A Broken Kind of Beautiful (2 page)

“Now’s not the time to talk about this, Ivy.” Bruce strode through the long grass toward a line of cars parked along the brick path, texting a message into his phone.

The drops of rain turned into a mist that settled over Ivy’s arms, cooling her skin. If only the drizzle could quench her fear. Who was he texting? She lengthened her stride, trailing him like an evening shadow. “You’re the one doing business.”

“How do you know it’s business?” He dug into his pocket, pulled out his keys, and clicked the button on the remote to unlock the car doors. Two short beeps interrupted a chorus of chirping birds hiding somewhere in the Spanish moss that dripped from gnarled tree limbs overhead.

Ivy rolled her eyes. Only Bruce would lock his car inside a cemetery in Greenbrier, South Carolina. “This isn’t New York City.” The two places existed on opposite poles. “I don’t think any burglars are prowling around waiting to break into your car.”

He stopped in front of the black Lexus with rental plates.

She stopped too. “I need to know, Bruce. It’s my future we’re talking about here.”

“If you were so concerned, you should have kept your mouth shut.”

“I made one lousy suggestion. You’re telling me O’Banion’s getting bent out of shape because of one small—”

“It’s not your job to make suggestions, especially not to a photographer like Miles O’Banion.”

Ivy’s stomach knotted. What would happen if that one slip cost her two years of security? Her twenty-fifth birthday crept closer each day. As hard as she tried, she wasn’t getting any younger and people were starting to notice. If she wanted to continue modeling, she needed that contract.

Bruce ran his hand down his face. “It’s your job to keep your mouth closed and work for the camera. That’s what you get paid for. Nobody cares about your opinions.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Then why didn’t you listen?”

A small group of women dressed in black stopped conversing. Bruce painted on a smile and gave them a polite wave. He leaned close to Ivy and spoke from the corner of his mouth, his smile unwavering. “We’re not talking about this here. Let’s show a little respect.”

Her muscles coiled. Respect? James didn’t deserve her respect. She didn’t care how touching the eulogy, how beautiful the flowers, or how crowded the funeral. Why should she care about losing a man who never wanted her in the first place? Why should his unspoken
I love you
echo in her mind? She refused to pretend her father’s death had any bearing on her life. Because it didn’t. She wouldn’t let it. She gathered her mounting anger and stuffed it in the empty place inside her chest.

Bruce opened the passenger-side door. “Get in the car.”

She folded her arms. “If you know something, as my agent, you have no right to keep it from me.”

“I don’t know anything. And when I find out, we can discuss it back in New York.”

“Why did Annalise tell me I lost the contract?”

“Because Annalise feeds off gossip, or haven’t you figured that out yet?”

Despite the stagnant heat, a chill crept across Ivy’s skin. As her friend, Annalise wouldn’t have pulled this out of thin air. It had to have some substance. She gripped her elbows, as if the harder her fingers dug into flesh, the less any of this would matter. “Gossip always starts with a seed of truth.”

“Look, either get in the car or I’m leaving you here. Your choice.”

Ivy looked over her shoulder at the rows of polished tombstones. Her throat tightened. She hugged her arms and stepped closer to the car. “I want to go to the airport.”

“We’re going to the luncheon.”

“Why?”

“He was my brother and your father. We’re not leaving now.”

“He was hardly my father.” The emptiness expanded, carving her out like a pumpkin-turned-jack-o’-lantern. She was nothing but a shell. A beautiful, empty shell.

An SUV pulled out from behind them. An engine rumbled in front. Except for a few stragglers in the distance lingering over her father’s grave, the cemetery cleared.

Bruce drummed his fingers on the top of the car.

“I’m not going to sit in that house, eat cucumber sandwiches, and pretend to care that he’s gone.”

“You don’t have a choice.” Bruce opened the door wider.

Her shoulders sagged. Ivy slid into the passenger side, pulled the seat belt across her body, snapped it into place, and stared straight ahead. Why had she said anything to O’Banion? So what if he wanted to keep her in the same overdone pose? She shouldn’t have said a word. If there was one mistake to avoid in her world, it was wounding the pride of a notoriously prideful photographer.

Bruce’s door opened. He got inside and set his phone in the cup holder. As soon as he started the ignition, the phone vibrated, rattling loose change in the console. He swept up the device and held it against his ear. “Bruce Olsen.”

Nothing but the unintelligible chatter of a female voice from the other end.

A muscle pulsed in Bruce’s jaw. He scratched his chin and looked out the window, hiding his expression. “I’ll be back tomorrow. Could we meet then and talk this over?” He clicked his seat belt into place and nodded. Another long pause. More unintelligible chatter. A sigh from her uncle. “I understand. Thanks for getting back to me.”

He hit the End button and started the car.

Ivy pressed her fingers against her sweat-dampened palms.

Bruce pulled out onto the brick street and steered toward the iron gate. “It seems Ms. Reynolds wants a fresh face for her cosmetic line.” He flipped on the radio. Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name” blasted Ivy’s ears. “Sorry, kid. They’re not renewing your contract.”

2

The sound of chattering guests and clinking plates swirled around Davis as he leaned against a doorframe, unable to erase the sorrowful image of Ivy Clark standing over her father’s grave. The first time she entered his life, he had been the one who had just buried his father—the one who had stared in disbelief as the ground swallowed up the man who gave him life—right before moving with his mom and sister across the country to Greenbrier, South Carolina. Away from his friends in Telluride and everything he knew at the impressionable age of sixteen. And what had gripped him about this mysterious wisp of a girl moving silently about his aunt’s house were her haunted eyes.

She, too, had been taken from all that was familiar and plunked into a world where she didn’t belong. Her prison, however, would only last a month each summer. His, it had seemed, would last forever.

