Bad Heiress Day Read online

  Heiress Lessons

  Jack practically craned his head out the window to take in the snazzy sports car in Ed Bidwell’s driveway. It was small and shiny—a take-no-prisoners red color—and slick enough for its own Bond movie. “Wow. Getta load of that thing, will you?” Jack had been none too keen on keeping this brunch date, but Darcy smiled to herself at Jack’s sudden change of heart. Evidently Pastor Doug knew just how to get Jack Nightengale’s attention. Or Someone Else did.

  Not quite ready to chalk it up to divine intervention, Darcy surmised that all well-to-do men indulged in fancy cars. A testosteronized version of the three-stone, multi-carat ring every well-to-do woman seemed to own. The rings in the magazine and television ads, with adoring husbands shouting their affections in Italian streets and other wildly romantic venues.

  Her brain flashed a quick, unlikely scene: Jack, in black turtleneck—unheard of—and leather sport coat—fat chance—and hair with just a touch of gel to make it look truly dashing—possible but not likely—by the Tuscan seashore. Crusty bread and Brie replacing Doritos and onion dip, a deliciously small black velvet box in his hand. Surging waves of violin music filled the air. With an elegant flair and a twinkle in his dark eye, he flips the lid to reveal one of those anniversary rings that are supposed to let you know he’d marry you all over again. Three whopping stones, cuddled next to each other in a bed of gold. Dazzling. Adding elegance to any hand, even one picking Play-Doh off the couch cushions….

  “Dar?”

  Jack was already out of the car, standing outside her door, hand ready to knock on the window if that’s what it took to get her attention. How long had that little daydream gone on?

  “Oh, I get it,” Jack said, “I’m supposed to open the door for you and such now. This is a high-class affair.”

  Darcy fumbled with her purse. “No, I just…My mind went somewhere.”

  “No kidding.” Jack actually looked a little nervous. Darcy had to admit she felt the same. The whole setup felt odd and unnatural. Jack nudged Darcy with his hip, a gesture he’d done when they first dated. “Can I get one of those?” he said, pointing to the four-wheeled wonder.

  “A two-car garage? Sure, hon.” She nudged him back. Wow. She couldn’t even remember the last time they’d done that to each other.

  “Very funny.” Jack ran a fidgety hand through his hair as they started up the walkway to the Bidwells’ front door. “This feels weird. I don’t know about this. I mean, we don’t know these people from Adam.”

  “I know. But it’s one brunch. Maybe they’re really nice. It couldn’t hurt. Besides, if you behave, maybe Ed will let you near that car….”

  Jack rubbed his hands together in a let-me-at-’em gesture just before he pushed the doorbell button. “Think there’s a butler?”

  Darcy giggled just a bit. “Jack…”

  The door swung open to reveal Ed Bidwell. Or a man who Darcy guessed was Ed Bidwell. He didn’t look anything like she was expecting. He looked more like everybody’s favorite grandfather than a printing magnate. He had a round, jovial face framed by a balding wreath of white hair. Gold wire glasses, hosting a pair of rather thick lenses, gave his water-colored eyes an oversize, magnified appearance. He had on an ordinary-looking plaid shirt and khakis, but Darcy noticed his belt and shoes were of a thick, soft, expensive-looking leather. He held his hands out.

  “Jack. And Darcy. Saw you come up the walk. Ed. Ed Bidwell. Come on in. Come on in.” He called down the hall as he took Darcy’s coat. “Glyn, honey! They’re here!”

  “I can see out the windows just the same as you, Bid. I’m coming.” Both their voices held the tint of a Southern upbringing, but softened from what sounded like years in the Midwest. Glynnis Bidwell came down the hall, tossing a dish towel on a side table as she did.

  She was the pepper to her husband’s salt—all dark but graying hair and wide brown eyes, her skin olive-colored to his fair skin. They were like a pair of ceramic salt shakers, the two of them: same size, same jovially heavy build, same sparkle in the eyes. They looked like the kind of couple you’d ask to play Mr. and Mrs. Claus at the church Christmas bazaar. That is, if Better Homes and Gardens ran your church Christmas bazaar.

  “Darcy, so nice to meet you. I’m Glynnis Bidwell.” She reached out a friendly hand. Well manicured, still damp, and boasting a one-stone ring. It was, however, a rather large stone. Darcy chided herself for even looking.

