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Her nerve endings heated under his regard in an unexpected way, and she nodded, feeling awkward. “Yes, I am,” she answered. “It’s good to be home.”
“Take the morning off, okay? Come in at around two. If you need longer, just call and let me know.”
“I’ll be fine. Two o’clock.”
“You sure?”
“We have the regional figures to go through,” she reminded him. “And meetings to prepare for.”
“We do. Okay, then. Two o’clock it is. Have a good night.”
Leo had already opened the trunk to collect her bags and carry them to the door for her. Nick watched as Celie followed the older man to the side door that led up to her apartment. She had a straight back, a tidy walk, a taste for very efficient and very tailored professional clothing, and glossy dark hair that would have bounced in time to her footsteps if it hadn’t been so neatly twisted and clipped high on her head.
Something moved in the corner of his vision. A curtain in one of the Victorian mansion’s six apartments, maybe, wafting in the night breeze. Nick’s muscles tingled with a sudden urge to chase after Celie and snap the clip off her hair so that its clean, silky bounce would become fact instead of imagination.
He resisted the urge, disturbed by how unexpected and how strong it was. He could almost feel her hair in his fingers. He kept watching as she reached her door, just ahead of Leo. Typically, she had her key already in her hand.
Of course she did. He would have been surprised if she hadn’t, and Celie Rankin almost never surprised him. This was one of the things he liked about her.
She wouldn’t let Leo bring her bags up the stairs, and disappeared inside within seconds. Leo headed back to the car, while Nick kept watching the big old house. A series of lights came on, showing Celie’s progress up the stairs. Finally, the big, round turret room at the front of the second floor lit up. He saw a faint shadow through the drapes as she moved across the room.
Celie was a great executive assistant. Nick had kept her up until well after midnight in his hotel suite last night, working on her laptop, and he suspected her mind had been buzzing too fast afterward to wind down and permit her some good rest. No wonder she seemed tired, and a little offline.
He never had that problem. He’d learned very early in his life the trick of switching off and disappearing deep into the haven of sleep. As a young child, sleep was the only place in his life where he’d felt safe. Now his facility for deep, unbroken sleep allowed him to function at a higher level than many people during his waking hours, and he rarely remembered his dreams.
“Okay, Leo,” he told his driver, dismissing Cecilia Rankin from his mind. He picked up his cell phone. “I’m going to call for some takeout and bring it over to Sam’s, since he hasn’t eaten yet. Can we swing by the Green Dragon, next?”
“I’m glad you’re back,” Celie’s creaky-floored old apartment seemed to say to her.
The chandelier in the middle of the turret room’s ceiling sparkled, and when she opened a window, a cool evening breeze wafted in. The antique clock on the side table by the door clacked like a percussionist playing out a rhythm. Eight o’clock, it read. Time to eat, her stomach said.
No problem, there. As efficient at home as she was at work, she kept the refrigerator in her little kitchen well-stocked with quick-to-prepare meals. Toss some frozen cheese ravioli into a pot of boiling water, heat a creamy pasta sauce in the microwave, tear up a few lettuce leaves, and she could eat in ten minutes.
Celie caught sight of her cherry-red robe hanging on a hook in the bathroom, and into her mind jumped the idea of taking a quick shower while the ravioli cooked, then eating in the robe and her matching slippers.
As a child, she’d been allowed to do that, when she was tired. Her mother would bundle her up on the couch with a crocheted blanket over her knees and a little tray table, spread with a linen place mat. She would eat a big bowl of homemade soup and fresh hot biscuits, and she’d feel so deliciously cosseted and safe.
She hadn’t done anything like that for years. Since her dad’s death, when Celie was seventeen, she had had to be the adult, the responsible one, the one who did the cosseting. It had seemed to frighten her mom if the daughter she depended upon displayed any sign of softness or vulnerability.
“You’re exhausted. Baby yourself a little tonight, Celie,” the robe on its hook seemed to say, but she ignored it and stayed in her clothes, afraid that if she gave in to the impulse she might fall asleep on the couch with the ravioli still boiling on the stove and not wake up until the kitchen caught fire.
She ate her meal, prepared for bed and fell asleep before ten.
The sound of a baby crying came to her ears after several hours of good rest. It seemed so close that it startled her awake. Or—But, no, was she awake? She found herself at the window, although she didn’t quite remember how she’d gotten there. Had she walked? Or floated? Someone whispered a sound. Soothing the baby? Or calling her name?
The cries still came. In this room? They sounded close enough, but no. She looked around. There was no baby here. Outside, then? Downstairs?
The sound seemed distinct and real—as real as sounds and senses could feel in a dream, heightened more than they were in daily life.
Celie pushed the curtain aside and looked out. She’d kept the window open, as the April night was mild. The street looked quiet. She couldn’t see anyone. Maybe the crying came from the apartment below. It sounded a little fainter to her ears, now. The couple downstairs didn’t have a baby of their own, but they could have visitors staying with them.
