Chapter10
I startedto downshift as I climbed a hill. A familiar hill. Stick gently squeezed my thigh, noticing my tension. “You’re doing great. You’ve got her.” He mistook my stiffening for my first big hill in Yvette. He didn’t know what I knew.
Just over the hill, I saw it. The gates to a large estate, the last one on this road.
The Holy Grail if you were my mother, Pandora Winters.
Easing my way down the hill (I just wanted to put it in neutral and coast, but Stick said no), I decided to pull over. Just a bit before the gate, like we’d done so many times before.
“Um…want me to drive?” Stick asked. His hand had stilled on my thigh. Part of me desperately wanted that hand to keep climbing, to tease and tempt, to pull me out of the place that being in front of this estate took me.
“I just… Can we stop for a second?” I said.
“Sure,” he said. Not a speck of sarcasm or derision from him. Weird.
I thought about turning to him, reaching for him, tasting him. But it was Stick, and it would have just been avoidance, so I didn’t.
It was some sort of sick pull that had me reaching for the door. The air was cool and brisk, the wind whipped somewhat, and I raised my face to it, like I was daring it to give me its worst. And as if Mother Nature knew me well, the wind died suddenly, leaving my view of the house beyond the gates, just at the top of a tasteful rise, clear and unobstructed by gusting, bare tree branches.
In the spring and summer, you couldn’t even see the house, the foliage was so thick, the tree line acting as a larger secondary gate.
I knew this because our pilgrimages were at various times and seasons. Pandora’s whims were not on any kind of calendar that I could ever figure out.
And I’d tried. Relentlessly, desperately, until I’d gone to boarding school hours away. Though I wasn’t entirely out of her line of fire there, at least I wasn’t woken out of a deep sleep to go “for a ride…for ice cream,” which would inevitably end up here, with her standing in front of the car, as I was now.
I moved around the front, my bare hand feeling the warmth of Yvette through the hood. She felt good, comforting.
I came to the passenger side, which was in front of the gate. Stick exited from the car but didn’t say anything.
Until I started to lean against Yvette. “Hey, hey. Hold on,” he said, pulling me by the waist and spinning me around. He did some kind of odd frisking thing, lifting up my peacoat and checking out my ass.
“Hey,” I said, pulling away from him.
“Just checking for anything that will scratch the car,” he explained, a bit too much humorous glint in his eyes for me to totally believe him. I gave him an “oh, please” look, and he said, “Seriously. You know what all those sparkly things on girls’ jeans do to good cars?”
“I don’t have sparkly shit on my ass.”
“So I see, but I had to be sure.”
I shrugged. “Why? You delivered her in pristine condition. Anything that happens to her now is on me.”
A sickening look crossed his face. Seriously. Like he was literally going to be physically ill.
“You’ll take care of her, right? I mean, I know shit happens, especially in winter, but, like, you’re not going to just…” He waved his arms in an abstract way, apparently unable to articulate the possible atrocities I might perpetrate against my new car.
“Relax. I’ll take good care of her. Like I’ve told you—many times—I’m not a silver spoon. I know the value of stuff.” He looked at me skeptically. I reached out and put my hand on his upper arm, still warm from being in the car. “I’m serious. I won’t be a douche to Yvette.”
This eased him, and he nodded at me. We turned, standing side by side, both leaning against the side of the car.
I don’t know if it was Stick showing me how to drive Yvette, or his genuine caring about her welfare, or just a moment of weakness on my part, but as I looked up at the gates I said in almost a whisper, “This is Caroline Stratton’s house. My father’s ex-wife.”
“I know who she is,” he said.
That’s right. If he was working for Grayson Spaulding and had done enough digging to know about my background, he’d have heard about Caroline.
But he couldn’t have known… “My mom and I used to drive out here and park right in this same spot.”
“When?”
