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Maybe, she thought, her mother had never worn it because she suspected that one day she’d have to sell it. Who knew how many other gold pieces might have been stashed away in that jewelry box, but sold off, one by one, to make ends meet?
“Your mother?” Esther frowned, obviously surprised by the answer—and not pleasantly so. “Are you sure?”
“Of course.” Tess was frowning now, too. She wondered what answer the woman had been expecting. A boyfriend, perhaps? But why would she care?
“The necklace belonged to my mother,” Tess reiterated blandly. “Now. Would you like me to take over for Ashley, or would you like to rebook?”
“Neither,” Esther said coldly. “My husband tells me the new resort at Silverdell Hills will have a spa. You people at Bell River might do well to remember that. You won’t be the only game in town anymore.”
Tess bit her lip briefly, then smiled the best she could. “I’m very sorry we can’t help you, Mrs. Fillmore, but I certainly understand your need—”
The polite words were wasted. The older woman had already turned her back and, buttoning her coat as she walked, was heading briskly toward the door.
Though she knew it was irrational, Tess felt deflated by the failure. It would have been so rewarding to overcome the woman’s strange hostility. But oh, well. Let her go home and be her unfortunate husband’s problem for a while.
Tess took a couple of moments to calm herself, then dove into making the calls. The minutes flew, and when the alarm on her phone trilled she was surprised to see it was time to get ready for her first appointment of the day.
She was also surprised to see that Craig had called. Eight times. The divorce had been final for two weeks now, and he’d promised to leave her alone. But she’d become a challenge to his pride, no doubt. He didn’t like failing. He used to be a high school–football star, and he still thought of everything in terms of wins and losses. He despised losses.
Craig was a smooth-talking, self-indulgent former jock who had made it to middle management in her mother’s insurance agency. Their six years of marriage had been a mistake from the start—a rebellion on her part against an upbringing that had been overly strict, big on rules and short on fun.
She knew now, of course, why her mother had been so stringent, so fearful that her daughter might repeat her own mistakes. But back then, her insistence on no freedom, no car, no boys in the house, no broken curfews—nothing that could encourage sex before marriage—had left Tess eager, at twenty, to marry the first man who made her laugh and gave her presents.
She sometimes wondered why he’d been willing to marry her. Probably because, otherwise, she wouldn’t have sex with him. She should have. If she had, she would have realized what an insensitive egoist he was, or else he would have checked “Conquer Tess” off his list and moved safely on. If only her mother hadn’t...
No. She stopped herself right there. Her mother had always insisted on honesty, and the truth was it wasn’t her mother’s fault she’d married Craig. It was her own. She’d fallen for him because he was handsome and a little older, which seemed glamorous, and he gave her nice things. He told her she was pretty. He told her she was smart.
Looking back, she realized she had sold herself far too cheaply. She should have held out for love. Twenty had been plenty old enough to recognize a louse, if she’d been looking hard enough.
She slid her phone into her pocket quickly as she heard Jean, the manicure technician, coming out of her room. Jean, who had been at Bell River only about two weeks longer than Tess, led out her client, made a new appointment for the woman, smiled at Tess, then started to head back to clean her area.
“Jean? You don’t recognize this client’s name, do you?” Tess pointed to the line on the computer screen for eleven-thirty. Marley Baker. “I’m not even sure whether it’s male or female.”
Jean, who was short and curvy and extremely savvy, twitched her nose, as if that might help her remember. “Nope,” she said finally. “I think I took the appointment over the phone, but I can’t really remember anything about it. It has been a little nuts around here this week.”
Tess chuckled. “A little. Oh, well, it doesn’t matter.”
“Sorry,” Jean said as she disappeared into the supply room.
Tess wasn’t too worried about the client’s gender. She never used particularly flowery scents anyhow, so most of her products would please anyone. What did worry her was that Baker was about ten minutes late. Ordinarily it wasn’t an issue, but today...
As she waited, Tess checked on the Blue Room, which was in perfect shape, opened a box of toners that had been delivered this morning, made a couple of notes in her personal client log and then did some deep breathing, to keep herself from pacing.
