Magic

SIX

Bryan bolted for the door with Rachel right behind him. He took the grand staircase two steps at a time and ran straight for Addie’s room. Addie shrieked again as he burst into the room.

“Blast you, Hennessy!” she blustered, shaking a gnarled fist at him. “I ought to pop you one! You startled the life out of me!”

Bryan brushed the reprimand aside. “Addie, what happened? We heard a crash. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, no thanks to you.” She clutched a fistful of nightgown to her chest. Her knuckles were white. “There was a ghost outside my window, trying to get in! Go out there and catch it,” she ordered, thrusting a finger at the portal. “You’re supposed to be good at that, aren’t you?”

For all her effort to appear calm, she was still terribly rattled. She’d been lying in bed, trying to sleep as memories tumbled through her mind all out of order, like the colors in a kaleidoscope, when the apparition had appeared. The shock had thrown her into a mental tailspin. Now fragments of the past mingled with the present so that she couldn’t distinguish one from the other. Her heart beat frantically as she tried to sort it all out.

“Mother!” Rachel gasped as she burst into the room belatedly, her shoes having hindered her progress on the stairs. “Are you all right?”

Rachel. Addie stared at her, confused. Love ached inside her. She lifted a wrinkled hand to brush her daughter’s hair back from her flushed face. “Rachel,” she said firmly but with far more gentleness than she’d used in years. “You ought to be in bed. You’re going to ruin your voice, staying up all hours. What will Mrs. Ackerman say?”

Rachel blinked at her. She hadn’t had a voice lesson with Mrs. Ackerman in ten years, but she couldn’t bring herself to say that to Addie. She didn’t want to do anything to ruin this single fragile moment of peace between them. Still, something had happened in this room, and they had to find out what it was.

“Mother, why did you scream?” she asked carefully.

Addie looked at her blankly.

“The ghost,” Bryan prompted. “Was it Wimsey?”

Rachel scowled at him. Why did he persist in this ghost business? How would Addie be able to cling to any part of her sanity with Bryan encouraging her hallucinations?

“Of course it wasn’t,” Addie muttered crossly as she backed up and sat down on her rumpled bed. She couldn’t think for the life of her who Wimsey was. It seemed best to lay the blame elsewhere. “It was a ghoul. It was the ugliest thing I’ve seen since Rowena Mortonson bought that horrid little Chinese dog. Perfectly hideous little thing. You couldn’t tell if it was coming or going.”

“Who’s Rowena Mortonson?” Bryan asked Rachel.

“She was our next-door neighbor in Berkeley.”

“Don’t speak as if she’s dead, Rachel. She’s only gone to Los Angeles to visit that effeminate son of hers,” Addie muttered, playing with the fraying end of her braid. “There’s a boy who needs a can of starch in his shorts.”

“What did it look like?” Bryan questioned.

“Oh, he favored Rowena, poor homely boy-pug nose, receding chin, limp brown hair. That pretty well describes the dog too.”

“No, Addie. The ghost that was at your window. What did it look like?” Bryan asked, earning himself another glare from Rachel.

“Oooooh…” Addie shuddered. “Pasty white with black eye sockets, and it made the most horrible strangled wretching sound.”

“You say this ghost was trying to break in?” Bryan asked.

“The window is broken,” Rachel said, slightly unnerved but unwilling to admit it. She sat down on the bed beside her mother and took advantage of Addie’s confused state, wrapping an arm around her frail shoulders. She wanted the physical contact, to comfort and be comforted, whether Addie was coherent or not.

“The glass was broken from the inside,” Bryan said, examining the gaping hole in the window. Shards littered the footwide ledge outside. Carefully, he raised the window and stepped out with one foot. He looked up at the gable peak and around the ledge itself, which was ornamented by a rusting wrought iron railing that had come loose on one end. There was no evidence of Addie’s “ghoul,” just a mournful howling as the wind swept around the various turrets and gables of the old house. In the distance the ocean roared.

“I threw a rock at the ugly thing,” Addie said truculently. Her eyes narrowed with anger and suspicion. “Coming in to steal my bird cages.”

Rachel closed her eyes and sighed. She was sure there hadn’t been anything at the window except a figment of Addie’s imagination. She had read that paranoia was one of the more common effects of Alzheimer’s. The person wasn’t able to remember where she’d put something and wasn’t able to reason that no one else would want it, so she was sure people were stealing from her. Seeing and hearing things that weren’t there were also common nighttime occurrences for someone with Addie’s affliction. Knowing that, it seemed painfully obvious to Rachel what had happened.

