Unmasked (New Adult Romance) (The Unmasked Series) Read online

  For a moment they just sat and looked out the window, Alyssa's glance moving back and forth between her father and the tree outside.

  "All these years," she said.

  "What's that?"

  "All these years we've wondered about that place. I remember making up all kinds of horror stories about it with Libby next door when we'd run around the woods as little kids."

  Her dad chuckled. "Yeah, there's a lot to wonder about."

  "I remember, one day, she decided that the whole place wasn't really an oil company headquarters, that it wasn't an oil field with, you know, the mansion way off away from it. She figured that since the only thing anyone from town ever saw of it was old man Webb every now and then, that he was harboring some kind of vampire or a Frankenstein or something."

  "Frankenstein's monster, dear." Alyssa's dad laughed correcting her. "Remember your eighth grade literature.

  "Yeah, yeah," she punched his arm. "But to think, the heir to the empire wasn't a vampire. Just a normal guy."

  "Anyway, enough about that. I haven't seen you in months, and all you want to talk about is an oil man? Come on! What's new in your world? Boyfriends, getting married? Having a baby you haven't told me about?"

  His kidding got a grin from Lys. Turning back to her dad, the way his eyes glinted when he was proud of a joke he told took her back to childhood, to the times when she had no idea how hard he worked to give them as much as he did. Now that she knew, it was a different world entirely. She decided right then that she wasn't going to let that happen again.

  "I'm gonna help you however I can, dad. Okay?"

  "I know you will. Those two, they've got each other. They're fine. You never had any other little kids to hatch crazy plans with. That's probably why we're so close. Why you and me and mom were so close." A slow, sad smile crawled across Ryan Barton's lips. "I miss her so much, Lyssie. I can't even tell you."

  He took a deep breath through his nose and let it out very slowly.

  Alyssa tried to think of something to say, but couldn't. Instead she just took his hand back between hers. His skin, so smooth and warm, reminded her again of all the times he picked her up when she'd fallen over and skinned a knee. The veins standing out on the back of his thin fingers brought it all back in a flood.

  "It's okay dad. I know."

  "Ah! Oh man," he sniffed and closed his eyes, then wiped them. "Sorry about that. It still gets to be too much sometimes. Anyway, tell me what's going on with you. When are you marrying that guy Bret? He always seemed like a decent fella."

  "He was. I mean is," Lys let out a heavy sigh, and steeled herself to recount the story for the second time in as many days. "Things just didn't work out."

  Chapter Two

  The shower felt good.

  Very good.

  Hot and steamy, the pounding droplets massaged away the tension that gathered in Alyssa's hips from six hours behind the wheel, and a day of wrestling with excited little siblings.

  But what she really needed was the thirteen or so hours that she cratered immediately following that wonderfully indulgent, exceptionally long shower.

  When she finally woke up, two angry looking Jays outside her window went back and forth, snapping at one another over what looked like half a beetle. It was chilly, so she pulled her fuzzy blanket tight around her neck, yawned, and popped her shoulders, then her neck. In the next part of her morning ritual, she stood up, stretched her arms as high above her head as they could possibly go before bending down to put her palms on the cool, wooden floor.

  A quick set of push-ups and sit ups later, she looked back out the window, to catch the end of the rumble on the tree branch. The birds had departed, but there was a new contest between two chipmunks to laugh at.

  "Get him!" She cheered for the fatter one, on the left end of the branch. "He took your nut! Don't let him treat you like that!" The laughing felt almost as good as the sleep.

  She took a deep breath, letting the air from outside fill her lungs. That was one thing about the city she didn't miss – and probably never would. "I need the space," she told one of the squirrels. "I can't handle the crowding and all the...I donno, go-go-go kinda stuff."

  "Holy hell! It's ten-thirty already! I'm sure there's something I need to do, but, well, maybe there's not. I should probably be wearing pants though, at any rate."

  Tossed across the back of the chair next to her bed lay the nice, loose jeans from the day before, but they'd been washed. So had the shirt, and apparently everything else, since her duffel bag was empty and sitting in the bottom of the closet.

