Selling Grace: A Light Romance Novel (Art of Grace Book 1)

by Samantha Westlake

  I felt as though she'd just socked me in the gut. "His what?"

  "Why, his fiancee, of course!" she repeated. "I've been wrapping up most of the matters in the city, but he had to go up today to sign the last paperwork on closing up the old place. Now that we're moving in here, there's no reason to pay two sets of cleaning staff, is there?"

  "Sanford is engaged?" I repeated, wondering if this was how it felt to have a stroke. My head hurt like crazy. "That can't be right - he never said anything-"

  "Oh, he doesn't like talking about himself, thinks that he can play Mister Dark and Mysterious with everyone he meets," Valencia said, giving another little disparaging wave of her hand. From deep inside of me, I felt a petty and personal dislike of the woman growing bigger with each second spent in her presence. "I'll get him under control, though, don't you worry."

  I didn't say anything, and an awkward silence fell over us for a moment. Valencia cleared her throat, frowning out at me, and I realized that I still stood on the front stoop of the Winterhearst mansion, right in her path.

  "Do you need something else?" the woman asked after a moment, as I tried to get any sort of thought into my head, fighting the rising sense of overwhelming panic.

  "Yes - no, I just have a little more review to do," I stammered out. "Really? You're really his fiancee? I swear that he never said he had a fiancee, that he was even seeing anyone!"

  Again with the laugh. Sanford might be engaged to this woman, but I itched to hit her in the face after just a minute of speaking with her. "Afraid so, honey," Valencia said, in what sounded like far too patronizing of a tone. "But I'm sure you'll find someone out there for you, someone a bit more your... level."

  "Anyway, head on in and take care of whatever else you need to do to finish up this whole appraisal business," Valencia went on, somehow not noticing how her words were making my fingers twitch as I fought to keep from tightening my hands into fists. "But before you go, do you know any good florists in this town? Good at the real bouquets, mind you, not just putting a half dozen wildflowers in a vase and calling it a 'custom arrangement'."

  "No," I answered shortly, wondering if she even noticed the frost that rimmed my words.

  "Oh, that's unfortunate. My normal florist told me that he doesn't do trips to set up for a wedding, and so I'll need to find someone in the area who can put this all together." Valencia sighed and smiled at me in what I suspected she thought of as a 'girly bonding' way. "Planning a wedding is so hard, you know?"

  "I wouldn't," I said shortly, wondering what the real punishment was for assault, especially if it was only my first offense.

  "Well, of course you wouldn't, but it's awful. Absolutely horrid. Anyway, I really should be going! So long!"

  And with that, she skipped down past me, climbing into a flashy, shiny Mercedes that I somehow hadn't noticed in the driveway and pulling away with a squeal of tires.

  I just stood there on the front step of the house, trying to determine whether this was just some sort of horrible hallucination. It had to be, didn't it? The idea that Sanford had been engaged all this time, that he was just using me as the side woman, was absurd.

  Right? Wasn't it?

  I mean, he'd taken me out (to a restaurant he chose, where nobody else saw us together), he'd flirted with me in public at the wine bar (although he insisted that we were just friends to anyone who asked), and he clearly let Winston find out about our little relationship (although really, who would Winston tell? The butler was clearly loyal to his employer, to the death). He hadn't made a single mention of a fiancee to me.

  So he couldn't be married. He didn't have anything to do with Valencia. She had to just be a friend of his, stringing me along.

  Right? Right? Please, oh please, let that be right.

  I still had to do my walkthrough of the house, making sure that I had everything on my itemized bill accounted for, but I didn't feel up to looking at anything inside the dark and unwelcoming house right now. I could probably go and try to hunt down Winston, but would I really be able to believe anything that the old butler told me?

  Finally, I dropped the bill down on a table just inside the front door, next to the keys and umbrellas and other items that someone might need to grab while on their way out of the house. I looked around for a moment, but then turned and headed back home.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  *

  I didn't stay long at home. Home didn't have any answers for me, and only kept me thinking about it by making sure that I saw the looming Winterhearst mansion whenever I glanced out one of my windows. Did the building really have to loom over me so much?

