Gracie couldn’t believe she was standing at the front door of an Upper East Side penthouse, about to ring the bell. How could she have insisted earlier that Harrison go ahead of her to the party so she could shop for something to wear? She was never going to be allowed into a place like this without him. She still couldn’t believe the doorman for the building had opened the door for her in the first place—even tipping his hat as he did—or that the concierge hadn’t tried to stop her when she headed for the elevator, or that the elevator operator had told her it wasn’t necessary when she fumbled in her purse for the invitation Harrison had given her to prove she had been invited into this world. He’d just closed the doors and pushed the button that would rocket her straight to the top, as if that were exactly where she belonged.
This was the kind of place that wasn’t supposed to allow in people like her. Normal people. Working people. People who hadn’t even had the proper attire for this party until a couple of hours ago, and whose attire still probably wasn’t all that proper, since she’d bought it at a secondhand shop.
She couldn’t remember ever being this nervous. But then throwing herself into a situation where she had no idea how to behave or what to talk about, and didn’t have a single advocate to cover her back, could do that to a person. Even if being thrown into situations like that had been Gracie’s entire day.
After leaving the Cosmopolitan Club, she and Harrison had gone to the prep school where Harry had, once upon a time, sat on the board of directors. Interestingly, it was also the school Harrison had attended from kindergarten through twelfth grade, for a mere sixty-three thousand dollars a year—though he’d told her tuition was only forty-eight thousand when he started, so a big “whew!” on that. The kids had worn tidy navy blue uniforms, they’d walked silently and with great restraint through the halls, their lunches had consisted of fresh produce, lean meats and whole-grain breads trucked in from Connecticut and their curriculum had focused on science, mathematics and the classics. Art and music were extracurriculars that were discouraged in favor of Future Business Leaders of America and Junior Achievement.
It had been such a stark contrast to Gracie’s public school education, where the dress code had been pretty much anything that wasn’t indecent, the halls had been noisy and chaotic during class changes, the lunches had overwhelmingly been brown-bagged from home and filled with things factory-sealed in plastic and the curriculum had been as busy and inconsistent—in a good way—as the halls, with art and music as daily requirements.
So not only had Harry told his son that money was the most important thing in the world, but he’d also proved it by spending all his time making money and sending Harrison to a school more intent on turning its students into corporate drones than in guiding them into something constructive and fulfilling. What the hell had he been thinking?
The headquarters of Sage Holdings, Inc., where Harry had once been the man in charge, had been no better: all antiseptic and barren, in spite of being filled with workers. Workers who had spoken not a word to each other, because they’d all been confined to cubicles and hunched over computers, tap-tap-tapping on their keyboards with the diligent dedication of worker bees. How could Harry have made his employees work in such soul-deadening surroundings?
And would this party tonight reinforce her anti-Harry Sagalowsky feelings as much as the rest of today had?
Gracie inhaled a deep breath and released it, telling herself everything was going to be fine. She was fine. Her attire was fine. She’d been enchanted by the dress the moment she saw it, a pale mint confection of silk with a frothy crinoline underskirt, a ruched neckline and off-the-shoulder cap sleeves. She’d found accessories at the shop, too—plain pearly pumps and a clutch and a crystal necklace and earrings, along with a pair of white gloves that climbed midway between wrist and elbow. And she’d managed to twist her hair into a serviceable chignon and applied just enough blush and lipstick to keep herself from being as pale as...well, as pale as a woman who was about to enter a situation where she had no idea how to behave or what to talk about.
With one final, fortifying inhale-exhale—for God’s sake, Gracie, just breathe—she pushed her index finger against the doorbell. Immediately, the door opened, and she was greeted by a smiling butler. Though his smile didn’t look like a real smile. Probably, it was a smile he was being paid to smile.
Wow. Harry was right. Money really could buy anything.
No, it couldn’t, she immediately reminded herself. Money hadn’t been able to buy Gracie, after all. Not that Devon Braun and his father hadn’t tried once upon a time.
Wow. Where had that memory come from? She hadn’t given a thought to those two scumbags for a long time. And she wouldn’t think about them tonight, either. This party would be nothing like the one that set those unfortunate events in motion.
