Tempting Fate

Seven

Dani spent most of Friday with her nose to the grindstone. Work helped keep her mind off her ransacked bedroom, her stolen things, her scrapes and bruises. She was more upset than she’d first realized over losing her two gate keys. Ulysses’s gold keys-made famous in The Gamblers -had always seemed just another of the legends surrounding him. Now one had surfaced, and it was gone.

Losing it was preferable to being killed, Dani thought, but she still wished she had it.

And work kept her mind off what day it was. That tonight was the annual Chandler lawn party.

She’d had her dress cleaned, and carted it and the ostrich plume and her red shoes up to the Pembroke salon, located in the estate’s former bathhouse, for some pampering and advice. It was getting close to seven. Time to put herself together.

She passed Zeke Cutler sitting on a stone bench in the shade of a sugar maple. He had his arms hooked on the back of the bench and his legs stretched out, his ankles crossed. He looked relaxed, confident.

“Afternoon, Ms. Pembroke,” he said in an exaggerated southern drawl, designed, no doubt, to undermine her sense of professionalism.

She didn’t let it, although she’d changed from her business clothes into shorts and a Saratoga T-shirt and had Mattie’s dress hanging over her arm in its plastic cleaner’s bag. She nodded briskly. “Mr. Cutler.”

“Nice day.”

That it was. Dry, clear, warm. But, of course, it would be. In its hundred-year history, the Chandler lawn party had enjoyed remarkably good weather. Someone had once figured out that it would have rained on the historic party the few Augusts that the Saratoga racing season had been canceled, in the early 1900s and during World War II.

“Have you been keeping busy?” she asked, trying to treat him as she would any other guest, regardless of his profession or how they’d met. What questions she still had about him. How physically attractive she found him.

“More or less. Right now I’m debating between tubing down the Batten Kill and weeding tomatoes. Which do you think?”

His sarcasm-or humor-was nearly, but not quite, undetectable. Dani said coolly, “It doesn’t seem to me you’re seriously considering either one.”

He almost smiled. “Maybe I should take a mud bath?”

“You’d find it refreshing, I’m sure.”

Dropping one hand, he picked up a bottle of Pembroke Springs Mineral Water he had beside him on the bench. “Nice package. I tried your orange soda-haven’t worked up the nerve to try this stuff yet.” He unscrewed the top. “I usually get my water from the tap.”

“It’s not the same.”

“That’s what scares me.” He took a sip and paused a moment, seeming to contemplate the taste. “I suppose it could grow on you.”

For some reason, Dani wasn’t offended. “It’s milder than a lot of the mineral waters around here. My grandmother-”

“Mattie Witt.”

She nodded but noticed the slight darkening of Zeke Cutler’s already dark eyes. “She knows-or used to know-the properties of a hundred different springs in the region, which ones would bind you up, which ones would unbind you, which were more suited to bathing. She claims there’s a spring that’ll cure virtually any intestinal ailment. She’s not as rabid as she used to be-I understand she used to pump my father full of various waters when he was a boy.”

“That was after she retired from Hollywood?”

“Oh, yes.”

Zeke Cutler drank more of his water, and this time Dani felt he was contemplating her. His eyes darkened even more, and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. The effect on her was more unnerving than she would ever want to admit. “Tell me,” he said, “do you take such a personal interest in all your guests or only the ones you’ve assaulted with iron skillets?”

The humor was back in his eyes. It softened them, made them a little less intense. Dani felt a rush of warmth and might have fled without answering, pretending she hadn’t heard him. But she said, “I’m keeping my eye on you, Zeke Cutler.”

He raised his bottle to her. “Ditto.”

The rush of warmth turned hot, and she got out of there, heading along a brick walk in the sun, which was nowhere near as broiling as she was.

Magda Roskov, who presided over the salon, and who was even tinier than her boss, shook her head in despair when she saw Dani. “But you give me just an hour! I need at least a week to work on you.”

Dani had thought an hour was a lot. “Well, just help me figure out how to get this feather to stay in my hair.”

Magda inspected the red ostrich plume. “This has possibilities.”

Coming from her, that was a major vote of confidence.

She worked on Dani for her allotted hour, lecturing her on leg waxing, manicures, pedicures, the right cosmetics. She signed her up for an herbal facial next week and insisted on setting Dani’s hair in pin curls. Magda examined her cuts and bruises with clinical objectivity and sighed loudly. “You want to climb rocks, you suffer the consequences.” Dani didn’t tell her she’d surprised a burglar.

The results-the pin curls, the dramatic makeup, the perfectly placed feather-were, she had to admit, far superior to anything she could have accomplished on her own. If not transformed, Dani felt downright glamorous. She wondered if Zeke Cutler would have been so sarcastic and controlled if he’d caught her in the garden looking like this.

Dangerous thinking. She had to stop it.

“Well,” Magda said, appraising her handiwork, “you’ll do.”

It was the best Dani would ever get from her by way of a compliment.

“You will put on your shoes?”

Dani grinned. She’d kept on her beat-up sneakers. “When I get there. Those three-inch heels are killers.”

“If you’d practice wearing them-”

“Bye, Magda. Thanks for everything.”

Watching Dani glide past him in a sexy retro dress, ratty sneakers and an ostrich feather in her shining dark hair, Zeke concluded the woman was pretty muddy on the subject of how heiresses were supposed to act.

