Page 20 of Married in Michigan

“Home.”

5

Even though he’s going relatively slowly at this point, the turn onto the wide, winding driveway still somehow manages to feel effortlessly reckless. We’re approaching one of the homes in the area that routinely appears on national lists of “most expensive homes.” Sprawling, with columns and walls of glass, multilevel decks facing Lake Michigan and several hundred feet of private lake frontage, with a built-in boathouse and enough garage space for a fleet. A large house is a mansion;thisis an estate, in the sense of the word used by aristocrats in eighteenth-century England.

I always figured this place belonged to Camilla’s family, but I never knew for certain—it’s one you can see from US-31, but only from a distance, and you get the sense that you’re only seeing a fraction of it, and that the interior would be even more impressive than the outside.

Of course, knowing the wealth of the deBraun family, they may very well own more than one house in the area.

“This isn’t my home,” I say, helplessly pointing out the obvious.

“I said home, not your home.” He doesn’t look at me, but his attention is nonetheless focused on me. “Although—” he cuts himself off, starts over. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

“What does that mean?” I ask, panic tingeing my voice.

“Nothing.”

The driveway winds around aimlessly through acres of manicured, richly green lawn for a quarter of a mile or so before coming to an end at a bank of garage doors…I count six doors, each one wide enough to admit two cars abreast. He touches a button somewhere near where the missing panel of the roof would fasten in, and a garage door slides open. The home towers above us as we wait for the door to silently open, stretching away in both directions as well as upward. Behind us, the lawn arches away, with a few stands of elegant birch and towering pine here and there to diffuse the view of endless grass. The door now open, Paxton gently nudges the gas so the car moves just above an idle through the door and into a cavernous garage filled with row after row of gleaming metal and glass. There’s an obvious gap where this car is parked, front and center in the collection, which is so vast as to make even me—a complete neophyte when it comes to cars—dizzy with the collective value in this garage.

This car, obviously, is one of the Crown Jewels.

Parking it perfectly in the space, Paxton unfolds himself from the driver’s seat and makes a quick circuit of the glittering, sleek, red hypercar, examining it for imperfections. A slender man in a black and white suit, wearing actual white gloves, waits off to one side—he’s buttoned up, stern, serious, and polished.

Paxton addresses him. “Hey, John.” He tosses something large and black and red over, and John, the suited man, catches it, a look of horror on his face.

“Please, Mr. deBraun. One doesn’ttossthe key to a LaFerrari.” John’s voice is smooth and cultured and vaguely English, and clearly disapproving.

“Like you’d drop it?” Paxton says, a wave of his hand dismissing the topic. “Give it a polish and gas it up, would you? And replace the top.” He grins easily. “Thanks, Johnny.”

With an actual half bow of his upper body, John turns away. “Sir.”

I snort at the absurdity, gaining me two looks of bemusement and disapproval. Paxton grabs me by the hand and hauls me through the rows of cars—I see several logos I recognize: Porsche, Ferrari, and Lamborghini, as well as others I don’t recognize. Paxton pauses in his march through the cars, gesturing with a sweep of his arm at a section of the garage—mostly red and yellow cars with similar lines as the Ferrari. In fact, an entire quadrant of the massive garage is dedicated entirely to Ferraris.

“That right there is why we got an invitation to buy the LaFerrari,” he says. “Several of those are one-of-one ever made, and all of them are rarities in the car world, and even more rare in the Ferrari-owner world.”

Dozens, at least. Some old, some new, some in between.

I roll my eyes and yank my hand away from his. “Congratulations.”

He catches the sarcasm, miraculously. “There are people who would pay a fortune just to get alookat the contents of this garage. This is one of the greatest car collections in the world.”

“I don’t even own a car, Paxton. So if you’re thinking I’m going to, like, swoon over you because your dad owns some fancy cars, think again.”

“Well, to be fair, it’s not just Dad. Some are Grandpa’s, some are Uncle Nicholas’s, and a couple are mine.”

“Which are yours?” I ask, curiosity once again getting the better of me.

Oh boy—judging by the way his eyes light up, that question was a mistake. He makes an about-face and wades through row after row of polished metal and chrome to the far back corner. He stops at a small, old hunk of metal—it’s rounded and cute and quick looking, rather than sleek and sexy.

Paxton runs a hand over the curved, rounded hood. “1956 Porsche 356 Speedster, matching numbers, all original exterior and interior.”

I sigh. “In English?”

He laughs, and sighs. “It means old car go zoom zoom.” He opens a hatch in the rear where a trunk should be and I see the engine, looking the worse for age. “It means this car looks and runs exactly as it did when it came off the line in 1956, that the engine, transmission, and exhaust system are all original to the car as manufactured, as well as the paint, body, seats, everything. Makes it rare and valuable. This is one of the most desirable of the classic Porsches.” He says itPor-shuh,two syllables rather than one.

“Just looks like an old car to me.”

He sighs, shakes his head. “It’s anything but just an old car, Makayla. I’ll take you out for a drive in it someday, and you’ll see what I mean.”