The Carriage House

Twenty-Three

Tess had headed north prepared to stay the night. The carriage house was out, and she'd assumed An-drew's guest room was out, too, or at least not a good idea. One of Beacon-by-the-Sea's inns had seemed more sensible, but here she was, unpacking in the guest room, with a milk-glass vase of violets and dandelions on her bedside stand. Dolly had picked them.

"Harl says dandelions are weeds," she said at Tess's side. "I think they're pretty."

Tess laughed. "So do I."

"Will you read to me?"

"Sure, why don't you go pick out a book?"

"Two books," she said, and ran out of the room.

Tess sank onto the bed. She was wrung-out. Mopping floors had helped anchor her mind and keep her thoughts from spinning out of control. Dinner with Andrew, Harl and Dolly hadn't helped at all. They were a family, and no matter how comfortable she felt with them, she was the new neighbor.

Andrew slouched in her doorway, the shadows darkening his eyes and bringing out the angles in his face. "What are you thinking about?"

"That you, Dolly and Harl make a nice family." But she quickly shifted the subject. "Did anyone actually like Ike?"

"Did you?"

"In a way. I know he was self-absorbed, arrogant and totally narcissistic, but we got along. Then again, he was a client, not a brother, a friend or a neighbor. I didn't have to live with him." She winced, sighing. "I'm talking about him in the past tense. I can't help it."

"Ike's a strange case. His relationship with peo-ple-even his sister-was always on his terms, never theirs. He only was interested in helping Joanna because it made him feel good. What she wanted was irrelevant."

"He steamrolls people," Tess said. "One minute, I'm tallying up what he owes me, next minute I have the deed to a nineteenth-century carriage house he was positive I wanted."

"Tess!" Dolly shoved herself between her father and the door frame. "I'm ready. I picked out two books."

Andrew placed the palm of his hand on her head and squeezed playfully. "Tess is tired. She can read you two short books, but that's it."

Tess brushed against him on her way out with Dolly. Even the brief contact gave her a jolt of awareness. He seemed to know it, feel it himself. But Dolly grabbed her by the hand and dragged her into her room.

Before they could settle in and read, Tess had to help her dress up one of the stuffed animals and have pretend tea.

"Do you think Snowflake or Snowball is a better name for the white kitten?" Dolly asked, carefully sipping thin air from her china tea set. "She's not all white. She's got some gray parts."

"Snowflake," Tess said decisively. "Snowball would be better for a furrier cat."

Dolly frowned in thought, then nodded. "That's what I was thinking."

Tess smiled. Dolly had been thinking no such thing, but she was trying to seem very grown-up, as Tess had when Davey Ahearn would come over and she'd show him how she'd stopped the kitchen-sink faucet from dripping. She wondered what might have been different if she'd had a woman in her life. Davey's two wives had never taken much interest in her, and her father kept any romantic interests he'd had after her mother's death completely private.

Mercifully, Dolly had picked out two Madeleine books for Tess to read. They were very short, and their intrepid heroine was a good reminder for her, too. She could feel Dolly's warm, sturdy little body snuggled in next to her, as if Tess had been reading books to her forever.

She couldn't resist. She reached down and picked up The Hobbit off the floor, opened it to the Winnie-the-Pooh bookmark and read softly, until Dolly fell asleep on her arm. Tess extricated herself and tiptoed out of the room.

Andrew was standing in the hall, ghostlike. He caught her by the hand and pulled her into the guest room, quietly kicking the door shut. He captured her against it, raised one arm to run his fingertips over her mouth. His lips followed, brushing lightly. "I thought you'd never finish reading."

"The Hobbit does go on."

"Tess." He still had one hand flat against the door, his forearm straightened at shoulder level. With his free hand, he snaked his fingers into her hair. "Why do I want you so much?"

She tried to smile. "Deprivation."

"Is that a knock on me or you?"

"Neither. It was a joke."