He’d rejected tubing on the Batten Kill, weeding tomatoes and anything else the Pembroke had to offer early on a Friday evening, and he’d dumped the rest of his designer water in the grass.

Ms. Danielle Chandler Pembroke, he observed, really wasn’t very big.

He didn’t know why her feather didn’t fall off. “Got that thing stuck on with Krazy Glue?”

She whirled around, startled, a pair of red high heels in hand. Zeke ducked. First a mineral water bottle, then an iron skillet, now shoes.

“In another life,” he said, “you’d be a knife thrower.”

“I’m sorry.” She lowered her shoes. “I’m a little on edge.”

“Heard you were going to the Chandler party tonight.”

She nodded, biting her lower lip, painted as red as her dress. Zeke suspected that she was hell on men. Ira Bernstein had told him the sure way to get shot out of the saddle with his boss was to send her a dozen roses and tell her you existed to make her happy. “She doesn’t want anyone to feel responsible for her happiness-her mother’s legacy.” Ira, of course, hadn’t intended to tell Zeke anything; it had just happened. Besides being an expert on weaponry and such, he prided himself on his ability to eke information out of people.

“Yes, I am,” Ira’s boss said.

“Alone?”

She looked annoyed. “I don’t see that my personal life is any of your business.”

“I don’t see that it is, either. I suppose a date would detract from the impact of your grand entrance.”

Her black eyes zeroed in on him; he could tell she was miffed. “I’m not planning a grand entrance-”

“Ha. You have Nick Pembroke’s and Mattie Witt’s flare for drama. That’s her dress, isn’t it? And the feather your mother wore in Casino?”

“You seem to know an awful lot about me, Mr. Cutler.”

“Honey, a lot of people know an awful lot about you, so that’s no big deal.” He was on his feet. “Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”

“I really don’t think-”

“I’m harmless,” he said.

“So you told me yesterday afternoon. And as I said then, you don’t look harmless.”

He shrugged. “Given my business, I suppose that’s just as well. My car’s in the Pembroke lot.”

“I have no intention of driving anywhere with you.”

“Sure you do.” He glanced down at her, noticing that the luscious red of her lips only made her skin seem paler and her eyes blacker. “It’ll save you having to park your car and risk spoiling your entrance.”

Her mouth snapped shut. “I was planning on walking.”

“And risk getting caught by the paparazzi in holey yellow sneakers?”

“Mr. Cutler-”

“You’ve got to stop that mister business.”

“I’m not going to hire you.”

“Fine, but will you let me drive you to your granddaddy’s mansion?”

“It’s a cottage.”

“Where I come from,” he said, “it’s a mansion.”

And he wondered if someday he’d tell her where he came from, or if she’d find out on her own, if Mattie would tell her, or someone else who knew about Joe and him and the ugly possibilities of their trip to Saratoga twenty-five years ago. But he couldn’t think about that now. He had to concentrate on the present, on the job he’d come to do. As he’d told Roger Stone last night, Dani Pembroke wasn’t his problem.

They headed together down the brick walk, and when the walk divided, one way going toward her cottage, the other toward the main house and the parking lot, she stayed with him. Zeke made no comment. When they came to his rented car, a nondescript midsize sedan, he unlocked the passenger door, opening it for her. Minding her feather, she slid in.

“Don’t get any ideas,” she said, pulling the door shut herself.

Her cheeks, he noticed, had gained some color.

She played tour guide on the drive up Union Avenue and Broadway, pointing out where the gargantuan United States Hotel had once stood-“It was built in 1874 and occupied seven acres”-and the Grand Union and Congress Hall, where the wealthy and famous of that earlier time had played. The massive hotels were all gone, burned or torn down.

“The Adelphi survived,” she said, gesturing to a Victorian hotel in the middle of Broadway. “It’s small by the standards of nineteenth-century Saratoga-it’s been completely restored in keeping with the era. I love having wine in the courtyard with friends.”

Zeke tried to imagine having a quiet glass of wine with her, amid flowers and greenery, with no agenda. But, with practiced skill, he shoved the image aside. He wasn’t a dreamer. Not anymore.

He drove straight up Broadway, through the light where the wide, busy street became North Broadway, quiet, residential, lined with Victorian mansions. He pulled up in front of the cream-colored Italianate that a Chandler had built. A couple hundred people had gathered on the side lawn. From what Zeke could see, they were dressed for a good time among their fellow rich. He could hear the soft strains of a jazz trio.

“To think,” Dani muttered, “I could be picking beetles off my rosebushes.”

The mystery and vulnerability that he’d detected in her that afternoon were there once again, playing at the edges of her eyes, at the corners of her frown. The smart comeback he had ready slid right out of his mind.

She already had her yellow sneakers off and was slipping on her red high heels. Her black eyes, liquid and maybe a little afraid, fastened on him. “Thank you for the ride.”

“Knock ’em dead, angel.”

Her smile was full of mischief and pain as she climbed out of his car, teetering a moment on her too-high heels. Then she started down the sidewalk in her saucy vintage dress and ostrich plume, a slim, fit, dark-eyed, dark-haired woman who didn’t look anything at all like the tall, fair, proper, ever-gracious Chandlers.

Zeke had never seen anyone look more alone.

