Third Time Lucky: Volume 1 (The Coxwells)

  He moved closer, feigning caution, and put a steaming mug on the nightstand before backing away with his hands up. “Then consider this a peace offering.”

  The chocolate smell got stronger. “Hot chocolate?” A nice gesture but about forty-five million calories. I glared at him. “I hope I’m rabid so you die a painful death after I chomp on you. This is cruel and unusual punishment, you know.”

  He leaned down, his tone cajoling, his eyes gleaming. “Maybe you’ve burned off enough calories to have earned it.”

  There was that damn blush again. “Maybe not.”

  “I can help.”

  I laughed, probably a first at that hour.

  Nick brushed my hair back with a gentle fingertip. “It’s skim milk, Phil.”

  This was too good to be true. And you know what that means—anything too good to be true usually isn’t. I eyed him with suspicion. “Equal?”

  “How’d I guess?” He shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his feet. “Maybe it was the fact that the only grocery you had came in little blue envelopes.”

  The man was becoming positively loquacious. I sniffed as I reached for the mug. I took a cautious sip of the hot chocolate.

  It tasted divine. Ambrosia with no after effects. “All right. Maybe you can live, after all.”

  He turned to leave, pausing halfway across the room. “We should have a chat about moderation and synthetic sweeteners, Phil. Real sugar has only sixteen calories per teaspoon and is entirely natural, not to mention a sustainable crop.”

  I sat up and gave him my best death glare. “I’m changing my mind. You should die after all, preferably painfully and slowly. I’m not much for lectures in the morning.”

  He folded his arms across his chest. “Such a short memory. I seem to recall someone insisting last night that I was better than chocolate.”

  I blushed, knowing that I’d said exactly that. “Well, it’s morning and all bets are off.”

  “Is that right?” I could have sworn I saw his eyes twinkling before he turned away. “Drink your chocolate, Phil.”

  Somehow that sounded ominous.

  I figured I was imagining things. After all, he left me in peace. The rain pattered against the windows and I took my time waking up. It was only quarter to eight, close to miraculous for me. There was rustling from the kitchen, as though Nick had hunted down a paper, and a strong smell of coffee. I like the smell of coffee in the morning, even though I don’t drink it.

  There was another smell too, lingering on the linens. I peeked and discovered that my resident neat freak had harvested all the debris. All in all, things were deceptively cozy.

  I sighed contentment, put my mug on the nightstand and smiled at the sound of the shower starting to run. I really could get used to this man being around if he was going to wait on me hand and foot.

  But that wasn’t exactly what Nick had in mind. He strode into the bedroom, peeling off his shirt. He dropped his pants and I woke up fast, not that it made any difference. He scooped me up in his arms and headed for the bathroom.

  “You’ve had a shower already!”

  “You can never be too clean.”

  I squealed when we got in the shower, because the water was cold.

  “Awake yet?” He turned to adjust the temperature.

  “Wide awake, thanks.”

  Nick smiled a predatory smile. “Good. Now, let’s play a little compare and contrast.”

  “Between you and chocolate?”

  He nodded, but I rolled my eyes, cheeky now that I was fortified. “That was very very good chocolate. You haven’t got a chance, Sullivan.”

  He certainly gave it the old college try.

  * * *

  We made it to the kitchen half an hour later, more or less ready to go. I’d chosen chinos today and a sweater, since I was probably going to have to get intimate with that Japanese maple.

  There was an empty box from the bakery down the street beside the trash. “I assumed you didn’t want a Danish.” Nick was doing up his shirt as he sauntered in behind me. He poured himself another cup of coffee, snagged me around the waist and nuzzled my hair.

  “How many did you eat?”

  He grinned. “You don’t want to know.”

  “I’ve got to git me one of them there tapeworms,” I muttered.

  There was a bowl of fruit and yogurt on the top shelf of the fridge and a pot of herbal tea already made. “You should rent yourself out,” I teased and joined him at the table.

  “You in the market for a rental?”

