Keepsake (18 page)

She gave him a wary look. "You didn't hire a limo or anything, did you?"

"Are you kidding?" he said as they headed for their coats. "Who's got that kind of dough? High-school seniors, maybe; not grown-ups."

His quip stopped Olivia in her tracks. She turned to him and said softly, "We really are grown-ups now, aren't we?
Where did it go, our youth? It ended so abruptly."

"No kidding."

"Oh, definitely for you, but even for me. I worked like a slave through college
... then graduate school
... then the shop
... another shop
... and where have I gotten? Practically nowhere."

"Aren't you being a little hard on yourself?" asked Quinn as he donned his topcoat.

"No. I should be running a company."

"A textile mill,
perchance?" Quinn ventured shrewdly. "Why aren't you?"

"My father had other plans, all of them spelled '
Rand
.' Don't get me started on that one," Olivia said flatly. She reached into the back of h
er closet and took out a floor-
length black velvet cape lined in scarlet. It was a ridiculous extravagance she'd bought years ago and had worn only once, but as she slipped it over her shoulders, she knew that on this night, at this gala, with this man, the velvet cape was finally going to fulfill its destiny.

She fastened the ebony-encrusted button and, feeling wildly romantic, turned around in a small circle for him to survey. "Well? What do you think?"

He gave her a look that warmed her down to her si
lk-
covered toes. "I think I'm a damned lucky bastard," he said, coming up to her and kissing her softly.

"Hold that thought," she said with a sly smile, "for just a few more hours."

Quinn didn't have a limo and driver waiting for her, but he did have a rented Mercedes. Olivia scolded him for throwing his money around, but secretly she was pleased that he was treating her like a homecoming queen. Yes, their prom days were definitely behind them, and that was too bad. But somehow Olivia couldn't help thinking that the best was yet to come.

Quinn was curious
to know why, exactly, Olivia
wasn't
working for her father at the mill. It seemed to him that Owen Bennett was wasting the best resource he had.

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," she said as they drove along the river before taking the turn into town. She explained how disappointed she had been when her father hadn't offered her a job.

"I was furious that my father was willing to hand over responsibility to my brother and not to me. Sometimes I think he just wants Rand where he can keep an eye on him—remember when Rand had that summer job at a camp in
Maine
, and my dad had to go up there to bail him out of jail?"

"When he was arrested for going on that joyride with those guys who stole a car up there? Yeah, I remember.
Rand
bragged about it to the whole team when he got back."

"Well, I can still hear my dad yelling that Rand was never going to leave
Connecticut
again, not if my dad had anything to say about it. Which of course he did—and still does.

"Anyway, out of either stubbornness or stupidity, I decided to stick around and beat my father at his own game. I was determined to be a success right under his nose. I don't know what I thought I was going to do. Start a rival textile mill?"

She let out a rueful laugh and continued. "I came up with the idea of Miracourt: high-end fabrics for decorating and for apparel. The store's a success, but I'm not close enough to the city to really take off. So I've begun to import decorator items for the home, mostly from
France
, and I'm going to branch out into mail order. And in the meantime, I threw in with my father to open Run of the Mill—because outlet stores are where it's at nowadays, I guess."

"You don't sound thrilled."

"I don't like the outlet," she admitted frankly. "It's in a crumbling warehouse with bad lighting and no windows. I get depressed when I go there, but my father is convinced that when the surroundings are dreary, people feel they get more value."

"He's probably right."

"I know that. He reminds me every chance he gets."

Her answer was decidedly tense. Presumably it had something to do with the fact that they were discussing her relationship with her father, which had been problematic for as long as Quinn could remember.

He recalled an April afternoon in seventh grade when Olivia had stopped to talk to him while he and his own father were raking the grounds of the estate. Owen Bennett happened to drive by. He called from the car for his daughter to come back to the house. She refused. He told her again. She refused again. Quinn wondered then—as he wondered still—if Olivia simply regarded him as a handy stick to poke in her father's eye.

He figured he'd soon find out. He drove the Mercedes through the open iron gates and past the cottage he had once called home and headed for the grand house on the hill, obscured from view by carefully placed evergreens growing among the century-old specimen trees that lent the scene such dignity.

"Funny," Quinn mused aloud. "This hill seemed so m
uch steeper when I was a kid."

"Yes. That's how it always is."

He glanced at Olivia and saw that she was as tight as an overwound clock. "You're not dragging me here over your father's objections, by any chance?" he asked, suddenly suspicious.

"No way," she answered tersely.

He eased into the last turn of the winding driveway, aware of light ahead. His first glimpse of the manor and its immediate grounds was through the grand sweep of branches on a copper beech. Quinn became aware first of brilliance, and then of magic: every tree and shrub between them and the house was strung with tiny white lights. The effect was spectacular, something out of the robber-baron age and wholly befitting a turn-of-the-century mansion like the Bennett house.

Quinn remembered the old days when his father used to climb an extension ladder to decorate two evergreens, one on each side of the portico, with big colored lights. But this! It must have taken a crew of men and a hydraulic lift to get it done. It was beautiful, all right, but it was completely over the top, like something out of Disney World.

"I miss the colored lights," he found himself muttering.

"Hmm? Oh. Those. Yes. They were nice."

She was still somewhere else. He didn't like it. "I'll drop you off and park the—"

"No, they have a valet for that," she said. "Just pull up to the house."
             

