Scandalous Box Set

by Layla Valentine

  I didn’t think it was possible, but I knew if I could pull it off, it would do wonderful things for my reputation. Better than the mansion, even. Besides, when was the last time I had turned a job down? Never, that’s when.

  “If I can get in touch with the decorators and contractors, I can get started on it before I fly out,” I said out loud. “I’m really not used to working on a place I haven’t walked in, but these pictures are enough to get me started. Finished by Christmas. Twenty-five…twenty-four days.”

  “Twenty-three, darling,” she said. “I couldn’t have you working on the place during the party, could I?”

  “Oh! You’re right, of course.”

  Twenty-three days. What on earth had I gotten myself into?

  Come on, Grace. You’ve always bitten off more than you thought you could chew, and you rocked it every time.

  Grinning with the rush of my own recklessness, I shook her hand.

  “I’ll do it.”

  Chapter 2

  Grace

  Night had fallen and a thick snowfall had started by the time I left my meeting with Mrs. Hornsby-Harris. I glanced at the sky and hoped that the storm system would blow itself out by the time I had to get on a plane the following week. My arms were full of pictures, blueprints, contact information for decorators and contractors, and my itinerary, and I was struggling to balance it all and my purse as I unlocked my car door.

  Of course everything fell as I got the door open. My phone popped out of my purse and skittered away across the concrete.

  Sighing, I shoved everything into the passenger seat, then chased after my phone. As I picked it up, I saw that I had missed a call from my mother during the meeting. After settling myself behind the wheel, I called her back.

  “Grace, how are you?”

  “Doing great, Mom. I just landed a big job, actually. How are you?”

  “That’s great dear. I’m fine, just fine.” Her tired voice belied her words, and I frowned.

  “Are you feeling all right?”

  “Yes, of course. I’m always fine you know that. It’s the trees.”

  “The…trees?”

  “In the backyard. That last storm wreaked havoc with my trees, loose branches, fractures. They’re shedding like mangy dogs and are just going to do more damage to themselves if they don’t get pruned properly. I was going to do it myself, but—”

  “Mom, no! You can’t be climbing around in trees at your age, especially not in all this ice and snow.”

  “If you had let me finish,” she said pertly, “I was going to say that I was going to do it myself, but I knew you would yell at me. Now Grace, these trees are hazards to themselves and my roof and anybody walking in the alley. If you have the time, I could use your help. If you don’t have the time, that’s fine.”

  I sighed. It wasn’t fine. If I didn’t show up, she was stubborn enough to get out there and do it herself and break a hip in the process.

  “All right, I’ll be there tomorrow if the snow lets up by then. Is that soon enough, or are you going to go trimming in the dark?”

  “Tomorrow will be fine,” she said. “As long as that big branch doesn’t blow off in the night and crush me in my bed.”

  “Sleep on the couch if you’re worried about it,” I said, indulging in an extensive eye-roll. “I’ll be there first thing in the morning.”

  “I’ll have breakfast waiting. You don’t eat enough.”

  “My thighs beg to differ.”

  “You just need a little exercise, that’s all. Trimming the trees will be good for that.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said wryly. “Get some sleep.”

  “It’s only seven o’clock. What do you think I am, an old lady?”

  “Good night, Mother.”

  “Well, good night then, if you’re turning in now. You’ve got to learn to live a little, girl.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ll borrow one of your flapper dresses one of these days and find myself a speakeasy.”

  “Terrible child.”

  “Love you.”

  “Love you too. See you tomorrow.”

  I stayed up far too late poring over the photos and notes and sketching all the bits and pieces into a coherent plan. The upper floors were in good shape for the most part, but Amelia had asked that I do her bedroom, the main hallway, and her husband’s bedroom in addition to the ground floors. I puzzled over the separate bedrooms for a while until my eyes began to close on their own.

  After a restless few hours of sleep filled with dreams of cherubs chasing me down green hallways, I dressed in my warmest, grungiest clothes and went to my mom’s place in Queens.

  “Is that the big branch that had you so worried?” I squinted up at the practically harmless branch, then raised an accusatory brow at my mother.

  “Look at where it is,” she argued. “One good gust and it goes right through my bedroom window.”

  “With a good deal of help from cartoon physics, maybe. All right, go inside. I’ll get it down.”

  “Don’t forget to cut the rest of it back, dear. I lost track of things over the summer. It’s a jungle out here.”

  “I got it,” I said, adjusting my safety glasses and ripping the cord on the mini chainsaw. I worked from the bottom up, silently cursing myself for not getting this done earlier in the year. The branches were frozen solid and put up more of a fight than they needed to.

  After an hour of chipping away at the most problematic tree, I turned off the chainsaw and wiped my brow. I was straddling one of the uppermost branches catching my breath when my phone rang.

  “Hello?” I winced at how breathless I sounded.

  “Grace? Amelia here. Just one more thing. That potted tree in the solarium, I believe it’s rotted through, but I do like the splash of plant life in that room, don’t you? So if you could find a replacement that would be just lovely.”

  “I’m adding it to the list as we speak.”