She opened her purse to retrieve her invitation, since butlers were obviously way too smart to allow someone entry just because she was wearing a vintage Dior knockoff and a serviceable chignon. But even though the purse was roughly the size of a canapé, she couldn’t find what she was looking for. Just her lipstick and compact in case she needed to refresh her makeup, her driver’s license in case she got hit by a bus, and the paramedics needed to identify her body, and her debit card in case Harrison shoved her out of the car in a sketchy part of town and she needed to take a cab back to Long Island, which could happen, since he still didn’t seem to believe her intentions toward Harry’s fortune were honorable. But no invitation.
She must have dropped it in the elevator when she was fumbling to get it out of her purse the first time. She was about to turn back that way when the same dark, velvety voice that had rescued her from the crowd at the reading of Harry’s will saved her again.
“It’s all right, Ballantine,” Harrison said from behind the butler. “She’s with me.”
She’s with me. Somehow, Harrison made it sound as if she really was with him. In a romantic, intimate sense. A tingle of pleasure hummed through her.
Although Gracie had had boyfriends since she was old enough to want one, none had ever been especially serious. Well, okay, that wasn’t entirely true. There had been one a while back who’d started to become serious. Devon Braun. A guy she’d met at a party she attended with a friend from school. A guy who’d taken her to a lot of parties like this one, since his family had been rich. But Devon had been sweeter and less obnoxious than most of the guys who came from that background. At least, Gracie had thought so then. For a couple of months, anyway.
But she wasn’t going to think about that—about him—tonight. She’d done extremely well shoving him to the back of her brain since leaving Cincinnati, and she wasn’t about to let him mess things up now. Tonight she was with Harrison. He’d just said so. And even if they went back to their wary dancing around each other tomorrow, she intended to avoid any missteps tonight.
Unfortunately, she was barely two steps past Ballantine the butler when she began to wonder if she’d been premature in her conviction. Because the minute Harrison got a good look at her, his smile fell. Somehow, Gracie was positive his thoughts just then were something along the lines of how he couldn’t believe she’d shown up dressed the way she was.
When she looked past him into the room, she realized why. Although all the men were dressed as he was—in dark suits and ties—none of the women was dressed like her. Nearly all of them were wearing black, and although there were one or two bursts of taupe, there wasn’t any clothing in the entire room that could have been called colorful. Or frothy. Or a confection. Except for a bubbly bit of pale mint silk on a woman who looked and felt—and was—completely out of place.
She forced her feet forward, manufacturing a smile for Ballantine as she passed him that was no more genuine than his, and made her way toward Harrison, whose gaze never left her as she approached.
Although she was pretty sure she already knew the answer to the question, she greeted him by asking, “Is there something wrong?”
He gave her a quick once-over, but didn’t look quite as stunned this time. She decided to take it as a compliment.
“Why do you ask?” he replied.
She lifted one shoulder and let it drop. “You look like there’s something wrong.”
Instead of giving her the once-over this time, he simply studied her face. “You look...”
Here it comes, Gracie thought, bracing herself.
“...different,” he said.
It wasn’t the word she’d expected. Nor did she understand why he chose it. She hadn’t done anything different today from what she’d done every other day he’d seen her. Maybe she’d put on a little more makeup and expended more effort on her hair, but what difference did that make?
“Good different or bad different?” she asked.
He hesitated, then slowly shook his head. “Just...different.”
“Oh. Should I leave?”
At this, he looked genuinely surprised. “No. Of course not. Why would you even ask that?”
“Because you seem to think—”
“Gracie, darling!”
The exclamation from Vivian Sage came just in time, because Harrison looked like he wanted to say something else that was probably better left unsaid. Vivian looked smashing, her black dress a sleeveless, V-necked number that was elegant in its simplicity and sumptuous in its fabric. She carried a crystal-encrusted clutch in one hand and a cocktail in the other. She stopped in front of Gracie, leaning in to give her one of those Hollywood air kisses on her cheek before backing away again.
“Darling, you look absolutely adorable,” she said. “You could be me when I was young. I think I had a dress just like that.”
