An Unforgettable Lady(86)

His past was one of the harder things to counter. She didn't doubt him when he said he had dangerous enemies, but she had to believe there was a way around even that impediment.

"Grace?" her mother said sharply.

She shook herself out of her reverie and looked down the table. Her mother had folded her napkin into a neat square, placed it next to her plate and was getting to her feet. Evidently, breakfast was over.

"Sorry. What?"

"I would like to see you for a moment."

Grace grabbed a piece of toast and reluctantly followed her mother across the foyer into the lady's parlor that her mother used as a study.

The room was painted in a cornflower blue and filled with delicate French antiques. Grace had never felt comfortable in it. Everything seemed small, dainty, and breakable. Booby-trapped. It was as if each of the chairs had been calibrated for her mother's birdlike weight and anything heavier would cause a collapse, embarrassment, and censure.

Carolina shut the double doors behind them and Grace's chest contracted. It was hard to imagine how such a bright, elegant room could feel like a dungeon, but it did.

"It's good to see Blair looking so well," Carolina said, pausing to inspect a bouquet of flowers on a delicate side table. She picked off two petals from a white rose and threw them into a little decoupage wastepaper basket that was otherwise empty. "Although it was a dreadful story about that tooth."

"Yes, it was."

"She's just lovely, don't you think?"

"Yes, she is."

Grace knew damn well she hadn't been called inside to discuss Jack's girlfriend and waited for the real conversation to get going.

Carolina walked smoothly over to her desk, a Louis XIV masterpiece with few things marring its pristine surface. In one corner, there was a silk box of her personal stationery that had her name at the top and Willings's address underneath. Laying on the stack, there was a single gold pen as thin as a flower stem and a tiny leather bound address book.

"Sit down, Grace."

She carefully lowered herself into the chair next to her mother's desk. The sunlight coming through an east-facing window streamed into her eyes, making it hard to see. She blinked.

"I'm surprised you're wearing your hair like that. It's a bit unruly, don't you think?"

There was a long silence.

"Mother, what did you want to talk about?"

Carolina crossed her legs at the ankles and smoothed down her perfectly flat skirt with a scrupulous hand. "I'm afraid you have put me in a rather awkward position."

"How so?"

"I saw you this morning. With that man."

Grace felt herself tightening up all over. "Which man? "

"You know exactly to whom I am referring."

"And?"

"You were arguing with him. On the lawn. I saw you from my bedroom window.”

Her tone suggested she would rather have woken up to a rotting Winnebago on the grass.

Grace fought the urge to look down at her fingers, which was what she'd done when she was young and facing the same refined condemnation. Reminding herself that she was a grown-up, she tried to stare back at her mother. With the sun making her eyes hurt and her back rigid in the uncomfortable chair, she had a clear vision of herself at the age of fifty still playing the apologetic daughter. Her stomach lurched.

"So?" she said in a low voice.

"Grace, ladies do not argue in that manner. And most certainly not out in public," there was a meaningful pause, "with a man other than their husband."

Grace shifted in the chair, felt it wobble underneath her and realized she was fed up. For the first time in her life, it occurred to her that she didn't have take her mother's prim displeasure.

It was a powerful epiphany.

She just wasn't sure how to act on it.

"Well?" Carolina demanded. "What do you have to say for yourself?"

How about just leaving, she thought.

Grace rose from the chair, stepped out of the sunlight and looked across the room at the closed doors.

"Where do you think you're going?" Her mother's voice was brittle.

Anywhere, she thought. Anywhere away from you.

"I want an answer," Carolina said sharply. "Why were you fighting with that man?"

"I don't have an answer for you, Mother," Grace murmured, walking away.