“Well, he’s gone now,” Bryan said, climbing back inside. He had pulled a screw from the loose base of the railing and stood rubbing the clinging bits of rotted wood from the threads, a thoughtful expression on his face. “I’ll take care of this window first thing in the morning. For tonight-”

“You can sleep in my room tonight, Mother,” Rachel offered, not only eager to make her mother comfortable, but eager to score some brownie points with her as well.

Addie looked around the room with a slightly frantic widening of her eyes. This was her room. She knew where everything was-most of the time. She usually remembered how to get from this room to any other part of the house. But if she spent the night in Rachel’s bed, she would be lost, and everyone would see it.

“This is my room,” she said, her chin lifting. “I shall sleep in it if I so choose.”

“Mother,” Rachel said wearily, “please don’t be stubborn.”

“Never mind.” Bryan smiled suddenly, bending to take off his shoe. Using the heel for a hammer, he drove the tip of the rusty screw into the thick meeting rail of the window. Then he took a large, gloomy oil painting of a foundering ship off the wall and hung it so that it covered the entire lower portion of the window, blocking out the damp cool air that had flowed in through the broken glass.

“Good as new and more interesting to look at,” he said as he dug a crumpled scrap of paper out of his trouser pocket and scribbled something down.

Relieved, Addie’s shoulders relaxed as she let out a breath. She slipped out of Rachel’s loose embrace and went forward to pat Bryan’s cheek. “Good boy,” she said as if he were a dutiful spaniel.

“I know how fond you are of your room, Addie,” he said. He took her hand in his, but his gaze went meaningfully to Rachel. “We don’t want to uproot you if we don’t have to.”

“Hennessy, you’re a treasure,” Addie said.

Rachel sat on the bed, running a finger absently across her lower lip, reflecting on Bryan’s actions-both there and in the study below. She could still feel his arms around her, could still taste him. He kissed wonderfully. Whether or not she should have allowed him to kiss her, she felt stronger and less alone now than she had before.

Her mother looked relaxed and was happily fussing with the painting at the window, straightening it to her satisfaction, the incident of the ghost apparently forgotten already. Rachel’s thoughtful gaze slowly swept around the room with its garish red moiré silk wallpaper. A place for everything and everything in its place. Everything in the room was arranged just so. Not all the items seemed to belong there-like the weird assortment of smooth stones on the white linen dresser runner-but Addie apparently found comfort in having them there, just as she found comfort in being in the room itself.

“Good night, Addie,” Bryan said. His gaze was on Rachel as he crossed to the bed and took her by the hand. He smiled gently. “Come along, Rachel. We don’t want you to ruin your voice staying up late; what would Mrs. Ackerman say?”

She’d say you were a treasure, Hennessy, Rachel thought, a small ember of warmth glowing inside her, but she kept the words to herself as Bryan escorted her out of the room and down the hall.

“I’ll have a look around outside, and I’ll keep an eye on her room,” Bryan said. “But I doubt anything more will happen tonight.”

“I doubt anything happened at all,” Rachel muttered. “I wish you wouldn’t persist in encouraging these fantasies of hers.”

“What makes you think this was a fantasy?”

Rachel gave him a look. “An ill woman looks out her second-story window and sees a ghost she knows is trying to break in to steal her bird cages. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure this out.”

“Well,” Bryan conceded grudgingly. “I’ll admit the bird cage thing is a little farfetched.”

They stopped outside the door of Rachel’s room, and Bryan leaned a shoulder against the frame. Rachel looked up at him pleadingly. “Don’t you see it, Bryan? She imagined there was something there, panicked, and threw a rock through the window.”

Bryan frowned, the corners of his handsome mouth cutting into the lean planes of his cheeks. He looked disappointed. “You didn’t see it, therefore it doesn’t exist? There are lots of things in this world that can’t quite be explained, Rachel. The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, but are felt in the heart.’ Helen Keller wrote that. She was blind and deaf. Just because she couldn’t see or hear the rest of the world, do you think she gave up thinking it existed?” he asked quietly.

Rachel took a breath, preparing to argue, but it occurred to her suddenly that he had changed the subject, had subtly altered the slant of the conversation so that ghosts were only a small part of it. The man was much more clever than that innocent smile of his let on.

Holding her gaze with his, he reached up into the darkness of the hall, and when he brought his hand back down, he held a tiny white flower between his thumb and forefinger. He tickled her nose with it and gave her a sweet, lopsided smile.

