Forgotten Father (15 page)

Struggling with conflicting emotions, Mitchell
watched the three leave together.

What an amazing woman.

He knew without a doubt Delanie would have the
inspector’s signature on an outdoor cooking permit before the man
left the place. That, or the damned supervisor would come by on his
way home and give them a permit. How did the woman do it?

Watching her finesse the situation left him filled
with admiration and anxiety.

On the one hand, she’d saved The Cedars from a
spectacular disaster. Botched weddings left a terrible reputation.
Particularly one as big as the Goldman/”Kiener” wedding.

Delanie had really pulled their tail out of the
fire. But watching her delicately play that jerk of a health
inspector made Mitchell uneasy inside.

She’d done it frighteningly well. Smiled at the man
with what appeared to be genuine warmth, appearing to see that
he
was the one in a dilemma, the one who had no choice but
to close them down. Smiling and agreeing and all the while, she’d
been maneuvering toward the goal. Manipulating the situation.

How easy it seemed for her.

She hadn’t done anything illegal or overtly
dishonest, but she’d gotten what she wanted.

That moron of an inspector hadn’t easily given way,
but Mitchell knew by the look on the his face that, given the
combination of Delanie’s charm and her delicate threat of involving
his supervisor, he’d cave in and sign the outdoor permit. Hell, he
might even offer to let them cook inside.

And it was all due to Delanie and her smile. Delanie
and her soothing voice. One dangerously sweet and wily woman.

Just seeing her work her magic left Mitchell queasy
inside. With a woman like her, how did a man know what to
believe?

******

Mitchell slammed the car door and waved as his
driver circled around the front drive at The Cedars and headed down
the valley road. His trip to New York had been necessary and, in
addition, conveniently timed.

He’d needed some time away from Delanie and The
Cedars dilemma to think about what his best move was now. Time to
think about her sweet generosity and the beautifully-manipulative
job she’d done on the inspector.

Having been called into the city on business almost
immediately after her handling of the health inspection crisis, he
hadn’t spoken to Delanie directly about the villa. But he hadn’t
wanted to leave the situation completely up in the air, so he’d
penned her a memo. Pushing aside his confusion about her true
character, he expressed himself in the most precise, business-like
tones. He’d simply pointed out that by going ahead with the
renovation without his consent, she’d breached their verbal
management agreement.

To his mingled frustration and amusement, she’d
faxed him a return memo to his office in New York. In it, she’d
cheerfully acknowledged that getting forgiveness was easier than
getting permission and, she wrote, he hadn’t actually ever said he
was opposed to the villa renovation.

Cheeky witch, he thought now. Waving to the desk
clerk on duty, he made his way up to his room.
He
remembered
specifically opposing the work on the villa from the first time it
had been discussed as they sat having breakfast with his
grandfather….

Mitchell frowned.

That conversation had taken place the morning after
he’d first met her, after they’d made hot, soul-wrenching love the
night before. During the weeks she couldn’t remember.

Still, he thought, shaking himself free from the
memory, she’d known the project hadn’t had his full approval and
she’d done it anyway.

Of course, he should have confronted her in person
before he’d left for New York. Only, doing so then had seemed mean
and small-minded when he remembered how magnificently she’d
salvaged the Goldberg wedding. How considerately she’d acknowledged
something as insignificant as a grown-up’s birthday.

It wasn’t like he’d earned that. He hadn’t been very
kind or encouraging to her through out the duration of their
relationship.

Hanging his overcoat in the closet, Mitchell
struggled with the increasingly frequent sensation of being off
kilter. From the time he’d graduated college and taken on the
responsibilities of managing the industries he’d inherited, he’d
always known his own mind.

Hell, he’d known his own mind when he was ten years
old when he’d made his first business deal trading baseball cards
with another kid at school.

Yet, here he was, completely at sea over a sexy
redhead who, a year and a half before, had lain waste to his…hopes
and left him only with fortitude of will. She’d done all that in
one twenty-four hour period and then forgotten him completely.

God, why couldn’t he forget her?