Of course, a valet. He should have known. Thank God for the Mercedes. "Well, this should be fun," he managed to say in a voice not completely grim. He rolled to a stop under the portico of the brightly lit house.

"Quinn! I have a confession to make!" Olivia blurted as the valet opened her door for her. Scrambling out of the seat, she said
over her shoulder and
in a single breath: "My father doesn't know you're coming or Rand but my mother does but she's not telling so just play along!"

Before he could say, "With what?" the valet was slamming her door in his face. Feeling as if he'd been zapped with a stun gun, Quinn sat where he was.

Now she tells me? Now she freaking tells me?

He snapped back to reality when he noticed the impatient valet, a kid who by the looks of him was a tackle on Keepsake's current team, waiting for him to surrender the wheel. Quinn got out and handed over the Mercedes to him, not without trepidation, and then turned to face the woman he had considered a friend and hoped to have as a lover.

"You evil little witch—this is a setup!" he said, seething.

"It's not! Oh, Quinn, it's not!" she said with an imploring look. "I was going to tell him, really I was, but—oh, what's the difference! Let's just go in and get it over with, can't we, please? All right?"

"No, it's
not
all right, goddammit," he said in a low growl. He tried to grab her arm to lead her out from under the portico, but he couldn't find it in the folds of
her
goddamned cape. "I'm not going where I'm not invited—not in there! Town Hill is one thing, but—" He swore under his breath and said, "Hell, I'm outta here."

He turned to go, but she caught his sleeve. "Quinn! You're not going to run
again
!"

Bull's-eye. She got him where he lived. He turned back around and blasted her a look filled with pure felony.

How could someone so smart be so incredibly dumb? Was she trying to provoke her father into all-out war? Jesus! Quinn was going to have to count on the Bennetts' good breeding; he sure couldn't count on hers.

"All right," he said. "We go in; we go out. Five minutes, and then I take you home and you'll be free to come back and party on with your peers or sprawl around and watch Guy Lombardo on TV. Just as long as I'm out of it."

Looking chastened and as near to meek as she got, Olivia allowed him to grab a fistful of velvet and haul her up to the double doors, thrown open to a steady flow of incoming guests. Quinn couldn't tell whether she was more afraid of him or of her father at that moment. What the hell had she been thinking, browbeating her mother into going along and then blithely omitting to tell her father? He found himself actually feeling sorry for the Bennetts—something strange and new.

The lofty entrance hall was a cavernous affair floored in marble. Quinn had been in it only a few times before in his life, none of them social. He remembered the most memorable time: Olivia had fallen out of a tree and got knocked unconscious, and he had carried her home in his arms and handed her over, still groggy, to her shocked and hysterical mother.

Ten years old, and in his arms. He should've quit while he was ahead.

"Is this the point when we put on the masks?" he said dryly.

"Oh! I forgot."

She reached inside her silver-beaded bag and took out a narrow slip of silver that wouldn't hide her face at all. Quinn couldn't help feeling that the mask she'd given him to wear made him a lot more incognito. Was that by design? He took the thing out of his inside pocket and slipped it over his eyes.

Hell.
It made him feel more like a gate-crasher than ever. Annoyed, he pushed it up to the top of his brow and let it sit there.

Olivia said faintly, "Whatever."

The hall was a noisy, busy place. The line of masked merrymakers waiting to be received by the host and hostess seemed to be moving slowly, possibly because of the trays of hors d'oeuvres and champagne being foisted on them as they greeted one another in shrill, expectant voices. From somewhere inside, Quinn heard an orchestra launch into a swinging rendition of "In the Mood." Suddenly he got why they called it a gala: the atmosphere really was gay.

Except for him and Olivia. His pride was smarting big time; he couldn't stand the thought of being rubbed in her father's nose like month-old bologna. The last time the two were face-to-face was in the gardener's cottage and Quinn had tried to knock him down. Would Owen Bennett remember?

Quinn gave their coats to a hatcheck girl who was set up for the event in a small reception room off the hall. Then, still operating in a chill of silence, he and Olivia took their place in the line of guests.

"How many people are your parents expecting tonight?" he asked, struggling with the small-talk thing.

Olivia shrugged a shoulder—the shoulder he had kissed in hungry abandon half an hour earlier—and said, "Three or four hundred."

"Are you kidding?" he said to her under his breath. "There aren't that many people in Keepsake who can stay up until midnight."

"My father has a lot of different connections," she said without enthusiasm.

"So it would seem."

That was it for his store of party chat. God, how he wanted out of there.

A couple swooped down on them, kissing air all around and waiting gleefully for introductions. Olivia obliged them. The woman, tall, blond, and languid, said, "Quinn Leary—I have heard so
much
about you."

"I wish I could say the same," he said with a smile that was as bland as hers was sly.

The couple moved on, to be replaced by another one equally curious and insinuating. And another. And another. Pretty soon he felt like Errol Flynn, backing up the winding stairs and holding the evil king's forces at bay with only his trusty sword.

And meanwhile they were moving up the receiving line. Before he knew it, he was hearing the dread words, "Mother, you remember Quinn Leary."

He smiled grimly and held out his hand. A woman of sixty, with fearful eyes in an attractive face that reminded him only marginally of Olivia, said faintly, "Of course I do," and laid her hand limply in his.

He remembered a line from
My Fair Lady,
a movie his father had enjoyed. "How kind of you to let me come," he said, even though he knew she hadn't let him come and was feeling anything but kind.