Copper Lake Secrets

“Just Jones.” His voice was deep, his accent Southern with a hint of something else. Black hair a bit too long for her taste framed olive skin and the darkest eyes she’d ever looked into. Mysterious was the first descriptor that leaped into her head, followed quickly by more: handsome. Sexy. Maybe dangerous.

She shook his hand, noting callused skin, long fingers, heat, a kind of lazy strength.

He released her hand and sat back again. She resisted the urge to tuck both hands under her arms and laid them flat on the marble instead. Rather than deal with Grandmother head-on, she directed a question to the general area between them. “The house appears to be in good shape. What are you restoring?” Left to her, she would be tearing the place down, not fixing it up.

“You can’t judge a house by its facade. Everything gets creaky after fifteen years.” Grandmother’s tone remained snippy when she went on. “Mr. Jones is an expert in garden restoration. He’s going to bring back Fair Winds’ gardens to their former glory. Not that you ever bothered to learn family history, Clarice, but a few generations ago, the gardens here were considered the best in all of the South and the rest of the country, as well. They were designed by one of the greatest landscape architects of the time. They covered fourteen acres and took ten years to complete.”

She waited, obviously, for a response from Reece. The only one she gave was inconsequential. “I go by Reece now.”

Grandmother’s lips pursed and her blue gaze sharpened. Across the table from her, Jones was making a point of gazing off into the distance, looking at neither of them.

“Gardens. Really.” Too little too late, judging by Grandmother’s expression. The only flowers Reece had ever seen at Fair Winds were the wild jasmine that grew in the woods. Her mother had told her their name and urged her to breathe deeply of their fragrance. Not long after, Valerie had left, the emptiness in Reece’s memory had begun and the smell of jasmine always left her melancholy.

A shiver passed over her, like a cloud over the sun, but she ignored it, focusing on the stranger again. Did just Jones look like a landscape architect, or whatever his title would be? She’d never met a landscape architect, but she doubted it. He seemed more the outdoors type, the one who’d do the actual work to bring the architect’s plans to life. His skin was bronzed, his T-shirt stretched across a broad chest, and his arms were hard-muscled. He was a man far better acquainted with hard work than desk-sitting.

“Sit,” Grandmother commanded, pointing to an empty chair as she got to her feet without a hint of creakiness. “Entertain Mr. Jones while I get some papers from your grandfather’s study. We’ll let him get started, and then we’ll talk.”

Reece obediently moved to the chair, automatically stiffening her spine, the way Grandmother had nagged her that summer. Howard women do not slump. Howard women hold their heads high. Howard women—

The door closed with a click, followed by a chuckle nearby. Her gaze switched to the gardener/architect wearing a look of amusement. “That last bit sounded like a threat, didn’t it?”

And then we’ll talk. It was a threat. And even though she’d come there just for that purpose, at the moment, it was the last thing in the world she wanted to do.

Swallowing hard, she tried instead to focus on the rest of Grandmother’s words. She might have trust issues and abandonment issues and a tad of melodrama, but she could be polite to a stranger. Her mother required it. Her job required it. Hell, life required it. But the question that came out wasn’t exactly polite.

“So … is Jones your first name or last?”

Chapter 2

“Does it matter?” Jones asked, aware his lazy tone gave no hint of the tension thrumming through him. She didn’t appear to recognize either him or his name, didn’t appear to realize she’d asked him that question once before, the first time they’d met. Had he been so forgettable? Considering that he and Glen had saved her life, he’d think not … but she was, after all, a Howard.

Or was she just damn good at pretending? At lying?

He’d thought he’d lucked out when he returned to the farm this morning to a job offer that would give him virtually unlimited access to the Howard property, but having Clarice Howard show up, too … If there were a casino nearby, he’d head straight there to place all sorts of bets because today he was definitely hot.

He’d looked for her on the internet and had found several Clarice Howards, just not the right one. He’d asked the gossipy waitress at the restaurant next to the motel about her, but the woman hadn’t recognized the name, didn’t know anything about a Howard granddaughter. She’d had nothing but good, though, to say about the grandson, Mark, who lived in Copper Lake.