“Yikes,” Kate Murtagh said. “Your checkbook must be as moth-eaten as that dress.”

She planted a tray of skewered tortellini, drenched in a spicy-smelling sauce, onto a server’s outstretched arms. Dani felt a touch of relief at Kate’s blunt words; she was among friends again. She wished she knew what had gotten into her to accept Zeke Cutler’s ride. Of course, she wished she knew what had gotten into her even to be here tonight.

“You’re just mad because I didn’t take your advice.”

“Aaron,” Kate said to one of her cohorts, a paunchy man arranging nasturtiums on a pasta salad, “make sure the shades are up when this crowd gets a load of this outfit. Everybody may drop dead, and we won’t have to serve dinner.”

Dani laughed, trying to stay out of the way as servers flowed in and out. “Do I look that bad?”

“You amaze me sometimes. Can’t you look in the mirror and tell you look terrific? A little bizarre maybe, but terrific. Honestly, Dani, I’ve never met anyone as gorgeous as you are who has no idea-maybe who doesn’t want to have any idea…” Kate glared at her, as if Dani had done something particularly annoying. “You could have your pick of men.”

“Maybe it’s lousy pickings.”

“And maybe you’re just too afraid to let anyone care about you.”

“How can you deliver a lecture while serving two hundred?”

Kate grinned, unembarrassed. “Talent. Where’d you get the shoes?”

“I bought them.”

“Mark the calendar, Aaron.”

The teasing loosened the tightness in Dani’s stomach, not just from having to face the Chandlers and the crowd, but from having spent fifteen minutes in a car with her mysterious guest.

“Kate, I need a favor. A guy’s been following me around.”

“Who?”

“His name’s Zeke Cutler. He’s some kind of professional white knight-he’s staying at the Pembroke.”

Kate wiped her hands on her oversize apron. “Is he here?”

“I don’t know. He drove me over-”

“Oh-ho.”

Dani felt her cheeks burn. “It’s not what you think. I just thought with your sources you could find out more about him.”

“The name’s familiar, but I don’t know why. I’ll see what I can find out.” A woman who missed nothing, she indicated Dani’s bruised wrist with a curt nod. “He do that?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Dani, what-”

“It’s a long story, and I know you’re busy. Later, okay?”

“You’re damn right later.”

A server raced over for more tortellini, and while Kate got to work, Dani made her exit. Soon, she thought, she’d tell Kate about the burglary, about finding Zeke in her garden, about Mattie’s reaction. But first she had to concentrate on tonight.

Memory took her back through the house. She hadn’t been there since Mattie came to take her back to New York while the search for her mother continued. Nothing in the big, elegant house seemed to have changed.

Outside, the breeze held the fragrance, still familiar to her, of the Chandler flower gardens, and she remembered the girl she’d been, so feisty and determined and free, willing to take on her grandfather or the whole world, it didn’t matter. She’d had a mother who’d loved her and a father who’d been honest, and she’d adored them both, at nine not seeing them as flawed human beings, and never feeling alone. But that was then.

She rounded the curved front porch with its baskets of pink-and-white petunias, heard someone whisper her name, and people began looking in her direction. In seconds a hush had come over the two hundred Chandler guests.

Dani hesitated, her resolve wavering. She knew these people. They’d been her mother’s friends. They’d helped look for her-they’d joined search parties and talked to the police and called everyone they knew for any possible tips, any hints about Lilli’s state of mind, where she might have gone. What might have happened to her. In the ensuing years they’d cooperated with the scores of private detectives Eugene Chandler had enlisted to find his missing daughter.

And all the while Dani had avoided them, had avoided Saratoga Springs in August. For twenty-five years the prestigious Chandler Stakes and Lilli Chandler Pembroke’s disappearance had been inexorably linked, not just for Dani, but for her mother’s family and friends as well.

Looking at them, elegantly dressed, uncertain of what they should do, Dani wondered if they secretly resented her mother for not having vanished at a more opportune time, then realized how horribly unfair she was being.

But she understood their shock as they gaped at her. She could feel herself becoming not the good-humored, risk-taking child of Pembroke scoundrels, not herself, but the image of what they wanted her to be.

It was as if, for a brief, stunned moment, lovely, lost Lilli Chandler Pembroke had finally come home.

Only she hadn’t. Dani had always known, even at nine, that she couldn’t-didn’t want to, ever-take her mother’s place.

She thought of Zeke Cutler. Was this enough of a grand entrance for him? It was far more than she’d bargained for. But this was her own doing, and her response was her choice. She pictured Kate Murtagh in the kitchen with the shades up, howling with laugher because she’d told Dani so.

Dani made herself smile. There was really nothing else to do. “Hi, everybody,” she said. “Good to see you all.”

Their relief was palpable. She wasn’t going to make a scene. They could have another glass of champagne and a bit of caviar before dinner and not have to think about Lilli’s disappearance or John Pembroke’s embezzling from his own father-in-law or Dani’s having walked away from her Chandler trust.

She swept a glass of champagne from a passing tray as Sara Chandler Stone came up beside her. “Danielle,” she said, taking her niece by the hand and kissing her lightly on the cheek, “I’m so glad you came tonight. It’s been far too long.”

Dani almost believed her. “I’m glad I came, too.”

