by Nora Roberts
Odette winked at Lena when Declan kissed her hand. “We’ll take a look at it when we’ve finished out here. Heard you hired Big Frank and Little Frankie,” she said, nodding toward their pickup. “How’re they working out for you?”
“They seem to be doing the job. I don’t know how.” He studied the patchy front gardens with his thumbs hooked through his belt loops. “I can’t catch them actually doing anything, but I blink and a couple truckloads of underbrush are gone. Would you like to walk around the grounds?”
“I would. Lena honey, get those spirit bottles out of the trunk. We’ll hang them on these live oaks to start.”
“Spirit bottles?”
“To keep the evil spirits away.” Lena began lifting bottles half filled with water from her trunk.
“Should I be worried about evil spirits?” Declan asked.
“An ounce of prevention.” And taking two, Odette moved off toward the trees.
“Spirit bottles,” Declan reported, lifting one. He’d seen them hanging outside the shotgun house. “Just how do they work?”
“It’s an old voodoo trick,” Lena told him. “The clanking sound they make scares the evil spirits away.”
Testing, he bumped two together. It sounded pleasant enough, he thought, and not particularly scary. “You believe in voodoo?”
“I believe in that ounce of prevention.” She strolled off, small and curvy, to join her grandmother.
Voodoo or old glass bottles, he liked the way they looked hanging from his trees. And when he tapped two together again, he liked the sound they made.
It took nearly an hour to wind their way around the house and into it as there had to be conversations with the landscapers, inquiries about their family, speculation on the weather, discussion of the garden.
When he finally got them into the kitchen, Odette fisted her hands on her hips and nodded. “That’s a good color, like a nicely baked pastry crust. Most men, they don’t know anything but white. Brings out these good pine floors.”
“I should have the cabinets ready to install next week.” He gestured toward the dining room. “I’m using pine there, too. With glass fronts.”
Lips pursed, Odette walked in, ran her hand over a cabinet. “This is nice work, Declan. You got a talent.”
“Thanks.”
“And it makes you happy.”
“It sure does. Would you like to go into the parlor? I’ve got a table in there. We’ll have some tea.” He glanced up as something heavy hit the floor above. “Sorry about the noise.”
“Work’s rarely a quiet activity. Lena and I will just wander along, if you don’t mind. We’ll find the parlor.”
“You can’t miss it. It’s the only room with a table.”
“He’s a very nice young man,” Odette commented as she and Lena walked out of the dining room.
“He is.”
“Good-looking, too.”
“Very.”
“Got a hot eye for you, chère.”
Now Lena laughed. “He does.”
“What’re you going to do about it?”
“I’m still thinking. Lord, what a place.” Lena trailed her hands over a wall. “Doorways wide enough to drive a car through. It makes you cry to see how it’s been let go.”
“Let go? I don’t know. Seems to me it’s just been waiting. Isn’t this just like a man,” she said when they stepped into the parlor. “Living with one table and two chairs. Bet he hasn’t fixed a decent meal for himself since he got here.”
Lena cocked an eyebrow. “Grandmama, you’re not going to make me feel sorry enough for him to cook his dinner.” Amused, Lena wandered to the window. “It’s beautiful, what you see from here. Imagine what it would’ve been like to stand here when the house was in its glory. Horses coming through the allée, those funny old cars rumbling up the drive.”
“It’ll be beautiful again. But it needs a woman—just like that boy needs one.”
Lena toyed with the little key that hung around her neck. “I said I’m still thinking. Chilly in here yet,” she added. “Needs a fire going.”
“I’ll build one,” Declan told her as he came in with a pitcher of over-steeped tea and plastic cups.
6
It was a good hour, Declan thought. And not counting Remy and Effie, his first real company.
He liked having them there, the female presence in his parlor with the fire he’d built crackling cheerfully and the late afternoon sun fighting through the dust on the windows.
