The Deveraux Legacy
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He took one of Kristy’s hands in his. “Why are they here?” he asked.
A demoralized expression on her face, she pulled away. “The same reason you are. To talk me into giving up the ghost, so to speak, and sell the place to a high roller like you.”
Connor sat back in his chair, began to rock. “But you’re not about to take the money and run, are you?”
“Nope.” Kristy pushed against the floor with the toe of her shoe. “I love this place. I know it’s still a work in progress,” she confessed as she rocked gently back and forth, “but I am determined to return it to its former glory and then some.”
Connor was beginning to see that. Which, of course, made his own mission all the harder. “You have a history here?” he asked.
She nodded. “My siblings and I visited here every summer when we were kids,” she told him, oblivious to the way she was sitting, giving him an unobstructed view of her fabulous body.
She turned to look at him, a mix of subdued temper and sentimentality glowing in her dark eyes. “When we got older, I worked here in the summers while my brother and sister were off at science camp, or volunteering at the hospitals in Raleigh, in hopes of getting into medical school.”
“Which they did,” Connor guessed.
“Oh, yes.” Kristy squared her shoulders, took a deep, regretful breath. “Both my brother and sister followed in our parents’ footsteps.”
Connor took a moment to consider what that must be like. “Everyone in your family is a doctor?”
Kristy nodded. “Except me. My father is a lung transplant surgeon and my sister is a pediatric oncologist. My late husband was a pediatric heart surgeon. I’m the only one who didn’t choose medicine as a career.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah,” Kristy said dryly, rolling her eyes at his reaction. “Wow.”
Before Connor could comment further, they heard a large vehicle lumbering slowly up Folly Beach Road. Kristy glanced at her watch. “That’s the school bus!” She jumped out of her chair and headed around the lodge again, just as a big yellow bus pulled up Folly Beach Road and stopped at the entrance of the resort. Two little girls got off the bus and began walking up the palmetto-lined driveway. One had shoulder-length corkscrew curls, the same rich hue as Kristy’s, and was dressed in a pretty pink cotton smock and lacy white apron. The other’s hair was caught in two messy braids. She was wearing shorts and a striped T-shirt and sneakers. Only as they neared could Connor see, by the sameness of their charming features, that they were indeed identical twins.
They were halfway to Kristy and Connor when the one in the smock said something to the one in shorts. The second little girl took offense, dropped her book bag onto the grass and shoved the one in the dress. She shoved back, even harder, and the next thing Connor knew, the two were down on the ground tussling and rolling.
Kristy gaped at them as if unable to believe what she was seeing, then rushed toward them. She separated the twins, who came up kicking and screeching. “Stop it!” Kristy demanded as Connor caught up with her. “Both of you! Stop it right now!”
The cute little girls glared at each other and Kristy tearfully. “What in the world has gotten into you?” Kristy demanded as the twins wiped the tears from their long lashes with the backs of their hands. “I’ve never seen you fight like this before!”
“It’s all her fault!” the one in the dress yelled abruptly, her frustration with her sister apparent. “She is just so dumb sometimes!”
“No, it’s not! It’s your fault, you big scaredy-cat!” the one in shorts shouted back.
“All right, you two, that’s enough,” Kristy said firmly. The girls faced each other, sniffling. “Go on inside. I’ll be in directly to talk to you.”
As the twins meandered off, still glaring at each other intermittently, Kristy turned back to Connor. “I’m sorry about that. I don’t know what’s going on.” She paused, her expression conflicted. “About dinner… Forget the invitation, okay?”
“You’re sure?” For some reason Connor didn’t mind being used by her like that, although in any other situation, with any other person, he would have.
“Positive,” Kristy said, smiling apologetically, as if trying to make it up to him.
He shoved his hands in the pockets of his slacks. Now he was the one feeling bereft. “What about your mother and brother?”
Kristy shrugged as if it were no big deal. With barely a backward glance in his direction, she strode resolutely after her girls. “I’ll tell them you couldn’t make it, after all,” she said.
“SO SHE’S NOT GOING to sell,” Skip Wakefield said, when Connor got back to the downtown Charleston office of Wakefield-Templeton Properties.
