CHAPTER 3 Odalys Does Not Believe in Coincidences

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Odalys Hale looked at Elodie the way a customs officer looks at a suitcase with a false bottom.

"You are shorter than your photographs," she said.

The old woman stood at the top of the stone steps with a cane in one hand and a cashmere shawl the color of smoke across her shoulders. Her hair was white and cut like a blade. Her eyes were the pale gray of the Atlantic in January.

"Grandmother," said Julian, "this is Elodie Marchetti."

"I know who she is. I read about her in the Journal. She doubled her father's revenue in six years and was thanked for it by being passed over." Odalys's gaze did not move. "Do you cook, Miss Marchetti?"

"I bake," said Elodie, "and I burn the dinner roll every time I'm nervous."

A pause. Then something in the old woman's face shifted by a single degree. "Honest, at least. Come in. You will freeze, and I won't have it said I let a Marchetti freeze on the first day."

The inside of Hollin Hall smelled of woodsmoke, beeswax and cold stone. Portraits climbed the staircase, generations of Hales with the same jaw and the same disappointed eyes, and Elodie felt each of them assess her as she passed. An enormous gray wolfhound named Admiral looked at Julian, then at her, and lay across her feet as if the matter had been settled in committee.

The family was assembled in the long drawing room, and they looked up all at once, the way a flock turns. A tall woman in a green dress, introduced as Aunt Winifred, kissed the air beside Elodie's cheek. Beside the fire, one leg thrown over the arm of a chair, sat a cheerful young man with Julian's jaw and none of Julian's weight, who rose and bowed like a stage performer.

"Rafe," he said. "The cousin. The disappointment. The one with the hobbies." He took her hand and, with great ceremony, did not let go of it. "I must say, Elodie, you are far too pleasant to be marrying my cousin. Does he know?"

"He has been informed," said Elodie, with a smile that she hoped was as warm as it looked. "Repeatedly."

Rafe laughed, delighted. Somewhere near her shoulder, the room dropped ten degrees.

She did not have to look. Julian had stepped closer, with the deliberate closeness of a man who had stopped pretending the space between them was a contract. His hand settled at the small of her back, light and exact. Section four, subsection b: touch, if an audience is present. His hand was warm through her sweater, and for one second, to her annoyance, her whole body noticed.

"Rafe," said Julian pleasantly, "you're holding my fiancée."

Dinner was at eight, in a dining room so long that the candles at the far end looked like another country. Elodie sat at Odalys's right hand, which she understood was either a great honor or a trap.

"So," said Odalys, setting down her fork. "You will tell me how it happened."

Everyone at the table went still.

Elodie put her wineglass down gently.

"At a gala," she said. "Last month. My father had just announced something about my future without consulting me, and I walked out onto a terrace to scream into the wind. Julian was already there. Eating one of my truffles."

"Stealing," said Julian.

"Analyzing," she corrected, and several people laughed. "He told me it was too sweet. I told him it was meant to be. He corrected my arithmetic."

"You were very insufferable," said Elodie. "And then he said something I did not expect. He said he hadn't asked anyone else." Her voice cracked, just slightly. It was the truth, which was exactly why it hurt. "I think that's when I knew he was not as cold as he pretends."

Nobody spoke. Julian was staring at her, bare and almost startled, like a man who had heard his name spoken in a language he had thought was lost.

Odalys regarded Elodie for a long time. Then she tapped her cane twice on the floorboards and said, "Rafe, pass the potatoes to the girl. She is too thin to be a Hale."

The table breathed out. Conversation started again, in a flood. And under it, below the clatter of silver, Elodie felt a foot nudge hers, lightly, once, under the cloth. Julian was cutting his lamb with great concentration, and he did not look at her at all. But the corner of his mouth, the small, rare, hard-to-find corner, had moved.

Later, in the corridor outside her bedroom, a small, cold, beautiful room with a window seat and a four-poster bed, he stopped her with one low word.

"Elodie."

She turned. The corridor was dim, lit by a single sconce, and he stood in the middle of it with his hands in his pockets like a man at the edge of a cliff.

"What you said at dinner," he said. "About the terrace."

"It was true."

"I know. That's what I..." He stopped, and began again, formal as a clerk. "Section Twelve. When you said you knew I wasn't as cold as I pretend, was that part of the performance?"

She looked at him. A hundred possible answers rose in her, and each one was either a lie or a dangerous thing. And the contract said she could not lie.

"Ask me in a week," she said gently.

His throat moved. "That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have." She reached out and, because there was no audience at all, straightened the collar of his shirt, which had folded under. A small thing. A nothing. "Goodnight, Julian."

"Goodnight," he said, and did not move until her door was closed.

She slept badly, and told herself firmly that none of this was in the contract.

The next two days were a campaign. Winifred mentioned, in a single breath, three previous Hale fiancées who had "not worked out," and the trust funds each had been quietly offered to leave. Rafe made her laugh at breakfast, and whenever he did, Julian found a reason to be in the room, once with a pair of gloves he had been searching for in the dining room for twenty minutes while holding them in his left hand.

It was the third evening, the twenty-second, when the doorbell rang at nine o'clock. No one at Hollin Hall was expected. Admiral lifted his head from the rug and growled, a low rumble from deep in his chest.

"I'll go," said Odalys, rising from her chair by the fire, with the speed and ease of a woman half her age. "I have been expecting this."

Julian had gone still beside Elodie on the sofa. Not the careful stillness she knew now, the stillness of a man holding back. This was a different kind. This was the stillness of a deer in a field.

"Who is it?" Elodie whispered.

He did not answer. The front door opened with a groan and a gust of winter air. A woman's voice, low and smooth as warm cream, drifted from the hall.

"Odalys, darling. I came as soon as I got your note."

The footsteps came down the hall, unhurried, a woman who had never once wondered if she was welcome. And in the doorway of the drawing room, snow melting in her dark red hair, a tall and exquisite woman in a cream coat stopped and smiled, and looked, not at Elodie, not at the fire, but directly at Julian.

"Hello, Jules," she said. "It's been such a long time."

Beside Elodie, with a small, hollow sound that no one else in the room could have heard, Julian Hale stopped breathing.