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Spencer’s grin told her she wasn’t fooling anyone. Then she shivered again, and this time it was because she actually was freezing.
“I really am cold,” she said as her teeth started to chatter.
“Of course. Come on.” With a casualness she didn’t fall for, he snagged one of her hands and tucked it in the crook of his arm. He led the way back to the sidewalk and steered her toward the front porch. After a moment of mental debate, Addy decided that the advantage of not having to look where she was going, allowing her to stare at the house looming over them, was worth the inconvenience of bumping into Spencer’s body with every step. Elwood pranced about their feet, kicking up snow with a dog’s sheer joy in play.
But it was the house, the fairy-tale, castlelike vision of a house, that she couldn’t take her eyes off.
With all of the lights on and a little more composure under her belt, Addy could see that although the house was large, it was the height of the building that made it seem so imposing. The house itself was three full stories tall, and its towers—there are towers, with round walls and cone-capped roofs, for God’s sake—stretched another story or two higher. There were windows everywhere, almost more windows than walls it seemed, and warm yellow light shone out of dozens of them.
Closer to the house, she started to realize why the building gave off such a feeling of age. Her initial impression of stone walls had been given by the mottled, peeling gray paint on the clapboard siding. The wraparound porch that stretched across the front of the house and around one side lent an air of elegant welcome, until she noticed that the gutters were pulling away from the porch roof in several places.
“Careful here. Watch your step.”
“I see Great-Aunt Adeline didn’t exactly keep the place up,” she said as she gave a little leap over the first stair, most of which seemed to be missing, up to the porch.
“She was ninety-two when she died, Addy. New paint didn’t exactly top her list of priorities.” Spencer kept his gaze directly ahead of him, but his clipped enunciation communicated his displeasure well enough.
“I’m a little tense.”
She knew her words weren’t an apology, could hear her mother’s voice in her head demanding that she make one, but Addy felt as if she’d done enough apologizing to this man already.
“I know.” Spencer’s hand tightened around hers for a moment and he turned his head to look directly at her. His eyes were the blue of the sky a half hour after sunset. Then he let go and reached for the door.
“I know.” She mouthed the words at his back like a bratty five-year-old. Of course he does. Spencer Reed knows everything.
It was amazing how easily this man could get under her skin with just two words.
“Come inside. I’ll find you some dry clothes.” He called the words back over his shoulder at her as he pushed open the front door and then stepped quickly up the staircase directly in front of the door.
“I’m not going to be here long enough—” she started to call out after his retreating back “—to change clothes.” She ended by talking to herself. “Sheesh. Like talking to a brick wall.”
Might as well check the place out, Addy thought. Then she actually looked around her and realized that she would have no idea where to start. A long hallway extended on either side of the staircase toward the rear of the house, and what seemed like a dozen doorways opened off it, scattered randomly on both sides of the hall. Even the doorways themselves were varied, some with doors, some without. One was arched and another was an open cutout in the shape of the minaret of a Turkish mosque.
Flipping a mental coin, she started walking slowly down the right side of the hall, trailing her fingers along a chair rail. A faded Oriental runner muffled the sounds of her boots on the hardwood floors.
Above the chair rail, the walls were crowded. Oil paintings, photograph collages, dried flowers, even an old violin, were displayed with care for visual pleasure all the way down the hall. Addy stopped in front of an age-darkened portrait of a dark-haired woman with her hair pulled back severely in a bun and a small smile on her lips. The family resemblance was unmistakable, even if Addy couldn’t have guessed the century for the life of her. Surprised, she found herself wondering if this was where her mother’s habit of blanketing her walls with photographs and artwork and family mementos came from.
Reaching out a hand, she traced the line of the woman’s cheekbone, her fingertips a millimeter from the painting’s surface. An angular scribble in the corner of the painting caught her eye. After a moment’s examination, she realized that the scribble was numbers.
1899.
Spiderlike chills crawled over her skin, lifting the hairs on her arm. This picture of a woman who looked so much like her mother, her sisters, herself, was over one hundred years old. Some quick math allowed her to guess that she was staring at a picture of her own great-great-grandmother.
“Her name was Susannah.”
She jumped and clenched her jaw to keep from yelping at the sudden noise. One hand pressed firmly to her chest, she took a deep breath.
“Don’t do that,” she said. “You could kill someone.” Spencer was holding out a pile of neatly folded clothes. She ignored it. A grin quirked across his face.
“Sorry.” His voice didn’t sound very apologetic. He looked at the portrait. “I don’t even know who she is, but Adeline used to stop and look at that painting all the time. She told me once that the woman’s name was Susannah.”