Her aunt smiled, playing the perfect Chandler hostess to the hilt. Her perfume was light and elegant, the same scent her older sister had worn, and probably their mother before them. She wore a simple, stunning coral dress, with diamond studs at her ears and a sprinkle of diamonds in her hair.

She was staring at Dani. “That feather…in your hair…”

“It’s the one Mother wore in Casino. It’s meant as a tribute, Sara. Nothing more.”

“Of course,” Sara mumbled. But she looked shocked, and grief-stricken.

“I didn’t mean to upset you.”

Sara carefully restored her hostess face. First the charming smile, then the rich, bright eyes; her cosmetics, Dani noticed, were expertly applied. She bet Sara hadn’t needed a Magda to do her up.

“Oh, don’t be silly. I was just surprised, that’s all. I think it’s a wonderful idea. Lilli would have been delighted. Here, let me introduce you to some of my friends. You haven’t seen Father yet, I take it. He should be out soon. He doesn’t move as fast as he used to.”

While Sara chattered on, Dani followed her around, surprising her with how many people on the lawns, among the beautiful gardens, her niece already knew. Their lives, hers and Dani’s, were concentric circles within a larger circle, never touching.

People were gracious and interested, asking about the Pembroke and Pembroke Springs. No one mentioned Lilli or commented on the ostrich plume. Dani invited everyone she spoke to up to her newly opened spa-inn for high tea; many said they’d already sneaked a peek at her rose gardens.

Finally Sara excused herself. “I’ll let you mingle now-I need to check with the kitchen.”

Dani wondered how Kate liked being called “the kitchen,” and smiled to herself, sipping her champagne near a stone statue of Demeter she’d tried to dress when she was six or seven. She realized, suddenly and with a rush of relief that surprised her, that she was no longer a frightened nine-year-old waiting for her mother to come and share her raspberries.

“You could have chosen a different dress,” Eugene Chandler said beside her. “Mattie’s, isn’t it?”

Dani tried not to let her grandfather’s cold tone undermine her surge of confidence. “Yes-I’m surprised you recognized it.”

“It was a credible guess.” He wasn’t very convincing, but he’d never admit to remembering what Mattie Witt had worn in a movie more than fifty years old. As for the ostrich plume, he’d claimed never to have seen Casino and his older daughter’s searing performance. “I assume it was a deliberate choice on your part.”

It was an accusation, not a question, but Dani refused to let him get to her, which was exactly what he was trying to do. “No need to spend money on a new dress when I’ve got a perfectly good one in the attic. How are you, Grandfather?”

Tilting his head back slightly, he inhaled through his nose. Even at eighty-two he was straight-backed and still possessed an uncanny knack for irritating her. His bearing and arrogance-his pride, he’d say-had seen him through scandal and loss. But clearly he’d aged. He was the only surviving child of Ambrose Chandler and his very young third wife, Beatrix, who’d lost their three older children to diphtheria when Eugene was just a baby. Now he was an old man with parchment-thin skin and brown spots on his hands, arms and face. His blue eyes had clouded, and his lips had a purplish cast to them. Dani might have felt sympathy for him, for the man had endured pain and anguish-the early death of the wife he’d adored, the years of not knowing what had happened to his firstborn child, the embarrassment of having his son-in-law steal from his family’s firm and the lack of a close relationship with his only grandchild.

But if tragedy ennobled some and embittered others, it seemed to have had no effect whatsoever on Eugene Chandler. His daughter was missing, so he just didn’t talk about her. His son-in-law was a reprobate, so he ignored him. His granddaughter had thrown her inheritance in his face after his cruel, offhand remark about dropping the Pembroke from her name, so he went right on as if nothing had happened between them and he’d said nothing wrong.

But they’d never gotten along. As a child, even before her mother had disappeared, he’d shut down her lemonade stand because “Chandler ladies” weren’t supposed to be entrepreneurs. He’d refused to let her climb trees where anyone might see her, he’d called her incorrigible and had pointed out every flaw in what she wore, what she said, what she did. It was as if from the moment he saw her black hair and black eyes he’d been looking for the Witt and Pembroke in her, and had tried at every turn to stamp them out. He’d never, it seemed to her, looked for the person she was: neither Chandler nor Witt nor Pembroke, but only herself.

“You know, Danielle,” he said softly, “you’re much harder on us than we deserve.”

His words caught her off guard. “I’m not trying to be hard on anyone.”

But he walked away, proud and in control. Fortunately one of Kate’s helpers stuck a tray of tiny spanakopita triangles under Dani’s nose, keeping her from chasing down her grandfather for an explanation for his remark, or to apologize, guiltily, for behavior that had become automatic over the years. “Kate said for me to tell you she’s hit the jackpot. I’m not sure what that means.”

Dani was: Kate had found out something on Zeke Cutler. But before she could sneak off to the kitchen, Roger Stone appeared beside her, handsomely dressed, the corners of his eyes crinkling when he smiled. Dani had always liked him, even if her unconventional executive style would give him ulcers and he’d seemed a little too eager to step into her father’s shoes after Eugene Chandler had fired him from Chandler Hotels, refusing to involve the authorities in the misdeeds of his own son-in-law.

“It’s been forever, Dani.” Roger took both her hands and whistled as he gave her a quick, appreciative once-over. “Don’t you look smashing.”

