Kitabı oku: «A Vow to Keep», sayfa 2

CHAPTER TWO

“I’LL have to go change,” Linda said, looking down at herself. She could actually feel a blush rising in her cheeks. Her pajamas looked worse for the wear. And the sweatshirt! Why had she picked something that made her look so frumpy and frazzled?

Shock, she realized. She was in shock. That was why she had said yes, she would go look at that house with Rick when it made no sense at all to do that.

Not that her mind was making sense right now.

Rick Chase was having the oddest effect on her. Looking at him—his large frame filling the tininess of her kitchen, his scent, richly masculine and amazingly sensual, filling her senses—she felt her belly do a dizzying drop. She’d known Rick for twenty years. She’d never reacted like this to him before!

Of course, she had never been single and available before.

Available? How did she know that he was? How could he be? Why wouldn’t he have been snatched up by someone? He wasn’t remarried, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t involved. It was a different world than the one in which she had gotten married. Marriage was only one choice of many these days. She’d assumed he was alone, but she had learned, the hard way, assumptions were very bad things on which to base decisions.

Bobbi stayed in touch with him, her honorary uncle, her godfather. Would Bobbi have told her about Rick’s relationships? Or would she have considered the romantic doings of old fuddy-duddies well outside that small range of things that interested her? Would Linda have heard if Rick was with someone? Suddenly she regretted all those phone calls from people in the office not answered.

“Rick, are you—”

The words stuck in her throat when he looked at her quizzically.

It was none of her business! She didn’t care.

“Am I what?”

Don’t ask, she pleaded with herself, especially not standing there in devil-embossed pajamas and an oversize sweatshirt. Especially not with her hair going every which way and not a smidgen of makeup on!

“Are you in a, um, relationship?”

There. She’d gone and asked. This was why she had become reclusive. She knew darn well she could not trust herself. Her interest could only be interpreted one way.

“No.”

She could feel the blush deepening in her cheeks and she rushed away from him, down the hall and into the safety of her bedroom.

She closed the door and leaned against it, taking a deep, steadying breath. Bobbi had been insinuating lately that Linda was losing her mind. Was she losing her mind? Why was she having this reaction to Rick?

“Because you aren’t getting out enough,” she scolded herself. So, she would go out with him and look at the house. No doubt after half an hour or so, the hammering of her heart would slow and she would return home more normal than when she had left.

She would, of course, refuse to be project manager on restoring the old house no matter how much she loved it. Then she would make her daily phone call to her daughter, and after that she would make plans to join a club. A bird watching organization might be nice. Perhaps it was time to start thinking about a job, though money wasn’t an issue for her.

Just this morning she had felt perfectly content with the challenge of a new house and the occasional whooping crane sighting. Now she realized she needed something that would make her less susceptible the next time she was in close proximity to a good-looking, available man.

Meanwhile, she had to erase the impression the pajamas and sweatshirt had made. She did not want Rick thinking she was a pathetic eccentric who had let herself go!

She opened her closet to find very little unpacked. For the last few months she had let the wardrobe thing slide. Especially since her life now belonged to her.

No daughter to wrinkle her nose—Mom, you aren’t really going to wear that are you?—no husband who she had felt she had been perpetually trying, and failing, to win.

So, she had taken to wearing jeans and workout pants and things that did not match, like an orange T-shirt with red slacks. She had taken to wearing flannel pajamas with pictures on them and furry socks.

Today, the decision of what to wear seemed hard again. The cream-colored slacks and the purple silk blouse the color of a jewel? What was unpacked? Next to nothing? Should she wear earrings? Makeup? Was there any help for the short hair that seemed to do whatever it wanted no matter how she tried to persuade it otherwise?

She drew herself up short. What was she doing? She came to her senses and made a decision.

“Rick?” she called from her bedroom, opening the door a crack.

“Um-hmm?”

“I can’t go. Never mind. Thanks for dropping by.”

There. What a relief. She sank onto her bed and waited to hear the back door squeak open—it badly needed oil, a much better use for her time than—

There was a faint knock on the bedroom door.

She froze.

The door, still open that crack, slid open further. He stood there, his shoulder braced against the jamb, his thumb hitched through the belt loop of his slacks. His legs looked so long and strong, his shoulders so broad. She hurt for things masculine: large hands, whisker-roughened cheeks, easy strength, the sensuous gravel of a deep voice.

She had a renegade thought. She wished he would come in, push her back on the bed, take her lips with his…which was exactly why she was not going anywhere with him.

She had been putting her life back together, and quite nicely, too. It was obvious he would be a terrible disruption to that process. She looked at his lips. The bottom one was soft and sensual.