  Dressing, eating a late breakfast with her dad, and a Saturday full of squealing kids running around the woods outside the house took Alyssa back a long way. Every weekend as a kid, she remembered her daddy's pancakes, which was the only thing he was both willing and able to cook without starting a minor fire incident and that she liked to eat.

  Half the kids within five miles of their house would be there every Friday night for pizza and a whole bunch of movies with Lys's mom, Jena, and then in the morning, dad took over while mom went off to one of her many sewing classes, then an exercise class.

  "She deserves it," dad always said. "She takes care of you, doesn't do much for herself. So I'm happy to give her Saturdays. I'd give her whatever she wanted, but she doesn't ask for anything else."

  Ryan Barton sat on the porch and alternated between drinking black coffee so strong that Lys and her friends teased him that it was going to melt the cup, and chasing them around, playing whatever humiliating games they wanted him to play. On special occasions, he agreed to jump rope, and on very special occasions, he even Double Dutched.

  "Hey Lyssie," her dad said, just as she was pouring him another cup of that same strong, intense, black coffee. "Remember that one time when you and, oh, who was it? Libby from down the street, and that other girl, the little one with black hair who always brought her yippy little dog over..."

  "Oh that was Sarah."

  "Right, that's right, Sarah Martin. Anyway, remember the time you three were cavorting around the fence to Webb's oil field, doing something you weren't supposed to do, but would never admit, and you came home screaming and excited about finding those mushrooms?"

  "Oh God," Alyssa laughed a little, but felt her cheeks heat up. "We thought we'd been given the most exquisite knowledge on earth by some roving hobo."

  "Ha! I'll never forget it. You had that little sack full of mushrooms, tied around a stick like it was a bindle, and you were about to ride the rails." Her dad slapped the table. "Oh man. You had – you came in with that bundle, and you guys were so excited. Covered in mud, black sludge halfway up all you guys' pants, your arms were covered, it was in your hair. God that was gross."

  "Yeah well, we got those mushrooms. And that old man did tell us what they all were!"

  "He sure did. You guys came back with a clutch of oyster mushrooms, those yellow ones, morels, and those big white ones that would have cost three hundred bucks if you bought them."

  "Boletes," she said. "The big white ones. They're bolete mushrooms."

  "Why didn't you go to school to be a fungologist? Is that what they're called?"

  "I donno daddy," Lys giggled. "I think mycology."

  "What's yours?"

  She groaned and he laughed again.

  "But," he said, "remember the most important part of all that. Remember who it was that told you all about picking the right mushrooms?"

  "How could I possibly forget?"

  "After all those stories you girls made up about him, old Preston Webb Sr. turned out to be a half decent guy, if a bit eccentric. I guess it takes a little bit of eccentricity to build a giant, sprawling estate in a nowhere town, dead in the middle of a massive oil field. I don't know the numbers, but I'm willing to bet there aren't many billionaire oil men who live in their fields."

  "Oh, speaking of that." Lys had her memory jogged and remembered the letter she found on the table the previous day. "Sor
ry I opened this. I remembered those constant offers to buy the land and got a little scared you finally gave in."

  "No worries. I don't have anything to hide from anybody. From you, especially." He took the letter from her, scanned the note and tossed it on the table. "He really is a nice guy. I feel a little bad about dwelling on whatever it is about his appearance that bothers him. He's taken good care of us since Elena died. I was in a really, really bad spot, but the younger Webb...anyway, he's a rare specimen of man, whatever hang-ups he's got."

  After another moment of silence, Lys asked what he had planned for the day, if anything. Nothing much, he told her, just hang out with the kids, maybe a movie later at night at the tiny theatre in town.

  She told him that sounded well and good and that she wanted to go with him. It'd be good to wander around the little town square if nothing else.

