Victoria Pade - Corner-Office Courtship

“You want us to be manipulative?” Lindie, the third of the triplets, asked.

“Only for the greater good,” GiGi answered. “So we can make up for what wrongs were done without opening that can of worms Derek mentioned. And we keep it strictly between us. No one else can know what we’re up to.”

“I don’t know, GiGi,” Lang said. “This could be risky. There are people out there who hate us and, now that we know they have real reason to, you want us to stroll in and try to make nice?”

“And without admitting anything wrong was ever done?” Cade added. “As if it’s just a coincidence that we’re offering something to the family of someone H.J., Gramps, Dad or Uncle Mitchum screwed over?”

“And what if they think we’re there to screw them over again?” Dylan contributed.

“It won’t be easy,” GiGi acknowledged. “And yes, there may be hard feelings and resentments and grudges to deal with. But we’re all living the way we do at the expense of other people. Are any of you all right with that?”

In unison, GiGi’s ten grandchildren said, “No.”

“Of course not.”

“You know us better than that…”

“Then we have to make up for it. Carefully. Quietly.”

“And you’re going to dispatch us each separately, on these… missions?” Lindie asked.

“That’s the current plan. And the first mission —as you put it—is a matter of the heart. Cade, I’m giving this one to you.”

“Great. I get to be the test case.”

“Only because you fit the bill, and I’ll be paying close attention to putting each of you in just the right situation. Cade, you have that ratty wall in your house with the wallpaper falling off and you need it fixed.”

“Oka-ay…” Cade said with reservation.

“There’s a small shop in Arden, in Old Town there—”

“It isn’t going to look suspicious for me to go out to the suburbs to find someone to paint a wall for me?” Cade asked.

“It’s only twenty minutes from here on the highway, and I have it on good authority that the girl who owns the shop does a beautiful job. Her reputation is cause enough to go to her,” GiGi said. “Her name is Natalie Morrison. She sells furniture and objects she’s painted. It’s like folk art. But she also does murals and custom wall treatments. I thought you could hire her to tear off that paper and paint something—”

“I don’t want folk art on that wall,” Cade said.

“You can have her do something that makes it look like leather or marble or something. And in the process, you can find out what happened after H.J. pulled the rug out from under her grandfather, Jonah Morrison.”

“Morrison… As in the Northbridge Morrisons?” Seth asked, connecting the name with the small Montana town where H.J. had begun, and where Seth currently ran Camdem Inc.’s extensive ranching operations.

“Jonah Morrison!” Livi said as if the light had just dawned for her, too. “Wasn’t he your first love, GiGi?”

“He was my high school sweetheart,” GiGi amended. “Apparently H.J. bought the loan on the Morrison farm and foreclosed on them to make sure that the Morrisons left Northbridge.”

“You didn’t know that until you read it in the journals?” Cade’s younger sister, Jani, asked.

“I was informed that the Morrisons had sold to H.J. I had no idea he’d foreclosed on them. And I thought that the Morrisons left Northbridge by their own choice, that they might be headed to Denver. Jonah and I had already broken up, and I’d met your grandfather by then.”

“Then you ended up in Denver, too, and you never looked up your old love?” Lindie asked.

“Of course not,” GiGi said. “I loved your grandfather and Jonah was old news. Why would I look him up? But then I read about the Morrisons in the journals and remembered how Maude Sharks recently was bragging at the club about this girl she’d hired to paint the nursery in her daughter’s house—”

“This Morrison girl?” Cade asked.

“It was like fate shining a light on what we needed to do first,” GiGi marveled. “I did some digging and sure enough, Natalie Morrison has family roots in Montana and a grandfather named Jonah. So that’s where we start. Where you start, Cade.”

“With me hiring your old flame’s granddaughter to fix my wall,” Cade concluded without enthusiasm.

“And in the process, find out what ever happened to Jonah and if having his family’s farm foreclosed on by H.J. was a blessing or a curse. For him and for the family that’s come after him—including this girl.”

“If it was a curse, what then?” Cade’s brother, Beau, asked.

“We’ll be giving Natalie work and we’ll figure out what else we can do to make things up to her and the rest of the Morrisons,” GiGi said confidently. “It’ll be up to Cade to figure all that out through the girl.”

For a moment no one said anything as the full impact of what they’d learned settled over them.

Then Cade took a deep breath, sighed and said, “So I guess I’m up to bat…. Happy birthday, GiGi.”

“Oh, you aren’t real, are you—from outside I thought you were…”

Only when Nati Morrison heard the man’s voice did she remember how she’d positioned the life-size scarecrow she was working on behind the checkout counter. Nati wasn’t visible to the man; she was sitting on the floor behind the counter, sewing straw to the inside hem of the scarecrow’s skirt.

She couldn’t see her visitor, but it could be Gus Spurgis, the Scarecrow Festival’s organizer, bringing her fliers for the October festivities. She decided to joke with him.

In a silly voice, she said, “May I help you?” and pushed forward on the pole running up the scarecrow’s back to animate her.

There was no immediate response.

Then Nati looked up, and there, leaning over the counter, was a complete stranger—not Gus Spurgis. Instead it was a man with a staggeringly handsome face and the most beautiful blue eyes she’d ever seen.

He smiled. “I hope you don’t pay your receptionist much—she’s a little stiff. And kind of freaky.”

“She does work cheap, though.” Nati played along as she got to her feet.

And took in the full picture of the man in the business suit standing on the other side of her counter.

Tall, broad-shouldered, with the body of an athlete, he had dark brown hair the color of bittersweet chocolate; a long, slightly hawkish nose; just the right fullness of lips; and a pronounced bone structure that included a finely drawn jawline and chin. It all came together with those incredible cobalt-blue eyes to make him so good-looking that it left Nati a little breathless.

And since he also seemed vaguely familiar on top of it she was lost for a moment in wondering where she might have seen him before.

But she decided she must be imagining things. She was sure that if she had ever—ever—encountered this particular man before, there wouldn’t have been anything vague about the memory.

After a moment, she pulled herself together to stop staring at him, and returned to the subject of her scarecrow.

“Freaky, huh?” she mused, glancing at her handiwork. The scarecrow had a real-looking painted clay face surrounded by hair made of straw, a puffy calico dress with more straw sticking out at the wrists and bloomers that came out from beneath the hem of the dress to form legs. “Since I sculpted and painted the face in my own likeness, I think I’m insulted.”

“It’s interesting—I’ll give you that. But you didn’t do yourself justice.”

Was that a compliment or a comment on her sculpting skills? Nati decided not to take it personally one way or the other. “It’s supposed to be sort of a caricature,” she explained. “I know my nose turns up a little at the end—”