  So instead, I headed to the one place where I knew I'd find an open, welcoming ear, as well as a soft shoulder to support me if I burst into tears.

  Vini wasn't technically open this early in the morning, but Della was inside restocking some of the cabinets with fresh bottles, and she opened the door immediately when she saw me pounding on the other side, a couple of tears rolling down my face as I unsuccessfully tried to hold them back with sniffles.

  "Oh my god, what's going on?" she exclaimed as soon as she unlocked the door and pulled it open for me. "What's wrong? Come in, come in, Elaine, talk to me!"

  "Wine," I blubbered out, probably looking like an awful mess.

  Della was far better than any therapist. While a therapist might have tried to get me to open up and talk about my issues first, Della knew that a glass of wine couldn't possibly hurt, and would probably help. She had one sitting in front of me on the counter by the time that my butt (a respectably sized butt, not a tiny little yoga one like Valencia had, I thought miserably to myself) landed in the tall chair.

  "Drink, then talk," she commanded, plopping the wine bottle down on the counter next to me. "Refill as necessary."

  I nodded, drained half the glass of wine in a single gulp, and then groaned. "He's engaged," I said, a fresh wave of tears threatening to erupt from my eyes just from those two words.

  Of course, Della didn't have any idea as to whom I was referring, but she still rushed around the counter to put her arms around me. She was wonderfully soft, and I again wondered why any man might choose a stick-thin woman over someone like her. "There, there, it's okay," she murmured as she patted my back. "Just get it out in your own time."

  After a few seconds, I felt a little better, enough to let go of her and reach out for my wine glass. "Sanford," I said, as I lifted it up to my mouth again. "He's engaged, to this woman who's just awful. She only just showed up today, and I guess she's finally moving down from the city. He went up there last night, she said to finish making the plans to move."

  "Well, I'm not surprised," Della replied. "A gorgeous man like that, with money and looks together? Any woman would rush to snap him up."

  This, of course, set off a fresh wave of tears, and Della looked aghast at the reaction that her words provoked. "Oh, honey, no, you'll find another man! It's okay!" she tried to comfort me.

  "That's what Valencia said!" I wailed, adding further to my best friend's confusion.

  Finally, after taking a few more deep breaths, I managed to reveal the basic bones of this story to her. As Della's mouth gaped wider and wider, I explained how Sanford and I had been flirting back and forth from the beginning, how this flirting grew into something more, although we didn't really define it as a relationship. But I'd thought that we might have something between us, that there was a real connection.

  "But the whole time, he was just a scumbag who was engaged, and that's why he wanted to keep things separate!" I said as I reached my conclusion. "He just wanted to get some on the side, and he didn't want Valencia to find out! But now she's back, and she's the absolute worst, and he's going to marry her and never look at me again!"

  Now that the confusing holes in my story had been cleared up, Della's mood had shifted to spitting anger. "You point her out, and I'll make sure to roofie her wine if she comes in here," she promised me. "And his, too! What an ass
hole! How dare he cheat on someone as wonderful as you!"

  Well, technically, he was cheating with me on Valencia, rather than the other way around. Still, this didn't seem like the right opportunity to point out this little detail. Instead, I focused on transferring more of the wine from the bottle in front of me to the interior of my stomach.

  "I just can't believe that he was lying to me like that, all this time," I said, once I had an empty mouth again. "I mean, I really can't even believe it all the way, even after meeting Valencia. He told me all sorts of details, never said anything about meeting another woman or getting engaged."

  "Yeah, well, men are scum," Della replied, glaring so furiously at an empty wine glass as she tucked it away behind the counter that I half expected it to shatter from her emotion alone. "Trust me on that. They'll say whatever they want if they think that it will get them laid."