******

An hour later, he once more trudged up the
snow-dusted path toward the villa, his breath a frosty fog in front
of him. Apparently, there’d been a problem at the house. The hard
freeze of the night before had taken hold of the old house’s pipes
and left them spraying water into an upstairs bath.

Delanie was at the villa now, Ben Norton said,
trying to get the leaks under-control and assess the water damage
to the floors below.

He’d thought about her while he was in New York.
More than he should have, no doubt, and he couldn’t suppress the
anticipation surging through him as he climbed the steps leading to
the villa.

How could one woman provoke so many emotions in him?
He was a rational man, one who knew the costs of trusting
passion-induced emotion. How important was one small birthday
celebration, really? Yet, he found his heart pounding as he crossed
the snow-encrusted lawn to the villa’s low front step.

She was here. Right inside the house. An amazing
woman full of contradictions. One who baffled, enraged and disarmed
him. He couldn’t be sure if she were in truth a wanton who used her
sexuality to bemuse an old man into leaving her a million-dollar
property or if she was someone entirely different.

He couldn’t think of who that might be.

That she was unique seemed unquestionable.
Multi-talented and intelligent. Beautiful enough to make him sweat
in his dreams.

He’d woken twice in the last week, knowing the
images from his sleeping mind had held her laughing smile, her
teasing voice.

Walking now into the villa, he was conscious of an
unacceptable confusion about Delanie Carlyle. Shaking it off, he
looked around.

The old house still held the furnishings he
remembered as a child, he saw as he stepped through the front door.
The Regency rosewood center table in the front foyer, the
balloon-back chairs against the wall. Through the archway into the
front drawing room, he spied the George III gilded secretaire his
grandmother had found in Europe as a young bride.

The place seemed to smell still of his grandmother’s
faint perfume. Lavender. More a recollection than anything real, he
still felt her presence here.

But the place was shabby, the old-fashioned plumbing
and kitchen had been inadequate when he was a boy.

Turning, he left behind fond memories and climbed
the stairs. Ben Norton had said the leak was in the bathroom off
the blue bedroom, two doors down from the room he’d slept in as a
child, he thought irrelevantly.

“That’s it!” a worker’s thick voice called out.
“That’s stopped it.”

Traversing the Turkey-carpeted hallway to the last
bedroom on the left, Mitchell heard Delanie’s voice.

“No! We’re not ripping down the curtains to sop up
the water,” she said, her words sharp. “I don’t care how old they
are. Go get some rags and dry up the worst of the water. Then you
can go home for the day.”

A heavy-set workman scuttled out of the bedroom and
went past him down the hall.

Hearing the disgust in Delanie’s voice, Mitchell
frowned, realizing he’d never actually seen her overtly frustrated
or angry. Not even that day by the lake when he’d said some
terrible things to her. She’d just looked at him with horrified,
wounded eyes, absorbing his words rather than lashing back.

“Yes,” she said now, irritably answering another
man’s murmured question, “it’s probably a good idea to take those
sopping towels with you when you go. That’s the point, getting the
water out of here.”

Another worker overtook Mitchell in the hall. Coming
from below stairs, he entered the blue bedroom ahead of him.

“We’ve got the water to this part of the house
turned off,” he said to Delanie, a wary tone to his words.

“Good,” she said, not acknowledging Mitchell when he
stepped into the room.

Dressed in a long, slender skirt of a rusty color
and a long-sleeved shirt with a patterned vest over it, she looked
even more beautiful than usual. And thoroughly annoyed which was
very unusual.

“We’ve checked the boilers. They won’t go off again
in the night,” the man assured her.

“They didn’t—“ she stopped, her voice softening
fractionally. “Thanks, Henderson.”

“You’re welcome. Banks and I are leaving now, if
that’s okay.”

“Fine.” She lifted her hand in a faintly weary wave
as she turned back to the sodden bathroom.

“So we sprung a leak,” Mitchell said, moving to the
door of the bathroom.

Delanie swung around, glaring at him. “Yes. That’s
what happens when pipes freeze.”