“Thank you. I hope I haven’t caused any trouble for you and Sara tonight by coming. I just wanted to see folks.” And she realized it was true-she’d wanted to be here.

His blue eyes warmed with understanding. “It’s not you-it never has been.”

“It’s my mother.”

“You don’t have a sister, so perhaps it’s difficult for you to understand, but Sara has deep feelings about your mother. Lilli disappeared less than a year after their mother died-it was a double shock, quite devastating. Tonight’s always difficult for Sara, that’s all. It’s a reminder of what she’s lost.”

“So am I.”

Roger studied her a moment, not a man to pretend or deny, and finally he nodded, without elaborating or minimizing.

Dani suddenly felt chilled. She’d almost rather have her aunt’s flawless, if phony, good cheer. “I suppose it’s the same for Grandfather.”

But Roger studied her, seeing much more, she suspected, than she wanted him to see. She sensed no condemnation, only a desire to understand. “It’s not such a bad thing, you know, to remind them of Lilli. They don’t want to forget her. They-” He stopped, frowning in concern as his eyes fell to her bruised arm. So far no one else had noticed the effects of yesterday afternoon’s festivities at her cottage. “Dani-what on earth happened to you?”

“Oh, I stumbled on a burglar yesterday.”

“At the inn?”

“No, at my cottage. He didn’t get away with much.”

“But you’re okay?”

His concern made her feel uncomfortable, awkward. “Yes, I’m fine. It was a good lesson in locking my doors.”

“What did the police say?”

“Nothing. I didn’t call them.”

Roger paused, assessing her response. “That was good thinking, I suppose. You just don’t need that kind of publicity right now.”

“None of us do,” she said curtly.

“I wasn’t thinking about us.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean-”

“But you did, Dani,” he said, not harshly. “It’s time to get rid of that chip on your shoulder. Your grandfather needs you. You’re his only grandchild. Sara needs you, too. We have no children of our own. She-” He broke off, annoyed. “Dani, can’t you see? We all care about you.”

Unable to think of anything to say, she swallowed and bit her lip, and Roger sucked in another breath and hurled himself back among his guests, leaving her to wonder if it wouldn’t be easier on all of them if they didn’t care. She about them, they about her.

Life, she thought, could be so damn complicated.

Zeke melted into a small crowd of onlookers who hadn’t been invited to the hundredth annual Chandler lawn party. They’d gathered on North Broadway to watch the comings and goings of the rich and elegant.

With her red feather, Dani was easy to pick out.

It wasn’t as easy to pick out Sara Chandler Stone, but Zeke did. She would be forty-seven now. Four years older than Joe would have been if he had lived. Eighteen months after her sister’s disappearance, she had married Roger Stone. Joe was a soldier by then. Zeke wondered if his brother had ever stopped loving Sara Chandler, or if he really ever had. Joe had been so young twenty-five years ago.

Zeke watched Sara greet a guest with a hug and a kiss and a smile, and it was easy to forget that she and the hothead with the iron skillet were from the same family. But they were. That was something Zeke needed to remember.

There was no point in sticking around. He wasn’t even sure why he had this long.

But as he turned, he felt the hair rise on the back of his neck, almost as if by instinct.

Quint Skinner came up beside him. “Evening, Zeke.”

“Quint.”

“Heard you were in town. Working?”

Zeke shook his head. “You?”

“Nope. I was passing by and thought I recognized you.” He narrowed his small blue eyes and scrutinized Zeke, his soldier’s training apparent in his steady, steely gaze. “I don’t want any trouble.”

His tone was amiable, but Zeke wasn’t fooled. Despite his Pulitzer Prize, Quint was a man of physical action, threats, intimidation. He’d never seemed entirely comfortable with his role as a celebrated writer. Zeke’s experience in protection and security wouldn’t impress him. Quint would still think he could beat him senseless. And very likely he could.

“See you around,” he said, starting down the wide brick sidewalk.

“Hey, Skinner.”

The soldier-turned-writer looked back, the evening sun catching his broad red face. He wore a khaki suit cut a size too small for his muscular frame, probably just to remind people he wasn’t just a smarmy journalist but a man who’d killed people.

Zeke’s gaze was direct and unintimidated. “Didn’t know you liked roses.”

There was no indication of surprise in the intense, beady eyes. Quint put a hand the size of a butt ham into the palm of his other hand and cracked his knuckles one by one. Just itching to knock out a few of Zeke’s teeth. “I’ll go where I want to go, and I’ll do what I want to do. You just stay out of my way.”

Zeke said nothing more. Quint had no gift for melting into a crowd, and Zeke was able to watch him all the way down North Broadway. If Skinner had robbed Dani, why? Had he made the connection between the gold key and the night Dani’s mother had disappeared? Between the gold key and Joe Cutler?

And the blackmail note, Zeke thought. Where did that little gem fit in?

Lots of questions. He just wished he had a few answers.

Dinner was served on long tables covered in pink linen and decorated-Kate Murtagh style-with simple milk-glass vases of asters and baby’s breath. Sara had Dani sit next to her grandfather at the end of the table, where a portly man was expounding on the yearling sales and the state of Saratoga’s thoroughbred-racing tradition.