But now, as he scanned the crowd, Davis knew that Greenbrier was not the prison he had made it out to be. In fact, it had become the opposite—a sanctuary. Sure, it had some thorns, but they were tolerable. If only he had realized this as a teenager, perhaps he wouldn’t have been so eager to escape.

Across the entry in the great room, Grandma Eleanor leaned against Grandfather’s arm and cooled herself with a handheld, rose-patterned fan. She chatted with Mom and her husband, Mike—a high school math teacher with a paunch and an expanding bald patch on the crown of his head. Much to his grandparents’ chagrin, Davis’s mother met Mike on an Internet dating site, married him two years ago, and moved to his house in West Virginia, escaping the reach of Grandfather’s indomitable thumb.

Grandfather met Davis’s stare. He wasn’t sure what Grandfather hated more—Davis’s first career as a fashion photographer or his current one as a church maintenance man. Not in the mood to discuss his professional future at a funeral, he looked away, shifting his attention from the chandelier hanging over the dining room table to the art decorating the foyer walls before catching sight of his sister. She stood on the landing of the wide staircase with one arm extended in front of her, fingertips grazing the frame of a watercolored fresco Marilyn purchased several years ago, her posture etched with such longing Davis could feel her ache.

He frowned and moved toward her when Aunt Marilyn descended the stairs. With a ghost of a smile and red-rimmed eyes, she took Sara’s elbow, whispered something in her ear, and guided her down the rest of the steps.

Davis walked to the north-facing wall instead, covered in arched windows that opened to a manicured front lawn spotted with azaleas and shaded by a large oak. A line of cars wound down the long drive and spilled onto the cul-de-sac. He closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the cool glass.

“She sure is a beauty.”

His attention perked.

“Someone said she was on the cover of
Vanity Fair
.” This voice belonged to somebody different, slightly younger and not quite so southern.

“And
InStyle
,” the first voice whispered, loud enough for Davis to hear.

“Is she really James’s daughter?”

“Can’t you see the resemblance? Those eyes. Her hair. She’s the spitting image.”

“But James and Marilyn celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary last spring. That girl doesn’t look a day over twenty.” A pregnant pause followed the statement, saturated with so much subtext Davis could practically hear their churning thoughts. “You mean Marilyn stayed married to him after such a scandal?

“Bless her heart, the poor thing must have loved him.”

“Well, he couldn’t have been all bad. I heard he donated a lot of money to the county hospital.”

“I don’t care how much money he donated. If my Cal unzipped his pants for another woman, he’d be out of the house quicker than that.” Fingers snapped.

His own dug into the frame of the window.

“She could never have kids of her own, you know. Such a shame. And then to find out about this girl. News like that would have sent me straight to the grave. I wouldn’t have been able to forgive him.”

Enough gossip for one funeral luncheon.

Davis stepped out of the shadow cast by the heavy velvet curtains and cleared his throat. Trudy Piper, daughter of Pastor Voss and wife to Cal—the owner of a local bar and grill—stood face to face with someone Davis didn’t recognize. Likely an out-of-town guest. The two women blanched, then strained their eyes and tightened their lips into appropriate funeral expressions.

“Davis.” Trudy clasped her hands. “I’m so sorry for your family’s loss. It’s a shame for James to have passed so young.”

“The cancer took him fast,” the other woman added.

Trudy gave him a hug, the floral scent of her perfume overpowering, and the pair melted into the crowd in the dining area. He watched them go, his jaw clenched. Pastor Voss had two grown daughters. Trudy was the younger of the two and, much to the pastor’s chagrin, the town gossipmonger. Aunt Marilyn didn’t need a woman like that gossiping behind her back. She had enough to deal with. He turned around and set his palm against the window frame, then straightened to full height.

Ivy Clark was in Marilyn’s front yard, sitting on a white bench with one sinewy leg crossed over the other. Shaded beneath the oak, her toffee-colored hair fell in long waves past her shoulders as she stared off toward the street. He noted the elegance of her neck, the angle of her body. Except for
her bouncing foot, she invoked an almost ethereal stillness, one that had him leaning closer to the window. There was a story there—hidden beneath her frame and her posture—and it begged to be captured.

Davis stepped away from the window and wove through the crowd. He plated a sandwich from the dining table and walked out into the humidity. If Ivy noticed him coming, she didn’t look up. Not even when he sat beside her on the bench, holding up the sandwich as an offering. “Hungry?”

She traced lazy circles around her kneecap. “Not much of an appetite at the moment, thanks.”

He set the plate down on the grass.

She leaned back on her palms. “Do you stare at women at funerals as a rule, or should I be flattered?”

It took him a while, but he found it. In her irises. A barely there pulse of the girl he remembered from way back when, before the world had its way with them both. It kept him on the bench when everything else begged him to leave. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

She shifted away and looked him in the eyes.

He decided to help her out. “Marilyn’s nephew?”

“Davis Knight, you don’t say.” She tipped her chin. “So what does that make us—cousins?”

“Stepcousins, I guess.” If there was such a thing.

“And here I thought I was running out of family.” She looked him full in the face, her expression bored or maybe challenging. Like she dared him to entertain her.

“You’re a lot different than I remember,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows. “And just how much do you remember, Dave?”

“You were sad a lot.”

“Well, there wasn’t much to be happy about back then. And I’m not a little girl anymore.” One corner of her mouth quirked into a private grin. “But I think you noticed that all on your own.”

Of course he’d noticed. Any man would. “I’ve followed your career.”

“Oh yeah?” She leaned so close her shoulder brushed against his. “Are you a fan? You want me to sign something?”

The woman in front of him bore no resemblance to the one he’d watched out the window. That woman had looked lonely. This one wielded seduction like a weapon. So which was the real Ivy Clark? “It’s hot out. You should come inside.”