“You can’t do that! I need a toilet!” Stephanie narrowed her eyes. “Boy, you have a lot of nerve. First you foist your ramshackle house off on me. Then you practically attack me and use it as an excuse to kick me off the ship. I’m going to get the Better Business Bureau after you. I’m going to call the League of Women Voters. I’m going to tell your mother!”
Ivan ran his hand through his hair. “First of all, my house wasn’t ramshackle until you moved in. Second, that was a mutual attack. Third…” He stopped and sighed. Stephanie’s big blue eyes were shining with fury, and her lips were pressed tightly together in indignation. She didn’t like this any more than he did, he thought, but she really needed Stanley Shelton to fix her plumbing. He swore softly, knowing he wouldn’t try to get another cook, and plucked a piece of leaf from her hair. “You picked up some hitchhikers when you tripped and rolled down the hill,” he said, his smile returning.
Stephanie combed her hair with her fingers, looking for more leaves. “I didn’t trip. I was pushed.”
Ivan looked at her sideways. “I don’t remember seeing anyone else up there.”
“I know. Isn’t that odd? I was sure I was alone, and then all of a sudden I felt two hands give me a shove.”
“Anyone ever tell you that you’re very strange?”
“Yeah, well, strange things have been happening to me ever since I bought your house. I had a perfectly normal life till then.”
Ivan nudged her out the door. “I find it hard to believe you ever had a normal life. What did you do before you became an innkeeper?”
“You’re pretty nosy.”
Ivan snagged her by the back of her shirt as she started up the ladder. “I have a right to know my employees’ work records.”
She couldn’t argue with that, but she wasn’t ready to talk about her previous job. And besides, she was annoyed that he had figured she wasn’t normal. She turned to face him. “I was sort of a teacher, sometimes… in a government program.” And this wasn’t the first time she’d had to hedge about her work. Go ahead, ask her anything. She was a master at evasion.
He looked skeptical. “Why did you stop teaching? You get fired for wearing illegal socks? Accidentally misplace some of your students?”
Stephanie shrugged. “I just got tired of it. I decided it was time to get away.” Time to get away before she was blown away, she thought ruefully. She wasn’t effective anymore. In three months she’d be thirty. Too old to fit in with teens. Too well known for her own good. And her personal life was a shambles.
“My whole family is in Jersey City. All the kids I went to high school with are still in Jersey City. Do you know, every Sunday for the past eight years I’ve gone to my parents’ house for roast chicken dinner. Think about it… eight years of roast chicken. Four hundred and sixteen chickens!”
“That’s a lot of chicken.”
“I love all those people, but I need something new. I guess I need to find myself. Pretty corny, huh?” She shook her head in amazement. “My work was so consuming, I took the easy way out on personal relationships. I needed them to be safe and predictable, and so I was calmly going around and around and around in circles. I’d made these daily grooves that I was able to follow without even thinking. One day Steve, the guy I’d been dating for four years, told me he had this special announcement. I thought he was going to propose to me. Turned out he was going to officially marry his roommate Roger.” She rolled her eyes. “All those years I thought Steve was shy! I kept wondering why he wasn’t interested in… uh, well, anyway, that was why we never got around to…”
“Wait a minute. You went with a guy for four years and you never… and then it turned out he was gay?”
“Well, I wouldn’t have anyway. I’m saving myself for marriage.”
Swell. A virgin. He had his stomach tied in knots for the only virgin left on the East Coast. “Lady, you’re not going to keep your virgin status very long if you go around kissing heterosexuals like you kissed me a minute ago.” He leaned his back on the wood-paneled wall and loosely crossed his arms over his chest. “I think it’s safe to say your chances of keeping it until you’re married are slim. Especially if you stay on this ship.”
Stephanie slumped against the ladder. “You have a point. Twenty seconds ago I didn’t give a hoot about my virginity. It was a lot easier to have high standards when I was dating Steve.” Stephanie made a flamboyant gesture with her hands. “I should have seen what was happening. I should have realized there was something wrong with our relationship, but I’d gotten so dull, so placid when I wasn’t working. I had to have a comfortable personal routine because I didn’t have any energy left over for myself. Boy, was I boring, or what? It’s no wonder Steve dumped me for Roger.”
