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Maizie’s bright blue eyes crinkled at the corners as she smiled at him. “A pleasant memory, I hope.”
“Yes, well, it was. Once,” he allowed, stumbling ever so slightly over the words coming out as he continued looking away.
“I see,” she responded, hoping he’d continue. Her prospective client appeared to be somewhat uncomfortable, though. One of the things she prided herself on the most, an ability she had honed both as a mother and as a successful independent businesswoman, was putting someone at ease.
Glossing over the young man’s last words, Maizie purposely went on to the reason she assumed that he had come to her in the first place. In her judgment, he appeared to be the type who was more comfortable sticking to the business at hand than touching upon anything even remotely personal.
Still, she couldn’t help wondering if he was married or, at the very least, spoken for. The young man was clearly the kind who fell into the “drop-dead gorgeous” category, as Cecilia’s daughter liked to say. If he wasn’t married, well then, she just might have met her newest challenge.
“Are you here looking to buy a house, Mr....” She let her voice trail off, giving him the opportunity to state exactly why he was here as well as introduce himself.
“Oh, sorry.” Keith upbraided himself. He really wasn’t on his game today. Going straight from the airport to the house and then staying there overnight had done that to him. He would have been better off booking a hotel room.
He was going to have to see to that as soon as he finished up with this woman.
“Keith O’Connell,” he told her, shaking her hand belatedly. Given their proximity and difference in height—Maizie was petite while he was six-foot-two—he didn’t have to lean over her desk because she was standing up. “And I’m looking to sell, not buy, actually.”
“Sell,” she repeated slowly, as if she was pausing to taste the word. “You own a home here in Bedford?” she asked.
“In a manner of speaking.”
He couldn’t think of himself as being the actual owner. That had been his mother, who had worked long and hard, stitching together disjointed hours so she could be home for Amy and him when they were younger and needed her, but still provide for them. It was his mother’s sweat and dedication that had managed to pay for the house. He had just lived there—until he didn’t. And now it was his by default.
Because there was no one left.
“It is—was,” Keith corrected himself, “my mother’s house.”
Maizie sensed another wave of discomfort sweeping over her client-to-be and interpreted it the only way she could. He was having second thoughts about the fate of the house.
“Are you sure you want to sell it?” she questioned gently.
“Yes.” The single word was emphatic, exploding from his lips almost like a gunshot. And then Keith backpedaled just a shade. “I live and work in San Francisco, and there’s no reason for me to maintain a house down here. I’d like to sell the house as quickly as possible,” he added.
Maizie had remained on her feet. “Well, then, let’s go take a look at it, shall we?” she suggested brightly.
Keith nodded. “My car’s parked in front of the restaurant,” he told her. Striding ahead of the agent, he opened the office’s front door and held it for her.
Maizie glanced over her shoulder at the young woman seated at a desk in the corner. “I should only be gone for a little while, Rhonda. Hold down the fort,” she instructed her assistant cheerfully.
The woman she addressed looked as if she was eager to be the only occupant of the “fort.”
“Yes, ma’am!”
“She’s in training,” Maizie confided to her client-to-be once they were outside the office and the door had closed behind them. “More willing than able at the moment, I’m afraid. But with luck that should change soon.” At least, she hoped so. “We’ll take my car,” she announced as she stopped in front of a cream-colored Mercedes.
Keith glanced over toward his own dark blue sedan parked several yards away. He was accustomed to taking charge, no matter what the situation. He was also accustomed to being the one behind the wheel. “I thought that—”
Maizie neatly cut him off, her maternal smile widening considerably.
“No reason for you to use up your gas,” she informed him cheerfully. Aiming her key fob at her vehicle, she pressed it, and a melodious signal announced that the door locks had been released.
Without hesitation, Maizie got in, buckled up, then looked to her right and waited. After a beat, her would-be client got in on the passenger’s side. She hadn’t quite comprehended how tall the man was until he more than filled that section of her vehicle.
Hands resting on the steering wheel, she paused until Keith buckled up before saying, “Now, if you just give me the address, we’ll be on our way.”
Keith gave her the house number, adding, “That’s in the—”
“West Park development,” Maizie acknowledged. She flashed a smile at Keith as she pulled away from the curb. “I’ve been at this for a while now,” she told him.
Good for you, Keith thought as he stared, sphinxlike, straight ahead through the front windshield. With luck, this would wind up being one of his last drives to his mother’s house.
* * *
“It’s a lovely home,” Maizie concluded after her tour of both floors, the three-car garage and the backyard.
She preferred to build up her own rapport with the house she was to sell, but many of her clients insisted on leading the tour. She’d noticed Keith had hung back a little after he’d unlocked the front door.
It was very evident he had no desire to be here.
Either that or Keith was reluctant about selling the house in the first place but found himself in a financial situation forcing him to take this path.
“How fast can you sell it?” he asked her abruptly the moment he saw that she had finished her initial inspection.
Maizie watched her newest client for a long moment, studying him before she finally replied.
“I’m afraid that all depends on the market, the price of the house, what you—”
“You do it,” he said abruptly.