  “Oh, good! Have you been in touch with the decorators yet?”

  “Not yet, but I will before the end of the day.”

  “Remember darling, the end of the day in London is noon here, so please hurry.”

  “It is Saturday. Will they be open?”

  “Oh yes, dear, they’ll be open for me. Just leave a message with my name if they don’t answer.”

  “I will, thank you.”

  “Excellent! Thank you, darling, that’s all.”

  She hung up and I wiped my brow again. Fortunately, I’d remembered to add the pertinent numbers to my phone the night before, which meant I could make the calls without having to scale down the tree first. It didn’t occur to me until afterward how ridiculous it was to be making business calls while perched in a tree.

  As I had suspected, none of the people I called answered. I left messages as instructed, but it still took me a good half hour to get through all of the contacts. The wind was picking up when I finished, freezing the remaining sweat to my hair. Shivering, I threw myself back into the job at hand.

  Chapter 3

  Grace

  By lunchtime I was frozen through, sore and miserable, but the job was done. I went inside to warm up and eat, and I found my mother struggling to climb a chair to reach something on the top shelf.

  “Mom! Get down from there. What are you doing?”

  “I’m making you lunch. What does it look like?”

  “It looks like you’re trying to give one of us a heart attack, is what.”

  She pursed her lips at me and sighed. “Fine, help me down.”

  I did, then reached for the tin she had been after and handed it to her. “Are cookies really worth a broken hip?”

  “They’re special cookies,” she said stubbornly. “They were your father’s favorites. That’s why I keep them up there out of reach.”

  “Out of your own reach, maybe. You don’t have to childproof your cupboards anymore, Mom. Quit making me worry about you.”

  “I’m not making you do anything.
Now sit down and eat your lunch before I force-feed you. You’re too skinny.”

  She didn’t see the irony, and I was too stiff and sore to point it out to her. She’d made grilled cheese and tomato soup with butter cookies for dessert.

  “Mm, nostalgia for lunch, my favorite.”

  “Are you being sarcastic?”

  “Not at all. You know, I felt like a kid yesterday when I met this big-shot client, and it was one of the most uncomfortable moments in recent memory. I feel like a kid eating this, but it’s a whole different feeling.”

  “Of course it is,” she said firmly. “A kid would be uncomfortable meeting your big-shot client but wouldn’t be uncomfortable eating a perfectly fine lunch.”

  “So I’m just a big kid, then?” I teased.

  “When you want to be. Now tell me about this client.”

  “She’s a very rich woman, or she’s married to a very rich man. Either way, she’s got this amazing Victorian manor in London. I’m flying out next week to fix it up for Christmas.”

  “You’re flying all the way to London?”

  “Well, I’m certainly not taking a ship.”

  She pursed her lips. “How long will you be there?”

  “I hope I’ll be back in time for Christmas, but it might take a little longer than that to wrap up all of the minor details.”

  “So you might not be home for Christmas?”

  “Don’t worry, Mom, you’ll have company. You always do.”

  She shrugged and didn’t argue, which wasn’t like her.

  “Is something wrong?”

  She sighed. “Mae—you remember my neighbor Mae? Her daughter Vickie—you remember, the little girl who lived next door? She’s twenty-one this year and just had a baby. Mae’s selling the house and moving to Washington to be with her. She’s leaving before Christmas.”

  “There’s Gail,” I said comfortingly.

  Mom shook her head. “Gail’s been moved to a nursing home. She can’t get around much by herself these days. She couldn’t afford it, but her grandson’s some bigshot video game designer and he paid her way. Grandkids do change things, don’t they?”

  “You know, Mom, right now I can’t tell if you’re trying to guilt me into being home for Christmas or guilt me into having a baby.”

  She tilted her chin up defiantly. “Who says I’m doing either? Maybe I’m just talking about my life. I was under the mistaken impression that you might be interested.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Of course I’m interested. But you have to admit that you’re sounding a little passive-aggressive.”

  “I’m never passive-aggressive.”

  “That’s a bald-faced lie.”

  “Which proves my point. If a person is going to do something, they should go all-out on it. Why be passive-aggressive if you can just be aggressive?”

  “Are you still capable of aggression?” I teased.

  “Try me.” She narrowed her eyes at me, and I laughed.

  As we ate in comfortable silence for a while, my mind began to wander. It did seem like all my mom’s longtime friends were moving on in one way or another. I’d been playing with the idea of traveling more for work, but after talking to her I could no longer seem to justify turning the fantasy into a reality.

  “You leave next week?” she asked.

  “Yes, Thursday night, which only gives me the rest of the weekend to order supplies and arrange manpower. Then I have to leave the whole project in someone else’s hands until Friday. I just hope they don’t make any irreparable mistakes before I get there.”

  “You micromanage too much—that’s your problem. Relax! This means you don’t have to do any real work until next Monday.”

  I blinked at her. She never had understood the nature of my work. The stripping and painting, installing and building, those were the easy parts. The difficulty was in the planning and purchasing, everything which took more thought than action. To really get into the appropriate mindset and feel my way around a project, weaving the owner’s mind between the bones of the structure.

