In his old life, Harry had been, first and foremost, rich. Anything else had been incidental. Gracie didn’t want to be one of the people who saw only dollar signs in conjunction with his name, and she didn’t want to be one of the ones who took from him. Especially after he’d given so much to her.
“Promise me, Gracie,” he said again from the big screen, obviously having known she would hesitate.
“Okay, Harry,” she replied softly. “I promise.”
“That’s my girl,” Harry said with another wink.
He said his farewells, and then the TV screen went dark. Again, Gracie felt tears threatening. Hastily, she fished a handkerchief out of her purse and pressed it first to one eye, then the other.
Across the room, Harrison Sage began a slow clap. “Oh, well done, Ms. Sumner,” he said. “Definitely an award-worthy performance. I can see how my father was so taken in by you.”
“Were I you, Mr. Sage,” Bennett Tarrant interjected, “I would be careful what I said to the woman who owns the Long Island mansion my mother calls home.”
It hit Gracie then, finally, just how much power she wielded at the moment. Legally, she could indeed toss Vivian Sage into the street and move into the Long Island house herself. That was what a trashy, scheming, manipulative gold digger who’d used her sexual wiles to take advantage of a fragile old man would do.
So she said, “Mr. Tarrant, what do I have to do to deed the Long Island house and everything in it to Mrs. Sage? This is her home. She should own it, not me.”
Harrison Sage eyed Gracie warily at the comment, but he said nothing. Something in Vivian’s expression, though, softened a bit.
“It’s just a matter of drawing up the paperwork,” Mr. Tarrant said. “Today being Wednesday, we could have everything ready by the end of next week. If you don’t mind staying in the city for a little while longer.”
Gracie expelled a soft sigh. Harry’s Long Island estate had to be worth tens of millions of dollars, and its contents worth even more. Just shedding that small portion of his wealth made her feel better.
“I don’t mind staying in the city awhile longer,” Gracie said. “It’ll be fun. I’ve never been to New York before. Could you recommend a hotel? One that’s not too expensive? The one I’m in now is pretty steep, but I hadn’t planned to stay more than a couple of nights.”
“It’s New York City, Gracie,” Mr. Tarrant said with a smile. “There’s no such thing as not too expensive.”
“Oh, you don’t want to stay in the city,” Vivian said. “Darling, it’s so crowded and noisy. Spend the time with us here in the Hamptons. It’s beautiful in June. We’ve been having such lovely evenings.”
Harrison looked at his mother as if she’d grown a second head. “You can’t be serious.”
Gracie, too, thought Vivian must be joking. A minute ago, she’d looked as if she wanted Gracie to spontaneously combust. Now she was inviting her to stay at the house? Why? So she could suffocate Gracie in her sleep?
“Of course I’m serious,” Vivian said. “If Grace—you don’t mind if I call you Grace, do you, darling?—is kind enough to give me the house, the least I can do is make her comfortable here instead of having her stay in a stuffy old hotel in the city. Don’t you think so, Harrison?”
What Harrison was thinking, Gracie probably didn’t want to know. Not if the look on his face was any indication.
“Please, Grace?” Vivian urged. “We’ve all gotten off on the wrong foot. This just came as such a shock, that’s all. Let us make amends for behaving badly. You can tell us all about how you met my husband and what he was like in Cincinnati, and we can tell you about his life here before you met him.”
Gracie wasn’t sure how to respond. Was Vivian really being as nice as she seemed? Did she really want to mend fences? Or was there still some potential for the suffocation thing?
Gracie gave herself a good mental shake. She’d been a billionaire for barely a week, and already she was seeing the worst in people. This was exactly why she didn’t want to be rich—she didn’t want to be suspicious of everyone she met.
Of course Vivian was being nice. Of course she wanted to make amends. And it would be nice to hear about Harry’s life before Gracie met him. She’d always thought the reason he didn’t talk about himself was because he thought she’d be bored. His life must have been fascinating.
For some reason, that made Gracie look at Harrison again. He was no longer glowering at her, and in that moment, she could see some resemblance between him and his father. They had the same blue eyes and square jaw, but Harrison was a good three inches taller and considerably broader in the shoulders than Harry had been. She wondered if he had other things in common with his father. Did he share Harry’s love of baseball or his irreverent sense of humor? Did he prefer pie to cake, the way his father had? Could he cook chili and fox-trot with the best of them?
And why did she suddenly kind of want to find out?
“All right,” she said before realizing she’d made the decision. “It’s nice of you to open your home to me, Mrs. Sage. Thank you.”
“Call me Vivian, darling,” the older woman replied with a smile. “I’m sure we’re all going to be very good friends before the week is through.”
Gracie wasn’t so sure about that. But Vivian seemed sincere. She, at least, might turn out to be a friend. But Harrison? Well. With Harrison, Gracie would just hope for the best.
And, of course, prepare for the worst.
Gracie awoke her second day on Long Island feeling only marginally less uncomfortable than she had on her first. Dinner with Vivian last night—Harrison was, not surprisingly, absent—had been reasonably polite, if not particularly chatty on Gracie’s part. But she still felt out of place this morning. Probably because she was out of place. The bedroom in which Vivian had settled her was practically the size of her entire apartment back in Seattle. Jeez, the bed was practically the size of her apartment back in Seattle. The ceiling was pale blue with wisps of white clouds painted on one side that gradually faded into a star-spattered twilight sky on the other. The satiny hardwood floor was scattered with fringed flowered rugs, and the furniture and curtains could have come from the Palace at Versailles.
How could Harry have lived in a house like this? It was nothing like him. His apartment had been furnished with scarred castoffs, and the rugs had been threadbare. His walls had been decorated with Cincinnati Reds memorabilia, some vintage posters advertising jazz in Greenwich Village and a couple of paint-by-number cocker spaniels. And Harry had loved that apartment.
There had been no ocean whispers drifting through the windows in the old neighborhood. No warm, salt-laden breezes. No deserted beaches. No palatial homes. There had been tired, well-loved old houses crowded together. There had been broken sidewalks with violets growing out of the cracks. There had been rooms crammed with remnants of lives worked hard, but well spent, too. Life. That was what had been in her and Harry’s old neighborhood. Real life. The sort of life she’d always lived. The sort of life she’d assumed Harry had lived, too.
Why had a man who could have had and done anything he wanted abandoned it all to live in a tiny apartment in a working-class neighborhood six hundred miles away? Harry Sagalowsky, alleged retired TV repairman, had turned out to be quite the mystery man.
For some reason, that thought segued to others about Harry’s son. Harrison Sage was kind of a mystery, too. Was he the charming flirt she’d first met in the library yesterday? Or was he the angry young man who was convinced she had taken advantage of his father? And why was it so important that she convince him she wasn’t like that at all?
Today would be better,