She glared at him. They’d already gone a few rounds about the fact that he’d let her sleep for three hours in front of the fire. He’d found it difficult to defend his decision since he wasn’t at all sure why he’d done such a thing. Being attracted to this prickly, sarcastic, hotheaded witch was one thing, but making sure she’d be stranded for the night with him was such a ridiculous strategy that he was startled to have given in to it.
He’d watched her struggle to pay attention to his words as the first wavelets of sleep began washing over her, then seen her head nod in approval of what he was saying even as he knew she was miles away in dreamland. And at first, he’d just meant to let her nap for a few minutes.
He had watched her sleep. Ruddy shadows and warm gold highlights had flickered over her face in the dancing light of the fire. Without her usual anger and defensiveness animating it, her face had looked like that of a teenager, the curves of her lips parted just enough for breath. Violet watercolor smudges had tinted the delicate skin around her eyes. She’d tucked her hands beneath her cheek, and the small, birdlike bones of her wrists had highlighted her aura of fragility.
He nearly snorted out loud, catching himself in the middle of this ridiculous reverie. Addy Tyler was about as fragile as a lead pipe, and she bent as much as one, too. It had been a battle every step of the way to get her to set foot in this house. He didn’t know why it mattered so much to him that she understand what she was giving up with her obstinate refusal to have anything to do with her great-aunt’s estate. He only knew that he’d planned to drag her to the house screaming for the police all the way if necessary.
The last thing he’d expected was to see this stubborn, un-sympathetic woman brought to the edge of tears by an old family portrait, an emotion that he knew surprised her as much as it did him.
He was beginning to wonder if that momentary glimpse of softness would turn out to be his downfall.
Of course, since at the moment she was only speaking to him when absolutely necessary, there didn’t look to be much chance of the two of them falling anywhere together.
On the upside, at least she wasn’t yelling at him anymore. It was almost peaceful right now, sitting at the same table and sharing a meal.
“This is very—” he began.
Silverware clattered as Addy threw her knife and fork onto her plate and shoved her unfinished meal away, an expression of disgust twisting her face.
Perhaps he’d spoken too soon.
“Was she insane?” she demanded. “I have a right to know whether there’s a history of mental derangement in my family. It might affect my decision to have children someday.” She threw herself back in her chair and crossed her arms on her chest. “Don’t give me that look. I’m being about as rational as good old Great-Aunt Adeline was in her will.”
He didn’t think this was the right time to mention that Adeline had considered Susannah’s branch of the family tree to be the unstable one. He’d settle for a smaller measure of the truth. “Your great-aunt was in her right mind until the day she died.”
“Says you,” she said, knowing she was displaying the maturity level of a two-year-old. She blamed her crankiness on leftover sexual tension. Waking up to what had at first seemed a continuation of a sensual daydream, she’d been overwhelmed by the slow pulse of sensation throughout her body. Her memory of Spencer’s description of the will’s terms, and her anger, were life preservers she’d clung to with the desperate grasp of a person swept overboard.
She was hanging on still.
“She was nuts.”
“Maybe she was just trying to make sure that you were, um…” Spencer paused for a moment. Was he hesitating? “That you were taken care of.”
Of all the insulting… “I don’t need a husband to take care of me.” She tried to keep her tone below that of a shout as she jerked out of her chair and stood next to the table. She didn’t think she’d been successful. “I take care of myself just fine, thank you. Where’s the kitchen?”
“All the way at the back of the house.”
She collected her tableware and squelched the thought that she was being rude beyond belief, leaving her host sitting at the table, finishing the meal that he had made for the two of them. Hey, at least she was clearing her own dishes.
At the end of the long hall, she found the kitchen, an enormous cavern of a room that ran most of the width of the back of the house. The faint odors—tomato and spicy sausage—of the Italian dinner Spencer had put together while she’d slept still lingered in the air. The room seemed to have been built before the advent of dishwashers, so she dumped her plate in the sink, determined to turn her back on the washing up and use some of her involuntary jail time here to explore the house.
She got as far as the door to the hall.
“A slave to my upbringing,” she muttered two minutes later, up to her elbows in soapsuds and dirty dishes. The freedom to wander the house wasn’t worth listening to her mother’s voice in the back of her head, haranguing her for leaving the cook to do the cleaning. She’d tossed the pots and pans from the stove into the sink for good measure. No sense doing a half-assed job.
The house was old enough to give her fair warning when Spencer followed her into the kitchen minutes later, floorboards creaking from under the rug in the hall. His footsteps in the kitchen were silent. They’d both ditched their wet, snow-caked shoes soon after entering the house.
But she didn’t need to hear him to know when he stood behind her, too close. She could see his reflection in the window above the sink, but more, she felt the warmth of him radiating into her. Imagined his breath stirring her hair. Pictured it until she could feel the strands stirring and then had a hard time keeping her wet hands from grabbing the back of her neck to still the shivers she felt there.
“Did you want something, Reed?” She rapped the question out like a drill sergeant, trying to shatter her awareness of him standing behind her, breathing.