“Susannah is my mother’s name,” she said after a long silence. “I think she was my great-great-grandmother.” Something was cracking inside her. What felt like an enormous pressure burst into existence behind her eyes and in her temples. She took a breath and felt it hitch alarmingly in her chest. Shook her head and closed, then opened, her eyes. “Is there a bathroom here?”
“Second door down. Take these with you.” Spencer pushed the clothes into her hands and she grabbed at them reflexively.
In the bathroom, she dropped the clothes on a green marble counter, cranked on the hot water and thrust her hands under the strong rush out of the antique taps. Everything was cold. Her hands felt like clattering ice cubes. She looked up and into a mirror and saw that her teeth were chattering.
No wonder I’m out of it—I really am about to come down with pneumonia. Time to stop being stupid just to prove I’m stubborn.
Five minutes later, she felt almost human again. Her jeans were still damp and chilly—taking her pants off was more comfortable than she’d wanted to get. But wearing a faded navy sweatshirt with Duke University emblazoned across the chest and thick, dry socks returned a little of her calm.
Duke?
She followed the sound of a whistling kettle and found Spencer in a tiny servant’s kitchen, not much more than a closet with a hot plate and a sink, off the other hall. He’d removed his overcoat, suit jacket and tie somewhere along the way and stood in gray slacks and a deep blue button-down with the sleeves rolled up. She stood in the doorway, reluctant to squeeze into the tiny room with this man who made all the little hairs on her arms stand on end.
“So, Great-Aunt Adeline was a big Blue Devils fan, was she?”
When he looked startled at her sudden appearance, she was pleased. Let him be the one off balance for a little while. His gaze skimmed over her from head to toe. She saw his eyes narrow and guessed that he’d noticed she still wore her wet jeans.
“Not that I’m aware of. That’s mine,” he answered as he returned to pouring tea from a fat ivory pot into two bone-china teacups. “Did the sweatpants not fit?”
“I don’t know,” she said, watching him pour. She found it irritating that instead of looking silly or a bit prissy with a teapot, the contrast between the fragility of the china and the muscles in Spencer’s hands and forearms only emphasized the strength of his physical presence in the tiny room. “I have this thing about wandering around big, empty houses with guys I don’t know while wearing their pants. I’d rather keep my own, thanks. So tell me, why are your dog and your sweatpants at my great-aunt’s house?”
His next words confirmed her suspicions.
“I’ve been staying here for a while,” he answered, dropping what she could only assume was an actual tea cozy over the pot and then turning to her. “Do you take anything in your tea?”
“I have no idea. I never drink it. Is living in my great-aunt’s house one of the perks of attorney-client privilege?”
“Of course not. Don’t you read anything?” He doctored both teacups with a dollop of honey and a splash of milk and placed them on saucers. “Let’s sit in the library. I’ll start a fire. You can warm up and I’ll tell you about all the information inside that useful packet of papers I sent you this morning.”
Trailing him down the hall, Addy felt like a fifth grader caught throwing spitballs during the teacher’s pop quiz. She had deliberately ignored the stack of legal documents since she had no intention of accepting the bequest. Now she realized that when dealing with Spencer Reed, it was better at all times to be fully prepared. She was clumsy enough around him without choosing to be ignorant, also.
The library was a long, narrow room that turned out to contain not only books and a fireplace but also a half-dozen glass-fronted cases holding collections of everything from iridescent pinned butterflies to small, fossilized sea creatures to dusty hunks of various minerals and semiprecious crystals. It was as if walking into a turn-of-the-century curio museum, and Addy tumbled straight into love at her first sight of its jumbled oddities.
“Here, curl up and get warm.” Spencer handed her tea to her and waved at a leather armchair with a muted plaid blanket draped over the arm.
She was more than happy to follow that order, and wrapped herself in the soft chenille throw while he squatted down in front of the fireplace and began fiddling with the stacked logs. His preoccupation allowed her to indulge in a lengthier look at the room around her. She was debating whether or not she ought to get up out of her comfy seat to take a closer look at some of the volumes on the far wall when she realized that her gaze, for the last several minutes, had been focused on the way the fabric of Spencer’s clothes stretched tightly against his shoulders and his butt as he leaned forward with the long fireplace match and lit the kindling.
Give yourself a break, girl, she thought, and raised the teacup to her lips to hide her smile. There’s no harm in looking, is there?
Just how much harm there could be was made clear, however, when Spencer suddenly turned and walked away from the fire, catching her stare. His grin rose like a slow tide on his face and she flushed. She would have sworn the dratted man could actually read her mind.
