House of Strangers (Harlequin Super Romance) (3 page)

She was a far cry from the pencil-thin flight attendants he was used to, but judging from the muscles in her arms,
she was in good shape. Probably her job required a certain amount of strength. He felt an immediate attraction.

He had certainly never expected to meet a woman like this in Rossiter.

“If you want to know the history of the house and the family,” she said, “check out the library in Somerville and the courthouse records. There’s also been a newspaper in Fayette County since before the Civil War. I’m sure they have copies at the morgue.”

He stiffened. “Why would I be that interested?”

“I just thought that since you bought—”

“Of course. Now that it’s mine, I should find out all I can about its history. I’ve never owned an old house before.”

“I can give you a list of movies to rent that will scare you even more than Buddy did,” she said. “
The Money Pit
comes to mind.”

“So you think I made a bad bargain?”

She put up her hands. “Oh, no! I think you made a wonderful bargain. It’s just that you’re going to have to live through three or four months of hell to get to paradise.”

“A few months seems a short time to wait for paradise.”

“You won’t think so a month from now.” She stood and Dante walked around to her left side and sat at her heel. “I’m glad to have met you. But I really do have to take some pictures before the rest of the light goes.”

“Of course.” He stood, as well. “What are you taking pictures of?”

“Details of any architectural detail that may have to be re-created, as well as the pediments and pilasters outside that we may have to rebuild or duplicate. Pictures of the scamoglio on the staircase—”

“Scamoglio?”

“It’s a fancy kind of plaster technique that looks like polished marble. You didn’t think that staircase wall was real marble, did you?”

“I assumed it was some kind of painted finish.”

Ann laughed. “Perish the thought. I’ve already taken some shots of the overmantel and the fireplaces, but I wanted to take at least a couple more rolls before the crews start cleaning up.”

“Buddy says you can salvage the mural in the dining room.”

“I’m going to give it my best shot, although it may be too fragile to leave where it is. You can always make a screen out of it.”

“You can get it off the wall?”

“We’ll see.” She stuck out her hand. “Sorry we met under these circumstances, but I’m glad at least we did meet. Next time Dante will know you’re a friend. He won’t knock you down again.”

“Great.” He stopped in the front hall. “I didn’t see a car out front. How did you come? Did Buddy drop you?”

“Oh, no, I walked. I live in the loft upstairs over the flower shop on the square.”

“I assumed the lofts were used for storage. Didn’t realize anyone lived there.”

“Actually, I have both the end lofts—the one over the real-estate office, as well. I use one for living and one for working.”

“What’s in the far building, the one with the bear?”

“That? Trey Delaney uses it as a kind of second office when he wants to get away from the farm.” She raised her eyebrows. “As well as from his wife Sue-sue and the children. Well, I’m off upstairs.”

“And I’m heading back to the motel. See you tomorrow?”

“Maybe.” She waved, picked up the digital camera that hung around her neck and trotted up the back stairs. He could hear the click of Dante’s nails on the naked risers.

He watched her rear end in the tight jeans. Nice to see a woman who actually looked womanly. The sort a man could enjoy holding in his arms.

He’d be willing to bet that even in jeans, she’d draw the eye of every man in a restaurant. There was an aura of sexuality about her, of passion just beneath the surface. He doubted she was aware of it.

He pulled himself up short. He had not come to Rossiter for female companionship, no matter how appealing. And there were excellent reasons not to become involved with any Delaney kin, even a kissing cousin.
His
kissing cousin actually, although he had no idea how to figure out their relationship. He had a job to do, a promise to fulfill, not only to Tante Helaine, but to his mother.

So Trey Delaney used the office with the bear outside. Paul would have to find out the story behind that bear. Might give him an excuse to start asking questions about Trey at the café. He very much wanted to meet Trey. Always a good thing to know your enemy. And they were, after all, kin.

B
Y THE TIME
Paul got back to his motel after dinner in a fast-food restaurant, all he wanted was a hot shower and bed. His damn shoulder was no longer just an ache, but a throbbing pain, and he still had his physical-therapy exercises to do. The hit he’d taken from Ann’s dog hadn’t helped any.

He turned on the television, muted the sound, picked up the telephone and dialed Giselle’s number. A moment later a youthful male voice answered.

“Harry, it’s Uncle Paul. May I speak to your mother?”

