Windswept Read Online Free Page B

soft, pudgy weight on his medium-height frame, his hair was already thinning and showing a bit of gray in the brown, and his beady, light blue eyes stared out through metal-rimmed eyeglasses with smudges on them. His tan suit was rumpled and his tie hung loose around his neck. He certainly didn’t resemble the prosperous lawyer-and-businessman image he usually projected.
    Davis had long thought Lloyd to be officious and self-righteous. Even as a child, he had always claimed to know the correct thing to do better than anyone else. He had also always tried to order Davis and the other kids around as if it were his right as the older cousin. Almost every time they had been thrown together by family events, they fought--physically as boys, verbally as men.
    He knew Lloyd resented his success in these battles and in his business and especially in the favoritism Edgar showed him. Lloyd had always considered himself to be the proper executor of their grandfather’s estate and foremost guardian of the Jamison family name, and he hadn’t been happy when he discovered Edgar had named Davis to the executor’s post. In fact, Lloyd had stormed out of the house after the reading of Edgar’s will. Now here he was in Houston.
    “What do you want, Lloyd?” Davis asked as he leaned back in his chair and threw his pen on top of the business plan he had been studying.
    “I want to know what you’re doing about the Windswept records, of course. I told Granddaddy they should remain in Louisiana and be properly cared for. I need to go through them.” Lloyd stalked over to the desk but didn’t sit down, clearly attempting to loom over his cousin.
    “Oh, sit down. You know you can’t intimidate me,” Davis ordered, disgusted by Lloyd’s usual bullying tactics. And about those damn papers again. He was wasting more time on those old records than he had to spare. “Why in hell do you want to look at the papers?”
    Lloyd sat down and glared across the desk. “Because things in those papers could hurt the family if they got out.”
    “Things? That’s a precise definition, isn’t it? Besides, what could there possibly be in the old collection to cause any harm now?”
    “My mother told me so after she found out you were taking them away. She said Grandmama had told her the terrible tales and falsehoods in them would ruin the family’s standing in the community if they became common knowledge.”
    Davis regarded his cousin sourly. He knew both Lloyd’s mother--Cecilia, his own father’s sister--and his late grandmother well. Both women were adamant about protecting the family’s reputation and place in society against any slights or slurs, real or imagined. Edgar himself hadn’t given a damn what other people said or thought, and he’d put up with his wife’s obsession by ignoring it. But Grandmama had passed on her predilections to her daughter and she to her son.
    Davis could understand how Lloyd might have the wind up his ass from his mother’s doomsayer’s prognostications. Lloyd was still getting a lot of mileage out of the family connections, living as he did in St. Gregoryville, the nearest town to the old plantation. His law practice and business interests served some of the most socially and politically conservative elite in the state, the type of people who asked, “Who’s your family and what’s their status?” first and centered their impressions, their business, and their social activities on the response. If you weren’t from the “right people,” you didn’t stand a chance with them--unless, of course, you had something they wanted. And once they got it, they dropped you as quickly as possible.
    “What ‘terrible tales’ specifically?” he asked. “What did Aunt Cecilia tell you? Did we have horse thieves or embezzlers or murderers in the family way back when? And if we did, so what? What possible harm could come to us now?”
    “Mama wouldn’t tell me.”
    “Wouldn’t or couldn’t? Does she