I reached for her hand, catching the tips of her fingers with mine as she jerked her arm back, her elbow slamming into the side of her plate, sending silverware clattering to the floor.
Her cheeks pink, she protested, “I don’t need a ring. I don’t need jewelry or anything. This isn’t—” A furtive glance to the open doorway and I knew what she’d been about to say.
This isn’t real.
She was wrong. This was real. Hope and I were real. Those kisses were real. I watched her carefully, trying to figure out the best way to get through to her. She sat across from me, polished and beautiful, comfortable yet stylish in a dark green cashmere sweater and skinny jeans that tempted me to fill my hands with her ass.
Beneath the veneer I could see young Hope staring at me apprehensively, her cognac brown eyes tinged with fear when she looked at that antique velvet ring box. Why?
Seeing echoes of the child she’d been in the woman she was shook me. When I opened my mouth to speak, I didn’t have the right words. I didn’t have any words.
Like a clod and a fool, I shoved the box across the table at her and said, “Open it.”
Nice proposal, jackass, I told myself. Hope reached out one hand for the box, closing her fingers around it tentatively before she pried open the lid and let out a shocked gasp.
“You can’t give me this. This is a Sawyer ring. It’s over a hundred years old. This is the ring you’re supposed to give to your—”
“My wife,” I finished for her. “My wife is sitting right in front of me.”
Hope stared at me as if I were mentally challenged. I set my jaw and waited. The ring was for my wife. Hope was my wife. I didn’t see why it had to be more complicated than that.
Her fingers trembling, she reached out and tugged the ring from the box. It slid on her finger, a perfect fit. She stared down at it, her eyes wide, twisting the band back and forth on her finger, the ruby and diamonds catching the light. It looked right.
I’d never given that ring to Vanessa because that ring belonged to Hope.
“I’ll give it back,” Hope said quickly, her eyes flashing up to mine. “After the five years,” she whispered, “I’ll give it back.”
I swear, I kept forgetting about the five years. Did she really think after five years we’d sign some papers and that would be that?
I shifted in my seat at the uncomfortable realization that Hope might think exactly that.
What if she was just biding time with me, doing what she had to in order to save the town, to pay me back for what she saw as her betrayal. What if she was just counting down the days until she had her freedom?
I looked at the ring on her finger. I’d do everything it took to keep it exactly where it was.
“We’ll worry about that later. For now, it fits?”
“It fits,” Hope said, stretching out her fingers and then making a fist.
“Good. That’s one thing we can scratch off our list. Now, if you’re done with breakfast—” I raised my eyebrows at her mostly empty plate, “We should hit the office and start digging into the mess Prentice left behind.”
Standing in the door to my father’s office, I thought the word mess had been a gross understatement. “Harvey said the room was cleared as a crime scene,” I commented. There were scraps of yellow tape at the sides of the doorway and smears of fingerprint powder here and there. Savannah had said she’d done a cursory cleanup, but, as my siblings were descending on the house the next day, most of her attention had been focused on getting the bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens up and running.
Prentice’s office had been spared the worst of the dust and cobwebs plaguing the rest of the house. Probably because he’d used this room right up until the moment of his death. My skin crawled just standing in the doorway.
I hated this room. I’d always hated this room.
It wasn’t the room itself. Much like the rest of the house, it had dark woodwork and tall windows. They should have let in the light, but Prentice had always kept the heavy damask drapes pulled closed. Two of the walls had built-in bookcases, each with its own brass and oak ladder to assist in reaching the higher shelves almost 15 feet from the floor.
On the other two walls where I would’ve hung oil paintings, my father had chosen dead animals, each shot by Prentice himself. I don’t have anything against hunting. I knew plenty of people who loved to spend a weekend laying perfectly still in the woods waiting for just the right moment to pull the trigger.