“Do what, exactly?” Maizie asked. He looked to be on edge. Why? she wondered. Did it have to do with the house or something else? There were a lot of gaps she would have to fill. It didn’t necessarily help with the sale of the house, but the information would be useful in other ways.
“You determine the going price for the house and sell it for just under that,” he explained.
“Under the going rate?” Maizie questioned. Why would he want to sell it short? This was one of the more popular models in the development, and its orientation was ideal. The morning sun hit the kitchen and family room first. By the time the afternoon arrived with its heat, the sun was hitting the driveway, leaving the house enveloped in comfort.
Maizie looked at her new client more closely. “What’s wrong with the house, Mr. O’Connell?”
“Nothing.” He had to hold himself in check to keep from snapping. That wasn’t going to help. Besides, it wasn’t Mrs. Sommers’s fault that closure felt as if it was eluding him. “There’s nothing wrong with the house. I just want to get rid of it. I told you, I don’t live in this area anymore, and I just want to sell the house and get back to my work.”
“What is it that you do, Mr. O’Connell?”
“I’m a lawyer.” Usually he experienced a tinge of pride accompanying that sentence. But this time there was nothing, just this odd, hollow feeling, as if being a lawyer didn’t matter anymore.
That was ridiculous. Of course it mattered. He was just fatigued, Keith insisted, silently scolding himself for the irrational thought.
“A lawyer,” Maizie repeated with an approving nod of her head, surprising him. “The son and daughter of one of my best friends are both lawyers,” she told him conversationally. And then she sobered slightly and she asked in as kind a tone as she could, “Did your mother die at home, by any chance?”
Because if the woman had, that put an impedance on the idea of a quick sale. Legally, at-home deaths had to be stated as such, and there were a great many people who wouldn’t dream of buying a home that supposedly came with its very own ghost to haunt its hallways.
Keith blinked. “What? No. Why?” The single-word sentences were fired out at her like bullets, shot one at a time.
Maizie’s tone continued to be kind as she answered him. “I thought that might explain why you seem so...tense,” she finally said for lack of a better word.
She didn’t want to offend the young man, but she did want to get to the heart of what might be troubling him, because he was troubled. Anyone could see that.
“Jet lag,” Keith told her dismissively, as if that explained everything.
“San Francisco is in the same time zone,” she pointed out gently. There was no reason for him to be experiencing any sort of jet lag.
“Of course it’s in the same time zone. I’m not an idiot,” Keith protested. “Sorry,” he murmured, doing his best to bank down his temper. Over the years, he’d schooled himself to be emotionally reserved. But what he’d learned was escaping him right now. “I was in New York on business when I got the call that—” Abruptly he changed the course of his response, correcting his last words. “My firm took a call from my mother’s neighbor saying that my mother had passed away. My assistant called me. So I caught the next plane back,” he told her.
And then he stopped cold.
Keith wasn’t accustomed to explaining himself. He hadn’t done that in a very long time. This had all caught him completely by surprise, and he was revealing more than he’d intended.
“That doesn’t have anything to do with anything,” he informed her stiffly.
“No,” she agreed, “it doesn’t. But I was just trying to get a feeling for the situation—and you. It helps me do a better job.” Maizie knew she had to sell this to the young man, who needed far more than the sale of this house to tie up loose ends.
He needed peace, she thought.
“I don’t care what you get for it. Just sell it,” Keith was saying. “I don’t want it hanging around my neck like the proverbial albatross.”
“You might not care about the sale price now, but you will someday soon. Perhaps even very soon.” Maizie paused, her sharp eyes sweeping over everything in the living room. “If you don’t mind my asking, what are you planning on doing with the furnishings?”
“Furnishings?” Keith repeated uncomprehendingly.
“The furniture, the clothing in the closets, the books—”
He hadn’t even thought about that. He supposed he was still coming to grips with the idea that as far as his mother was concerned, there would be no more tomorrows and all that entailed.
Replaying the agent’s words in his head, Keith waved his hand, dismissing the problem. “Get rid of it. All of it.” The things she’d enumerated represented a place in his life he had no intention of revisiting. “Throw it all away.”
That would be a terrible waste, and Maizie wasn’t about to be wasteful if she could possibly help it. “I think if you do that, if you just throw all this away, you’ll live to regret it.”
He was already regretting this conversation. However, he told himself that it cost him nothing to hear her out. “All right. What do you suggest?”
Maizie thought of the conversation she’d just had yesterday with Theresa over a late lunch. It involved the daughter of a mutual friend.
The single daughter of a mutual friend.
A wide smile blossomed on Maizie’s lips. “I think I have an idea you just might like.”
Chapter Two (#ulink_0e0b54e8-258f-572d-88ac-228b50e3ddfe)
“You do realize you work too hard, right?”
Marcy Crawford aimed the question at her younger sister, MacKenzie Bradshaw, as she followed her sister around a showroom that was nothing short of an obstacle course for anyone who wasn’t a size three. And in her current state of pregnancy, Marcy admittedly hadn’t been a petite size three for a little longer than eight months now.