Without replying, the teenager yelled, “Mom, it’s Uncle Paul.”

He heard the telephone drop with a clunk and his cousin’s voice. “Harry, you have the manners of a tarantula! And turn down that music!” Then a moment later, “Paul, why didn’t you call last night? I’ve been so worried.”

“Sorry, Giselle. Landed too late to disturb you.”

“Was your car waiting for you? No dents?”

Paul laughed. “Yes, Giselle. You can tell Harry that his buddy seems to have driven all the way down from New Jersey without so much as a speeding ticket. He also washed the car, cleaned the inside and left it sitting beside the airstrip with the keys under the fender in the magnetic case.”

Giselle gave a sigh of relief. “Thank heaven. I had
visions of Kevin doing a Thelma and Louise somewhere on the Blue Ridge Parkway.”

“He even left me copies of his gas charges on the front seat. Very responsible young man. Tell Harry I’ll send both him and Kevin a bonus.”

“Have you decided to give up this madness and come home where I can look after you?”

“You’re already looking after two teenage sons and a husband. I’m fine on my own.”

“Humph,” Giselle said. The sound came out with a Gallic flavor. Giselle spoke both English and French without accent, but her wordless expressions still sounded more French than English. “You don’t belong down there. What good is it going to do? You won’t find anything. That Paul David Delaney is dead, assuming he is the right Paul David Delaney.”

“Oh, he’s the right Delaney—my honorable father, pillar of society, richest man in the county, the man who married and abandoned my mother and then killed her when she found him.”

“I know you and Maman believed that, but you could be wrong. The detective said a serial killer or someone could’ve picked her up along the way. You don’t even know for certain whether she even met your father after she went down to Memphis.”

“Tante Helaine, your mother, never believed that my mother was murdered by a stranger at the precise moment she was due to confront my father, and neither do I. Too big a coincidence. No, he killed her all right. I’ve always known it in my heart. I had no way to check it out before.”

“No one has ever found her body….”

“That’s another thing. I want to find what he did with her, give her a decent burial if that’s possible.”

“After thirty years? What would be left to identify? Besides, you can’t bring a dead man to justice.”

“Well, I want someone to pay. I want to rub the noses of every living Delaney in the muck of what Paul Delaney did. I want them to admit in public that my father was a murderer.”

“The present generation had nothing to do with it. Anyone who might have known about it is long dead.”

“The present generation benefited from my mother’s death. Why should they live out their lives thinking their father was a paragon? I promised Tante Helaine I would expose him, and I will. Let them deal with the truth for a change.”

“Then go tell the son what you suspect, who you are. He’s your half brother, after all.”

“And have the entire clan circle the wagons? No, until I have incontrovertible proof that my father killed my mother, proof that would convince a jury, nobody down here is going to know I have any connection with the Delaneys. Now that I own the family home I have the perfect cover story—it’s natural to want to find out the history of an old house. These people will fall over themselves regaling me with anecdotes. The Delaneys were the most important family in the county. Trey Delaney is still one of the richest men. Certainly he owns the most land. I’m really looking forward to meeting him.” He tried to keep the sarcasm out of his voice, but Giselle knew him too well.

“You should never have promised Maman you’d avenge Aunt Michelle. You want to destroy the Delaneys for Maman, but in the end, I think you are the one who will suffer. The kind of hate my mother carried around corrodes like acid. It ruined her life, and in the end I think it contributed to her death. I know you’re still angry that
you can’t fly big jets any longer, but don’t transfer your anger to the Delaneys. That’s a whole different issue.”

Paul laughed. “Don’t psychoanalyze me, Giselle. I don’t blame the Delaneys for that. Nor for the fact that Tracy walked out on me because she couldn’t take looking after an invalid, nor for the pain in my shoulder. I blame them because I grew up without either a mother or a father.”

“Stop it! Maman and Dad loved you like a son.”

“Of course they did. And I loved them both. But having your aunt and uncle take you in isn’t quite the same thing as growing up with the man and woman whose genes you carry. In my case I didn’t even know who’d donated half of my genes until a few months ago.”

“I have a very bad feeling about this. Not for those Delaneys, but for you.”

“Who said revenge is a dish best eaten cold? After thirty years it’s damned near frozen.”

“What if you like them? The ones who are left, I mean?”

“I’ll try not to let that happen. If it does, I’ll deal with it.”