Fifteen minutes later, she was about to call the contact number for Baker when she heard a soft trill of chimes, and the spa door opened on a swirl of cold air and an odd smell of motor oil. A small, wiry man entered, reeking of aftershave and putting his crooked teeth on display in something he probably thought was a smile.
“Mr. Baker?”
His smile widened, the pink of his gums glistening. “In the flesh,” he said.
“Good morning,” she forced herself to say pleasantly. A frisson of distaste moved down her back as their gazes met, but she steadfastly ignored it. She had worked on unpleasant physical specimens before. Everyone, even people who weren’t as clean as they should be, even people who smiled like that, deserved to have their aches and pains soothed.
“Are you Tess?” He glanced down, and this time she was darned sure he wasn’t looking at her pendant. Either he had a slight twitch, or the man had actually wiggled his eyebrows in some kind of secret salacious joke with himself.
Was he one of those? A few men—thankfully very few—seemed to believe their therapists owed them what they lewdly referred to as a “happy ending.”
Well, if he were one of those, she knew how to make him see his mistake without embarrassing anyone.
And if he were one of the really terrible ones—the dangerous, violent ones, who were only legend for her, so far, thank God—well, she knew how to deal with that, too. Her very first mentor had taught her a couple of moves that would make it unlikely that Marley Baker would be thinking such thoughts, or going to the bathroom on his own, for at least a week.
“Yes, I’m Tess. I’ll show you to the room, if you’re ready.”
As if to compensate for thinking such thoughts based on nothing but her own bias against his type, she gave the man an extra warm smile. Immediately, when he smiled back with that strange, oddly feral curve of his thin lips, she regretted it.
“Oh, I’m always ready,” he said.
Again, she bristled at his tone. She toyed with telling him there had been an emergency. She’d have to cancel. Every instinct was warning her not to end up alone in a room with him. But how would she explain herself to the Wrights? Two days on the job, and she was turning away badly needed clients? She couldn’t. It was unprofessional, and it was unfair.
And he hadn’t actually said a single word out of line. He just wasn’t as well-to-do as most of the clients, and his tone was rough around the edges. So what? She’d been poor most of her life. She had seen her friends’ parents eyeing her cheap sneakers and secondhand clothes, assuming a low bank balance meant a poverty of morals, intelligence and breeding.
“This way.” She led him to the Blue Room and showed him where to put his clothes, made sure one more time that the towels and sheets were all folded back and ready, then left him to prepare.
She chose her lotions carefully. She wasn’t stalling. She was simply being extra careful. She’d use an herbal muscle calmer, probably. Chamomile and aloe vera, since those wiry muscles seemed to indicate he did manual labor, and probably didn’t take care to stretch or take anti-inflammatory supplements. Calm, calm, calm. That’s what she needed to be with this one. He might not be aggressive or dangerous, but he was without question oddly revved, full of some unhealthy tensions. Her instincts couldn’t be that wrong.
She decided to leave the door open and double-checked that her phone alarm was set and safely in her pocket. She added gloves to her supplies and, squaring her shoulders, headed to the Blue Room.
She knocked on the door, but just as with Jude Calhoun, she heard no response. A wriggle of discomfort made its way into her midsection. She didn’t like the unnatural quiet. Jude had been different. No way a man humming with nerves like this guy could have actually fallen asleep. She hoped to God Baker wasn’t playing games, pretending not to hear her so that he could be “caught” with his nakedness uncovered.
Suddenly, she wasn’t nervous anymore. She was annoyed. To heck with him. She wasn’t a debutante who would run shrieking at the mysterious horror of a man’s naked body. She was a professional therapist. She was also a lot tougher than she looked, and she was having a bad day. If he got cute, she’d hustle his puny self out so fast he wouldn’t know what hit him.
“Mr. Baker.” She knocked again, loudly enough to wake the dead, and then she shoved the door open, ready for anything.
To her surprise, the room appeared to be empty.
The man was nowhere in sight.
