Page 11 of Hero Next Door
They were welcoming me home, I thought. Giving me the hug the house might want to give me. Telling me that I was exactly where I belonged.
It was a crazy, fanciful thought, and I never would have shared it with anyone else. They would have thought I was insane, thinking things like that.
But as long as no one ever knew…
I kept spinning and laughing, and when I opened my eyes again, the butterflies had moved into the valley and become colorful dust motes in the distance, their progress erratic and unhurried.
And absolutely beautiful.
I watched them for a moment, making their haphazard way over the grass like they didn’t have anywhere they’d rather be, then turned and went into the house with my heart full and wearing a smile I hadn’t used in a very, very long time.
* * *
I spent the rest of the afternoon doing what I should have done before I had that developer over. I poured some iced tea, grabbed several of the cookies someone—I assumed the lawyer—had left on the counter with the paperwork, and started getting reacquainted with the house.
The place hadn’t changed at all. Tall ceilings, everything done in old and very dark wood, the floors matching the banisters and the beams of the ceiling, separated only by whitewashed walls and the hundreds of paintings that covered them. Scarlett’s colorful, hand-woven rugs still spread themselves over the floors and the furniture was all hers, everything done in bright, flashy colors that shouldn’t have suited the house or matched. It was all color and memory and dreams in here.
It always had been.
None of it should have worked. It should have been gaudy and overdone and completely unsuited for a house that was begging for antiques and neutral colors. But it was somehow exactly what the house wanted. Color and flash and dreams, just like Scarlett herself. None of it made any sense. But I couldn’t imagine it being any other way.
I took the stairs up to the second floor, my fingers trailing along the banister as I remembered Scarlett teaching me how to slide down it without falling off. I grinned, the memory clear and full of laughter. She’d caught me riding down the railing with my back facing outward, my feet flying over the stairs, and had sat me down and lectured me for at least half an hour about how much damage I might do to myself if I got going too fast and fell off.
I’d thought that she didn’t have the first idea how much damage my little body could take, or how much it faced every day I lived with my father. But I’d kept my mouth shut. I hadn’t thought then that she knew about my father, and I hadn’t wanted to ruin her idea of the man. I’d been terrified of it, in fact. Worried that she’d go to him and say something... and that it would get me in even more trouble.
Now, as an adult, I wondered whether she’d known after all, and that was why she’d kept me at her house so much. I wondered if she’d known that going to him in personwouldhave gotten me in more trouble... but that keeping me at her house would be seen as nothing more than giving him a break from the brat he so obviously didn’t like.
Regardless, she’d acted like I was the most breakable of children, and had insisted that I never slide down the rail in that manner again.
Then she’d taught me how to do it the right way, pulling her flowing skirts up to her thighs and throwing one leg over the rail, her butt facing the lower end of it and her hands in front of her, grasping at the banister. She’d look at me, given me an irrepressibly mischievous grin, and then pushed herself backward, shrieking as she picked up speed and flew toward the bottom of the stairs. She’d landed in a heap that had me running after her, worried that she’d hurt herself trying to teach me something—and feeling like I might never recover if she’d done that for me—but she jumped to her feet and laughed.
“I’d forgotten that bare skin makes it a whole lot more painful,” she’d chuckled. Grabbing my hand, she’d raced for her bedroom and the closet, which held more clothing that I’d ever seen in my life. Seconds later we were back on the stairs, Scarlett clad in a pair of cigarette pants that looked like Audrey Hepburn could have worn them in the 50s.
This time, when she threw her leg over the rail, she waited for me to settle onto it in front of her, wrapped her arms around me, and sent us sliding toward the bottom.
I felt a tear trail its way down my cheek and wrapped my hands around the railing, trying to feel her presence there. God, I missed the woman. I should have made a bigger effort to come down here and see her while she was still alive.
Though I’d been afraid to come back here until a little over a year ago, when my father finally died.
And if I was right in thinking that she’d known about him and what he did to me, then I was guessing she understood why I hadn’t come back. Not that the thought alleviated the guilt I was feeling at all.
Taking the next step up the stair and heading for the landing, I let my consciousness wash through the house, gathering the dreams and memories that I’d left here. That man who’d been here today, I remembered, hadn’t wanted to say what he’d do with the house. Or the property. I’d wanted to hear he had a buyer on hand already, a perfect family, and instead he’d told me not to worry about it.
Two guesses whatthatmeant.
And two more guesses what it would do to the people around here if he did it. This wasn’t the sort of town that would do well with a big new development going in right outside city boundaries. The traffic, the noise.
The outsiders.
I shivered at the thought, my natural small-town upbringing making me hate the idea of someone from the big city stepping foot in this house—or tearing it down.
No, he hadn’t been the right choice. It was the right thing to do, sending him away, and not only because he’d called me ‘little lady.’
Certainly not because Dev Hawthorne had come here and made his feelings on the man clear.
Definitelynot because of Dev.
And that was final.