Mark, who, along with Reece, was the last person Jones had seen with his brother. Mark, who had threatened both Glen and Jones.

“I take it you don’t live around here,” he remarked.

“No.” That seemed all she wanted to say, but after a moment, she went on. “I live in New Orleans.”

“The Big Easy.”

“Once upon a time.” Another moment, then a gesture toward his truck. “You’re from Kentucky?”

“I live there.” He was from a small place in South Carolina, just a few miles across the Georgia state line. He’d been back only once in fifteen years. His father had begun the conversation with “Are you back to stay?” and ended it a few seconds later with a terse “Then you should go.” He’d followed up with closing the door in Jones’s face.

Big Dan was not a forgiving man.

“What brings you to Georgia?” he asked.

Reece didn’t shift uncomfortably in the wrought-iron chair, but he had the impression she wanted to. “A visit to my grandmother.”

“She was surprised to see you. You don’t come often?”

“It’s been a while.”

Then her gaze met his. Soft brown eyes. He liked all kinds of women, but brown-eyed blondes were a particular weakness. Not this one, though. Not one who, his gut told him, was somehow involved in Glen’s disappearance.

“What made you think Grandmother was surprised?”

“I’m good at reading people.” Truth was, he’d heard Miss Willa gasp the instant she’d gotten a good look at Reece. Lord, she looks like her daddy, the old woman had murmured. I never thought …

She’d ever see her again? The resemblance to her father couldn’t have been that surprising. She looked the same as she had fifteen years ago, just older. She still wore her hair short and sleek; she still had that honey-gold skin; she still had an air about her of … fragility, he decided. She was five foot seven, give or take an inch, and slender but not unappealingly so. She didn’t look like a waif in need of protection, but everything else about Reece Howard said she was.

But appearances, he well knew, were often deceiving.

Deliberately he changed the subject. “Do you know much about the old gardens?”

Despite the change, the stiffness in her shoulders didn’t ease a bit. Would she be against the project? Was she envisioning her inheritance being frittered away on flowers and fountains? “No, Grandmother’s right. I didn’t learn the family history the way a proper Howard should.”

History could be overrated. He knew his own family history for generations, but that still didn’t make them want any contact with him. They didn’t feel any less betrayed; he didn’t feel any less rejected.

“I’ve seen photos from as early as the 1870s,” he went on, his gaze settling on the fountain beside them. Built of marble and brick, with a statue in the middle, it was silent, dirty, the water stagnant in the bottom. “They were incredible. Fountains, pools, terraces.

Wildflowers, herb gardens, roses … They covered this entire area—” he waved one hand in a circle “—and extended into the woods for the shade gardens. Fair Winds once had more varieties of azaleas and crape myrtles than any other garden in the country.”

“And you’re going to replant all that.” Her tone was neutral, no resistance but no enthusiasm, either.

“Probably not all, but as much as we can. We have the original plans, photographs, detailed records from the head gardeners. We can make it look very much like it used to.”

“What happened to the gardens?”

He shrugged. “Apparently, your grandfather had everything removed. The pools were filled in, the statues taken away, the terraces leveled. Miss Willa didn’t say why, and I didn’t ask.”

Reece muttered something, but all he caught was mean and old. She’d missed the funeral, Miss Willa had said. Grandfather or not, apparently Reece wasn’t missing Arthur Howard.

Shadow fell over them, and the wind swirled with a chill absent a few seconds earlier. A few brown leaves rattled against the base of the fountain, then grew still as the air did.

As Reece did. She sat motionless, goose bumps raised all the way down her arms. He considered offering an explanation—a cloud over the sun, though there were no clouds in the sky; a gust of mechanically-cooled air from an open window or door, though he could see none of those, either—but judging by the look on her face, she didn’t need an explanation. She knew better than him the truth behind the odd moment.

Here there really were ghosties.

Did she know what he’d come to find out? Was one of them Glen’s?

Before he could say anything else, the door to the house opened and Miss Willa hustled out, her arms filled with ancient brown accordion folders and books. He rose to carry them for her, but she brushed him off and set them on the table. “These are all the records I could lay my hands on at the moment. Clarice may be able to find more in her grandfather’s boxes while she’s here.”