Blue by You Read Free Page A

William Chatsworth. His people are from St. Tammany Parish, and we have a fifteen-year-old son.”
    “Does he live here with you?”
    “During the school year, but he spends the summers with his father at their lake house.” Billy loved living at Dahlia Hall as much as he loved the Chatsworth family lake house, but she worried that, someday, living in a cottage at a historical tourist attraction might wear thin on Billy. If that happened, she’d have to give thought to buying a house in the suburbs.
    “You must have gotten a nice settlement.”
    Born in the South or not, it was Blue’s experience that old ladies tended to say inappropriate things on purpose. The closer they got to death, the more inappropriate. But, “Yes. I was able to do some of the major renovations on the property after my divorce.”
    Miss Sudie smiled as the sound of tires on gravel reached their ears. “He’s here,” she said, as a pair of headlights cut through the dusky night, and a white truck with tinted windows rounded the side of the big house and continued toward the overseer’s cottage. A Pennington Construction truck.
    Blue stood without thinking. “You didn’t call a taxi?”
    “No.”
    The truck rolled to a stop, and the driver’s side door opened. A light illuminated the cab as one work boot, then the other, hit the gravel.
    Maybe it wasn’t him.
    “Kasper!” Miss Sudie said, all cheery as she rose from the rocking chair and set her tea on the ground.
    Maybe he wouldn’t recognize her. She’d been twenty-two years younger and about ten pounds lighter. There’d been so many females in his life, surely he wouldn’t remember one scrawny teenager from all those many years ago.
    “Grand-mère. What are you doing here?” He shut the truck door. His voice was older, deeper. More mature. Still smooth, and Blue felt a knot in her chest. An anxious little knot, when she had nothing to be anxious about. She didn’t care one bit about Kasper Pennington.
    “I hate that place you stuck me.”
    “I didn’t stick you in Sunny Crest Estates.” A beige ball cap covered his hair and cast a darker shadow across his face. He stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up at his grandmother. He was bigger, taller than she remembered, and the shadow from his hat slid to the crease of his lips. A tiny bit of anger pulled at the anxious knot in Blue’s stomach. Not a lot of anger. Not enough to fly down the steps and give him a throat chop but enough that it surprised her after all these years.
    “I thought you liked Sunny Crest Estates.”
    “No, boo. It’s not my home.”
    Boo. She wondered if Sudie knew that the old Cajun endearment had been taken over by Usher and the Kardashians and just about every teenager in the contiguous U.S.? Maybe Alaska and Hawaii, too.
    “It has bought air and cable, so you can watch all your shows.” He lifted a hand and dropped it to the side of his beige cargo pants. “You have friends there.”
    Sudie sniffed. “It smells like old folks.”
    “Jesus.” He pulled the hat from his head and ran his fingers through hair still as black as sin.
    “I want to go home.”
    He folded the hat in half and stuck it in his back pocket. Then his gaze returned to his grandmother. The light from the porch touched his nose and lips and the five o’clock shadow darkening his cheeks and strong jaw. The brows above his eyes were the same black slashes that she recalled. “It’s still a construction zone, Grand-mère.”
    Blue stood in the darker porch shadow, and, apparently, he really didn’t recognize her. Praise God.
    “It’s my home, boo.”
    Kasper sighed and looked up toward the heavens as if he’d receive help from above. He swore softly and scrubbed his face with his hands.
    It was best that he did not recognize her, less embarrassing that way. Best that he not recall the day they’d spent in a three-hundred-year-old oak tree. Really, why should he remember? He hadn’t been the virgin.
    He