Connor draped his sport coat over the back of a stylish chrome-and-leather chair and dropped into the one next to it. He faced his old friend. “Not yet.”
“Meaning what?” Skip asked, his probing green eyes alight with curiosity as he ran a hand through his close-cropped, reddish-brown hair. A risk taker with a practical streak, he was always focused on the bottom line. “You think you can change her mind?”
Connor reached for the necktie in his coat pocket and began to put it back on. “I think it’s possible, given enough time.”
His expression thoughtful, Skip watched as Connor buttoned the top button on his shirt and pushed the knot into place. “We don’t have a lot of time,” Skip warned as he tapped the end of a pen against his desk. “The investors we’ve rounded up to underwrite the costs of building the condo project aren’t going to wait around indefinitely. Even though suitable beachfront property is so darn hard to come by these days, and this place is ideal. If this project doesn’t come together soon, they may find another place to put their money.”
Connor had to agree with his partner on that. It seemed everyone wanted to live at the beach, and no one wanted to sell what they had. Not a twenty-five acre parcel, the amount Skip and Connor needed, anyway.
“Kristy Neumeyer’s property is worth waiting for.”
“Only if she’ll sell. If she won’t—” Skip shrugged, looking unhappy again “—then she and her resort are of no use to us.”
Speak for yourself, Connor thought. He had spent only thirty minutes or so with her, but she had definitely made an impression on him.
Skip tilted his head. “You’re not getting sweet on her, are you?”
Guilt swept through Connor, even as he denied the possibility. “Why would you think that?” he demanded. He had never been one to mix business and pleasure. Not since Lorelai, anyway.
“I don’t know.” Skip studied Connor. “Maybe because I haven’t seen you look that starry-eyed when talking about a woman since junior high.”
Connor grinned. “Are you sure those aren’t dollar signs you’re seeing in my eyes?”
Skip clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. “I wish your main desire was to make money because if it were, our partnership would be a lot more profitable. Instead, you want everyone to like you.” He said that as if it were the worst quality on earth.
Connor knew differently. “It helps if people don’t hate your guts when you’re trying to broker a deal between two warring parties.”
His partner’s eyes gleamed with a cynical light. “It’s more than that, and you know it,” he scoffed. “You just can’t stand making an enemy of anyone.”
It was true, Connor admitted to himself. Probably because he had spent so much time as a kid feeling caught up in the animosity simmering between members of his family. For years he had suspected that his parents and his older sister had secretly resented the heck out of each other, but he hadn’t understood why. Not that his younger sister, Daisy, who had been adopted as an infant, had escaped the family penchant for stifled emotions and supersecret angst. No, she had been as unhappy as all the rest, albeit more openly so. To the point that everything had finally exploded during the course of the previous summer. The truth had come out. And his parents had reluctantly ended the deception as well as their forty-eight-year marriage. Now, everyone seemed content to go on with their lives. Only Connor, it seemed, was still reeling, still trying to take it all in. Still wondering where the hell it left him.
Aware that Skip was waiting for a response, Connor stood and moved lazily about the office. “So I don’t like fighting.”
“I know, you just want everyone, and I do mean everyone, to get along,” Skip intoned dryly, shaking his head. “Speaking of which, that neighbor, Bruce Fitts, called here, said you weren’t doing a good job with Kristy, not at all. He suggested I go back out there myself.”
Connor objected fiercely to that. “It was you talking to Kristy in the first place that really set her off.”
His partner spread his hands wide. “All I did was offer her a cool five million dollars for her land and buildings.”
“Which wouldn’t have been a problem had she been at all interested in selling.” She wasn’t.
Skip flashed him a sly smile. “She’ll come around—if I know you. And I think I do.”
“I hope so, too,” Connor allowed. “But in the meantime, Skip, where Kristy’s concerned, let me do the talking.”
His partner agreed without argument. “When are you going to see her again?”
“Tonight.”
Skip blinked. “You got her to agree to go to dinner?”
“Actually, she invited me to have dinner there.” Then she had dis-invited him, but Connor figured that was beside the point.
“Way to go, buddy!” Skip came out of his chair to high-five Connor. Grinning, he predicted, “You’ll have her seeing things our way in no time.”
Connor hoped that was the case.