“Explain that, Miss Lindquist.”

Rachel laughed and batted his hand away. “You had that up your sleeve, you charlatan.”

“You’ll never know for sure, unless you get me to take my shirt off,” he said, teasing. “And I’m not that kind of boy,” he added, squaring his big shoulders and lifting his nose in the air.

“Don’t let Mother hear you say that,” Rachel said, eyes twinkling. “She’ll think you need starch in your shorts.”

“Hardly,” Bryan muttered dryly, gritting his teeth on the surge of desire that came automatically from just looking at her. He couldn’t seem to keep his gaze from wandering to the low V of her neckline. With every subtle movement she made, the silk of the old dress slid sensuously over her creamy flesh. Lord, how he envied that dress! Just the thought of touching her made his lungs hurt from lack of oxygen.

Rachel smiled up at him, unaware of his torment. It was wonderful the way he made her feel relaxed and playful in spite of all that had happened. He had a rare way with people, Bryan did. And he was a heck of a kisser.

As if he had read her mind, he leaned down and brushed his lips across hers. The kiss caught fire as quickly as dry kindling, burning hotter and hotter as Bryan’s mouth slanted across Rachel’s. He pinned her between the doorjamb and his own body, seeking as much contact as he could get. Rachel’s arms wound around his neck, and she arched into him, swept away by a flood of physical desire that had leapt out of control before she had even had a chance to consider damming it up.

Need built inside them and around them in waves of heat. Rachel gasped at the feel of Bryan’s hand skimming down her side, tracing the outer swell of her breast, following the inward curve of her waist and the flare of her hip. His fingers stroked downward to cup her bottom and lift her against him. She gasped again at the feel of his arousal, pressing hard and urgent against her belly, and succeeded in drawing his tongue deeper into her mouth.

Somewhere in the dimming regions of her mind she knew she should have been putting an end to this instead of encouraging it, but her sense of logic seemed to have little control over the situation. Her body wanted Bryan Hennessy. She’d never been one to throw herself at a man, but it felt as if her body was ready to change that trait right now.

It didn’t make sense, she thought, struggling against the wanton need rampaging inside her. Why would she lose control this way with a man like Bryan, a man who believed in ghosts and magic, a man who, in the end, would only bring her more disappointment. She couldn’t fall for him. It just wasn’t smart.

“Good night, angel,” he whispered softly, pushing himself away from her. His chest rose and fell quickly with shallow breaths. There was a sadness in his steady gaze that made Rachel want to apologize, though she wasn’t certain for what.

He slipped the tiny white flower into her hair behind her ear and backed into the hall, tucking his hands into his trouser pockets in a vain attempt to disguise his state of arousal. “Put the flower under your pillow and you’ll have sweet dreams.”

Her confusion plain on her face, Rachel Waved to him as she disappeared into her room. And Bryan turned and wandered down the hall, thinking it was going to be another endless night.

In the long, sometimes illustrious life of Drake House, not once had the estate been owned by anyone named Wimsey. Nor had any of the owners had any children with the first name Wimsey. These facts Bryan had managed to discover easily enough, checking old records and browsing through the library books he had found. That left a number of possibilities. Wimsey might have been someone’s nickname, or he might have been a servant of one of the families or a friend or an enemy.

Or he might have been, as Rachel had interpreted the name, a whimsy, a figment of Addie’s deteriorating mind.

“No,” Bryan muttered, paging through yet another book. “I don’t believe that.”

Addie was too matter-of-fact about Wimsey. She didn’t bring his name up to garner attention or to divert attention from herself. Wimsey was real to her, and Bryan wanted badly to prove her right, if for no other reason than to show Rachel that ghosts existed as surely as dreams and rainbows and magic did.

Rachel. So responsible and practical and levelheaded. Rachel, who had been avoiding him like the plague for two days-ever since they’d shared that searing kiss at the door of her room. She believed she couldn’t have magic in her life when it was what she needed most. He meant to give it to her.

He’d made his decision. He couldn’t stop thinking about her, couldn’t stop wanting her. It seemed he had no real choice in the matter. He was going to pursue a relationship with Rachel Lindquist whether either of them thought it prudent or not.

A thread of guilt drifted through him, and he sat back in the desk chair with a sigh. Elbows on the arms of the comfortable old chair, he steepled his fingers and his gaze came to rest on the small etched-gold ring he wore on his left pinky. Even in the subdued morning light of the study the ring glittered on his finger, bright and merry and pretty, just like Serena had been.