  "I'm gonna go check the email Webb set up for me. Usually after letters show up, there's a little work he needs from me. Whatever you want to do, do it. Okay Lyssie? If you want to sleep all day, perfect. If you want to go to town and go to that little diner you like so much, the keys are in the truck." Her dad got up, quaffed about half his cup of coffee in one go. "I've thought about your offer, to help me and all that. This is gonna be good. I admit it, I need the help."

  "Good!" She grinned. "I'm glad you finally got over yourself. Remember, you've got me for a semester, to do anything you need. Taking care of the kids, earning a little money on the side, whatever you need. Okay?"

  "Yup. I'll get my mileage out of you. You're gonna earn your bacon." He patted her softly on the shoulder and she stared out the window into the woods.

  Behind her, he poured another cup of his beloved sludge, and in the tree where earlier she watched the squirrels fight, Lori and Jake had managed to worm their way up a rope ladder and into a little box of a tree-house Rick built them up there.

  "This will be good," Alyssa whispered. "This will be really, really good."

  Someday, she might be able to admit to her dad that her being here to help him was all a cover. It was all for show. She needed to get to get away from the city, and away from the intense responsibility of her life and her job and all of that. For a little while, anyway, she needed to recover, to be a little girl again. She'd happily go back to reality next term, but she had to come to terms to a world without her mom.

  Alyssa wanted to tell her dad all of that. She wanted to make sure he knew that he was helping her just by his letting her putter around Newton and do his busy work. But for some reason, the words just wouldn't come. She never was much of a talker, she figured, so it'd be okay.

  A few minutes later, minutes spent watching the two near-monkeys swing around tree branches and magically not plummet to their deaths Lys looked down at the letter on the table, or rather the back of it, which was facing upward.

  "Now there's an idea," she said. "If I can't say stuff, I can just write it all down. If I decide to give him the letter, fine, if not, that's fine too. Take it easy on yourself Alyssa. For once, take it easy on yourself. Okay?"

  Reaching out across the table, Alyssa scooted the notepad upon which her father habitually kept to-do lists, and ripped out three sheets from the back of the pad.

  "Dear Dad," she wrote.

  After she chew her lip for a second, and scribbled a swirl on the corner of the paper, her pen started to fly. Before long, she ripped another page, and then another. An hour faded, then another hour and three more pages.

  As she folded up the surprisingly thick stack of paper, she made the decision to sneak it onto her dad's nightstand at some point. Not that day, maybe, but possibly the next. Or the next.

  "Take it easy on yourself, Lys," she said again. "Give yourself a break. Okay?"

  "Okay. Just this once."

  Chapter Three

  "Everything is in order, Mr. Webb." Gadsen Cartwright, the aged, hook-nosed, stiff-as-a-board butler who had worked for the Webb family since long before Preston Jr. made his entrance to the world, rubbed the sides of his beak with thumb and forefinger. "I think this a move that would make your father a very, very proud man indeed."

  From behind a massive oak desk that was faced away from the door to his office, Preston Webb smiled as well as he could. He scratched the scar stretching from his lip, across his face to the opposite temple, underneath his hair.

  It hurt him to smile.

  "That's good to hear, Gadsen. Is there – I'm sorry to ask you for something like this, but can you bring me some tea? My throat..."

  "Of course, sir. I'll bring the tea along with the contracts. They should be arriving by courier shortly."

  "Right, thanks."

  "Peppermint?"

  "Yes, please. Oh, one more thing Gadsen."

  "Sir?"

  "You said my dad would be proud. That's...good. But would-"

  "Yes sir, she would be very proud of the man you've become. I'd never seen her happier in her life than when she was having you."

  Preston swallowed, his throat clicking from dryness. "Okay. Thank you, that helps."

  "Of course, sir."

  Alone in his office after the door closed behind Gadsen, Preston Webb ran his fingers backward through his inky black hair. His blue eye, and his green one, both glittered as he looked through the huge window in front of his desk over the massive courtyard in front of the estate. He bent his head and smelled the miniature rose bush he had to keep himself occupied when his thoughts got too dark.

