Lucas looked no less confused than he had before. And for that matter, I was right there with him. We both turned to Elaine. What was the point in not warning us about this? She must have known, for months probably.
Unless… unless the reason she didn’t tell us was because she didn’t think Lucas would come. And the reason she needed Lucas and I here so badly was for this. I remembered the things Lucas had told me in the car, about how appearances meant everything to them.
Well, shit.
We must have obviously had that escaped prisoner-in-the-floodlights look about us.
My mother-in-law had a huge but very fake smile pasted on. “Come, let me show you around. We can talk about all this later. We have all week.”
I took Lucas’s hand and followed her as she walked into the entry hallway of the main building. He was rigid beside me, clearly upset with his mother. I glanced up at him. Regardless, he hid it well.
“I’m sure I will. I love everything I’ve seen here so far. It’s amazing.” I cast a glance around me at the frosted glass windows above the doorway. It was all so bright with gleaming white marble everywhere, the onyx statue on an alabaster plinth in the center. Gorgeous paintings hung on the wall of a quality that belonged in a museum. No doubt authentic and incredibly expensive.
And the chandelier! The opening at the top, an oculus, allowed sunlight in to catch light on all the crystals. It wasn’t electric, as far as I could tell. Just brilliant and gleaming in the sunlight, leaving mini rainbows on the shimmering entryway floor and walls.
Lucas’s mum caught me staring at it gap-jawed. “That’s from Austria. Swarovski crystal. It’s powered by the sunlight.”
“Holy crap. Oh, I mean—um, how cool.” Elaine stared back at me, blank-faced. The camera clicked away from the doorway and I squirmed. I looked up at Lucas, silently pleading with him to get me out of this weird awkward situation. “I mean—I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s amazing, um, and—”
Lucas squeezed my hand. “We’re a bit tired and we’d like to freshen up…”
Elaine’s expression brightened. “Of course, of course. Deleon has taken your things to the villa already. You remember where it is? Do you want the golf cart?”
“We can stretch our legs.”
Lucas ushered me through some kind of fancy parlor that looked like a set out of The Crown and out some glass doors onto a balcony. It overlooked an extravagant French garden complete with shrubs cut into geometrical shapes, tiled walkways and bursts of color from carefully designed flowerbeds.
I couldn’t help it. I had to let loose a few more expletives. Instead of shushing me, Lucas laughed. “I kinda wish I could see all this through your eyes right now,” he said in a low voice.
“My eyes are a bit bedazzled, to be honest.”
He said nothing, but watched me, his grin widening.
Off to the left side of the parkway, I caught glimpses of a huge gleaming swimming pool ringed with pale rocks and what looked like a complex waterfall system. Directly in front of us at the far end of the long garden were more buildings and, off toward the righthand side was what looked like an old-fashioned carriage house. Lucas pointed in that direction. “The villa is over behind the carriage house.”
“That’s a hike.”
He blew out a breath. “In a few days, you’ll be so grateful for the privacy, you won’t care about having to walk out there to get it.”
I shot him a glance. “Speaking of privacy, what do you think about that reporter and photographer thing going on?”
He shook his head, smile vanishing. “I’m thinking that’s the real reason she was practically begging us to come to the reunion. I thought it was weird at the time, how insistent she was being. I figured she was all up in the night about how it would look to the cousins and uncles that we weren’t there. Something like this never even occurred to me.”
“So weird…”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Hopefully they’ll be so busy with all the other people here, they’ll leave us alone or just pay minimal attention to the young people. Not many people our age even read that magazine, anyway. If any magazine at all.”
“Good point. Besides, if they don’t, we can always demand our privacy, since this is our ‘honeymoon’ and all.”
The stroll went quicker than I thought and our butler, Mr. Deleon, greeted us at the door. How