The Amorous Heiress

by Carrie Alexander

  “If you worked for him, you agreed by silent assent” She made a face. “But I’m not a good person to protest. I haven’t done a thing with my own degree, professionally speaking, so I guess…”

  Jed tipped forward and the chair legs hit the deck with a thud. “Why not?”

  “There’s a good question.” Gussy tried to think why she’d fallen into her plush but unproductive way of life. Probably because it was easiest to do what everyone had expected of her—which was essentially nothing serious, only maintaining the appropriate social calendar and volunteering where needed.

  She attempted another carefree laugh; maybe she’d get better at it with practice. “The world needs a healthy supply of strictly decorative heiresses, don’t you think?”

  Jed was noncommittal. “I guess it takes all kinds.”

  “You really want to say ‘Get a job,’ but you can’t because you’re my job, more or less.”

  “Probably less.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”

  He shrugged.

  “I hate men who’ve graduated from the Gary Cooper School of Laconic Communication.”

  Jed’s grin flashed unexpectedly. Every time it did, his eyes glinted like sapphires under a spotlight, which was very challenging to her sense of decorum.

  “Men are physical,” he said. “Women are verbal. Men kind of like it that way because—”

  “Do you mean oral?” she asked, surrendering to the kind of mischievous impulse she hadn’t known she possessed—up to now.

  He cocked his head. This time his eyes didn’t glint; they glittered, provoking Gussy far beyond good behavior. She elaborated. “Men like it when women are oral, not so much verbal—”

  Jed interrupted. “Are you forgetting that I’m your gardener? Not one of the cast of thousands you call boyfriends?”

  “Thousands? I don’t—”

  “Okay, then, dozens, wasn’t it?” He shifted uneasily, glancing around the deck as if he was desperate for their waitress—or anyone else—to interrupt.

  Gussy wasn’t sure what had happened, but she knew she’d been jolted from her rock-steady path of boredom and propriety. She felt stimulated, witty, alive. She even felt alluring. Suggestive repartee wasn’t her custom, but since he was reacting to her as a woman and not a mouse…

  “Care to make it a baker’s dozen?” she teased.

  With no timely distractions to be had, Jed reluctantly turned to face her. His stare was level and lengthy before he finally found the wherewithal to respond negatively to what had surely been a frivolous invitation. “Not on a bet,” he said.

  He felt as slimy as seaweed when Gussy’s face crumpled. “Oh,” she whispered, turning a lovely mottled pink. “Sorry.”

  He tried to make amends. “Don’t take offense. See, I have this aversion to crowds. I tend to get lost in them.”

  She still looked miserable, and why was that when by all accounts she already had more suitors than she needed? Jed couldn’t figure it out. One instant Gussy was flighty and flirtatious, the next vulnerable and shy. Last night she’d been ready to pollinate, then by morning she was as brittle as a corn husk in November. It was enough to make a man laconic—he didn’t dare open his mouth because he was sure to say the wrong thing to the wrong Gussy.

  Then again, it could be his own feelings that were confused. He had to admit that despite his avowal not to let it happen, he was more and more drawn to Miss Augustina Fairchild. On the surface she was the self-described decorative heiress without a serious concern, but below that…well, there was much about her outlook and tastes that seemed to mesh with his own. And when she forgot herself, she was sweet and delightful and fascinating and funny. Any woman who could recite the characteristics of sixteen varieties of irises wasn’t entirely useless.

  Finally the waitress arrived, bringing a basket of warm, nutty bread, Gussy’s Caesar salad and Jed’s clam chowder. Gussy kept her face turned down, concentrating on her lunch, although Jed soon noticed that she was pushing forkfuls of it around her plate instead of eating.

  “It’s not a good idea to mix business with pleasure,” he said cautiously. “I shouldn’t have kissed—”

  “Why, Jed! Why, Jed, I…” Her voice started out bright and hard, but faded fast. She shook her head and mumbled, “You’re right.” Two beats later, she looked up accusingly. “What about Vanessa Van Pelt?”

  “What about her?”

  Gussy waved her fork in a little circle. “Don’t tell me Vanessa hasn’t tried…you know.”

  “Tried, but not succeeded.”

