
No more children.
” She struggled with her voice, then, “He was so afraid of losing you, after your mother died. He said he couldn’t bear the fear that came with more children.”

I bent my head to hers and curled her hands beneath my chin like sleeping, manicured kittens. For a long time we simply sat, communing in miserable silence over the babies she’d never had, the half-siblings I’d always wanted. “I’m sorry for you,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry I’m the reason you didn’t—”

“Hush.” She stroked my hair. “It’s not your fault. People have to protect themselves the only way they know how. Your Dad had to devote himself to you. Just as I devoted myself to him.”

“And to me. You put up with so much from me.”

“I loved you. I love you now.” Her voice broke. “You never think of
me
as your
mother
, but I always think of
you
as my
daughter
.”