carpenter with his own little construction company. She would give him a chance to explain.
Ken turned the truck into a private drive. After a half mile they approached an electronic gate. Ken took a small box from the glove compartment and pushed a button. The gate swung open. Chris read the name on the gold plaque. “Darby Hills.”
“Afraid so.”
This was going to be hard to explain. This was going to be opulence. Freshly painted white board fence enclosed pastureland on either side of the drive. “There are cows here,” she said, dully. “You have cows in your front lawn?”
“Steers, actually. And there aren’t very many of them.” He sounded apologetic. “I suppose there are a few hundred. I don’t even know why I have the blasted things. I think we eat them once in a while.”
Chris folded her hands in her lap and stared straight ahead. She didn’t want opulence. Maybe other women wanted Prince Charming, but Chris wanted the frog. You could come home to a frog and count on his being there. Frogs were dependable. The truck slowed at a large, beautifully landscaped stone house. The house was cozy and not terribly intimidating. “Is this your house?” she asked hopefully.
“No.”
There was a touch of exasperation to her voice. “Well? Whose house is it?”
A muscle twitched in his jaw. “This is Henry’s house. Henry’s sort of a caretaker.” He thrust his chin out pugnaciously. “My house is just past that copse of evergreens.”
Oh boy, she thought. This must be one pip of a house. She steeled herself as they passed through the evergreens. Sunlight broke overhead and illuminated the enormous Georgian country house that dwarfed the top of a small hill. “Holy cow,” Chris breathed. In her wildest dreams she had never imagined anything like this.
“It just looks big. It’s actually a lot smaller inside.” He drove along the circular drive and parked at the door, his eyes fixed firmly on the house.
Chris kept her hands clenched in her lap. Ken Callahan was gone. He’d been lost somewhere en route to Darby Hills and would never be seen again. And she was left with Kenneth Knight-a stranger. She searched for something to say-something that would hide the sudden feeling of awkwardness. “This is…big. Bigger than Mount Vernon.” She spread her arms in disbelief. “This is bigger than Mount Rainier.”
Ken sighed and turned to her. His eyes roamed her face for a clue to her feelings. “I suppose you’ve guessed I’m not just a carpenter?”
Chris felt guilty at her hidden knowledge. She nodded her head and swallowed against the lump in her throat. When she finally answered her voice sounded strangely thin. “Actually, Bitsy recognized you from the cover of Newsweek.”
He stared at her wordlessly, absorbing the impact of her admission. A flicker of anger passed across narrowed eyes and was instantly hidden behind a controlled mask. He stroked his beard. “I thought I was disguised.”
“Why did you lie to me?” Have a good reason, Chris silently pleaded. Something solvable-like amnesia, or drugs, or problems with the police.
He flicked at the keys dangling from the ignition. “I guess it started out as a lark. It was obvious you thought I was a bum, and at the time it seemed like it would be fun to be a bum.” He smiled ruefully. “I haven’t had much fun lately…until I met you. For the past six months I’ve been trying to straighten out my business…my life. I had a business partner who expanded a small construction firm into a multinational corporation and bred graft and corruption everywhere he went. It took me three years before I could nail him on embezzlement and force him to sell out. For the last six months I’ve been rooting through every company we control, reorganizing and firing. When you broke down on the highway in front of me I was on my way to ax a man I had always considered to be a good friend. I’ve had a three-week vacation, and now I’m afraid I have to go back and finish the job I started.” He leaned his head against the headrest and closed his eyes. “I didn’t like being Kenneth Knight when I met you, so I became Ken Callahan. It was actually only a little white lie. My mother’s name was Callahan. Callahan is my middle name.”
Chris felt the fine line of civility snap. She made a swift, angry gesture with her hand. “A lark?” she shouted. “You moved into my house on a lark? You seduced me on a lark?”
“I didn’t seduce you. Women only get seduced in historical romances. What we had was mutual lust.”
He was right, but, dammit, she didn’t like hearing it. Lust. It was such a narrow emotion, and what she felt for him was so beautiful and complicated. But she couldn’t deny it. In the beginning there had been a lot of lust going on. She shook her head. “Who cares what you call it, anyway. You’re starting a battle over semantics to avoid the issue. You took advantage of me and my aunt. These three weeks have just been a diversion for you. Three weeks of lies and a phony engagement just to amuse yourself because you’re tired of being Hatchetman.”
“The business about me being tired of Hatchetman might be true, but there’s nothing phony about our engagement. I love you. There’s nothing phony about that, either.”
“Unfortunately, I love Ken Callahan. I don’t even know Kenneth Knight.”
“They’re the same person, Chris. They just dress differently.”
“Are you kidding? Look at this house! What sort of a person would live in this house? Lord Fairfax couldn’t have handled this much grandeur.”
“I hate this house.”
“You bought it. You must have liked something about it.”
There was a moment of strained silence before a mischievous twinkle appeared in his eyes, and an embarrassed grin spread across his mouth. “I guess I had an image of myself lounging about in bucolic majesty.”
Chris was caught short by the sudden change in tone. The tension in her eased a little and she giggled. He really did have a way with words. “Bucolic majesty,” she repeated. “I like that.”
His smile was stiff. He looked at the red brick monster that dominated the hillock. “A little pretentious, huh?”
“Everything is relative. Louis XIV would have thought this was modest.”
“We could gut it and make it an ice rink.”
“Yeah. It’d have about the same seating capacity as the Capital Center.”
The two of them burst into gales of laughter, relieved that they could still find humor in a crumbling world. Chris finally wiped her eyes and sank down in her seat. “My sides hurt.” She gasped for breath.
“You’re lucky. It’s my heart that’s breaking,” he whispered. “I love you.”
Chris blinked against an annoying mist in her eyes. She didn’t feel up to a discussion about love. She had achieved her goal. She had forced him to tell her the truth, and now she wanted to go home. She wanted to be alone to lick her wounds and restore some order-some peace to her life. She bowed her head and studied her skirt with unseeing eyes. She had expected to feel hurt and anger and resentment, but she only felt sad. She had anticipated this confrontation for days-had lived through it in minute detail every waking hour since she’d seen the magazine, and now she was incapable of real communication. She had rehearsed speeches, but she couldn’t remember any of them.
Ken draped his arm over the wheel. He gently touched her cheek with his thumb, wiping away an errant tear. “Why did you ask me to bring you here?”
“To force your hand. To help myself decide what to do about this ring.”
He kept the tone of his voice light. “Got cold feet?”
She nodded. Tears choked her throat, and she swallowed them down. “Could you take me home now?”
Chris glared across the room at Ken Callahan Knight. “You’re being unreasonable.”
Ken lounged against the dining room wall and watched the two women working in the kitchen. “I don’t consider it unreasonable. I’ve paid my rent through December, and I’m not leaving.”
Chris slammed the freezer door and marched over to the stove with a box of frozen corn. She wanted him out of her house. His presence was like a drug, robbing her of her ability to make an intelligent decision. And Lucy was becoming more attached to him with each passing day. “You took the ring back. Why won’t you move out?”
“I didn’t take the ring back. It’s sitting in a coffee cup on top of the toaster because you refuse to wear it. And I’m not leaving because I like it here.”
She ripped the box of corn open with a vengeance and thunked it into a pot of boiling water. Already he was behaving like Kenneth Knight. Unreasonable, unbending, unflappable tycoon. Just look at him standing there so
