Scandal in Copper Lake

“Who you are. Why you’re here. What you’re up to.”

“You know who I am. Do I need an explanation for coming to stay at a house I’ve owned for twenty-three years? As for what I’m up to…I’m resting. Taking a break from my regular life. Retreating.” After a long drink of lemonade, she went on. “I suspect Mr. Kennedy’s primary interest is what I want with Miss Lydia.”

“What do you want with Miss Lydia?”

“For me, nothing. My mother had a message for her that I agreed to pass on.”

Skepticism crossed Robbie’s face. “You talk to your dead mother?”

Ignoring the sting of pain deep inside, Anamaria shook her head. “I don’t have that ability. She speaks to my grandmother.” As a small child, Anamaria would have been afraid to suddenly hear Mama’s voice again. As a teenager, she would have given a lot to hear her say one more time, Everything’s gonna be all right, baby doll. As an adult, she felt snubbed. She hadn’t asked for any sort of abilities, but if she had to have something, why couldn’t it have been the one gift that would allow her to connect with the mother she missed so desperately?

“What are your abilities?”

She smiled the aloof, mysterious sort of smile that customers always responded to. “I can read your palm, your tea leaves or your cards. I can look into your future and tell you something so vague it could be taken a dozen ways. I can gaze into the crystal ball or throw the bones or study your astral charts and give you information so startlingly imprecise that it could apply to anything or nothing at all.”

“So you’re a total fraud.” He grinned. He was handsome enough when his mouth was set in a grim line, but when he grinned…That flash of blinding-white teeth made his dark hair darker, his blue eyes bluer, his bronzed skin damn near lustrous.

A warning sounded distantly in her mind. Men and love were the downfall of the Duquesne women, together more dangerous than anything else they might face. So far, she had managed to avoid feeling passionately about anyone, but she was always on watch, always drawing away.

But if any man was safe for her, it was this one. Robbie Calloway was the most elite of an elite group. He was white, very socially aware, raised with two hundred years of teaching that the races didn’t mingle. His family, his church, his country club, his office, his circle of friends—all white. He’d dated enough women to populate a sorority house or two—all white. He wasn’t a threat to Anamaria.

Though he might make her a threat to herself.

“Did you take time from your busy workday just to check me out?”

His smile was wry. “Yeah, I lead a busy life. Twenty hours a week in the office is about ten too many for my tastes.”

“I thought you were a successful lawyer.” She hadn’t lied about reading the newspaper; reading back issues of the Clarion had been one of the first things she’d done once she’d decided to make this journey. His name appeared on a regular basis, as much for professional activities as for social ones.

“I am successful. I just don’t see the point of expending too much time or energy at it.”

“It’s not your passion?”

He drained his lemonade, then set the glass next to the pitcher. She asked with a gesture if he’d like more; he shook his head. “I feel passionate about some of my cases, but the job itself? No. Is scamming—sorry, I mean advising—people your passion?”

“One of them.” She loved her work, her family, her job at Auntie Lueena’s diner. The only thing that could make her life better was having her mother and baby sister in it.

“What are the others?”

“That’s an impertinent question to ask someone you’ve just met.”

Robbie shrugged, his deep-green shirt rippling over nice muscles. “What was the message for Lydia Kennedy?”

The change of subject caught Anamaria off guard, though she hid it. “That’s Miss Lydia’s business. It’s not my place to share.”

“If I ask her, she’ll tell me.”

“So ask her.”

He studied her a moment, then slowly smiled. “I’ll do that.”

She doubted Lydia would have any qualms about sharing. The message had been innocent enough: good wishes from a white-haired man who loved to garden, along with a reminder to look out for his prized irises. It really had come from Glory, through Mama Odette, though no doubt Robbie was skeptical. He was a lawyer who believed in evidence, hard facts. Anamaria was a dreamer who took many things on faith. His feet were firmly planted in his reality; she was adrift in her own.

“How long will you be staying in Copper Lake?”

“I don’t know. Maybe long enough for Mr. Kennedy to finance another toy for you.” She waved one hand languidly in the direction of the Corvette. Automobiles were transportation to her, nothing more. Mama Odette had never owned a car or learned to drive. Even now, closing in on seventy, she preferred her own two feet for getting around. That was why the good Lord gave them to her, wasn’t it?

Anamaria prayed the good Lord would let her grandmother continue getting around. She was having a hard time recovering from this last stint in the hospital. Her heart was weak, the cardiologist said. Maybe not so much, Mama Odette had declared with a wink. There’s still livin’ left to do. Fortunes to tell, places to go, people to meet.

