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The minute the words came out, Mitch felt himself flushing. That was a low blow. It wasn’t fair. Mitch liked his brother’s wife, always had. And Rowena had had her reasons for acting wild. But why couldn’t Dallas see that Bonnie must have had her reasons, too?
“I’m on your side here, Mitch,” Dallas said mildly. “I thought you were through with her, anyhow.”
“I am.” Mitch stood. “I am. But just because she broke my heart...that doesn’t mean I have to pretend she’s a monster. She’s not. And she’s not a liar.”
Dallas raised his eyebrows.
“She’s not,” Mitch repeated. “A hundred times, when I was trying to make her tell me what was going on, it would have been easier for her to invent any old story, just to shut me up. But she didn’t. She didn’t want to tell me the truth, but she was too good to tell me a lie.”
“Okay.” Dallas nodded slowly, though he clearly wasn’t convinced. “But there’s one other thing you ought to know. If you look her up, you’ll see. She’s rich.”
“I don’t give a damn about that.”
“I know. I just want you to be prepared. When I say rich, I don’t mean comfortable. I mean really rich. Dripping, Rockefeller rich.”
Mitch hesitated, looking down at his brother’s somber face. “I see. What you’re trying to say is that she’s out-of-my-league rich.”
“More or less, yeah.” Dallas didn’t mince words. “I’m saying she’s trouble, and she’s out-of-our-league rich. Look, she left you. You had a grand adventure, but it’s over. She’s gone back to her real life. You need to let it go, Mitch. You need to let her go.”
* * *
MAYBE JACOB AND the rest of them were right, Annabelle thought as she knelt, here at this fork in the bricked path of Greenwood’s butterfly garden, oddly paralyzed and unsure where to plant the final daffodils. Maybe she was crazy. Divorced from reality, dysfunctional, paranoid—just as her mother had been.
Because the way she felt, now that she was back home at Greenwood...
She felt like her own ghost.
So maybe they were right. Maybe it was loony to feel that her invented alter ego, Bonnie O’Mara, was more real than Annabelle Irving could ever be.
Maybe it was bonkers to insist on living in the Greenwood gardener’s cottage and refuse to spend a single night in the elegant, twenty-two-room Italianate mansion where she was born and raised.
Maybe it was daft to dream of taking the Irving fortune, every hellish dollar of it, and burning it in a bonfire down by the creek.
But the truth was...being back here, being the heiress to all this had paradoxically stolen any hope of being happy. It had reduced her once again to an object, a thing, a possession, instead of a woman.
All her life, Annabelle had understood she wasn’t a person. She was an idea. An arrangement of colors on canvas. A mythical, imaginary creature who came to life only in the minds of the people who romanticized her pictures. When the lights were off, when the museums were closed, she was supposed to sink back into the ornate frame, frozen in place, until another art lover came to imagine her into existence all over again.
“The irises will be coming out any day now.”
Annabelle looked up as Fitz, the elderly gardener who had tended Greenwood since Annabelle was a little girl, came limping toward her, his wheelbarrow rumbling before him. She forced herself to smile. Fitz had been the one person she could honestly call a friend. Drawn together by their mutual love of growing things, he’d come to be like a father to her through the years.
And yet, in the end, even he had betrayed her.
“Yes, the irises will be gorgeous. And I’m so glad you put in day lilies.” Shading her eyes with the knife blade she held in one palm, she peered up at him. Only about five-three, with a face turned to tree bark by the California sun, he looked even browner with the light behind him, casting him in shadow. “They’re a wonderful addition.”
He reached into his wheelbarrow and lifted out a straw hat. “Here,” he said. “You don’t want to end up a grizzled old piece of shoe leather like me.”
“Don’t I?” She took the hat, but she didn’t put it on. She raised her face toward the sun. No one cared anymore—no one would punish her for getting dirty fingernails or letting the sun freckle her pale skin. And yet it still felt like the most luxurious act of defiance, to be out here at noon, with her hands in the earth and the heat on her face.
