Keepsake

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  Ha-ha.

  "I guess you're right," she said, sipping to his toast after all. "I'm a pathetically modern woman."

  He leaned back against the kitchen counter and gave her a thoughtful look. "What did it say under your yearbook mug shot? I was never mailed a copy, needless to say."

  "Oh! Would you like to s—?"

  Dumb; why remind him of a year he'd never get back? "Y'know, I think it's buried somewhere in a closet," she amended. "Maybe another time. Anyway, as I recall, it said, 'Olivia Bennett—she hasn't got time for the pain.' "

  "Carly Simon."

  "Mm-hmm," she said, sipping her wine. "I suppose it was as accurate as any of those predictions are. They're a little like horoscopes, aren't they? You see what you want to see in them."

  "Liv, I have a confession to make," he said out of the blue. "All those years that I spent in California ... well, I thought of you more than once. A lot more than once."

  Her heart was on the launching pad, ready for liftoff, when he added, "and every damn thought of you was more bitter than the one before it."

  "Oh."

  He set the wineglass down on her granite counter and walked up to the bank of windows in the breakfast area, the windows that had a view of a swift-running river he could not see. For a long moment he was lost in his own private reverie, this buzz-cut, cummerbunded stonemason who'd just confessed to harboring bitter thoughts of her.

  Olivia waited, hurt and baffled, to hear more.

  Soon enough, it came rolling out. "I resented you because you had everything I ever wanted in life: stability, a proper family, the admiration and respect of everyone around you.

  "Oddly enough," he added with a shrug, "I never resented your brother. I knew I was smarter than Rand, and better on the field. But you! You had everything I had—ambition, brains, discipline—and wealth and status besides. That gave you an unbeatable edge. God, how I hated that. Hated you. Thought I hated you, anyway," he said with a pained glance in her direction.

  He turned back to the river that he didn't know was there. "But guess what? It turns out that I was wrong," he said softly. "It turns out that I've been confusing hate with something else. So maybe I'm not so smart, after all."

  He got lost in such profound silence that Olivia, type A that she was, felt the need to prompt him."Something else?''

  "Yeah."

  He sounded so resigned, so melancholy. But not very specific.

  "Something else?"

  "Mmm." Turning from the window, hands still in his pockets, he said, "But honest to God, I'm not sure what."

  He came back toward her and when he got close he stopped, half-circling her face with his fingertips. "Look at you," he said in a voice of wonder. "There's not a man alive who could resist you. But there are other beautiful women in the world—a lot of them in California—and I've never felt this way about any of them."

  He laughed at himself and said, "God, I sound like an arrogant bastard. Am I out of line, telling you this?"

  "I'll let you know," she said, hardly daring to breathe. Beautiful? She wasn't beautiful.

  "Liv, we're not lovers, so how can this be—?" He made a comical face, lifting his eyebrows and compressing his lips.

  "Something else?"

  "Yeah. That. I spent seventeen years resenting you, and now suddenly it's ... something else."

  Olivia understood completely; she was feeling it herself. She studied his face and marveled that she knew it so well: the hazel eyes, narrowed in self-defense from the sun even when the sun wasn't shining; the eyebrows that were pulled together in determination more often than not; the squared chin with its hint of a cleft; the nose with its bridge more Roman than Celtic; the wide grin with a tiny, endearing overlap in the two front teeth. She knew his face almost as well as she knew her own.

  "We grew up together," she said, trying to explain away the comforting sense of familiarity. "That should count for something."

  Quinn's response to that was a chuckle. "We grew up together, it's true. But you were a major pain in the butt."

  "That's what I thought about you!"

  "I never could stand your self-assurance. You were way too cocky for a girl."

  "Isn't that funny? I used to think you were rude, refusing to let a girl win."

  "I know. You expected me to give up my seat to you, so to speak. And yet you always went for the jugular.''

  "And you always went for the knees."

  He nodded in fond recollection. "You remember the day the door of your locker was siliconed shut and you couldn't get at the take-home final you were supposed to hand in? I did that."