  I knew that I should be feeling angry. Wasn't that the first stage of grief? No, wait, there was one before it. I couldn't remember what it was, but I guessed that it was numbness, since that's what I felt right now. Pushing my glass and the mostly empty wine bottle aside, I laid my head down on the cold surface of the counter.

  "Della, what do I do?" I asked softly.

  "You move on, that's what you do! And maybe throw something through his windows, too. Steal the most valuable antiques out of his house and sell them off. Call it payment for your emotional pain."

  "That's not what I mean," I said, still just looking down at the counter. "Della, I really cared about him. This wasn't just a fling, at least not in my head."

  When I lifted my head up, Della was looking back at me with unexpected tenderness in her eyes. "Was it..." she started, but paused.

  I knew what she was going to say. "Maybe," I said miserably, shrugging my shoulders. "I guess I'll never know now."

  "Well, in that case, you need distance," she advised me. "Right away. You definitely can't be living next to him any longer, not after dealing with this. Either he'll show up late at night at your house and convince you to take him back and give him one last round, which will destroy all the defenses you've built up, or his fiancee is going to somehow find out about the two of you and try to burn your house down, or maybe try and hurt Whiskers to get revenge."

  I started to protest that no one would hurt Whiskers, but then I remembered my first impressions of Valencia. She didn't seem like the most well-adjusted individual, and she had sounded fiercely possessive of Sanford. Maybe hurting a poor, defenseless animal like Whiskers wasn't beyond the realm of possibility for her.

  "So where can I go?" I asked, but even as I said these words, one answer did occur to me. It was an awful option, but it was a possibility.

  "There's always your parents?" Della asked, voicing the thought in my head. "Aren't they just twenty minutes away or so? And didn't you say a couple weeks ago that they really wanted you to visit?"

  I had said that to Della, I recalled. Hard to believe that the last call from them had only been a couple of weeks ago. With all the time spent with Sanford, it felt like longer, like he'd been a part of my life for much more than just a month.

  Then again, maybe if we'd gone on much longer, I might have started to see some of the holes in his story, to see through his lies. "Yeah, I guess I could go and stay with my parents for a little while," I gave in. My mother would be overjoyed, at least. I wasn't so thrilled about the possibility of moving back home, but at least it would get me away from Sanford. "I could wait for the asshole to pay my bill, and then figure out what to do with the money."

  "Like I was telling you the other day, you need to take a vacation!" Della insisted. "Trust me, this is even more of a reason to do it. You've got the money, you don't have any reason now to stick around, and getting away will help you clear your head, maybe even help you move on past this total jerkwad. You can come back in a couple of weeks, all tanned and bronzed from spending time in the sun, and you can tell me all about how you let a bunch of hunky Latin men do all sorts of wild and crazy, sultry things to your body!"

  "Della!" I exclaimed, but perhaps for the very first time since I went over to the Winterhearst mansion that morning, I cracked a smile. "That's awful!"

  "Hey, I'm just letting you know how I'd grieve over finding this out," she replied with a shrug, but I saw her smiling in triumph at getting my lips to at least briefly quirk upwards. "And my grieving process has a necessary step where I go out and find the sexist man around, whisper in his ear all the dirty, nasty things that I want him to do to my body, and then drag him back to my hotel room and go nuts until the maids at that place hate me."

  Okay, that was ridiculous. A snorting laugh escaped my lips before I could help myself. "Della, you're awful," I told her. "Absolutely despicable."

  "And that's why I'm your best friend," she filled in the rest of my sentence. "Now, get out of here and go home and pack before the asshole gets back from his trip and realizes that you know the truth!"

  "You can still use his name, you know."

  "Nuh uh." Della shook her head, wild curls of hair bouncing around her face. "From now on, he's the asshole. I don't even care if his bitch fiancee finds out about his cheating and leaves him. Good riddance to bad rubbish all around, I say."

  I didn't feel like trying to persuade her to call Sanford by his name. After all, it might not be politically correct, but "asshole" summed up my feelings towards him, as well, despite the little voice inside my head that insisted that he was still a good guy, that he really did have deep feelings for me. That voice would just have to wither away and die - hopefully sooner, rather than later.

