few ideas. I’d like for you to see them.”
She cleared off an area on her desk. “Yes, I’d love to.”
Happy that they were talking about something without arguing, he spread out the papers.
“This one,” he said pointing to the first paper on top of the pile, “is a drawing of what the cottage looks like now.”
Her eyes grew misty as she looked over the rendering of Winnie’s cottage. She sucked in a deep breath. “Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen that place. Brings back memories.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.” Damn it, he didn’t mean to make her cry. He’d hoped it would be good for her, give them something to talk about.
“It’s okay. Just the initial shock, you know?”
He did. All too well.
She ran a finger over the drawing, as if she was seeing it in her mind through her fingertips. “I remember when she bought this place.”
Winnie owned the cottage when they met and had left it to him, but he’d never heard the story about how she bought it. “Tell me.”
“We had just graduated from college. She had a trust fund that her parents left her and since she had graduated recently, she had access to it. She thought about traveling through Europe, but her financial advisor convinced her to look at real estate. He recommended a few properties and she hated them all.”
He laughed, because it sounded so much like what he would imagine her doing. “Let me guess, he recommended city properties. Penthouses. Maybe some commercial properties. That sort of thing.”
“Yes. And she would have none of that. We went to Cannon Beach one Saturday. She wanted to spend the afternoon painting and she begged me to come along. I figured why not, so I took a couple books, planned to spend the afternoon reading while she painted.”
He wondered if she had painted with joy then. She would have been so young, before she met him. Before he took away her joy.
“We got to the beach,” Marie continued. “But we never even had a chance to get her things set up. We were walking down the shore and she saw a cottage for sale. It was horribly run-down. Weeds had taken over the yard. It needed a new roof. You name it, it needed it. But she saw it for what it could become. She said there was something inside yearning to be set free. I told her it was a rat, probably a family of them. I never was as creative as she was. She was always like that, you know? Could see the good at the core, what something might be. And she was right, not only about that cottage—it ended up beautiful—but just about everything else.”
Except she hadn’t been right about him. She had sorely misjudged Lennox. But as Marie spoke, he pictured Marie and Winnie as young women in his mind. Both of them laughing, joking, having a grand time as they fixed up the cottage.
“We did a lot of the work ourselves,” Marie said.
“She told me.” He shuffled the papers, putting a new one on top. “She often talked about how much she enjoyed fixing the cottage up with you. That’s why I think we won’t change a lot of the outside.”
He had been awed by the drawing his friend had rendered. Apparently, Marie felt the same. She gasped and her hand flew to her mouth as she studied the second picture.
“It’s beautiful.”
He nodded. “We leave the outside basically the same.” He pointed to an area off to the side. “Except we install a small garden here. She always mentioned she wanted to do that.” He looked over at Marie. Her nod confirmed Winnie must have told her the same thing.
“Yes,” Marie said. “She would love that.”
“The inside of the cottage will need a little bit more work. I’d like to keep a bedroom.”
“Just in case you need a place to stay when you’re in town?”
“Something like that.”
He was getting ready to show her the ideas his friend had sketched out for the inside when a loud crash out in the hall caused them both to jump.
“What the hell?” he asked, standing up.
Marie rushed past him and opened the door. “Oh no.”
Lennox looked out into the hallway, and tried to make sense of what he saw. Andie had Susan pushed against the wall outside of Fulton’s office. A discarded tray lay upturned at her side.
“I know fifteen ways to poison you that a medical examiner would never discover. Try me, bitch.” Andie’s grip tightened on Susan’s shirt.
Marie gasped.
“Miss Lincoln,” Lennox said in a tone of voice that had been known to put the fear of god in grown men.
Andie didn’t budge. “Tell them. Tell them what I just overheard.”
“Master MacLure,” Susan said. “Thank goodness. This . . .this . . . lunch lady attacked me as I was going down the hall.”
“I’m a chef, you no good sorry piece of—”
“Andie!” Fulton said from the end of the hall, walking toward them.
At the sound of his voice, Andie dropped her hands. Nobody said anything until Fulton made it to where they stood.
“Everybody into my office,” Lennox said. He opened the door to his office and ushered everybody inside, away from the prying eyes of other students and staff that now filled the hallway. He had no idea what had happened between the two women, but he intended to find out. He waited while everyone took a seat.
“This will not turn into a shouting match. You will speak one at a time, when I ask you a question.” Once everyone had nodded, he continued. “Andie, you were the most vocal outside, let’s begin with you.”
Susan raised her hand.
“Yes, Susan,” Lennox said.
“Are you really going to listen to her, Sir? After what she did to me in the hallway?”
Lennox crossed his arms. “Miss Lincoln is a trusted member of my staff. Yes, I am going to listen to her. Just as I will listen to you when it’s your turn.”
Andie cleared her throat. “I was on my way to Fulton’s office with a tray full of snacks, when my phone rang. It was Terrence.” She looked sideways to where Fulton sat.
Fulton’s expression grew hard. “You still talk to Terrence?”
Terrence was Andie’s ex, but more than that, he was also one of Lennox’s friends, who just happened to be Hollywood’s latest golden boy. It was a bit understandable that Fulton wouldn’t care for him.
“No, just today. I was so surprised to hear his ringtone, I stopped in the hallway to answer.”
Fulton didn’t seem overly pleased with this bit of information, but he nodded so she would continue.
“He said he’d had a meeting this morning with a reporter when he happened to mention he’d been in Portland recently.” Andie frowned. Probably remembering exactly why he’d been in Portland. He’d been visiting her after she’d had a boating accident and ended up in the hospital. That had also been when she’d broken up with him for good. “The woman he was meeting with got all excited, she said she had a plant doing an undercover assignment at an exclusive adult-only castle. He figured this was the only castle in the area, so he tried to call you, Master MacLure, repeatedly, and when you didn’t answer, he called me.”
Lennox’s stomach fell to his knees and he reached for his phone, remembering he’d turned it off before the session earlier with Susan. He turned it on and within seconds the screen was populated with missed calls. He cursed under his breath.
“Then,” Andie said. “I turned the corner into this hallway and I hear her,” she pointed to Susan, “on the phone saying the exposé on the headmaster was a bust, but she had an idea about filing assault charges on Fulton.”
Fulton stood up. “What the fuck?”
Lennox held his hand up, trying to remain calm even though he was so angry he could have snapped his desk in half. “Susan?”
For her part, Susan looked completely unaffected. Lennox decided she must be more than a model; she was also a damn good actress.
“Let me get this straight,” Susan said to Andie. “You’re the woman who left Terrence Knight all high and dry? You’re the on
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