She would have wanted him to get on with his life. She wouldn’t have wanted him to shut himself off from people the way he had been doing. His self-imposed isolation had closed him off from his gift and his magic. And since he had begun to open up again, he had begun to feel again.

He could feel himself standing unsteadily on a threshold with the cocoon of his grief behind him and the rest of his life before him. Already he could feel himself leaning through the portal toward whatever the future held for him. A part of him was eager and a part of him was sad because of it.

He bent his head and pressed a gentle kiss to the ring Serena had given him, the ring that encircled his finger in warmth, and tears rose up in his eyes as he said his final good-bye.

“Bryan?”

Rachel’s voice preceded her into the study, giving him enough warning so he could clear his throat and squeeze his eyes shut.

“Bryan, are you-oh, here you are,” Rachel said. She stopped uncertainly as she stepped into the study. Her brows pulled together in concern. “Are you all right?” she asked hesitantly.

“I’m… fine.”

He didn’t look fine, Rachel thought. He looked like a man laboring under the strain of some terrible emotion. The idea caught at her heart and squeezed it tight. Bryan was always smiling-except when he was scolding her for not believing in magic. In the short time she had known him, she had seldom seen him be entirely serious. She had never seen him in pain. Until now.

“I was resting my eyes,” Bryan lied. He plucked his glasses off and rubbed at the bleary blue orbs. “Too much reading.”

He settled his spectacles back on his nose and stared up at Rachel. She was worried about him. He could sense her concern. Warmth stirred inside him, and a soft smile tugged at one corner of his mouth.

“What are you searching for?” she asked, approaching the desk slowly, trying not to appear too curious.

She had been forcing herself to steer clear of him, but discovered she was so drawn to him that she kept dredging up excuses to seek him out. Her emotional tug-of-war was wearing her out.

“Proof of Wimsey,” he said.

“You haven’t found any, have you?” It was more a statement than a question. She felt the pendulum inside her swing away from him.

“That doesn’t mean there isn’t any,” Bryan said with forced cheerfulness, “only that I’m not looking in the right places.”

Rachel sighed, her shoulders drooping with resignation. “Do you really think this whimsy is what Mother keeps seeing at night?”

There had been two more incidents involving Addie’s elusive intruder. Both times she had been the only one to see anything. Rachel was no more convinced now than she had been that the apparition was real. Bryan, on the other hand, seemed as sure as ever that it was.

“She says not. She seems to think it’s some other entity. Odd that she’s never spoken of other ghosts before, only Wimsey,” he reflected, clearing a fat book aside so he could stare at his charts. “And there’s been almost no activity recorded in the parts of the house where these last three sightings have been.”

“So?”

“So,” he drawled, beckoning Rachel nearer still. He swept a hand across his blueprint of the house on which he had drawn a numbered grid and jotted down smaller numbers that were circled. “Sightings are almost always concentrated in specific areas. This very room, for instance, and the foyer.” He tapped his pencil to two separate grid blocks, each of which was crowded with a cluster of little numbers.

“This looks very… scientific,” Rachel said, surprised. She might have decided Bryan was no con man, but that didn’t mean she had decided to accept his so-called profession.

He gave her a wry look. “Yes, they try to train us properly at Transylvania U.”

Rachel felt a blush creep into her cheeks. “You said the other night you and Jayne went to college together.”

“Yes.” Mischief twinkled in his deep blue eyes. “She majored in witchcraft and druid rituals. Ask her to change a man into a toad for you sometime. She’s quite good at it.”

“Stop it,” Rachel commanded, narrowing her eyes at him. Laughter threatened, and a smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. “I’m trying to extricate myself gracefully.”

Bryan winced. “Sounds painful.”

“You’re not making it any easier.”

“Sorry,” he said, utterly unrepentant. “Jayne and I and two other friends you will no doubt meet soon attended Notre Dame. I got my master’s at Purdue.” Rachel’s eyes widened comically. Bryan chuckled. “And you thought you Californians had cornered the market on weird.”

Her brows lowered ominously, and she tapped a finger to the blueprint. “You were explaining this to me.”

“All right,” he conceded. Maybe he would be able to convince her with a logical scientific explanation. Somehow the idea didn’t appeal to him as much as simply having her believe did. He took a deep breath and began. “Many parapsychologists believe all places are ‘haunted’ by memories of past events. Some places more strongly than others, naturally, say the scene of a violent death, for instance.”

“Why can’t I see this whimsy of Mother’s? I heard her talking to him in the hall this morning, but when I stepped out to look, there wasn’t anybody with her.”

