Page 84 of The Last Dance You Saved
I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes.
If Adam had done more than just steal from the estate, if he’d come at me and Lauren, it was because of years of jealousy and anger that had nothing to do with me. But had I done something to trigger it? His Grandpa Joe had been a bitter old man full of hate. I’d caught him staring at me like I was the devil incarnate more than once. Adam had loved the man, eaten up his stories like they were decadent candies.
There’d been some kind of talk about him and Great-grandma Beatrice being friends, hadn’t there? Something about Hollywood and the parties Joe had gone to with her? I opened my eyes and stared at the portrait of my great-grandmother over the mantel, and my gaze landed on the diamonds all but dripping from her.
Adam had wanted them, but he’d also told Sadie he was looking into whether the family had been reimbursed for the stolen jewels by an insurance company. Is that what he’d been looking for in the boxes in the safe?
I swallowed the bourbon I’d poured for Steele that he hadn’t touched and then forced myself up and into the safe.
It took me a minute to find the right box as most of them were unmarked. The first one I opened held files with neatly printed dates going back to the 1930s. I flipped through them quickly, noting some legal documents, old photos, and a handful of notebooks. I set it aside and opened several more before finding the one holding the mixed-up documents Adam and I had carelessly thrown back inside after he’d dropped it.
I took both boxes into the office and started sifting through them.
The exhaustion dragging at me as much as the alcohol I’d downed made the entire experience surreal. Like I’d stepped back in time. Old invoices. Contractor agreements for the build of the mansion. Payment to the armed guards who’d protected the mines after there’d been repeated incidents of people trying to sneak in and dig for diamonds themselves.
What caught my attention and had my hands slowing as I flipped through them were the black-and-white photographs taken at a ball held at the house when it was bright and new. Shots of the famous movie stars who’d been in attendance with Beatrice standing amongst them like she belonged.
I frowned, trying to remember more of the stories I’d heard, not from my dad but from my mom. Beatrice had been an actress who’d given up Hollywood to marry Great-grandpa Alasdair, much like my mother had given up her dreams of her art for my dad. An image of Beatrice with Alasdair, elegant in evening wear, had more unease sifting through me. There’d been a large age gap between them, nothing strange for that time, and yet it was less than what existed between Sadie and me now. I didn’t like the comparison of women who’d given up their lives for the men they’d married any more than the age difference.
At the bottom of the box Adam had been rifling through, I found a small leather journal elegantly embossed with Beatrice’s maiden name. After opening it and reading the first entry, I realized it was her personal journal. It felt like an invasion of her privacy to read it, even though she’d long been gone, but her words drew me in.
Each entry was short and to the point, but they were mixed with vivid descriptions and random lines of poetry. I didn’t know if they were Beatrice’s own words or famous lines from poems I didn’t recognize. She wrote about dancing with the new-to-Hollywood Clark Gable and the older, more famous Wallace Beery and about meeting Great-grandpa Alasdair at some movie premiere after-party. He’d already won the ranch by the time she’d met him, but they hadn’t discovered the diamonds yet.
As I skimmed through pages of their whirlwind romance, engagement, and marriage, it hit chords that continued to resonate with me about my relationship with Sadie. The suddenness of it. The overwhelming feeling that it was right. Beatrice thinking fate had somehow led them to each other. But it also grew the worries I’d already had about what Sadie would have to give up if she became mine, because it was clear to see that, while Beatrice had started out ecstatic, she’d slowly started to miss her old life.
The excitement of the diamond discovery was overshadowed by Tommy Hurly’s suicide and the loneliness that eked into the pages as Alasdair left her alone for days on end while dealing with the mine and the building of the mansion. Into that void, Joe Hurly had stepped. Seven years younger than her, she’d felt sympathy for him at first and then a common bond over the lives they were living that weren’t what either of them wanted or expected. They’d formed a friendship.
But it wasn’t until she and Alasdair fought over loaning the jewels to a friend at a small movie studio that things took a real dive sideways. She’d wanted him to go with her, for them to not only take the jewels to Hollywood personally but to spend a few weeks there. To take a vacation they hadn’t had since their honeymoon. She wanted a chance to recover the love and friendship she’d felt like they’d lost. Alasdair refused. He couldn’t leave the mine, not with the break-ins and sabotage that was happening almost daily.
