Under a Gilded Moon(105)
Kerry crumpled the page. Thrust it deep in her apron pocket just as the door swung open.
Madison Grant smoothed his face into a flat, mirthless smile. “Kerry. How . . . interesting to find you here. In the bachelors’ wing. I was under the distinct impression only valets and footmen assist the male guests. Perhaps the rules have changed to my advantage.”
They stood sizing each other up. Then one of his hands shot back to flip a lever on the door’s knob. Locking it. He kicked it shut behind him. Strode forward.
She felt the breath leave her.
As she stood her ground, he stepped in close.
Stealing a glance at the stack of stationery, his features relaxed. Reassured, perhaps, that he’d not left the letter there.
Stepping back, Kerry could feel the fireplace mantel against her shoulder blades. Nowhere to run.
He wasn’t a muscular man. But he was a man with much to lose. And desperate men, like cornered boars, were ferocious.
She gripped the back of the chair with his tweed coat strewn across it, the coat he’d worn the day she’d applied at the Battery Park Inn for work. An image flashed across her mind: Grant in the tweed coat in the inn, the clerk calling across the lobby: So good to have you back again this season, Mr. Grant!
“You were here before last fall,” she said. “Last fall wasn’t your first visit to Asheville. You’ve been here before, spreading your putrid, hateful ideas. A place where the rich have been coming since the railroad arrived, so no one thought a thing of your being here, doing your work among people you knew to be angry and scared with all the change, just looking for someone to blame.”
The smile did not wane. Even as he pushed her against the wall next to the fireplace. Now he pressed his groin against her so hard her spine crushed against the wall.
“I’ve no idea,” he said in her ear, “what you mean.”
Churning inside, she eased her right leg up as she reached down toward her calf. His hands moved on her. But she couldn’t fight him. Not yet.
He kissed her neck as if he would bite down on her throat, feral, going in for the kill, then shake his head so hard her spine snapped.
Kerry had slipped her hand under her skirt’s hem. Her fingers could just brush the knife’s handle now. Just another inch . . . If he could just be distracted, even for an instant, she could reach farther down and get to it.
Her voice came strained from her crushed chest. “You’re behind all of it: the flyers promoting hate, the group in France and the people here you’ve been in contact with, the fear you’ve tried to fan.”
He eased back an inch, eyes sparkling with triumph. A hunter with a deer in the crosshairs.
Slowly, taking advantage of his leaning slightly back, she managed to lift her leg enough to slide the knife up out of the top of her boot with two fingers. “So,” she managed, “did you kill Berkowitz yourself or hire Farnsworth to do it?”
His lips stretched into a sneer. “So, you’ve landed on me as the killer, have you?”
She wasn’t at all sure she’d hit on the answer—Grant killing the man out of sheer loathing or a fear of what the reporter might’ve known that could’ve sullied Grant’s public reputation. For all his superiority and polish, Madison Grant seemed capable of attacking someone he loathed just like he’d smashed the phylacteries—and she had to see his reaction. Her hand wrapped fully around the knife now.
“Did he have particularly damning information on you and the LNA—something, perhaps, that could have hurt your public persona if the public knew what an utter scoundrel you are?” She began easing her right hand up.
One of his eyebrows lifted. “And what, pray tell, does a little kitchen maid know of the LNA?”
Her right hand was nearly in position for a clear strike.
But then he pinioned both arms to her sides. “No one, you understand, will believe a pretty little servant, dirt poor, over an Ivy League man from a prominent family of New York. Try it and I promise, I will ruin you.” He thrust himself hard up against her again, and her spine slammed into the wall once more.
The impact loosened her grip on the knife, and it slipped soundlessly to the room’s carpet.
Oblivious of what she’d just dropped, Grant yanked upward on her skirts and grabbed under them. Kerry ducked away from him even as she strained toward the knife he’d not seen.
But Grant wrenched her back. “You little slut.”
Just as he’d bragged in the bowling alley, Grant did know his angles. Clamping down at her wrist, he twisted one hand behind her back so hard she was sure it would snap and lowered his mouth to her ear. “You realize, of course, if you scream for help, you expose yourself as having snuck up to the bachelors’ wing—of your own volition. Driven, it would appear, by ambition and lust to the bedroom of a guest. A sullied end to a poor mountain girl’s employment.”
Kerry groped with the fingers of the hand he’d pinioned behind her, digging her nails into the soft of his wrist. Grant’s grip on her loosened only long enough for her to leap a few feet away and dive headlong for the knife, even as Grant dove to block the door. Snatching up the knife, she leaped for the far side of the room and flashed the blade now so that he could see.
“Ah, I suppose it should be no surprise that hillbilly trash would know how to put up a fight.” He looked entertained—not in the least wary of her or her weapon.