The scattered patches of snow melted over the weekend, and the world took on the gloomy gray cast of winter, spiced only by the almost frantic approach of Christmas. The days grew shorter — and yet every hour hung long on Clancey’s hands. She hadn’t realized before how often she looked at the clock to see if Rowan was free to leave his office yet. Now that she knew how ingrained a habit it had become, she was glad he was staying away.
And perhaps, she reflected drearily, if she kept repeating that to herself often enough, she might eventually learn to mean it.
*****
Clancey called Kaye McKenna a couple of days before Thanksgiving to tell her she couldn’t come for the holiday, after all. She didn’t say, though it was certainly the truth, that she would rather be tied to a stake and burned than have to sit across a table from Rowan and give thanks when she felt no gratitude at all, only heartache and resentment and anger. Instead she explained that she’d found a new location for Small World and would be spending the holiday there, getting ready for her move.
Kaye made no more than a polite protest. So much for the threat to send a kidnapping force if she didn’t show up.
Rowan might have given Kaye any story at all. And even if he’d told the truth — well, political disagreements could run deep, but family pulled together nevertheless, and on this issue Clancey was most definitely the outsider.
So as she painted the walls of her new store, she tried not to think of what the McKenna family might be doing. Were they watching the elaborate parades on television, or were they the sort to be playing basketball in the driveway instead?
She sat down to munch a sandwich at noon and thought of Kaye’s big turkey. She started talking to herself just to hear another voice, and before she knew it, she was imagining the family banter over dinner and wondering if Rowan’s mother was really as dreamy and absentminded as he had pictured her. If only there wasn’t this issue standing between them, Clancey might have had a chance to find out....
She found herself asking if it was such a terrible thing he was doing, after all. It was only a house — an old, half-decrepit, long-abused house. Tearing down a house wasn’t a crime. There could be a legitimate difference of opinion on whether any given house should be demolished or restored, and though in Clancey’s eyes it would be a waste to destroy this particular one, it wouldn’t change the course of the world.
“But the issue involves a whole lot more than just the house,” she reminded herself. “It’s a question of Rowan’s ethics.” And if solitude and paint fumes were making her begin to question her own judgment on that matter, it was time to quit work.
She put the lid back on the paint can and cleaned up her mess. On her way home she stopped at the convenience store to rent an old movie, in the hope of boring herself to sleep.
And when she saw the headline and the artist’s rendering of the new civic center in delicate color on the front page of the local newspaper, she bought a copy. “A souvenir,” she told herself wryly. “A memento of a place that doesn’t deserve to be destroyed.”
That was before she glanced at the story and realized that the site chosen for the civic center was on the other side of the retail area, a couple of miles from Pine Street and the historical district.
Her house — or, more accurately, Rowan’s house — had escaped destruction, after all.
The relief was overwhelming. Everything would be all right, she thought, now that the house was safe...
“No, it won’t,” she reminded herself. Rowan had made light of his shady deal, but the fact remained that his actions had been illegal. Using inside knowledge to make a profit; diverting taxpayers’ dollars to the benefit of an individual; running up the costs of a public project in order to enrich himself—those things could have sent him to prison. The fact that his scheme had ultimately been unsuccessful was no credit to Rowan.
No, his actions were things she couldn’t forgive, things she couldn’t overlook. A man who couldn’t be trusted in matters of business couldn’t be relied on in other ways, either.
It was over. Clancey’s only choice was to pick up the pieces of her life and go on.
*****
But she’d forgotten something, after all. There was one more thing she had to do, and one more time she would have to see him. She still owed him another month’s rent.
Rowan had said originally that he would come around to collect on the first day of each month. In December that fell on Saturday, and so all day she expected him, bracing herself each time the door opened. When he hadn’t come by closing time she found herself confused — half annoyed at him for prolonging the agony, and half puzzled. Even if he didn’t particularly wish to see her, he’d want to have his money. And now that he didn’t have a windfall from the city government to look forward to...
Then it occurred to her that Kaye would surely have told him about the new storefront. He might be expecting her to move at once, despite the interruption to her Christmas business, in order to avoid paying rent on two places.
Was he expecting to come by later and find the house cleaned out and empty? That wouldn’t be a pleasant scene for either of them.
The longer Clancey thought about it, the less she liked the possibility. It might be days before he stopped in to check his property, and the mere idea of sitting there and waiting for him to turn up was enough to make her nerves crawl like cobras.
“When there’s something you don’t like to do,” she reminded herself, “face it fast and get it over with. It hurts less that way.”
So she wrote out her check with a hand that shook slightly, making her signature appear rather odd, and looked up his address in the telephone book. Then, before she could talk herself out of it, she drove across town to the high-rise condominium complex where he lived.
