“At least...not yet,” Julie said.
Colin almost spit out the sip of coffee he’d just taken. Both women looked over at him as he coughed. And covered his gaffe with another sip.
“Do you mind if I take a look at them?”
Chantel’s next question, while a natural progression, considering her business, caused him to tense up all over again. He had to stop this. Now.
“Now’s not a good time,” he said. “Jules has to be in LA this morning. She’s trying to get a proposal passed to fund a child-life position at the new Santa Raquel Children’s Hospital for patients whose families can’t be with them. Someone to work as an advocate for the families and their children. To spend quality time with the children, to be there to support them through procedures and to measure and capture age-appropriate development advancements...”
Mr. Rainmaker was putting both feet in his mouth at once.
“It’s okay, Colin.” Julie’s interruption was not the least bit timid. She turned to Chantel. “I’d like to show them to you sometime. But not because I want your opinion on if they’re publishable. I can’t think of them in those terms. I’m afraid they’d lose their current purpose, and I can’t afford to take that chance.”
He sat completely still. Afraid to even move his glance from where it had been passing over the empty place mat across from Chantel, who was in between him and Julie at the round table in their breakfast room. The mat was handwoven off-white silk—he remembered Julie’s excitement when she’d won the bid for the set at an auction the previous year.
“What’s their current purpose?” Chantel sounded genuinely curious, but she wasn’t prying. And again Jules had opened the door.
Twice now with this woman.
Was Julie noticing that there was something different about Chantel, too? Like she was an angel handpicked by their folks to save them from themselves?
He glanced at his sister as the thought occurred to him, then started to sweat anew. He hadn’t told Julie yet that he’d told Chantel she’d been raped.
“I was raped ten years ago.” The words dropped baldly into the room. Definitely not breakfast conversation, not that he gave one hoot about that. There wasn’t so much as a tremor in Julie’s voice.
It was the first time, since the night it had happened, that he’d heard Julie say the words.
Sitting forward, Chantel reached for Julie’s hand, taking hold of her fingers lightly. Julie didn’t pull back.
She always pulled back when she was touched. Most particularly by a stranger.
“After Saturday in the car...Colin told me that you’d been attacked at a party.” Chantel’s words were going to get him in serious trouble with his sister, not that she’d know that. He respected her for telling the truth, rather than pretending that she hadn’t known.
Something his discerning and ultrasensitive sister might have seen through.
Julie nodded. Swallowed. Turned her hand over and clasped Chantel’s fingers.
“The books... They’re how I fight my way out of the darkness. I have to find the child within me to create them. To see the simple yet seemingly endless beauty in the world...”
“To view the world from a child’s innocent and trusting eyes.” Chantel’s soft voice took up where Julie’s dropped off.
“Yes,” Julie said. She was smiling. And there were tears on her cheeks, too.
His sister’s tears were nails in his heart.
But a miracle was happening.
He wouldn’t have stopped it if he could.
* * *
CHANTEL WAS OFF work until Saturday, when she and Daniel had to work a special detail—a visiting dignitary who was traveling down the coast and would be stopping for a meal in Santa Raquel. The dignitary and the reason for his visit were unknown to lowly folk like her. The hours and the pay were good. A full shift’s pay for six hours of her time.
Didn’t much matter to her who it was. She’d make certain that her stretch of street stayed safe and bankroll the bucks. Babysitting was her least favorite part of the job.
Before she’d left his home after breakfast Wednesday morning, Colin had invited her to the theater Thursday night. She had to accept. But she suggested they meet in LA, rather than drive down together, as she had a friend of her mother’s to meet for lunch. Total bullshit, of course, but she couldn’t take a chance on the long drive home late at night becoming too intimate. He’d be dropping her at her hotel and...
Nope. She had to make that drive alone.
He tried to work out another solution, even to the extent of hiring someone to drive her car back for her, but in the bright morning sun, immediately following the emotional moments with Julie, she remained resolute.