  I ate a piece of fruit, guessing by the brightness of his gaze that I was on dangerous ground. “I’m a rent-to-buy kind of woman.”

  He smiled a Mr. Enigma smile and sipped his coffee. “Those kind of deals are hard to find.”

  If I had expected a pledge of undying love then and there, I was doomed to be disappointed. He was evidently fascinated by his newspaper. I gave him a good look through my lashes while I ate.

  Then I noticed that he was wearing one of the shirts from his backpack. I tried to play innocent, not my best trick.

  “Oh, you found your pack?”

  “Uh huh.” He shot me a glance so fast I nearly flinched. “Did you find anything interesting in it?”

  It seemed ridiculous to lie, but I tried to hedge. “How do you know I even looked?”

  “Don’t you think someone who routinely carries a lot of cash would want to know whether anyone had rifled through their luggage?”

  “I didn’t rifle.”

  “No, you were careful.” A smile touched his lips. “Just not careful enough.”

  “How could you tell?”

  Nick watched me over the rim of his cup. “I can’t go telling all my secrets.”

  I snorted. “I don’t think there’s much fear of that.”

  His expression turned serious. “Which reminds me. Thanks for listening, Phil.”

  Oh, he could disarm me so quickly with a look and a couple of words. So, what had that been? A fling? A means of satisfying curiosity?

  Or something more?

  Fortunately I didn’t have to pluck one of the ten thousand questions whirling through my head, because someone rang the bell and hammered on the door without waiting to see whether I answered.

  “Philippa, open up! It’s pissing out here!”

  “Elaine,” I supplied before Nick could ask, and hurried for the door.

  “Ah, she of the gilded tongue.”

  “Be nice. She’s had a tough row to hoe. If I’d started where she did, I sure wouldn’t have made as much of myself.”

  He smiled at me. “There you go again.”

  “What?”

  “Seeing the best in people.”

  I spun on the threshold of the kitchen. “Well, she’s lending me her car today. What’s not good about that?”

  He straightened. “What’s wrong with the Beast?”

  Elaine was in the foyer in time to hear his question. “Sick. Possibly dead. It croaked on Philippa yesterday in the middle of nowhere, faithless piece of crap. Do I smell coffee?”

  “There’s a full pot,” Nick said. He got up and poured, taking Elaine’s directions for milk and sugar as she wriggled out of her wet coat.

  “Yum yum yum. Too bad you don’t have a Danish or two.”

  “You’re too late for that.” I went back to my fruit.

  Elaine frowned at her mug, then held it up and studied the pattern. “Since when do you have nice dishes anyway?”

  I had a piece of melon in my mouth, so I pointed my spoon at Nick. “Ask him.”

  “You picked this?” Elaine turned the mug, examining its giddy pattern. “Wow. It’s so, so Philippa.”

  I did like what Nick had bought—all the pieces were brightly colored and didn’t exactly match up. It had a giddy hodgepodge kind of feel and looked sunny on the table.

  Elaine put down the cup and looked between the two of us. “What’s up with you two, anyhow?”

&nbsp
; Trust Elaine to dig in and come up with the million dollar question.

  I was kind of interested in the answer myself. I took my time with that piece of melon but Nick wasn’t playing anyone else’s game.

  “I thought she’d like it, that’s all. And you can’t say Phil didn’t need dishes.” He obviously was more interested in other things. “So, what’s wrong with the Beast?”

  “Who knows?”

  “I don’t want to even ask,” I told him.

  “It’s gonna be bad,” Elaine affirmed grimly. “We’re gonna get took.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a chick/mechanic symbiosis thing.”

  Nick harrumphed and sipped his coffee. “Then you should go to a different garage.”

  Elaine pulled out a chair and I could smell her getting an idea. “Don’t suppose you’d mind calling after it?”

  “Elaine!”

  “What? They’ll probably give him a different answer. A cheaper answer.”

  Nick straightened. “That would hardly be ethical.”

