Lacey sat up straighter, and Conn couldn’t help feeling good about making her wariness disappear. He didn’t know what exactly he’d said to work that magic, but the glow in her eyes was worth it.
Even though he wasn’t supposed to give a tinker’s damn.
The fire flickered and frost shrouded the window, emphasizing the cabin’s cozy intimacy.
“Can I tell you something crazy?” she asked.
“I suppose.” Was the romantic atmosphere getting to Lacey, too? Was it convincing her that they knew each other better than they actually did?
She leaned toward him again, her skin flushed. “This is so…” A hesitation, a stretched second of thought in which she bit her lip, then grinned. “I’m building a glass castle,” she said proudly.
Conn tried his best not to seem jarred by her statement. He was sure he’d done a decent job of keeping a straight face, but he couldn’t restrain his curiosity. “A full-scale castle? With glass?”
“It won’t be Locksley Castle, really.”
“Locksley Castle?”
She gestured with her hands, conveying her enthusiasm. “You have to see it someday. On the outskirts of the town, we’ve got an actual castle. An incredibly rich East Coast family with ties to European royalty lives there, supposedly, but we never see them. It’s one of those Kane’s Crossing myths.”
Conn nodded, still not understanding the reasons behind the glass castle, not really even understanding why she was confiding in him, a near stranger.
Lacey continued, unfazed. “My castle will be large enough to fit in a warehouse. I know—it sounds wild. And when my brothers first found out that I’d purchased land with the old toy warehouse on it, they thought it might be a sound investment. But then they realized I was going to hire an architect and contractors to actually build a glass castle, and they about flipped.”
“What’s the purpose?”
“Purpose?” Lacey’s gaze drifted to the fire, as if the flames held pictures of the finished product, the crystalline structure glimmering with every cinder-sparked burst. “I wanted to do something for Kane’s Crossing. Something that might bring the town together. And the Reno Center, a place for orphans, always needs money to help run it. I thought I could build this—I don’t know—spectacle, and people might come all the way to our town and pay to see it.”
Now the idea made a little more sense. “But…?”
“Yeah, I know,” she said, waving a hand toward him to brush off his doubts. “Why a glass castle? Everyone asks me before shaking their heads and rolling their eyes. But that’s why I think folks will come to see it. Because it’s so…unexpected.”
And majestic. Conn wasn’t much into fairy tales and happy endings, but he could imagine a person staring at Lacey’s creation with as much fascination as he stared at the North Star. He could even see someone making a wish on Lacey’s dream.
Oddly touched and intrigued, Conn bent forward, reaching out to run an index finger over the soft curve of Lacey’s cheek.
She already had a way of doing this to him—making him not think. It was scary how dumb he got when she was around.
Her eyes went wide as his finger traveled down her skin to the line of her jaw, to the tip of her chin. Conn, himself, even felt a little startled, his pulse kicking and screaming through his veins.
Suddenly, he pulled back, standing with such force his chair scraped the floor with a yelp. “Let’s get you home.”
One of Lacey’s shoulders—the one below the cheek he’d caressed—drifted upward, as if she wanted to wipe away his touch with a brush of her turtleneck but didn’t have the bad manners to do so. Was she angry because he’d been so forward?
After what seemed like an uncomfortable infinity, Lacey stood to clean the table, and he wasn’t any closer to an answer.
“I’ll take care of that,” he said, needing to get her out of here and back to the boundary of her own house.
With a glance that seemed to chastise him for ordering her around, she left the table and retrieved her coat. She moved toward the door, and he followed.
“Forget it,” she said, opening the door and letting in the night. “I can walk myself home.”
She left so quickly he couldn’t even thank her for dinner.
The next day, after Conn had beat himself up all night about offending Lacey, he still hadn’t forgiven himself.
As he perched by a pine, he held the binoculars to his sight, training the lenses toward the Spencer estate. He needed to be disciplined in his efforts, needed to clear his mind of the cute-as-snowflakes Lacey Vedae. The stakes of his stay in the woods were too high to fool with.
He couldn’t let his mother down, and the point had been driven home yet again after talking to her on the phone this morning. He’d traveled over county lines to the next town, just to stay away from the Kane’s Crossing scene, using a random pay phone to check in on her. During their short conversation, she hadn’t been able to hide a cough, had merrily scolded him for worrying about this minor cold.
But every sniff, every sigh worried Connor. A relapse. Death. He wouldn’t let either one of them happen to his mom.
He glanced at a mild sky still cloudy enough to preserve some snow then shrugged into his coat a little more, coveting its warmth.
This damned spying was tedious, barely better than his research trips to libraries in the neighboring counties, trips that allowed him access to old newspaper files. He was determined to find out all he could about the Spencers.
The name caused the bile to rise in his throat. All these years, living a lie. All this time, thinking that he was…
Wait. A black Lexus had pulled onto the circular driveway in front of the Spencers’ colonial mansion. The structure resided on a hill, as regal as a ruler on a throne, its front facade guarded by pine trees. Siggy Woods, where Conn now sat, offered a side view of the estate, allowing him to see the front and back of the house. Luckily, the trees were sparse from this point, giving Conn his first glimpse of the man he thought might be Johann Spencer, the family’s new leader.
From gossip columns, Connor knew that Johann was a distant European cousin of Horatio, Edwina, Chad and Ashlyn. He’d purchased all their remaining properties after Horatio had run into legal troubles and fled to Europe.
Through the binoculars, the new token of power seemed like a giant, towering over his wife and two children. His pale blond hair clashed with the black of his expensive overcoat, offering Conn the chance to scoff at the juxtaposition of lightness and darkness contained in the same space.
But as far as Conn was concerned, the Spencers were all about darkness.
A chauffeur drove the car away as Johann led his family toward the mansion. The front door seemed to open on its own, but Conn knew it was probably a butler who had done the menial work, ushering the Spencers into the house.
A
