I might point out. When you lost the lease on your studio, I was glad to let you use the guest house.”
Darcy ground her teeth. It was true. Olivia was generous to a fault. She would accept no rent from Darcy, not a cent.
“Now,” Olivia said, “I’m asking you a simple favor, that’s all. He’s a sick young man in a strange town. How can it be wrong to offer him food and shelter?”
Damn! Now Olivia was making her feel guilty. Darcy raked her hand through her hair in exasperation.
“I’m asking you,” Olivia said, “for very little. Create a hospitable setting for him. Be polite. Get to know him as well or as little as you like. But remember, he’s going to be my stepson. In all probability, that is.”
Darcy winced. She had a horrid premonition that there was no “probability” involved. That Olivia would become Sloan English’s stepmother.
“Can I count on you?” Olivia asked.
Darcy pressed her hand against her midsection, which was suddenly queasy. She looked at her weeping sister. “Yes,” she said unhappily. “You can count on me.”
“Give him a chance, darling,” Olivia said. “You might actually like him.”
Right, Darcy thought bleakly. I’ll love him like a brother.
She hung up and turned to her sister. “Emerald,” she said as kindly as she could, “don’t cry—please.”
Emerald, who hated to be seen crying, stared at Darcy with swollen, brimming eyes. “She’s going to do it, isn’t she?” she said bitterly. “She’s going to marry that man—isn’t she?”
Darcy tried to keep her expression composed. She nodded. “It sounds like it.”
“It’ll be terrible,” Emerald said, and burst into a new freshet of tears. “It’ll be a disaster. He’s probably just after her money, and he’ll spend it all and make a fool of her—” Emerald gave a strangled little wail and hid her face in her hands again.
Stay calm, Darcy cautioned herself. Somebody around here has to. She went to Emerald and knelt beside her. She put her hand on her sister’s slender arm. “It may not happen. This thing may end as quickly as it started. These intense romances are like that. I’ve seen it happen before.”
Emerald straightened, dug a tissue from her waistband and wiped it across her nose with an angry gesture. “And that man—that churl who passed out on the floor—Mama wants him to come live in the lake house?”
Darcy shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “For just a few days. You don’t even have to see him. It’s all right.”
Emerald rolled her teary eyes heavenward. “I can’t believe it. His family’s already moving in and mooching off her. He’ll probably go through all her closets and drawers and steal the silverware—”
Darcy took Emerald’s chin between her thumb and forefinger. “Em, look at me. Calm down.”
“I don’t want to calm down,” Emerald shot back. “I don’t want a stepbrother. I don’t want a stepfather. I don’t want a step anything. Why can’t we just have Mama to ourselves? Why does she have to get mixed up with him? She can’t really know him. He could be a gigolo. Or a bigamist. Or one of those lonely hearts killers. Or—”
“Shh,” Darcy said, and laid her finger across her sister’s lips. “Listen. We don’t know anything about him—good or bad. But if the son comes here, we can find out. This is an opportunity.”
“Some opportunity,” Emerald said disdainfully.
“No. I mean it. I can find out things, feel him out.”
“He’ll probably feel you up,” Emerald retorted. “He’s probably a wolf like his father.”
“Whatever he is, I can handle him.”
“Ha! You don’t know that,” Emerald scoffed. “You don’t know a thing about him.”
“He may be just as suspicious of us as we are of him,” Darcy reasoned. “But I’ll gain his trust, win his confidence. Bit by bit, I’ll draw him out, and then we’ll know—”
“We won’t know anything,” Emerald argued. “He could lie his head off. I’ve got a better idea. Let’s not be nice to him. Let’s make him hate us. That’ll stop them.”
Darcy squeezed her sister’s arm. “No. Mama’d be appalled. We can’t—”
“We can’t let her go through with it, that’s what we can’t do,” Emerald said passionately. “I say that we break it up. Whatever it takes, we do.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Darcy warned. “My way’s best.”
Emerald narrowed her eyes. With a fierce gesture, she scrubbed away the last of her tears. “We’ll see whose way is best.”
Then she stood and walked to the fallen peanut butter sandwich. She picked it up, dropped it into the wastebasket, turned and left the room. She came back, almost immediately, wearing her boots. She carried her armor, her sword in its scabbard. Her back straight, she walked out the front door.
Darcy followed her as far as the porch. She put one hand on her hip and watched her sister stalk to her car.
“Emerald, where are you going?” she demanded. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going home,” Emerald said sulkily. “I’ve got to think.”
Once again, foreboding filled Darcy. “Then think over what I said. We have a great deal to gain from being nice to this Sloan person, and nothing to lose—”
“Except the silverware,” Emerald said sarcastically. “And, of course, Mama.”
SLOAN HAD STUDIED Darcy’s business card as diligently as a fortune-teller studying a tarot card for the answer to an impenetrable mystery.
The mystery, of course, was what he would say to her.
Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
I behaved like a jackass—
Now what do I do?
Three times he had picked up the receiver to call her. Three times, he had set it down again, suddenly convinced the words he’d rehearsed were inadequate, utter tripe.
The clay pot of wildflowers sat on his bedside tray like a perfectly constructed rebuke to his foolishness. He had burst in on her rudely, full of suspicion and self-righteousness. In return, she had given him courtesy and a gift of beauty he did not deserve.
He stared at her card and eyed the flowers. He wondered how she had put such simple elements together in a way that was so striking and original—just as she seemed to be.
He was usually an articulate man, but he found himself tongue-tied. He was normally confident,
