The Wrong Wife. Carolyn McSparren
course. See you at the club,” she said, and ran her hand down his cheek. He stood on the step beside his mother and watched Brittany glide to her car and drive away with a wave.
“She is a lovely woman,” Elizabeth said.
“Uh-huh.”
“And very, very clever.”
That didn’t sound like a compliment.
“She will look extraordinary in the dress we designed. Daddy, I take it, has money?”
“Pots of it, according to the grapevine.”
“Do I need to start designing her wedding dress?”
“Uh—I’d hold off on that.”
“Ah.” His mother narrowed her eyes at him. “You can’t have cooled off so quickly.”
He ignored her remark. “If I don’t get out of here, I’m going to miss our reservations at the club.” He kissed his mother perfunctorily and started down the concrete stairs to the front yard.
“Are you going to bring her to my regular Thursday-night dinner party?” Elizabeth called after him.
Damn! His mother’s legendary Thursday nights. “I don’t know. I’ll call you.”
“Fine. It doesn’t have to be Brittany, you know. Any girl will do so long as she’s not an airhead.”
“Right.” He climbed into his car and drove away much too fast for the narrow street. He scared a small woman who was walking a large bull mastiff. He knew he should have stopped to apologize. She was probably one of his mother’s neighbors, although he didn’t recognize her. She would be one of his constituents, if he ever became district attorney. He needed to remember he was a lawyer first, a man second.
The hell he was.
CHAPTER TWO
ANNABELLE SHUT THE DOOR to the backyard and leaned against it with both hands behind her back. There was no point in throwing the bolt against Ben. He’d just walk around to the front. His mother would let him in, assuming he didn’t have his own key to her house.
Annabelle’s heart raced, the pulse in her temple throbbed, and she knew she had a film of sweat on her upper lip, despite the cool early-April air outside.
The kin of my enemy is my enemy. Her grandmother had drummed that into her head since she could remember. Grandmere was already having triple conniptions because Annabelle was working for Elizabeth, Hal Jackson’s ex-wife. The idea that Annabelle might be attracted to Hal Jackson’s son would probably give her a stroke.
And she was attracted. Heck, she’d always been attracted to Ben, although she hadn’t seen him since he went off to college.
She’d known about Judy Bromfield’s death, of course; it had happened the summer after Ben graduated from high school. The whole thing had been horrible, especially when it came out that Ben’s father had been responsible for getting the man who’d raped and murdered Judy off on another charge only two months earlier.
Annabelle remembered Ben as cheerful, funny, wildly successful at everything he did. The golden boy. Now, although he sounded much the same, there was something cold at the center.
She recognized the wariness in Ben’s eyes. She saw it in the mirror every morning.
Back in high school, she’d thought he was the warmest, kindest person she’d ever known because he treated her the same way he treated everybody else.
Now he was asking her to dinner, and she longed to go, but didn’t dare. The only way to avoid becoming as big a slut as her mother had been was to avoid temptation like the plague. From the electrical connection she’d felt when she brushed off his clothes, Ben was a combination bubonic and pneumonic, with a big dash of anthrax thrown in.
Besides, he was Hal Jackson’s son. Grandmere would go crazy. Working for Elizabeth was bad enough.
But how was Annabelle expected to make enough money to support herself, not to mention avoiding the loss of her skills and reputation, when she’d come back to Memphis to look after Grandmere?
Elizabeth’s job offer had been a godsend. It would actually enhance Annabelle’s reputation. And it gave her a place to live while she was here as well.
Annabelle would not live in the mansion with her grandmother. The day Jonas had driven her to the plane for New York and design school, she’d made a solemn vow that she would never live there again.
Elizabeth had offered Annabelle the apartment over what was now a four-car garage, but what had originally been the carriage house. It was furnished—rather charmingly, as a matter of fact. Elizabeth Langley never did anything halfway. It was almost as large as her loft in SoHo. It even had a fireplace.
Now that she had shoved some of the furniture out of the way, set up a trestle table and brought in a sewing machine and serger, she had plenty of room to keep working until all hours of the night.
Better than sleep. Back where it had all happened, her dreams were even more troubled. She would not resort to pills. Reality was bad enough. Altered reality was a horror not to be contemplated.
She began to climb the steps to the workroom once more. What kind of human being marks the day she will finally be free as “when Grandmere dies?” A monster, obviously. But then, once a monster, always a monster. At least here everybody expected her to behave monstrously.
Ben had remembered her instantly; he’d gotten all embarrassed over his remark about killing his mother. In New York no one would have made the connection. In New York she was not Annabelle Langley, the bad seed.
“You all right?” Marian Wadsworth’s callused fingers stopped plying her needle for a moment and let the piece of Venice lace she held lie loose in her lap.
“Fine.” Annabelle shoved her hair out of her face for the fiftieth time since morning. “I am going to shave my head like a Buddhist nun.”
“It would grow back wilder than before.”
Annabelle picked up a foot-long piece of rayon seam binding off the floor and tied her hair into a ponytail at the back of her head. Without a rubber band, the binding would hold for an hour or so before it slid off.
She saw the glint of one of the missing paillettes in the crack between two floorboards and bent to pick it up. Then she saw another and dropped onto her hands and knees. “Funny thing. Ben Jackson nearly fell on me.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“He was up in that big old oak. I didn’t even know he was there, then suddenly, wham, he drops out of nowhere at my feet.”
Marian laughed and picked up the lace. “When he was a child he shinned up that tree whenever he wanted to get away.” She turned serious. “After Judy was killed, I think he practically lived up there all summer. It’s where he did his grieving. Is he all right?”
“Yes, Marian, your darling is all right, and incidentally, so am I.”
“I can see that, Belle, that’s why I asked about Ben.”
“I brushed him off and sent him back inside looking amazingly little the worse for wear. Ah, gotcha!” she added as she found another paillette.
“He was always one of those Teflon children who came from school looking as neat as he did when he left home.” Marian shook her head.
“I, on the other hand, looked as though I’d been through a wrestling match ten seconds after I dressed. Used to drive Grandmere frantic.” She sat back on her heels.
“How is she today?”
“Cross your fingers. I haven’t had a single call from the sitter, or nurse, or whatever they’re calling themselves these days.”
“Caregiver,