Ivan grinned. He couldn’t imagine her being boring. She was bright and sexy and talked faster than any two people put together.
Stephanie grimaced at the painful memory of rejection. She’d said too much, but once she’d gotten started, it had all poured out. Not that it mattered. The only thing significant about her personal life was that it was insignificant. “Anyway, I decided to start over. So I cleaned out my paltry savings account and went to Atlantic City to gamble.”
“And you made a big killing?”
“No. My uncle Ed died while I was there and left me all his money. That’s how I bought your house… with Uncle Ed’s money.”
It had seemed like the perfect move. It was the antithesis of her former life. It was calm, cozy, normal. It would give her a chance to meet people who weren’t staring back at her down the snub-nosed barrel of her service revolver.
She turned, pulled herself halfway up the ladder, and stopped. She looked at Ivan over her shoulder. “Is the house really haunted?”
“Some people think so.”
“Do you?”
He put a friendly hand on her backside and encouraged her to go topside. “I think you’d better check on Ace. Make sure he doesn’t knead anything other than bread dough. He’s hell on divorced women, and we have three of them on this cruise.”
Stephanie scooted up the ladder and blinked in the bright sunshine. “You avoided my original question.”
“Does it bother you that the house might be haunted?”
She paused at the hatch to the galley. “I don’t know. I guess it would depend on who was haunting it. And you still haven’t answered my question.”
“There’s a very fine line between imagination and reality when it comes to things like ghosts. I think it’s just a matter of what you choose to believe.”
“So what you’re telling me is that my house is haunted.”
“Definitely. But don’t worry about it. It’s only my aunt Tess. She’s an old lady.”
“How old?”
“About three hundred years. She’s hardly noticeable. She prowls the widow’s walk in the fog, and sometimes she sits on the window seat in the master bedroom.” He waved his hand in a dismissive gesture when he saw the look of horror on her face. “Actually, she hardly ever sits on the window seat. Once or twice a year, maybe.”
“She hates me,” Stephanie said.
“What?”
“She’s undoubtedly the one who pushed me down the hill.”
“Aunt Tess wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
“Oh! A lot you know about your aunt Tess. Suddenly it all makes perfect sense. The woman is vicious! She probably broke my toilet. I’d bet money on it.”
“Ghosts don’t go around breaking toilets.
They moan and drag chains and walk through walls.”
“Then how else would you explain my house problems?”
“If you’re trying to get me to admit to negligence, it isn’t working. It’s an old house, and things break. Although I have to admit it is strange. That porch was in good condition when I moved out. Wood just doesn’t rot that fast. Tell you what, as soon as we get back to Camden, I’ll have a talk with Aunt Tess. See if I can calm her down.”
&n
bsp; Stephanie gave him a black look. “You’re just humoring me. You don’t really think she broke my toilet, do you?”
The grin widened. “She was the wife of a pirate. She could be capable of anything.”
“You think I need Ghostbusters?”
“I think you need to go below and make sure Ace doesn’t have a woman stowed in his bunk.”
An hour later Stephanie was up to her elbows in chocolate chip cookie batter. “You mean to tell me Lucy bakes cookies like this every day?”
Ace picked a handful of chocolate morsels out of the huge bowl and popped them into his mouth.
“Yup. She gets up about five and starts the stove. By six o’clock she’s made hot coffee, and she starts chucking trays of cookies in. Lucy just keeps the cookies going all day while she bakes other stuff. Usually she makes the dough the night before.”
Stephanie dropped a glob of dough onto a cookie sheet. “Don’t these poor people ever get any real cookies? You know, like Oreos and Fig Newtons?”
“Nope. We force them to eat homemade,” Ace said, reaching for more chocolate.
