IN ROOM 33 (18 page)

This was news to him. "You did read those numbers, didn't you?" The estimates he'd worked on—which excluded final figures on the air conditioning and electrical—said close to a couple of million was needed to get the ball rolling.

"I know the numbers"—she glanced at Sinnie and Mike—"but I'd rather not discuss them standing in the hall."

"Your place or mine," he said.

"Mine." She looked uncomfortable and quickly added, "But tomorrow. I'll be more, uh, certain about things then."

Wade knew there were as many questions in his eyes as there were secrets in hers—plus a heaping of guilt.
Curious.

"Well, kids, helluva tour, but I'm outta here," Mike said. Two seconds later he trudged down the hall and disappeared into the fire escape stairwell. Sinnie watched him go, her expression troubled.

Joy went one way down the hall and Wade went the other, a thoughtful unusually quiet, Sinnie at his side.

Outside her door, without warning, she grabbed his forearm and dug in her nails. "Don't let her do it. You do it. This is your hotel. Not hers. She's just a girl." Her voice was low, earnest.

Figuring he was in for another of her lectures about his "legacy," he loosened her grip, touched her anxious face. "It's all right, love. Everything's going to be okay. You and I both know the Phil can't survive as it is. Change is inevitable. And better Joy Cole than a wrecking ball." He kissed her cheek. "If she can make it work, you and all the rest of the tenants will be treated fairly. That's all you can ask." He opened her door, gently shoved her inside."Just think about it before you set that hard old head of yours against it, okay?"

"Oh, I'll think on it, all right. Won't be thinking about much else from here on in." She closed her door in his face.

Wade headed for the Phil's front door, questions drumming in his head. He'd figured when Joy had time to digest the financial demands for renovating the Phil, she'd bolt or at least contact Grange and start the selling process. She hadn't.

The woman was full of surprises.

Outside, the morning was bathed in sunlight, and with Old Sol levering his way still higher in the east, it promised to be a sweltering day.

Wade stretched, eased his tense muscles into more fluid movement, then started to run. He pushed Joy Cole and her scheme for the Phil to a back corner of his mind. And when he'd freed up his more rational thinking, the first person who came to mind was Henry.

Wade might tease Sinnie, and the woman might drive him crazy, but she had the instincts of a CIA agent. If she thought something was wrong, it probably was. When he finished his run, he'd check Henry's room again, this time without an entourage.

He jogged easily to the corner, crossed the street, and ran into Blackberry Park. He picked up his pace—didn't spot the cab following him, nor was he aware of the azure blue eyes tracing his every movement.

Chapter 9

Lana watched Wade's strong legs and powerful stride take him to a tacky little park not far from the hotel; then she leaned back into her seat.

He was better than she remembered. Any woman in her right mind would want him all over her. Want all of him. She doubted her so-smart, so-cool daughter would be any different. When a man who looked that good wanted you, you wanted back. Of course, he'd want Joy, if for no other reason than she looked so much like Lana.

She smoothed her hair and refreshed her makeup.

The situation was troublesome.

When Lana glanced out the cab window at the Hotel Philip, she didn't see a stolid, lusterless hotel with broken windows and a dirty brick facade; she saw a very large check made out to her.

If Wade seduced Joy, if they slept together—and if he was as physically commanding as she remembered—that check, along with a lifestyle she was determined to maintain, was at risk. Lana wasn't fond of risk.

"That horrible, hideous hotel," she said, unaware she'd spoken aloud.

"Where to, ma'am?" the cab driver asked, looking at her through the rearview mirror.

She gave him her address, and he pulled away from the curb. Lana gazed blindly out the window, tried to think what to do next. One thing was imperative. She had to keep her eye on things; she couldn't sit by and wait on pins and needles for Joy's decision. If she and Wade were fucking each other's brains out, she needed to know.

Which meant getting closer to her daughter.

She put a hand on her stomach, applied pressure to settle it.
Close
wasn't something she did well.

But it would make David happy. He'd wanted her to "keep abreast of things," but she'd put it off, not relishing the task of spying on her daughter, and not thinking it necessary.

That was before she knew Wade was in the picture.

Lana hadn't seriously believed Joy would take on the hotel, had convinced herself she was being her usual difficult self, solely to irritate Lana. After all, she had no money, no business experience, and chronic wanderlust. She'd thought her contrary, maddening, and inconvenient, but never the threat David thought her to be.

Wade being on the scene changed that.

He regarded the Philip as his by right, had been fixated on it since he was boy. When Stephen disowned him and threw him out of the house that night, he hadn't cared about anything except the Philip. "Keep all the other crap," he'd said, referring to what at the time was a substantial fortune. He'd been so calm, so determined. "But the Philip is mine. It's what Grandfather wanted. It's what I want—for me and Mom. That's all. You and your whore of a wife are welcome to the rest." The boy was fiercely protective of that cow of a mother of his, she remembered.

Stephen, enraged by Wade calling her a whore, said hell would freeze over before Wade saw a penny of Emerson money or the deed to the Phillip. He'd told him to get out, said he never wanted to see him again. He never did.

Lana put her head back against the headrest.

Now Wade was back, and he'd been handed the perfect opportunity to get
his
hotel and get laid at the same time. What man would resist that? None that Lana knew of.

