Page 8 of Courting Catherine
“Yes, indeed. Not well. We attended some of the same parties in our youth. I remember dancing with him once at a cotillion in Newport. He was dashingly handsome, fatally charming. I was quite smitten.” She smiled. “You resemble him closely.”
“He must have fumbled to let you slip through his fingers.”
Pure feminine delight glowed in her eyes. “You’re quite right,” she said with a laugh. “How is Trenton?”
“He’s well. I think if he had realized the connection, he wouldn’t have passed this business on to me.”
She lifted a brow. As a woman who followed the society and gossip pages religiously, she was well aware of the senior St. James’s current messy divorce. “The last marriage didn’t take?”
It was hardly a secret, but it made Trent uncomfortable just the same. “No. Should I give him your regards when I speak with him?”
“Please do.” A sore point, she noted, and skimmed lightly over it. “How is it you ran into C.C.?”
Fate, he thought, and nearly said so. “I found myself in need of her services—or I should say my car needed them. I didn’t immediately make the connection between C.C.’s Automovations and Catherine Calhoun.”
“Who could blame you?” Coco said with a fluttering hand. “I hope she wasn’t too, ah, intense.”
“I’m still alive to talk about it. Obviously, your niece isn’t convinced to sell.”
“That’s right.” C.C. wheeled in a tea cart, steering it across the floor like a go-cart and stopping it with a rattle between the two chairs. “And it’s going to take more than some slick operator from Boston to convince me.”
“Catherine, there is no excuse for rudeness.”
“That’s all right.” Trent merely settled back. “I’m becoming used to it. Are all your nieces so... aggressive, Mrs. McPike?”
“Coco, please,” she murmured. “They’re all lovely women.” As she lifted the teapot, she sent C.C. a warning glance. “Don’t you have work, dear?”
“It can wait.”
“But you only brought out service for two.”
“I don’t want anything.” She plopped down on the arm of the sofa and folded her arms over her chest.
“Well then. Cream or lemon, Trenton?”
“Lemon, please.”
Swinging one long, booted leg, C.C. watched them sip tea and exchange small talk. Useless talk, she thought nastily. He was the kind of man who had been trained from diapers on the proper way to sit in a parlor and discuss nothing.
Squash, polo, perhaps a round of golf. He probably had hands like a baby’s. Beneath that tailored suit, his body would be soft and slow. Men like him didn’t work, didn’t sweat, didn’t feel. He sat behind his desk all day, buying and selling, never once thinking of the lives he affected. Of the dreams and hopes he created or destroyed.
He wasn’t going to mess with hers. He wasn’t going to cover the much-loved and much-cracked plaster walls with drywall and a coat of slick paint. He wasn’t going to turn the drafty old ballroom into a nightclub. He wasn’t going to touch one board foot of her wormy rafters.
She would see to it. She would see to him.
It was quite a situation, Trent decided. He parried Coco’s tea talk while the Amazon Queen, as he’d begun to think of C.C., sat on a sagging sofa, swinging a scarred boot and glaring daggers at him. Normally he would have politely excused himself, headed back to Boston to turn the whole business over to agents. But he hadn’t faced a true challenge in a long time. This one, he mused, might be just what he needed to put him on track.
The place itself was an amazement—a crumbling one. From the outside it looked like a combination of English manor house and Dracula’s castle. Towers and turrets of dour gray stone jutted into the sky. Gargoyles—one of which had been decapitated—grinned wickedly as they clung to parapets. All of this seemed to sit atop a proper two-story house of granite with neat porches and terraces. There was a pergola built along the seawall. The quick glimpse Trent had had of it had brought a Roman bathhouse to mind for reasons he couldn’t fathom. As the lawns were uneven and multileveled, granite walls had been thrown up wherever they were terraced.
It should have been ugly. In fact, Trent thought it should have been hideous. Yet it wasn’t. It was, in a baffling way, charming.
The way the window glass sparkled like lake water in the sun. Banks of spring flowers spread and nodded. Ivy rustled as it inched its patient way up those granite walls. It hadn’t been difficult, even for a man with a pragmatic mind, to imagine the tea and garden parties. Women floating over the lawns in picture hats and organdy dresses, harp and violin music playing.
Then there was the view, which even on the short walk from his car to the front door had struck him breathless.
He could see why his father wanted it, and was willing to invest the hundreds of thousands of dollars it would take to renovate.
“More tea, Trenton?” Coco asked.
