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Polished wood greeted her everywhere, from the original plank floors to the polished stair railing rising to the second floor. Colorful old rugs were scattered around the foyer, and the walls were painted a creamy white. Through the door to the right she could see a living room filled with beautiful period pieces, and to the left was the dining room, with a long Queen Anne table and chairs.
“I didn’t know you liked antiques,” she blurted.
“These aren’t antiques,” he said almost impatiently. “I made them myself.”
She looked up at him. “When do you have time?”
He shrugged. “I’ve been doing this for years. Keeps me busy in the evenings. What do you want?”
He wasn’t even going to ask her to take her coat off, she realized. Not even a civilized, neighborly offer of something hot to drink before she left. She was, however, stubborn enough not to allow him to rush her. What she was about to do deserved at least that much consideration.
“How’s your mother?”
“Getting better. Still exhausted. She sleeps a lot. She’s sleeping right now. Did you want to see her?”
She could tell he doubted it, and she couldn’t blame him; she certainly hadn’t tried to come see Barbara in the last two months. “No,” she said slowly. “I came to see you.”
“Big mistake. Witt’ll have your hide.”
“Witt’s not entitled to my hide. I’m a grown woman.” She smothered her exasperation. “And it’s all irrelevant, anyway.” Shoving her hand up under her jacket, she tugged the envelope out from under her sweater and offered it to him. It was warm from her body. “Here. The request for bids on Witt’s lodge.”
Hardy hesitated, looking at the envelope as she held it out to him. “Joni…” He trailed off as if he didn’t know what to say.
“You’ve only got until the tenth to submit,” she said, thrusting it toward him. “I’m sorry I couldn’t give you more time, but I just got this today. You’ll have to hurry.”
He still didn’t take the envelope. He stared at it as if it might explode at any moment. Then, slowly, he dragged his gaze from it and looked straight at her. “Witt is going to kill one of us if I take that.”
She shrugged, all too aware that he was right. “I can handle it.”
“Joni, why are you doing this? Why?”
She looked down, studying the braid rug beneath her feet, watching the melting snow drip from her boot and disappear into the rug. “Karen would want me to.”
For the longest time Hardy didn’t say anything. He didn’t even move or seem to draw a breath. Just as she was about to look up at him, to make sure she hadn’t shocked him into a stroke or something, he spoke.
“Take your jacket and boots off,” he said roughly. “You need something hot to drink, and I’m boiling water for tea.”
“I need to get right home,” she said, mindful that Hannah would ask questions if she was gone too long. She wasn’t comfortable with the lie she had already told, and she didn’t want to have to tell too many more of them.
“You’ve got time enough for some tea. If you’re worried about your mother, call her.”
Hannah wasn’t the biggest part of her problem, Joni thought gloomily as she tugged off her boots and hung her jacket on the coat tree. Not by a long shot.
She followed Hardy into the kitchen, which was behind the dining room toward the back of the house. Here, too, loving care was displayed in a brick floor and gleaming modern appliances complemented by beautiful oak cabinets and tiled countertops. Hardy waved her to a round oak table.
“Earl Grey okay?” he asked.
“Great.” She wasn’t much of a tea connoisseur, and she would have been content with ordinary old orange and black pekoe.
Hardy brought two steaming mugs to the table, both dangling tags over the side. “Sugar? Cream? Lemon?”
“Black’s fine.”
Apparently he felt the same, because he sat across from her, dipping his tea bag absently while he studied her. “Karen’s been gone a long time,” he remarked. “I doubt any of us could know what she’d want.”
“She’d want for her dad not to be so angry and bitter,” Joni said firmly.
“And me submitting a bid is going to change his mind?” The question was full of disbelief.
“If you submit a good one, it might force him to face how unfair he’s been to you.”
“Are you so sure that he’s been unfair?”
The question jolted Joni. What was he talking about? The cops had said the accident wasn’t his fault. The other driver had steered right into them and Hardy hadn’t been able to evade him. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said urgently.
“Maybe not.” He dragged his eyes away from her and looked toward a corner of the kitchen. “And maybe it was. The point is, Joni, nobody except me really knows what happened that night. I can’t blame Witt for thinking I should have done more. I think about that a lot myself.”
Horror gripped her like vines of ice around her heart. “No, Hardy.”