The cab driver pulled up outside her house. She paid him and walked the short distance to her front door.

Inside she went into the living room and sat heavily in a chair. Dear God, this whole business was tiresome.

She was exhausted by it.

But exhausted or not, Lana wouldn't allow Wade to seduce his way to her money. She'd stop him, by any means available. And, of course, with a man the means was
always
available, conveniently located behind a zipper. She smiled, knew the chance of her righteous daughter taking her mother's leavings to her own bed were less than zero.

But before that, she'd do the mother thing, find out what was going on in her daughter's perverse, high-minded brain.

* * *

First thing Monday morning, Joy took a seat across from Jarvis Deane, her banker. His desk, glass-topped, was surgical clean—not a paper on it except a file with her name on its tab.

Her married name. Joy Marie Sheldon.

"Mrs. Sheldon," he said, his tone breezily formal. "It's nice to see you again."

"Call me Joy, please—and it's Cole, Mr. Deane, not Sheldon. Hasn't been since... the marriage ended." Joy ignored the stones in her stomach.

"Yes, of course. It's been a while, hasn't it?"

"Eight years."

"Really? Time flies and all that." He pulled the file toward him and opened it. "Let me see what we've got here." He opened the folder, swiveled the computer on his desk to face him, and keyed in the number from the file folder. His eyebrows lifted. "Very nice."

She wanted to run but instead asked, "How much?"

He put a finger on the screen. "One million, nine hundred and forty-two thousand dollars and... twenty-six cents." He closed the file in front of him and smiled at her, as if he'd just delivered her a healthy set of twins.

Joy emptied her lungs in one loud swoosh and crumpled back in her chair. "That much? Really?"

"Really. Behold the miracle of compound interest and a conservative investment strategy. Combined, they've come close to doubling your money in eight years." He swung the computer aside, fisted his hands, and plunked them on her closed file. "So you're here, Mrs. Shel—Joy. Which means you have plans for your money. How can First Bank help?"

* * *

Joy left the bank a half-hour later, her emotions tangled—satisfaction in the knowledge she had the money to begin work on the Philip in the same stew as an overwhelming regret she was about to use money she'd tried to forget she had for nearly a decade.

She looked up at a sky slowly shifting from summer blue to gray. You said I'd be glad I had it one day, Matt. You were right. Thank you.

And there was her mother...

When Lana discovered the source of Joy's wealth, she'd revel in how her "high-minded prig of a daughter"—a description she'd used more than once—had taken a man for a pot-load of money.

It didn't matter.

What mattered, suddenly more than anything, was the Philip, the work and challenge of bringing it back, making the old new again. What had started as a slow-building dream during her tours of the Phil had come alive in Wade's carefully thought out numbers. The Philip could come back. And Joy could make it happen. How ironic. All the years of traveling on trains, boats, and planes—and the endless stream of nondescript hotels—yet it was a hotel, a decaying ruin of a hotel, that now felt like home.

She wouldn't let her mother, or the origin of her money, ruin that.

While she walked, the sun flitted in and out from behind gray clouds. It was sultry hot. But it wasn't the heat that made her mind stop on one thing that, strangely, bothered her more than any other. If she wanted his help—and she did...

She'd have to tell Wade.

* * *

Wade had spent the weekend thinking and Monday morning running. By the time he got back to the Phil, it was after ten and Sinnie and Gordy, Gordy's mom, Cherry, and Lars and Rebecca were camped in his room. No Mike, thank God.

Sinnie had made them all coffee and doled out his cookies, and except for Gordy, who was watching television, they sat around his kitchen table eating as if it were their last supper or a funeral watch. He didn't need this. He had serious thinking to do. He'd been running for hours, and his head was clearer than it had been in years.

He had the rudiments of a plan rooting in his brain, and he wanted time to forge it into something more solid than wishful thinking. He did not want a roomful of people.

"What's this about?" He stood in a runner's sweat in the middle of the room and called on his limited patience. He raised a hand. "If it's about plumbing, I don't want to know. I don't do plumbing."

Lars laughed. Sinnie gave him her fish-eye. "Five's empty. Everybody's gone."

Wade stopped on his way to the bathroom, where he was bent on taking a shower. "What do you mean, gone? And who's everybody?"

"Everybody but me, that's who," Sinnie said. "I'm the only one left on five. Phyllis and Jack from 53 are gone and that nice Doddie woman from 51. Pretty, with the red hair?"

Wade didn't know, but he came around quickly to Sinnie's "something strange" theory. These defections made it six people leaving within a couple of days. Unlikely statistics. Wade looked at the people sitting around his table. "Anybody here know anything about this?"

As one, they shook their heads. Then Rebecca spoke. "I think Nick and Natalie are going, too. I saw her bringing in boxes from the market down the street."

"Did you talk to her?"

"She said she was cleaning up, getting rid of stuff." Rebecca's voice was soft when she said, "I didn't believe her. She looked—she looked scared, is how she looked."

"Rebecca," Lars interjected. "Don't start imagining things."

"I'm not—" She rubbed a hand nervously over her rounded belly.

Wade held up a hand. "The one thing we don't need is a domestic dispute." He looked at Sinnie. "Any chance you've let it loose in the hotel about Joy's plans?"