Someone commented that the revival of Pembroke Springs and the opening of the Pembroke would be good for the town, and Dani felt her grandfather stiffen next to her. He didn’t look at her, but she knew he disapproved of her having gone into business for herself against his wishes and against his advice, a different sort of embarrassment for him than her mother’s disappearance and her father’s embezzling.

But he didn’t say anything, and the conversation drifted to other, more innocuous topics. Someone asked how long she’d been in Saratoga. Someone else asked where her date was, the unsubtle implication being that she’d been seen arriving with Zeke.

“One of my guests dropped me off,” she explained.

Her grandfather’s clouded, watery eyes fastened on her, his irritation apparent, she was sure, only to her. Getting a ride from a male guest-even having paying guests-would grate on him. Mentioning it at his dinner party would be, in his mind, rude, a deliberate act to embarrass him.

Dani lasted through the main course, then excused herself and ducked into the kitchen.

Thankfully, no one followed her. The racing talk and flower-scented breeze, and just being there, reminded her of the nine-year-old who’d waited and waited and waited for her mother to come home.

Trying to squash the flood of memories, she stopped at the counter, where Kate was sifting confectioner’s sugar onto a plate of her incomparable brownies.

“Rough night, eh? Well, if you’d wanted to avoid the nonsense,” she said without sympathy, “you could have stayed in here with me and watched the show from the kitchen. I’d even have let you help-except you in a black skirt and white top carrying a tray of stuffed mushrooms would probably kill your grandfather. Though I don’t know why you in that dress hasn’t killed him.”

“Maybe he was anticipating something worse.”

Kate looked remarkably calm despite being in the midst of serving two hundred. “I suppose it’s possible.”

But there was something in her eyes. “Kate?”

She set down her sifter. “We have to talk.”

“Okay. Tomorrow-”

“Now. Dani, have you ever heard of a book called Joe Cutler: One Soldier’s Rise and Fall?”

Dani shook her head.

“Joe Cutler is-was-this Zeke character’s older brother. I knew there was something familiar about his name. I asked Aaron, and he remembered.” Aaron also taught history at the local high school. “Joe was pretty messed up.”

“You’ve read the book?”

She nodded. “A few years ago. It’s got nothing to do with Zeke being in town so far as I can see.” Her intelligent eyes focused on Dani. “Except for one thing-he and his brother grew up in Cedar Springs, Tennessee.”

And there it was. A connection. Cedar Springs and Mattie. But her grandmother hadn’t returned to her hometown since she had left for Hollywood at nineteen, long before Zeke was even born.

“What’s he up to?” she asked.

“Beats me,” Kate said, “but you need to watch yourself with this guy.”

Dani snatched a brownie. “I will.”

“If Cutler’s responsible in any way for that bruise on your arm-” Kate waved her spatula “-you let him know he’ll have to answer to me.”

Impossible to tell if the woman was serious. And yet, beneath her bantering tone was a concern for Dani, something she never wanted to take for granted.

She went down a darkened hall and through the antique-filled drawing room where the oil portrait of her mother at sixteen still hung above the mantel. She seemed so sophisticated, yet demure, the perfect young heiress. The artist had failed-or, given who was paying the bill, perhaps simply had known better than to try-to catch the glint in her eye, the determined set to her jaw that hinted at a seething soul. Lilli Chandler had been privileged and beautiful at sixteen. At thirty, privilege and beauty hadn’t been enough to satisfy her.

“I’ve tried to take that portrait down,” Eugene Chandler said from a Queen Anne chair, startling Dani. “I thought it would be easier on all of us, Sara in particular. She always adored your mother. But she insisted it should stay.”

Dinner must have broken up for the more informal dessert, or he, too, had made good his escape. “Look, if I in any way-”

He cut her off, or hadn’t heard her. “You know, right or wrong, that’s how I remember Lilli-as a lovely, devoted sixteen-year-old girl who might never really have existed…” He trailed off as he sighed, sounding tired and old. When he continued, his voice was almost inaudible. “That’s the most difficult part. She’s gone, and I never knew her. My own daughter.”

“I’m sorry-”

“No. I am.”

Dani took a step toward him. “Are you all right?”

He smiled sadly. “No, I’m not.”

She’d never seen him so depressed. Even when it had become clear that something had happened and her mother had disappeared, he’d shown only anger, determination, raging worry. Never real, quiet, reflective sadness. “Should I get Sara?”

“You should go on, Danielle.”

As she moved closer, he looked away. He was not a man given to touching, the quick kiss, the tender hug. And he’d come not to expect such affection from his only granddaughter. “I’m not sure I should leave you-”

“I prefer to be alone,” he said, not gently.

“If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.” His clouded eyes met hers, just for an instant. “I’ve never known what to say to you nor you to me. So go on, Danielle. Carry on. You always have, you know.”

Would he like her better if she fell on her face? If she had to crawl on her knees to him in desperation? But it wasn’t the time for accusation or asking him to be something he wasn’t. How could she ask him to accept her when she couldn’t accept him?

Suddenly she was nine again, running from the grandfather she’d never been able to please.

She kicked off her high heels on the porch and scooped them up in one hand, walking through the cool, soft grass to the sidewalk. She’d left her sneakers in Zeke’s car. It didn’t matter-she’d walk home barefoot. She wanted off North Broadway, away from the Chandlers and back to her own little cottage where she’d learned to keep the memories at bay.

