Stone Kissed (4 page)

Her shoulders slumped in resignation. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Yes, you will.” He meant it to be a warning, but it felt like a promise.

***

I belong here.

Her fingers tingled as she stepped from the car, picking her way carefully through the gravel past Delia’s little wreck.

Cecily always got a rush of energy when she touched this soil. She’d snuck up here countless times in the three years since her return from that unfortunate period in New York City in order to see, to
feel
what should have been hers. As her red heels hit the paved walkway, she stopped to survey the front façade. She’d entered the house through the front only once before and only reached the foyer. The old bastard must have been tone-deaf because he hadn’t responded to the music in her voice or the vitality of her skin. He’d given her nothing and told her to be on her way.

When she owned the estate, she’d park in front every damned day. She’d walk in the front door, toss her coat and bag to the latest butler—or toss her things to the floor and drag him upstairs.

“Delia?” she called, but no one answered.

The house itself was a disappointment. Russ’s fire should have eaten the house from the kitchen hearth outward, breaking its bones, blackening its stones. At least the east windows had blown out, leaving gaping black holes where once light reflected off glass. Cheery yellow police tape draped the entrances. Scorch marks decorated the stone around the windows, but otherwise, she saw little evidence her fire had done any worthwhile damage.

Logically, it was for the best. She’d only wanted the house to be devalued. Demolition would come later—there was money in these chunks of granite brick. But the true worth and power of the Steward estate was in the ground itself, not in this cold heap of rock jutting up from the earth like the last tooth in a bleached jawbone.

She inhaled the thick smoky perfume of the fire and stepped onto the ash-coated walnut of the foyer. When she slammed her heel down, the impact reverberated up her thigh. The wood held solid. Dumbass Russ hadn’t done much damage at all. She picked her way to the back of the house, running her fingertips through the soot on the walls and grinding her shoe into small chunks of carbonized wood strips and plaster.

“Delia?” Absolute silence. Dark, cold silence. God, how she hated this house.

The kitchen was the heart of damage—this, at least, Russ had done correctly. But Cecily smelled the vestiges of kerosene and gasoline and sighed. One lonely old drunk and a gas stove. How hard could it have been to do what she’d told him?

Her men never started out this stupid, she swore. Gradually, however, each of her lovers lost fundamental common sense at the rate they gained a new set of wrinkles.

She was better now at dosing them out. As a teenager she hadn’t yet learned to balance her needs with her resources, which led to awkward times with her parents. She didn’t blame Mother. It wasn’t easy raising a succubus, especially when Daddy’s only indication of the Steward power was his exceptionally green thumb. When Cecily hit puberty she learned how to feed her need by trial and error: Her errors, her mother’s trials.

But Cecily had gotten it together. She’d learned her lessons, learned how to pace herself, to work through temporary hunger and to find untraceable food. Once she owned this pile of bricks and the vital earth upon which it stood, Mother would come back from their so-called “retirement” and bring Daddy with her.

Tugging on the skeletal remnants of a circular photo frame, Cecily jerked the bits of wire from a nail on a burnt-out stud. Which venerable ancestor had this been? She crushed the wires together and snapped them in half.

It was a pity the old man was still alive, but comas were good. She could work with a coma, and she could handle her cousin too. For a legitimate Steward Witch, Delia was a frail little thing, always hiding in corners and hugging the walls. Her mother had been powerless, and Delia wasn’t much better. She chatted with lawn ornaments and pissing-cherub fountains, and was naïve enough to believe no one else knew. But her sideshow skills couldn’t compare to Cecily’s own power—the ability to take a man’s will, to take a man’s life.

“What are you doing in here, Cess?”

“Just looking around, Carl. Trying to get a valuation.” She was annoyed with herself. The fat-ass chief of Stewardsville’s police force of two had snuck up behind her.

“Got a call that someone was seen on the property. Should have known it was you.” He looked up at the nail she’d left in the wall. “You’ll do well on this one. She has no money.”

God bless him, he was trying to be nice. He might not remember. They often didn’t—especially married ones like Carl. It was in their best interests to forget they’d ever touched Cecily Johnson.

“Is that so?”

Delia Forrest had a few thousand dollars in equipment and the crap in her father’s junk store. Cecily knew how much back rent Delia’s father owed for the store, because Daddy owned most of the buildings on West Main and let her manage the properties in his retirement.