  Gussy tipped up her chin. “Yes, I can see it. Women throwing themselves at you left and right, yet Jed Kelley remains a paragon of virtue.”

  At least she was no longer looking so dejected. “I never said I never said yes,” he admitted.

  “But not to a client?”

  “Definitely not.” In the case of the amorous heiress, that wasn’t easy. And he could foresee it getting even tougher.

  Although Gussy was pretending to watch the harbor, her brown-penny gaze kept sliding sideways with little flicks and flutters of her lashes. Her open, expressive face prompted an undefined ache inside Jed.

  Her brow furrowed as if she was deep in thought. Her lips parted without a sound, then, eventually, came a tentative speculation, spoken with a soft, lazy, sun-drenched hum that oozed through him, sharpening his need. “What if I wasn’t a client?”

  Though he had no idea what she had in mind, the possibilities made his world tilt on its axis.

  “MACHINE GUN KELLEY!”

  Jed blinked.

  “Jed, is that you?” boomed the disruptive voice, busting into itty-bitty pieces the very nice fantasy that Jed had instantly conjured at Gussy’s soft insinuation. “Hot damn! Whaddya know—Machine Gun Kelley!”

  Gussy chortled. “Machine Gun?”

  Jed groaned. “I’d say ‘Don’t ask,’ but I think you’re about to find out.”

  A bear of a man with a gap-toothed grin jogged up the deck steps from the direction of the wharf. He was as burly and blunt-featured as a longshoreman, although he wore madras shorts, a Maine Berrypickers Union T-shirt and neon green flip-flops. His accent was heavily Canadian. “Well, well, Jed! It’s a small world, isn’t it?”

  Jed stood and shook hands. “Bronson,” he said with a smile. “Good to see you.”

  “Who’s the girlfriend?” Bronson asked immediately. “Glad to see that you’re not brooding over Julie.”

  Jed saw the flash of copper in Gussy’s eyes, then the slow speculation as she carefully smoothed her expression. “Gussy, this is Steve Bronson, my former teammate.”

  “Been retired three years now,” Bronson said.

  “Bronson, Gussy Fairchild. A local girl.” Jed purposely used a description bland enough to divert attention. He didn’t want to get into some drawn-out discussion of how he’d found Julie’s replacement. “What brings you to Maine, Bronson?”

  “I needed the vacation after visiting Sue’s parents in Nova Scotia. We’re waiting for the ferry—that’s Sue Anne and little Bronnie feeding the gulls.” Bronson waved at the wife and son, who were standing at the end of the wharf tossing hunks of bread to the gulls swooping and spiraling around them. “Come September, I’m back in Ottawa teaching squirts how to bodycheck. Looks like you’ve got it better than me.” He thrust a robust elbow at Jed’s flat midriff.

  “Oof,” Jed said.

  Bronson thought that was hilarious. “Yup, yah shot the puck like a machine gun, but yah never could take the blindside check!”

  “Thank God I no longer have to,” Jed said. “Running a gardening business is easier on the body.”

  Bronson was eyeing Gussy as if she were a piece of pie à la mode. “Yum-yum,” he said with crude admiration.

  “The gardens of Gussy’s family estate are my biggest—”

  Bronson just laughed. “Hey, man, what do you need with Julie—let Pierre have her.”

 
Jed felt his expression freeze. “So she’s with Pierre now? Why am I not surprised?”

  Bronson waved his arms. “Forget her!”

  Jed tensed, waiting for Gussy to ask. She smiled sweetly at his former teammate instead. “Are you taking the ferry to Osprey Island? Don’t miss the view from the northeastern point.” She chatted about the island’s cranberry bog and the protected habitat of the ospreys until the ferry blatted its horn and Bronson left them at a gallop, waving and shouting his goodbyes.

  Now she’ll ask, Jed thought.

  She didn’t. She buttered a piece of bread.

  Jed ate a spoonful of his chowder. Then another. Gussy picked up her drink and smiled pleasantly at him over the rim.

  “Julie Cole was my fiancée,” he blurted, then almost bit his tongue. Why had he felt the need to confess that? The entire regrettable affair was best forgotten—not that he could. Its effects still lingered.

  Gussy looked alert but heedful. “What happened?”

  “Howitzer O’Hallihan.”

  “Howitzer, Machine Gun…hockey must be a very violent sport.”

