“You seemed angry at whoever you were talking to.”
“That’s John Peterson, our CFO. He’s involved in a pretty important deal with a company we just acquired in Germany. It’s a very complicated deal. I can’t go into the details.”
“Oh, of course. I wouldn’t expect you to.”
His shoulders were hunched and he seemed distant. “It’s just business,” he said, as if trying to convince himself.
A short while later, they arrived at Nicole’s new home.
She’d tried to prepare herself for a shock, but really nothing could prepare her for what was in store when they approached the gate of Red’s Connecticut property. She couldn’t even see his home from the gate. All she saw were rolling hills, a large lake (or maybe it was a pond, but it was a huge pond), and trees fading into the distance.
The private road was well lit by street lamps, but this time of night it was hard to tell just how big the property really was.
At the gate there was a security booth with a young, fiercely serious man inside, sporting a military crew cut.
Red put down his window and smiled at the young man peered into the car and looked directly at Nicole with cold, green eyes. Then his eyes flicked back to her fiancé. “Good evening, Mister Jameson.”
“Evening, Dan.”
“Is everything good, sir?”
“Better than good, Dan. Thanks.”
The gate clicked and hummed as it opened electronically. The guard watched them as they drove slowly past and now they were on the private road.
Red glanced at her. “Overwhelmed?”
“Very.” She took a deep breath and exhaled. The pond was on their left now. “It’s absolutely breathtaking.” She saw a family of ducks swimming leisurely in the still water. A quaint bridge, strewn with tiny glowing white bulbs extended over the narrower portion of the pond. In the distance, a little house lay nestled close to the water’s edge.
“We’re on about seventeen and a half acres of land,” Red said. “It’s quite a lot to maintain. Over there is the caretaker’s home, and he and a small crew keep up the grounds year round. They’re good people, you’ll get to know all of them well.”
Over the crest of a tiny hill, she caught sight of a full-sized basketball court on the left, and just next to that, tennis courts. They looked beautiful, as if they’d only just been built a day or two before. “Do you play on those?” she asked.
“I do,” Red told her. “A few times a week a tennis pro comes to the house and gives me lessons or we play a set together.”
“When you say, tennis pro, do you mean like one of those club pros that they have? The ones that give lessons to little kids and beginners or…”
Red laughed. “I mean, one of the guys ranked in the top hundred in the world. I’ve had Roger Federer our here to play, John Isner, Andre Agassi. Andre’s back isn’t so good these days. Oh, Pete Sampras…”
“They give you lessons.” She shook her head in disbelief.
“A lot of them are friends. I’ve done campaigns with most of these guys. But yeah, they give me lessons and play with me. I don’t exactly provide much of a challenge, but the pay is good and afterwards they might stay and have a lovely meal.”
The private way stretched on and on. They came over another rise and the house appeared in the distance, sprawling and magnificent. With the lights on both inside and around the house, it looked like something from a dream Walt Disney might have had. It literally took her breath away. The entire house and property was glowing magically, as if enchanted.
“It’s a bit on the large side,” Red admitted, glancing at her reaction.
“I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“It’s got twenty-five bathrooms and twenty-three bedrooms. Fifty thousand square feet.”
“Why…why would you need any of that? You could provide room and board to a small village with that much space.”
He chuckled at her astonishment. “I suppose I don’t technically need the space. But one day I do hope to have a family, and I like the idea of having plenty of room for guests; mothers and fathers, uncles, grandparents, little kids. And everyone has their own privacy, nobody’s on top of each other.”
“Nobody can even find each other,” she said.
His expression became serious. “Maybe it’s because of how I grew up,” he told her. “We had no space at all. Me and my brother and mother, in a little apartment together, always on top of each other. I didn’t have any privacy, I had to share a room with Bryan until I was seventeen and finally went to college. I know it could have been worse, but something about it just ate at me.” His eyes were hard and she could feel the tension radiating off of him. She sensed that Red hadn’t exactly had a happy childhood.