  “See you’ve met Ed. And you must be Jack. Glad to meet you, too. Don’t think I didn’t see you eyeing Ed’s baby out there in the driveway. Go on, Bid, show your toys off. I’d much rather have the two of you out of my hair than in the kitchen anyway.” She shooed the men off as if telling her grandsons to go play in the yard.

  Ed smiled, not bothering to hide his enthusiasm. “Glyn never misses anything.” He winked at Jack. “Makes it hard to misbehave, but God must’ve known I needed watching, hmm?” Jack shot Darcy a quick you-didn’t-tell-me-they-were-one-of-those looks, hopefully too quick for Glynnis to catch. “Like Coke, do you Jack? I got a thing for Cherry Coke. Keep a whole fridge of it in my garage. Can I stand you a drink, sir?”

  Jack put up no resistance whatsoever as he let Ed Bidwell guide him into what must surely be a Man’s Wildest Dream of a garage. Cool cars and Cherry Coke. Maybe Someone had known just how to put those two together.

  Darcy looked back from watching them leave to find Glynnis eyeing her with one hand on her hip. Ouch. She had seen Jack’s quick glance. Funny though, she didn’t seem annoyed. More like she’d just received confirmation of a suspicion. “Jack wasn’t itching to come here, was he?”

  “Well,” Darcy hedged, thinking she should be polite, but also quite sure no one pulled anything over on Glynnis Bidwell, “all of this has got us rather…baffled.”

  Glynnis shrugged a bit in her orange cardigan, fastening the two bottom buttons. “The world’s a baffling place these days. Don’t blame you one bit for feeling like someone’s just shook the inside of your snow globe.” She looked up from her buttons. “If even half of what Doug’s told me is true—and I know he’s only told me the half of it—then you were up to your eyeballs in sticky issues even before the world went on red alert.” Glynnis turned, tucked Darcy’s arm in the crook of her elbow and headed toward the kitchen. “Let those boys drown themselves in sugar water.” She snatched the dish towel as she went past. “I’ve made us some ice tea.”

  Darcy wondered if the sugar water remark was a joke as she watched Glynnis dump not two but four spoonfuls of sugar into her own ice tea. “I like life sweet. And I think saccharin is for the birds, even if my thighs might be thinner for it,” she said, catching Darcy’s glance. Man, this woman did not miss a trick.

  Glynnis plopped herself down onto the counter stool beside Darcy. The Bidwell kitchen had a comfortably cluttered feeling—as if there was too much fun in life to be tidy. It was well decorated, but with an eclectic, impulsive eye. Glynnis surely had a thing for chickens—they were everywhere—on potholders, drawer pulls, wallpaper border paper, and an abundant collection of chicken figurines lined up like a henhouse above her cabinets. If a kitchen could be bustling in a house with only two people, this was it.

  “The hens…” Glynnis began, catching Darcy’s sweep of the room. “Yes, well, I must admit there are a lot of them. Bid gave me one as a joke once, saying I should never become a biddy old hen because my name already had a bid in it and now I already had a hen.” She pointed to a rather riotous ceramic one given a place of obvious prominence overseeing the sink. “Things just sort of snowballed from there. Soon this place became a henhouse.” She offered Darcy a wink. “If the sky should happen to be falling, I’ve got enough Chicken Littles in here to be the first to know.”

  Glynnis settled in closer to Darcy and wrapped her hands around her ice tea glass. “Sounds like lots of your sky has already fallen, my dear. I am truly sorry to hear about your dad. Paul and I didn’t travel in the same circles, but he seemed like a
good man. Cancer’s an awful way to go. Are you doing okay?”

  Even though a hundred people had asked her that question in the last month, Darcy knew Glynnis really meant it. Darcy found herself liking Glynnis Bidwell almost immediately. There was something wonderfully transparent about her—one look and you knew just what you were getting. “I’m not even sure I know what ‘okay’ is supposed to look like now,” Darcy replied with a small smile.

  “I don’t expect you’ll know anytime soon. It’s important to have good people around you at a time like this. Have you got good friends helping you out?”