  “Indoor sports can be just as dangerous.”

  “Are you referring to Julie?” Gussy cocked her head; sunshine flashed on her glasses. “But Julie is such a sweet name.”

  Jed measured his reply. “Sometimes the sweetness only temporarily disguises the bitter aftertaste.”

  “Oh, dear,” Gussy murmured. “She done you wrong.”

  He couldn’t eat any more of the chowder. He couldn’t take any more of Gussy’s circumspect responses, either. “You’re the most confounding, contrary woman I ever met,” he complained. “Aren’t you even curious?”

  She acted surprised. “I thought you’d be impressed by my restraint. After all, we wouldn’t want to confuse our business relationship with personal references.”

  “Touché.”

  She relented, her eyes gone soft and velvety. “So tell me what happened after Howitzer happened.”

  “I found out that Julie liked me more as a star hockey player making big bucks than as an injured ex-hockey player needing a new career. Looking back, it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise.”

  “Who broke up with whom?”

  “By the time she actually returned the ring, it was mutual. It’s kind of hard for a guy to stay engaged when his fiancée is already scouting among the Whalers’ roster for a replacement.”

  “So then this Pierre guy is a hockey player?”

  “Julie upgraded. Pierre does have endorsement deals and trading cards and fan clubs. But if he wants Julie to stick around, he’d better not lose them. She likes status.”

  Gussy looked at him sorrowfully.

  Damn. Jed put his head in his hands, swearing to himself, wishing he’d kept the whole sorry saga under wraps. He didn’t need to have the amorous heiress thinking of ways to buck up his self-esteem. It was doing fine, thank you. He’d learned a hard lesson, suffered a little, but now he had his head on straight and his life focused. Never again would he be susceptible to one whose sweet girlish charm was not entirely natural, but practiced.

  Like Gussy, he thought. Maybe.

  He should proceed with the utmost caution. In hockey, he’d learned how dangerous it was to turn your back on someone with the power to blast you out of your skates.

  He was afraid that Gussy was gaining that power. He wasn’t sure that she knew it, though. Unless she was a very good actress.

  He looked up, smoothing one hand across his shorn skull. Gussy’s eyes were big and round, glistening like chocolate melting in the sun. “Andrews made a crack,” she said, “about gardening being a comedown after pro hockey. Do you feel that way? Do you miss all the glamour and prestige?”

  “Not that.” He drained his iced tea before continuing. “I miss the game, yeah. Having to quit so abruptly was tough to handle. But by the time I’d rehabbed my knee I was past that. Since I’d always liked gardening, and I wanted to stay busy…” He shrugged. “Here I am.”

  “Well, I’m glad you ended up in Sheepshead Bay,” she said softly.

  Despite his misgivings, Jed smiled. He looked at the billowing cumulus clouds, the briny water lapping at the gray stone and weathered pillars of the quay and the stark beauty of the evergreens etched against the cobalt sky. He looked at Gussy, her chin propped on her hands, her baggy pant legs flapping in the wind and her face, her solemn eyes, her rosy lips so soft and sweet, so sweet…

  “So am I,” he agreed.

  6

  The Amorous Heiress and Co.

  IT WAS A BUSY WEEK. It was also a very long week.

  At least for Jed. He suspected Gussy was of another opinion—she’d certainly seemed to be enjoying herself.

  Tuesday, he’d been demonstrating the proper way to clip boxwood to one of his part-time workers when Andrews Lowell arrived to take Gussy out to lunch. Jed happened to be kneeling out of sight behind one of the topiary bushes when they emerged from the house, laughing and chatting and looking very Town & Country. “Where did Jed go?” Gussy asked, but at that point he wasn’t about to pop up in his overalls and grovel for her attention. Andrews had hustled her along with promises of lobster bisque and no Felicity and Ted.

  Thursday, Marian Throckmorton called for Jed to bring the Rolls-Royce up to the parking court because she was on her way to tea at the Gilmores’. He obeyed, secretly hoping for a glimpse of Gussy. She obliged, coming out the side door right behind her grandmother, frowning as she tugged at a pair of white gloves. Jed held the car door open in temporary-chauffeur fashion. Gussy watched him from beneath the brim of a pert straw hat until he winked devilishly at her to see how she’d respond. She turned away, flustered, her cheeks pinkening, her high heels mincing on the gravel as she scooted around to the other side of the car and got in. They didn’t exchange a word.