But she was having difficulty talking, and he pressed in closer, letting his fingers trail down her neck, over the curve of her shoulder, down her arm. Their mouths met again, hungrily this time, neither holding back. Tess felt desire, deep and full, well inside her until she thought she'd burst just from their kisses.

"I've thought about you," she whispered, barely able to get the words out, "all day."

His fingertips skimmed across her breasts, and she sank a bit on the door. He didn't relent. They kissed again, his control ragged. He spoke near her mouth, his eyes searching hers. "What about at night?"

"All night, too. When I wasn't thinking about-"

"Hell."

She knew she'd broken the spell. Perhaps she'd done it deliberately, if not consciously. But he didn't draw back. Instead he put his free hand against the door, trapping her between both his arms. There was no threat. If there had been, she knew what to do. Davey had taught her. But there was simply determination, strength and a tenderness that made her heart stop.

"When I make love to you, there won't be any talk of goddamn skeletons in the cellar." His voice was low and intense, a mix of intelligence, discipline and experience. He was reticent by nature, she realized, only because he chose his words well and expected people to listen. His eyes, darkened now to a midnight blue, held her in place as surely as his arms. "And my six-year-old daughter won't be down the hall."

"But Dolly lives here-"

"She has aunts, uncles, grandparents and Harl. But she's not the problem. She'll never be a problem."

"Not for me," Tess said quietly. She leaned against one of his outstretched, muscular arms. "It's Ike."

"It's not just Ike."

"It's the skeleton in general, too, whatever, whoever it is or was."

"Tess."

She frowned at him, with his eyes narrowed, his jaw set in that serious, uncompromising way that reminded her of Jedidiah Thorne. They were a rough lot, the Thornes, and had made their mark on the unpredictable North Atlantic over the centuries. Andrew was one of them. She had to remember that, father of a six-year-old though he was. "You have something else in mind?"

"It's Davey Ahearn, too," he said. "And Jim Haviland."

She scowled. "That's ridiculous."

"Is it?"

She saw he was serious. She had to laugh. "Andrew, Davey and my father are what they are. Get used to it. I have."

"You're sure?"

"Positive. They're a part of my life, and as much as I bitch and moan at times, I wouldn't have it any other way. But the men in my life might, because of crazy ideas-"

"Not so crazy," Andrew muttered.

"Fast-forward yourself thirty years. What kind of relationship do you think you'll have with Dolly?"

He didn't hesitate. "Whatever kind of relationship I want."

"Exactly. I rest my case." She ducked under his arm and went over and plopped down on the bed, noticing that Dolly's dandelions had already wilted. The violets were still in good shape. She smiled, and looked up at Andrew. He was aroused, clearly frustrated. "But point well taken about skeletons and Ike. And Dolly."

"Forget it. We can lock the damn door-"

But she shook her head, knowing what he wanted and thought was right. Knowing what she wanted. She licked her lips, deliberately sensual. "No, our first time…I don't want to hold back."

He stared at her a moment, then growled, "Hell," and left, shutting the door firmly but not loudly behind him.

She shot to her feet and ran to the window, breathing in the sea breeze, the smell of the ocean, the memories that seemed to hang over the rocks and sand.

"Oh, God, Mom."

It was the voice, not of a six-year-old, but of a woman almost the same age as her mother when she'd died. So young. How had she known so much? How had she been so wise? "Live well, Tess. Love well. That's what matters most."

She loved well, all right, she thought with a rush of sarcasm. She was hyperventilating, bursting with a turmoil of emotion that seemed to press against her chest, rob her of air.

Meet a man on Friday. Lie to him and argue with him about skeletons on Saturday and Sunday.

Fight with him on Monday. Fall in love with him on Tuesday.

Yeah, she loved well. She just wasn't smart about it. Never had been. Love made no sense to her whatsoever. There was no logic, no trusted instinct she could rely on for direction.