She stepped back, and was about to let the curtain fall back into place when something on the windowsill gleamed in the moonlight and caught her attention. She picked it up. It was a hat pin, old-fashioned, with a long shaft of dull, dark gray metal and a big glass pearl at one end.
And that means I’m definitely dreaming, she realized, as part of the dream. Because I’ve never seen this before.
The glass pearl was pretty, and she imagined a dark-haired young woman with a wide, mobile mouth and friendly eyes, standing in front of a mirror and reaching her hands up behind her head as she used the hat pin to fasten a broad-brimmed creation of straw and chiffon into place on her thick pile of hair.
“This is a very nice dream,” she told the woman. “If only that little baby would stop crying.”
“Nick will go to him and soothe him back to sleep,” the woman said. Her smile at once began to calm Celie’s concern.
And a few seconds later, the baby stopped crying, so the woman pinning her hat must have been right. Nick had picked him up. Of course he had! Celie could see him with that little dark head settled on his broad shoulder and brushing against his clean-shaven cheek. His shirttail had escaped from his waistband again, but he was too absorbed in the baby to notice. Everything was fine.
Celie tucked herself back into bed with a smile on her face.
In the morning, however, the hat pin still lay there on her windowsill, and that was distinctly strange.
Dressed in her blue-striped flannel pajamas and only just out of bed, she picked it up and twirled its metal stem in her fingers as if the glass pearl was a little flower. So pretty, the way it caught the morning light. It made her think of Victorian lace, hand-stitched fabrics, elaborate hats and porcelain figurines. Despite its spiky point, it felt feminine.
When she thought about it, there was a perfectly rational explanation for its presence on her windowsill, too.
No, okay, not perfectly rational.
She wished she could find a better one.
But it was plausible, if you were prepared to stretch. The attic apartment directly above this one was in the process of renovation. The construction team had really torn into the place, pulling up floorboards and ripping ancient plaster off the walls. The hat pin must have gotten lost a hundred years ago, fallen through a crack in the floorboards and—
Well, here it was on the windowsill, so something like that had obviously happened, even if Celie couldn’t quite picture the physics of it, right now.
And the baby—Nick’s baby, protected in his strong arms—had been purely a dream.
For some reason, Celie didn’t want to risk losing the wandering hat pin again, so she put it in the little zippered compartment on the side of her purse. After her usual light breakfast, she went to the mall.
“Sorry I’m late,” Celie said breathlessly, as she entered Nick’s office.
He looked at his watch.
She was right.
She was late.
By a whole two minutes.
And she looked a little different. Fresh, energetic, happy and well-rested, for a start, although he felt there was more to it than that. Her hair looked extra silky, and the clips had to be new. He didn’t think she usually wore clips decorated with little flowers. They went some way toward undercutting the severe styling of her skirt, he thought, as did the pastel top she wore.
She definitely looked different.
This fact niggled at him a little, although he didn’t have time to work out why. They had a lot to get through this afternoon. He allocated only a few seconds to the topic, and told her sincerely, “You look very nice.”
She nodded, and said, “Thanks,” and he knew she wouldn’t expect him to pursue the question any further than that.
“Let’s get right to those regional figures,” he told her.
With various interruptions, the regional figures took most of the afternoon, and didn’t leave Celie much time to contemplate her slightly disturbing morning at the mall. In the few moments she did have in which to think about it, she felt churned up inside. On the one hand, fluttery in the stomach, like a child going to a birthday party, but on the other, ill at ease.
At the mall, she’d kept thinking about her dream last night and about the hat pin. She’d even gotten it out of her purse a couple of times, to prove to herself that it was real…although she might have felt more reassured if it hadn’t been. She’d been twirling it in her hand when the hairstylist had asked her, “Just a trim?”
And she’d felt the strongest temptation to answer, “No, I’d like to try something completely new.”
She’d resisted it in the end. There was a good reason she always kept her hair up and out of the way. With the hairstylist waiting, and the hat pin still twirling in her fingers, Celie had needed several seconds to remember what the reason was—that it wasn’t very efficient to have hair in her face when she was focused on work—but it did come to her in the end, and she opted for the usual trim.
She and Nick got through the regional figures by the anticipated time, and her boss was happy. When Celie got home that night and opened the closet to hang up two of the new, more softly styled tops she’d bought this morning to pair with her skirts—she’d worn the third top to work—the closet seemed to approve.
Several hours later, the bed wasn’t so friendly. Tonight’s dreams clattered into her mind with more violence, and the images were harder to put together. A figure lay on the floor of the kitchen. Her kitchen? The room looked familiar, and so did the figure itself, but then her dream lurched off into a different direction, she heard the sound of tearing fabric, and lost the image of the figure in the kitchen before she could decide exactly who it was, and what was going on.
The baby started crying, and she sat up in bed, alert at once, but the woman by the mirror told her again, “It’s all right. Nick will go to him. Nick will care for him.”
“I hope so,” Celie answered. “But what about the woman on the floor?”
“Call her in the morning.”