  Friday was hot, and Jed was late coming home from overseeing the resodding of the Van Pelts’ lawn. He’d just parked at the carriage house, stepped out and stripped off his sweaty T-shirt when Gussy zipped past in the passenger side of some playboy’s seventy-five-thousand-dollar onyx Raptor convertible. He caught only a glimpse of her face—eyes wide open, mouth even wider, one hand clamped to her hairdo and the other scrambling for the seat belt. Jed wadded up his shirt, tossed it in the back of the pickup and without stopping to think about what he was doing crossed the estate grounds and climbed down the steep stone stairway to the beach in record time, his mind fuming and his body made acutely painful by thoughts of the amorous heiress and her equally amorous suitors. As the sun set in an orange-red-violet splendor, he dunked himself again and again in the freezing ocean and asked a higher power to grant him the strength to withstand the sweet poison of Gussy’s allure. Innocent or not, she was an imminent danger to his vital parts.

  When Saturday finally arrived, Jed made himself work until noon on a new client’s perennial garden even though on the way through town all the traffic was going in the opposite direction. The air was giddy with the holiday feeling of the regatta, but it was Gussy’s image that burned in his mind while he staked delphiniums and watered the languishing phlox. She would be smiling, looking deceptively shy and old-fashioned as she passed out lemonade to an endless parade of her admirers.

  Finally Jed gave up, washed himself with the hose, collected his gardening tools and headed back toward town. Gussy had personally issued him an invitation to her refreshment booth. She was probably looking for him.

  Sheepshead Bay was bursting with tourists. People in two-hundred-dollar sunglasses and trendy beachwear mobbed the town, exclaiming over the quaint shingled fishing shacks and Cape Cod-style cottages and the charming crooked streets, buying up every blueberry pie and authentically weathered weather vane in sight. Most of the activity was centered at the booths ringing the harbor, where pure white and rainbow-striped sails danced across the water. The scent of buttery popcorn and corn on the cob, sizzling deep-fried fish and seaweed mingled among the shouts, laughter, tinn
y music and occasional booming announcement over the loudspeakers. A starting gun popped and a cheer went up, onshore and off.

  Jed bought a whitefish sandwich. Chewing, he bypassed the cloying perfume of the flower-show tent, where Marian Throckmorton presided over a dozen babbling ladies as colorful in their print silk dresses as the triple-tier aisles of fussy floral arrangements.

  The garden club’s refreshment booth was decorated with a fringe of freshly cut fir boughs; a sharp, resinous tang hung in the air. Wet glass pitchers of lemonade sat in a row, tempting potential customers. Miss Augustina Fairchild, in white cotton with a pale yellow sweater tied around her shoulders, was even more tempting to at least one of them.

  Jed licked his lips.

  He thought her eyes lit up when she saw him. “Lemonade?” she asked, slightly out of breath.

  He looked at the iced lemonade decorated with sprigs of mint, then back up at Gussy’s open, glowing face. She couldn’t be that guileless and a vamp, too. Could she? He laid a twenty-dollar bill on the table. “I’ll take a pitcher.”

  “A pitcher?”

  “I told you I’d be thirsty.”

  Clucking her tongue, she shook her head so her long, thick brown braid swung from shoulder to shoulder. The ice cubes clattered when she poured. “I’ll start you with a glass.”

  He finished it in one long swig and handed it back. Smiling, she poured him another. “Have you done your duty for the garden club?” he asked, thumbing up the droplets that had trickled from the sweating glass and down the side of his mouth.

  Coyly, Gussy peeped at him from the corner of her eye. “What did you have in mind?”

  “First off, getting you out of here before Andrews shows up.”

  She laughed appreciatively. “Sally, would you take over the counter for me?”

  A girl with a round, freckled face looked Jed up and down. “Shu-ure thing.”

  Gussy slung a tiny needlepoint purse with an extra-long strap across her torso, leaving her hands free. Jed drained his second ten-dollar glass of lemonade without regret at the cost and took one of her hands before it was no longer free. “What did you have in mind?” she asked.