before you met him.”
Gracie wasn’t sure how to respond. Was Vivian really being as nice as she seemed? Did she really want to mend fences? Or was there still some potential for the suffocation thing?
Gracie gave herself a good mental shake. She’d been a billionaire for barely a week, and already she was seeing the worst in people. This was exactly why she didn’t want to be rich—she didn’t want to be suspicious of everyone she met.
Of course Vivian was being nice. Of course she wanted to make amends. And it would be nice to hear about Harry’s life before Gracie met him. She’d always thought the reason he didn’t talk about himself was because he thought she’d be bored. His life must have been fascinating.
For some reason, that made Gracie look at Harrison again. He was no longer glowering at her, and in that moment, she could see some resemblance between him and his father. They had the same blue eyes and square jaw, but Harrison was a good three inches taller and considerably broader in the shoulders than Harry had been. She wondered if he had other things in common with his father. Did he share Harry’s love of baseball or his irreverent sense of humor? Did he prefer pie to cake, the way his father had? Could he cook chili and fox-trot with the best of them?
And why did she suddenly kind of want to find out?
“All right,” she said before realizing she’d made the decision. “It’s nice of you to open your home to me, Mrs. Sage. Thank you.”
“Call me Vivian, darling,” the older woman replied with a smile. “I’m sure we’re all going to be very good friends before the week is through.”
Gracie wasn’t so sure about that. But Vivian seemed sincere. She, at least, might turn out to be a friend. But Harrison? Well. With Harrison, Gracie would just hope for the best.
And, of course, prepare for the worst.
Gracie awoke her second day on Long Island feeling only marginally less uncomfortable than she had on her first. Dinner with Vivian last night—Harrison was, not surprisingly, absent—had been reasonably polite, if not particularly chatty on Gracie’s part. But she still felt out of place this morning. Probably because she was out of place. The bedroom in which Vivian had settled her was practically the size of her entire apartment back in Seattle. Jeez, the bed was practically the size of her apartment back in Seattle. The ceiling was pale blue with wisps of white clouds painted on one side that gradually faded into a star-spattered twilight sky on the other. The satiny hardwood floor was scattered with fringed flowered rugs, and the furniture and curtains could have come from the Palace at Versailles.
How could Harry have lived in a house like this? It was nothing like him. His apartment had been furnished with scarred castoffs, and the rugs had been threadbare. His walls had been decorated with Cincinnati Reds memorabilia, some vintage posters advertising jazz in Greenwich Village and a couple of paint-by-number cocker spaniels. And Harry had loved that apartment.
There had been no ocean whispers drifting through the windows in the old neighborhood. No warm, salt-laden breezes. No deserted beaches. No palatial homes. There had been tired, well-loved old houses crowded together. There had been broken sidewalks with violets growing out of the cracks. There had been rooms crammed with remnants of lives worked hard, but well spent, too. Life. That was what had been in her and Harry’s old neighborhood. Real life. The sort of life she’d always lived. The sort of life she’d assumed Harry had lived, too.
Why had a man who could have had and done anything he wanted abandoned it all to live in a tiny apartment in a working-class neighborhood six hundred miles away? Harry Sagalowsky, alleged retired TV repairman, had turned out to be quite the mystery man.
For some reason, that thought segued to others about Harry’s son. Harrison Sage was kind of a mystery, too. Was he the charming flirt she’d first met in the library yesterday? Or was he the angry young man who was convinced she had taken advantage of his father? And why was it so important that she convince him she wasn’t like that at all?
Today would be better, she told herself as she padded to the guest bathroom to shower. Because today she and Harrison—and Vivian, too—would have a chance to get to know each other under better circumstances. They would get to know each other period. It was a new day. A day to start over. Surely, Harrison Sage would feel that way, too. Surely, he would give her a chance to prove she was nothing like the person he thought she was.
Surely, he would.
* * *
Harrison was deliberately late for breakfast, hoping that by the time he showed up, Grace Sumner would have left, miffed to be shown so little regard now that she was richer and more important than 99 percent of the world. Instead, when he ambled out to the patio, freshly showered and wearing a navy blue polo and khakis more suitable for playing golf than for being intimidating, he found her sitting poolside with his mother. Even worse, the two women were laughing the way women did when they realized they had some shared experience that had gone awry.
And damned if Grace Sumner didn’t have a really nice laugh, genuine and uninhibited, as if she laughed a lot.
His mother sat on one side of the table, still in her pajamas and robe. Grace sat on the other, looking nothing like a gold digger and very much like a girl next door. At least, she looked like what Harrison figured a girl next door was supposed to look like. It was the way girls next door always looked in movies, all fresh and sweet and innocent. He’d never seen an actual girl next door who looked like that, since the girls he’d grown up with who lived next door—a half mile down the beach—had always looked...well, kind of like gold diggers, truth be told.
But not Grace Sumner. Her burnished hair was in a ponytail today, the breeze buffeting a few loose strands around her nape and temple in a way that made Harrison itch to tuck them back into place, just so he could watch the wind dance with them again. Her flawless face was bathed in late morning sunlight, making her skin rosy. The retro suit of the day before had been replaced by retro casual clothes today—a sleeveless white button-up shirt and those pants things that weren’t actually pants, but weren’t shorts, either, and came to about midcalf. Hers were spattered with big, round flowers in yellow and pink. Her only jewelry was a pink plastic bracelet that had probably set her back at least two dollars. Maybe as much as three.
Had he not known better, he could almost believe she was as innocent of conning his father as she claimed. He would have to stay on guard around her. Would that his father had been as cautious, none of this would be happening.
“Oh, Harrison, there you are!” his mother called out when she saw him. “Come join us. We saved you some caviar—mostly because Gracie doesn’t like caviar. Can you imagine?”
No, Harrison couldn’t imagine a woman who had just swindled herself billions of dollars not liking caviar. But it was an acquired taste for some people. She’d get the hang of it once she was firmly entrenched in the new life she’d buy with his family’s money.
“And there’s still some champagne, too,” his mother continued. “Gracie doesn’t like mimosas, either.”
Neither did Harrison. Still, he would have expected someone like Grace to lap up champagne in any form from her stiletto. The thought made his gaze fall to her feet. She wore plain flat shoes—pink, to match the flowers on her pants.
Okay, that did it. No woman could be as adorable and unsullied as Grace Sumner portrayed herself. It just
