Silk and Stone Read Free

and Hugh. “Is that woman keeping the stone?”
    Hugh nodded.
    “She’s a thief, then. And William is a fool.” Rachel Raincrow, daughter of a white road-construction engineer who’d passed through on a Roosevelt WPA project during the Depression without leaving her his name, was a first-class rockhound. No one understood quite how she did it, but she had an uncanny knack for finding anything that glittered. She’d supplied Pandora’s jewelers with local stones for years. A few of her more illustrious finds had paid Hugh’s way through medical school.
    And no one took her pronouncements lightly. Alexandra’s reputation was doomed among the oldtimers.
    Sarah caught Alexandra’s kid sister, Frannie, looking at them miserably. Frannie Duke was a little blond beatnik, a truly odd, gentle character among the Dukes, which was why she was the only one of the clan Sarah would have welcomed as a sister-in-law. Too bad Frannie was only seventeen and didn’t have Alexandra’s Barbie-dollbeauty. Too bad that quiet, sweet, aging-bachelor William had fallen in love with the wrong Duke sister.
    “I’m sorry, Sarah,” Frannie said tearfully.
    Sarah bit her lip and refused to answer. Hugh pressed his fingertips against her spine and smoothly guided her up a hallway to the front door. She looked up at him, tears in her eyes. “I’m not greedy or jealous. This isn’t about the ruby—it’s about broken promises.”
    “I love you,” Hugh answered. “Let’s go home.”

    Frannie crept into an upstairs bedroom as Alexandra was changing into her traveling suit. Her sister was alone, standing like some slim, perfect mannequin before a full-length gilded mirror in nothing but her ruby necklace, white silk panties and a white bra with cups as pointed as nose cones on rockets. Alexandra could kill somebody with those big, pointed bosoms. Frannie felt, as always, as if there were only so much space in the world for egos, and Alexandra had taken both their shares long ago. Frannie had always been in awe of her willpower. Alexandra had alternately defended her and ignored her, all their lives.
    Frannie was the black sheep—a mousy little day-dreamer, not good potential for upgrading the family’s position by snaring an important husband—a mission for which both she and Alexandra had been instructed all their lives.
    Alexandra was crying silently, tears sliding down her face in streaks of pink rouge. Frannie couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her sister in tears. When Alexandra heard her close the door, she pivoted, wiping her face quickly, frowning. “What do you want?”
    Frannie took a deep breath. “What you did was
wrong.
” There. It was said. For the first time in her life she’d overcome cowardly inertia and confronted her sister. Like a boulder pushed over the crest of a hill, her courage rolled out of control. “I know how you operate,” Frannie continued breathlessly, straightening her back, hands knotted by her sides, defiant. “You actso innocent, but you’re always thinking of yourself first. You … you persuaded Judge Vanderveer to give you his family heirloom, even though you knew it shouldn’t be yours. You don’t care at all that you came between him and Sarah.”
    “You’re right—I don’t.” Alexandra sank wearily into a chair. “Nobody cares about
my
happiness. Why should I have any pangs of conscience about making other people miserable?”
    Frannie knelt beside her and awkwardly touched one of her hands. “I care about your happiness. I thought marrying Judge Vanderveer is exactly what you want.”
    Alexandra laughed bitterly but clasped Frannie’s hand. “You live inside your books and your daydreams. You think you’re safe from reality that way. You don’t have the foggiest idea what’s going on, do you?”
    “I know that you didn’t have to marry him if you didn’t want to.”
    “Don’t you understand? I want to be somebody. I was
raised
to want that—it’s all