“Mr. Baker?” It was a simple room, without a lot of hidey-holes, but she checked every spot she could imagine a man’s body would fit into. Cupboards, the closet, even under the massage table, though she felt a pure fool doing so.
She straightened, her hands on her hips, and stared at the windows, which let in a soft light through their muslin shades.
Marley Baker was gone. And, now that she had a chance to think through the details, she had to wonder whether he’d ever intended to stay. The sheets on the table hadn’t been touched, hadn’t been wrinkled or shifted by a fraction of an inch.
Even more mystifying—how had he managed to leave without her realizing it? It made her skin crawl to think he might have tiptoed inches behind her as she picked out lotions and powders, and headed surreptitiously for the front door.
Her nerves prickling, she stopped by the nail tech room, where Jean was now giving a pedicure to a middle-aged woman talking volubly on her cell phone.
Tess signaled to Jean, who excused herself and came to the door.
“You didn’t happen to see a man walk by in the past few minutes, did you? Dark-haired? Kind of short and wiry?”
“No.” Jean frowned. “Is anything wrong?”
“I don’t think so.” Tess shrugged, keeping her tone light. “My client left unexpectedly. I guess he got a call or something.”
Jean’s frown deepened, but she returned to her post.
Tess did the same. The phone was ringing. Plus, she had another client coming in half an hour, and she had to change the sheets, in case Marley Baker had touched them, however briefly.
She tried not to dwell on the unpleasant morning, concentrating instead on her afternoon clients. Her massages were therapy for her, too. And, as usual, turning her attention to other people helped. By the end of the day, she was exhausted, but in a good way, and utterly relaxed.
And maybe a little proud of herself. She’d pulled off another miracle, and kept the spa humming almost single-handedly.
Marley Baker was the furthest thing from her mind. At least...until she was leaving and noticed a tiny rectangle of paper tucked inside the chic plaque that read Bell River Ranch.
Though it could have been left by anyone, for a dozen perfectly innocent reasons, she felt her hair follicles rise. With her clumsy gloved fingers, she pried the paper out and awkwardly unfolded it.
Two short words were scrawled there. Just a dozen bright red, simple block letters, more like a random shout from a passing car than a true message. But for a minute, though she stood with snow fluttering down the collar of her coat, then melting disagreeably against her neck, she couldn’t move, couldn’t take her eyes off the angry, red words.
DIRTY, it said.
And then on the next line, BITCHES.
* * *
OVER THE PAST couple of days, while Tess had been wearing blinders that prevented her from seeing anything but the spa’s most immediate needs, she’d almost forgotten about all the other holiday festivities going on elsewhere on the ranch.
The ugly note she held in her hand felt even more obscene here, as she stood at the front door of the main house, which was framed in pine-scented garland and sparkling with fairy lights. She wished she could turn around and go back to the hotel. She was extraordinarily tired, suddenly. She needed to get off her feet. She needed something to eat. She needed—
The door opened. One of the men she’d met the night they offered her the job—she thought this one was Gray, Bree’s husband—stood there, smiling.
“Hey, Tess,” he said easily, as if she’d worked there for years. If she hadn’t been paying close attention, she might have missed the subtle surprise in his eyes. “Everything okay?”
“Yes.” Too late, she wondered whether uniformed employees were supposed to use the rear entrance. “I think so,” she amended. “But there is something I should talk to Rowena about, if she’s free.”
“Well, Ro isn’t ever really free, but I think we can snag her. Come on in.” He stepped back from the door, and through the garland-swagged foyer Tess could see that the living room was in shadows. The only lights came from a twinkling Christmas tree by the windows, and a projector’s beam hitting a big screen at the front. A crowd of people perched on folding chairs, and they seemed to be watching a slide presentation.
“Oh. I’ve come at a bad time.”
“Not at all.” Gray smiled. “On Monday night, Penny shares the nature shots taken during her photography classes. Ro isn’t a part of that. She’s in the great room dealing with a totally different minicrisis. Barton has a sing-along starting in about half an hour in there, but right now we’re all trying to get Alec off the wall without breaking anything.”