“Yes, Hardy,” he said almost mockingly. He looked at her. “I’ve replayed those thirty seconds in my mind so many times, and I keep reaching the same conclusion. I didn’t have enough experience at the wheel. Maybe I should have sped up instead of slowing down. Maybe I could have spun the wheel more. Maybe if I’d known that drunk drivers steer right into lights I would’ve had the presence of mind to turn mine off. Maybe I should have gone left instead of right. I can think of a dozen things I could have done differently. Maybe the outcome would have been different.”
He leaned forward, his gaze burning into her. “And if I can think that, why shouldn’t Witt? I don’t blame him for how he feels.”
She hated to think of Hardy feeling this way. “Hindsight’s always twenty-twenty.”
“No it’s not,” he said harshly. “It just asks a lot of pointless questions. But this isn’t getting us anywhere. I can’t bid on this project. I’d just be wasting my time.”
“You don’t know that.” Anger began to burn in her.
“And you don’t know that Witt might have a change of heart.”
“You don’t know that he won’t. My uncle isn’t a stupid man, Hardy. He wants to build the best lodge he can afford. He doesn’t want it to be second-rate, or fail because it isn’t attractive enough.”
“And he can get any one of a dozen decent architects and general contractors anywhere between Denver and Glenwood Springs.”
“He said he’s doing this to make jobs for local people.”
Hardy shook his head in exasperation. “Noble intent, but I’m sure he’s not thinking of me as local people. Christ, Joni, you still go off half-cocked, don’t you?”
Another time she might have bristled, but right now she didn’t want to argue with him. It would only make it easier for him to refuse to bid. “I’m not going off half-cocked. I’ve been thinking about this for months now.”
He just looked at her.
“Hardy, it’s time for this to end.”
His eyebrows lowered, and something in his jaw set. “Have you considered that you’re proposing to pick at one very large scab? That if you keep this up, someone may well wind up bleeding?”
“It’s been twelve years,” she said. It sounded like a mantra, even to her. “Enough is enough. Don’t chicken out, Hardy.”
She tossed the envelope on the table and rose, ignoring her tea. But before she could reach the kitchen door, his voice stopped her.
“How are you going to explain to Witt that you don’t have your copy of the bid package?”
She shrugged, refusing to look at him.
“Jesus H. Christ,” he said under his breath. “Drink your damn tea. I’ll make a copy of it.”
She faced him then. “You’re going to bid?”
“No, I’m going to save your altruistic butt.” Snatching up the envelope, he disappeared into the back of the house, where his office was. Moments later, she heard the sound of a photocopier warming up.
He was going to bid, she told herself. There would be no reason for him to make a copy otherwise.
But even as she lied to herself, she knew she was doing it. He was just making sure she didn’t have any excuse to leave without her copy of the request for bids.
He was taking care of her again, the way he’d always tried to in the old days. Part of her wanted to resent it, and part of her was touched that he still cared enough to do it, even after all these long years.
A few minutes later he returned with two sheafs of papers. One was her copy, carefully restapled at the corner. The other, unstapled, was clearly his copy.
“There,” he said, returning hers. “Look, this isn’t some kind of morality attack, is it?”
Confused, she looked at him. “Morality?”
“Yeah. You’re not on some moral high horse, thinking that you’re going to teach us all to be better people, are you?”
“No. God no! I’m not that conceited.”
“No?” He put his palms on the table and leaned toward her, looking straight at her. “Then what is this, Joni? Are you saying our feelings aren’t valid? That Witt doesn’t have a right to be angry with me? That I don’t have a right to feel it’s better to avoid the man?”
She felt hurt, because she didn’t at all like the way he seemed to be seeing her. Her eyes started stinging, and her throat tightened up. Pressing her lips together, she snatched up the envelope, stuffed the papers into it and headed for the door, picking up her jacket as she went.
“Joni…”
She didn’t want to look at him, but something made her turn around anyway. “I think…I think I’m ashamed of my behavior,” she said thickly. “I think I’ve let Karen down. You and I were friends, Hardy. We were friends.”
Hardy stood at his open door, watching her dash down the street. Not until she stopped and pulled on her jacket did he close the door.
Damn her, he thought almost savagely. Damn her eyes. What was she doing, shaking all this old stuff out of the woodwork at this late date? What was she hoping to accomplish? Did she think some miracle was going to occur if he entered his bid? Did she think Witt was going to forget all his anger and bitterness just because Hardy Wingate could build a better hotel?
