Nick Tawes stood a few paces behind them.
She’d been so caught up in her conversation with Rupa that she hadn’t heard the elevator descend.
“None of your business,” she said rudely.
Rupa dived into the library, hiding.
Lanie sighed. That was the problem with aggression: the wrong targets suffered. “Are you leaving now?”
“It depends.”
The silence drew out. Even as Lanie recognized that breaking the silence meant she lost the power play, she couldn’t help herself. “What does it depend on?”
“You.”
She blinked.
He smiled, just a little, wry and inviting her to respond. “I’d like a tour of the museum. A garden has to continue a house. They should be in conversation with one another. I can wander around the museum on my own, but as you’re the curator, I thought you might want to tell me how you’re aiming to present things. What you want to achieve.”
What she wanted to achieve was for him to leave, and not return. But that was a discussion she needed to hold with Mrs. Smith. Meantime, as unsettling as the thought of guiding him around was, having him roam unsupervised and uncontrolled through her domain was worse.
“I’ll just explain things to Rupa.” Lanie indicated the library door through which Rupa had made good her escape.
“I’ll wait.”
Chapter 3
If you’ve seen one formal dining room, you’ve seen them all. Nick spared the room a cursory glance—red velvet curtains, white linen, polished wood—and concentrated on Lanie. “I’d like to apologize for what I said on the roof.”
“Which part, Mr. Tawes?”
He admired the biting coolness of her response. “The part where I threatened your employment. I don’t have any influence over the owner of the museum, and even if I did, I wouldn’t use it to destabilize your career.”
“To get me fired?” Glimmering mockery showed in the glance she slanted his way. “Mrs. Smith tends to make up her own mind on such matters.”
“Ah. As with the roof garden?”
Lanie’s mouth, perfectly outlined in challenging red lipstick, compressed.
“Sorry.” He was meant to be apologizing, not antagonizing her. He truly regretted his uncharacteristic behavior on the roof. The reality was, she struck sparks, and not just from his temper. Metaphorically, she had stay away signs posted, and perversely, that made him want to get closer. She made him want to get closer.
He shook his head. He wasn’t ten years old, to respond by teasing a girl he liked—and intruding into her life and work wasn’t teasing, anyway. The roof garden was serious: peripheral to his life, other than the television program, but central to hers, impinging as it did on both her work and home. He would do better. “I’d like to work with you on the roof garden. And my name is Nick.”
Lanie walked around the corner of the dining table, putting it between them and leaving him stranded by the window.
Body language and interpersonal skills weren’t his strength, but he could recognize a bad sign when he saw it.
“Do you want to start over?” she asked.
“I don’t think anyone can start over.”
She looked at him properly then, no longer avoiding his eyes as she’d done since he’d invited her to work with him on the roof garden.
“People, relationships, they build on what’s gone before.” He rolled his shoulders, uncomfortable with the twist in the conversation. How the hell had he gotten into discussing life philosophy with her?
“We’re the sum of all that has come before.” The idea seemed familiar to her. Her tone was musing, even sad, before it strengthened. “We have choices, though.”
He waited, wary.
She smiled at him, bright, cheerful and insincere, and retreated into the role of tour guide. “In an Edwardian house, they’d have filled the dining room with flowers, in season. The vases in this cabinet show the range from crystal and silver through to cheaper memento china from seaside visits or royal happenings.” She lightly touched the glass-fronted cabinet beside her.
The role of tour guide warded him off as effectively as a ten foot pole. Nor could he shake her from it as he trailed her from formal room to formal room and up the grand staircase. He wondered if he should even try. They were professional colleagues, and that, fleetingly. He ought to remember that his time in England would be as minimal as he could cut it. He’d apologized: leave it at that.
Climbing the staircase, he admired its proportions. “The carving of the balustrade is excellent.” An intricate pattern of ivy wove up with them.
Lanie’s mouth softened and she trailed her hand fondly along the banister. “It takes a lot of polishing.”
The pit of his stomach tightened. Her reaction to his praise of the house was that of a woman in love. Just so would she touch a lover.
But her words were practical. They shifted his picture of her, from the glamour of her appearance to an appreciation of the work involved in running the museum. She’d have to love the place to put in the hours needed to keep it looking as good as it did since he doubted a small museum had the money for an extensive staff. He certainly hadn’t seen them.
“Does living above the job mean you put in extra hours?”
“Are you wondering how early in the morning you can start work on the roof?” she countered.
“No.” He raised his hands in a gesture of surrender and not guilty. “Genuine curiosity.”
She paused on the landing. “The master bedroom is to the left, here, but I think the room for the lady of the house ties in more with a garden.”
He thought she was avoiding the question. She surprised him.
“I’d work extra hours at the museum no matter where I lived—there’s so much to do—but eliminating commuting time definitely helps. I’m lucky to have the flat. I’d be sharing, otherwise. Rents are so high in London.” She broke off as they entered the distinctly feminine bedroom. “Where do you live?”
He’d trespassed into her private life with his question. Turnabout was fair. “I have an office in Dubai.” The wallpaper distracted him. It seemed to heave with life, emphatically green, with botanically improbable flowers dotted through it.
