Sandra Marton - Guardian Groom

Crista cleared her throat. “What long face?” she said briskly.

“Did you hear the one about the camel and the goat?”

She groaned. “Only a thousand times.”

“I’ve got a new version, guaranteed to make you smile.”

He was right; the joke did make her smile. In fact, she almost forgot the brief sense of despair that had engulfed her moments ago…

Almost. But not quite.

Grant stood on the terrace of his Fifth Avenue penthouse, sipping a glass of Dom Pérignon from a Baccarat flute, waiting for Kimberly to reappear.

“Such a glum expression,” she’d said in a little-girl voice, just before she’d traipsed off to the powder room. “Don’t worry, darling. When I come back, I’ll make you smile.”

He doubted that, Grant thought grimly. He was bored, he was tired of watching Kimberly watch herself in every reflective surface, and he was hungry. What had his housekeeper left in the kitchen? Canard a l’Orange ? Whatever it was, it had to wait until Kimberly put in an appearance.

He shot another look through the open terrace doors into the elegant white-on-white living room. Where the devil was she? She’d said she needed to fix her face—although what you could fix on that face was beyond him. It was so perfect it was almost expressionless, something he’d never noticed before tonight.

“Hell,” Grant muttered, and put the champagne flute down none too gently on a glass-topped table.

What was wrong with him? The feeling of disquiet that had begun late this afternoon had grown so that now he felt edgy and irritable. A premonition, his sister, Kyra, would have said.

He frowned. Kyra? What did she have to do with anything? Why was he thinking of her when—

The telephone on the table beside him shrilled. He picked it up.

“Yes?” he said brusquely. It was Jane, his secretary.

A shape materialized at the far end of the living room. Kimberly was sauntering toward him, her hips swinging as if she were on a modeling runway. She was wearing a scarlet teddy, a sultry pout, and nothing else.

Grant’s breath caught, but not because of Kimberly. He turned away and pressed the phone more tightly to his ear.

“I see. Thank you, Jane. You did the right thing. I can make it. Would you phone my sister and tell her I’m on my way? And my brothers. You have Zach’s Boston number. Cade is in the Middle East. Ask Zach if—Fine. I’ll be in touch.”

He hung up the phone, cleared his throat, and turned to face Kimberly, who was breathing moistly against his neck.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but something’s come up.”

She giggled and put her hand on him. The scent of her perfume, sweet and cloying, filled his nostrils.

“Not yet it hasn’t,” she purred. “But it will.”

Grant’s hand clamped hard around her wrist. “I have a plane to catch,” he said. “Take your time dressing. The doorman will put you in a taxi when you come down.”

“A plane?” Kimberly said, her voice filled with bewilderment. “But I thought we…” Her voice rose as he brushed past her. “Grant, what’s so important that…?”

He wondered what she would say if he told her what was so important, if he said, well, Kimberly, if you must know, my father—a man I feel less for than I would for a stranger—my father, Charles Landon, is dead.

But he only turned and strode through the perfect living room, up the curved staircase to his bedroom. By the time he came down again, carrying a leather weekend bag, he had forgotten Kimberly existed.

In the taxi to the airport he puzzled, briefly, over the sense of disquiet that had plagued him all day. He wasn’t about to give any credence to the idea of premonitions. Still…

Grant sighed wearily, sat back and closed his eyes.

In Greenwich Village, Crista paused with a forkful of pasta halfway to her lips.

“What’s the matter?” Danny asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Just—just a funny feeling…”

“A goose walked over your grave.” He grinned at the look on her face. “Listen, when you have a grandmother from the Old Country, you pick up all kinds of weird stuff.”

“A goose, huh?” Crista laughed, stabbed her fork into her spaghetti, and began to eat her dinner.

THE sun was coming up fast over the Rocky Mountains, but the highest peaks were still shrouded in mist and the wind blowing across Emerald Lake was chill. Grant, who’d worked up a sweat during his five-mile run, shivered a little as he entered the aspen grove that led to the Landon mansion.

Gravel crunched under his Nikes, the sound a gritty counterpoint to the rasp of his own breath. He’d run this distance every morning for almost as long as he could remember, but it was a long time since he’d done his running at this altitude. His hard muscles ached, his heart was pounding, his lungs were working hard…

And he was loving every minute of it.

How could he have forgotten how peaceful it was here? Except for a pair of startled mule deer, Grant had the lake and the slopes all to himself. No cars, no trucks, no people, nothing but the deer, the sky, and the mountains.

Damn, but this was one hell of a beautiful spot.

Grant’s mouth twisted in a grimace. Except for the mansion rising just ahead, it was perfect.

The house was monstrous in size and in pretension. It should have been made of fieldstone and glass, with soaring, clean lines. Instead, it was massive, built of concrete and brick, and as out of place as it was opulent. The mansion didn’t harmonize with its setting, it competed with it—and lost, Grant thought as he slowed to a walk. Hell, it was no contest.

His lips twisted again. “Be it ever so humble,” he muttered as he trotted up the steps to the flagstone terrace, “there’s no place like home.”

He smiled bitterly as he snatched his towel from the lounge chair. If there was one thing this place had never been, it was a home. He’d hated the house when he was a boy and he hated it still.

It was a damned good thing he was leaving today. A week in this place was about all he could manage and still remain sane.

Grant wiped his face with the towel. He hadn’t shaved since yesterday and the stubble of his dark beard rasped across the soft cotton. Tossing the towel aside, he reached for the Columbia Law School sweatshirt that lay on the chair, and yanked it down over his head. With a sigh, he raked his hair back from his forehead, turned and walked slowly across the terrace, and stood looking out at Emerald Lake, glittering like the jewel it had been named for under the first rays of the sun.

What a hell of a week this had been! He’d ended up having to install a private phone line, just so he could keep in touch with his New York office. The mansion’s own lines, all eight of them, had been jammed with incoming calls and faxes from newspapers and wire services and what seemed like every moneyman, politico, and bigwig industrialist from coast to coast.

“It’s a goddamned circus,” Zach had muttered one morning, after the three Landon brothers had spent a frantic hour fielding calls.

“Yeah,” Cade had said with a thin-lipped smile, “and the old man would have loved it.”

Grant shook his head as he leaned his arms on the stone wall that surrounded the terrace. Cade was right. The old man certainly would have loved it—the fuss, the media attention, the brouhaha the day of the funeral, when vans from the TV stations, the limos, and the mourners’ cars had caused a massive traffic jam on the roads leading to the cemetery where Charles had been laid to rest—oh yeah, he’d have loved that most of all.

Grant had hated every minute of it. Hell, he’d almost come to blows with a scum-sucking, freelance photographer who’d tried to slip inside the mausoleum to snag a shot of the old man’s mahogany casket as it came to rest beside Ellen Landon’s. Zach and Cade had damned near had to pull him off the guy.