Bryan shrugged as he wrote himself a note to check the hall tape recorder. “Maybe you haven’t got the right kind of psychic sensitivity. You don’t want to believe in him; that doesn’t help. People tend not to see things they don’t want to see.”

“Why doesn’t he appear to you? You want to see him.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why my equipment hasn’t picked anything up either, but then, these things are never predictable. If they were, we wouldn’t call them ‘paranormal,’ would we?”

“I’m sorry,” Rachel said, shaking her head, “but I still don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Neither do many psychic investigators. As a whole, we tend to be a very skeptical lot.”

“You seem anything but skeptical.”

He grinned at her, and Rachel felt her heart lurch. She reminded herself that this was exactly why she’d been avoiding him. He made her body react entirely against the better judgment of her mind.

“I’m one in a million,” he declared happily.

That was for sure, Rachel mused, watching him as he leaned toward her. She thought he was going to kiss her again, and her lips buzzed with the memory of the kisses they had shared. But he touched the tip of his nose to hers instead, and smiled the most devastatingly sexy smile. Heat washed through her, and she unconsciously wet her lips with the tip of her tongue.

“Did you have sweet dreams the other night, angel?” he asked in a voice so soft it was like a caress.

Rachel’s cheeks bloomed red. Sweet was probably not quite the word to use regarding the dreams she’d had. Erotic was far and away the most accurate. She didn’t understand it. Bryan was hardly the first good-looking man she’d ever known. And she was categorically against getting involved with him. Why then did she continue to go on feeling such a fierce attraction?

It made no sense. But then, little that had gone on in the past few days had made any sense. It was this blasted old house, she decided irrationally. The sooner she was out of it, the better for all concerned. Her life was pointed down a very narrow road. There was no room for a dreamer to tag along.

Bryan drew back, a gleam of satisfaction in his eye. She had dreamed about him. That bit of news was certainly a balm to his bruised male ego. He decided not to gloat; it wasn’t his style. Instead, he produced three small red foam balls from nowhere and began to juggle.

Rachel stared at him, bewildered. That was all right, he decided. It would do her some good to be thrown off balance on a regular basis. It was too easy to picture her letting her life settle into a rut of dreary, dutiful routine. If she didn’t learn to look around for magic and rainbows now, she certainly wasn’t going to start in a year or two. The struggle to cope with Addie’s illness would have worn her down and extinguished all belief in dreams and happiness. He just couldn’t let that happen.

“Did you have a question?” he asked.

“What?”

“When you came in here, did you have a question, or dare I hope you came seeking out my pleasant company?”

Rachel gave herself a mental shake and gathered her wits. She straightened away from the desk, looking suddenly very purposeful. She was wearing a soft blue prairie-style dress with a simple shirtwaist and gathered skirt. A big turquoise pin was fastened at the throat of the stand-up collar. Her hair, which had flowed like fine champagne down her back the night they’d kissed, was up now, secured in a sensible knot at the back of her head. Wild tendrils curled around her face.

Bryan thought she looked like a schoolmarm-a very pretty, vulnerable schoolmarm.

“Perhaps you’ve come to discuss our relationship,” he suggested.

Rachel nearly bolted. “We-we don’t have a relationship,” she said, sounding more rattled than resolute.

“I beg to differ,” Bryan argued with a charming smile. He caught the red foam balls and clutched them to his chest, his expression turning melodramatic. “Or were you just leading me on when you kissed my socks off?”

“I was not leading you on!” Rachel protested. He made the whole incident sound as if she had planned it.

“Well, then…” He shrugged innocently, implying that if she hadn’t been leading him on, then she had been seducing him with a purpose.

Rachel ground her teeth and refused to rise to the bait. She wasn’t getting involved with him. She wasn’t even going to argue about getting involved with him.

“I was wondering if you knew where my mother keeps the books for her antiques business. I’ve been looking all over for them. I have to get started on them so I can find out exactly where we stand financially.”

“Did you ask Addie?” He settled back down on the desk chair.

“Do you honestly believe she’d tell me?” she questioned, unable to keep all the bitterness out of her voice. She and Addie seemed no closer to a reconciliation than they had five years before. It didn’t help that Rachel had been to see her mother’s lawyer to find out where they stood legally and financially. Talking about power of attorney and conservatorships did not make for ice breaking.

“Have you spoken with her about selling the house?” Bryan asked.

“No.”

“She isn’t going to like it.”