A terrible disruption.

“Why not?” he asked. She unglued her eyes from his lips and leaped up from the bed. She pulled a box out of a heap and began to randomly unpack it.

“Why not what?” she asked.

“Go look at the house?”

Oh, yes, that.

Whoops! The box she had grabbed was full of underthings! The ones she didn’t wear anymore—wisps of lace and temptation. She began to ram them back in the box as quickly as she had taken them out.

“I’m not unpacked. I have to oil the back door. I might bake cookies. A house doesn’t feel like home until you’ve baked cookies in it.”

She sounded like an idiot, babbling, but she looked over her shoulder at him and tilted her chin defiantly. Didn’t he know he was being rude? He shouldn’t be standing there in the doorway of her bedroom making her think hot thoughts about him, watching with way too much interest as she unpacked—repacked—her most intimate things.

A little smile tickled his lips.

“Go away,” she said, flustered. “I’m busy.”

“If you come look at the house, I’ll help you unpack later.”

Absurd. She did not want him helping her unpack. He was confusing her, bringing a sensation of turmoil to a life that had been without it for some time.

“Maybe not that particular box,” he said, and the smile deepened.

Okay, so it would be awfully nice to have someone who could move some of the larger pieces of furniture around. It would be awfully nice to have someone to help, period. But she could hire someone for that! And if she was so starved for things male, she could hire some twenty-something guy with bulging muscles. To look at. Nothing else. Her daughter would be disgusted to know her mother even looked!

Why was she suddenly more aware of being pathetic than she had been since that awful day when she’d learned the truth about her husband?

“No, really, I—”

“And bake cookies,” he said. “I’ll help you bake cookies.”

She turned and faced him and put her hands on her hips. “Rick Chase, you do not know how to bake cookies!”

“You don’t know the first thing about what I know how to do.”

Now his eyes were fastened on her lips with heat. And something else. Longing. Well, that wasn’t so surprising, was it? He’d been alone even longer than she had.

But he could have any woman he wanted. She was sure of that.

Weakness flooded her. She wanted to throw herself in his arms, allow herself to be held, to accept the strength he was offering her. But that was the whole thing. She could not be weak. She could not look weak. And she would look weak if she did not go look at that stupid house now that she had said she would.

“You were the one who was a lousy cook,” he reminded her, his eyes breaking from her lips. “I bet you’d end up with door oil in your cookies.”

He was remembering a long, long time ago. Her first efforts in the kitchen, as a new wife and a young mother had been mostly disastrous. But she had applied herself to learning with a fury, and she had become competent enough to turn out items for Bobbi’s school functions: decorated cookies on Valentine’s Day, chocolate cakes for the bake sale. She had learned how to make lasagna and roast beef and chicken. Once she had even managed to single-handedly cook turkey dinner for Bobbi’s Brownie troop of forty-two girls.

But Rick knew none of that. He only knew that Blair, oblivious to her pride in her developing talents, had hired a cook as soon as he could afford one. Roast beef had become Beef Wellington served with Yorkshire pudding, the turkey was smoked and delicately sliced. Linda had dined—often alone—on braised Cornish game hens, slivered Sockeye salmon, soufflés so delicate it was like eating clouds. She felt the familiar cold squeeze in her chest that happened whenever her thoughts turned to her life with Blair. A single thought could ruin a whole day!

She reminded herself, desperately, that now her meals ran to peanut butter on toast with a side dish of quartered tomatoes and that was how she liked it. Then she realized Rick was offering her a morning’s respite from those haunting memories and she suddenly wanted to grab his offer with both hands, foolish as that might be in the long term.

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll be ready in a few minutes.”

He gave her a tiny salute and shut the door.

She sank down on her bed. Here was the truth of it: She was, in some part of herself, relieved that her life was being railroaded, relieved that the unexpected was happening, astounded that she was feeling things she had not felt for a very long time. She felt annoyed to be sure, but she also felt alive, in the same glorious way she had felt alive this morning when the crane had lifted itself from the earth.

“Linda,” she told herself sourly. “Remember about happy. A challenge to the gods.”

She found him outside fifteen minutes later. She had opted for the cream slacks, and purple blouse, no makeup, not entirely by choice. She had not been able to find the box it was packed in. Her hair had decided not to cooperate no matter what she tried and was sticking up in rebellious spikes that would have made Bobbi roll her eyes.

Rick was inspecting her car.

“Cute,” he said, smiling at her.

She touched her hair self-consciously. Cute was not the look she had been trying for at all. Attractive-but-not-interested would have summed it up.

Then she realized he meant the car.

