Holly Read online

  “Yes, sir, I do,” Nick said. And I know where to scratch your daughter’s itch, he wanted to say.

  The “sir” seemed to mollify him. “How soon can you be here?”

  “About nine hours,” Nick said.

  “Then do it. The lawnmower is in the shed by the garage. Your house is the white one by the water. I like employees in direct proportion to how little attention I have to pay to them. Do your job, stay out of my sight, give me no problems, and I’ll frequently raise your salary. Understand me?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll—” Nick said no more because Ambassador Latham had hung up on him.

  For a moment Nick stared at the phone. Was he sure he wanted to do this? It wasn’t as though he was in love with Miss Hollander Latham. Just because he’d spent two fabulous days with her and now he could think of nothing else in the world was no reason to subject himself to a summer of lawn mowing. And boat maintenance. And chiggers. And more fabulous sex.

  Smiling, Nick looked at his watch. He could be at Spring Hill in eight hours. He’d given himself an extra hour to go to a local store and buy a wardrobe of T-shirts and jeans.

  Chapter Six

  “HOLLY, DARLING,” MARGUERITE LATHAM SAID from across the dining table, “you look exhausted. Aren’t you sleeping well?”

  Holly caught herself before her chin fell into her soup. It might be canned tomato soup, but it was served in Wedgwood china, on Irish linen, and an eighteenth-century mahogany table.

  “What’s wrong with you?” her father asked from around his newspaper.

  “Nothing, sir,” Holly said. “I was up late…studying.” She swallowed because she wasn’t good at lying.

  “So who have you met?” Taylor, across from her, asked.

  Holly tried to kick her stepsister under the table, but Taylor moved her long, slim legs out of the way. Growing up, Taylor had been Holly’s closest friend. Together they’d been shuffled from one school to another, moved from one country to another. Taylor had been ten years old when her mother had married James Latham. She’d lived a life of poverty and deprivation, but she’d adjusted to being an ambassador’s daughter in an amazingly short time. “I always knew I didn’t belong in a fourth-floor walk-up,” she’d told Holly when Holly was still a kid and Taylor was a gorgeous, elegant, sought-after young woman.

  Because they knew each other well, Taylor knew Holly was lying, and from the look on Taylor’s face, she meant to find out why Holly was nearly falling asleep at the table.

  But Holly also knew Taylor. She turned to her stepmother. “Didn’t you say you planned to use gardenias in the centerpieces at the wedding? I read that gardenias are so very ‘last season.’ ”

  “Last season!” Taylor exclaimed. “What idiot wrote that? Gardenias are always in fashion. They denote old-world culture, southern charm. Charles’s family is nothing if they aren’t southern. They epitomize—”

  “How a turncoat can flourish,” James said, putting down his paper. He’d had a minion do some research and found out that when the American Revolutionary War started, Charles Maitland’s ancestors had been on both sides, English and American. They’d waited until they saw who won before settling on the American side. They’d stood back and watched the newly formed American government confiscate hundreds of thousands of acres from families that had remained loyal to the king, but the Maitlands kept their land. Not that they still owned their ancestral land, but they still had the name—and money made from cotton and peanuts.

  “Father,” Taylor said in a voice of exasperation, “that was hundreds of years ago. Before Charles was born. I think it’s time to forget, even if you can’t forgive. I think—”

  As Holly bent her head over the soup, she could feel her stepsister’s eyes bearing down on her, willing Holly to lift her head and look at her.

  But Holly didn’t look up because she was afraid the guilt would show in her eyes. It was, of course, absurd, but she was afraid her family would see in her eyes where she’d spent her last days.

  She well knew that Taylor had indulged in more than one weekend with some man she’d never see again, but Holly hadn’t. She had—

  The overpowering noise of a lawnmower just outside the window made her look up.

  “Damnation!” James Latham said, pushing back his chair and going to the door. “Turn that thing off!” he bellowed. There were few people on earth who could be heard above a powerful lawnmower, but the ambassador was one of them. Instantly, the noise stopped and Mr. Latham went back to his chair, then looked at his BLT sandwich with disdain. “When does the cook arrive?”

  “Tomorrow, dear,” Marguerite said. Perhaps because she was waitressing when she met her second husband, she refused to make anything more than canned soup and simple sandwiches—although both girls knew she was quite an accomplished cook. Once, she’d told the girls, “If your father found out I can cook, he’d put yet another responsibility on my shoulders and I have quite enough already, thank you.” She was right. James Latham believed his job was to sort out the world and his wife was to take care of everything else. Now that he was retired, he saw no reason to change.

  “So, Dad,” Taylor said, “who is the gorgeous hunk you hired to mow the grass?” Taylor loved to antagonize her stepfather. Whereas Holly was half-afraid of him, Taylor loved to push the man to the point of rage.

  “Taylor, I don’t think—” Marguerite began, always the peacemaker.

  “Have you seen him?” Taylor asked Holly.

  “No,” Holly said sleepily. Yesterday the movers had shown up at 6:00 A.M. and, probably to get her back for standing them up, they’d had a thousand questions an hour—all on different floors. She’d spent the day running up and down stairs. But as exhausted as she was, that night she’d not been able to sleep. All she’d thought about was Nick. She thought of his arms, of his face nuzzling her neck. She thought of the way he’d run soapy hands over her body. At 3:00 A.M. she got up, got into her car, and drove to his house. There was no answer to her knock. Feeling as though he’d rejected her, she’d returned to the summer house, packed her clothes, and started the drive to her parents’ house. Yet again, she’d had another night of no sleep.

  “I can tell you that if I didn’t have Charles, I’d—”

  “Run off with the lawnmower boy?” Marguerite asked, horror in her voice. The only time she was a snob was when the life partners of her daughters came into consideration.

  “Maybe I’d just spend a weekend or two—or six—with him,” Taylor said, obviously trying to provoke her stepfather, but he was ignoring her.

  Eating his sandwich with a knife and fork (James Latham did not touch food with his hands), he looked at his wife and said, “So what invitations do we have?”

  “The usual. The Edenton Historical Society wants your endorsement, and there are a few teas.”

  “Humph! Little old ladies who think they should wear hats when they meet me. What else?”

  “All the churches. One has asked you to give the sermon.”

  “Possible,” he said. “Possible. Perhaps I—Now what?!” Outside came the noise of a weedwhacker. Tossing his napkin onto the table, he got up, went to the door, and bellowed again, “Turn that thing off!” When it was silent, he said, “Bother me with that noise again and you’re fired.” He paused as the new gardener seemed to be talking. “Then do it by hand!” was Ambassador Latham’s answer.

  “Machinery!” he said, sitting down once again. “Now, where were we? Oh yes, invitations.”

  “Some dinner parties.”

  “Any of them interesting?”

  “No. Oh yes. Remember that nice young man who lived down the river? He had an unusual first name. Something from Little Women.”

  “Jo?” Taylor asked.

  With each word her stepmother spoke, Holly’s sleepiness fell away. Lorrie’s mother had loved the book Little Women and it was she who called her son “Lorrie” instead of “Larry.”

  “Lorrie,” Holly said, trying to so