Stephanie opened the oven door and felt her mind go momentarily slack at the sight of wall-to-wall ham. Hot air rushed out at her, carrying the spicy smell of cloves and Lucy’s special honey glaze. There was just enough room at the top for one tray of cookies, so she slid it in.
Stephanie closed the door on the ham and cookies and threw a skeptical glance at Ace. “You think this is going to work?”
“Sure. Just watch the little temperature gauge on the front of the stove.”
Stephanie squinted at the gauge. Five hundred degrees. You could probably bake a brick at that temperature, she thought. She stared at the stove for five minutes, then opened the door and took out a tray of charred cookies. “How do we get this sucker cooled off? Fast.”
Ace pulled a stack of paper shopping bags from a cubbyhole under the sink. “Lucy wets these and puts them in the oven. She says it brings the temperature down.”
Stephanie soaked the bags and stuffed them in around the ham. She added another tray of cookies, closed the door, and secretly tried to bribe God into lowering the heat. If you just do this one thing for me, she promised, I’ll never say another curseword, I’ll eat all my vegetables, I’ll drive at the speed limit.
Mr. and Mrs. Pease carefully lowered themselves down the fo’c’sle stairs. “Isn’t this cozy?” Mrs. Pease said. “And it smells wonderful down here.”
Mr. Pease poured two mugs of coffee and peered into the bowl of cookie dough. “Did you use oat flour?” he asked Stephanie.
“Nope. Just plain old flour flour.”
He shook his head. “Oat flour’s the secret to a chewy cookie. You have to use some oat flour, and you can’t bake them too long.”
Mrs. Pease took a mug from her husband. “He’s a wonderful cookie baker,” she told Stephanie. “You’d never know they were homemade.”
Stephanie sniffed and rubbed her eyes. “Is it always this smoky in here?” she asked Ace.
“Smoky?” Ace removed his dark glasses. “You’re right. It’s smoky.” He checked the flue and shook his head. “I don’t know what’s wrong. The flue is okay.”
“Maybe something’s burning in the oven,” Mrs. Pease suggested.
Stephanie opened the door and jumped back as a wall of smoke and flame rolled out at her.
“Jeez,” Ace said, “looks like the bags caught fire. That never happened when Lucy did it.”
Stephanie stuck her hand into a thick potholder mitt, pulled the flaming bags out of the oven, and hurled them into the sink.
Mrs. Pease put her hand to her heart. “We’re gonna die. The ship’s gonna burn to a cinder, and we’re gonna drown.”
Stephanie fanned the air with a hand towel. “This is how we lower the temperature in the woodstove,” she said. “Nothing to worry about. We do this all the time.”
Mr. Pease came over to take a closer look at the oven. “I didn’t realize being a ship’s cook was so complicated.”
Ace removed the tray of smoking cookies and set them on the counter. “Man, look at these mothers. They’ve been cremated. And the ham! Looks like a meteor I saw once in the Smithsonian.”
Stephanie squinted at the smoldering ham. “It is sort of black. Maybe it just needs basting,” she said hopefully. She poked at it with a long-handled fork. “Probably we should pick the ashes off it first.” She closed the oven door and checked the gauge. Five hundred degrees. She gave it a whack with the fork to make sure it was working. “Darn.” She turned to Ace. “Any other ideas?”
Ace put his dark glasses back on. “It looks better this way.”
The first mate looked in at them. “Stephanie here? Captain wants to see her.”
Stephanie handed the fork over to Ace. “Does he make people walk the plank?”
Ivan unconsciously gripped the wheel a little tighter when he saw Stephanie. She had a sweat stain running down the center of her tank top, her hair was plastered against her damp forehead, her face was flushed under a layer of soot and flour, and cookie dough clung to her shirt and shorts. She caught sight of a pelican fishing the shoreline and stopped in her tracks. A wondrous smile lit her face, leaving no doubt in Ivan’s mind that this was the first time she’d seen a pelican in flight.
She turned and waved at Ivan. “It’s a pelican!” she shouted.