It was a Smart Car, the Mercedes Benz developed Micro Compact, another of her change-of-life purchases.

“Bobbi calls it a bean can,” she said, and couldn’t resist giving her tiny car an affectionate pat. “She can’t believe I got rid of the SL-500 for this.”

But Linda did not see it that way. She saw it as a step back toward herself, back toward the young woman she had once been who had cared so passionately about her world. She was sick to death of waste, Beef Wellington in the garbage being only one example. She now found excess exhausting. She’d had the dream—the huge house on the river, the staff, the cars, the jewels—and it had drained her energy like a vampire that sucked life blood. She wanted simplicity, she wanted to make her way back to who she genuinely was.

Was the big handsome guy looking at her car going to be a detour on that journey? He looked up, met her eyes. Or did he have the map of how to get where she was going?

“You like it?” he asked of the car, holding open the door of his Escalade for her.

“I love it.”

“Good for you.”

“And do you like this one?” she asked as he came around to the driver’s side and slid in beside her. The vehicle was obviously very nearly new and smelled of leather—and him.

He shrugged, started the vehicle, did up his shoulder belt. “I see it as a necessity, part of the business. I take clients to see properties. I want as safe and reliable and comfortable a ride for them as possible.”

She pondered that. He was so different from Blair, who had only been interested in how things looked, how to manipulate people’s impressions of him. A car like this, for Blair, would never have been about the comfort and safety of his clients.

How dangerous was it that she was comparing Rick to Blair?

“You know me, Linda—”

Did she? That’s what she had to keep reminding herself, that maybe she didn’t know Rick at all. She remembered those days after Blair’s death, when the truth had begun to come out…that feeling of not knowing anyone. Maybe most of all not herself.

“If I wasn’t in this business, I’d probably still be driving a motorcycle. I own one. Nothing fancy. I take it out on the odd weekend, head to Banff, or do the ranch country loop through Black Diamond.”

Alone? she wanted to ask. But she had already asked that, and it would have seemed way too interested to press further.

They chatted about mutual acquaintances, Rick updating her on the people she had turned her back on. Life, it seemed, had gone on. Babies had been born, couples had married and divorced, parents had died.

She liked the way he drove, with a complete lack of aggression, effortlessly handling the traffic, showing no impatience when things suddenly bottle-necked on Memorial Drive.

“There’s the problem,” he said.

A young woman stood in front of an older model import, the hood up, staring helplessly at the engine.

Rick signaled and pulled off the road in front of her. “I’ll just see if I can give her a hand,” he said.

He said it so casually, as if it would be unthinkable not to do the decent thing. A few minutes later, he was back in the car. His hands were dirty and he wiped them on a white handkerchief. He obviously didn’t regret his decision, even if it had meant getting his hands dirty.

“That was nice,” Linda said, aware she offered the compliment grudgingly. “To stop and help her.”

“I couldn’t do much. Called a tow truck for her.”

It was still nice. Decent. An old-fashioned virtue that she wondered about the existence of from time to time.

“She reminded me of Bobbi,” he said. “I’d want to know someone would stop and help Bobbi—or you—if you needed it.”

Linda considered her worst weakness to be the tenderness of her heart. She saved that side of herself now for one person and one person only, her daughter. Yet, just now, she was suddenly nearly swamped with a sense of tenderness.

Harshly she pulled herself up. He could have done the decent thing for her once, too. He could have helped her by simply telling her the truth about her husband’s affair. He had chosen not to.

That’s what she needed to remember when she was getting caught up in the heaven of his scent, in the astonishing green of his eyes, in the way his fingers looked on the steering wheel. She needed not to let those things—or even his chivalrous roadside stop—sway her into believing in the basic decency of the man.

She folded her arms over the place where her heart hurt and glared out the window.

Rick could not help but notice Linda changed abruptly, her thermostat going from just slightly above freezing to flash frozen in the blink of an eye.

What was he doing, anyway? Offering to help her unpack and bake cookies? He was negotiating to get what he wanted, he defended himself. That’s what he did for a living. That’s what he was good at.

But couldn’t he have thought of a trade that did not involve tangling with her quite so personally? He was weaving his life with hers, and that was quite a bit more than he had promised Bobbi he was going to do.

Damn it, he liked her.

He had always liked her. And he had always known, guiltily, she had married a man completely unworthy of her.

He sighed heavily. She glanced at him, and he was afraid she would see his soul, see the weight that was carried there, the burden.

Why had she asked him, earlier, if he was in a relationship? How many reasons could there be for a woman to ask a man that? It suddenly occurred to him that even though he and Linda had known each other since they were both young and foolish, this was brand-new territory for them. For the first time in their shared history, they were both without partners. And he’d offered to bake cookies with her! That was probably akin to a marriage proposal to a widow!

