Eye of the Storm Read Online Free PDF Page B

deteriorate."
As I was cleaning up after breakfast, the phone rang again. This time it was Aunt Victoria.
"Your mother," she said punctuating the word with such venom, she turned it into a curse word. "and Grant are flying in this morning. We will be at the house by two o'clock. We're meeting with our attorney for lunch first," she added, which was clearly meant to intimidate me.
"It seems like lawyer's day," I replied coolly,
"What's that supposed to mean?" she fired back,
"I'm meeting with my attorney for lunch here at the house. too," I said.
I wasn't, of course. but I wanted to do her one better and show her I could be just as intimidating. There was a long pause.
"You're making a big mistake being so obstinate," she said.
"Isn't that odd?" I countered.
"Isn't what odd?"
"I've been thinking you're making a big mistake being so obstinate."
If a moment of silence was ever packed full of explosive energy, this was it.
"We'll all be there at two." she repeated. "Make sure you're there as well."
"I have no place I'd rather be today," I said. "Thanks for the warning."
When I hung up, my heart was pounding.
But to me it sounded like all the ghosts in the house were clapping.
    2
Fortune Hunter
.
When the doorbell sounded only a little after
    twelve. I knew it couldn't be my mother. Grant and Aunt Veronica. It was too early. My first thought was it might be Mr. Sanger, my lawyer, who must have decided he had to stop by and give me advice.
    Instead. Corbette Adams stood there looking in at me after I opened the door. Corbette had played George Gibbs to my Emily Webb in the Dogwood High School production of Our Town that had earned me Mr. MacWaine's admiration and the invitation to study the performing arts at his school in London. Easily the most handsome boy at Sweet William-- the sister school to Dogwood, the private school I had attended while living here with Grandmother Hudson-- Corbette had moved like some soap opera star over our campus, basking in the swoons of so many of my classmates.
    He was the first boy with whom I had made love, and confronting him now filled me both with angry heat and guilt. Who could blame me, however, for falling beneath the power of his charm and good looks then, especially me, someone so overwhelmed by all the wealth and privilege he and all the others enjoyed? I had been lifted from one world and dropped into another with little or no preparation.
    Corbette's familiar sapphire orbs brightened once again at the sight of me. He didn't look much different from the last time I had seen him. His brown hair with hints of copper was still unruly, curling upward at the nape of his neck, the only imperfection in his otherwise perfectly respectable appearance. Despite the position of esteem his family held in the community, there was always something defiant in Corbette, a danger which made him even more attractive and exciting to most girls, and admittedly, once to me.
    His strong lips opened and fell back in a soft smile.
"You're even prettier now," he said. "Or else I have just forgotten how beautiful you were."
"Hello. Corbette." I said coldly.
I stood there in the doorway not backing up to let him in. He wore his Sweet William dark blue blazer over a light blue shirt, jeans and a pair of white tennis sneakers. In his right hand he carried a bouquet of white roses and quickly extended them toward me.
I didn't reach for them and the smirk of displeasure remained on my face. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
"Sorry about Mrs. Hudson's death," he said. "My family went to the funeral and I heard how beautiful and dignified you looked. Many people were impressed with how sad and upset you appeared for a girl who only had been Mrs. Hudson's ward and for so short a time. too. There's a lot of gossip about you, about what she might have left you in her will," he added, still smiling with that unrestrained selfconfidence that I had come to despise.
After all, once he had succeeded to have his