Chapter Two
“Kristy, dear, please come and look at this.” Maude Griffin said, pointing to the television screen mounted near the ceiling of the hotel kitchen. “This is exactly what I was talking about.”
Kristy left the crab cakes frying in the skillet and walked over to stand beside her mother. The TV was set to the Weather Channel. “…tropical storm Imogene, with winds of sixty-five miles an hour, is gathering strength five hundred miles southeast of Bermuda….”
“Mom,” Kristy explained patiently, “it’s October. It’s hurricane season. And thus far a very mild one. So of course there are going to be tropical storms and, yes, even hurricanes headed our way till the end of hurricane season.” Which Kristy knew was usually around November 1. “It’s a fact of life on the Atlantic Coast.”
Maude lifted a pot from the stove, carried it to the stainless steel sink and emptied its contents into a mesh strainer. Steam rose from the cooked redskin potatoes as the boiling water ran down the drain. “Suppose Imogene hits Paradise Resort?”
Trying not to let her mother’s worry transfer to her, Kristy handed her milk and butter. “Suppose Imogene does?”
Maude put the potatoes in a bowl and sprinkled them with salt and pepper, before switching on the mixer. “Kristy, you are sinking so much money and effort into this place without any reassurance at all that you are going to make it back.”
They had been over this dozens of times since Aunt Ida died and left Kristy Paradise Resort, and Kristy had announced her decision to sell her house in Chapel Hill, and move the girls south in time to start the new school year.
She stabbed the green beans with a fork and found them tender. “I need a life, Mom.”
Maude carefully added the milk and butter to the mashed potatoes. “You’re only thirty-three. You’re still young enough to go to medical school.”
Kristy took the remoulade sauce out of the fridge and garnished it with a few sprigs of parsley. “That was your dream for me, not mine.”
Maude scooped the mashed potatoes into the serving bowl, then paused to regard Kristy hopefully. “Only because you never gave it a chance.”
Kristy layered the cooked crab cakes onto a large white serving platter. Doing her best to contain her exasperation, she asked, “Don’t we have enough doctors in the family?”
Her mom ladled the steaming green beans into a dish. “We could always use one more. Think about it, honey,” Maude persisted as they carried the food out to the table set up in the hotel dining room. “Your house in Chapel Hill hasn’t sold yet, and University of North Carolina has a medical school. You could still move back there and get your medical education while the girls are in school. You had the grades and medical college admission test scores you needed to get in. And if not there, you could go to Duke or Wake Forest. Wherever you want.”
If Kristy thought it would bring her happiness, she would have headed for medical school right out of college. But it wouldn’t. Unfortunately, she couldn’t seem to make her family understand that. Although Kristy supposed that, too, was her fault. She should never have let her parents pressure her into taking the premed courses and the medical school qualifying exam while simultaneously earning her college degree in hotel management. But she had….
Maude looked out the door toward where Doug was walking along the beach with his nieces. As usual, whenever they were home or just hanging out, Sally had Lance’s old beach towel slung around her neck, and Susie had his beat up Frisbee clutched in her hand. Maude rang the dinner bell Kristy had mounted next to the door, and signaled them all in. Kristy smiled as they waved and headed toward the lodge.
“The twins would enjoy going back to North Carolina, too.”
Kristy wasn’t so sure about that, either. “The only thing that will make the twins happy is if they could have their father back,” she answered soberly, as she brought out pitchers of sweet tea. “And that’s not going to happen.”
Maude paused. “You still miss Lance, too, don’t you?”
Kristy didn’t know how to answer that. She missed the man she thought Lance had been when she married him. She lamented all the dashed hopes and lost dreams, and she still felt tied to him in some way. Unable to go back, not quite willing to move on. At least in that sense. Her throat aching, she busied herself getting a plate for store-bought rolls and a bowl for coleslaw. “When do you and Doug have to leave for your medical conference?” she asked instead, as the twins and Doug walked in and went straight to the bathrooms off the lobby to wash up.
“Tomorrow. Early, about seven.” Maude started to close the doors behind them, then began to smile.
“What is it?” Kristy asked.
Her mother turned back to her, surprise in her eyes. “I thought you said your friend wasn’t coming.”
