Chapter Twenty-Seven
TWENTY-SEVEN
JO slept into midday and woke alone. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept until ten, or when she had enjoyed such a deep and dreamless sleep.
She wondered if she should have been restless, edgy, or weepy.
Perhaps she’d been all of those things long enough, and there was no need to go on with them now that she knew the truth.
She could grieve for her mother. And for a woman the same age as Jo was now who had faced the worst kind of horror.
But more, she could grieve for the years lost in the condemnation of a mother, a wife, a woman who had done nothing more sinful than catch the eye of a madman.
Now there could be healing.
“He loves me, Mama,” she whispered. “Maybe that’s fate’s way of paying us all back for being cruel and heartless twenty years ago. I’m happy. No matter how crazy the world is right now, I’m happy with him.”
She swung her legs over the side of the bed. Starting today, she promised herself, they were going to stand together and fight back.
* * *
IN the living room, Nathan finished up yet another call, this one to the American consulate in Nice. He hadn’t slept. His eyes were gritty, his soul scorched. He felt as if he were running in circles, pulling together information, searching for any hint, any whisper that he’d missed months before.
And all the while he dealt with the dark guilt that his deepest hope was to confirm that his own brother was dead.
He looked up as he heard footsteps mounting his stairs. Working up a smile when he saw Giff behind the screen, he waved him in as he completed the call.
“Didn’t mean to interrupt you,” Giff said.
“No problem. I’m finished, for now.”
“I was heading out to do a little work on Live Oak Cottage and thought I’d drop off these plans. You said how you wouldn’t mind taking a look at the design I’ve been working up for the solarium at Sanctuary.”
“I’d love to see it.” Grateful for the diversion, Nathan walked over to take the plans and unroll them on the kitchen table. “I had some ideas on that myself, then I got distracted.”
“Well.” Giff tucked his tongue in his cheek as Jo walked out from the bedroom. “Understandable enough. Morning, Jo Ellen.”
She could only hope she didn’t flush like a beet and compound the embarrassment as both men stared at her. She’d pulled on one of Nathan’s T-shirts and nothing else. Though the bottom of it skimmed her thighs, she imagined it was obvious that she wore nothing under it.
This would teach her, she supposed, to follow the scent of coffee like a rat to the tune of the pipe. “Morning, Giff.”
“I was just dropping something off here.”
“Oh, well, I was just . . . going to get some coffee.” She decided to brazen it out and walked to the counter to pour a mug. “I’ll just take it with me.”
Giff couldn’t help himself. It was such a situation. And since he was dead sure Lexy would want all the details, he tried for more. “You might want to take a look yourself. Kate’s got that bee in her bonnet about this sunroom add-on. You always had a good eye for things.”
Manners or dignity. It was an impossible decision for a woman raised on southern traditions. Jo did her best to combine both and stepped over to study the drawing. She puzzled over what appeared to be a side view of a long, graduated curve with a lot of neatly printed numbers and odd lines.
Nathan ordered himself to shift his attention from Jo’s legs back to the drawing. “It’s a good concept. You do the survey?”
“Yeah, me and Bill. He does survey work over to the mainland, had the equipment.”
“You know, if you came out at an angle”—he used his finger to draw the line—“rather than straight, you could avoid excavating over here, and you’d gain the benefit of using the gardens as part of the structure.”
“If you did that, wouldn’t you cut off this corner, here? Wouldn’t it make it tight and awkward coming out from the main house? Miss Kate’d go into conniptions if I started talking about moving doorways or windows.”
“You don’t have to move any of the existing structure.
” Nathan slid the side view over to reveal Giff’s full view.
“Nice work,” he murmured. “Really nice. Jo, get me a sheet of that drawing paper over there.” Nathan gestured absently.
“I’ve got men in my firm who don’t have the skill to do freehand work like this. ”
“No shit?” Giff forgot Jo completely and goggled at the back of Nathan’s head.
“You ever decide to go back for that degree and want to apprentice, you let me know.”
He picked up a pencil and began to sketch on the paper Jo had put in front of him.
“See, if you hitch it over this way, not so much of an angle as a flow. It’s a female house, you don’t want sharp points.
You keep it all in the same tone as the curve of the roof, then instead of lining out into the gardens, it pours through them. ”
“Yeah, I see it.” He realized that his working drawing seemed stiff and amateurish beside the artist’s. “I couldn’t think of something like that, draw like that, in a million years.”
