Believe in Me: A Rosewood Novel by Laura Moore Read Free Book Online

Nonie, now she couldn’t wait to get through lunch and begin discussing how best to decorate the guest cottage. Then at least she’d have the satisfaction of saying good-bye to him.
    The lunch verged on inedible. The poached salmon was rubbery, the asparagus drastically overcooked, and one bite of the cloyingly sweet key lime pie that Nonie served for dessert had made Owen’s teeth ache. Just as syrupy and distasteful had been Nonie’s “dear” and “darling” every time she addressed him.
    Yet surprisingly Owen was enjoying himself. The chance to sit across the china-and-silver-laden table from Jordan Radcliffe more than made up for the meal’s deficiencies.
    Owen studied the woman seated across from him. A man who appreciated contrasts, he could not help finding her fascinating. Such a curious mix of social poise and palpable hostility. And for a woman with more prickle than a cactus, she had the smoothest, silkiest skin imaginable. She also happened to live in one of the finest houses in Virginia. This fact alone made Ms. Jordan Radcliffe extremely worthy of his attention.
    Guessing what a lunch at Nonie Harrison’s would be like, he’d made every attempt to avoid it. But then she dangled the promise of Jordan Radcliffe’s presence. He would dutifully eat an entire platter of overboiled asparagus for the chance to step inside Rosewood. The house was rumored to be a near-pristine example of Greek Revival architecture in Virginia, passed down through generations of Radcliffes. The family had apparently never deemed it necessary to alter the home built by their ancestor, the storiedFrancis Radcliffe. To the architectural historian in Owen, visiting a house like Rosewood was like mining the mother lode.
    He’d seen a few tantalizing glimpses of the house in a
Vogue
photo spread that an assistant had brought into his Alexandria office to show him. One of the Radcliffe sisters was a fashion model and had agreed to a photo shoot in the ancestral home. Now he remembered seeing in the spread a picture of Jordan, as well. That he should have noticed her at all was nothing less than remarkable. He’d been scouring the photographs for details of her ancestral home, not for images of its owners.
    Indeed, if someone had asked Owen a mere hour ago which would hold greater interest, meeting a direct descendant of Francis Radcliffe, who’d commissioned Rosewood in 1840, or getting a chance to explore the mansion inside and out, his answer would have been immediate. I’ll take door number two.
    But that was before he’d met Jordan. To say he found her intriguing was an understatement. When he’d shaken her hand earlier, he’d felt the slight trembling of her fingers clasped in his and caught the flash of feminine awareness in her wide blue eyes. Yet rather than acknowledge that they were two individuals who recognized a spark of attraction between them—he was always more than happy to admit any interest in a beautiful woman—she had abruptly gone all prickly on him.
    Her dislike seemed a bit too determined when all they’d done was shake hands, and so to Owen she was that much more interesting. From Nonie’s pointed comment, he’d already figured out that she was divorced, so what was the big deal?
    Owen didn’t consider himself particularly conceited, but he was rather accustomed to being liked by the opposite sex. He was decent-looking. He took care of his teeth and trimmed his nails. It wasn’t hard to keep in shape by supplementing themanual labor he put in on his renovation projects with visits to the gym. But most likely the reason women seemed to gravitate toward him was because he’d always been comfortable around them. It was a trait developed early, fostered by the long string of au pairs and nannies his parents hired to care for him as they traveled the world.
    By the age of six, Owen had already tapped into the winning combination of using the right words and a few disarming grins to convince almost