“No. You don’t.” Fitz plucked the hat from her hands and stuffed it on her head. “I bet you didn’t even use sunscreen. You know, BonnyBelle, you don’t always have to do the opposite of what your grandmother would have wanted you to do. Sometimes she was right.”
She looked down at her grimy fingernails, realizing the truth of his words. She could have put on sunscreen first, and she could have enjoyed her gardening without courting skin cancer. As it was, she’d be red as a watermelon by nightfall.
“You’re right, Fitz—I’m acting silly, and—” But she couldn’t complete her sentence. One of the maids was scurrying down the brick path toward them, her hand held up, waving urgently.
“Ms. Annabelle,” she said as she reached them. “I’m sorry. There’s a man, and he won’t go away. I told him you weren’t at home, and so did Mr. Agron, but the man says he isn’t leaving till he talks to you. He’s been here half an hour, and Mr. Agron said we should call the police, but—”
Annabelle’s heart hitched. Could it be Jacob?
The maid stopped to catch her breath and maybe to find the right words. “I don’t know if we should. He’s not doing anything, and he’s obviously not a reporter. He’s kind of like...a cowboy or something.”
Annabelle dropped her trowel and, without thinking it through, rose from her knees. She wiped her earthy palms on her jeans, then raised a hand to her hair, which was flyaway and tangled and probably littered with leaf debris and vermiculite.
“A cowboy?”
“Well, sort of. I don’t know exactly. He doesn’t have a horse or a hat or anything, but—” She shook her head. “Anyhow, he says you know him. He says if we’ll just tell you his name—”
“What is his name?” Annabelle’s voice came out tight, threaded with tension. She already knew the answer, of course. She knew because the maid was flushed with a pretty confusion, a heightened female awareness caused by a gorgeous young cowboy.
“Mitch,” the maid said, her lips curving into a small, puckering smile as she formed the word. “Mitch Garwood.”
* * *
MITCH HAD DECIDED he’d give her an hour. He’d wait out here, on one of the benches around the front fountain, till the sun disappeared behind the mansion’s fancy white colonnades.
If Bonnie hadn’t come out by then, he swore to himself, he’d go back to Silverdell and to hell with her.
But as the minutes dragged on, and it seemed likely he’d have to make good on the threat, he wondered whether he could really do it. Could he just hop on his motorcycle and head east, flipping the bird to Greenwood—and Bonnie—in his rearview mirror?
Because...if he did, what then?
He tried to imagine going the rest of his life without an explanation, without hearing from her lips what the whole crazy running thing had been for. He hadn’t been able to unearth anything that made sense, though he’d combed the internet and studied every single photo of the Annabelle Oils till he could probably paint one himself.
The prim, lace-draped Annabelle Irving was Bonnie, all right. But not his Bonnie. The Annabelle Oils girl was straight out of a fairy tale, with floating clouds of red curls so pale they were almost gold and huge blue eyes that looked haunting and strange, as if you’d never be able to see what she saw, not if you stared at the same spot forever.
His Bonnie wasn’t one bit strange. His Bonnie’s eyes were smart, clear and friendly. She didn’t wear lace, and she was too sexy to be allowed in a fairy tale. She was a normal, red-blooded woman. She hummed off tune and didn’t care who heard her. She ditched her shoes the minute she got inside, and sometimes her fuzzy socks didn’t match. She cooked a steak so tender it melted between your teeth. She bit her fingernails and looked killer in blue jeans.
So if he never found out what had happened—if he never found out how Annabelle became Bonnie, and then, like an evil magician’s cabinet trick, turned back into Annabelle again...
Well, if he never found out, he’d be so angry and bitter inside he’d rot like a wormy apple.
On the other hand, he wasn’t sure getting an explanation would make much difference. He might be doomed to sour from the inside out, no matter what.
He kicked the oyster-shell driveway beneath the bench and glared at the mansion, as if it were to blame. As if it had swallowed his Bonnie whole and was refusing to spit her out again.