  I knew I would never be able to explain that to her in a way that she would understand. I had tried repeatedly, but she seemed to be convinced that the only work that counted was the work a person did with their hands.

  “So that means you’ll have lots of free time this week, won’t you?”

  Here we go.

  “Not really. I have to call in orders and make plans and hire people and…”

  Her shoulders slumped ever so slightly. I placed my hand on hers and sought her gaze, but she was studying her empty bowl intensely.

  “Mom. You’re going to be okay while I’m gone, right?”

  She shook herself and straightened her spine, shooting me an irritated look. “What do I look like, an invalid? I’ll be fine. You go have fun in London. I’ll just be…here.”

  I studied her for a moment, then looked—really looked—around the house. The books on the shelves looked a little more worn than they had the last time I’d noticed them. Her endless pile of crossword puzzle books had dwindled down to two, and one of them was open to the middle. The whole house was utterly spotless, and a half-finished crochet quilt hung over the arm of the couch. She was settling into her age now that my father had passed away, and it was killing her.

  “Do you still go dancing on Friday nights?”

  She looked startled. “That’s a strange question. Why do you ask?”

  “Come on, tell me. When was the last time you got out of the house?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t like to go out. Everywhere I want to go is full of old people. I’m not ready to be old yet.” She sighed, her eyes drifting to a family photo which had hung in the kitchen since I graduated high school. She and my dad stood on either side of me, beaming at the camera. “Your father was always good at keeping us young. I don’t know what to do with myself anymore.”

  “The community center always has something fun going on. Yoga and painting and collage, you like that stuff, don’t you?”

  My phone rang before she could answer, and I looked down at it. “Oh, it’s the paint people. I have to take this. Hello?”

  I wandered away into the living room to take the call, as Mom was already getting started on the lunch dishes. They had my order in stock, they said, and would have it shipped to the manor that very evening.

  “She wasn’t kidding about her name pulling weight,” I said as I rejoined my mother in the kitchen. “I better go. It’s looking like a busy day.”

  “Okay, go decorate the world. I’ll just be here.” She sighed moodily, and I hugged her.

  “Why don’t you call Millie or Agatha over? You can play some games or gossip about boys or something.”

  I kissed her as she scoffed at me, then hurried out the door. The phone rang again before I’d even reached my car. I answered and handled that order before driving home, but I barely made it to my parking space before the phone was ringing again.

  The phone didn’t stop ringing until after three. At that point, I had exhausted all of the orders I was certain about, and then I spent the rest of Saturday fine-tuning my plans. Sunday let up a little bit, but I still woke up to three messages. One of them was from Amelia. I called her back first.

  “Darling, I remembered one last thing I needed you to handle. There’s a small parlor we did not discuss at length, the little room with the dreadful green carpet? You know the one. I want to turn that into my husband’s office.”

  “Oh, yes of course. What are his tastes?”

  “Stuffy and dry,” she said with a laugh. “Very Victorian. If I can pry any ideas out of him, I will send them to you. If not, well, you have good taste. I trust you will think of everything.”

  “Thank you, I’ll get right to work on it.”

  “Very good. Oh, and if you can ensure that the office matches my husband’s bedroom?”

  “Of course. Is there a shared bedroom I should be planning for?”

  “Why no, darli
ng, these old manors are designed for separate bedrooms. Sleeping together is only necessary if you haven’t got the space or the house is heat-poor, neither of which applies.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, privately shocked. “Is there anything else you can think of?”

  “Not just now,” she said carelessly. “I trust your judgment.”

  Maybe you shouldn’t. I glanced at the blueprints and realized that I’d likely promised her an impossible outcome by Christmas. Still, I had no intention of backing out now, however prudent it might have been.

  This resulted, after I hung up with her, in a frantic planning session peppered with phone calls which likely wouldn’t be answered until the following day. The week went on like that, with a dozen calls from Amelia as she remembered “just one more thing”, hundreds of calls to and from warehouses and decorators, and planning sessions which lasted well into the night.

  Chapter 4

  Grace

  I worked at a frantic pace until I boarded the plane to London late Thursday night. Generally a nervous flier, I was so relieved about being forced to stop working that I was dead asleep before the plane reached cruising altitude. I slept right through to London. As such, I missed the announcement about the local time and weather report and was shocked to see that we had flown into a veritable blizzard.

  “I thought New York winters were bad,” I said to myself as I peered out of the window. “I wonder, can I even get to Kensington in this weather?”

  Worse than the weather was my own disorientation. My body’s clock determined that it was about seven in the morning and was not nearly ready for breakfast, while the time displayed indicated that it was lunchtime. All I wanted was to go straight to my hotel and settle in, handle my jet lag as best I could, and be fresh for work tomorrow.

  I called Amelia.

  “Hello darling, how was your flight?”

  “The flight was fine,” I said. “But this storm is horrendous. Do you think it will let up by tomorrow? There isn’t a cab to be seen anywhere, but my hotel should be nearby.”