“Then I’ll have to deal with her anger, because there isn’t any other way,” Rachel said stubbornly. The frustration of the past few days boiled up anew inside her. “I have a good job waiting for me in the city. We need the money.”

“There’s always another way, Rachel,” Bryan said, his disapproval of her plan subtle but clear.

“Oh, really?” Rachel arched a brow as her temper flared up. She crossed her arms in an effort to keep from trying to strangle him. “What is this wonderful alternative? Maybe you could enlighten me. So far I’ve discovered that this house is probably worth less than Mother owes the bank because it’s falling down around our ears. The electric company is threatening to discontinue service because she hasn’t paid the bill in months. The doctor bills we’re going to incur will wipe out my own bank account all on their own.”

“You need to have a little patience,” Bryan insisted. “Something will turn up.”

Rachel felt as if a switch had been flipped inside her, letting anger pour forth unchecked. Something will turn up. That had always been Terence’s line. He’d forever been telling her to lighten up, loosen up, that the future would take care of itself. She’d seen firsthand that wasn’t the case. Nothing ever just “turned up.” She had learned the hard way that the world had two kinds of people: People like Terence who believed in rainbows, and people like her who accepted responsibility.

It made her angry to think that Bryan belonged to the first group, the group she knew better than to get tangled up with. And deeper down it made her angry that she had to belong to the second group. Her life would have been a whole lot brighter with a rainbow in it, but she couldn’t have one, and she didn’t have time to go chasing it, at any rate. She had responsibilities.

She was angry with him. Bryan could feel the heat of it, he could see it burning in her eyes. He had stepped on a nerve. He opened his mouth to smooth things over, but Rachel didn’t give him the chance.

“It must be nice to be able to coast through life believing everything takes care of itself,” she said bitterly. “But I wouldn’t know, because I’ve always been one of those people destined to pick up after dreamers and shoulder the realities they can never seem to face.”

Bryan shot up out of his chair and grabbed her by the wrist as she turned to storm out. “Rachel, wait-”

“I can’t wait, Mr. Hennessy,” she snapped, glaring at him. “I’ve got work to do.” She jerked her arm from his grasp and rubbed at it as if to erase the memory of his touch. “I’ll let you get back to your juggling,” she said with a sneer.

Bryan closed his eyes and heaved a long sigh. Each click of her heels on the wooden floor made him wince until the sound faded away. He turned to stare up at the portrait that hung on the paneled wall.

“Got any bright suggestions?” he asked.

The pleasantly pudgy man in the painting was Arthur Drake III, the last Drake to own the house. He merely went on staring straight ahead, a secretive smile on his small mouth, one hand raised, palm up, as if gesturing to the viewer to behold the room around them. A badly tarnished brass plaque fastened to the bottom molding of the frame was engraved with a quote by Seneca: Gold is tried by fire, brave men by adversity.

“I guess this is adversity,” Bryan muttered. “Well see how acceptable I am.”

He sank slowly into the chair and swiveled around, letting his gaze take in the gracious room: the cherry paneling, the built-in bookshelves crowded with musty old leatherbound volumes, the fireplace, which had apparently been renovated at some point because the brick was newer than any other in the house.

What was he going to do about Rachel?

Kissing her seemed like a good idea.

“Right,” he murmured wryly in answer to his inner voice. “I’ll do it again next time she lets me get within a hundred yards of her.”Rachel finally found the books for her mother’s antiques business squirreled away inside an oak icebox in what was supposed to be Addie’s office. It was a sunny room at the front of the house, cluttered with stacks and stacks of old newspapers, and wastebaskets full of splintered glass figurines. The desk contained hundreds of old lace doilies. One drawer was brim full of ballpoint pens. But not one scrap of relevant business information had been housed there. Inside a file cabinet she had found cigar boxes full of buttons of every description, but not until she checked the icebox and looked beneath three dozen old Life magazines did she find what she’d been looking for.

She realized, as she eased down into the chair behind the desk, that while she had been looking for this financial information, she had been dreading actually finding it. It had become obvious to her that Addie was in no condition to run a business with anything remotely resembling efficiency. She feared the books on Lindquist Antiques would only confirm what she already knew to be true.

Shoring up her resolve with a deep breath, she brushed the dust from the cover of the old ledger and turned it back. The first few pages of columns were written in her mother’s neat, brisk hand. Sales and acquisitions were noted with proper care and detail. The columns of figures added up to the penny.