But then he saw the big carved front door opening. He was on his feet in a flash. Even if it was just the stuffy butler coming out to warn him the police were on their way, anything was better than sitting here stewing.
A woman emerged. At first, in the shadows of the portico, she was barely visible. White shirt, long pants... Not the maid, then...
When the sunset caught her hair, he knew. Bonnie. His heart did that reflexive thing it always did, and his thighs flooded hot, thrumming with the urge to run toward her.
But he shoved his hands into his pockets and forced himself to wait. Not Bonnie, really. Not anymore. Annabelle.
She walked slowly. Carefully, as if she balanced an egg on her head. Her pace was measured, ceremonial, like a princess pacing down the wedding aisle. Or a queen walking to the guillotine.
Maybe she was buying time so that she could get her story straight.
Or maybe she was waiting for him to close the distance first.
He dug his heels a little deeper into the powdery shells of the driveway. Not going to happen.
“Hi,” she said as she reached him. Her voice sounded rusty, as if she didn’t use it anymore. Her eyes raked his face, clearly searching for clues to his mood.
He didn’t respond. “Hi” seemed laughable, and everything else he could think of felt as if it came from some entirely inappropriate script. From a melodrama where people yelled things like “How could you?” or some slapstick comedy where the dumb cowboy went all “Shucks, ma’am” around the elegant lady.
Or, even worse, from that pathetic script where someone gushed, “You had me at hi.”
He set his jaw and refused to let any of that spill out. Let her do the talking. She was the one who had the explaining to do. She was the one with the secrets.
She cleared her throat and tried again. “How did you find me?”
He raised his shoulder. “Fingerprints.”
“Fingerprints?” Her eyes widened, and he realized they did look a bit strange, now that they were set against the fantasy rose-gold of her real hair. The size of them, and the color... Nothing in the natural world should be that mesmerizing mix of blues, as if robins’ eggs and sapphires and summer skies had magically melted together.
“Fingerprints,” she repeated, her voice dropping slightly, as if she were disappointed in him. “Of course. The water glass.”
He could have defended himself. He could have explained that Rowena had been the one to supply the fingerprints, not him. Technically, that was true. But it would have been a lie in its heart, if not in its facts.
He hadn’t come all this way just to have another useless conversation laced with lies. So he simply stared at her, calmly defiant.
“I see.” She clearly had taken the measure of his anger, and she now knew he hadn’t come in peace. “All right, then maybe the more pertinent question is...why did you find me?”
He laughed harshly. “Come on.”
“I mean it.” She raised her chin. “You said you never wanted to see me again.”
“No, I didn’t. I said I was tired of thumping my head on the sidewalk while you used me like a yo-yo. I said I wasn’t interested in being your quickie next time you snuck into town.”
Her pale cheeks flamed red. To tell the truth, he felt a little flushed, too. He hadn’t intended to sound quite so nasty.
“But I never said I didn’t want answers, Bonnie. Because I damn sure do. And what’s more, I deserve them. I think you owe me that much, after—”
After what? After she’d broken his heart? He swallowed those words and gave her another hard, unblinking stare instead.
She was breathing fast. Her lips were parted a fraction of an inch, and he noticed suddenly she had a smudge of dirt right where a movie star might put a beauty mark. He glanced down, realizing she held a trowel in her left hand, its gleaming silver tip speckled with mud, too.
So at least that part hadn’t been a sham—she really did love gardening. Back at Bell River, she’d always wanted to be outdoors, always wanted to be rooting around in the dirt. Once, before they’d fled from Silverdell, they’d planted a white fir sapling on the abandoned Putman property, partway up Sterling Peak. They didn’t have the right—the property was in some kind of divorce dispute and couldn’t be sold or occupied—but they’d liked to hike out there and dream of owning it someday.
He’d talked about the house they’d build, complete with his ridiculous inventions. She’d laid out the fantasy gardens, describing them so clearly he might as well have been looking at a painting.