Of course she did. Except Vivian’s would have had a genuine Dior tag sewn inside it, instead of one that looked like it said, Christian Dior Paris, but, upon close inspection, really said, Christina Diaz, Paramus. But Vivian had uttered the compliment sincerely, so maybe the evening wouldn’t be so horrible, after all.
Then she had to go and ruin that possibility by turning to her son and saying, “Doesn’t she look beautiful, Harrison?”
But he surprised Gracie by saying, “Uh, yeah. Beautiful.”
Unfortunately, he dropped his gaze to the floor before saying it, thereby making it possible that he was talking about their host’s carpet selection instead. Which, okay, was pretty beautiful, all lush and white, like the rest of the room.
This time, when Vivian leaned in, it was toward Harrison. “Then tell her, darling. A woman wants to be reassured that she’s the most beautiful woman in the room, especially when she’s at one of Bunny and Peter’s parties.” To Gracie, she added, “Bunny Dewitt is one of New York’s biggest fashion icons. She’s always being written up in the style section. Every woman here is worried that she’s underdressed or overdressed or wearing something so five-minutes-ago.”
Then Gracie had nothing to worry about. Her dress wasn’t so five-minutes-ago. It was so five-decades-ago. She felt so much better now.
Harrison threw his mother a “thanks a lot, Mom” smile at her admonishment, but said, “You look beautiful, Grace.”
He was looking right at her when he spoke, and for once, his expression wasn’t inscrutable. In fact, it was totally, uh, scrutable. His blue eyes were fairly glowing with admiration, and his mouth was curled into the sort of half smile that overcame men when they were enjoying something sublime. Like a flawlessly executed Hail Mary pass. Or a perfectly grilled rib eye. Or a genuinely beautiful woman.
Then the Grace at the end of the sentiment hit her. Nobody had ever called her Grace. Except for Devon, who’d told her she was too classy to be called Gracie—then turned out to be the most déclassé person on the planet. But she wasn’t going to think about Devon tonight, so he didn’t count.
And even if Harrison didn’t think she was beautiful—or classy, for that matter—the fact that he was making an effort to...well, whatever he was making an effort to do...was a welcome development.
So she replied, “Thank you. And call me Gracie. No one calls me Grace.” Well, except for the aforementioned—
Dammit, why did Devon keep popping into her head tonight? With no small effort, she pushed thoughts of the past to the back of her brain again, where they belonged. And stay there.
Harrison looked like he wanted to balk at calling her Gracie, but he dipped his head in acknowledgement that he had at least heard her.
“Ms. Sumner!”
Gracie was surprised—and delighted—to hear another familiar voice, and smiled when she turned to greet Gus Fiver, the second-in-command at Tarrant, Fiver & Twigg. He was dressed as conservatively as all the other suits at the party, but there was something about his blond good looks that made him seem far more relaxed. Instead of the briefcase she’d always seen him armed with before, this time he held a cut-crystal tumbler with what looked to Gracie’s trained eye like two fingers of very good single-malt Scotch.
“Mr. Fiver,” she greeted him. “What are you doing here?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Dewitt’s son Elliot is one of my best friends,” he said. “Our families go way back. And please call me Gus.”
Gracie turned to include Harrison and Vivian in the conversation, and then realized she had no idea how to do that. Although everyone in the small group knew each other already, it wasn’t like the Sages and Tarrant, Fiver & Twigg were exactly best friends. “You, um, you remember the Sages, I’m sure.”
Although there was a bit of a temperature drop not unlike the one she’d experienced in the Sages’ library a few days ago, Harrison and Gus managed to exchange civil greetings. Vivian was a bit warmer, but she, too, was reserved. Gracie supposed it was the best any of them could manage, having been on opposite sides of a very contentious case for two years.
“I’m surprised to see you here,” Gus said. Somehow, though, Gracie couldn’t help thinking that the subtext of his sentence was something along the lines of “I thought by now one of the Sages would have suffocated you in your sleep.” “I hope you’ve been enjoying your stay in the Hamptons.”
“I have,” she said, surprised to realize it was true. In spite of the weirdness of the situation and the wariness of the sort-of truce that seemed to have developed between her and Harrison—at least for now—her stay had been reasonably pleasant and abundantly enlightening. “Long Island is beautiful, and I’m learning all kinds of things about Harry I never knew before. Vivian and Harrison have been very accommodating.”