Daddy wouldn’t be happy about losing his long-term tenant. Stewardsville, however, needed a coffee shop with Wi-Fi: Something trendy and funky for young women of ambition and men of vitality. Daddy was a brilliant businessman and would see the value in her idea—if she could ever get past Mother to speak to him.

“Such a shame,” she murmured.

“Such a crime,” Carl spat back. She looked him over. They had gone to school together, but he looked at least a dozen years older. She blamed the cigarettes. She’d seldom sipped from him, and not at all since returning from her marriage debacle. She’d taken longer than she should’ve to learn not to shit where she ate. Unfortunately, today she might have to sip a little from Carl.

“Stupid kids.” She tested the waters.

“Don’t think this was a prank.”

Cecily shook her head and stepped into him. “You’ll never figure this one out.” She put a slight purr in her voice, just enough to keep him rooted to the spot.

“Actually…” Carl’s voice trailed off. His eyes widened in his round face, and his arms dropped to frame the barrel-shaped torso in his shiny dark blue uniform jacket. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead.

“No.” She shook her head and lifted his chin. “You don’t have a clue.”

The next morning Grant drove Delia in silence to her car. He followed her to the bank. He waited in a chair in the vice president’s office while she signed the paperwork in the conference room. The bank president himself notarized the forms, the only sound in the room the quiet scratching of pens. With every slash of ink, Delia cut herself off from the magic which had both plagued her and given her a home. The Steward family’s eulogy was written on a banker’s receipt.

But that was the easy part. The hard part had been holding herself together with him in the building. He strode through the bank as if he owned it. The admiring gazes of the tellers and the expectant smile of the vice-president followed him into the conference room. He slashed his own name in ink and stepped out again, and Delia couldn’t help but watch him go. He’d said he’d meet her at the shop, but for all intents and purposes, Grant Wolverton was finished with her. She was glad of it, she told herself.

She made it out of the parking lot, all the way to the hospital, past Frank and up to the flimsy plastic visitor’s chair in her father’s room. Only then had Delia released the dry, silent sob she’d been holding in her gut. She studied her father, the man she was giving up her business, her city apartment, her tiny little
life
for. She braced her hands on her knees and pushed herself upright.

He looked worse today. What Delia could see of his face was swollen up like an overripe tomato, as if the slightest touch might split the skin. His eyelashes were lost in the narrow cuts where his eyelids and cheeks folded together. Doctor Bustamante’d said he would swell from the IV fluids, but she hadn’t imagined anything like this. He was grotesque.

The doctor had asked her about Father’s state of mind and his alcohol consumption, but Delia had no answers. Was Father depressed? Perhaps. More so than usual? She didn’t know.

Fortunately his wounds were, for the most part, superficial-to-medium-depth burns, although some patches on his arm and face would require grafting. He’d inhaled some smoke. The doctor thought his left forearm was broken, and rib fractures were probable. The doctor didn’t want to x-ray him yet, but his other bones and spine seemed to be intact. Until he awoke, however, they wouldn’t know if he could speak or what damage had been done to his mind.

“He will be in pain,” Dr. Bustamante had warned. “We’ll do what we can, but while he is alert, he’ll be in severe and constant pain for the first few days to weeks.”

Her father was no stranger to pain or, to his way of thinking, injustice. Every other dealer was out to get him. Every vendor wanted to rip him off. Every bereaved widower was a greedy bastard trying to bilk him out of a commission. After Delia’s mother died, he became markedly angrier. When he sent her off to the Hancock School for Young Ladies of Character, fourteen-year-old Delia had been profoundly relieved—even if it meant leaving Steward House, the home of her heart.

Because of this man, with whom she shared only a pair of green eyes and a name, Delia had lost her home completely, and she had nowhere to go with her own pain and anger. He’d never listened to her before and now he couldn’t even hear her.

But now he needed her. Father had spent the past decade sending her away, paying her tuition even in the months when he didn’t scrape enough money out of his Main Street junkshop till to cover the utility bills. He’d worked so hard to get rid of her. Now she might have to live with him for the rest of his life.

Doctor Bustamante had spelled out her father’s future, assuming he retained his mental faculties. The man who woke from the coma might be very different from before the fire. He’d be physically debilitated and would probably suffer from impaired memory. His personality might change, and Delia couldn’t help but hope for the better. She could hire a nurse for a while, but Delia would need to learn the basics of physical therapy, occupational therapy and scar treatment. She’d cook for and clean up after him—maybe actually clean
him.

And still the shiny green dollars she’d put in the bank this morning would flow away like rain in the gutter.