Rachel checked their accuracy with her calculator, feeling slightly inferior. Addie had always done math in her head as quickly and unerringly as any machine. She had always expected Rachel to be able to as well, and she had always seemed let down when Rachel hadn’t been able to live up to that standard. Rachel recalled with a pang the nights she had sat up in her bed with her covers over her head to hide the brightness of the flashlight as she worked on her math tables, determined to make her mother proud of her.

The only thing about Rachel that had unfailingly pleased Addie had been her voice. Addie had been a demanding taskmaster, forcing her to practice, practice, practice; correcting her slightest error; critiquing every note. But when Addie had sat and listened to a performance, a look of rapturous longing had stolen over her face. Pride and love had shone in her eyes. And afterward Addie had always roused herself, as if from a dream, and said, “You have the voice of an angel, Rachel. I am so very very proud of you.”

Rachel shook herself now from the bittersweet memory. She had fought against that pride in an attempt to gain her mother’s understanding, and she had lost. It had been a foolish thing to do, but she’d been young and rebellious and longing to have her mother love her for who she was, not how she sang. She rubbed at her temples now as she thought of how it had all backfired on her, how all her pretty rainbows had melted into grayness.

Maybe if Bryan had had to deal with a harsh reality or two, he wouldn’t be so quick to believe in magic either, she thought.

A relationship with Bryan Hennessy. She shuddered at the thought, though whether it was out of fear or anticipation she couldn’t have honestly said. She told herself it was righteous indignation. The nerve of the man insinuating that she had been pursuing him!

Turning another page in the ledger, she noticed that the handwriting had changed subtly. It wasn’t quite as neat or strong. A figure or two had been scratched out and written over. The penmanship worsened with every page, until she began to find words misspelled, letters transposed, mistakes in the math. And Rachel realized that what she was seeing was documentation of Addie’s decline.

Nearly a year had passed since the last entry had been made in the book, and that final column of figures had never been tallied. The page was wrinkled and dark from a coffee stain, as if Addie had perhaps become upset with her inability and had spilled the cup in her haste to escape the written evidence of the illness that was progressively stealing her mind.

Rachel set the ledger aside and picked up the inventory book, hoping against hope that it was more up-to-date. But what she found was a repeat performance. The entries started out logical and legible, and gradually declined to the point that what little she could make out made no sense. The book was no more up-to-date than the ledger had been, and it was too much to hope that nothing had been purchased or sold in the interim. She was going to have to inventory everything in the house, then they would have to have a sale of some kind to dispose of the bulk of the merchandise.

They would be able to take only Addie’s most personal possessions and a few antiques to San Francisco. Rachel knew they would not be able to afford much in the way of an apartment. There certainly wouldn’t be room for the hundreds of pieces of furniture Addie had accumulated, or the bric-a-brac… or the bird cages.

“Oh, Mother,” she whispered, planting her elbows on the desk and rubbing her hands over her face as a wave of helplessness crashed into her. “What are we going to do?”

Addie stood in the doorway to the office, motionless as she stared at Rachel. Spread out on the desk before her daughter were the books she had come to dread and hate. It was clear to her that Rachel had seen them. A cold knot of panic settled in her stomach.

“What are you looking for?” she asked, trying to sound commanding but sounding uncertain instead. She shuffled into the room, her garden boots scuffing on the worn rug. “Money to give to Terence, the slimy snake?”

“I don’t see Terence anymore, Mother,” Rachel explained calmly. She wondered how pleased Addie would have been to know her relationship with “the cheap folk singer” had died long ago, that the bloom of love had faded along with her dreams.

“Good,” Addie said, taking a seat on a dusty chair that sat beside the desk. “I never liked that boy. He wasn’t good enough for you.”

Rachel didn’t comment on the remark. Terence was in the past. There was no sense wasting energy thinking about the past when the future was going to take everything they had.

“Mother, we need to talk,” she said gravely. She was bracing herself for a fight, but when she looked into her mother’s eyes, she didn’t see the anger she had come to expect. She saw sadness. Somehow that was worse.

“I’m a little behind on those books,” Addie said.

“It’s all right. We’ll get them straightened out.”

“Here. Let me, Rachel. You were never good with numbers.”

For an instant there was a flash of her old efficient, businesslike self as Addie reached across the desk and picked up the ledger. She sat up straighter, her bony shoulders squared beneath the thin cotton of her housedress. Taking a pencil out of a cup on the desktop, she opened the book.

