“Today has been …”
“Pretty great?”
“Yeah,” she said and tucked her long blonde hair behind her ear on the side closest to him. She was nervous, he could see it in the tension of her long neck and the quick rising and falling of her chest.
“You’re thinking it’s too good to be true?” he asked, because that’s what he was thinking too.
She nodded. “I want you to meet my parents.” She took a long swig from her bottle.
“This is moving fast,” he teased.
“Not like that.” She rocked him with her shoulder. “I want you to meet them so you can understand me better. I am sorry for treating you so badly the last couple weeks and I think it would help if you saw the whole picture.”
“I think the thing that scares you the most is that I do understand you. It’s the only reason I could be so patient with you while you were trying to take me down. I knew since we met on the train that there was far more to learn about Blake Holly Hollis.” Theodor took a deep breath and another swig. “I appreciate your apology.”
“There’s an exhibition at the farm tomorrow morning. I need to make an appearance anyway and maybe smooth things over with my mother, if she’s in a good mood. It’s not far from here. Do you think you can come with me?”
He really wanted to. “I can’t. I have a delivery at the shop that I have to be there for. I have a ton of work to do still. Your shop is way further along than mine, and?—”
“It’s fine. It was a silly thing to ask.”
Theodor caught her chin in his hand and turned her face towards him. “It’s not silly. I just can’t tomorrow.” He looked out at the lake water shimmering under the stars. “How aboutI make it up to you with a moonlit boat ride tomorrow evening. Eight o’clock?”
She licked her lips and signaled her agreement with a blink. He let his lips do the talking and caressed the spot where her tongue had just been. She was far too delicious for his own taste, and for his own good. He had a whole day to plan their next date, and it would be a good one!
CHAPTER 20
There waslittle else Holly disliked more than showing up to an event alone. The occasion was irrelevant because the situation would play out the same each time. She would walk inside, her mother would thrust any number of eligible members of the club at her, and she would make nice to get along. Holly’s mother was fixated on maintaining appearances, while Holly was split between keeping the peace with her mother and being herself for her father.
Having parked at the end of a very long line of luxury cars skirting the semi-circular drive, Holly walked towards a sprawling clubhouse. The farm’s compound accommodated meeting spaces and all the offices for the trainers, partners, and executives who all worked tirelessly to be the masters of the horse racing community. All she saw was wasted money, though she would rightly admit to being a beneficiary of her mother’s success.
If the horses were the main draw, the clubhouse was next. Holly had always loved the style of the building. When Holly was a little girl, the club had undergone an extensive renovation and was remodeled in the Victorian style. The single-story structurewas painted white with black accents which allowed the copper downspouts and exterior lighting to shine.
Tall, rounded peaks accentuated the roofline and reminded her of a castle. Even though the towers were decorative in nature, as children, she and Millie had gained access to one and set up the space as their own personal girl fort. She looked up to the roofline and wondered which one still held the treasures they had stored there.
As she approached the front doors, Holly caught a whiff of the honeysuckle bushes that hugged the foundation. Her mother’s favorite color had always been yellow, and mounds of golden flowers spilled out from below the bushes and onto the border of the drive. Catching her reflection in the glass panel as a valet opened the front door, she realized she unintentionally had worn a yellow dress that day. No doubt her mother would assume the choice was an effort to pander.
“Good day, Miss Hollis,” the valet said as she entered, and she flashed a smile.
At some point, she was unsure when exactly, the staff had stopped calling her Miss Blake or Lady Blake and started calling her by her surname. It made her feel older than she thought herself to be, but it also made her feel more important than she was too. Her mother was Mrs. Hollis. Her father was Mister Hollis. Her parents had worked hard to get where they were now, but she was just there; the girl with the good fortune to have been born to successful parents.
Upon entering and following the line of the green and yellow carpet runner, she spotted her mother right away. It was hard to miss the tall, slender woman, with blonde hair styled higher than heaven, and a smile to match. Her white fascinator was tilted to one side and hid her eyes from Holly’s view, though she must have sensed Holly’s presence in the room with a straightening of her spine. Her laughter stopped and she twistedher head as though she was ducking below the edge of her headpiece to see.
She excused herself from her conversation and made her way through the crush of people to Holly. She clapped her hands together and skipped-walked across the room, the people parting the sea around her. She was an impressive woman, Holly had to give her mother that much.
“Mother,” she said and they kissed cheeks.
Her mother held Holly’s hands and stood back to get a look at her outfit. “Well, isn’t this a surprise. I wasn’t sure you were going to make it over here today. Your father tells me you have so much work to do with your little ice cream place.”
“It would be easier to finish if you hadn’t cut off my finances.”
“You know very well that I did it for your own good,” she said, even though Holly knew her mother only wanted to bend Holly’s will. “You look beautiful in this dress.” She pulled her in and whispered into Holly’s ear, “Today of all days, you know better than to show up here dressed like it’s some sort of nightclub.” Backing off, she plastered a fake grin. “What a happy day it is.”
This was always how it was with her mother. Holly could do nothing right. It was her father who always had Holly’s best interests at heart. “Is Dad here?”
“He’s where he always is: at the bar,” her mother said and rolled her eyes in that direction. “Catch up with me later. I have a surprise for you.”
“Mother, please tell me it’s not some man?”