If she wanted the money to last for more than a couple of years, at best, she couldn’t pay rent on the soon-to-be empty shop on Main Street or for her apartment in the city. Even this close to Richmond, Forrest Restoration, her comfortably obscure and barely profitable small business, wouldn’t survive. Sooner or later she’d need to get a job.

Delia rubbed her eyes, sniffed and straightened.

No use borrowing trouble, Grandmère would say. Delia knew where her duty lay. She’d failed Steward House once. She wouldn’t fail the house again, nor would she fail the damaged creature lying in the hospital bed.

Raised voices from the hall broke into her reverie—Doctor Bustamante’s deep tones and a woman’s chirps, which grated against Delia’s ears and caused her fingers to curl into fists. The door to her father’s room burst open and in strode a tall woman with inky hair restrained in a sleek chignon. She had brown cat’s eyes in a fresh, clear face, and she looked too young for the red power suit she wore. But her expression was anything but youthful: Her eyes were too wide and her feral grin was full of large shiny teeth. She extended a business card to Delia, who imagined she caught a whiff of something acidic. She forced herself to take the card with the tips of her fingers and dropped it into her lap.

“I know I’m intruding, but I really did want to catch you before you left town. I’m so sorry about your father.”

Delia nodded automatically, but she pressed back against her chair. She looked down at the card wadded in her hand and smoothed open the crumpled paper.

“I’m Cecily Johnson with Johnson Realty.”

“You’re a broker?”

“Yes, I took over for my father a couple years ago when Mom and Dad got a place in Florida—and who could blame them? The cold was so bad for Mom’s arthritis.” Miss Johnson settled into the other plastic chair, pulling it up to the foot of the bed to face Delia. “You probably don’t remember me, but we went to school together.”

Delia shook her head and Cecily Johnson leaned forward, her knee nudging into Delia’s personal space. Delia’s shoulder blades squeezed together.

“Ah, well.” Cecily reached out to pat Delia’s hand, and Delia couldn’t help herself. She jerked back before Cecily could touch her, and the leg of her chair screeched on the polished concrete floor. Cecily’s eyes widened, but her smile didn’t falter even as she dropped her hand. “I’m a little older than you.” Cecily looked like a seventeen-year-old playing dress up, her skin as smooth as newly polished marble. “We’re related, you know.”

“Related how?” She scanned Cecily’s features for similarities with her own. They both had dark hair, but otherwise shared nothing. Cecily was beautiful. Delia was not.

“We’re distant cousins. One of my grandfathers was born on the wrong side of the Steward family blanket, if you know what I mean.”

Delia sorted it through. They were third cousins if what this woman said was true. She’d never considered extended family. No one, to her knowledge, had ever approached her parents with such a claim.

“Since we’re family,” Cecily continued, “may I offer you some advice?”

Her face was so earnest, her smile so sweet. Her teeth were unbelievably perfect. Delia couldn’t take her eyes off those teeth.

“I know you have a lot to think about, but you have to consider Uncle Vernon. A single-level ranch would be perfect for him. It’ll take months to repair the damage at Steward House. The old dinosaur is drafty, with steep stairwells and tiny bathrooms. At his age, he really belongs somewhere more senior-friendly, don’t you think?”

“I’m not buying a house.”

Cecily’s giggle tinkled like crystal shattering on slate tile. “Not yet, of course! I’m talking about selling. Once the basic cleanup is complete, you need to consider putting Steward House on the market—or are you going for a full demolition?”

She sounded
hopeful.

“I can’t sell Steward House.”

“In a few weeks, when you’ve had a chance to review your options, call me. Life transitions can be scary.” Cecily’s voice was thick with sincerity. “I can help you through the process.” She reached for Delia’s hand again, but Delia jerked it back in visceral revulsion. She simply couldn’t allow this woman to touch her.

In order to distract Cecily and to explain herself, Delia reached into the purse at her feet, “Miss Johnson, you don’t understand.” She pulled out the sheaf of papers and tugged the notarized receipt out from the center. “I already sold it.”

Cecily straightened slowly and tilted her head to the side. Her lips remained locked in rictus, but her voice dropped deep. “Pardon me?”

Delia took a deep breath and folded the papers together again. “I sold the estate this morning.”

It was a confession. She should have felt better for it, felt cleansed. But as Cecily’s smile faded, Delia felt satisfaction instead. She was not a malicious person, but this “cousin” and her false perfection brought out the devil in her.