And so, she’d gone without him, taking Joe so she wouldn’t have to travel alone with the diamonds. Just seeing it in writing made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Maybe it was simply what was happening now with Adam that had me reading between the lines and seeing it as something sinister, but I despised finding I was right when Beatrice’s excited entries filled with talk of Hollywood parties disappeared altogether.
She wrote nothing for several weeks. And the first entry afterward was a tear-stained paragraph saying she was back at the ranch and that the jewels had been stolen. Beatrice felt responsible. She was anxious and depressed, although she didn’t use those words, and her pen had all but sunk into the page, underlining the words heavily when she said Joe would never be allowed in the main house or near her ever again.
Had he taken the jewels and threatened her? Had he made moves on her? Or worse?
It sickened me. Worse, after discovering the returned jewelry were fakes, Alasdair accused Beatrice of cheating on him and planning the theft with Hurly. Even her newfound, violent disgust of Joe hadn’t swayed him. When the small, up-and-coming movie studio had told Alasdair they hadn’t insured the jewels, he’d demanded they find a way to compensate him. A handwritten letter from the president of the studio was tucked into Beatrice’s diary. In exchange for keeping the theft quiet, Alasdair was given the fake jewels along with shares in the studio. The letter made it clear,if the real jewels were ever recovered, the Harringtons had full claim to them without owing anything back to the movie studio.
While I could imagine my fury if I’d been my great-grandfather, could imagine the doubts and hurt that would have accompanied the events, he’d still negotiated a decent deal out of it. While his shares of the studio had kept him just under majority ownership and he’d never had a say in what movies were made, he’d still gotten a significant cut of the profits. And holding on to the shares for over eighty years had allowed me to take advantage of the funds in building Marquess Enterprises.
I skimmed through the rest of the journal, the tension and sadness in the rest of the entries weighing on me. Beatrice only mentioned Joe Hurly once more after that. After months of being gone, he dropped off a wife and a son on the one-acre plot of land that belonged to the Hurlys and took off again, leaving them without any means of financial support. Beatrice took pity on them and brought the woman to work at the mansion. Whenever he did show back up at the ranch, Joe’s wife told Beatrice he was drunk and often violent, rambling about LA and Las Vegas and those who’d done him wrong.
I closed the journal and leaned back in the chair with my eyes closed again. At some point, Joe had come home, because he’d worked for his son when Donnie had been my dad’s foreman. The two men had both been ancient, crotchety, and crusty. Snapping at me and Spence. We’d avoided them as much as we could.
Donnie had been in his forties when he’d had Adam and Lauren. Their mom had been his second wife, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember ever hearing what had happened to the first. What I did remember was the way Adam had idolized both his father and his grandfather.
From the moment Alasdair Harrington had won the ranch, the Hurlys’ luck had spiraled downward. Yes, it had mostly been because of their own bad decisions, but people had a way of shifting the blame to others. What might Adam have heard from Joe Hurly that had twisted the truth to fit his needs? What kind of poison had been spread through his veins, and what might Adam do to take back what he thought of as his family’s lost inheritance? Would he steal? Kill Spence and me? What would I do if our situations had been reversed?
As it was, my jealousy for Spence had cost us both the lives we’d thought we’d have.
What had Adam hoped to find in these boxes that would have helped him? Nothing gave him rights to the land. If anything, it showed why there was even less of a reason for us to hand it over.
But he’d started digging in here after Sadie had told him about the jewels. Was he hoping to find the contract saying the jewels were ours if they were ever found? Maybe he’d simply wanted the diamonds for himself. Or maybe he’d hoped to prevent Lauren from finding out about them because he didn’t want the ranch to be saved. Because he wanted to watch the Harringtons and the ranch be destroyed the way his family had been.
It didn’t seem possible that, right at the crucial moment, Sadie had been brought into our lives, bringing the stolen jewels back with her. Was it that fate Beatrice had thought had brought her and Alasdair together? Had we all been cast under some spell only Sadie could break? Or would my taking her and keeping her bring the same heartache I’d read in Beatrice’s journals?
All I knew was my time with her had not been nearly enough. I wanted to wake up to her impish smile and her passionate strength every single day.
I heard her calling my name, saying it in that same throaty, breathless way that she had while we’d been in the throes of passion. While she’d taken what I’d given and asked for more. I wanted to taste and lick and savor every inch of her all over again. Embed myself in her. Give her more of those pieces of myself I’d felt slipping away while staring into her bluebell eyes.