Her question was a rhetorical one, and it was meant to get Kenzie, the youngest of five and the one everyone in the family doted on, to reassess her present life. However, her supposedly impromptu visit to Kenzie’s place of work wound up getting the latter to fall back on her usual evasive maneuvers. Whether or not she actually meant to, Kenzie was weaving her way in and out of small pockets of space. Pockets that Marcy was frustratingly finding close to impossible to get into. Thus she was completely unable to follow.
Kenzie glanced over her shoulder, pausing only long enough to blow her light blond bangs out of her eyes—she had to find time to get a haircut, she silently noted. With Christmas almost here, business had been good lately, really good. The turnaround at her shop, Hidden Treasures, both with items coming in and going out, had been more than a little gratifying.
“Said the woman who’s more than eight months pregnant and carrying a fourteenth-month-old around in her arms,” Kenzie pointed out.
She dearly loved her sister—loved all four of her siblings and her mother—but she instantly went into withdrawal mode the moment Marcy or the others felt compelled to change around the structure of her life. She liked it just the way it was—busy and profitable.
“Exactly my point,” Marcy said, shuffling so that she was finally able to move in front of her sister by coming in from the other side. The less than fluid movement managed to trap Kenzie with an ornate carved turn-of-the-century credenza at her back while she, with her sheer girth, barred her sister’s escape from the front. “All this effort you keep putting out, it should be going toward your own family, not toward pawing through dead people’s junk.”
“Hidden treasures,” Kenzie corrected her with just a touch of indignation, taking offense for both her clients and the one-of-a-kind items in her shop. “One woman’s junk is another woman’s prized possession.”
“Call it whatever you like,” Marcy told her with a sigh. Alex, her sleeping fourteen-month-old son, was growing increasingly heavy and she shifted him from one side to the other in an effort to balance his weight. “Just say you’ll come to dinner tonight.”
“I’d say it,” Kenzie replied willingly, “but you know I don’t believe in lying.” She fixed her sister with a penetrating look. “Look, Marce, I’d come over in a heartbeat if you weren’t setting me up.”
“Setting you up?” Marcy echoed, torn between sounding utterly innocent and completely indignant at the suggestion that she would do something so underhanded—even though that’s exactly what she was doing. Her free hand was pressed against her offended breast. “Who’s setting you up?” she asked, her voice cracking as it went up just a little too high at the end of her question.
“You are,” Kenzie replied without blinking. Turning, she found an opening next to a vintage Singer sewing machine console and wiggled through it, leaving Marcy to lumber over to a wider aisle.
Marcy valiantly attempted to keep up the ruse. “I am not. Why would you say that?” she demanded. When Alex began to whimper in response to her elevated voice, Marcy was forced to lower it to a whisper. “Why would you say that?” she repeated in almost a hiss.
Kenzie gave her a knowing look. “You told me not to wear my jeans and to remember to fix my hair.”
Because of her hectic schedule and the fact that she had to dress well for work, in her off hours Kenzie enjoyed kicking back and being comfortable during her get-togethers with her family. Apparently, in her sister’s estimation, there was such a thing as being too comfortable.
Marcy sniffed. “I just happen to think you look nice with your hair up.”
Kenzie felt compelled to point out the flaw in that excuse. “Marcy, you spend your days running after a kid whose energy levels rival the Energizer Bunny and you’re about to give birth in a month or less. Why would you even care if I shaved my head before I came over for dinner?” she challenged. “Unless, of course,” she went on, “you’re inviting an extra guest to attend that dinner.”
Marcy sighed, giving up the pretense. “Okay, you got me. I had Bob invite his friend George to dinner. But George is very nice—”
Kenzie immediately cut her off. This line of conversation had no future. There was no point in letting Marcy just go on and on.
“I’m sure he is,” she said, patronizing Marcy just the slightest bit, “but I’m never going to find out because I’m not coming over to dinner.”
Marcy looked at her pleadingly. “C’mon, Kenzie, don’t be stubborn.”
“You call it being stubborn. I call it surviving. Stop pulling a Mom on me,” Kenzie requested, then added a little more kindly, “I have no desire to be set up. My life is full enough as it is.” With that, she went on adjusting a new display of furnishings.
Marcy cast a disparaging look around at her sister’s most recent acquisitions. “Yeah, full of dust and allergens,” she grumbled.
Kenzie paused for a moment to pat her sister’s cheek. “C’mon, Marcy. Don’t pout. Your face might set that way,” she teased. It was something their grandmother used to threaten them with when they were little and scowled at being reprimanded.
“What am I going to tell George?” Marcy asked. “I’ve already built you up to him as the greatest thing since sliced bread.”
“Tell him I ran off to feed the masses,” Kenzie joked. And then she sighed, shaking her head. She would have thought Marcy would know better by now. “This can’t be coming as a surprise to you. You know how I feel about setups.”
Marcy shifted Alex over to her other hip again, clearly physically uncomfortable. “But that’s when Mom does them.”