If there was one thing Rick was not doing again, it was marriage. When he’d signed the final divorce papers, he had buried the part of himself that could care that deeply, the part of himself that could be hurt that much.

The truth was, he liked being single. And not for any of the reasons a person might have thought. He did not like playing the field, he did not even particularly like dating. What he liked was freedom: to climb on that motorbike and go without having to answer to anyone or to be back at any given time. He liked being able to phone and book a trip to Taiwan or Bombay or Borneo on a whim. He liked backpacking through Mexico and South America with absolutely no plan, and he liked riding on buses crowded with chickens and mothers and babies and grandmothers. He liked to get up in the middle of the night and play chess on the Internet. Rick Chase liked being single!

The something that had sizzled through him back there at her house, watching her in her bedroom, could threaten all that, if he let it.

He wasn’t going to let it, plain and simple.

She was a good deed, not very unlike stopping to help that girl on the road back there. Linda would probably kill him if she knew. Or perhaps she’d kill him anyway. He slid her a look. He needn’t have worried about Linda having designs on him. Whatever he’d said or done back there after he’d pulled back into traffic had sealed his fate. She looked like she’d rather be sharing the car with Attila the Hun than with him.

They entered the Mount Royal area, located on a hill just south of downtown Calgary. Developed between 1904 and 1914, this neighborhood had been developed to be prestigious from the very beginning. The lots were huge, the houses gracious, the boulevards lined with mature, leafy trees. Despite some in-fill housing, the area still held the grace of old money. Houses here started at one and a half million dollars, and many sold for three times that.

They pulled up to the O’Brian house, typical of this area. It had covered porches on both floors, bay windows with original stained glass uppers, wide steps, an enormous yard. Despite the thrill of pleasure Rick felt when he saw the house, he could not stifle a groan. For the one other woman who thought he was Attila the Hun was sitting on the front porch of his house, rocking back and forth as if she owned the place.

“There’s Mildred,” he said. “Careful. She’s probably got a shotgun loaded with salt up there on that porch with her.”

Mildred, of course, looked like the quintessential little old lady, so Linda gave him a look that branded him an insensitive boor, and bailed out of the Cadillac as if it held a bad smell.

He sighed and got out of the vehicle. He shoved his hands in his pockets and trailed Linda down the walk. Mildred, her face set in battle lines, was coming down the stairs to meet them.

“Linda Starr,” he said reluctantly, “Mildred Housewell.” What he wanted to say, to Mildred, was get the hell off my property, but he didn’t want Linda to know just how mean he could be.

“I used to be an O’Brian,” Mildred said, laying claim to the house.

“How lovely,” Linda said, as if she meant it. She took both the old woman’s wrinkled hands in hers. “Would you be kind enough to show me the house?”

Mildred shot him a look loaded with satisfaction, as if she had finally been recognized. “I’d love to,” she said.

He unlocked the door. And then he was ignored as the two women explored the house together.

Mildred’s granddad had been the first owner of the house, which was built in 1912. Each of the rooms had a story. She knew the history of each of those additions and seemed terribly attached to the worst of the renovations, rooms divided, bathrooms upgraded.

The house was quite terrible inside—original hardwood covered under stained rugs, a distressing life collection of old stuff that no one wanted. There was extensive water damage under the kitchen sink and in one of the upstairs bedrooms, so the whole place smelled musty.

But the bones of the house—stained glass, gorgeous wood, high ceilings, architectural details that no one could afford anymore—were exquisite. Rick knew the Calgary market, and he knew that even if he invested a hundred thousand dollars in restoration costs he could make a lot of money on this house. And restore it to dignity at the same time.

He caught a glimpse of Linda’s face, and recognized what he saw there. Like him, Linda loved houses, plain and simple. Not the new cookie cutter ones, but ones like this, regal old ladies of nearly a hundred who had seen generations come and go, who had character in every line.

“Do you have pictures of the way it used to look?” Linda asked Mildred when they’d arrived back at the front door.

Mildred shot him a look that could only be called vindictive. “Hundreds of them.”

“Do you think I could see them?”

“For what purpose?” she asked Linda suspiciously.

“Mildred—” Linda’s voice was gentle “—your family sold this house when your mother died.”

“But I didn’t want to!” Mildred wailed. “How could they do that?”

“I think they knew they couldn’t afford to do what needed to be done. Or maybe they weren’t interested. It’s going to take a great deal of work, but this house deserves to be restored to its original beauty. That’s why I’d like to look at the pictures. To get it just right. I’m hoping you’ll help me.”