A Self-Made Man

Kara grinned goofily, apparently struck dumb by Adam’s smile, and then overcompensated by vigorously pumping his hand. He didn’t protest. He merely raised one eyebrow in mild curiosity and allowed her to continue. Finally, Kara seemed to notice that she still held his hand and let go abruptly, apologizing in unintelligible mortification.

Tilly chuckled. Turning to her other side, she slipped her arm around Lacy’s shoulders. “And of course,” she said with just a hint of protective warning in her voice, “you must remember our little Lacy.”

Lacy forced herself to meet his gaze, bracing for the pain of recognition. She had always loved Adam’s eyes. Stunning blue dramatically framed by black brows and black velvet lashes. Clear, intelligent, audacious, sexy. Uptilted with a secret laughter he had reserved for her, glowing with a rogue tenderness that lay deep beneath the streetwise facade.

And the fire—oh, yes, the fire! Startled by the sight, she realized that she had naively assumed that their decade of separation would have extinguished Adam’s fire—just as it had snuffed her own. But it was still there, the fire that had warmed the coldest nights of her life….

Apparently it would take more than ten years to turn Adam Kendall to ice. She could only imagine the parade of women who had lined up to keep the flames alive after he left Pringle Island, and Lacy, behind.

She fought a shiver that skimmed across her shoulder blades and, somehow, with the help of Tilly’s firm embrace, held her posture erect. She offered him a smile and held out pale, numb fingers.

“Hello, Adam,” she said with extreme courtesy. “Welcome back.”

He took her hand. His tanned fingers were warm, his grip so strong her bones pressed tightly together. But she hardly felt either warmth or pain. He might as well have been shaking hands with a plastic mannequin.

“Hello, Mrs. Morgan,” he said, and she wondered whether anyone else could hear the slow, scathing emphasis on her name. “This is a pleasure. You’re looking well.”

“She’s looking well? Nonsense!” Tilly tightened her hold. “She’s looking magnificent, and you know it. Bellisima, no crees?”

Adam once again scanned Lacy slowly. “Yes,” he agreed finally. “Bellisima. She’s right, Mrs. Morgan. You’re looking particularly…prosperous. Marriage seems to have agreed with you.”

Tilly frowned. “Adam—”

But Lacy had, at long last, found her tongue. Apparently even mannequins could speak up if pushed far enough.

“And traveling has obviously agreed with you, Adam,” she observed pointedly, scanning his crisp, sinfully well-cut tuxedo in a deliberate replication of his earlier perusal of her. “You’re polished to a rather high gloss yourself.”

He shrugged, smiling. “Just window dressing.” He cocked his head sideways, proving his point by suddenly looking far more like a pirate than a gentleman. “Apparently, Mrs. Morgan, we’ve both learned the value of wearing the right uniform.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Uniform?” His smile was really quite unpleasant. Why, then, did it still cause that little hitch in her heartbeat?

“Yes.” His grin broadened, though it never quite reached his eyes. “After all, if you don’t suit up, they won’t let you play, will they?”

She took a moment to breathe past her anger. How dare he? Perhaps his clothing was just a costume, a veneer applied to disguise the irreverent rebel he had always been, but her transformation was deeper, more fundamental. She wasn’t that same untamed child he had once known, painfully thin from poverty, slightly scraggy from neglect, starved for love. His love.

No, by God, she hadn’t “suited up” to play a poised young widow. She had changed far more than her gown. She was no longer naive, desperate or foolish. And she had learned to live without love.

“I really wouldn’t know,” she said coolly. “Unfortunately, I have very little time to play games. Which reminds me, I should be getting back to the other guests.”

She ignored Kara’s shocked inhale, not caring whether the woman thought she was rude. How could Kara understand? Kara Karlin, the mayor’s daughter, knew nothing of Lacy’s past. Lacy Mayfair simply hadn’t existed for the Pringle Island upper crust. Socially, she had been “born” on the day she married Malcolm Morgan.

Lacy turned to Tilly. “Perhaps you should take Adam and show him some of our more expensive paintings,” she said, meeting Tilly’s worried gaze with a grim implacability. “After all, now that he’s gone to the trouble of suiting up as a rich philanthropist, we certainly wouldn’t want to deny him the chance to get in the game, would we?”

UP IN THE OLD HAYLOFT, right next to the hot black spotlight that had been trained on the podium below, Gwen Morgan looked down on her stepmother, who was conversing with some rich guy in a tuxedo. Lacy looked spectacular tonight, Gwen acknowledged reluctantly. That vivid blue suited her, and the choice to go without earrings or necklace was brave in this crowd, but somehow right. Every other woman looked vulgar compared to the elegant widow Morgan.

But then, when didn’t Lacy Morgan look perfect? She had been making Gwen feel ugly, awkward and clumsy, either over-or underdressed, and occasionally even downright invisible, for the past ten years.

Gwen nudged the spotlight an inch, so that its light caught the crown of Lacy’s head, shining on the thick, glossy knot of exquisitely dressed hair. Another flawless call. Gwen touched her own tangled mass of perverse curls, remembering the day, years ago, when she had nearly scorched it all off her head trying to iron it into some desperate approximation of Lacy’s long, swinging pageboy.