Ivan took a quick breath as emotion knifed through him. It was unnatural, he thought— the way she could knock the wind out of him with a simple wave and smile. Maybe unnatural wasn’t precisely right, maybe supernatural was a better choice. What else would explain the instant attraction, the surge of joy at sharing a pelican sighting? Hell, he didn’t even like pelicans. They were big, dumb, ugly, brown birds. He shook his head. He was losing it. Stephanie Lowe was making him crazy. She had him blaming a rise in his testosterone level on a defenseless three-hundred-year-old ghost.
“Did you see it?” she asked wide-eyed as she approached the helm. “I never realized they were so big.”
He reached out with one hand and drew her beside him, feeling a rush of tenderness. “You really are something,” he said, plucking dried cookie batter from her hair. “I’m almost afraid to ask why you’re head-to-foot soot. Could it have something to do with the black smoke that came billowing out of the galley five minutes ago?”
“A minor setback in my cookie making,” Stephanie told him, trying to sound casual, almost swooning every time his fingertips touched her temple.
“How bad was the fire?”
“It was just some bags burning in the oven. I think we might even be able to eat the ham.”
He did a fast mental assessment of their course, searching his mind for a night harbor that had a restaurant. “Was that Mrs. Pease I heard saying she was going to be burned to a crisp and drown?”
“She got a little excited.” Stephanie put her hand on the wheel, feeling the polished wood slide under her fingertips.
“I guess I can relate to that,” Ivan said, watching to see if she caught his implication. “Stephanie Lowe,” he whispered, his voice a sexy growl, “you stir up the pirate blood in me.”
“Omigod.”
Ivan tipped his head back and laughed. It had been the perfect response. It said it all. He motioned for Stephanie to take the wheel and stood behind her. “Now, my fair pirate’s wench, time for thee to learn the ways of the ship.”
“Are you kidding me? You mean I really get to drive?”
“No, you don’t get to ‘drive.’ You get to steer. And while you steer, we can talk.”
“If I’m the one steering, why are you still hanging on to the wheel?”
Ivan pressed himself lightly into her back and murmured into her hair, brushing his lips against the shell of her ear. “Because it’s a sneaky way of getting you where I want you.”
Stephanie closed her eyes and swallowed as a combination of panic and desire rushed through her. He was good. She had to give him that. He’
d made sure everything was right up front in a voice that sounded like rustling sheets. So what’s next? She wanted new experiences. How about a roll in the hay with a scoundrel? She cringed at the word scoundrel. Six months ago she would have said jerk. Now here she was thinking about ghosts and pirates and scoundrels. And romance.
She supposed those were the things her move to Maine was all about. She needed some fun and some whimsy in her life. She needed to make friends. And maybe she needed to have a real honest-to-goodness love affair. She was pretty sure a romance with Ivan Rasmussen wasn’t a good idea—but nature seemed to be taking its course in spite of her misgivings.
Ivan tugged at Stephanie’s hair. “Do you feel it, Steph?” he asked. “What do you suppose this is between us? Lust? Love? Magic?”
The huge sails rattled, and Ivan spun the wheel to change direction and catch the wind.
Stephanie licked her lips, tasting the salt spray that bathed her face when the boat bit into the sea. “It’s too soon for love, I hardly know you!”
“What about love at first sight?”
“Love at first sight is lust.”
“Okay,” he said. “What about lust at first sight? Are you in lust?”
“Definitely not!”
He grinned down at her. “Liar.”
He liked her bravado and her ability to go forward, and for the first time in two months he felt at ease with his decision to sell Haben. Somehow, he knew it had fallen into the right hands. Whether Aunt Tess thought so was another issue.
Stephanie turned to face him. “We haven’t touched on magic.”
“Magic is a definite possibility. Any ghost who would stoop to screwing up a toilet wouldn’t hesitate to mess with people’s lives.”
He looked dangerous when he smiled like that, Stephanie thought. He was teasing—on many levels. It was darned unnerving, and the beard served as the perfect foil for a smile that would have been a definite tip-off to Little Red Riding Hood. Worst of all, she couldn’t tell where the teasing ended, but she suspected he actually did believe in ghosts.