Or maybe it was the pleasure of thwarting someone, anyone. From the moment she’d taken Baldridge’s call, Delia had been buffeted along on a wave of other people’s needs and desires. Grant took her house. Her father would take her days and nights, possibly for the rest of his life. All Delia had gotten was a heap of paper. And $1.2 million, which still felt unreal, no matter how often she looked at the tiny words.

Delia plastered on her work smile. “I appreciate your offer, but I won’t need your assistance.” She opened her palm toward her father. “I’m going to sit here a while longer.”

“Who bought it?”

“Pardon me?”

“Who. Bought. The property.”

Cecily’s voice hissed like acid on limestone and Delia leaned toward her father’s bed as if to shield him. Cecily pulled herself together visibly, smoothing all expression from her youthful face and patting her skirt with her palms. She reached a hand for Delia’s receipt, but Delia clutched it to her belly.

“How much, if I may ask?” Cecily’s voice was artificially silky and light, and she, too, adopted a false smile.

Delia shook her head. That was one confession too many. Grant’s payment was blood money and she couldn’t speak of it.

“Never mind.” Cecily sniffed. “It’s all public record.” She turned to go, but looked back over her shoulder as she opened the door, “Has he said anything? About the fire?”

“No.”

“Nothing?”

“He’s comatose.”

Cecily blinked, “How silly of me.” She showed all of her teeth. “What about you? You need a place to stay? I have a couple of empty apartments. I’ll give you a great deal.” Her voice was bright and earnest. “We are family. We can help each other.”

Delia felt her head shaking back and forth, heard the blood pounding in her ears.

The hospital room door bounced back on its hinges as Cecily slammed it shut, and Delia slumped back in the chair to rub her temples. Cecily Johnson didn’t feel like family. But what did Delia know? The ones she loved were carved from giant rocks.

“Can’t stay, Father,” she said to the figure on the bed. “I’ve got a rescue mission to mount.”

But when she turned to go, Grant filled the doorway. He’d changed into faded jeans and a black tee. She felt the heat pool in her belly until she remembered who he was. She settled back in the chair, schooling her face into a bland mask. “What are you doing here?”

He scanned her father as if he were a particularly intriguing painting. “I had Lars look into Dr. Bustamante.”

“You did what?”

“He’s considered quite the expert on burns. You’re lucky he decided to retire here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know someone at the Evans-Hayes Center up in Richmond—they both have full burn units with a full range of post-hospital care.”

“Right. The doctor doesn’t even want to shift him in the bed. I’m not moving him anywhere.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” He placed his hand on her shoulder as if he had every right to do so and she couldn’t help herself. She leaned into his warmth. “The folks at Evans-Hayes speak highly of Bustamante, and he’s made sure this facility has the equipment and staff for each stage of your father’s recovery.”

She needed to focus on his words, but her heart and body yearned toward the hand on her shoulder. Once, long ago, he had held her. He was just being helpful, but as a teenager she’d built his embrace into something much bigger, much more romantic. Even now, while they were discussing her father, Delia wanted to hear Grant say,
 
“I remember you.” She wanted his eyes to light up with a sense of connection and shared history.

No. She needed to let go of her Wolverton fantasy. It was time to grow up and move on. “We don’t need your help.” His fingers tensed on her shoulder. “We didn’t even need your money—someone else was just here to buy the house.”

“Who?”

“Her.” She pulled the crumpled wad of paper from her pocket. “Call her when it’s time to flip it.” Her mouth tasted of gravel dust.

Grant frowned at the card in his hand. “She works fast.”

“You’re one to talk.” She shoved at him, and he finally removed his hand so she could rise. “I have to go. Chief Benson asked me to meet with him.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. The chief had requested an interview, but he’d cancelled earlier in the day.

“Who are you going to rescue?”

He’d overheard her talking to her father. Thanks to a lifetime of practice, Delia kept her face placid. “You. You’ll never find your way out of the shop if I don’t get in there and organize a bit. See you there in two hours?” By then, she’d know what she was dealing with and have a plan.

“Sure. Two hours.”

***

Fifteen minutes later, Grant’s car was parked in the alley behind Forrest Antique Shoppe. In her father’s spot. His arms were folded so that his biceps bulged up in high relief, and he leaned against the hood of his Lexus, as relaxed as jungle cat. She felt her desire rising from low in her belly, and she resented it.

“How’d you know I’d be here?”

He smiled and shook his head, not even bothering to answer. “How’d the interview go?”