stiffen.
Jillian looked past him to see an older man walking toward them. In his late fifties or early sixties, he was tall and broad-shouldered, with brown hair streaked with gray. His face was heavily lined with age and what she suspected were many years of working in the sun. His features settled into a heavy frown.
“Don’t you have work you should be doing?” the man said before he reached them.
“Yes, Dad,” Zack said. His posture tight with resentment, he turned away from Jillian without another word, skulking off into the gardens.
Jillian turned her attention to the newcomer. “You must be Ray,” she said, remembering what Meredith had told her yesterday. “I’m Jillian.”
“I know who you are,” he said, his tone conveying he wasn’t overly impressed with that knowledge. “I’m sorry if he was bothering you.”
“Not at all,” Jillian said diplomatically. “He was just being...friendly.”
The man grunted. “Yeah, he’s real good at being friendly. I’ll make sure he stays out of your way.”
“It must be nice having your son working with you,” she said quickly when he started to turn away, not wanting to lose him just yet.
“It’s a good way to keep an eye on him,” Ray said.
“Does he need someone to keep an eye on him?” she asked curiously.
He gave her a head-to-toe once-over, as his son had, but there was no interest in his gaze. “Most people do,” he said vaguely.
“What about Mr. Sutton, the previous owner?”
“What do you mean?”
“Zack was telling me a little about him. Made it sound like he might have gone a little...crazy?”
The man’s mouth tightened into a hard, unyielding line. “The boy talks too much.”
Before she could say another word, he put his back to her and stalked into the gardens, quickly vanishing behind the hedge.
She could chase after him and ask him to show her the gardens in hopes of drawing out the conversation, but somehow she doubted running after him like that was going to make him any more talkative. She was going to have to find another approach to get him to open up to her, even a little, if that was even possible.
Instead, she drew in a deep breath of the warm morning air, tilting her head back to feel the sun on her face again. It was still bright out, the sky clear and blue, but Jillian suddenly felt inexplicably colder.
She needed answers, and if no one at Sutton Hall was willing to tell her what she needed to know, she’d have to go outside to get them.
And as she glanced up at the balcony hanging far in the sky, getting away from Sutton Hall for a little while didn’t seem like such a bad idea.
Chapter Five
“We need to talk about Jillian Jones.”
After waiting for hours to speak with Meredith, Adam didn’t wait for her to close the office door behind her before launching into the topic.
Meredith shot him an exasperated look. “What is it now?”
“I caught her in the tower bedroom last night. The one Courtney Miller was staying in.”
The clarification wasn’t necessary, Meredith’s gaze dimming before he offered it. She knew full well where Courtney Miller had been staying. She was the one who’d put her there, a fact he knew she still felt guilty about, though it certainly wasn’t her fault the woman hadn’t had enough sense not to venture out onto a balcony in a fierce wind and tumble off of it.
“I thought it was locked,” she murmured.
Adam swallowed a twinge of guilt. “I must have forgotten to lock it the last time I went to check that everything was cleared out.”
Meredith’s eyes narrowed with suspicion, and he knew exactly what she was thinking. He never “forgot” to do things. It was something he took a great deal of pride in.
She evidently decided to let the issue pass. “What was she doing there?” she asked.
“Nosing around. Said she was curious.”
“Well, you can hardly blame her for that. Honestly, I think it would be more suspicious if she wasn’t.”
It was exactly what Jillian Jones had said, Adam remembered with no small irritation. And both she and his sister were right. The fact that Jillian claimed not to care that another bride had recently died in the place she herself intended to be married had struck him as suspicious. If anything, the revelation that she wasn’t quite so indifferent to that information should serve as a relief of some kind.
Instead, their encounter had only left him more wary of the woman than ever. The fact that