  Darcy stirred her tea. “One really good one. Some people try to be nice, others don’t seem to know what to say. Only a few people know about…the money part. Mostly I haven’t had time for friends lately.” She put the spoon down, noticing it was a heavy, solid silver. Someone once told her the mark of a true Southern lady was that her silver set included ice tea spoons. Darcy wondered when her mind had begun cataloguing such obscure details about people. “It’s odd to have so much time now.” She continued, “I feel like I can’t remember what to do with it.”

  Glynnis pushed a plate of crackers toward her. Darcy dunked one into a bowl—chicken patterned—with dip in it. “It’ll come back,” the older woman offered in warm tones. “It’ll all come back. But I imagine a few things are changed forever in your life now. You’re not the same person you were before Paul died. You’ve got new responsibilities and challenges ahead of you now.” Glynnis took a cracker and absolutely loaded it with dip before popping it into her mouth. “Listen, hon, lots of money is fun, but it has its own problems—and not everyone understands that. Things can get kind of messy before you find your balance.

  “Bid and I, well, we got used to it bit by bit. Not that we didn’t make a colossal mess of things in places along the way, but we had a chance to learn as we went. You, you and Jack have a whole different ball of wax. Everything all at once is no picnic. You need lots of good counsel if you’re going to see it through.” She drowned another cracker in dip. “It’s a funny little niche Bid and I have carved for ourselves, helping people deal with big finances, but we like it. It’s no accident Doug hooked us up, you know. God’s been sending us people for years now, letting us help them over the—how does Bid say it?—‘the big bumps that come with the big bucks.’” She chuckled as she selected another cracker for saturation. “That’s my Bid. Always has a way with a phrase. Now, Darcy, tell me more about your dad….”

  “Play golf, Jack?’ Ed Bidwell snapped the tab on his Cherry Coke with a satisfied grin.

  “No, never could quite find the time.” Jack pulled the tab on his own can.

  “Good.” Bidwell hoisted the can in a salute. “Hate the game, myself. All those men chasing that silly little ball around a hunk of nice landscaping. Ah, give me a horsepower over a good tee time any day.” The man looked lovingly at his sports car.

  Jack had to admit, it was one lovable car. A beauty, and brand spanking new from the looks of it. Hadn’t he seen one of those on the cover of Car and Driver? “What is it?”

  Ed walked out into the driveway with the swagger of a man who felt king of all he surveyed. “That, my young friend, is a Ford Thunderbird. Hot off the line. Packed to the gills and gleaming in the sunshine.” He continued to spout off a collection of technical specifications that made Jack’s head swim. Jack could just picture the car zipping through the windy streets of Mount Adams, Cincinnati’s upscale, steep-hilled section…

  …and skidding all over the place. This was a car that belonged on the autobahn, not slipping down the hills in a Cincinnati winter. Totally impractical.

  But one fabulous little car anyway.

  “’Course,” Ed continued, as if reading Jack’s thoughts, “she’ll be about as useless as a woman in high heels when the weather turns cold. But that first day of spring, when the weather gets warm enough to pull her out again and put the top down, well, that’s a day I’m looking forward to with a huge hunk of pleasure.”

  Jack had to nod.

  “I’ll get another month out of her at least, but I don’t think she’ll hit the streets after October. Too much salt on these hills. Wouldn’t want to rust these lovely curves now, would we?”

  “No, sir.” Jack thought about the blotches of rust gracing the “curves” of his car. It would practically be its own salt lick by February. The transmission was getting ready to give out soon, too. Not to mention the sad shape of the tires on Darcy’s van—they might not last the winter, either.

  Ed plucked a handkerchief from his pocket and rubbed at a nearly invisible smudge on the front headlamp. “How’s Darcy holding up now that her dad’s gone?”

  Jack wasn’t sure how much he wanted to get in-depth on this topic just yet. He gave his standard response. “As well as can be expected. We’ve known this was coming for so long, it mostly feels over. She gets blue some days, then on others she’s her old self again.”

  Ed didn’t look up from the headlamp, moving to inspect the other instead. “Dying’s hard on a family. On a marriage, even. Glyn and I had more fights the year her mother died than we’d had in our entire marriage until then.” He turned to look at Jack. “’Course Glyn’s mom was a stubborn old battle-ax, and Paul was a saint, hmm?”

