The Secret Daughter. Roz Fox Denny

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СКАЧАТЬ their lunch was served, Noelani let the subject drop. Her grandmother had believed it was a fitting outlet for a young woman’s pent-up hostilities. She’d signed her only granddaughter up for lessons at age thirteen, insisting it’d help Noelani work through her grief and anger. A wise woman, her tutu.

      Following lunch, Noelani’s seatmate took a nap. The woman slept all the way to Dallas. Noelani barely had an opportunity to say goodbye, as she had to run to catch her connection to Baton Rouge.

      Her arrival there was greeted by pouring rain. Thunder shook the baggage terminal. If this was mild weather, as her seatmate had intimated, Noelani hoped she didn’t encounter bad weather during her brief stay in Louisiana.

      And her stay here would be brief.

      Gazing out at the ominous skies, Noelani was engulfed by a wave of homesickness. She watched people chatting with those who’d come to pick them up and felt more alone than ever.

      In Dallas, she’d seen greeters carrying signs with the names of various travelers. She peered around, hoping to see someone displaying her name—maybe even one of her half siblings. Until now, Noelani hadn’t realized how much she’d counted on being met by someone from Duke’s family.

      What were they like, these relatives she hadn’t even known about?

      As the carousel began to empty it became patently obvious that Duke’s kids weren’t imbued with the famous southern hospitality her mother had touted the one and only time Noelani succeeded in getting her to speak about the man she loved. She was always shuffled off to her tutu whenever she asked questions about her father, but on that one occasion Noelani refused to be ignored. In a rare unguarded moment, Anela described her absent lover as a dashingly handsome and charming southern gentleman. A hard man with a soft heart. Anela said then she’d love Duke Fontaine until the day she died. Noelani was sure she had.

      It wasn’t until much later that Noelani inadvertently learned that Duke had neglected to mention his marriage at the outset of his relationship with Anela. According to Tutu, Duke had also wanted to divorce his wife and leave his Louisiana home, but Anela refused to hear of it. It wasn’t until after he’d left Maui that she discovered she was pregnant—a fact that never altered her decision to let him go.

      Talk about decisions… After ten minutes of watching the baggage department clear out, Noelani collected her bags and went in search of a cab. If money to help shore up Shiller’s mill hadn’t been her prime objective in coming to this dreary place, she’d have asked the driver to take her straight to a hotel.

      But according to a terse telegram from Jackson Fontaine that had accompanied her ticket, a room awaited her at Bellefontaine. It was that address Noelani reluctantly gave the cabbie.

      Through a streaked window, she watched the skyline of Baton Rouge disappear in a mass of black clouds. Her cab crossed a wide, churning expanse of muddy water the driver said was the Mississippi River.

      Never before had Noelani felt so out of her element.

      Soon the city gave way to wet fields of tall cane. The knot in her stomach began to uncoil. As a child she’d played hide-and-seek in similar cane rows. Friends often broke off stalks and chewed them for the juice, but Tutu had warned it would ruin her teeth, so Noelani rarely sneaked a nibble. But, oh, how she loved the smell of burnt sugar that used to hang like mist in the air when they burned fields. More of life’s changes, she mused, watching field after field slide past. Agricultural developers had introduced new cane that was too tough to chew, followed by better fertilizers, which made it more advantageous to plow under old ratoons. As well, environmentalists had forced an end to burning.

      The driver pointed. “Up ahead, through those magnolia trees, is Bellefontaine. In French, Bellefontaine means pretty fountain. There are fountains all over the grounds. I’m not sure how many.”

      Noelani scooted forward as far as her seat belt allowed and craned her neck for her first look at Duke Fontaine’s home. A home he’d purportedly been willing to give up for her mother. Right! The gift of a lei promised that its recipient would return to the islands, but Duke had never made another trip to Maui. Plainly, by the look of this place, he’d gone on with his life in grand style while Anela pined hers away.

      Noelani counted four fountains on a huge manicured lawn. Not even the downpour detracted from the effect of tall white pillars and wide balconies supporting a mansion larger than Queen Emma’s summer palace. As a special treat one time, Tutu took Noelani on a tour of their most beloved Hawaiian ruler’s part-time residence. This home was more ostentatious.

      Unable to catch her breath, Noelani didn’t immediately realize the cab had pulled around to the back of the house. Awed by the home’s magnificence, and heedless of the falling rain, she stepped out for a better look. The fresh, rain-washed scent failed to cloak an acrid odor of charred wood.

      Standing several yards away from a jutting porte cochere, Noelani saw that a section of the mansion had burned. Recently enough so that a workman was even now attempting to spread tarps over a gaping hole in the roof. He leaned far out from the top rung of an extension ladder. The man was bare-headed, and dark hair lay plastered to his skull. Faded blue jeans and a gray T-shirt were molded to his wet skin.

      Suddenly the ladder slipped out from under the man’s sneakers and fell hard into a flower bed below. The man was left clawing at a sagging rain gutter. He managed to grab the tarp with one hand seconds before the gutter cracked and a large section canted crazily. If he continued to kick, the section would break and plummet him to the ground below. Granted, that section of the house was only one story tall, compared to three in the main structure. Nevertheless, the man could break his neck.

      Heedless of her strappy leather heels and new linen suit, Noelani tore across the soft lawn, leaving her cabbie in the process of requesting her fare.

      ADAM ROSS, WHO’D BEEN HIRED by Casey Fontaine to restore Bellefontaine to historical perfection, swore roundly at his ladder. He maintained a tenuous grip on the canvas tarp and had one elbow buried in a weak rain gutter that had sustained damage during a recent kitchen fire. It wasn’t bad enough that this storm had blown in from the gulf, calling a halt to the job of his dreams; now Adam feared he’d break a leg or worse and lose the contract altogether. “Dammit to hell!”

      He kicked experimentally to see if maybe the ladder hadn’t fallen all the way to the ground. A warning crack and further sagging of the gutter forced him to freeze. Even at that, his hundred-and-ninety-pound weight was liable to rip the entire gutter from its shaky mooring.

      “Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn!” He kicked again, only halfheartedly.

      “Quit swearing at the roof and hold still.”

      Adam wondered if he’d imagined the woman who appeared to be digging through the honeysuckle below and to the left of his swinging feet.

      “Are you hurt?” a low melodic voice inquired.

      “A few scrapes,” he muttered. “Probably bruised a rib or two. If you can lift that ladder, sweet thing, chances are I’ll live.”

      “Chances go down if you call me sweet thing again.”

      Adam couldn’t see much of his Good Samaritan. But he fell instantly in lust with her sweet-as-sugar voice. Lately, women hadn’t figured in Adam’s life. He’d been too busy building a business after working his butt off to graduate from LSU in restorative architecture. Certainly he’d never been smitten with a woman based solely on her voice. That was СКАЧАТЬ