“It’s William and Morris.” Lanie answered his interest. “Reproduction obviously. The original wallpaper would have been saturated in arsenic, given the amount of green in the print.”
“Arsenic?”
She crossed over to the canopied bed and sat on it. For a museum curator, she was casual with its objects. Still, her femininity suited the romantic feel of the room. She crossed her legs. “Arsenic was a major part of the green dye they used.”
Lanie observed Nick as he prowled the room. It had been furnished as a romantic retreat for the lady of the house. A bower, to use the old-fashioned term. Frills and lace, soft colors and chestnut wood predominated. It was a garden brought indoors and re-imagined, free of insects and mud, but filled with flowers that wove through the green print of the wallpaper, covered the upholstery of the chairs in pink and cream, and gave the fabric of the canopy bed a smothering, overwhelming profusion of peonies.
Against this backdrop of floral femininity, Nick’s lean, muscled figure was a confident assertion of masculinity. He should have looked wrong, out of place. Instead, he presented a wicked fantasy as a dream lover.
Lanie bounced up from the bed, coughed to hide her sudden embarrassment, and smoothed the counterpane.
With Nick Tawes, she was flying blind. Last night, she’d mistaken him for a builder, a fleeting disruption to her life, and so, had dismissed him. She hadn’t done even basic research on him. You could learn so much about a person online. As soon as he departed, she’d look him up, but that wouldn’t help her now.
Now, she was dependent on a cold reading of him, and he wasn’t giving much away.
On the roof, he’d been absorbed in his work, and protective of it. He’d warned her not to get in his way.
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But then he’d retracted; not his determination, but the threat.
Her best option for stopping the roof garden remained changing Mrs. Smith’s mind. However, she couldn’t let go of the puzzle that was Nick. And despite her frosty and displeased “Mr. Tawes”, she did think of him as Nick. He seemed to have bypassed all her defenses to intrigue her.
In her theatre act, she’d steered clear of people like him. They were too self-contained. The clues they gave about themselves were inadvertent, since they refused to engage in the process of getting to know a person.
Open-ended questions and observations that flattered and equivocated, leaving the other person to fill in the gaps, worked with people eager to talk about themselves. She doubted Nick would be so receptive to manipulation. In fact, he’d probably be suspicious.
Just look at how he’d evaded a simple question on where he lived—his office was in Dubai. His office! and he’d dared to imply that she was odd to be living above her work. Ask him where he lived and he answered with where he worked.
A workaholic?
She assessed the air of vitality he exuded. His tanned skin and easy movements spoke of constant exercise. He didn’t just plan gardens, she’d bet he worked in them. His hands… although clean, they weren’t pampered and soft. He worked with his hands.
An unwanted shiver slid down her spine.
A man’s hands weren’t a private thing—until you imagined them touching you.
Lanie blamed the romantic atmosphere of the bedroom, and fled it. Opposite, just across the hallway, was the room Rupa wanted to reinvent. Lanie opened its door and grimaced at the stale air that met her. Rooms needed not only to be aired, but to be used, or they grew stale.
She opened the window, or tried to. Old windows stuck.
“May I?” Nick stood back, respecting her personal space.
She thumped the wooden frame of the window with the heel of her hand, then wriggled the handle. Nothing. “Thanks.” She moved grudgingly aside.
The window resisted momentarily, then gave into his forceful push. He turned and surveyed the room. “A spare room?”
“At the moment.” She could take him upstairs, show him the attics, but as with the kitchen, she didn’t think he really needed to see them. This tour was a stopgap. She intended to get his roof garden project cancelled. Nonetheless, she was curious. “What do you think of the house? What sort of garden would match it?”
He leaned back, butt against the window sill, hands braced either side of him. “Obviously, an Edwardian garden. The museum is like a stage set.”
She straightened. That was how she saw the exhibits.
“A house in which people, a family, have lived in over the years acquires a different feel. Compromises are made. It happens with gardens, too. One person’s vision is overlaid by another person’s need. Competing, changing interests are traceable in the end result.” He looked at the large wardrobe in the corner of the room, the shadows under the iron bedstead. “There are no ghosts here.”
Her muscles spasmed, cramping in shock. She hadn’t expected the comment, hadn’t thought he recognized her. “What do you mean?”
He raised both hands and let them drop in a very Middle Eastern gesture. “There are no memories here. The rooms are filled with mementos, but they have no memories attached to them. No one looks at a chair in the drawing room and remembers their grandma who used to sit in it. No ghosts.”
“That makes it peaceful,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow. “Do you believe in ghosts?” His tone dripped scorn.
“Me? No. Lots of people do, though.”
“When you die, you die.”
“Uncompromising.” But his attitude steadied her. “I do believe in restless spirits, but from the living, not the dead. Sometimes people aren’t ready to accept a loved one’s passing. They unsettle things since they’re unable to accept reality. They try to hold onto a memory and make it live.”
He released his grip on the window sill. She’d caught his interest.
