“Shall we go downstairs?” he asked as we came to the staircase.
I nodded and asked, “How long have you lived here?”
“Since I moved to New York two years ago.”
“You’re not from here?”
“I’m from Boston. Uncle Edmund was my mother’s brother. They were both raised in a wealthy home in Boston—my grandfather was a merchant. Edmund took the family money and invested it in real estate and hotels. My mother married my father, a minister. It was a love match, but my grandfather was very upset, and he disowned her. I am their only child and because Edmund and Maude had no children, I became my uncle’s heir. He sent me to Harvard and as soon as I graduated, I was called here to apprentice with Uncle Edmund. When he passed away last year of a heart attack, I stepped in and took over.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not as sorry as I am.” His light-hearted banter had ended, and I suspected he had forgotten we were supposed to be flirting.
“You’re not happy with the business?” I asked.
He turned at the bottom of the steps toward the front of the house. The main entrance was just as large as the gallery above and if I tilted my head up, I could see all the way to the stained-glass ceiling.
“I would be ungrateful if I said I wasn’t happy.”
“No—you would be honest, and there’s nothing wrong with honesty.”
Alec looked down at me and I was at a loss for more words. His blue eyes were so intense and full of emotions I couldn’t identify. I’d never met anyone like him. Kind, thoughtful, intelligent—yet mysterious and filled with depth.
“This is the front parlor,” Alec said as we walked into another oversized room with delicate furniture and expensive-looking wall coverings. “It opens to the music room behind it and the back parlor beyond that. When all three rooms are open, they make a large ballroom.”
“Does Aunt Maude host balls?”
“Every year at Christmas.”
Christmas. Just two months away. Would she expect me to attend? My legs felt weak at the thought.
We walked from the front parlor through the music room and into the back parlor.
“What do you do with the business?” I asked, curious about the life he led beyond these walls.
“I am the president of the eight hotels we own. There are three here in the city, one in Newport, two on Coney Island, one in Philadelphia, and one in Boston. I oversee all the major decisions regarding them and supervise the renovations beingdone to the resort in Newport. It’s the most luxurious of our properties and the one that provides our largest income.”
Eight hotels? I couldn’t fathom that kind of responsibility. “If you aren’t happy with the business,” I said, picking up our earlier conversation, “what would you rather do?”
“It doesn’t matter what I’d rather do,” he said, a little stiff, though not unkind. “My path was set for me when I was young, and I haven’t had the luxury of dreaming.”
Alec and I were more alike than I’d realized.
We turned left in the back parlor and walked into a massive dining room along the backside of the house. The table was so large, I couldn’t count the number of chairs around it without stopping. Above our heads, a mural had been painted on the ceiling with cherubs, clouds, and something like a Greek god shooting lightning out of his finger.
Large windows lined this room from floor to ceiling.
We walked through it silently and then he opened the door, and we reentered the front hall again. “What shall we talk about next?” he asked. “I’m supposed to be teaching you how to flirt, remember?”
“Perhaps I already know how to flirt,” I said with a little smile and a lifting of my eyelashes in his direction. I’d seen Fiona do it a dozen times and had tried to perfect it—though I felt foolish now.
He paused as his face grew serious again. “Perhaps you do, Miss O’Day.”
We looked at each other for a heartbeat and then he motioned for me to enter a room on the right. “Shall we continue to practice in my favorite room of the house?”
It was a library.
I paused just inside the enormous room, trying to take in the sheer number of books before me. There were thousands of them, on floor-to-ceiling shelves, surrounding a huge fireplacethat dominated the center of the outside wall. There were little nooks and crannies with window seats, comfortable chairs, tables, and potted plants. And ladders, on both sides of the room, to get to the books on the upper shelves.