“Not too warm?” he asked, settling himself in the chair next to hers, tea in hand.
“Not at all,” she said, denying the heated redness of her cheeks.
“Good, then we can get started.” With these words, he leaned forward, bracing his forearms on his knees. “First of all, did you read any of the papers I sent you?”
“You mean the papers that arrived at five this morning?” she retorted smartly. The blatant lie was her best option. “I was in nonstop meetings all day long. I didn’t have the time.”
“I’m sure.” His drawl bordered on insulting and the way he sat meant his clasped hands rested only inches from her knees. She tucked her legs up beneath her in the chair. “What is it that you do? No poor-taste joke to follow,” he added.
“I’m a civil engineer.” Gotcha, buddy, she thought, as her words made him sit up a little and cock his head a little to the side. And you can just ask me what that means if you don’t know.
The silence held.
That was unexpected, Spencer thought. A civil engineer. He leaned back again in his seat and picked up his cup of tea, using the gesture to fill time as he thought about the implications. If she’d said she was an animal trainer for the circus, or a performance artist who did weird things onstage while reciting poetry under a black light, he wouldn’t have been surprised. Adeline had told him stories about her niece, Addy’s mother, who’d gotten pregnant and run off with a jazz musician at eighteen years old. So he was prepared for a little oddity in the mother’s daughter. And she certainly had a mouth on her that defied polite-society conversation.
A civil engineer. Although he wouldn’t want to be put on the spot to define what exactly that was—something to do with how a building affected the land and hooked up to various public-works systems, he thought—he was sure that you didn’t get to be one by having a few screws loose. She’d likely done postgraduate work in a scientific field and held licenses from several federal and state boards.
This changed things. He wasn’t sure how, but he was sure that it did.
First, a guess.
“Were you in the field yesterday morning?”
“How perceptive of you.”
Tromping around on a construction site went a long way toward explaining her mud-bespattered appearance at his office. Still, even now she looked more like an unemployed college student, with her wildly curly black hair and what he felt sure were braless curves under his sweatshirt. She had silver rings—some braided, some set with stones, some plain—on almost every finger of both hands, including her thumbs.
But, an engineer.
“Please don’t be offended if I tell you that that was not what I expected.” He decided that honesty would be best, and waited to see if she would spring out of her chair and attack him for it.
“You mean like I didn’t expect to find you living in my great-aunt’s house?” she asked with a real smile. She was warm. She was cozy. There wasn’t enough energy left in her body right now to get into a fight. Elwood strolled in the library door and flopped down in front of the fire. That’s how she felt, too.
“Yes, something like that.” He smiled at her, crinkling the corners of his ocean-blue eyes, and for the first time, she just smiled right back at him. The firelight was doing interesting things to his hair, dancing bronze and gold sparks off the ends. As their gazes held, she felt those same sparks take up dancing in her stomach.
“You’re going to explain that, right?” she asked at last, cutting through the building tension with her voice.
He laughed. “Don’t worry. It’s only temporary while my condo is being renovated. I knew Adeline my whole life. My family have been her family’s lawyers for almost a century, and when she heard I was going to move into a hotel, she invited me to stay here.”
“Really?”
“Cross my heart. You can ask my mother.” The thought of meeting the society matron who’d raised him did not excite her. “I hate hotels.”
“Me, too,” she murmured and curled up a little more in her blanket. The warmth of the fire was so soothing on her face, the low crackling of the flames hypnotizing. “So tell me what’s in all those papers.”
“Certainly. You should know, first of all, that this last version of your great-aunt’s will was drawn up just last year. Since there are no other living relatives outside of your family, there should be no contesters as to the validity of the will. Assuming you fulfill the conditions of the bequest, there will be no…”
Spencer’s measured baritone was very calming. His tone of voice asserted that there were no problems in this world that reflection and clear thinking could not solve. She was so reassured, in fact, that she thought she’d just rest her eyes for a moment while he spoke. She could listen to his very reasonable description of the terms of the will while she relaxed just a little bit after what had been an extremely long, tense day.
She fell asleep as she was listening to the conditions of the bequest, her sleepy brain certain that everything seemed very reasonable indeed. She even nodded her approval.
The room was silent when she next had a conscious thought. She wondered why the fire wasn’t snapping and hissing. She considered opening her eyes to look at it.
Too much effort.
Someone was stroking her hair, she realized fuzzily. Static electricity had strands pulling away from the side of her face as the hand drew away. Gentle fingers returned to tuck the hair behind her ear.
