September 27th, 1955. Her father’s birthday.
Oh, my baby boy. How I love you.
Tears pierced her eyes as she realized she was reading her grandmother’s uncensored thoughts—those of a stranger related to her by blood about the birth of her own father. Belle thumbed through the pages, her wonder growing. She’d wanted to figure out who her grandmother had been. Well, this would probably be a good start. In fact, after skimming ahead a few pages, it seemed the whole volume was a book of letters written from mother to son.
Her grandmother hadn’t been heartless or indifferent. She’d loved him very much, based on just the first page or two alone. So what had happened? Why the rift?
Belle was willing to bet the answers lay in this book. She slid the one filled with gibberish back in its hiding place and jimmied with the molding until she felt a little groove slide back into a seemingly corresponding tongue. It locked in place easily, as if made for just that purpose.
As she stood to head to the bedroom, she wondered how the strip of decorative wood had come loose like that. It seemed so secure now. And where had the loud bang come from? When she really thought about it, the noise had seemed too close to be the furnace. She’d have to solve that mystery when she wasn’t utterly exhausted.
Sir followed her from the room with a sleepy yawn, and she shrugged away her questions. Since nothing terrible or tragic had happened, did it matter now? She had some reading to do. But not until she washed the sheets on the bed and made sure the house’s many doors and windows were all locked.
As she looked around once more, Belle shook her head. An inch-thick layer of dust, the ancient hot water heater, the peeling wallpaper. Being the owner of a home with so much history and recent neglect was hard work…but at least it might keep her mind off her broken heart.
* * * *
Eric finally managed to get that fucking intern Belle had hired to pick up his phone just as they turned down the narrow, busy street that should lead them to her new home.
Her temporary home.
“Yeah?” Warrington Dash III had an upper-crust name and three judges in his family, which was good for him because Eric was pretty sure the kid had a lot of pot in his system. Without such familial influence, he’d probably be behind bars.
“Sequoia, we’ve been calling you for hours. Why haven’t you been answering the damn phone?”
The kid was all of twenty but had already decided not to go by Warrington, the family name he’d been given. Instead, he’d chosen the name Sequoia in honor of trees or some shit. He was studying to become an environmental lawyer, and that made Eric weep for the planet.
“Dude, I was doing yoga. No phones. It blocks the process. Hey, I could get you in sometime. You three could use some serious introspection.”
They’d have better “process” with another intern. “I need you to handle the calls at the office for a bit. Something’s come up on this trip, and we’re going to be away a few more days.”
Kellan pulled into a parking space and gestured up the street, letting him know they weren’t far from her address. Tate bounded out of the car in an instant.
Eric put a hand over the phone. “Catch him. He’ll run down the street, screaming her name like some Streetcar Named Desire impersonation.” Eric turned his attention back to his call the minute Kell closed the car door. “So I need you to go back to the office and grab the calendar on Belle’s desk.”
“Dude, Belle and I already had this conversation. I’ve already done all of the stuff she told me to do. It’s a total bummer she quit.”
“She did what?”
“Yeah, she called a couple of hours ago and said she wasn’t coming back. Oh, and she faxed her resignation, too. I’m supposed to tell you guys that she found a new home and stuff. Do you think she’s going to want the yogurt in the fridge? I could use that tomorrow because work makes me hungry and it’s the only vegan thing in the office. You guys eat a lot of animal flesh. Do you really think that’s good for you?”
She’d quit—and she’d done it by telling the goddamn intern. She hadn’t even had the courtesy to call them and tender her resignation. “Don’t touch her yogurt. No matter what she told you, she’s coming back.”
He stabbed at his phone to end the call, then hopped out of the car, his heart pounding in his chest. Anger simmered in his veins, mixing with cold panic and encroaching dread.
He jogged up the street, his dress shoes slapping against the concrete, heading for the other two. Kellan had managed to contain Tate, and the two of them stood in front of a three-story house set right against the street with a blue door. In the dark, he thought it might be connected to the little house around the corner, but he couldn’t be sure.
“Belle quit. She called Sequoia and told that pot-smoking fucker she wasn’t coming back,” Eric grated out.
Kellan cursed. “That’s not a good sign. I really expected her to tell me off, then give me the cold shoulder until I groveled.”
And just like this “move,” the fact that she hadn’t more than suggested she really didn’t intend to come back. This wasn’t just a snit. They were about to launch a battle to bring her back…but for the first time, Eric wondered if the war was unwinnable.
Eric stared at the pale stucco house with its bent screen door. It might look a little rundown, but once it had a coat of paint and a few repairs, the place would shine and look like the mansion Belle’s paperwork suggested she’d inherited. In fact, in both location and historical significance, he was looking at pure New Orleans splendor.
Restoring the house would be Belle’s dream project.
“Shit.” Tate stood beside him, shaking his head as he studied the place in the streetlamp lit evening. “She’s never going to want to leave here. We have three bedrooms that she says need paint with ‘personality,’ whatever that means, and a game room she refers to as the man cave. She holds her nose when she walks in there. Do you think that means something?”