“Vivian and Harrison.” Gus echoed her use of their first names in the kind of speculative tone he might have used if he were conjecturing about the identity of Jack the Ripper. “I see.”
Gracie supposed it was only natural that he would be skeptical. After all, the last time she’d seen him, Harrison had been accusing her of giving his father an STD and robbing him blind. Now that she thought about it, she, too, wondered why she wasn’t still mad at Harrison.
In a word, hmm.
“I’m glad to hear it,” Gus said. “And you’ll be glad to know—as will you, Mrs. Sage—that the paperwork on the Long Island house and the Manhattan penthouse is in progress. We should be able to courier the papers to you in Amagansett Thursday or Friday, right on schedule.”
“That is wonderful news,” Vivian agreed. “Thank you again, Gracie.”
“No thanks are necessary, Vivian. I’m sure Harry knew I would return the houses to you and that it’s what he wanted.”
“Yes, well, that makes one of us, darling. Oh, look, there’s Bunny,” Vivian said, lifting a hand in greeting to their hostess. “You’ll all excuse me.”
She hurried off without awaiting a reply, leaving Gracie to be the buffer between her son and the law firm that was her son’s biggest antagonist.
“So, Gus,” she said, grappling for some benign subject to jump-start the conversation. “How did you get into the long-lost-relative business?”
“Tarrant and Twigg recruited me when I was still at Georgetown law school. I was in my last year of probate law and wrote a paper on how to better employ the internet for heir hunting for one of my classes. My professor was a friend of Bennett’s and thought he’d find it interesting so he passed it along to him. The next time Bennett was in DC, he and I met for lunch, and he offered me an associate position.”
“So have you guys reunited lots of families?” she asked.
“Or split a lot of them up?” Harrison interjected.
Gracie threw him an irritated look, but Gus only chuckled.
“No, it’s a fair question,” he said. “Family estates can be very contentious, especially when they’re large. Fortunately for us, we most often deal with single heirs to estates. Ones who are the last in a line, so there’s no one to contest the terms.”
“Well then,” Harrison said, “aren’t my mother and I lucky to be among the few, the proud, the contested.”
Again, Gus smiled. “Well, we do seem to have had an unusual run lately of clients who could be wandering into some potential conflict. Once we find them, of course.”
“And I’m sure you’ll find them,” Gracie said.
“We always do,” Gus assured her. Then his expression changed. “Well, except for that once.”
Gracie was about to ask him more about that, but someone hailed him from the other side of the room. So Gus bid her and Harrison a hasty farewell and made his way in that direction, leaving the two of them alone. And although they had been alone together pretty much all day with fairly little uneasiness, Gus’s departure left Gracie feeling very uneasy indeed.
Harrison seemed to share her discomfort, because the moment his gaze met hers, he quickly glanced off to the right, and then turned his entire body in that direction. In response, Gracie turned away and shot her gaze in the opposite direction. Then both of them looked back at each other again, turning their bodies back a little, then a little more, until they were standing face-to-face again. For one long moment, they just stood that way, their gazes locked, their tongues tied. And then...
Then something really weird happened. It was as if some kind of gauzy curtain descended around them on all sides, separating them from everyone else in the room. Everyone else in the world. The clamor of the chattering people tapered to a purr of something faint and almost melodic. The gleam of the chandelier mellowed to a blush of pink. The chill of the air conditioning ebbed to a caress of awareness. And everything else seemed to recede until it was nothing but shadows and murmurs.
Gracie had no idea if Harrison felt it, too, but he stood as still and silent as she, as if he was just as transfixed and didn’t want to move or speak for fear of ruining the moment, either. Time seemed to have stopped, too, as if nothing but that moment mattered. Then a woman somewhere in the room barked raucously with laughter, and the entire impression was gone.
Leaving Gracie—and possibly Harrison—feeling more awkward than ever.
“I’ll go get us a drink,” he said suddenly, sounding almost panicky. Yep, he felt the awkwardness, too. “What would you like?”
