to Fresno or Bakersfield or God knows where. Blood test first. Among other things, I want to know whether you’re getting better.”
“For the record,” she said, “I have no intention of going to Fresno, ever, in this lifetime.”
He watched her drive off, thinking how fetching she’d looked in that sundress, with her bare shoulders and back, her golden skin making him want to touch her, feel the warmth of her, run his hands down her spine.... He wondered how many men she would encounter in the next few hours who would be thinking along similar lines. The degree to which this bothered him bothered him.
Declan was used to women fawning on him. Along with a reasonable amount of money, looks and an accent that for some reason Americans drooled over, he knew he had charm. Even when he’d been living on the streets, there had been women, even when he was too young to know what to do with them. Eventually he’d done everything with them—except marriage. That was the shifter in him: the concept of “settling down” held little appeal. He was always clear about that to the women he got involved with, that he wouldn’t be giving up his freedom. Most were fine with it. The innocents weren’t his type anyway.
But now there was Sailor Ann Gryffald, and he didn’t know what to make of her or the feelings she aroused in him, or how far he should let those feelings lead him. He’d originally written her off as—well, as she’d once described herself—an actress-slash-waitress, a commodity as common in Hollywood as the lemons falling off trees and rotting on sidewalks. And yes, an innocent. He was revising that opinion. She might look like a starlet, but her ambitions ran deeper. She was waking up to her destiny as a Keeper and seemed determined to educate herself. And by the time they got through this crisis, he reflected, she might not have much innocence left.
That bothered him, too.
He took his cell from his pocket and phoned Harriet. “Cancel my calendar for the day, love. And get Darius Simonides on the phone. And Antony Brandt, the coroner.”
Chapter 7
Charles Highsmith didn’t actually live in his own Keeper district. People with that much money, Sailor figured, couldn’t be expected to have just one home. So while Charles maintained a residence in Bel Air, he apparently preferred to live with his polo ponies, which was why she now found herself driving to Lake Sherwood.
Just south of the Conejo Valley, Lake Sherwood was old, man-made and beautiful. It had originally been called Potrero Lake, but in the 1920s, after Douglas Fairbanks had filmed Robin Hood there and in the surrounding forest, the name had been changed. Sailor had learned all this from Merlin, who’d been telling her Hollywood history since her childhood, long before she appreciated it. The terrain was rugged, Old West and ruinously expensive to maintain if you wanted to grow anything other than desert plants. Charles Highsmith did. As she drove up the long road to his house, she marveled at the huge rolling lawn, with grass as green as a golf course. His water bill had to be as big as his mortgage.
The house looked new and devoid of personality. Sailor was greeted at the door by a uniformed maid and led across a circular foyer dominated by a sweeping staircase and endless marble, then through double doors to a library. Even though she was on time, the room was filled, and she had the sensation of entering a party in progress. Had everyone else been given an earlier arrival time?
“Sailor, welcome.” Charles Highsmith was dressed, improbably enough, in cream-colored jodhpurs and a polo shirt, with glossy riding boots that she was certain had never mucked out a stable. “Let me introduce you.” He seemed to have forgiven her for the night before, for which she was grateful. She’d been ready to tough it out, but it was daunting to be the newcomer in a group this tight, their closeness born of years together and countless Council meetings.
She knew most of the Keepers either by name or reputation. Of course, they all knew her father, but Rafe had socialized with only a handful outside of meetings, and the meetings themselves were closed to non-Keepers and heavily guarded. She tried to gauge her fellow Keepers’ degree of friendship with her father by the way they reacted to her. It wasn’t easy. These people, like Charles Highsmith, were political animals and