“I’m going to come back,” Odette told him, “to see your kitchen when it’s finished.”
“I hope you’ll come back often. I’d be glad to show you the rest of the house.”
“You go on and show Lena. Me, I’m going to walk on home.”
“I’ll take you home, Grandmama.”
“No, you stay awhile.” However casual her tone, there was a sly look in her eye. “I want to walk, then it’ll be time for my nap.” As she started to rise, Declan got up, offered his hand. And made her smile. “You got a pretty manner about you. You come back and see me when you’re not busy. I’ll make you some sauce patate—potato stew—before you get so skinny your clothes fall off your bones.”
“I got the phones hooked up.” He dug in his pocket for a scrap of paper, found a pencil in his shirt pocket and wrote down the number. “If you need anything, just call.”
“Yes, indeed, a very pretty way.” She turned her cheek up, inviting his kiss. When he walked her to the door, she gestured for him to lean down again. “I approve of you sparking my Lena. You’ll have a care with her, and most don’t.”
“Is that your way of telling me I don’t have a chance with you, Miss Odette?”
She laughed and patted his cheek. “Oh. If I was thirty years younger, she’d have a run for her money. Go on now, and show her your house.”
He watched her walk by the trees with the spirit bottles dangling.
“You like my grandmama,” Lena said from the parlor doorway.
“I’m love-struck. She’s wonderful. Listen, it’s a long walk to her place. You ought to—”
“If she wants to walk, she walks. There’s no stopping her from doing anything.” She wandered to the front door to stand beside him. “Look there, it’s Rufus come to walk her home. I swear, that dog has radar when it comes to her.”
“I kept hoping he’d come around.” He turned to Lena. “Bring you with him. I started out two nights this week to go to your place, and talked myself out of it.”
“Why’s that?”
“There’s persistence, and there’s stalking.” He reached up to twirl her hair around his finger. “I figured if I could hold out until you came by here, you wouldn’t consider getting a restraining order.”
“If I want a man to go away, I tell him to go away.”
“Do men always do what you tell them?”
Her lips curved into that cat smile that made him want to lick at the little black mole. “Mostly. You going to show me this big house of yours, cher?”
“Yeah.” He caught her chin in his hand, kissed her. “Sure. By the way.” Now he took her hand as he led her toward the staircase. “I have Miss Odette’s permission to spark you.”
“Seems you need my permission, not hers.”
“I intend to charm you so completely, we’ll slip right by that step. Fabulous staircase, isn’t it?”
“It is.” She trailed a red-tipped finger along the banister. “Very grand, this place of yours, Declan. And from what I’ve seen of it, I realize you’re not a rich lawyer after all.”
“Ex-lawyer. And I don’t follow you.”
“You got enough to put this place back, to keep it—you do mean to keep it?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Then you’re not rich. Step up from rich. You’re wealthy. Is that the case?”
“Well, money’s not a problem. It doesn’t buy happiness, either.”
She stopped on the landing and laughed. “Oh, cher, y
ou think that, you just don’t know where to shop.”
“Anytime you want to help me spend some of it.”
“Maybe.” She looked down over the banister toward the grand foyer. “You’ll be needing furniture eventually. There’s some places I know.”
“You have a cousin?”
“One or two.” She lifted her eyebrows at the noise and cursing from the end of the long hall.
“Plumber,” Declan explained. “I had him start on the master bath. It was . . . well, it was an embarrassment of avocado. If you know anyone who wants some really ugly bathroom fixtures, let me know.”
He started to steer her away from the door of what he now thought of as his ghost room. But she turned the knob, opened it. Declan found himself holding his breath as she stepped inside.
“Cold in here.” She hugged her arms, but couldn’t stop the shiver. “You ought to try to save the wallpaper. It’s a pretty pattern. Violets and rosebuds.”
She was halfway to the gallery doors when she stopped, and the shiver became a shudder. The feeling that poured into her was grief. “It’s a sad room, isn’t it? It needs light. And life.”