“Your feather’s drooping.”

Zeke fell in beside her, dark, solid, taking her in with an efficient glance that told her nothing of what he was thinking. In the darkness the shadows of the trees and streetlights played on his face, making his expression even more impossible to read.

“What’re you doing here?” she asked.

“Just hanging out.”

Dani didn’t believe him. “You don’t strike me as the type to just ‘hang out.’”

He shrugged. “Know me so well, do you?”

“Mr. Cutler-”

“You’ve really got to stop that. The name’s Zeke, as in Ezekiel James Cutler. Only bad guys call me Mr. Cutler. How come you’re leaving early?”

“No reason.”

He slowed his pace, eyeing her. “You’re not a very good liar, are you?”

She wished she hadn’t noticed the humor playing at the edges of his voice and in his eyes. She didn’t answer, instead thinking about what Kate had told her about him. She’d hoped she’d have a chance to think, to talk to Mattie, before confronting him again.

“Why don’t I give you a ride home,” he said, “and you can tell me what’s on your mind.”

They’d come to his car. He unlocked the passenger door and swung it open. He looked very tough and very controlled, and Dani suddenly wondered what kind of woman a professional white knight went for, what kind he attracted.

“I prefer to walk,” she said.

“Kind of a long way to walk in bare feet.”

“You could give me my sneakers back.”

He smiled. “I could.”

They were at an impasse, his will against hers. Her high heels dangling from one hand, she wiggled her toes on the cool, rough sidewalk and became aware-too aware-of the fit of her dress and the aching of her bruises and just how tired she was.

“I’ll ask you again. Was your being in my garden yesterday afternoon a coincidence?”

He stood back from the door, leaving it open. “Dani, you know I didn’t rob you or-” he touched her wrist “-do that to you.” His eyes, dark and serious, held hers. “But I don’t often believe in coincidences.”

Dani knew there were other ways to get home without Zeke Cutler’s help. She could call the Pembroke for a ride, or call a friend, or a taxi. She could even go back and ask her aunt or grandfather if their driver could take her home.

She could fight one Ezekiel James Cutler for her sneakers.

But without a word, she slid onto the passenger seat of his rented car. She wanted to know more about this man. Had to know more about him. It wasn’t just the burglary, his profession, his being from Cedar Springs, Tennessee. It was also her reaction to him, the strange, unsettling feeling that she was meant to find him in her garden one of these days. And how could she explain the rushes of warmth when she was around him? She was wary, and annoyed that he was clearly holding back on her, but, she had to admit, she was also intrigued.

“If I’d been your crook,” Zeke said, climbing in behind the steering wheel, “I’d have gone after you when you tried to nail me with that bottle of mineral water.”

“You did go after me.”

He glanced at her, turning the key in the ignition. “Honey,” he said in an exaggerated drawl, “that wasn’t going after you.”

There it was again, not just a rush of warmth but a flood. Dani shifted in her seat, reaching down onto the floor for her sneakers. She slipped them on and didn’t bother tying the laces.

“Tell me, would you have thrown the skillet or just bonked me on the head with it?”

“I don’t know. I guess it would have depended on what you did. I’m not a trained white knight. I have to operate on instinct-like when I walked into my room and saw it had been trashed. Since I don’t carry a weapon, I used what was at hand.”

“Which was?”

She hesitated, then held up one red shoe as she had yesterday.

Zeke grimaced.

“It worked out,” Dani said, not defensively.

Without comment he pulled into the street and started down North Broadway toward the main commercial center of town. He seemed to give his driving his total concentration. Dani noticed the dark hairs on his forearms, the muscles, the tanned skin. His long fingers. For no reason she could fathom, she found herself wondering if he dreamed. Was he ever haunted by the past? Did he ever lie awake nights asking what might have been? She thought of the book Kate had told her about. Easy to guess that his brother probably hadn’t come to a happy end.

Had Mattie known Joe Cutler? Did she know Zeke? Was that why she’d responded the way she had when Dani had told her about the burglary?

He turned down Circular Street, and Dani had the feeling he was letting her make the next move, giving her a little time to pull herself together.

Finally she decided just to get on with it. “I want you to leave the Pembroke.”

He glanced at her. “Why?”

“Because you haven’t told me the truth.”

Following the traffic onto Union Avenue, he didn’t argue or protest, but kept his eyes on the road.

“You have until tomorrow morning,” she said.

“Dani, you can’t throw me out.”

She breathed deeply. “Yes, I can.”

“It’d end up in the papers.” He slowed for a traffic light, then came to a stop. “Enough reporters are on your case without you going toe-to-toe with an internationally recognized security specialist such as myself.”

There was a note of self-deprecation in his tone, of humor, but it was buried underneath the seriousness. Dani felt her mouth go dry. She should have found another way home.

The light changed, and he continued a short way past the racetrack and turned smoothly onto the Pembroke driveway. “A photographer caught you tonight, feather and all. Someone could easily have seen you get into my car. Imagine what a heyday the gossips would have if they found out that you’d given me the boot.”

“Are you threatening to tell them?”

“No.”

They passed the rose garden, the fragrance permeating the cool night air, easing Dani’s confusion and nervousness. Zeke bore left at the fork in the road, onto the dirt road and over the narrow bridge. She could hear the trickle of the stream, smell its coldness.