His arm sneaked into the corner of her vision as he reached past her to put his plate on the counter to the side of the sink. As she opened her mouth to snarl at him again, she felt a light weight drop onto her shoulder. A dish towel. At the same moment, Spencer snaked his hands down the length of her arms until his fingers tangled with hers in the hot water. He tugged her hands up.
“I’ll finish up here.” His voice was normal, denying the intimacy of their position. She was caged between his arms, between the solid strength of his body pressed against her back and the edge of the counter against her hips. She shivered and knew he felt it.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Those who cook don’t clean.”
“Addy.” He let go, dragged the towel off her shoulder and wrapped it around her hands, then turned her to face him. He ducked down a little to capture her downturned eyes with his own. She stopped avoiding them. “I’m sorry you’re stuck here for the night. But since you are, you’re my guest, and guests don’t scrub pots.”
He smiled at her and her stomach tripped and fell down an elevator shaft. Did his eyes have to be so damn blue?
“Besides—” he gave her a little push toward the door to the hall “—I know you’re dying to take a look around.”
She stuttered to a halt and turned back to him, hands still cocooned in the towel. “I like it better when you’re not being so nice to me.”
He covered the smile well. “I know.”
She threw the towel at his head.
Catching the cloth one-handed, he turned to the sink with sublime indifference to her scowl. He waggled fingers in the air over his shoulder.
“Run along. I’ll find you when I’m done here.”
She stuck her tongue out at his back.
“That’s very mature.”
Damn. She’d forgotten that he could see her in the window’s reflection. Time to get out before she made even more of an ass out of herself.
She ignored the central staircase for the time being, its two sets of stairs crossing like departm
ent-store escalators in the middle, one coming from the front and one from the back of the house. There were still more rooms on the ground floor that she’d yet to venture into.
The house faced west and was split in half by the massive staircase, with rooms opening to the north and the south off the side halls that ran the length of the building. The library butted up against the kitchen, at the rear of the north side of the house, with the tiny tea closet behind the next door as she walked slowly toward the front of the house. Another bathroom came next, this one done in shades of cream and palest gold.
The last room, at the very front of the house, was long enough that two sets of intricately carved wooden doors that slid into recesses in the walls opened onto it from the hall. She entered at the near set.
She felt as if she’d stepped into a Jane Austen novel.
It was a music room. Or at least that was what she supposed you would call it. Mossy green walls imposed an atmosphere of meditative calm, with framed copies of what looked like original music scores scattered here and there. At the front of the room, where light from the windows would fall upon it as the sun set, was a massive ebony grand piano. A harp, gilded and taller than she was, stood in the middle of the room near a clustered arrangement of chairs and sofas. Balancing the room at the near end was another piano, this one smaller and oddly constructed.
A small, framed black-and-white photograph just inside the door caught her eye. The image was of a young woman in a long, dark skirt and a pale blouse, cradling a violin in her arms. She wondered if the violin was the same as the one she’d seen in the hall earlier.
Then she wondered if the woman in the photograph was her great-aunt.
“My grandfather saw her play once.” Spencer spoke from the doorway. Not startled because she’d somehow known the moment he entered the room, Addy stared at the photo.
“Great-Aunt Adeline?” It felt embarrassing to admit that she didn’t recognize her. She tried willing some sort of recognition beyond that of similar bone structure. If this woman was a part of her family, shouldn’t she feel more of a connection with her image?
“Yes, with the CSO. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra.” At least Spencer didn’t seem to think it too odd, her not knowing what her own great-aunt looked like.
“I’m not an idiot, you know. I know what the CSO is.” Though, truth be told, she would probably have had to think about it for a bit. Highbrow culture wasn’t exactly her thing.
“He said she was absolutely luminous. That he couldn’t take his eyes off her, onstage.”
“So why did she quit playing?” She turned away from the photo and leaned against the wall, watching him. He’d unrolled his sleeves but had not rebuttoned the cuffs.
Spencer shrugged. “I don’t know. Grandfather said that years later, he and his wife would invite her to join them in their box at the symphony and that she always turned them down. Every time. As far as he knew, after she stopped playing, she never attended another performance in her life.”
“Strange.”
“Sad.”
They stood in companionable silence for a bit. For no good reason, Addy found herself sighing a little, so she straightened and looked around the room again. Spencer blinked and seemed to shake off an invisible net of distraction. They walked together to the piano.
“Do you play?” she asked, tilting her head to look at him. She could see the curve of his cheek rise as he smiled.
“Ten years of lessons as a kid,” he said and laughed. “You would think that I could.”
“Twins, separated at birth,” she intoned with an emcee’s exaggerated voice. She ran her palm along the sleek wood of the propped piano lid. Catching his confused look, she continued, “I don’t think I made it through ten years, but it was a lot. And all I can play today is the first page of the theme to The Pink Panther.”
“Isn’t that just the same four chords over and over again? Da-dunh, da-dah. Da-dunh, da-dah. And so on?” he teased from the opposite side of the baby grand.
“Hey, put up or shut up,” she said, laughing. “What can you play?”