“Please call me every night or e-mail me. I want to know everything that’s going on.”

“I promise. I love you, Giselle. Regards to Jerry.”

“Good night,
mon frère.
”

He put the phone back in its cradle and lay back on the bed.

“Scamoglio,” he said, and laughed. “Who knew?”

At least Ann was enthusiastic about something other than Botox injections in her forehead. He turned the sound up on the TV, moved to the floor and began the exercises to stretch and strengthen his right shoulder and arm. He
must be getting better. The tears from the pain didn’t begin to run down his cheeks and into his ears for a good five minutes.

“G
RAM, WE’RE STARTING
the Delaney restoration job tomorrow morning,” Ann said as she reached for another ear of sweet corn. “It’s going to be fabulous.”

“Pass the butter to your daughter, Nancy,” Sarah Pulliam said.

“She does not need any more butter,” Ann’s mother said shortly. But she passed it anyway. “Mother, you are a great cook, but does the word
cholesterol
mean anything to you?”

“Hush. The girl has no meat on her bones as it is.” Sarah turned a concerned face to her granddaughter. “I wish they’d tear that old Delaney place down and salt the earth it stands on.”

“Whatever for? I
love
that house.”

“Ann, honey, I firmly believe that old houses take on the character of the folks who lived in them,” her grandmother said, and slid the platter of barbecued pork chops closer to Ann. “Nobody who ever lived there has been happy, starting with the Delaney who built it.”

“I know Mr. Delaney lost his only daughter, Gram, but half the people of west Tennessee lost children to the yellow fever. Whole families died sometimes.”

“He wanted a houseful of children. Adam was the only child who survived. Delaney’s poor wife had half-a-dozen miscarriages trying to get him more. Wore her out and killed her in the end.”

“Mother,” Nancy said, moving the pork chops away from Ann, “unless you’re a whopping lot older than you’ve been saying all these years, there’s no way you could know all that.”

“My mother, your grandmother, told me, Miss Nancy.
She wanted to marry Adam’s son Barrett for a while. She was glad in the long run she’d missed out on him. A meaner man never lived. During the depression he foreclosed on half the farmers in Fayette County so he could acquire their farms cheap when they were sold on the courthouse steps. One of them tried to shoot him. Missed, unfortunately.”

“But the next generation was happy. Aunt Maribelle and Uncle Conrad doted on each other.” Ann said. She started to reach for the chops, but one look from her mother stopped her. “I mean, they seemed to have had a wonderful marriage. Everybody got along, even Aunt Addy.”

“You were much too young to see what was really happening. Two cats in a burlap bag. My sisters barely tolerated each other, and living in the same house didn’t help. When Daddy refused to let Addy go to the Conservatory of Music in Philadelphia, I really thought she’d die. She had real talent. She wanted to be a concert pianist. Instead, she wound up an old maid living in her sister’s house and teaching piano lessons to children like you. Daddy should have let her go.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“He always said that it wasn’t seemly for an unmarried woman to live alone in an apartment or a boardinghouse, but the real reason was that Maribelle was engaged to Conrad Delaney and demanded a society wedding. Daddy couldn’t afford both.”

“So Aunt Maribelle won?”

“Maribelle always won. Mostly because it never occurred to her she
wouldn’t
win. You have no idea how it galled Addy to have to live under her sister’s roof all those years. And Maribelle’s marriage to Conrad wasn’t quite the blissful union she tried to make everybody believe.
Anyway, that has never been a happy house, and it will find some way to make the new owner suffer, too, you mark my words.”

On the drive back to town from her grandmother’s farm, Ann absently scratched behind Dante’s ears and thought over her grandmother’s remarks. Bernice had said more or less the same thing at the café that morning, but Ann hadn’t paid much attention. However, she couldn’t dismiss her grandmother’s concerns as easily. Sarah Pulliam was supposed to be fey. People said she had “the gift.”

As far as Ann could tell, that meant her grandmother could penetrate the facades behind which people tried to hide. Ann had suffered many times as a child because her Gram always knew full well who was responsible for knocking down the rose trellis or forgetting to feed the dogs. It wasn’t second sight. It was solid knowledge of the mischief Ann was capable of.

And Gram was the only person who’d warned her she’d be miserable if she married “that Travis Corrigan.” She’d definitely been right on that score.