She’d spent the sixteen years since he left living in his hometown, and they’d felt like sixteen. Sometimes, she wondered if time passed differently for Carson, out there carousing around the world, building embassies for the Foreign Service, never staying anyplace for more than a few seasons.
He flicked his eyes over her. “You look good.”
He said it with such sincerity, she actually looked down, expecting to find herself dressed in a sundress or an elegant business suit. But no. She’d been standing on a ladder, trying to strip a hundred years’ worth of dirt and paint off the pressed-tin ceiling of the kitchen with baking-soda paste. She looked it.
“So do you.”
In the large, open front room, he stood a good head taller than her usual guests. He wore jeans and an ordinary wool herringbone coat that she recognized from his father’s wardrobe, but there was nothing ordinary about him.
It was definitely something to do with his feet. Or else in the set of his shoulders. Julie couldn’t put her finger on it, but the fact was, all he was doing was standing there, and yet he managed to look like a character in a Hemingway story. Like he ought to have a shotgun and a pith helmet, and he should speak in short, urgent sentences and shoot elephants for sport.
But maybe she was projecting. Maybe he wasn’t really conveying as much testosterone-laden intensity as she imagined.
Maybe she thought he only looked like a territory-conquering slab of rough-and-tumble male charisma because he’d conquered her territory, tumbled her rough, and left her behind a long time ago.
Now he just stopped by every so often to replant his flag.
“You know, I’ve never been in here before?” He backed up a few steps to the center of the room and dropped his head back to look straight up.
With its curved central staircase and tall ceiling, the entryway was her pride and joy. She’d started her restoration work here, focusing on making everything as grand as it must once have been—the banister gleaming, the chandelier brought back to its former glory, the wallpaper period-appropriate and covered with an elaborate fleur-de-lis pattern. “What a great house,” he murmured.
“Thank you.”
The compliment warmed her. How distressing.
“Custom doors,” he said to himself. “What are they, white ash?”
He was meandering around the room now, testing surfaces with his fingertips and gazing appreciatively at the moldings.
“Yes.”
“And you kept the radiators in. Or did you have to buy them?”
“No, the radiators were fine. I found a plumber who knew how to tune them up and get them going again.”
“That’s good. More efficient than forced air.”
Such a male thing to say. His father and uncle Bruce had been similarly enamored of the radiators. But it felt different to hear Carson appreciating her house.
He’d been the one to show it to her to begin with. H
er first summer in Potter Falls, he took her for a walk and pointed to the mansion with its peeling paint. That’s the Comstock place. I used to ice-skate on the pond when I was a kid.
She had longed for it even then—longed not just to fix up the mansion and live in it, to bring it alive again, but to live here with him. To marry him and fill the rooms with dark-haired babies and laughter and life. She’d thought that by showing her the house, he was hinting—in an inarticulate, male sort of way—that he wanted it, too.
More fool her. Carson had never been anything but perfectly honest about his desires. The day she met him, he’d told her his plan: college, then a stint in the army to pay his ROTC dues, then he would travel all over the world and build things. Make his mark.
All Julie had ever wanted was to make a home. She’d yearned for the kind of community she missed out on growing up on the Upper East Side, raised by a succession of nannies and instructed by her parents in the art of being sophisticated and wry and terribly lonely.
“You’ve done pretty good for yourself, Jules.” He finished his tour and fetched up beside her.
“What do you want?”
A rude question. She strove to be civil with Carson—placid and calm and flawlessly polite. But he got to her.
“I need a room.”
“I don’t have any rooms.”