“Aside from ‘Chopsticks’?” He slid onto the piano bench, stared at the keyboard for a moment and then started playing a ragtime melody with one hand, fumbling occasionally for a note. Thirty seconds later, he stopped and she applauded the effort with enthusiasm. He scooted off the end of the bench near her, took a quick bow and grinned. “‘The Entertainer,’ Scott Joplin. First page, right hand only.”
“Congratulations. You’ve got me beat.” She waved a hand at the rest of the room. “Got any other masterpieces in you?”
He shook his head. “Are you kidding? The harp is for girls—mind you, this is how I thought at ten years old—and only old people listen to the harpsichord.” She guessed that was the odd-looking piano at the other end, glad she hadn’t embarrassed herself by not knowing what it was. “The piano wasn’t the trumpet or the sax, but it was still vaguely cool.”
“My dad was a sax player,” she said. She felt the words settle like a blanket over the room, muffling the brief burst of good humor between the two of them. She regretted it, but couldn’t resist the urge to talk about her dad in this house. This house, into which he’d never once been welcomed. She stared at her hands. Her fingers had twisted themselves awkwardly together. She forced them to separate and hang empty at her sides. “I heard him play in a club when I was six.” The memory flooded her, as immediate as ever, and she tilted her head back, blinking to clear her eyes. “He was amazing. His music was like honey on fire. Lick-your-fingers sweet and white-hot at the same time.”
“I’m envious.”
She looked at Spencer. Weight resting on one hip, hands resting in his pockets, he stood rooted in one place, as if he would stand there until the world split into a million pieces and time stopped, just to listen to her speak. That she felt comfortable doing so was the surprise.
“She never let him set foot in this house. Not once,” she said. The many-paned windows looking out onto the sweep of the snow-covered front lawn were a step away. She stroked the velvet nap of the heavy, floor-length drapes. She meant her laugh to be harsh. It wasn’t. “You’d think the music would have been something they had in common.”
The sharp edges of the lead mullions created a diamond pattern that wavered before her. Stupid tears. She wondered if she could blame it on PMS, which sometimes made her weepy at the most ridiculous moments. A knuckle under her lashes erased any trace of moisture before she faced the room, and Spencer, again.
“Wanna show me the rest of the house?” She brushed past the intimate moment as if it hadn’t occurred. Something that was becoming a habit with her and this man. Neither of them had spoken a word about the kiss they’d shared earlier. And it had been much more than just a kiss, if she was honest.
She started to leave the room. A sharp tug at her elbow spun her around.
“Not this time.” Spencer stood over her. He gripped her shoulders and gave her a little shake. “I can see what you’re doing, what you’re thinking, as if I were inside your head, Addy. Do you think I don’t notice it? How you shut down completely as soon as you catch yourself talking to me like a normal human being?”
Tearing herself out of his hands, she left the room.
“You can just stay out of my head,” she said, throwing the words over her shoulder.
“Your great-aunt gave up her music.” He followed her into the hall entryway. The man couldn’t let a damn thing go without having the last word. She ignored him.
He kept talking.
“I don’t know why she did it, but whatever her reasons were, she never played again. Even here, in her own home, she kept this room closed up.” She heard him sigh. Watched her fingertips as they skated over the checkerboard inlay of a small table against the wall.
“Maybe she was afraid of your father—if not for herself, then for what he might represent for your mother.”
This was a bit much. No one should make exc
uses for her great-aunt’s actions. No one could.
“And maybe it just wasn’t proper.” She looked him straight in the eye. Listen up, buddy. “Her niece got herself pregnant by a guy who had to work for a living, a musician who played in bars, not symphony halls. Instead of the grand society wedding, there was a quick ceremony at City Hall. And instead of gossiping proudly about the match with all her rich friends, Great-Aunt Adeline pretended it never happened. That my parents simply didn’t exist.”
“You may find this hard to believe—” he was angry now, she could see, blue eyes narrowed and alive with energy, both hands open in the air as if he’d like to reach out and strangle her “—but to a woman like your great-aunt, what was proper, as you put it, was important. She grew up in a different world and she believed she’d been taught what was right.”
“Still with the excuses,” she said and threw her hands up. “You know what I was taught by my parents, Reed?” She pointed a finger at him, stopped herself from poking him with it. “That nothing matters more than love. What you love. Who you love. That’s it. All that counts in this life.”
Before he could open his mouth, she raised her hands in surrender.
“Listen, Reed.” She shut her mouth and shrugged, caught without words for a moment. She went with the first sentence that floated to the surface. “I don’t want to fight with you.”
He looked blank for a moment and then began what she could only describe as laughing his ass off. After a moment, she grinned with him.
“Contrary to appearances,” she admitted. He might be a bit stiff and spend way too much money on his wardrobe, but at least the guy had a sense of humor. “It’s midnight. I’ve got to get up in five hours, less if I want to dig out my truck instead of calling a cab, and I’m already tired at the thought. So why don’t you give me the ten-cent tour of this house that’ll never be mine and we’ll call it a night.”
Sleeping Arrangements (Silhouette Desire) Page 5