Her eyes drifted open slowly. Spencer was crouched down at her side, one arm draped along the chair back, fingers tangled in her hair. His other hand rested on her knee. She felt a physical click run through her system as his gaze locked with hers, bringing her closer to wakefulness.
“You know, you’re incredibly beautiful when you sleep.” His voice was soft and low. Maybe she was still asleep. Now he was smiling at her. “It helps that your mouth is shut.”
His shadow fell over her first as he leaned toward her and then captured her lower lip between his and sucked on it lightly. She opened her mouth in surprise and he immediately covered it with his own, his tongue smoothly curling around hers in a dizzying attack on her senses. She was electrically conscious of where his hand was tracing small circles on her knee.
“What—” Her voice was sleep-rough as she tried to speak between kisses.
“You’re beautiful,” he murmured. She could feel the vibrations of his voice against her lips. “When you sleep.” His mouth pressed hers open again.
Someone was moaning softly. Addy was afraid it was her. As her body surged into awareness of this man who was kissing her, who she wasn’t even sure she liked but whose touch was turning her insides into a puddle of melted wax, her brain struggled to recall how she’d gotten into this situation.
His teeth nipped at her lower lip. He swallowed her sudden gasp. Her fingers were running themselves of their own will around his neck and dipping, touching him beneath the collar of his shirt.
She couldn’t think. Tried harder. His hand was skating up the outside of her jean-clad thigh. He had been talking, explaining something about the will. Fingers slid under the bottom of her borrowed sweatshirt and skimmed the bare skin at her waist. There was the house and the money. His hand kneaded firmly at her hip. Something about living here for six months. His mouth was fiercer on hers now, the pressure arcing her head back and pressing her breasts into his chest. There was more, though, she was sure of it.
She had it.
With a near shriek of rage, she tore her mouth from Spencer’s and shoved hard at his shoulders. Scrambled to get her numbed legs out from under her and clawed her way past him and out of the chair. Standing in the evening-dark room in her stocking feet in front of the embers of a banked fire, a blanket half draped over her shoulders, she only wanted the answer to one question.
Could she possibly have heard him correctly?
“Did you say that I have to be married?”
Three
“Ow.”
Spencer looked up from his plate and across the corner of the long dining room table.
“Just pinching myself,” Addy said, sucking at the sore spot on the back of her hand. The silver fork and knife in her hands were heavy, another world from her stainless-steel utensils at home. “Thought I must have been dreaming to agree to stay here tonight.”
He tore his eyes away from the sight of her lips pulsing against her own skin. “Look outside. It’s like the blizzard of ’76 all over again.” He pointed to the velvet-draped windows. She didn’t turn to look at the swirling clouds of white made only more opaque by the light shining out of the room into the night. “You can’t drive in that, even if we could manage to dig out your truck.”
She glared at him. They’d already gone a few rounds about the fact that he’d let her sleep for three hours in front of the fire. He’d found it difficult to defend his decision since he wasn’t at all sure why he’d done such a thing. Being attracted to this prickly, sarcastic, hotheaded witch was one thing, but making sure she’d be stranded for the night with him was such a ridiculous strategy that he was startled to have given in to it.
He’d watched her struggle to pay attention to his words as the first wavelets of sleep began washing over her, then seen her head nod in approval of what he was saying even as he knew she was miles away in dreamland. And at first, he’d just meant to let her nap for a few minutes.
He had watched her sleep. Ruddy shadows and warm gold highlights had flickered over her face in the dancing light of the fire. Without her usual anger and defensiveness animating it, her face had looked like that of a teenager, the curves of her lips parted just enough for breath. Violet watercolor smudges had tinted the delicate skin around her eyes. She’d tucked her hands beneath her cheek, and the small, birdlike bones of her wrists had highlighted her aura of fragility.
He nearly snorted out loud, catching himself in the middle of this ridiculous reverie. Addy Tyler was about as fragile as a lead pipe, and she bent as much as one, too. It had been a battle every step of the way to get her to set foot in this house. He didn’t know why it mattered so much to him that she understand what she was giving up with her obstinate refusal to have anything to do with her great-aunt’s estate. He only knew that he’d planned to drag her to the house screaming for the police all the way if necessary.
The last thing he’d expected was to see this stubborn, un-sympathetic woman brought to the edge of tears by an old family portrait, an emotion that he knew surprised her as much as it did him.
He was beginning to wonder if that momentary glimpse of softness would turn out to be his downfall.
Of course, since at the moment she was only speaking to him when absolutely necessary, there didn’t look to be much chance of the two of them falling anywhere together.