The address would have surprised her if she had chanced to look it up before. People who lived in that tower didn’t generally consider taking on an old, half-decrepit house in a problematic neighborhood. Hank was right; buying the house made no sense at all for someone like Rowan McKenna.
“It’s just too bad I didn’t check it out earlier,” Clancey muttered as the almost-silent elevator zoomed up a dozen stories. “I might have started asking questions sooner, and saved myself a whole lot of pain.”
But her ordeal was nearly over now, she told herself bracingly. All she had to do was ring the bell, hand him the rent check, make sure he understood that she wouldn’t be out till the end of the month, and run for her life.
A simple plan, easy to follow.
Except that when she pressed the bell, she didn’t hear footsteps coming to answer it. Instead, a far-off voice called, “Come in.”
He must be expecting company, then. And just as obviously, it wasn’t Clancey for whom he was waiting.
She drew a long, deep breath and debated whether she should just stand there and ring again in a little while. But her courage was giving out. She wasn’t certain it would last even another minute, so she pushed the door open and almost tiptoed in.
The foyer was small, and her shoes tapped noisily against the ceramic tile on the floor. She bit her lip and looked around, into the living room, down a short hallway. There was no one to be seen.
Rowan’s head, with a telephone pressed to his ear, appeared around the corner of a door at the far end of the hall, and even at that distance Clancey could see the expression that flared in his eyes. It wasn’t the familiar green glow of mischief, but something she’d never seen before.
And it was something she hoped never to see again; it made her nervous. She put her hand to her mouth, hoping to make her lower lip stop trembling, and tried to concentrate on the apartment itself. It was very sleek and contemporary — ivory carpets and drapes, overstuffed furniture, stylish little tables. There was only one thing that would have fit nicely into the house on Pine Street — a glass-and-mahogany cabinet that displayed at least a hundred paperweights of all sizes, shapes and colors. She moved to the doorway o
f the living room to get a better look.
There was certainly no sign that he intended to close the apartment up anytime soon. There wasn’t an item out of place. The surface of the smoked-glass dining table held only a basket of silk flowers.
But then, she’d hardly expected to see boxes, tape, marking pens and tissue paper, had she?
She didn’t hear him coming until he was directly behind her, and when he spoke she jumped almost a foot.
“What have I done to earn this honor, Clancey?” His. tone was faintly ironic, and it stung like salt rubbed into a fresh cut.
She took the slightly crumpled check from her coat pocket and held it out to him. “I wanted to deliver this personally so you can’t say I was late with the rent,” she said stiffly.
A muscle at the corner of his mouth twitched a little. He inspected the check with insulting care.
Clancey hadn’t planned to turn this visit into an attack, but she was unable to stop herself. “It’s too bad if you expected me to move right now, but a deal is a deal, right?”
Rowan folded the check and slipped it into his money clip. He still didn’t say anything.
The silence goaded Clancey past endurance. “Don’t worry, I’ll be out before the first of the year, as we agreed.”
“Are you happy with your new place?” His voice was softer than she’d expected it to be; it sounded sincere.
Perhaps it was genuine, she thought, with a tinge of regret for her own sharpness. Whatever other plans he had nurtured, he’d never seemed to want to force her out of business.
She shrugged. The gesture would have looked casual, but it hurt; her whole body was tensed, and she felt as if the muscles in her shoulders were tearing as she moved. “It will do.”
“I shouldn’t have said what I did — telling you to get out.”
“Why not? Obviously you meant it. What are you going to do with the house, anyway?”
“I haven’t decided. You don’t have to move at all, you know. Not right away, at least.”
“I know,” Clancey said crisply. “I read the newspapers. But — well, let’s just say I’ll be glad to leave. Perhaps I’ll sell out completely, and try my luck somewhere else.” Some other town, she thought, where she wouldn’t be tempted to look for him on every street corner, in every car that passed by. “It’s probably time to move on.”
He stared down at her for a single moment that seemed to stretch into eternity. “Tell me, Clancey, what did I ever do to make you hate me so much?”
She couldn’t react quickly enough to keep the stricken look out of her face, or stop herself from looking up at him.
“And yet, you don’t hate this,” he whispered.
His mouth came down on hers, hard and hungry and demanding. There was not even a hint of gentleness about him then, but despite the fierceness of his embrace, it took every ounce of Clancey’s strength to keep herself from kissing him back with all the fire that he roused in her, to keep from giving him all the response he could desire.
When finally he raised his head, she said with the last of her breath, “Do you really think that proves anything, Rowan?”