  Maybe I did need to consider Della's advice and throw myself into the bed of another man to get my mind off of Sanford.

  In any case, I headed home and hurriedly threw together a suitcase, tossing in clothes haphazardly without thinking about any sort of organization or what I'd need. I called up my mom to tell her that I'd be coming to stay with them for a few days, and her squeal of happiness practically burst one of my eardrums. I threw my suitcase into the little trunk of my car, and then grabbed the cat carrier and starting hunting around for Whiskers.

  I couldn't find him.

  Oh, perfect. Just perfect. "Whiskers, honey, come out!" I begged, trying to keep the edge of hysteria out of my voice. "Come here, baby, we're going on a trip! I promise that it's not to the vet!"

  Whoops. Probably shouldn't have said that. In any case, Whiskers didn't appear, even when I resorted to giving his treat bag a loud, rattling shake, or even opening up a fresh can of cat food and waving it around, as if the smell would magically conjure him out of the air. I was fairly sure that he hadn't managed to sneak out of my house this morning, but I couldn't find him anywhere.

  Eventually, I just put out the open can of cat food and double-checked to make sure that all of the doors and windows were securely shut. He had plenty of water and food, and I'd just cleaned his litter box the other day. He'd be fine for a day or so, until I came by to pick him up again, or maybe just replenish his food and water.

  Still unable to look up at the big house on the lot beside my own, I climbed into my car and drove away, telling myself that this time away would be good for me.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  *

  My parents, apparently determined to embarrass me from the moment that I arrived at their house, were both waiting outside on the wraparound front porch for me to arrive. My mother rushed down to greet me in the driveway, even before I turned off the engine of my car, while my dad just gave me a wave from his seat up on the porch.

  "Oh, we're so happy to have you, honey!" my mom exclaimed, throwing her arms around me when I was halfway out of the car. "And we've got so much to catch up on. You won't believe how big that boy, Tommy, who lived just down the street from you when you were growing up, has gotten. And he looks just like-"

  Of course, these words immediately provoked a new wave of tears from me. "Mom, I really don't want to talk about guys o
r dates or anything," I choked out, trying to fight back the wetness already welling up around the corners of my eyes. "Can we just go inside, please?"

  My mother might be pushy about wanting me to find a boyfriend, but she still had her mothering instincts, and those won out over her pushiness as soon as she saw the tears in my eyes. "Oh, honey, of course," she immediately said, totally changing her tune and squeezing me tightly again. "Here, come inside. I've got a bunch of cookies fresh out of the oven. You can have as many as you want as you tell me about whatever's on your mind."

  How could I refuse that offer? I headed inside, pausing to give my dad a quick hug to say hello. "Stay as long as you want, kiddo," he said to me as I bent down to wrap my arms around him.

  "Thanks, Dad," I said back to him. "See you inside?"

  He nodded. "I think we're doing meatloaf for dinner."

  That, at least, put a shaky smile on my face. Meatloaf was the quintessential Dean family meal. I swore that my mother had an infinite supply of frozen meatloaf in a chest freezer somewhere, and she just pulled out a brick whenever she needed something comforting that would stick to the ribs of everyone who consumed it. I'd eaten countless meatloaf dinners growing up, and it always made me feel a little better, comforted.

  Inside, I alternated between stuffing my face with my mom's delicious cookies and telling her about what brought me back home. My mom managed to keep her face fairly straight, clucking in sympathy when I told her about how I discovered Sanford's dirty secret by running into his fiancee.

  "That's awful," she commiserated. "But don't worry, honey, you can stay here as long as you need. Your father and I are happy to have you."

  Once I had tallied up the number of cookies I'd eaten and realized that I'd probably explode if I tried to get down another, I carried my suitcase up to my room. Walking into my childhood room brought back another wave of nostalgia, and I sank down on the bed, burying my face in the covers and inhaling that faint scent of off-brand laundry detergent that my mom always used.