by Lisa Kleypas
“Sure,” Alex said automatically, although there was nothing of Zoë’s sparkling allure in the photo, only a hint of resemblance.
“Fifty-two missions over the Himalayas,” the ghost said, reading the article aloud. He looked at Alex. “They called it the ‘Hump.’ The transport pilots had to fly fully loaded cargo planes. Bad weather, high altitude, hostile aircraft. Dangerous as hell.”
“Were you … are you …”—Alex reached for the clipping on the floor—“this guy? Gus Hoffman?”
The ghost mused over the possibility. “I flew a P-40. I’m sure of it. Not a cargo plane.”
“You were a pilot facing the enemy,” Alex said. “What’s the difference?”
The ghost looked outraged. “What’s the difference between a fighter or a transport? You’re in a fighter, you’re alone. There’s no low-and-slow, no coffee and sandwiches, no one else to keep you company. You fly alone, you face the enemy alone, you die alone.”
Alex was secretly amused by the pride and arrogance threaded through his tone. “So you were in a P-40. Facts are, you were a pilot, you were in love with Emma, and you remember stuff about the house she grew up in, as well as the cottage at Dream Lake. All this falls in line with you being Gus Hoffman.”
“I must have come back to her,” the ghost said distractedly. “I must have married her. But that would mean—” He gave Alex a sharp glance. “Zoë could be my granddaughter.”
Alex rubbed his forehead and pinched the corners of his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “Oh, great.”
“That means hands off from now on.”
“You were pushing me to go after her,” Alex said in outrage.
“That was before I knew about this. I don’t want you becoming part of my family tree.”
“Back off, pal. I’m not going near anyone’s family tree.”
“I’m not your pal. I’m … Gus.”
“Theoretically.” Alex glared at him as he stood and whacked the dust from his jeans. He set the article aside and tied the top of the large garbage bag.
“I want to find out what I looked like. And when I died, and how. I want to see Emma. And I—”
“I want some peace and quiet. Not to mention five minutes alone. I wish to hell you could find a way to disappear for a while.”
“I could try,” the ghost admitted. “But I’m afraid if I do, I might not be able to talk with you again.”
Alex gave him a sardonic glance.
“You don’t know what it was like,” the ghost said, “being alone and invisible to everyone. It was bad enough that even getting to talk to you was a relief.” He looked contemptuous at Alex’s expression. “Hasn’t occurred to you to think about that, has it? You ever tried to put yourself in someone else’s shoes? Ever taken one minute to wonder about someone else’s feelings?”
“No, I’m a sociopath. Just ask my ex-wife.”
A reluctant grin spread across the ghost’s face. “You’re not a sociopath. You’re just an asshole.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s good you got divorced,” the ghost said. “Darcy wasn’t the right woman for you.”
“I knew that when I first met her. Which is exactly why I married her.”
Pondering that, the ghost shook his head in disgust and looked away. “Never mind. You are a sociopath.”
Thirteen
As soon as the contracts were signed and a schedule of periodic payments had been agreed upon, a large number of decisions had to be made quickly. Zoë had instantly approved of the cream-colored stock cabinetry and the maple for the butcher-block countertops. However, she still had to choose hardware such as knobs, pulls, and plumbing fixtures, as well as tile, carpet, appliances, and lighting.
“This is where it helps to have a limited budget,” Alex had told Zoë. “Some of the decisions are going to make themselves when you see the prices.” They had agreed to keep to the bungalow style of the house as much as possible, with simple wainscoting, rich wood, and subtle tones with the occasional bright splash of accent color.
Justine had no interest in color palettes or browsing among tile samples, which meant that Zoë would choose the decorating and finishes. “Besides,” Justine had said to Zoë, “you’re the one who’s going to live there, so you decide how it should look.”
“What if you end up not liking it?”
“I like everything,” Justine said cheerfully. “Go for it.”
That was fine with Zoë, who liked going to builders’ supply stores and looking through hardware catalogs. And she wanted the opportunity to spend more time with Alex. No matter how much she learned about him, he remained a fascinating stranger. He was not a charmer like his brother Sam, nor did he try to be. There was something unreachable about him, an intransigent remoteness. But somehow that only made him sexier.