“Why are you here?” she asked softly.

“I have my reasons.”

Which, his tone said, were none of her affair. “Do they have anything to do with the business you’re in?”

He didn’t answer, sliding his rented car to a stop at the end of the flagstone path that led to the front door of her cottage. “Do Hansel and Gretel show up every now and then?”

“Are you implying I’m a wicked witch?”

His expression was impenetrable in the darkness. Probably he wanted it that way. “Maybe not wicked.”

Dani bit the inside corner of her mouth, feeling unusually awkward, deeply aware-physically aware-of the man sitting next to her.

It would be so easy to back down, so easy to trust him. But she had no basis for trust, and she’d never been very good at backing down. “You have until tomorrow morning. I’ll speak to Ira.”

She could feel Zeke’s eyes on her. He seemed capable of seeing things people wouldn’t want him to see, of penetrating not only thoughts, but souls. In his business, such sensitivity-such probing-could be an asset. He asked quietly, “Do you like living out here all alone?”

“I did until yesterday afternoon.”

“You know, you should lock your doors. It’s often an effective deterrent.”

His tone was professional, neither critical nor patronizing, but Dani hated being told what to do. “How do you know my doors weren’t locked?”

“I tried them.”

“When?”

“This morning. I wandered off on my own during a guided nature walk.”

She placed her hand on the door latch, her heart pounding. She could be gone in a matter of seconds. Was she crazy to be alone with a man she didn’t know-a man who apparently knew more about her than she did him? He was from Mattie’s hometown. He was staying at the Pembroke on the twenty-fifth anniversary of her mother’s disappearance. He was an internationally known security consultant. Dani was torn by curiosity, but she felt she had no choice. She had no reason to trust him. It wasn’t, right now, a risk she was prepared to take.

“I want you off my property.”

“So you’ve said.”

“Are you going to go quietly?”

A flash of sexy smile. “Honey, I don’t go anywhere quietly unless I so choose. And that’s probably the only thing you and I have in common.”

“Oh, no,” she said coolly, deciding on gut instinct to take him on then and there. “That’s not all we have in common, and you know it. You see, Zeke, upstairs, in my bedroom, I have a blanket on my bed. It’s dark green, pure wool, quite old. My grandmother gave it to me. She took it with her when she left home.” In the darkness, through the opened windows, she could hear the crickets and tree toads, the breeze soughing in the woods and meadow. “It was made in a woolen mill in Cedar Springs, Tennessee.”

Zeke didn’t move a muscle or say a word.

“My grandmother’s hometown,” Dani said in a near whisper. “And yours.”

She was off like a shot, racing up the walk and through her front door, slamming it behind her. Her wrist ached. So did her scraped shins and her feet from standing so long in her three-inch heels. But she hunted up her car keys and locked all her doors. Front, back, side. She hadn’t bothered last night. What more was there for her thief to get?

She didn’t lock her windows. She’d suffocate.

And she didn’t call Mattie right away, although she was tempted. She wanted to think first. Get her perspective on tonight, on Zeke Cutler of Cedar Springs, Tennessee.

Groaning, pushing him out of her mind, she ran into her kitchen and got out the half bushel of peaches she’d been meaning to freeze for days. They were going soft. She filled her biggest pot with water and put it on the stove. When it was hot, she’d scald the peach skins to make them easier to peel. Or so the theory went. No matter what she did, the peel always seemed to stick.

As she worked, she considered, and finally admitted, what really had gotten to her tonight.

Zeke’s confidence, his striking looks and his unexpected humor, cloaked as it was in his middle-Tennessee accent, had made her aware of the void in her own life. Riding next to him, she’d felt alone and needy-and that was unacceptable. It wasn’t that he gave two figs about her or she’d ever want him to. He could have arranged the burglary yesterday just to unnerve her and get her to hire him. Given what she’d seen so far of the man, such underhandedness seemed out of character, but that wasn’t the point.

The point was that something about him, or tonight, had made her feel empty. She’d found herself wanting closeness. Wanting love and romance and companionship.

And she remembered something her father had told her years ago, in a static-riddled phone call from some fleabag hotel in some hellish corner of the world. “The love of your life,” he’d said, “is the person who makes you forget what all your standards and preconceived notions about love and romance even were.”

If such a man existed, Dani hadn’t met him yet. And the last thing she needed now was to mess up her life with pointless longing. Loneliness was not a choice she planned to make for herself.

And it was silly to let a dark-eyed security consultant stir up her deepest doubts about herself.

She grabbed fistfuls of peaches and dropped them into the pot, although the water wasn’t yet scalding hot. But she was impatient, anxious to get moving on something, anything.

“Oh, God,” she whispered.

It wasn’t just Zeke Cutler.

She watched the peaches bob to the surface of the water.

Had her mother ever peeled peaches? Had she ever made her own peach jam or known the satisfaction of pulling a peach cobbler from the oven in the dead of winter knowing it was made from fruit she’d frozen herself?

Dani couldn’t remember. Or she just didn’t know.

Twenty-five years tonight.

What happened to you, Mama? Are you alive? Are you dead?

Why did you leave me?

She dropped in more peaches, burning her fingers. She knew she might as well peel peaches until dawn, do up the whole lot of them, because there was no way she’d get any sleep tonight.