answers in search of the one she was most likely to believe. She’d seen a lot of men with that particular look on their face, as they sorted through their possible come-on lines in search of the one that was most likely to get a beauty queen into bed.
“I don’t want to be responsible for taking your family’s business away from my grandfather,” he said eventually.
“It’s a bread-and-butter estate settlement, isn’t it?” It hurt her to talk about her grandmother’s legacy this way, but she could put on a cool front just as successfully as Jared himself. What lay beneath the cool front was surely hotter in her case, however. “Your grandfather must deal with this sort of thing all the time. Losing one client isn’t going to bankrupt him.”
“Losing the Duncan family is going to send the wrong message around town, and he’ll lose other clients as well, as a result. Look, it’s up to you.” He shrugged. “I just don’t think it’s necessary, that’s all. It seems petty, or something.”
“Petty on my part?”
“Petty that either of us should feel that your grandmother’s estate has anything to do with a personal and much-regretted mistake I made six years ago. I’ve moved on. I’m sure you have, too.”
Oh, he had a good line in sincerity. The voice really helped, as deep and buttery, now, as a bottomless bucket of popcorn. So did the eyes. And the lashes. And the tiny glint of ironic awareness almost lost behind the lashes.
Shallis almost believed him—enough to consider that, yes, Banks and Moore would be more expensive and less convenient, and to finally decide to give him the benefit of the doubt. It was just a straightforward legal matter, after all, and it wasn’t fair to Mom to let it drag out longer than it had to, or get it tangled in personal feelings.
“All right,” she said. Her nerve-endings jumped and squealed, treacherous things, like giggling teenagers glimpsing their latest crush. “We’ll do what needs to be done today, and then I’ll find out how my mother wants to proceed.”
She would talk to Linnie about it, too, only Jared didn’t need to know that.
“Would you like coffee while we talk?” Jared asked as they entered the front office once again.
“Yes, please.” You could hide a surprising amount behind a steaming cup, Shallis knew, and she might need to do exactly that.
“Andrea?” he said to the receptionist.
She nodded. “Coming right up.” If she was curious about Shallis’s sudden departure and unexpected return, she didn’t let on. “How do you like it, Miss Duncan?”
“Cream and no sugar, thanks.”
“And I’m sorry, Mr. Starke, you made your own this morning and I didn’t see…”
“Just black.”
So he wasn’t too exalted to make his own coffee. Or maybe he was just softening Andrea up with a good first impression so he could load her down with unreasonable requests later on.
What, me? Cynical? About Jared Starke? Never! Shallis thought.
This time, he sat behind his desk while Shallis sat in front of it, which acted as a useful reminder that their meeting was purely business. He ran through the steps that had to be taken before the proceeds of the estate could be disbursed, and asked to see some of the papers and documents that Shallis and her mother had found amongst Gram’s things so far.
“She wasn’t a very organized person,” Shallis told him.
“But you forgive that in some people, don’t you? From what I’ve heard, your grandmother was one of them.”
“She was wonderful. Generous and fun and creative. Wicked sense of humor. Really surprising take on a whole lot of things. Cared a lot about people. Drove us totally nuts, sometimes, especially my dad, but the whole world always seemed that much fresher and more interesting when she was around. I—I actually can’t believe that she’s gone.”
“No, I bet,” Jared said quietly. “And it’s only been two weeks, right?”
“Just over.” Shallis couldn’t have said more than two words, at that moment.
She kind of hid in the coffee for a couple of minutes and Jared didn’t rush her, which she had to be grateful for, even though at some level she didn’t want him to have the slightest clue about how to behave so well. It would really have helped with this crazy nerve-ending problem if he’d been crude, insensitive, obvious and a flagrant con artist.
Why had she told him so much about Gram in the first place, she wondered. Because he’d paved the way by talking about his father’s death, earlier?
“Your mother didn’t want to wait a little longer on all this?” he finally asked. “Sorting through a person’s whole life can be very draining and difficult.”
“I think it’s helping Mom, in some ways. And she had a little time to prepare before Gram died. Gram was eighty, and the stroke was a severe one. We knew she wouldn’t want to linger for a long time without hope of recovery, and her wish was granted. She died in her sleep ten days after she first collapsed.”
“You said she wasn’t very organized. Did she at least keep all her papers in one room? Did she have any kind of a filing system?”
“Uh, no.” Shallis smiled a little. “There are boxes and stuffed envelopes and loose file folders all over the house.”
“Right.” He smiled back. “That kind of a filing system. I know it well.”
“And then there are all Gram’s wonderful knickknacks and souvenirs, precious memories folded away in tissue paper, bits of jewelry, old evening gowns, so much.”
“Some hard decisions. You’ll need to put aside anything you want valued. There are a couple of local valuers my grandfather recommends.”
He reached into a drawer of the desk and took out two business cards. He didn’t hand them to her directly, but reached across to put them down just in front of her. There was never any risk that they’d touch, and Shallis wondered if that was his intention.
“Thanks,” she said.
She picked up the cards and slipped them into a pocket inside the lid of the open briefcase, which she’d place on the desk to her left. Then she looked back at Jared and found him with his jaw propped on his two thumbs and his elbows on the desk for support.
He looked a little tired. Stressed out, even. She wondered what lay behind his decision to take a break from his jet-propelled ascent up the ladder of success in Chicago, but realized she might never know. She definitely wasn’t going to ask any searching questions that might bring the information out.
“Should we make an inventory as we go?” she asked.
“It might be better to sort through everything first.”
“There’s so much. We’re not tackling any of it systematically.”
“Room by room?”
“That’s what
