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Only two more days, she thought, walking into the dining room.
She was surprised to see both Jack and his girlfriend seated at the long table.
"Blair!" she exclaimed. "When did you get here?"
The other woman got to her feet and they embraced.
"Late last night."
Blair, tall and slender with closely cropped blond hair and dazzling gray eyes, was the perfect complement to Jack's sleekness. With their expensive clothes and their classic looks, they were a matched set.
As Grace stepped back, she saw Smith come into the room and became instantly aware of him.
"How's the tooth?"
"A little sore." Blair laughed, rubbing her jaw. "But I was feeling better than I thought I would and came late last night."
"She's a real trooper, all right," Jack said.
The woman looked over at him. "Although I'm going to have to miss today's sailing excursion. I am not strong enough to hit the ocean with you and Alex."
"Funny, you managed to get out of it the last time he asked us." Jack chuckled. "Are you sure you didn't plan the root canal?"
"Alex is in town?" Grace asked, sitting down as Jack pushed her chair in.
Alex Moorehouse was one of the country's best America's Cup sailors and an old friend of Jack's. Grace had met him on a number of occasions and liked the man.
"He is and I wouldn't miss a chance to get out on the open sea with Moorehouse. That man's pure adrenaline."
Carolina entered the room and they all stood up. She was dressed in a fine tweed suit, her hair precisely arranged in the chignon she'd worn it in for years. As her mother's eyes passed over her, Grace touched her own hair, which was down and flowing over her shoulders.
Carolina eyed Smith's blue jeans with disapproval before smiling at her newest guest. "Blair, darling, how are you? Sit, sit, everyone."
Jack helped her with her chair and then she rang the bell. Marta came in with a breakfast of scrambled eggs and cut fruit on a large silver tray. The woman paused by each guest, holding the load with ease.
When it was her turn, Grace didn't take much of either.
"It looks lovely, Marta, thank you," she said. "Mother, today we're going to go to Mr. Blankenbaker's. Would you like to come?"
"No. I'm having lunch with Harrington Wright. First, however, I must go to see Stella Linnaean, who is not feeling well. And then ..."
Grace let her mother's recital of the day's activities pass over her like a mist. She thought instead of John and what he'd said earlier that morning. She was surprised he'd revealed so much of himself, although it was a damn shame that so little of it worked in her favor. She replayed their conversation in her head over and over again, looking for a way to make him see the possibilities instead of the obstacles between them.
His past was one of the harder things to counter. She didn't doubt him when he said he had dangerous enemies, but she had to believe there was a way around even that impediment.
"Grace?" her mother said sharply.
She shook herself out of her reverie and looked down the table. Her mother had folded her napkin into a neat square, placed it next to her plate and was getting to her feet. Evidently, breakfast was over.
"Sorry. What?"
"I would like to see you for a moment."
Grace grabbed a piece of toast and reluctantly followed her mother across the foyer into the lady's parlor that her mother used as a study.
The room was painted in a cornflower blue and filled with delicate French antiques. Grace had never felt comfortable in it. Everything seemed small, dainty, and breakable. Booby-trapped. It was as if each of the chairs had been calibrated for her mother's birdlike weight and anything heavier would cause a collapse, embarrassment, and censure.
Carolina shut the double doors behind them and Grace's chest contracted. It was hard to imagine how such a bright, elegant room could feel like a dungeon, but it did.
"It's good to see Blair looking so well," Carolina said, pausing to inspect a bouquet of flowers on a delicate side table. She picked off two petals from a white rose and threw them into a little decoupage wastepaper basket that was otherwise empty. "Although it was a dreadful story about that tooth."
"Yes, it was."
"She's just lovely, don't you think?"
"Yes, she is."
Grace knew damn well she hadn't been called inside to discuss Jack's girlfriend and waited for the real conversation to get going.
Carolina walked smoothly over to her desk, a Louis XIV masterpiece with few things marring its pristine surface. In one corner, there was a silk box of her personal stationery that had her name at the top and Willings's address underneath. Laying on the stack, there was a single gold pen as thin as a flower stem and a tiny leather bound address book.