“Okay. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. Of course.” The suggestion made so much sense that it soothed her back into sleep…or out of her dream…and it didn’t occur to her that she didn’t know who she was supposed to call.
In the morning, she woke late. Hurrying to prepare for work, she knew her sleep had been cut through by another dream, but didn’t have time to try and bring it back to mind.
That happened later.
Sam’s personal assistant, Kyla, told her, as they sat waiting for a meeting, “I love your hair like that. Any reason?”
“Oh, I just didn’t get a chance to put it up this morning, that’s all.” She’d tried a couple of times, but for some reason her fingers wouldn’t go through the familiar maneuver, and the fold of hair kept slipping sideways. In the end, she’d let it drop around her shoulders, still sheened and slippery from yesterday’s salon conditioning treatment.
“You should wear it that way more often,” Kyla said.
White-blond Kyla wore lots of jewelry, and lots of black. She was a single mother with a five-year-old daughter, Nettie, and although she came across as a ditz sometimes, she got things done. Sam depended on her more than Kyla herself ever let the man guess.
“I would, only it’s not very practical,” Celie answered.
She had that churned up, self-conscious sensation again. Somehow, she didn’t feel quite safe. She suddenly remembered last night’s dreams, and the reassuring advice of the woman who stood by the mirror.
“I’m supposed to call someone,” she said aloud. “Check on someone.”
She stood up in a panic, and it came to her in a rush. That figure, lying on a kitchen floor, wearing a nightdress and with one leg stuck out strangely…
Mom.
Eleven years ago, Celie’s older sister, Veronica, had already been away at college when their father died, and her mom hadn’t coped with Veronica’s absence or with widowhood and grief too well. Celie herself had gone to college at Ohio State, so that she could remain at home. She’d moved into an apartment of her own several years ago, but still she never wanted to let her mother down. She spent a lot of time at Mom’s, helping her out, and this morning’s call to her seemed urgent, now.
A cluster of senior Delaney’s executives and regional managers entered the room at this moment, carrying briefcases and sheafs of papers. Nick and Sam wouldn’t be far behind.
“If they’re ready to start, Kyla,” she gabbled. “Tell them…uh…that I won’t be long. Or—could you take notes for my Mr. D, if he needs it?”
“Sure. What’s up? You look—”
“Nothing. I’m sure everything’s fine.”
Celie hurried to her private office, adjacent to Nick’s, and keyed in her mother’s phone number, but her mom didn’t pick up, and neither did the machine.
Celie’s mother had had a bone-density scan a few months ago, and the result had come back low. She took risks, too—vague, thoughtless ones that she didn’t even realize were risks until Celie pointed it out. She went down the basement stairs of her little house without turning on the light. She put a step stool on the grass in the yard to reach up and prune a branch.
Celie had the phone number of her mom’s neighbor Mrs. Pascoe in her address book, and she’d called a couple of times in the past to ask Mrs. Pascoe to check next door.
“Sure I’ll go across, honey,” Mrs. Pascoe told her today. “Just don’t you worry, okay?”
But when Mrs. Pascoe called Celie back a few minutes later, her voice sounded very different.
“Thank heaven you called me when you did, Cecilia!”
Her mother had fallen from her step stool two hours ago while trying to change a lightbulb in the kitchen. She’d broken her leg, and she hadn’t been able to get to the phone.
“I’ve already called 911,” Mrs. Pascoe told her. “The ambulance is on its way.”
Celie hung on the line, shaky and hardly able to breathe, and it seemed like an hour before the other woman came back to the phone again to report, “She’s going to be okay, although the paramedics say it looks like a bad break. They’ve just left, and they’re taking her to Riverside. You can probably hear the sirens in the background. She’s in shock, after lying on that cold floor for so long.”
Mrs. Pascoe hung up, but Celie’s fingers were curled tightly around the phone and she couldn’t seem to let it go. Nick appeared in the doorway while the receiver still hung in her hand.
“Kyla said—” Nick stopped, midsentence. “Heck, what’s wrong, Celie? You’ve gone white.”
“My mother’s broken her leg. She had to lie in pain on the kitchen floor for two hours, with no help on its way. I dreamed about it. Which is just so weird.”
“You dreamed your mother broke her leg?”
“Yes. I saw a figure lying on a floor, only I didn’t know who it was. Someone in the dream told me, ‘Call her in the morning.’ I remembered the dream just now, so I did call her, and when I did…” She took a shuddery breath. “Thank heaven I called!”
“Celie, it’s all right. Keep remembering to breathe, okay? Are you going to faint?”
“No.” She’d never fainted in her life, and didn’t intend to start now.
“Help is with her now, right?”
“She’s in the ambulance.”
“So it’s okay. And for heaven’s sake, don’t worry about a little thing like a dream!”
“No. Of course. You’re right.”
Celie felt herself sway. She didn’t think she would have fainted, since she never had before and was so determined not to, but when Nick’s arms came around her for support, strong and warm, she clung on to her boss for dear life and whispered hoarsely, “Don’t let go.”
Chapter Two