  "I was sure you did. That's why I stole your term paper from study hall a week later."

  "You did that?"

  "Uh-huh. And then I gave it to Tim Kroft. He got an A."

  "You little devil!" Quinn said with a surprised laugh. "If I had known that, I wouldn't have stuck up for you when Jimmy O'Malley wrote that limerick about you and posted it all over school."

  "I remember that. You ripped them all down and then you gave Jimmy a black eye. That was really nice of you, Quinn," she said with a sigh, and she meant it. The limerick had been insulting and obscene and she had been completely devastated by it.

  She looked up and said, "I was so grateful. I never forgot what you did. I think that's why after you and your father disappeared, I sneaked into the cottage to save your trophies before the police could confiscate them. My parents still don't know that I was hiding them all this time."

  "It amazes me that you did that. And even though I reacted like a jerk when I found it out, I have to say, it was a terrific gesture. I should have thanked you properly at the time."

  She took a sip of her wine. "Properly?''

  Please, please, please.

  Quinn smiled, then lifted the glass from her hand, setting it carefully on the counter beside them. He slid his hands behind her head, twining them in the curls of her hair.

  "Yeah. Properly," he whispered, bending his face to hers for the kiss. It was tenderly given, a light and yet lingering token that had as much respect in it as it had affection.

  She closed her eyes, the better to savor the brush of his mouth against hers, and felt the shiver of his breath as he said, "I want you to know ... that sometime soon ... I plan to make love to you, Olivia Bennett."

  "Now who's cocky?" she whispered, but the shivers that rippled over her were her own.

  Ignoring her challenge, he began to drop feathery kisses on her cheek, her chin, the arc of her throat. She leaned her head back like a cat to savor the strokes and felt his voice rumbling on the surface of her skin as he tested her with tiny, provocative nips and murmured, "I want you to know ... that I'm not in this ... for the thrill of it all."

  "Oh, gosh, I am," she whispered through a pleasurable haze.

  His chuckle echoed close to the beat of her pulse, quickening it. He sounded so sure of himself. "Livvy ... Liv," he said on a sigh, "you do things to me ...."

  "I ... can tell," she said as he pressed close to her, signaling his arousal.

  He brought his mouth back to hers for another kiss, night-and-day different from the first. This one was an expression of raw hunger—rough, ready, a sharp and painful reminder that he meant what he said. Caught off guard by it, Liv made a sound in her throat of surprise and then of surrender as she yielded to the force of it.

  His hand caught and cupped her breast through the thin fabric of her dress, sending a surge of desire rocketing through her. He pulled the sparkly string-strap away from her shoulder and ran his tongue in the hollow there, driving her deeper into the ground.

  "Christ, how I want you!" he muttered, coming back to cover her mouth greedily with his. He had her pinned against the counter; her hands gripped the smooth granite in her effort to steady herself against him. His kiss was dark, delicious, an invitation to a steamy netherworld that she rarely had time to visit.

  "I'm sorry ... I'm sorry ... this isn't what I'd planned
," he said hoarsely, but he didn't sound sorry at all.

  "I'm sorry, too," she whispered, which also was not true. "The ... oh, God, the—"

  She brought her hands up around his neck and cupped the back of his closely shorn head, pulling him closer, returning his kisses, feeding the fire. It was her one, last, willful indulgence before she broke away and finished her sentence by gasping, "The timing. It's awful."

  His look seemed blurred and undirected for a second, but he snapped back into focus quickly enough. "The gala?''

  She nodded glumly.

  He scowled and shook his head, like a boy being offered bad medicine. "I say we stay here instead," he said, bringing his mouth closer to hers again.

  "No, wait, stop," she said, laying her fingers against his lips. His face was inches from hers. She stared fiercely into his green eyes, battling the promise of pleasure she found there. She was only a slinky dress and a pair of pantyhose away from saying yes. It would be so easy, so decadent, to hole up with him in her townhouse making love instead of getting on with her campaign to rehabilitate him with the good citizens of Keepsake.

