Midnight Bayou

  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 wit
h 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?”

  “No, it’s why I realized I could leave.”

  “You didn’t love her.”

  “No, I didn’t love her.”

  “It makes you sad to say that.” She drew out the bowl, got a fresh plastic fork, then handed it to him. His eyes were stormy again, she noted. With regret. “She love you?”

  “No. We looked good together. We were used to each other. She thought we wanted the same things.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “We never did. And the closer it got to D Day, the more I saw my life just . . . narrowing down until I was squeezed into this tiny slot. No room, no air. No light. I realized I felt the same way about marrying Jessica as I did about practicing corporate law, and if that was going to be the rest of my life, I could jump off a bridge or get out of the slot while I had the chance.”

  She brushed the hair from his forehead. “It was braver to get out than to jump.”

  “Maybe. This is good,” he said as he scooped up more egg. “Why don’t you have a man?”

  She cocked her head. “Who says I don’t?”

  He grabbed her hand before she could turn away. “I need to know if you do.”

  She looked down at his hand, back to his face. “Why is that?”

  “Because I can’t stop thinking about you. I can’t get you out of my head, from under my skin. Because every time I see you, my heart kicks in my chest.”

  “You’re good at that, too. At saying things that stir a woman up.” If it had just been that, just a matter of being stirred by him, she might have eased in between those long legs and satisfied them both. But this wasn’t a simple man, she thought.

  Being with him wouldn’t be simple.

  “Eat your eggs,” she told him, and slid her hand free of his. “Why are you starting with the kitchen if you eat peanut butter and don’t have a single dish to your name?”

  “I’ve got dishes, just not the kind you wash. The kitchen’s the heart of a house. The house where I grew up—this big, old wonderful house with big, wonderful rooms. We had that cook, but it was the kitchen where we ended up if there was a crisis or a celebration, or just something to talk over. I guess I want that here.”

  “That’s nice.” She leaned back on a cabinet to study him. “You want to have sex with me, cher?”

  His pulse lurched, but he managed to hop nimbly off the sawhorse. “Sure. Just let me kick the plumber out.” He loved the way she laughed. “Oh, you didn’t mean right this minute. That was, what, like a true or false type of question. Let me check.” He laid his fingers on his wrist. “Yeah, I’m still alive, so the answer is true.”

  She shook her head, took the empty bowl from him and dumped it in the box he was using for trash. “You’re an interesting man, Declan. And I like you.”

  “Uh-oh. Hold on a minute.” He glanced around, picked up the screwdriver lying on a plank. “Here you go,” he said as he handed it to her.

  “What’s this for?”

  “So you can plunge it into my heart when you tell me you just want to be friends.”

  “I bet Jessica’s still kicking herself for letting you slip away. I do want to be friends.” She turned the screwdriver in her hand, then set it down again. “I don’t know yet if I just want to be friends. I have to think about it.”

  “Okay.” He took her arms, ran his hands up to her shoulders. “Think about it.”

  She didn’t try to pull away, but lifted her face so his lips could meet hers. She liked the easy glide from warmth to heat, the fluid ride offered by a man who took his time.

  She understood desire. A man’s. Her own. And she knew some of those desires could be sated only in quick, hot couplings in the dark.

  From time to time, she’d sated hers in just that fashion.

  There was more here, and it came like a yearning. Yearnings, even met, could cause a pain desire never could.

  Still, she couldn’t resist laying her hands on his face, letting the kiss spin out.

  Inside her, deep inside her, something sighed.

  “Angelina.”

  He said her name, a whisper of sound, as he changed the angle of the kiss. As he deepened it. A thousand warnings jangled in her brain and were ignored. She gave herself over for one reckless moment, to the heat, to the need. To the yearning.

  Then she drew back from all of it. “That’s something to think about, all right.”

  She pressed a hand to his chest when he would have pulled her into him again. “Settle down, cher.” She gave him a slow, sleepy smile. “You’ve got me worked up enough for one day.”

  “I was just getting started.”

  “I believe it.” She let out a breath, pushed her hair back. “I’ve got to go. I’m working the bar tonight.”

  “I’ll come in. Walk you home.”

  However calm his voice, his eyes had storms in them. The sort, she imagined, that would provide a hell of a thrill before they crashed over your head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Lena. I want to be with you. I want to spend time with you.”

  “Want to spend time with me? You take me on a date.”

  “A date?”

  “The kind where you pick me up at my door and take me out to a fancy dinner.” She tapped a finger on his chest. “Take me dancing after, then walk me back to my door and kiss me good-night. Can you handle that?”

  “What time do you want me to pick you up?”

  She smiled, shook her head. “I’m working tonight. I got Monday night off. Place isn’t so busy Monday nights. You pick me up at eight.”

  “Monday. Eight o’clock.”

  He grabbed her arms again, jerked her against him. There was no glide into heat this time, but a headlong dive into it.

  Oh yeah, she thought, it would be quite a thrill before the crash.