  "Hm, one of you needs trimming," he said to the tiny bush, taking up his scissors.

  He clipped the browned leaves from the stem, then the bud that had been there too long, and had not opened, that he suspected of some kind of disease. Rubbing it between his fingers, he forced the protective leaves open to reveal, as he thought, a malformed, dead flower.

  "It's too bad that this sort of thing has to happen," he said softly, in the voice of a parent comforting a child. "But we can't all grow straight and tall and beautiful."

  As he spoke, he ran a finger along the jagged scar crossing his face, from lip to temple that rasped across the stubble of his five o'clock shadow.

  "That's alright though. It takes all kinds to make the world such an interesting place." He couldn't help but laugh as two of his dogs – Schala and Sky – charged across the grounds and one dove at the other, missed, and rolled on her back before she went for another round.

  Without thinking, he lopped off another rose, one that was perfectly healthy, and leaned back in his chair, inhaling deeply its scent. In front of him stood a three-inch thick pile of papers that, once completed, gave him the rights to build a pipeline through Newton, and east where it connected with a major pipe that ran north and south all the way from Maine to Georgia. The idea of such a pipeline thrilled him on the one hand, because it was the culmination of a great deal of work that his father, Preston Sr. had left undone when he died five years ago.

  At the same time, there was a sense of anxious unease that such business carried. After thumbing his scar again, he took out a notepad and scribbled a note to his newest employee, one Ryan Barton, from Newtown.

  The man lived on land that butted up against Webb Oilworks' massive property, and Preston was aware that his father spent a great deal of time courting him and his neighbors to sell to the company to make the pipeline one step easier. For the vast majority of Preston's conscious life, his father had been obsessed with the pipeline, and very little else.

  He massaged his temples to try and calm yet another headache that threatened to burgeon in the front of his skull and then rubbed the bridge of his nose with the heel of his hand.

  Before him lay the culmination of his father's entire life, and when Gadsen returned with the contract from the Newton town council, it was all done. No one had to sell their land. They only had to permit a pipeline to be laid. And, because of his very persuasive pocket book, the council decided that it would publish a decree that everyone had to abide the ruling. No one was a
llowed to protest, or try and block the construction.

  That's the part that Preston couldn't stand. Gadsen convinced him six months ago to pursue it, because "you never know what people who don't understand business will do," but it never sat right with him. Even then, with everything finished and waiting for his signature, he wasn't sure.

  Another few moments spent clipping brown leaves off his rosebush calmed his thoughts. He looked across the table to the three mail boxes he kept. In the first one was a letter from Barton. Even though Preston visited him from time to time, and they lived only a few miles apart, Preston insisted that all correspondence be done by mail.

  "Gadsen," he said as the butler re-entered with tea in hand, "when did this letter arrive?"

  "Which one is that, sir? Here's your tea and the contract from the bumpkin council."

  "Don't call them that, Gads. They're human, just like us. Or, well, like me at least." He laughed at his own joke. Gadsen stiffened.

  "Yes, well. What letter sir?"

  "This one here," Preston held up the letter.

  "Oh, from that Barton fellow. Two days, maybe three? I have trouble keeping up with your pet projects from time to time."

  "He's not a project, Gadsen, he's a damned good employee."

  "Right. Well I just don't understand the point of going outside the company for backing up those ancient records. Why bother in the first place?"

  "Because it's the right thing to do. The numbers he's recording are the entire history of this company – of my family – for the last fifty years. I don't want them to be lost in a fire or something like that. Also, I'm well aware of how internal things tend to work. I want honest numbers, nothing fudged."

  "Just so, sir," Gadsen pulled his lips tight across his teeth, smoothing his wrinkled mouth for a moment. "Why him? Why not a reputable accountant?"

  "This isn't work that requires one. And anyway, my father liked Ryan Barton's daughter. He relished those times he'd find her out in the woods and teach her about mushrooms. They've fallen on hard times lately, and he needed the work besides. Anyway, thank you for the tea. Three days, you said? I should look into getting myself a computer."