He could think of worse company.
* * *
HANDS ON HER jean-clad hips, Nadine stood near her idling Chevy and stared at the fortress that protected the Monroe summer home. In all her thirty years—even in the few weeks when she’d been secretly seeing Hayden—she’d never walked through the sturdy wrought-iron gates that led to what was rumored to once have been the fanciest house on the lake, built by a movie star in the late twenties and purchased—or, more likely, stolen—by the thieving Monroe family in the fifties.
Her lips turned down at the corners as she eyed the rock wall that stretched around all fifteen acres of prime lakefront property. Only the uppermost branches of the tallest pines were visible over the eight feet of stacked basalt and mortar.
And now, she was allowed—as a servant, she reminded herself—access to the fabled estate. The code she’d been given by the hotshot attorney in San Francisco worked. She punched out the numbers on a keypad and electronically, with a loud clang and groan, the gates swung inward.
Ironic, she thought, that she should be here, called upon to clean up the old manor, get it ready for its new inhabitant. It seemed that the attorney who had hired her didn’t know about her connection to the Monroes. All the better.
She slid behind the wheel of her Nova and disengaged the emergency brake. The little car sprang forward, as if as eager as she to view the mansion owned by the man who had nearly single-handedly ruined her family.
The drive was overgrown with weeds, but still seemed inviting as it curved through a forest of sequoia, oak and pine. Pale winter sun streamed through the leafless branches and spattered the ground with pools of shimmering light.
As she glanced in her rearview mirror, she noticed the huge gate swing closed again, cutting her off from the stretch of road that wound through the hills surrounding Whitefire Lake.
She’d thought often of leaving Gold Creek, but after her shattering experience with Hayden, and what had happened to her as a direct result of her short-lived romance with him, she’d never left again. Her family, or what was left of it, still resided in the town, and she wasn’t the kind of woman who would fit into the suburban sprawl or the hectic pace of the city. She’d learned that lesson the hard way. So, after being shipped off to a boarding school her parents could barely afford, she’d returned to Gold Creek and her battered family. Through her parents’ divorce, through her eldest brother’s death and through a bad marriage, she’d stayed.
She’d even, for a brief period, fancied herself in love with Turner Brooks, a rough-and-tumble cowboy whose house she cleaned on a weekly basis.
Nadine squelched that particular thought. She hadn’t let herself think of Turner for several months. He was happily married now, reunited with Heather Tremont, the girl of his dreams. He’d never even known that Nadine had cared about him.
Why was it that she always chose the wrong men?
“Masochist,” she reprimanded herself, as the lane curved and suddenly the lake, smooth as glass, stretched for half a mile to the opposite shore. Mountains rose above the calm water, their jagged snowcapped peaks reflected in the mi
rror that was Whitefire Lake.
Nadine parked and climbed out of her old car. She shoved her hands into her pockets and shivered as a cold breeze rushed across the water and caught in her hair. Rubbing her arms, she stared past the gazebo, private dock and boathouse and tried to see her own little house, situated on the far banks of the lake, but was only able to recognize the public boat landing and bait-and-tackle shop on the opposite shore.
Her small cottage was a far cry from this, the three-storied “cabin” that had once been the Monroe summer home. The manor—for that’s what it was, in Nadine’s estimation—looked as if it should have been set in a rich section of a New England town. Painted slate gray, with navy blue shutters battened against the wind, it was nestled in a thicket of pines and flanked by overgrown rhododendrons and azaleas.
This was where the Monroes spent their summers, she thought, surprised at her own bitterness—where Hayden had courted Wynona Galveston before the accident that had nearly taken the young socialite’s life. He’d never called Nadine, never written. Nadine had told herself that the pain and disappointment were long over, but she’d been wrong. Even now, she remembered her father’s face when he’d come home and caught her trying to sneak out and visit Hayden before he was transferred to San Francisco. She’d begged and pleaded until Ben had agreed to take her over to County Hospital while her mother had been working at the library, but George Powell, his shift shortened that day and for many days thereafter, had come home early and caught them. Thin lines of worry had cracked her father’s ruddy skin, and anger had smoldered bright in his eyes.
After sending Ben out of the room, he’d rounded on his daughter. “Didn’t I tell you to stay away from him?”
“I can’t, Dad. I love him.”
She’d been banished to her room, only to come down later and find her parents engaged in another argument—a horrid fight she had inadvertently spawned.
“I’ll kill that kid,” George had sputtered.
“Daddy, you wouldn’t—”
He changed tactics. “Well, I’ll let him know how I feel about him using my daughter. No one’s going to get away with hurting my little girl.”
“You think you can stop him?” Donna had interjected bitterly, pinning him with a hateful glare. “Haven’t you learned yet that those people have no souls? How could you hurt a man like Hayden Monroe? The way you hurt his father? By giving him everything we ever owned.”
“Stop it!” Ben had snarled. “Just stop it!”
At that point Nadine’s father had nearly broken down; it was the only time Nadine had seen him blink against tears in his usually humor-flecked eyes.
Now, years later, she saw the irony of the situation. Obviously, because her name was no longer Powell, the attorney who’d paid off her father hadn’t recognized her. Instead, he’d offered to hire her at an exorbitant rate to clean the place from stem to stern. “…and I don’t care how much time it takes. I want the house to look as good today as it did the day it was built,” Bradworth had ordered.
That would take some doing, Nadine thought, eyeing the moss collecting on the weathered shingles of the roof.
She’d almost turned down the job, but at the last minute had changed her mind. This was her chance to get a little of her father’s lost fortune back. Besides, anything to do with the Monroes held a grim fascination for her. And she needed to prove to herself that she didn’t give a fig what happened to Hayden.