She shrugged. “Sometimes it’s the other way around. A loved one prepares for their passing and what they set in place—be it a will, arrangements, conversations they’ve had—has an effect beyond their life. In a sense, they remain a restless spirit, influencing events after their death. Assembling objects to create a fantasy house, a museum, strips away memories, ties, guilt, and old griefs. It becomes impersonal.”
“That’s what I couldn’t pin down.” He straightened, hands sliding into his pockets, musing. “The museum looks like a private home, but it’s actually public space.”
“A stage set,” she agreed. “The stronger the illusion, the more visitors feel that they’re both entering a home and going back in time.”
A frown drew his black eyebrows fractionally closer. He stared at the wardrobe, but she doubted he saw it. Then his attention returned to her. “I can’t do that. There’s no way a roof garden can replicate a proper Edwardian garden. There simply isn’t the space, and I’m constrained by weight limits. I don’t want to strain the structure of the building. I’ll have to sketch the illusion of an Edwardian garden—key features and a sense of the era. What is your theme for the house?”
“I didn’t put together the collection.”
He nodded, but waited.
The empty spare room gave her no answer. She walked out and into the master bedroom that she’d thought to cut from the tour. In some ways, it was more grandiose than the formal rooms downstairs.
Royal blue curtains framed the large windows and the color repeated in the bed covering. Fully carpeted, the floor’s dark red Axminster pattern clashed with the blue. Imposing furniture brought what could have been a separate dressing room into the main bedroom. Massive walnut wardrobes and tallboys created that alcove. Brass lights, watercolors and scattered books attempted to humanize the space. A red brocade reading chair stood between the window and bed.
The room was a statement of male power and possession. An old flintlock pistol hung above the marble fireplace. A whiskey decanter, filled with colored water, stood near the bed.
She looked at Nick as he stood in the doorway. “What does this room say to you?”
He gave it an assessing look. “Too cluttered.”
“Mmm.”
“Expensive, privileged. Staged.”
“In some ways, an Edwardian house was. We don’t always recognize it in the formal rooms. We expect them to put on a show for guests. But this bedroom, to me, it’s almost more of a display piece than the dining and drawing rooms. Edwardians, like all of us, told themselves stories. Unlike the Victorians, while Edwardians liked formality, they allowed for comfort. However, life remained uncertain. This was the era before antibiotics. Death came suddenly. A sore throat could lead to scarlet fever. They bolstered their confidence by showing off their wealth and social status. Hygiene was important, cleanliness. You can see the bathroom, if you like.”
“I’ll pass.”
She nodded, although the bathroom was the one room she’d put together. Horry Smith, who’d assembled the collection and fitted out the house, hadn’t been interested in bathrooms, so she’d sparsely furnished one of the plainer, and hence, more timeless, bathrooms with a medicine kit from the Edwardian era, old bottles and tins of patent medicine, a shaving kit and a hooked rug.
A man’s wool robe that had been flung with artful carelessness over the back of a chair in the dressing room alcove, had fallen. She crossed the room and retrieved it from the floor.
Nick strode to the window. He was forever looking out windows. Escaping? He turned to her. “What did you want this room to show me?”
She draped the robe on the chair back. “You asked me what the theme is for the Horry Museum. It is about the Edwardians, but it’s also something more.” She paused. He’d gotten to her, provoked her by his interest to share more than she’d meant to. “The museum is a fantasy of comfort, that life can be settled and safe. Just as the Edwardian
s fortressed their homes with little luxuries, warding against uncertainty, people now like to imagine the Edwardian era as a time before the First World War, a time of peace and plenty, but lots of people were starving in the East End of London, struggling throughout the world.”
“You’re aware it’s fiction, yet you present it.” Interest rather than criticism marked his tone.
“It’s not fiction.” She realigned the dressing table set: hairbrush, comb, bottle of hair tonic added for giggles. The antique bottle promised to cure baldness. “This is how people lived.”
“Avoiding reality?” No hiding his disapproval now.
“Coping with it,” she riposted.
Silence. Light from the window showed the strong lines of his face, the slight frown of concentration as he studied her face across the room. Slowly, he said. “So, the house constructs an idyll, and in doing so, shuts out reality.” He walked towards her. “Gardens aren’t quite as good at shutting out problems. There’s the weather, storms, insect attacks.”
“Inside, there’s rising damp, woodworm and light-fingered visitors.”
His expression relaxed into a smile. “Are you challenging me to create an Edwardian fantasy garden to match the house?”
“The design of the roof garden can be anything you want,” she said, withdrawing from battle. Behind her back she crossed her fingers, a childish superstition to ward off the possibility that her words would make it real. “It should leave room for people to imagine their own fantasies in it.”
“Fantasies.” His dark gaze held hers for a long moment.
Her nerve broke. Ever since Adam and Eve, garden fantasies had held an erotic element. Her brain presented vivid images of famous paintings, but somehow the men and women in them were her and Nick. Unlikely, but highly disconcerting. She fought a blush. “If you want to look around on your own, I have work to do.”
The carpet muffled the sharp clatter of her high heels as she dashed for the door. Her office, and safety, was just across the hall.
Nick caught up with her at the bedroom door. He stood close, but not touching her. “Thank you for your time.”
Sky Garden Page 4