“Really?” he murmured, curious about what had put
her in such a rage. He’d seen the woman handle daunting adversity
with quick wit and a ready smile. Where had her breezy sense of
humor gone?

The white-tiled bathroom floor still had puddles
standing here and there. The crew member who’d returned with the
rags, knelt there now, swiping at the wet spots while Delanie
examined a gaping hole in the tile above the claw-footed tub.

“Is that where the break occurred?” Mitchell
asked.

“One of them,” she responded tersely.

He frowned. “How many pipes broke?”

“Two,” she snapped, not looking at him. “One here
and one in the space between the floors.”

“So they flooded—“

“Both floors,” she said in a goaded voice. “As you
can see, this room was flooded. The one below—“

“A sitting room,” he said, his childhood memory
kicking in.

“Yes, that’s right,” she declared pugnaciously.
“Half the ceiling’s now lying on an antique settee that was worth
five thousand dollars.”

The workman who’d been sopping up the floor, rose to
his feet, a sodden mass of towels in his arms. “That’s most of it,
Delanie. Anything else you want me to do before I go?”

“No. I’ll see you in the morning.”

The usual lilt had gone completely out of her voice,
Mitchell realized as she sent the worker off, replaced by an edge
he’d never heard before. No teasing glint hovered at the back of
her eyes. Even her shoulders seemed slumped.

“So how much damage do you estimate?” he asked,
glancing at the hole in the wall.

Delanie’s head reared back.

“I don’t have an exact amount,” she said nastily,
“but don’t get your wallet in a twitch. I’ll cover the cost
myself.”

Mitchell stared at her, vaguely aware of the sound
of the heavy front door closing downstairs as the workers left.

“None of this,” she waved her hand toward the
wrecked wall, “will cost you a cent.”

“What the hell is your problem today?” he demanded,
glaring back at her.

“Look!” She yelled, still gesturing toward the hole
in the wall. “I’d say the problem is fairly obvious!”

For a long second, he fought to keep back the first
retort that came to mind.
She
was the one who’d opened this
can of worms. If left to him, the villa would have stayed sealed
and forgotten like a tomb for his disjointed childhood
memories.

No water running through the villa’s pipes, hence no
way for the pipes to freeze and break.

But he didn’t say it, didn’t throw the mess back in
her face. For some reason, she was genuinely upset and he didn’t
think leaking pipes were the whole story.

Actual anger glowed on her face. Real frustration in
her green eyes. No play-acting. No flirtatious manipulation or
maneuvering.

She stood before him, one angry, sexy redhead, her
chest rising and falling in quick breaths, a glint of tears in her
eyes.

“Delanie,” he said gently, disarmed by her distress,
“what’s really wrong?”

“I told you!” she yelled, her cheeks growing pink.
“We’ve got a damned wet mess here! Can’t you see?”

He glanced at the wall. “I see a relatively minor
mishap. You’re in the construction business. You know things happen
sometimes that are out of our control.”

“Hurricanes!” she yelled. “Tornadoes and
earthquakes! Hell, even tidal waves!
Those
are out of our
control, but
this!
This—“

She stopped, staring at him before suddenly looking
away, the anger seeming to drain away.

“—
this was my responsibility. I
made this problem myself,” she finished in a low, disgusted
voice.

He frowned, not understanding. “What do you
mean?”

Delanie walked past him, subsiding onto the edge of
the claw-foot bathtub.

“I was the last one to leave here last night,” she
said, not looking at him.

“So?” He went to sit next to her, struggling with an
urge to comfort her distress.

“I was the last one to leave,” she said again,
lifting her gaze to his, “and I…turned down the heat.”

She sprang up from the tub to pace in front of him,
disgust in every line of her body. “I’ve worked in this part of the
country for years! I know what the weather is capable of this time
of year. How could I be so stupid as to try and conserve on heat!
Of all the idiotic things to do!

She’d known he was against spending the money on
redoing this place, Mitchell thought. How much had that contributed
to her concern about the utility costs?