Her father, telephoned by the nuns who ran the elite boarding school where Gwen had been incarcerated at the time, had been furious. What fool would bother such a busy man over such a triviality? “Just leave it alone, for God’s sake,” he had barked. “Your hair is problematic enough already.”

Problematic. Even at thirteen, she had known the word was a euphemism for “disappointing.” He’d found her problematic all around—from her messy hair to her bad grades, from her pitiful tennis serve to her intractable acne. And especially problematic had been her maddening habit of being in the way when her father wanted to be alone with Lacy.

Lacy Mayfair Morgan. Her “stepmother.” Her father’s new child bride. A child bride only five years older than Gwen herself. A child bride who, though she’d been born on the wrong side of the tracks, had definitely inherited what Gwen had started to sarcastically call the Sleek Gene.

As Gwen watched now, Lacy smoothly turned away from the tuxedo guy to speak to some other penguin-suited moneybags. The younger girl had a sudden, regressive urge to throw something down on her stepmother’s understated French hairdo. A spitball, maybe, or a water balloon…

Naw. Why bother? It would just give Lacy another chance to handle herself with magnificent aplomb, showcasing the Serene Gene, which apparently was also in her DNA. Gwen watched her stepmother move safely out of range, and she wondered if this was what God felt like. Bigger, higher, above the fray, comfortably able to pass judgment anonymously.

She sighed irritably. Probably not. For one thing, she was pretty sure God didn’t have pests like Teddy Kilgore fiddling insistently at her navel ring.

She captured Teddy’s thumb and squeezed it hard. “Put your paw on my belly button one more time, and I’ll break every one of your fingers.”

It was too dark up here for her glare to have much effect, but she frowned at him anyway. At twenty-one, Teddy Kilgore was two years younger than she was, a straight-A pre-med student, the apple of his snobby mother’s eye, and pretty much a roaring bore. But ever since the day Gwen had come home from boarding school wearing her first training bra, Teddy had been making passes at her every chance he got.

Sometimes she liked it. Sometimes she didn’t. Right now she wished he’d have another beer. Maybe then he’d pass out and let her concentrate on watching the Stepwitch.

No one but Teddy knew Gwen was in town yet. She would have to announce herself eventually, of course. She needed someplace to stay. And, naturally, she needed an advance on her monthly check, which only Lacy could arrange. But Gwen wasn’t ready. She wanted to have these few minutes of secret superiority, silently observing Lacy before the balance of power shifted, as it always did, back to her stepmother.

“Damn it, Teddy,” Gwen whispered, exasperated. The young man had leaned over and begun nibbling at the small gold navel ring, pulling it between his teeth. She couldn’t shove him away without losing an inch of skin, so she grabbed a handful of his silky black hair and tightened her fist warningly. “That hurts.”

He lifted his head and gave her a pout that he undoubtedly thought was sexy. “Aw, c’m’on. If you don’t want men to play with it, why do you wear it?”

“That’s the important word,” she answered, not easing her grip on his hair even fractionally. “Men. Unfortunately you don’t qualify.”

“Well, darn.” Teddy took his disappointment in stride. He rolled over, lying flat on his stomach on the loft, and wiggled his fingers in front of the spotlight. “Look,” he said mischievously. “I can make dirty finger shadows on the curtains down there.”

Gwen looked, wondering if there might be any amusement in a game like that, but though she could see some hazy movement on the curtains behind the podium, she couldn’t make out details. Teddy might have been creating a bunny or a T-rex. She squinted. Or maybe a profile of Adolph Hitler?

Teddy was chuckling, apparently more impressed by his efforts than she was. “Look. I learned this one at school. It’s two people with—”

“Shhh!” Gwen put her hand over Teddy’s fingers and captured them against her pink crystal-studded T-shirt. Lacy was nearby again, this time talking to someone Gwen couldn’t see. Gwen thought she had heard her own name mentioned. “I want to listen to this.”

“What—?”

“Shh!”

“—and we understand she’s been living in Boston,” the disembodied voice was saying, the tones making Boston sound as decadent as Gomorrah. A Pringle Island snob, then—Gwen knew the type. Her father had been the worst. “We couldn’t believe it, of course, but we were actually told that Gwen was installed in a doctor’s household…acting as an au pair!”

Lacy looked unfazed. “Yes,” she said. “I believe that’s true.”

“Oh, Lacy, my dear.” The speaker, who Gwen finally recognized as Jennifer Lansing, the town’s official Minister of Gossip, made a wounded little note of utterly false sympathy. “I know how you must feel. A nanny! After all the advantages you and Malcolm gave her, to be working as a, well, it’s really just a glorified baby-sitter, isn’t it? Malcolm must be turning over in his grave.”

Lacy laughed. “Surely he would understand. She’s quite young, after all. There’s plenty of time to pick a real career.”

Jennifer sniffed. “She’s only a few years younger than you, Lacy dear, and… Well, really, there’s no comparison, is there? Still, perhaps baby-sitting is a step up from her last job, which I hear was waitressing in Spandex tube tops at the Honeydew Café. Better babies than lewd old men with roaming hands, I suppose.”

Lacy bowed her elegant head, accepting the other woman’s sympathy. “I’m sure you’re right. But speaking of babies, have you seen the lovely Verengetti that was donated tonight? I can’t help picturing it in your conservatory. Not everyone has a room with enough scope and style to carry off a painting like that, but you…”