HE WASN’T SUPPOSED to be here, but you would never know that by looking at Connor Templeton’s face, Kristy thought, her heart racing as she went to the front door of the lodge to show him in.
Unlike the rest of the family, who were in shorts and T-shirts, Connor was still in the casual business clothes he’d had on earlier, including tie and sport coat. He had two bottles of wine—one white and one red—a bunch of flowers and a basket of gourmet cookies in his arms.
“My goodness!” Maude said cheerfully, rushing past Kristy to lend a hand. “You really went all out this evening!”
Connor looked past Kristy to the table in the middle of the hotel dining room, set with steaming food. “Looks like I’m just in time.” He smiled, stepping closer.
Kristy bit her lip in embarrassment, knowing she was serving dinner a full half hour before she had told him she would, prior to privately uninviting him. Inhaling a whiff of his brisk masculine cologne, she replied, “Supper got ready quickly.” Which was true.
Doug and the twins came out of the powder rooms in the lobby, smelling of hand soap and sea air. Susie and Sally looked at Connor curiously. Remembering she hadn’t made formal introductions earlier, Kristy said, “Girls, this is Mr. Templeton. Connor, my daughters, Susie and Sally. Connor is going to be eating dinner with us this evening.”
Susie and Sally eyed Connor curiously, but didn’t seem to care one way or another whether he joined them. Kristy wished she could say the same. She, an accomplished hostess with years of experience entertaining guests, was suddenly all thumbs. Her mother, on the other hand, had already sprung into action and was quickly adding another place to the banquet table.
The six of them sat down and said grace.
“Everything looks delicious,” Connor said, as they began passing the food.
“My husband and I taught all three of our children to be proficient in the kitchen,” Maude stated proudly.
“What about you?” Doug asked, with an assessing look. “Can you cook?”
“Uh, no, actually, I can’t,” Connor admitted as he helped himself to a crab cake and passed the platter. “In my house all the cooking was done by the chef. We weren’t even allowed in the kitchen. If we wanted something we had to request it and then wait in the dining room, or if we were sick, in our room.”
Everyone was looking at him as if he were a Martian. “I’m guessing you’re wealthy?” Maude said eventually.
“Very,” Kristy said.
Undaunted, Connor shot her an assessing look. “I’m not sure I’d say very—”
Aware she was risking his ire, she persisted anyway. “I don’t know what else you call old money and trust funds and multimillion-dollar business deals,” she said with a shrug. “But to me—to us—that’s wealthy, Connor.”
Recognizing a shot across the bow when he saw one, Doug looked at Kristy curiously. “How do you know all this, sis?”
“For one thing, I read the Charleston newspaper—Connor’s business deals are always being reported on the front page of the business section.” He was a full-fledged tycoon and then some. An entrepreneur herself, Kristy had to respect him for that. “I’m also friends with his younger sister, Daisy. And she’s talked about what it was like growing up in one of the wealthiest families of Charleston.” It hadn’t been all pleasant. Although, according to Daisy, these days Connor, his sisters and his mother were pretty close. His father, Richard Templeton—who had gone off to Europe to recover after a considerable scandal of his own making—was another story.
“Plus,” Kristy continued, answering her brother’s questions, “when Connor and his partner, Skip Wakefield, started sniffing around my property, I made it my business to find out everything I could about their commercial real estate and development dealings in the area.” She had wanted to know what, and with whom, she was coming up against, in refusing to sell to them. Although to this point, it had been mostly Skip Wakefield, a pleasant if determined thirty-something bachelor, who had been darkening Kristy’s door every other week or so and putting forth proposition after proposition. Until this afternoon, Connor had been conspicuously absent. A fact she hadn’t really appreciated until now. Skip she could resist. Connor…well, he was not so easy to disregard. Both were handsome, successful, affable men. But there was something about Connor. Something in his eyes. A gentleness, an intuitive awareness of what she was thinking and feeling and considering, that left her on edge. She wasn’t used to having anyone able to read her mind or predict her next move. Even Lance hadn’t been able to do that. But Connor seemed at least a half step ahead of her. Like now, for instance. He seemed to realize she was planning to use not just his interest in her property, but his blue-blooded background to keep them from becoming friends. And seemed just as determined to prevent said action.