Although Zoë had no doubt that Alex drank too much—he certainly hadn’t tried to pretend otherwise—so far he had lived up to his reputation for being reliable. Alex arrived early whenever they had agreed to meet. He liked schedules and lists, and he used more sticky notes than anyone Zoë had ever met. She was sure he had to buy them in bulk. He put them on walls and windows, attached them to cables and flooring samples and catalogs, used them as business cards, appointment reminders, and shopping lists. When Zoë didn’t know the location of a place he had mentioned, he drew a little map and stuck it on the side of her bag. When they went to an appliance store, he stuck blue squares on all the models of refrigerators, dishwashers, and ovens that were the right dimensions for the kitchen.
“You’re wasting trees,” Zoë told him at one point. “Have you ever thought of making notes on your phone, or getting a digital tablet?”
“Post-its are faster.”
“What about writing a list on one big piece of paper?”
“I do that sometimes,” he said. “On jumbo Post-its.”
Maybe it was because he was so controlled that the discovery of a quirk was something of a relief to Zoë. She would have liked to learn more about him, to find out his weaknesses. To find out if she could possibly be one of them.
There were, however, no chinks in the armor. Alex had taken to treating her with a calculated politeness that made her wonder if the scene in the kitchen at Artist’s Point had been a dream. He asked Zoë plenty of questions about her family and her grandmother. He’d even asked about Grandpa Gus, whom she’d never met and knew next to nothing about, other than he’d been a pilot in the war and afterward had worked as an engineer at Boeing. Eventually he’d died of lung cancer long before Zoë was born.
“So he was a smoker,” Alex had said in a faintly censorious tone.
“I think everyone was back then,” Zoë replied ruefully. “Upsie told me that my grandfather’s doctor said that smoking was probably good for his nervous condition.”
Alex had taken particular interest in that. “Nervous condition?”
“PTSD. Back then they called it ‘shell shock.’ I think Grandpa Gus had it pretty bad. His plane was shot down over the Burmese jungle behind Japanese lines. He had to hide for a couple of days, alone and wounded, before he could be rescued.”
After telling Alex about her family’s past, Zoë expected him to do the same. But when she tried to find out more about him, asking about his divorce, or his brothers, or even something like why he’d become a contractor, he turned quiet and standoffish. It was maddening. The only way she knew to handle his evasiveness was to be patient and encouraging, and hope that in time he might open up to her.
Zoë had an innate compulsion to take care of people. It must have been in the Hoffman blood, because Justine had it, too. They both loved to welcome travel-weary or burned-out guests at the inn, most of whom were battling the endless variety of troubles that came along with being human. It was gratifying to be able to offer them a quiet room with a comfortable bed, and a good breakfast in the morning. Although none of that could fix anyone’s problems, it was an escape.
“Do you eve
r get tired of this?” Justine had asked one day, putting away clean dishes while Zoë made cookies. “All this baking and cooking and stuff.”
“No.” Zoë rolled out cookie dough into a perfectly even sheet. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason. I’m just trying to figure out what you like about it. You know how I feel about cooking. If it wasn’t for the microwave, I’d have starved long before you ever started working here.”
Zoë had grinned. “I’ve wondered the same thing about all your jogging and bike-riding. Exercise is the most boring thing in the world to me.”
“Being outside in nature is different every day. The weather, the scenery, the seasons … it’s always changing. Whereas with baking … I’ve seen you make cookies about a hundred times. It’s not like you get a lot of excitement.”
“I do, too. When I need excitement, I change the shape of the cookies.”
Justine had grinned.
Zoë picked out cookie cutters shaped like flowers, ladybugs, and butterflies. “I love doing this. It reminds me of the time early in my life when most of my problems could be solved by a cookie.”
“I’m still at that time in my life. I have no problems. No real problems, that is. And that’s the key to happiness—knowing how good you’ve got it while you’ve still got it.”