“There’s a ghost. A woman. I think she was killed here.”
“Do you?” She turned back to him. Her face was a little pale, her eyes a little wide. “It doesn’t feel . . . violent. Just sad. Empty and sad.”
Her voice had thickened. Without thinking, he went in, went to her. “Are you all right?”
“Just cold.”
He reached down to rub her arms, and at the contact, felt a quick shock.
With a half-laugh, she stepped back. “I don’t think that’s what Grandmama meant by you sparking me, cher.”
“It’s this room. There’s something strange in this room.”
“Ghosts don’t worry me. Shouldn’t worry you. They can’t hurt you.” But she walked to the door, had to fight a need to rush her steps.
She wandered through the other bedrooms, but experienced none of that grief, the dread, the dragging loneliness that had driven her out of the first.
At the door to Declan’s room, she smiled. “Well, not so rough in here. You got taste, cher.” She poked her head in the bathroom, where workmen clanged and cursed. “Which is more than I can say for whoever did this bathroom. That you there, Tripadoe? Your mama know you eat with that mouth?”
She leaned on the doorjamb, spent a few minutes chatting with his plumbers. And Declan could stand back and just look at her.
It was pathetic, he told himself, this puppy-dog crush he’d developed.
And when she glanced at him over her shoulder, he felt the jolt right down to the soles of his feet.
“Why don’t I show you the ballroom. It’s going to be the showcase.”
“Sure, I’d like to see that.” But when they started out, she gestured toward the stairs. “What’s up there?”
“More empty rooms. Storage, some of the servants’ quarters.”
“Let’s have a look.”
“It’s nothing special.” He made a grab for her hand, but she was already going up.
“Can you get to the belvedere from here?” she asked. “I used to look over at that and imagine standing up there.”
“It’s easier from the—don’t!”
His sharp order had her hand freezing on the dull brass knob of the nursery. “What’s wrong? You got a woman chained in here? All your secrets locked inside here, cher?”
“No, it’s just . . .” He could feel the panic rising, burning the base of his throat. “There’s something wrong with that room.”
“Something wrong with most of them,” she tossed back, and opened the door.
He was right. It hit her immediately, that same throbbing sense of grief and loss and loneliness. She saw walls and floor and windows, dust and neglect. And felt as if her heart were breaking.
Even as she started to speak, the cold swept in. She felt it blow over her skin like breath, pass through her hair like fingers.
“It’s the center,” she declared, though she was far from sure what she meant, or how she knew. “Can you feel it? Can you?”
He swayed in the doorway. Bearing down, he dug his fingers into the jamb. His fear was unreasonable, spearing like knives into bones. It was his house, he reminded himself grimly. His goddamn house. He took a step inside, then a second.
The room spun. He heard a scream, saw Lena’s face, the alarm that leaped over it. He thought he saw her mouth move, form his name. Then his vision grayed, white spots dancing through the mist.
“Declan. Here now, cher. Here, darling.”
Someone was stroking his hair, his face. He felt lips brush over his. He opened his eyes to a blur, so simply closed them again.
“No, you don’t.” She tapped his cheeks now with fingers that trembled lightly. He’d gone down like a tree under the ax, right after his face had drained of color and his eyes had rolled back white. “Open your eyes.”
“What the hell happened?”
“You fainted.”
His eyes opened now, focused on her face. Mortification warred with a vague nausea. “Excuse me, men don’t faint. We do, on occasion, pass out or lose consciousness. But we do not faint.”
The breath she let out was a shudder of relief. He may have cracked his head, she thought, but he’d come to with his wits about him. “I beg your pardon. You passed out. Cold. Hit the floor hard enough to bounce your head off it.” She leaned down again, brushed her lips over the raw scrape on his forehead. “You’re going to have a bruise, bébé. I couldn’t catch you. I guess if I had, you’d’ve taken us both down.”