Robbie looked offended at her description of his car. “That’s the sweetest car this side of Atlanta. She has 327 cubes at 365 horsepower and tops out at 140 miles per hour.”

The words meant nothing to her. Duquesne women weren’t mechanically inclined, but they had a knack for finding men who were. “A high-performance toy. It won’t take you anywhere my Honda won’t go.”

“No, but I’ll get there in style,” he said with a grin as he rose from the rocker. It creaked in protest a few times—at the movement? Or his leaving?

Anamaria stood, as well, and walked to the screen door with him. She was tall, five-ten in her bare feet, but he stood a few inches taller. He moved with the ease of someone who’d always known his place in the world. He did wondrous things for khakis and a polo shirt, and he smelled rich and sexy and very, very classy. He was most definitely what Auntie Lueena would call a fine catch—with four daughters, Lueena was ever hopeful that one would break the curse and marry—and yet he remained single.

It wasn’t Anamaria’s place to wonder why.

“Thank you for the lemonade and your time,” he said as he passed through the doorway. On the second step he turned back, the charming smile still in place but absent from his eyes. “Watch your step with Lydia. She’s like family to me, and you don’t want to go messing with my family.”

Anamaria leaned against the doorjamb, one arm outstretched to hold the screen door open. “You don’t want to go messing with Miss Lydia, either. She knows what she wants and how to get it.”

He raised one hand as if to touch the strand of hair that had fallen loose from its clasp and now brushed her shoulder, then, only inches away, lowered it again. “You know what you want, too, don’t you? And you know how to get it. Luckily, I know how to stop you.”

With those words, he took the remaining steps two at a time, strode across the dirt and got behind the wheel of his expensive little car. She watched him back out in a tight turn, then accelerate down Easy Street before she closed the door and returned to the rocker.

Robbie Calloway didn’t have a clue what she wanted. Like most skeptics, his distrust of her abilities also meant a distrust of her. She was a fraud in his eyes, not just as an advisor but as a person.

Her business was her business. What she’d said to Lydia, why she’d come to Copper Lake, everything she did…in the end, she bore sole responsibility for her actions, and she carried no regrets.

When she returned to Savannah, she would still have no regrets.

Especially not one named Robbie.

Chapter 2

Much of Copper Lake’s downtown area showed its two-hundred-year-old roots: red bricks softened to a rosy hue, dimpled glass, wood glowing with a well-deserved patina. At the heart was the square, manicured grass bordered with flowers, war monuments and walkways leading to and from the bandstand that anchored the park.

Everywhere Anamaria looked, she saw beauty, prosperity…and the Calloway name—law offices, a construction company, doctors’ and dentists’ offices, investment and accounting firms, retail shops. Robbie Calloway’s office was on River Road, the building only a few years old but built to blend in with its vintage neighbors.

Nice space for a man who thought ten hours a week in the office just fine. She worked sixty hours a week or more and would never own a place like that or a car like his. But she knew all too well that money didn’t buy happiness and neither did things. People were the only thing that mattered, and all the money in the world couldn’t buy the good ones.

Then she thought of the Civil War monument she’d just passed and amended that thought: not anymore. Such places as the Calloway Plantation and Twin Oaks, Lydia Kennedy’s home, had undoubtedly relied on slave labor to do all the jobs that kept the families clothed, fed and wealthy. Slaves such as Ophelia, Harriett, Gussie and Florence Duquesne, their children and their grandchildren.

Turning onto Carolina Avenue, she drove east. A few miles past the town limits sign was Twin Oaks, but she was meeting Lydia in town today. The older woman had suggested they meet at River’s Edge, the centerpiece of downtown. The Greek Revival mansion had undergone an extensive restoration and had been transformed into a beautiful white gem in the midst of an emerald-green lawn, all of it surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence. It was open to the public for tours, parties and weddings, Lydia had told her, but not on Wednesdays. They would have the place to themselves.

But with time to spare, Anamaria bypassed the street that would take her back to River’s Edge. She drove aimlessly, past parks and schools and stores—not the pricey ones downtown but the cheaper, shabbier ones on the outskirts. She located the church she and Glory had attended—a small structure that looked every one of its one hundred forty years in spite of its fresh coat of white paint. She tried to remember using swings on this playground, getting enrolled for kindergarten at that school, shopping for groceries at this market, dressing up in her Sunday best and skipping into the church.