Not bloody likely.
“Shit!” He swore under his breath so his mother wouldn’t be disturbed. He could almost hate Joni right now. She’d dangled a plum under his nose, something he would have given his eyeteeth to do, something that would have put him in a position to take his mother to Hawaii.
And considering that Barbara wasn’t doing well at all, he desperately wanted to give her that trip. Since her pneumonia she’d been so frail, even needed a wheelchair some of the time. Her lungs had been damaged, leaving her breathless after even mild exertion. He needed to get her to a lower altitude, but she refused to go.
Swearing softly once more, he grabbed the bid packet from the table and went back to his office. A spacious two rooms he’d added to the house, it was like another world: gleaming real-wood paneling, wide picture windows looking out onto a snowy, night-darkened backyard, a freestanding fireplace. Worktables, model tables, drafting boards, two computers…
It was his eyrie. His escape. His dream-place. When he was here, he forgot everything except creating.
On the model table right now was the project he’d been working on for the last couple of months despite himself: a lodge for Witt Matlock. He had decided to fly in the face of the conventional for this one. Instead of following the Vail and Aspen trend toward Alpine looks in redwood and cedar, he’d chosen to carry the Victorian charm of Whisper Creek into the hotel. High spires, lots of gingerbread, a porch that wrapped around. Beautiful.
Lines that sang. A creation that deserved to be realized.
He stretched out his arm and prepared to knock the whole thing to the floor, to wipe out the insane dream that Joni had planted in his brain.
But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he dropped onto a stool and simply sat staring at the model. Seeing it not as it was, but as it could be when finished. Somebody else could build it, he told himself. It didn’t have to be Witt. Some other investor would come along, especially if Witt built a lodge.
That was what Witt probably wanted. A long, low building, the rustic log-cabin type. A male sort of retreat. That would be like Witt, to want something of that kind, not this Victorian froufrou.
But he knew he was lying to himself. He was lying to himself about a lot of things, and had been for many years. It was a poor excuse, realizing that deluding himself was the only way he could remain sane.
Squeezing his eyes shut, he clenched his fists and wondered why he couldn’t just keep on pretending. Wondered why Joni had suddenly decided she had to take action when this whole mess had been carefully buried years ago.
Did she suspect? he wondered. Had she always suspected at some unconscious level? And if Joni had, had Karen? And maybe Witt?
It was something he’d never really admitted to himself, and sometimes, over the past twelve years, he’d managed to convince himself he was imagining the whole thing.
But the heavy weight of guilt in his heart didn’t let him fool himself that easily. It wouldn’t let him forget for long.
The night he’d taken Karen out, the night she’d been killed…he’d begun thinking about breaking up with her.
Because he’d just started to realize that he was falling for someone else.
And that someone else had been Joni.
4
The drive to Denver took nearly four hours, even with the high speed limit on the interstate highway. Witt was impatient all the way, and glad of Hannah’s company to keep him distracted.
“I still don’t understand why you want me to come with you,” Hannah said as they were at last traveling through the suburbs, passing the Westminster exits.
“It’s simple,” he said, as he had yesterday when he’d insisted she ride shotgun. “I want a second opinion on the proposals.”
“But I don’t know anything about hotels, Witt.”
“But you know the kind of place you’d like to stay in if you were taking a vacation in the mountains.”
“I doubt that.” She looked at him with a vaguely amused smile. “It’s one woman’s opinion, Witt.”
“It’s one more than just mine.”
“Aren’t these things decided on the basis of cost?”
“Partly. That has to be taken into account, of course. But whatever it costs, I want to be sure it’s appealing.” He didn’t want some boxy-looking place that could be any one of a hundred other motels and hotels in the state. “I want something special.”
She nodded and settled back in her seat. Out of deference to her, Witt had troubled to lay a metal sheet across the floorboards so the wind of their travel wouldn’t be blowing up through the holes.
Hannah had never criticized his truck, unlike Joni, who was apt to tease him mercilessly about it. But Hannah didn’t seem to have very high expectations, which he found a little strange in a woman who’d been married to a doctor. Instead, she seemed content with whatever she had, meager though it might be. And she never criticized his truck.