“Why would they be sniffing?” Sally interrupted, perplexed.
Connor grinned. “I think that is just a figure of speech,” he said, looking the little girl in the eye. “Kind of like when you say you’re really ticked off about something. You’re not really ticking, right?”
“Our hearts are.” Susie piped up as she touched the center of her chest. “My daddy was a heart doctor for kids and he used to let me listen to my heart with his stethoscope.”
“Mine, too,” Sally added seriously.
“That’s nice.” Connor smiled at them gently, as if he were really enjoying their company.
“Not to change the subject,” Doug interrupted soberly, “but how come you don’t have any guests here, Kristy?”
Kristy swore inwardly. She had not wanted to get into this with her know-it-all older brother, who never hesitated to tell her what she was doing wrong with her life. “I’m not reopening until October 15.”
“You have bookings then?” Maude asked hopefully.
Kristy cut into a crab cake that was golden brown on the outside and white and flaky inside. “Not exactly.” She dabbed a bite of it into the river of yellow remoulade sauce on her plate.
“Partially booked then,” Doug ascertained, a worried frown creasing his square face.
Kristy did not want to be discussing her business problems in front of Connor Templeton. But unless she wanted to lie, there was no helping it. She looked at her mother and brother resolutely. “I’m in the process of trying to hire a concierge slash assistant hotel manager, as well as a chef, handyman and several maids.”
Maude nodded. “I saw your Help Wanted sign out front.”
“But in the meantime, I am going through Aunt Ida’s old booking records and sending out brochures to travel agents and groups that used to hold business conferences here,” Kristy continued. She sipped her tea.
“But you still don’t have any bookings?” Doug asked.
Kristy’s throat felt parched. Wondering how much worse the familial inquisition was going to get, she said somewhat hoarsely, “I have to open first.”
“Actually,” Connor interjected, as he reached across the table and gave her hand a brief reassuring squeeze, “I think my sister Daisy rented a cottage here, and so did her new husband, Jack Granger.”
“When they were first getting to know each other,” Kristy remembered, thankful for the gentle steering of the conversation away from what her brother considered her business mistakes.
“I still don’t see how you’re going to make any money here, never mind enough to live on and put the girls through college,” Doug said worriedly. He looked at Connor, man-to-man, and asked, “What were you and your partner willing to pay for this place?”
“That is not dinner table conversation,” Kristy interrupted, with a telling look at her daughters.
To Kristy’s relief, Doug backed off, albeit reluctantly, and the rest of the meal was devoted to discussing the wonders of the South Carolina autumn.
“Wonderful dinner, Kristy,” Connor said.
She smiled and rose, picking up plates in both hands. “My mother helped me cook it.”
“And we’re not finished yet,” Maude said, getting up to help clear the table. “We still have dessert and coffee.”
“Well, my hats off to both chefs,” Connor said, just as a knock sounded on the door and a handsome blond man in his mid-forties walked in.
“I’M HARRY BOWLES,” the stranger said in a charming British accent, as Kristy walked across the room to greet him. “And I’ve come to apply for the concierge job advertised in this morning’s newspaper.”
She turned her back to the lodge dining room, where the rest of the family sat, watching with an annoying amount of interest, and guided Harry back out into the lobby.
“I’d like an interview with the hotel management as soon as possible.”
“I’m Kristy Neumeyer, the resort owner and manager.” Kristy shook his hand, noting that Harry had a firm, businesslike grip. “And if you like, we could do it now,” she said, aware that that would mean missing dessert with her family, but happy for anything that would cut short her brother’s annoying questioning.
“Everything okay?” Connor Templeton walked up to them and nodded at Harry Bowles. “Nothing has happened to Winnifred, has it?”
“Winnifred…?” Kristy said. Obviously, the two men knew each other quite well.
“Deveraux-Smith.” Connor supplied the rest of the name, before nodding again at Harry Bowles. “Harry here has been her butler for years.”
“Twenty to be exact,” the man replied as he straightened the lapels on his exquisitely cut dark business suit. “And, no, nothing is wrong. I am simply here to apply for the job. I resigned my other position this afternoon and find myself in need of work and a place to stay. And while I could check into a hotel or rent an apartment, I prefer to simply take another position right away.”