  Elaine squeezed her eyes tightly shut. “Ethics. Auto repair. What do these things have in common?” She shook her head. “I give up. Some of these things just do not belong together.”

  “Nick, you shouldn’t do this. It’s our problem.”

  “It’s not an issue, Phil. You’ve probably got a ton of things to do today. I just have to figure out what to do with that glass.” He hefted his cup towards Elaine, then at me. “You can tell me where the Beast is. And then you can tell me where you hid the brandy snifter.”

  I put down my spoon. “I didn’t pick it up.”

  “Well, of course you did.”

  “No, it wasn’t there. You picked it up.”

  He shook his head. “No, it was there on the counter. Then I got distracted and it was gone when I left. I thought you had taken it.”

  “I thought you had already picked it up before I got there.” We looked at each other and my hair was doing that standing up thing.

  “It was there when I got there,” Nick repeated carefully, “but it wasn’t there when I left. Which means either you took it, which you didn’t...”

  “Or somebody else did,” I concluded.

  “Aren’t you two getting a bit excited about a glass?” Elaine drank her coffee, looking between the two of us questioningly. “I mean, I’ll pick you up another brandy snifter today if you like.”

  “We wouldn’t have heard someone else in the house,” Nick mused. “Not with the music playing.”

  “Especially not a ghost. They tend to move quietly.”

  “What?” They both looked at me like I was crazy.

  “I saw Lucia’s ghost, right there in the greenhouse. She was all dressed in white and kind of floating. She didn’t look very impressed that I was there.”

  I shook my finger at Nick. “And there was that phone call. It was kind of creepy, though at the time I just figured it was another one of Mrs. H.’s neighbors.”

  “What phone call?”

  “It was a woman, she said I ruined everything and that I should stay out of her house.”

  Nick stared at me. The gears were in motion. He looked down at the paper, blinked a couple of times, then looked back at me. “How could I not have thought of that?” he murmured, then he began to smile. “It’s perfectly, utterly Lucia!”

  And then he started to laugh.

  In fact, he laughed so hard that it took a long time to get him to make any sense at all. Elaine gave her cup of coffee a hard look and put it aside half-finished.

  He howled until the tears ran down his cheeks and he thumped his fist on the table. “I told you,” he finally choked out, “I told you that she was more likely to kill me than the other way around.”

  “You mean Lucia set you up?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a bit extreme, don’t you think? Committing suicide just to get even with someone?”

  “Who committed suicide?” Elaine looked between the two of us. “I feel like I walked into the middle of a movie.”

  “No one did. That’s the point.” Nick leaned across the table and caught my hands in his. “You didn’t find her body in the greenhouse, because she wasn’t dead. She wanted me to think she was dead, but she isn’t.”

  “She cleaned it up.”

  “Which is why it was cold in there. And was it wet?”

  “Well, yes. I thought the sprinklers had just run.”

  “No, she hosed the place down.”

  “But Nick, you said she was stabbed.”

  “It’s a stage trick, Phil. I should have looked closer. Lucia knows how to create stage illusions. She probably broke off the blade from the dagger and stuck the hilt to her skin. The rest she could do with make-up and whatever concoction she chose to use for blood. God only knows what it was. It smelled awful.”

  “But what about the ghost?”

  “There are no ghosts, Phil.”

  “That house is supposed to be haunted.”

  “Well, I lived there for years and it isn’t. You must have seen Lucia again.”

  I was skeptical. “So, she must really be a witch. How else could she levitate?”

  He smiled. “Another trick of the light, one achieved with a mirror. You saw her reflection, which is why she probably looked kind of wispy.”

  I nodded.

  Elaine was intrigued, even though she didn’t know the whole story.

  “She must have been standing to one side of the door or the other. She’d wear white, because the eye is drawn to white, then dark socks, so the silhouette of her feet dropped away in the reflection. It works especially well if the light is high and the lighting is otherwise poor.”

  “She was holding a candle.”

  He spread his hands. “See? She’s good with this kind of stuff.”