He put her aside, almost roughly, and she stooped to retrieve her keys, which had dropped unheeded to the floor in the midst of that ... assault, she supposed, was the only accurate word for it.
“Maybe I’ll just demolish the damned house,” he said. His hands were outspread, fingers rigid, as if he was longing to rip boards one from another by brute force. “There would be great satisfaction in tearing it apart piece by piece.”
“You don’t expect that threat to bother me anymore, do you? That’s why you bought it, after all — to destroy it. Just my bad luck I got in your way, wasn’t it?”
Rowan’s jaw tightened. “Your bad luck? Maybe. It was certainly mine.”
The tone of his voice stung. Clancey clenched her fists till her nails dug into her palms. “You can’t blame me for all of it. It wasn’t my plan to bulldoze it.”
“And not mine, either. I intend — I intended to live in that house.”
“Oh, sure,” she mocked. “Glass-and-steel furniture and all. Who’s going to prove what you might have intended? But I’m not stupid, Rowan, so don’t bother to lie to me.”
“I’m damn tired of having my word questioned, Clancey.”
There was something about the icy blue glitter in his eyes that made her take a step back. But she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “Just because you misjudged the council, or didn’t have quite as much political pull as you thought you had—”
“Oh, I’ve got pull, all right – don’t worry about that.” He sounded almost grim. “I know all the right people, and exactly how to make them move.”
“But—”
He walked across the living room and stared out at the city’s skyline. “If you’ve finished, Clancey... Thank you for delivering the check.”
She didn’t stir. Pieces were clicking together in her mind. “You fixed it,” she said. “You knew they were going to choose that site, and you thought better of the whole thing and fixed it so they picked the other one instead.”
Rowan winced. “No, I didn’t, dammit.”
“But then—”
“I can show you the list of sites the council considered. Pine Street wasn’t on it.”
“But you admitted the whole thing!” She almost choked on the words.
“I didn’t admit anything.”
Clancey shook her head vehemently. “You as much as said—”
“You said a lot of things that night. I—” He paused and then added heavily, “I just didn’t think it was worth defending myself.”
He was right, she realized. He’d said almost nothing. She’d thought it was simply because he was annoyed at being caught out. “If it wasn’t true, why would you have let me believe all that?” she whispered.
“You didn’t exactly give me the benefit of the doubt, Clancey.”
Her head drooped guiltily. “It was so obvious—”
“To Hank, maybe it was. You might find it handy to remember that Hank is usually about six weeks slow with his facts.”
“And exactly what does that mean?”
Rowan’s eyebrows raised at the challenge in her voice. “That he wasn’t completely mistaken, just behind the times. Pine Street was on an early list of possible sites. A list I stumbled across when I was finishing up all the paperwork to get the house. As it turns out, it was eliminated as soon as the historical people started making noise.”
“People like Kaye?”
“Yes,” he said dryly. “And just how do you think Kaye found out, anyway? Who do you think tipped her off to mobilize her troops?”
Was that what he had meant about knowing the right people? Clancey’s throat had almost closed up. “But the petitions and everything — she was working on it till the announcement was made. For all I know she’s still at it. If it was eliminated weeks ago—”
“She’s trying to prevent problems from sneaking up on them in the future, the way this one did.”
If the historical district was enlarged, Clancey thought, the safeguards would be automatic. And if all this was true, then Rowan should get a great deal of credit for it.
He turned, staring out across the city again, and added softly, “But you took Hank’s word for everything, didn’t you? You didn’t even ask me.”
She jammed her hands into the pockets of her jacket, nails biting into her palms. “Of course I asked you,” she said, almost under her breath. “You admitted you were buying other houses on the block, too.” She crossed over to the window. “What about that, Rowan? Why did you want those other houses, if you weren’t planning to hold up the city for a nice profit?”
He shook his head a little. “I was only trying to buy the ones on each side, for protection, and I was trying to keep it quiet so the prices didn’t skyrocket. It’s not the world’s best neighborhood at the moment, you know. Owning a little extra green space seemed like a
good idea.” He didn’t look at her. “At least, it did when I still wanted to live there. Now... Well, I wish they would blast the damned house down with dynamite. It would save me a good deal of trouble.”
There was a sour, bitter taste in Clancey’s mouth. Her reasoning had been so perfectly clear, so perfectly damning – and so perfectly wrong. And now even the attempt to explain how she’d reached such an insane, stupid conclusion would be useless.
I should have known, she thought. I should have trusted him, no matter what.
But it was too late for that. There could be no patching things up anymore – for having broken their growing trust, she’d then ground the pieces under her heel until nothing remained. If it hadn’t been worth it to him even to defend himself...
The Unexpected Landlord Page 16