Like? she echoed to herself. How was she supposed to answer that? Her brain was so scrambled at the moment, she barely knew her own name, and he was asking her what she wanted? Well, okay, maybe she had an idea of what she, you know, wanted at the moment, but there was no way she was going to tell Harrison she wanted that. And how could she want that from him in the first place? Not only had she known him a mere matter of days, but she also wasn’t even sure she liked him enough for that. And she was pretty sure he didn’t like her, either, even if he was sharing weird, gauzy-curtain, shadow-and-murmur moments with her.
“Um, whatever you’re having is fine,” she said. “That will be fine. It’s fine.”
It was all Gracie could do not to slap a hand over her mouth to keep herself from further babbling. For one terrifying second, she honestly thought she was going to tell him that what she wanted was him. Then for another even more terrifying second she thought he was going to tell her that that was good, because he intended to have her. There was just something about the expression on his face just then that—
Thankfully, after one more panicky look, he bolted toward a bar in the far corner of the room, where a group of people had congregated, leaving Gracie alone to collect her thoughts. Unfortunately, her thoughts had wandered so far off that she was going to need an intergalactic mode of transportation to bring them all back.
By the time Harrison returned with their drinks, she had managed to gather herself together enough that her brain and other body parts were reasonably under control. At least until she went to remove her right glove so she could accept her cocktail, because that was when her fingers suddenly wanted to fumble all over the place. Possibly because he seemed unable to peel his gaze away from hers, and then seemed unable to peel it away from her fumbling fingers. After she finally wrestled off the glove, she made a tight fist to halt the trembling of her hand before accepting her drink. But it still trembled when she took the glass from him, enough that he cupped his hand over hers for a moment after transferring the drink to her, to make sure she didn’t drop it.
And damned if that weird gauzy-curtain thing didn’t happen again. This time, though, they were making contact when it did. She was able to feel how gently he was touching her, and how warm his hand was over hers, and how she wished more than anything he would never let her go. But he did let her go, finally, and up went the curtain again. Somehow, she was able to mumble her thanks, though whether her gratitude was for the drink, the way he touched her or the fact that the strange episode had come to an end, she couldn’t have said.
Harrison’s gaze met hers again, and he was smiling the same sort of smile he’d smiled when he’d told the butler she was with him. She lifted her drink for a sip and—
Wait. What? The import of that finally struck her. Harrison had been smiling when he told the butler “she’s with me.” Therefore something about her arrival at the party had made him happy. And something about telling Ballantine she was with him had made him happy, too.
Now he was smiling that same smile again, which must mean that he was viewing her less as an enemy. But that was good, right? It meant he was starting to believe Harry left his fortune to her for philanthropic reasons, not because she took advantage of him. So why did Gracie suddenly feel worried again, and for entirely different reasons?
For a moment, they only sipped their drinks in silence—bourbon, not Gracie’s favorite, but it was okay—and looked around the room. Then Harrison fixed his gaze—that blue, blue, good God, his eyes were blue gaze—on hers.
And very softly, he asked, “Earlier tonight, why did you ask if you should leave?”
It took her a moment to remember what he was talking about. Back when she first arrived at the party, when it was obvious he didn’t like what she was wearing. “I thought you wanted me to leave because I was going to embarrass you and Vivian.”
He looked surprised. “Why would you think that?”
She was surprised by his surprise. Wasn’t it obvious why she would think that?
“Because I’m not...sophisticated,” she said. “I’m not...elegant. I’m not...” Now she made an exasperated sound. “I don’t know how to act around people like this, in situations like this. I don’t belong here. Not that it ever mattered before, you know? I never needed to be sophisticated or elegant. I never wanted to be. But tonight...”
She trailed off without finishing, and Harrison looked as if he had no more idea what to say than she did. So Gracie sipped her drink again, finding the smoky flavor a little less disagreeable this time. See? People could learn to like things they didn’t like before. They just had to give them a chance.
She looked at Harrison again. Harrison, who was so far out of her league, even intergalactic modes of transportation couldn’t connect them. No way would he ever consider her sophisticated or elegant or think she belonged in a place like this. She wished she didn’t care about that. She wished it didn’t matter. She wished...
The irony of the situation was staggering, really. For the first time in her life, Gracie could—technically—afford anything she wanted. And the one thing she was beginning to think she might want was the only thing she would never be able to have.