  Elaine propped her chin on her hand. “But Philippa got a phone call. What’s that about?”

  “When was it?”

  “Yesterday. After I left you at the house in the shrine o’ Sullivan.”

  Nick nodded. “And she said you ruined her plans. That room was never like that. I don’t even know that I’ve seen all of those pictures before. It was set up when I got in the house, with the light on beside that chair. Her record was on the turntable already.” He shrugged. “Now that I think about it, it was kind of contrived, but I just got sideswiped.”

  I reached out and touched his hand. “It’s okay to get caught up in your memories.”

  Our gazes held across the table and I remembered how upset he had been.

  “So what do you think she was planning? To float in on you?”

  “Probably to spook the hell out of me, then reconcile.” Nick caught my hand in his and smiled crookedly at me. “No wonder she was ticked. You really threw a wrench into the works, Phil.”

  “Didn’t you stay?”

  “Now, I left right after you.”

  I didn’t want to sound critical but it seemed to me that this had to be said. “Don’t you think it was a pretty mean trick? Are you sure she would do this?”

  “Oh yes. Lucia has always played hard.” He toasted me with his coffee. “All or nothing.”

  The phone rang and I reluctantly got up. I knew who it had to be at this hour. Elaine started to give Nick directions to the garage. “Hi Mom.”

  There was a strained silence on the line. “Is this Philippa Coxwell?” It was a man, with a rough voice.

  “Yes, why? Who’s this?”

  “I’m Josie’s cousin, Max. She said you wanted to know about Tuesday, about Sean borrowing my car.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Well, how am I supposed to tell you if you never answer your phone? I’ve been calling you all the time and if I hadn’t got you this time, that would have been it. Some people think that everyone’s got all the time in the world...”

  “Did he borrow your car on Tuesday?”

  Nick looked up with interest.

  “No. That Josi
e, nice girl, but jeez. She’s always getting the days mixed up. It was Monday, not Tuesday. I’m telling you the girl’s short of a load, if you know what I mean.”

  I shook my head at Nick and he shrugged, content that his theory was confirmed.

  “Well, thanks for letting me know.”

  “Like I said, this was the last chance. Glad I got a hold of you. Sean, he’s a good guy. You need to hire a good guy, you keep him in mind. You gotta always be looking for good guys.”

  He insisted on giving me his number and I finally realized that Max had my business card. “We’re fine now, thanks, but you never know.”

  “Summer’s got to be busy for you garden people and Sean is a good guy. Hard worker...”

  I declined to comment on that. “Yes, it is a busy time, Max. Thanks for calling. I’ve got to go.”

  “See?” Nick said. He got to his feet and stretched. “Mystery solved.”

  “So, what are you going to do?”

  He smiled. “Let Lucia worry about it a bit. I’ll bet she’s hopping mad. Meanwhile, I’ll check on the Beast.”

  We planned to drop Elaine off downtown en route, where she was meeting a client to prowl for antiques. She was bouncing in anticipation of living vicariously, spending someone else’s money on shiny baubles.

  Nick lost the argument about his sitting in the back seat of the Geo—as tallest, he won the front passenger seat. I warmed up the engine as he rounded the hood after doing the gentlemanly door thing. I liked that he did those kinds of things and that he never made a big deal about it.

  Elaine leaned over the seat and tapped me on the shoulder. “If you throw him back, I get dibs,” was all she managed to say before Nick opened the door.

  Which got me thinking again about how I could convince Nick to not throw me back.

  Maybe it couldn’t be done.

  But it was definitely worth a try.

  I had a day and a half.

  The Mission: Impossible theme song began running in my head.

  * * *

  The amazing thing wasn’t that Phil drove the Geo with the same aggressiveness as she had the Beast—it was that her driving seemed temperate compared with that of the other drivers in the city. The place was a madhouse. He watched her decisive grip on the wheel and easily imagined her driving an expedition truck across the savannah, dodging antelopes and potholes as adeptly as she outmaneuvered sport utility vehicles and pedestrians.