Gritting her teeth in determination, she began at the top of the page. She saw the numbers, took them into her brain, and tried to put them together, but they scattered and went off in all directions in her mind. She took a deep breath and tried again. She had always been so good at math. Now she could barely comprehend the numbers on the page before her. She tried to add two numbers together, and just before the answer became clear to her, it slipped away.

A terrible chill ran through her. She could excuse her forgetfulness. She was a busy woman with a lot on her mind. So what if she put her car in reverse instead of park once? So what if she went to the mailbox on Sunday? Busy people forgot things all the time. But this, this was something else. She couldn’t discount her inability to add these simple numbers together.

She stared at the figures on the page until they seemed to leap out of their columns and spin around one another in a whirlpool of black and red ink. Panic rose up in her throat, and she slammed the ledger shut. She wanted to throw the book aside and run out of the room, but her brain suddenly couldn’t separate all the intricacies of each task, and she clutched the book to her breast instead.

“Mother?” Rachel asked softly. Her own sense of panic was growing inside her, and it trembled in her voice. She had never seen her mother as anything other than strong, invincible, indomitable. And before her very eyes Addie was shrinking down on her chair, her face a mask of stricken confusion. Rachel reached out toward her, the fingers of her hand curling over the edge of the musty old ledger. “Mother?”

“Rachel,” Addie murmured, her voice straining. She felt too fragile and frail to speak louder than a whisper. She felt as if she might shatter like the many china figurines she had broken over the last few months as the connection between her brain and her fingers had shorted out. The shield of anger and indignation that had held her up so many times was gone, vanished as suddenly as her memory could vanish.

All her life she had been strong. She had stood on her own to raise her daughter when her husband had been killed. She had never asked for help from anyone. But now she turned instinctively to her daughter, her eyes full of anguish and tears. “Rachel, I’m so frightened.”

Rachel took her mother in her arms and held her as her mother had held her when she’d skinned her knee or had had a bad dream. And she offered what comfort she could while she shared her mother’s pain and felt the pain of her own loss. She was losing her mother. Addie would never be the strong one again. It was Rachel’s turn. At that moment both of them realized it.

“I’m frightened too,” she murmured through her tears. “But we’ll manage. Together, like it used to be. Just the two of us. I’ll take care of you. I love you. I love you so much.”

Bryan stopped in the doorway, everything inside him going still at the sight. He had intended to barge in and sweep Rachel away from the books for a walk around the grounds. He wanted to show her that there was more to her life than worrying about money. But it looked as if she didn’t need him to tell her that at the moment.

He knew he should have stepped back out into the hall and allowed Rachel and Addie absolute privacy, but it seemed important that he see Rachel this way-as a loving daughter, as a caring person, not embarrassed by her mother’s illness, but heartbroken for a loss that could never be replaced.

Or perhaps what was truly important was the feeling coming to life inside himself, the feeling he had denied over and over the past few days. He was in love with Rachel Lindquist.

He did step back then, as if the realization had come in the form of a physical blow. He let himself out of the house and strode quickly toward the fence that ran along the cliff’s edge, breaking into an athletic lope that ate up the distance. When he reached the rusty iron railing, he stopped, sucking in great deep gulps of sea air. In each hand he grasped a spear point that decorated the top of the wrought iron pickets, twisting at them so that the oxidizing metal flaked against his palms.

Without really seeing it, he stared out at the ocean. The gray-blue waves rolled in, one after another. Fishing boats dotted the misty horizon. Gulls keened and swooped along the rocky beach below.

How had it happened so fast, he wondered. He hardly knew anything about her. Except that she loved a mother who had shunned her for five years, and she’d had dreams broken, and she tasted of need and sweetness. And when the moon shone in her eyes, he could see how badly she needed to believe in rainbows and how afraid she was to reach out for one.

It didn’t seem possible that he could have fallen in love when he had just opened up enough to offer Rachel his help. He had meant only to reach out to her, to offer her a little respite from her worries. But in opening up he had not simply given, he had received. He could feel again. Now Rachel’s pain would be his pain, her fears would be his fears.

“I don’t know if I’m strong enough to go through that again,” he whispered.

You are. Love makes you strong.

He thought of Rachel holding her mother, whispering assurances through her tears. Love was the most powerful thing in the world. It could endure time and turmoil, hurt and heartache, pride and pain. Love was magic.

Bryan’s broad shoulders rose as he drew a deep breath, filling his lungs with cool air, and a deep, abiding calm settled inside him with the kind of acceptance that comes only from the heart. It might not have been smart or logical for him to love Rachel Lindquist, but love her he did, and if he could give her magic, he would.