She had managed to roll him over, and now stroked her fingers over his pale cheeks. “You do a lot of passing out?”
“Usually I have to drink myself into oblivion first, which I haven’t done since college. Look, at the risk of embarrassing myself twice in a matter of minutes, I really have to get the hell out of this room.”
“Okay. All right. Can you stand? I don’t think I can haul you up, cher. You’re a pretty big guy.”
“Yeah.” He got to his knees, tried to catch his breath, but it was clogging again. It felt like a semi had parked on his chest, and his heart was tripping to try to find a beat. He staggered up, stumbled.
Lena wrapped an arm around his waist, took as much of his weight as she could manage. “One step, two steps. We’ll just get you downstairs so you can lie down.”
“It’s okay. I’ll be okay.” His ears were ringing. The minute he got out of the room, he headed for the steps, then just sank down and put his head between his knees. “Jesus.”
“There now, sweetheart.” She stroked his hair.
“Close that door, would you? Just close it.”
She hurried back, slammed it shut. “You get your breath back, then we’ll get you down and into bed.”
“I’ve been wanting to hear you say that since the first time I laid eyes on you.”
The clutching in her belly eased a bit. “You’re coming back, aren’t you?”
“Better.” He could breathe again, and the nausea was fading. “I’ll just have to go beat someone up, or shoot some small mammal so I can regain my manhood.”
“Let me see your face.” She tipped his head back, studied him. “Still a little pale, but you got some color again. I bet Grandmama’s right. You don’t eat. What’d you eat today, cher?”
“Wheaties. Breakfast of champions.” He managed a wan smile. “Doesn’t seem to have worked.”
“I’m going to fix you a sandwich.”
“Really?” The simple pleasure of the idea trickled through him. “You’re going to cook for me?”
“A sandwich isn’t cooking.”
“In my world it is. Lena, that room . . .”
“We’ll talk about that—after you get something in your stomach.”
The pickings were sparse. One look in the secondhand refrigerator currently gracing the dining room had Lena sending Declan one long, pitying look.
“How old are you? Twelve?”
“I’m a guy,” he replied with a shrug. “Guys’ grocery habits never age. I’ve got peanut butter to go with that jelly.” He glanced around the room. “Somewhere.”
He also had one lonely slice of deli ham, two eggs, some anemic-looking cheese and a half bag of pre-cut salad. “Looks like I’m going to cook for you after all. Where’s the stove?”
“Right here.” He tapped the top of a microwave.
“Well, we’ll make do. Bowl? Knife? Fork?”
“Ah . . .” He rooted through the box of his current kitchen supplies and came up with the plastic ware.
“Honey, this is just sad. Sit yourself down, and Lena’ll take care of you. This one time,” she added.
He hitched onto a sawhorse and watched her beat some eggs, shred in the ham, the cheese, sprinkle in some of the contents of the salad bag.
“You got any herbs, cher? Any spices?”
“I got salt and pepper. That counts,” he muttered when she sighed. “Explorers discovered whole continents for salt.”
“Grew up with a cook, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. So?”
“What did you do when you moved out on your own?”
“Takeout, delivery and the microwave. With those three things, no man need starve.”
She set the bowl in the microwave, programmed it, then turned back to him. “Living out here, you’d best hire yourself another cook.”
“Name your price.”
“You’re a funny man, Declan.” His color was good now, his eyes clear. The knot that had been in her belly since he’d pitched over loosened. “How come you don’t have a woman?”
“I had one, but it turned out I didn’t really want her.”
“That so?” She opened the oven when it beeped, whisked the egg mixture around, then programmed it again. “What happened?”
“Remy didn’t tell you?”
“He doesn’t tell me everything.”
“I was engaged. I called it off three weeks before the wedding, which makes me, you know, a cad. A lot of people in Boston are still cursing my name.”
He was trying to make it a joke, she thought, but wasn’t quite pulling it off. “Is that why you left?”