He’d swallowed the dream whole, fool that he was. He was surprised he hadn’t choked to death on it. She’d just been playing a game, playing house, as if she’d love to be the queen of the simple log lodge he was happily designing. Ha. All the while, she’d been keeping the secret of—he glanced at Greenwood, its marble arches slightly pink-gold in the sunset—the secret of this.
“I guess we should sit down,” she said. “If you really want to hear the whole story, it’s going to take a while.”
She didn’t seem to have any intention of inviting him into the mansion, so he dropped onto the garden bench where he’d been waiting the past half hour. He leaned against the scrolled iron back and waited some more.
She sat, too, and stared down at the trowel, which she’d rested in her lap, for several seconds. Then she looked up, met his gaze and shook her head slightly.
“I’ve thought about telling you all this so many times you’d think I’d have a speech ready. But it’s complicated. The whole thing is so weird, so convoluted...”
“And I’m just a simple cowboy who couldn’t possibly understand?”
Her eyes narrowed, and he saw her fingers close tightly around the trowel. “That’s cheap, Mitch. You’re not simple, and you’re not even really a cowboy. And I’m not a snob. You can be angry, but you can’t pretend we’re strangers. I won’t let you act as if all those months we spent together weren’t real. I won’t let you pretend we weren’t real.”
“We?” He shrugged, tapping his hand against the bench’s cool wrought iron armrest. “Who exactly is we? Do you mean me and Bonnie O’Mara? Problem is, I don’t see Bonnie here—not a shred of her. So you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t quite know what’s real and what isn’t.”
She flushed again—and he, who knew every nuance of her face, knew that shade of mottled red meant anger. Her flush of embarrassment was seashell-pink, and the flush of sexual desire was...
He tightened his jaw, trying to force those memories away. Forget all that—this look was pure anger. Well, fine. He might not be turning red, but he was mad, too. They were both mad as hell. Desire was a thing of the past.
She took a long breath, as if to steady her voice before she spoke. “Look, Mitch, if you want to tell me off, you should go ahead and do it. You have every right, and I won’t stop you. But if you want to know the truth, you need to let me talk.”
He nodded tightly. “Go ahead. I won’t interrupt again.”
She looked skeptical, but after a cautious second she started again. “As you can see, my grandmother, Ava, had a lot of money—some from her painting and some from her family. She left everything tied up in a life estate for my mother’s use.”
“Why? Why tie it up?”
“My mother had...problems.” Bonnie looked away briefly. “She wasn’t terribly responsible, and my grandmother obviously didn’t trust her to inherit outright. But she did want to provide for her, so the lawyers suggested the life estate. I was the first remainderman. That meant if I outlived my mother, I would inherit everything.”
Mitch shook his head without really meaning to. How complicated could you get? Rich people were nuts.
Or maybe it was the lawyers who were nuts. He thought of his patent applications and the documents Indiana Dunchik had drawn up so he could sell his chore jacket to the highest bidder. The papers provided for every imaginable contingency and some that Mitch could never have imagined, not in a million years.
So of course the lawyers for the rich Ava Andersen would provide for the remote possibility that a perfectly healthy young woman might get hit by a bus or a meteor and die before her mother did. If Bonnie was the first “remainderman,” there probably were ten other remaindermen behind her, just in case...
And then, finally, the lightbulb went on.
He got it. He felt like an idiot that he’d been so dense.
“Ahh,” he said slowly. “So who was the second remainderman?”
“My cousin Jacob.” She leaned back, as if she were suddenly tired. “I assume you know who Jacob is, since you found me through my fingerprints. He’s my first cousin. His mother, my mother’s sister, died giving birth to him, and his father, a lawyer in San Francisco, worked himself into a heart attack when Jacob was only twelve. That’s when Jacob came to live at Greenwood and began to make my life hell on a regular basis, instead of just in the summers.”
Mitch took a breath, but he didn’t say anything.
“And—this is the part I assume you found when you looked up my prints—when I was eighteen, I was arrested for stabbing him with the pruning shears.”