Tess frowned, wondering if he was kidding. “The...the wall?”
He gave her a wry look over his shoulder. “Yeah. It’s okay, though. He can’t hold on much longer, so he’ll be down in the next couple of minutes, dead or alive.”
They had reached the entrance to the lovely great room, with its cathedral ceiling, huge fireplace trimmed in red candles and green fir, and impressive river-rock surround.
The room was full of people. In front of the fireplace, Bree, Mitch, Barton and Max, Penny’s husband, stood in a perfect square, holding the corners of a thick blanket above a layer of sofa cushions and quilts, as if they were making a safety net of sorts.
Their faces tilted toward the ceiling. Tess followed their gazes, and to her horror spotted Alec a foot or two from the upper edge of the river rock. From this distance, he looked small, skinny and awkward, his arms and legs splayed like a superhero as he tried to hold on to the lumpy rock.
Tess glanced around, wondering how everyone was maintaining such calm. Over at the end of the room near the kitchen, Dallas and a young man in a Bell River uniform were rapidly assembling an articulating ladder. An ordinary stepladder would never reach high enough.
“Where’s the damn mattress?” Dallas glanced toward the foyer doorway once, then refocused on the ladder.
“Isamar and Carrie are bringing it now,” Rowena said.
“I’ll go help.” Gray touched Tess’s arm. “Hang on. Ro will be free soon.”
Tess felt her mouth hanging open slightly. Her stupid anonymous note seemed absurdly trivial. The boy was at least twelve feet in the air. If he fell...
She shivered. He probably wouldn’t die, not with the people below, and the pillows, and the blanket. But he might miss. Even a partial miss could be catastrophic. He might well break half a dozen bones.
And he must be scared to death.
“Dang it,” the little boy said, his voice and words a touching echo of his father’s. He sounded very far away, but was full of bluster, clearly reluctant to reveal fear. “Too bad Jude’s not here. A stunt man would know what to do. My hands are getting sweaty.”
A little girl piped up from the corner. “I told you it wouldn’t be as easy to come down as it was to go up.”
Max gave the girl a hard look. “Really? You think this is the right time to say I told you so?”
She blushed and hung her head, but didn’t say another word.
Two seconds later, Gray showed up, the large, thick mattress, which must have weighed a ton, carried over his head as if it were light as a feather.
“Coming through,” he called, and plopped his burden as near the safety net as he could. Then he dropped to a squat and muscled the mattress until it lay directly under the blanket. A couple of Bell River staffers rearranged the pillows and quilts on top of the mattress with lightning speed.
“This’ll be faster than the ladder, Dallas,” Gray said, putting his hand on Dallas’s shoulder. “And just as safe. Tell him to let go.”
Dallas glanced at the pile of cushioning, the outstretched blanket and his team of helpers. He looked up at his son, then down, clearly calculating the geometry of the placement. And then he nodded.
“Keep going,” he said quietly to his assistant beside the ladder. “Just in case.”
Then he moved closer to the fireplace. “Okay, buddy. Time to give those arms a rest. We’ve got you covered. Let go, and try to fall on your rump, okay?”
The little boy was silent for a moment. He twisted his neck for one second, trying to get a look at his dad, but swiveled it back quickly, as if the motion scared him.
“Come on, Alec.” Dallas’s voice was utterly calm. “It’s all good. You’ll be fine.”
A tiny voice floated to them. “You sure?”
Tess found herself holding her breath, and the room spun a little, as if she might faint, which surprised her, because she wasn’t the fainting type.
“Yep,” Dallas said, projecting complete confidence. “I’m sure.”
“Well, then. Okay.”
As though someone had pulled a lever, the boy dropped from the wall. Tess’s knees seemed to liquefy. She touched the wall for support. As if in slow motion, the blanket dipped as his scrawny form hit it, rump first, just as his father had requested, and then bounced up.
Thank God. Alec’s smiling face emerged from over the edge of the blanket, beaming and laughing, as if it were all a grand game.