  Jack wasn’t quite sure what to make of that last remark. Was Ed speaking well of the dead, or inviting Jack to share his honest opinion? He sure didn’t know this guy well enough to read between his lines. He sipped his Cherry Coke to bide a bit more thinking time.

  “You’re a smart man, Jack.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I know half a dozen fellows your age who wouldn’t have seen that comment for the minefield that it was.” He laughed, folding the handkerchief back into his pocket. “You knew there was no real safe way to respond to a remark like that. I could spot it in your eyes. I like a man who knows that sometimes the best answer is not to answer at all.”

  Jack eyed him, half annoyed, half impressed. “Do you always test people for their conversational—” he searched for the right word “—agility so quickly after meeting them?”

  “Only if I think they’re worth it, Jack my boy, only if I think they’re worth it.” Ed tossed his Coke can into a large recycling bin clear across the garage in one perfect long shot. “I think I’m ready for lunch.”

  Chapter 7

  The Torture Man Cometh

  Kate pulled up a stool to Darcy’s kitchen counter as they shared a cup of tea. “So the Bidwells have a nice house?”

  “Really nice. Jack was drooling over the guy’s sports car. Nice furniture, the works. Real art, not just prints from a superstore. She had silver ice tea spoons, even.”

  Kate made a dour, uppercrusty socialite face and stuck her pinky out.

  “No, it wasn’t like that. I mean, that’s what I was expecting, but she was really nice. The house was gorgeous, but it was a…comfortable sort of gorgeous.” Darcy sighed. “It’s hard to describe. It was really a lovely afternoon.”

  Darcy could tell that Kate had caught the edge to her voice. “But…” Kate cued.

  Darcy sighed and stirred her tea again. “It just seemed to make everything worse.”

  “Worse how?”

  “They were so perfect, so happy, so…compatible.” She looked at the colored plastic handle of her teaspoon and thought of Glynnis’s graceful flatware. “I could look at them and see what could be…and see what isn’t.” Darcy put down her spoon. “Isn’t, isn’t, isn’t.”

  Kate sighed. “You guys fought again last night, didn’t you?”

  “It’s so funny, Kate. Jack talked to Ed Bidwell, I talked to Glynnis. Ed and Glynnis are so in sync with each other, so agreeable, and yet Jack and I came out of that visit with two completely different viewpoints. No, let me rephrase that. We came out of there with the same viewpoints we’ve had all along, only just farther apart than before. How can that happen? It doesn’t make sense. It should have made things better, but it
made things worse.”

  “Jack still on the investment bandwagon?”

  “More so than ever. If I didn’t know better, all he and Ed Bidwell talked about were the miracles of compounded interest. I think he told Jack the interest off his latest investment strategy bought that shiny new car Jack was eyeing.”

  “Ed Bidwell’s a pretty big honcho. Maybe it did.”

  Darcy eyed her. “You’re not helping.”

  “Okay, tell me about this Glynnis lady. All I know about her is what I see on the charity ball page of the newspaper. She’s a bigwig at the art museum, isn’t she?”

  “From the looks of her walls, she sure is.” Darcy leaned in. “She was so…cool. She launches all these incredible projects and mentors people and looks so happy and…you just want to hate her but she’s too nice to hate.”

  “Must be nice.”

  “She’s done such amazing things with what she’s got. She can look back on her life and tell me story after story of people she’s helped, things she’s done, differences she’s made in people’s lives.”

  “And you want that.”

  Darcy stopped and stared at Kate. Want. Yes, she wanted that. She wanted what Glynnis had, what Glynnis did, how Glynnis changed her world. Even though she’d felt the emotion, and had even expressed something like that to Jack last night, Kate had somehow nailed it. Kate always nailed it. “Yeah,” she said softly, surprised at the hurt in her own voice, “I want that.”

  The women sat in silence for a moment. “Did you tell Glynnis about your idea? The Restoration Project?”

  “No, I wasn’t ready to for some reason. You’re the only one who knows.” Darcy pressed her fingers to her brow. “I don’t know, Kate, it sounds so stupid. It’s not like you can change the world with a good haircut.”

  Kate got a sassy look on her face. “Oh, I don’t know about that. Don might argue with you there.”