“Sure you could. You’d already done the hard part. It’s a hell of a lot easier for somebody to look at good, detailed work and shift a couple of things around to enhance it than it is to come up with the basic concept in the first place.”
Nathan straightened, contemplated his quick sketch through narrowed eyes. He could see it, complete and perfect. “Your way might suit the client better. It’s more cost-effective and more traditional.”
“Your way’s more artistic.”
“It isn’t always artistic that the client wants.” Nathan put his pencil down. “Anyway, you think about it, or show the works to Kate and let her think about it. Whichever choice, we can do some refining before you break ground.”
“You’ll work with me on it?”
“Sure.” Without thinking, Nathan picked up Jo’s coffee mug and drank. “I’d like to.”
Revved, Giff gathered up the drawings. “I think I’ll just swing by and drop these off for Miss Kate now. Give her some time to mull it over. I’m really obliged, Nathan.” He tugged on the brim of his cap. “See you, Jo.”
Jo leaned against the counter and watched as Nathan got another sheet of drawing paper. Finishing off her coffee, he started another sketch.
“You don’t even know what you just did,” she murmured.
“Hmm. How far is that perennial bed with the tall blue flowers, the spiky ones? How far is that from the corner here?”
“Nope.” She got herself another mug. “You don’t have a clue what you’ve done.”
“About what? Oh.” He looked down at the mug. “Sorry. I drank your coffee.”
“Besides that—which I found both annoying and endearing.” She slid her arms around his waist. “You’re a good man, Nathan. A really good man.”
“Thanks.” Normality, he promised himself. Just for an hour, they would take normality. “Is that because I didn’t give you a little swat on the bottom when you strolled out here in my shirt—even though I wanted to?”
“No, that just makes you a smart man. But you’re a good one. You didn’t see his face.” She lifted her hands to his cheeks. “You didn’t even notice.”
At sea, he shook his head. “Apparently I didn’t. Are you talking about Giff ?”
“I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like Giff, and I don’t know many who think of him as anything more than an affable and reliable handyman.
Nathan—” She touched her lips to his. “You just told him he was more, and could be more yet. And you did it so casually, so matter-of-factly, he can’t help but believe you. ”
She rose up on her toes to press her cheek to his. “I really like you right now, Nathan. I really like who you are.”
“I like you, too.” He closed his arms around her and swayed. “And I’m really starting to like who we are.”
* * *
KIRBY had a firm grip on her pride as she walked into Sanctuary.
If Jo was there, she would find a way to speak to her privately.
Her strict code of ethics wouldn’t permit her to tell any of the Hathaways what she’d learned the night before.
If Jo had come home after speaking with Nathan again, Kirby imagined the house would be in an uproar.
If nothing else, she could stand as family doctor.
But that wasn’t why she’d been summoned.
She had planned her visit to avoid Brian, using that window of time between breakfast and the midday meal. And she’d used the visitors’ front door rather than the friends’ entrance through the kitchen.
Since they had managed to avoid each other for a week, she thought, they could do so for another day. She wouldn’t have come at all if Kate hadn’t hailed her with an SOS after one of the guests slipped on the stairs. Even as she turned toward them, Kate came hurrying down.
“Kirby, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. It’s a turned ankle, no more than that, I swear. But the woman is setting up such a to-do you’d think she’d broken every bone in her body in six places at once.”
One glance at Kate’s distracted face and Kirby knew that Jo had yet to speak of Annabelle. “It’s all right, Kate.”
“I know it’s your afternoon off, and I hated to drag you over here, but she won’t budge out of bed.”
“It’s no problem, really.” Kirby followed her up the stairs. “It’s better to have a look. If I think it’s more than a strain, we’ll x-ray and ship her off to the mainland.”
“One way to get her out of my hair,” Kate muttered. She knocked briskly on a door. “Mrs. Tores, the doctor’s here to see you. Bill the inn,” Kate added to Kirby in an undertone, “and add whatever you like for a nuisance fee.”
Thirty minutes later, and more than a little frazzled, Kirby closed the bedroom door behind her. Her head was aching from the litany of complaints Mrs. Tores had regaled her with. As she paused to rub her temples, Kate peeked around the corner.
“Safe?”