  But she had a civic duty.

  "We have to go, Quinn. They're expecting me. They might think something—"

  "Happened to you? Because you were alone with the gardener's son?"

  She grimaced and said, "Oh, come on, Quinn. You know that's not what they'd think."

  He shrugged. "It was worth a shot." And then he grinned that heart-melting, endearing grin of his and took a big step back from her. "Madame," he said with a deep bow and a graceful flourish of both hands, "your chariot awaits."

  She gave him a wary look. "You didn't hire a limo or anything, did you?"

  "Are you kidding?" he said as they headed for their coats. "Who's got that kind of dough? High-school seniors, maybe; not grown-ups."

  His quip stopped Olivia in her tracks. She turned to him and said softly, "We really are grown-ups now, aren't we? Where did it go, our youth? It ended so abruptly."

  "No kidding."

  "Oh, definitely for you, but even for me. I worked like a slave through college ... then graduate school ... then the shop ... another shop ... and where have I gotten? Practically nowhere."

  "Aren't you being a little hard on yourself?" asked Quinn as he donned his topcoat.

  "No. I should be running a company."

  "A textile mill, perchance?" Quinn ventured shrewdly. "Why aren't you?"

  "My father had other plans, all of them spelled 'Rand.' Don't get me started on that one," Olivia said flatly. She reached into the back of her closet and took out a floor-length black velvet cape lined in scarlet. It was a ridiculous extravagance she'd bought years ago and had worn only once, but as she slipped it over her shoulders, she knew that on this night, at this gala, with this man, the velvet cape was finally going to fulfill its destiny.

  She fastened the ebony-encrusted button and, feeling wildly romantic, turned around in a small circle for him to survey. "Well? What do you think?"

  He gave her a look that warmed her down to her silk-covered toes. "I think I'm a damned lucky bastard," he said, coming up to her and kissing her softly.

  "Hold that thought," she said with a sly smile, "for just a few more hours."

  Quinn didn't have a limo and driver waiting for her, but he did have a rented Mercedes. Olivia scolded him for throwing his money around, but secretly she was pleased that he was treating her like a homecoming queen. Yes, their prom days were definitely behind them, and that was too bad. But somehow Olivia couldn't help thinking that the best was yet to come.

  Chapter 12

  Quinn was curious to know why, exactly, Olivia wasn't working for her father at the mill. It seemed to him that Owen Bennett was wasting the best resource he had.

  "Thanks for the vote of confidence," she said as they drove along the river before taking the turn into town. She explained how disappointed she had been when her father hadn't offered her a job.

  "I was furious that my father was willing to hand over responsibility to my brother and not to me. Sometimes I think he just wants Rand where he can keep an eye on him—remember when Rand had that summer job at a camp in Maine, and my dad had to go up there to bail him out of jail?"

  "When he was arrested for going on that joyride with those guys who stole a car up there? Yeah, I remember. Rand bragged about it to the whole team when he got back."

  "Well, I can still hear my dad yelling that Rand was never going to leave Connecticut again, not if my dad had anything to say about it. Which of course he did—and still does.

  "Anyway, out of either stubbornness or stupidity, I decided to stick around and beat my father at his own game. I was determined to be a success right under his nose. I don't know what I thought I was going to do. Start a rival textile mill?"

  She let out a rueful laugh and continued. "I came up with the idea of Miracourt: high-end fabrics for decorating and for apparel. The store's a success, but I'm not close enough to the city to really take off. So I've begun to import decorator items for the home, mostly from France, and I'm going to branch out into mail order. And in the meantime, I threw in with my father to open Run of the Mill—because outlet stores are where it's at nowadays, I guess."

  "You don't sound thrilled."

  "I don't like the outlet," she admitted frankly. "It's in a crumbling warehouse with bad lighting and no windows. I get depressed when I go there, but my father is convinced that when the surroundings are dreary, people feel they get more value."

  "He's probably right."

  "I know that. He reminds me every chance he gets."

