Tommy leaned in a bit. “I’ll bet you’d like to see something of the place where your dad grew up. Let me show you around. There’s a sunroom on the back that has a nice view of the gardens. This way.” He put his hand on her waist, as if to steer her toward the hall, and let it drift down over her hip.
“Thank you, but I think I’ll let my cousin show me around if she cares to.” She slid away from his grasp. Did he find that approach actually worked on women? Or maybe he expected the Blackburn name to awe her.
With a polite nod, she crossed the room to where Brenda stood, gesturing with a glass dessert plate as she talked to a tall redhead with overly made-up eyes and a sulky smile.
Brenda swung toward her, arranging her face in a smile that seemed to argue with her anxious eyes. “Are you enjoying yourself, Allison? Tommy especially wanted to meet you.”
“I noticed,” she said, and the redhead gave her a surprised, involuntary smile. Up close, the girl was not as old as she wanted people to think, plainly still in her teens.
“This...this is my daughter. Krysta.” Brenda touched the girl’s arm lightly. “We were just...” She let the sentence die out, as if she didn’t want to finish it.
Disagreeing about something, Allison would guess, judging by the sulky look that settled back on to Krysta’s face.
“I don’t see any reason why I have to hang around,” she muttered. “It’s just a bunch of old people making stupid conversation.”
Allison had to suppress a smile. Krysta would probably class her with the old people and be surprised to learn Allison felt very much the same.
“Don’t talk like that.” The words should have been a reprimand, but instead they sounded like a plea. “You know I wanted you here to meet your cousin Allison and make her feel welcome.”
“Welcome!” Krysta threw off her mother’s hand with an impatient gesture. “Like anybody welcomes her. Why don’t you tell her the truth?” Her voice had risen, and Allison felt the embarrassment anyone experiences when someone else’s child is acting out in public.
She took a step back, and the movement seemed to draw Krysta’s fulminating gaze to her. The girl’s blue eyes narrowed. “You want to know why Evelyn left Blackburn House to you? I’ll tell you. She wanted to humiliate us, that’s why.”
Krysta’s voice had risen above the chatter of the crowd, and she seemed suddenly aware that people were staring at her.
“You are behaving like a child, Krysta Conner. Perhaps you’d better go to your room until you can manage to act like an adult.”
The woman who spoke had gray hair cut mannishly, a forbidding expression and a commanding voice. She stared Krysta down without apparent effort, and the girl turned and ran from the room, face flaming.
Forced chatter resumed as people cast sidelong glances at Brenda, whose face was nearly as scarlet as that of her daughter’s.
“Really, Julia, you didn’t need to speak to her that way.” Brenda’s protest was muted.
“Someone had to. It should have come from you. You’re her mother. I’d suggest you develop some backbone before that headstrong daughter of yours does something you’ll both regret.”
For an instant Allison thought Brenda would flare out. Then she shook her head and carried her plate over to a side table.
The woman flashed a glance at Allison. “I always think one of the privileges of getting to be an ugly old woman is being able to say what you really think. I’m Julia Everly. I was a friend of your grandmother’s.” Her smile showed patently false teeth and gave her a shark-like look. “Well, sometimes we were friends and sometimes enemies. At least we were never boring.”
Allison couldn’t help laughing. “I can readily believe that.”
Julia gave an unrepentant grin. “You’re wondering why your grandmother left Blackburn House to you. Trust me, it wasn’t because of anything Brenda and Krysta said or did.”
Allison studied her. Despite what she’d said, Julia wasn’t exactly ugly. With her round, wrinkled face and bright eyes she resembled an intelligent monkey. She would never have had the kind of classic beauty that Evelyn must have possessed, but she was instantly likeable.
“Is this a guessing game or do you know why my grandmother left it to me?” she demanded, suspecting Julia preferred people to be as direct as she was.
The woman shrugged. “Can’t say I knew everything she was thinking. Evelyn had a way of keeping her own counsel when she wanted. But I do know that she’d always planned to make provision for you. When your mother remarried, she said to me, ‘Julia, that little girl will be all right now, so I won’t rock the boat. But when I go, I’ll see that she’s taken care of.’”
That didn’t answer all of her questions, but it was more helpful than anything else she’d learned since she came to Laurel Ridge. So, her grandmother had known about her life, even without contacting her. And she’d at least considered her.
She realized Julia was studying her face and spoke quickly. “Thank you. I appreciate your telling me.”
Julia squeezed her hand, and Allison felt the woman’s cluster of rings bite into her fingers. “Don’t you let anybody rush you into any decisions. That’s my advice, for what it’s worth. Come to lunch one day, and we’ll talk. I’ll call you.”
“Thank you,” she said, before it occurred to her that she’d planned to be gone in a week’s time. But nothing seemed as clear-cut now as it had when she’d made that plan.
By the time an hour had passed, Allison had been introduced to so many people and had made so much meaningless chatter that her head felt about to split. She caught a passing server and asked directions to a powder room, thinking to escape the noise for a few minutes.
The girl pointed vaguely to the back of the center hallway, and Allison walked quickly in that direction. Surely she’d been here long enough to satisfy the demands of courtesy. She’d find Brenda and make her excuses.
She opened the door at the end of the hall, took one step forward and froze. She’d wandered into the sunroom Tommy had spoken of, and she wasn’t alone. T.J. and Krysta were sprawled on a wicker sofa, with the girl’s dress pulled up nearly to her waist.
The door swung shut behind her, and they both turned at the sound. T.J., eyes heavy-lidded and mouth swollen, looked both older and more dangerous than the prep-school image he’d projected earlier, while Krysta, paradoxically, looked younger and more vulnerable. She scrambled to her feet, smoothing her dress down.
“I told you we shouldn’t.” Krysta’s voice quavered.
“Didn’t figure on somebody spying on us.” T.J. got to his feet and took a swaggering step toward Allison. “What is it to you, anyway?”
“It’s nothing to me what you do, T.J.” Allison kept her voice even. “But Krysta is my cousin.”
Krysta seemed to regain her persona now that she was decently covered. “I don’t need a cousin like you.” She practically spat the words.
“I’m