Just this feeling of panic. And yearning. And somewhere deep inside where she couldn't quite reach…an incongruous sense of calm.

She turned from the window, wishing she had her white-noise machine. She scanned a bookshelf, coming up with a frayed copy of Emma. That was something. Jane Austen on the bookshelves. It had to be a positive sign. A man didn't have to read Jane Austen himself, but having a book in the house signaled an open mind. An ability to compromise. An understanding of different tastes and sensibilities.

Then again, he hadn't renovated this room yet. He might come in here, throw out all the Jane Austen and put in how-to books on things like building your own gazebo.

For no reason at all, she smiled and opened to page one. At least, she thought, nobody'd be sneaking around stealing dead bodies out of old cellars in Emma.

Andrew gave up on sleep around 1:00 a.m.

He rolled out of bed and headed downstairs, noting the lights were out in the guest room. He checked on Dolly, fast asleep with about a million stuffed animals.

The lights were on in Harl's shop. Andrew walked out across the dark, dew-soaked lawn. He made sure Harl knew it was him coming, not anyone he'd require a baseball bat against.

They sat out on the Adirondack chairs in the dark. A half-moon and stars shone overhead, and they could hear the tide coming in. "You working on the rolltop?" Andrew asked.

Harl nodded. "I'm treating that thing like a museum piece. The people who own it don't care. They just want it to look good and not fall apart. They're going to use it for bill-paying." He looked over at Andrew, his white beard and white hair standing out against the darkness. "Tess Haviland keeping you awake?"

Andrew didn't answer.

"You need a woman raised in a bar that makes the best chowder in Boston and serves college students and working stiffs both. She's the kind of woman Joanna would have wanted for Dolly. She told me, you know. She said she wanted to be stronger, more self-reliant, for Dolly's sake." He stretched out his thick legs, this much talk more than Harley Beckett would ever consider easy. "Joanna couldn't make herself happy, never mind you."

"It wasn't her job to make me happy."

"That's part of the problem with you and women. I'm not saying I'm any expert."

"Good."

But Harl was on a roll. "You were always too independent for Joanna. She wanted more control over you. She was smart, and she was a damn good woman, but I think she figured she could control a mountain better than you. Tess is used to independent men. She can hold her own."

Andrew stared over at his cousin. "You've been doing a lot of thinking, Harl."

"Up yours, Thorne. You want to self-destruct, send this woman back to Boston, go ahead."

"Her relationship with Ike-"

"Maybe it was a real friendship. Ike never had friends, and not just because he was a pain in the ass. He was rich, he had a lot of energy, he could do things. People projected stuff onto him, fed off his optimism. I mean, he could home in on a person's weaknesses, and he was self-centered-but he was arrogant enough to think he had enough energy and charisma to go around."

Andrew settled back in the old Adirondack chair and gazed up at the shagbark hickory, the stars and moon shining through its branches, creating black silhouettes against the sky.

"I wonder if Ike had a premonition he'd need Tess to find him," Harl said.

"And that's why he gave her the carriage house? Not Ike."

"It could have been an unconscious premonition. They were friends, and he knew if something went wrong, Tess had just the kind of bulldog personality that'd get the truth out on the table, make everyone see what was what." Harl nodded, pleased with his theory. "I think about Jedidiah. Who knows what happened at the carriage house that day? Maybe the truth's never come out, justice has never been served."

"He had years to tell his story."

"Maybe his sense of honor stopped him. You know those nineteenth-century types."

"You could have a point."

"Or I could be full of shit. I need to get some sleep if I'm going to face six-year-olds tomorrow." He got heavily to his feet. "Forget what I said. I talked too much. Must be the ghosts."

He went back into his shop, but Andrew didn't move. He listened to the ocean and stared up at the hickory, the stars and the moon. For all he knew, Harl was right about everything. Joanna, Ike, Tess, Jedidiah. And the ghosts.