  Her answer was decidedly tense. Presumably it had something to do with the fact that they were discussing her relationship with her father, which had been problematic for as long as Quinn could remember.

  He recalled an April afternoon in seventh grade when Olivia had stopped to talk to him while he and his own father were raking the grounds of the estate. Owen Bennett happened to drive by. He called from the car for his daughter to come back to the house. She refused. He told her again. She refused again. Quinn wondered then—as he wondered still—if Olivia simply regarded him as a handy stick to poke in her father's eye.

  He figured he'd soon find out. He drove the Mercedes through the open iron gates and past the cottage he had once called home and headed for the grand house on the hill, obscured from view by carefully placed evergreens growing among the century-old specimen trees that lent the scene such dignity.

  "Funny," Quinn mused aloud. "This hill seemed so much steeper when I was a kid."

  "Yes. That's how it always is."

  He glanced at Olivia and saw that she was as tight as an overwound clock. "You're not dragging me here over your father's objections, by any chance?" he asked, suddenly suspicious.

  "No way," she answered tersely.

  He eased into the last turn of the winding driveway, aware of light ahead. His first glimpse of the manor and its immediate grounds was through the grand sweep of branches on a copper beech. Quinn became aware first of brilliance, and then of magic: every tree and shrub between them and the house was strung with tiny white lights. The effect was spectacular, something out of the robber-baron age and wholly befitting a turn-of-the-century mansion like the Bennett house.

  Quinn remembered the old days when his father used to climb an extension ladder to decorate two evergreens, one on each side of the portico, with big colored lights. But this! It must have taken a crew of men and a hydraulic lift to get it done. It was beautiful, all right, but it was completely over the top, like something out of Disney World.

  "I miss the colored lights," he found himself muttering.

  "Hmm? Oh. Those. Yes. They were nice."

  She was still somewhere else. He didn't like it. "I'll drop you off and park the—"

  "No, they have a valet for that," she said. "Just pull up to the house."

  Of course, a valet. He should have known. Thank God for the Mercedes. "Well, this
should be fun," he managed to say in a voice not completely grim. He rolled to a stop under the portico of the brightly lit house.

  "Quinn! I have a confession to make!" Olivia blurted as the valet opened her door for her. Scrambling out of the seat, she said over her shoulder and in a single breath: "My father doesn't know you're coming or Rand but my mother does but she's not telling so just play along!"

  Before he could say, "With what?" the valet was slamming her door in his face. Feeling as if he'd been zapped with a stun gun, Quinn sat where he was.

  Now she tells me? Now she freaking tells me?

  He snapped back to reality when he noticed the impatient valet, a kid who by the looks of him was a tackle on Keepsake's current team, waiting for him to surrender the wheel. Quinn got out and handed over the Mercedes to him, not without trepidation, and then turned to face the woman he had considered a friend and hoped to have as a lover.

  "You evil little witch—this is a setup!" he said, seething.

  "It's not! Oh, Quinn, it's not!" she said with an imploring look. "I was going to tell him, really I was, but—oh, what's the difference! Let's just go in and get it over with, can't we, please? All right?"

  "No, it's not all right, goddammit," he said in a low growl. He tried to grab her arm to lead her out from under the portico, but he couldn't find it in the folds of her goddamned cape. "I'm not going where I'm not invited—not in there! Town Hill is one thing, but—" He swore under his breath and said, "Hell, I'm outta here."

  He turned to go, but she caught his sleeve. "Quinn! You're not going to run again!"

  Bull's-eye. She got him where he lived. He turned back around and blasted her a look filled with pure felony.

  How could someone so smart be so incredibly dumb? Was she trying to provoke her father into all-out war? Jesus! Quinn was going to have to count on the Bennetts' good breeding; he sure couldn't count on hers.

  "All right," he said. "We go in; we go out. Five minutes, and then I take you home and you'll be free to come back and party on with your peers or sprawl around and watch Guy Lombardo on TV. Just as long as I'm out of it."