AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Her brow arced.
“You must be upset and ready to get back home,” I said, gesturing toward the Audi parked on the gravel drive. “Let me take you back. I had someone pick up your things so you can get settled in today.”
She cleared her throat, not moving.
“You were my father’s friend,” she said, her voice hoarse.
I nodded.
“Did you like him?”
“We were very close and I had a lot of respect for him,” I said carefully, unwilling to unload the last decade of the closest friendship of my life onto his daughter.
She tilted her chin, squinting across the cemetery.
“I’m glad you had a good experience with him,” she said. “I didn’t. I’m not happy he’s dead, but I’m not sad. Does that bother you?”
I fumbled for words, unused to such honesty.
“No…anything you feel is valid,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “I just wanted to get that out of the way. I didn’t like him very much, I’m not really sad, and I’m ready to move on. Okay?”
I nodded, speechless. My grief had made me a shadow of myself for the last week. Sitting alone late at night with a whiskey in my hand. Staring up at Edwin’s portrait on my office wall. Eyes dry and mind reeling.
She lifted her hand, palm up, and I stared down at it, unsure what she wanted me to do with it. She gave a little sigh of exasperation and grabbed my hand, threading her fingers through mine.
I stared down at it and a slow, pleasant warmth moved up my wrist to my forearm and ended up somewhere near my heart.
“I want to have lunch,” she said.
She told me later that was the first time she’d ever held anyone’s hand, except her best friend Candice’s. I wondered, as I led her across the grass to my car, why she was so eager to trust me.
It made more sense as time went on.
She’d lived her life without the sun. Her father’s death had ripped the curtain from the window.
We were both silent as I drove back to my house outside Providence. It was a huge, East Coast mansion surrounded by an iron fence and locked with a gate and a guardhouse.
I guided the Audi down the winding driveway, around the loop, and pulled up before the front door. She kept her face glued to the window, staring around with big eyes. Taking in the neatly trimmed garden and the pool, covered for the winter.
I got out and went to circle the car to let her out, but she was already on her feet, crunching across the gravel. Turning in slow circles with her big, ocean eyes drinking everything in.
She stopped at the bottom of the steps, spinning to face me.
“Do you live alone?”
“Not anymore,” I said.
Her face broke into a slow smile. “This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.”
I’d spent a lot of time and money to make my house exactly the way I liked it. It was a quiet estate and the house was decorated with only the finest materials. Dark oak, hardwood, marble counters, brass doorknobs.
It meant a lot to me that she liked it.
Inside, I led her down the hall to her bedroom and pushed open the door. My assistant had purchased a cherry wood frame and white, fluffy blankets for the bed. The floor was garnished with a soft creamy rug and the heavy drapes matched.
It was elegant and feminine, what I assumed young women wanted.
