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He wasn’t sure exactly what he’d done to make his grandmother upset, although if he had to guess, he figured it had to do with those pictures of Lydia. Those photos and the accompanying article in the paper had caused quite a stir around town. Sheriff Todd even had Lydia arrested and charged with endangering public safety. She was probably looking at a heavy fine, probation, and a few weeks of unpleasant community service.
It was a huge scandal for such a fine, upstanding family as the Whittakers. Things like that just didn’t happen around Rosewood very often, and when they did, they were never linked back to a family like theirs.
Clark hadn’t credited Blake with the photos when he ran the story, but he had no doubt word had gotten around that he was responsible for them. He didn’t care. Lydia needed a little public shaming. If that caught him hell with his grandmother, so be it. There was still the question about the picture in the slideshow, though. He hadn’t done it. He hadn’t even known there was going to be a slideshow.
“Sit,” his grandmother commanded, as if he were one of the little lapdogs she’d had when he was a child.
Well trained, he complied, settling into the velvet wingback chair opposite her own. He looked down at the small table between them. There was no tea, no nibbles. Not even a plate of stale cookies. His grandmother almost always had something set out when people were over, even family. An empty tabletop did not bode well.
“Where have you been, Blake?”
He wasn’t expecting that. He’d been out of the public eye for a few days. He’d taken some vacation and spent his time fishing on his little pond and futzing
around the house. Honestly, he hadn’t thought anyone would notice his absence, especially his grandmother, who rarely left her mansion.
“I’ve been around,” he argued. “I took a few days off work after all the fund-raiser activities. I needed a break.” It was a legitimate response, though untrue. In reality he was trying to avoid the fallout of his breakup with Ivy. If word got out about it, he wanted to be unavailable for consultation. The last thing he needed was to see the news of his scandalous breakup plastered across the cover of a magazine at the grocery store. What confused him was why his grandmother cared what he was doing.
“Needed a place to hide is more like it!”
Blake’s eyes widened and he jerked back as though she’d reached out and slapped him. “Why are you so upset, Grandma? Is this about Lydia and the newspaper article?”
His grandmother rolled her eyes. “No, it is most certainly not about that scheming, insipid Whittaker girl. She got what she deserved, if you ask me.”
A sly smile curled her lips after a moment and Blake was hit with the sudden realization of who had been responsible for that photo getting projected at the concert. Clark had said the montage included old pictures, some of which had to come from his family. He didn’t know how his grandmother had gotten her hands on a copy of Nash’s photograph, but it would’ve been child’s play to slip that picture into the box with all the others they’d used for the show.
“Grandma Dee?” he asked, the obvious question unasked.
She didn’t respond. She just smiled and shrugged. “That’s not important. I’m more interested in discussing what is going on between you and Ivy.”
He couldn’t help but wince at the mention of her name. “Nothing is going on,” he said. “Literally nothing.”
Adelia Chamberlain eyed him with suspicion, reading into his cryptic words. “Something was going on between you two a few days ago. You’d become quite the hot item. Then she released that new song . . . I thought things were progressing nicely, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. She flew back to California the night of the concert without a word to anyone. Women in happy relationships don’t flee like they’re leaving the scene of the crime. So, are you sticking to your story or are you going to tell me what the hell happened?”
Hearing his genteel southern grandmother cuss was a little unnerving, but not as unnerving as having someone mention that song again. This was the third or fourth time someone had brought up Ivy’s new song, but he still hadn’t heard it. He didn’t want to hear it.
He’d shoved Grant out the front door of his house when Grant tried to play it for him on his phone. People insisted it was a love song, not “Size Matters, Part Two,” but he still didn’t want to listen.
In the end, it didn’t matter what the song was about or how great it was. Even if it was the sweetest love song ever written, listening to it would just amplify the fact that he’d ruined what they had together. It had been written and performed before she walked in on him and Lydia. It didn’t matter what she said before, because he was willing to bet good money she didn’t feel the same way now.
Blake took a deep breath and tried to figure out how much he should say about it. The problem with his grandmother was that she had a keen sense for lies. If he held something back, she’d know it. He didn’t know how many times she’d busted him as a child for one thing or another. He might as well tell her everything at the start so she didn’t have to drag every detail out of him. He was certain she would torture him until she found out what she wanted to know.
“Well,” he began, and before he knew it, he had dumped the entire story on her. Lydia’s scheming, the photos, her luring him to his office, Ivy walking in . . . the whole shebang. “She wouldn’t listen to me. She just ran off. After what happened in college, there’s no way I can convince her that it wasn’t what she thinks it was. I mean . . . I love Ivy.”
Saying the words aloud for the first time felt strange, especially admitting it to his grandmother instead of the object of his affection. “I wanted to tell her how I felt after the concert. I certainly wouldn’t have ruined things twice by getting involved with someone else.”
Adelia sat back in her chair and folded her hands across her lap. She had listened intently throughout his entire story, not saying a word to interrupt. Now, he awaited her verdict on the situation. At this point, he’d be happy to hear what someone else thought he should do.
“You’re a damn fool.”
That was about right, but not an entirely helpful observation. “Tell me something I don’t know, Grandma.”
She arched an elegant gray brow and pointed her manicured index finger at him. “Okay. Do you know how much trouble it took me to get Ivy to come back to Rosewood? How many calls I had to make to that Lynch fellow before she’d even consider it? Did it ever occur to you that we could’ve gotten someone else to do a charity concert for a lot less aggravation?”
“Well, actually, yes, it did. When she first arrived, I’d wished we had gotten someone else. It felt like the fund-raising committee had a personal vendetta against me, bringing her here.”
“I brought her here because I wanted Ivy. And I wanted Ivy because I decided that you two deserved a second chance to make things right.”
Blake was stunned. He’d never known his grandmother to give a hoot about other people’s love lives. The fact that she had gone to this much trouble to help with his own was mind-boggling. He wished she’d asked first, although he probably would’ve resisted the idea. “Really?”