“I could be happier,” Zoë had said reflectively.
“How?”
“I’d like to have someone special. I’d like to know what it’s like to really fall in love.”
“No you don’t. Being single is the best. You’re independent. You can go on adventures with no one to hold you back. You can do whatever you want. Enjoy your freedom, Zo—it’s a beautiful word.”
“I do enjoy it, a lot of the time. But sometimes freedom seems like a word for not having anyone to snuggle with on Friday night.”
“You don’t have to be in love to snuggle with someone.”
“It doesn’t feel the same to snuggle with someone you don’t love.”
Justine grinned. “Are we using ‘snuggle’ as a metaphor? Because it reminds me of the obituary I read about Ann Landers, where it said one of her most popular columns ever was a poll asking if women would choose cuddling or sex. Something like three quarters of her readers said cuddling.” She made a face.
“You would choose sex,” Zoë said rather than asked.
“Of course. Cuddling is fine for about thirty seconds, but then it’s irritating.”
“Physically irritating? Emotionally irritating?”
“Every kind of irritating. And if you cuddle with a guy too often, it encourages him to think you’re having a relationship, and it gets all meaningful.”
“What’s wrong with meaningful?”
“Meaningful is a synonym for serious. And serious is the opposite of fun. And my mother told me that life should always be fun.”
Although Zoë hadn’t seen Justine’s mother, Aunt Marigold, for years, she remembered how beautiful and eccentric she had been. Marigold had raised her only child as a free spirit, just as she had been. Sometimes she had taken Justine to attend festivals with odd names, such as the Beltane Bash or the Old Earth Gather. She had made food Zoë had never heard of before, things like Covenstead Bread with honey and citron, and Groundhog Day cake, and Half Moon cauliflower. After visiting distant relatives, Justine had returned with stories of participating in drumming circles and “drawing down the moon” rituals held in the forest at midnight.
Zoë had often wondered why Marigold never visited the inn, and why she and Justine seemed virtually estranged. When she had tried to ask, Justine had flatly refused to discuss the subject.
“Most parents,” Zoë ventured, “tell their children that life shouldn’t always be fun. Are you sure that wasn’t what she said?”
“No, I’m sure it’s supposed to be fun. That’s why the inn is perfect for me—I like to meet someone new, get to know them superficially, and send them on their way. A continuous supply of short-term friendships.”
Unlike Justine, Zoë wanted permanence in her life. She had liked the stability of marriage, and the companionship, and she hoped to marry again someday. However, the next time she would have to choose very carefully. Even though the divorce with Chris had been cordial, she never wanted to go through something like that again.
As for Alex Nolan, he wasn’t the kind of man who would fit in with her plans. Zoë decided that she would focus on cultivating a friendship with him, nothing more. She knew herself well enough to be certain that she was not a short-term-affair kind of person. And she would have to take Alex at his word, when he claimed that she wouldn’t be able to handle him as a lover. “I have to have all the control,” he’d told her in that raw-velvet voice, and, “I’m not nice.” Which had been intended to warn her away, but at the same time had aroused a wild curiosity about what he’d meant.
Alex was relieved to begin the physical work of the remodel, starting with the teardown of the kitchen wall. He and two guys from his crew, Gavin and Isaac, prepared the area with plastic and removed fixtures and outlets. Gavin, a trade-level carpenter, and Isaac, who was in the process of getting LEED certified for green construction jobs, were both serious about their work. Alex could trust them to show up on time and get the job done as safely and efficiently as possible. Wearing goggles and dust masks, the three of them took the wall down to the studs with pry bars. They tore out chunks of plaster, occasionally reaching for a reciprocal saw to cut through stubborn nails.
The hard physical work felt good to Alex, helping him expend some of the pent-up frustration that had accumulated during the past few days with Zoë. She had qualities that annoyed the hell out of him. She was unreasonably perky early in the morning, and she always seemed to want to feed him. She read cookbooks as if they were novels, and she recounted restaurant menus in astonishing detail, seeming to expect he would find the subject as fascinating as she did. Alex had never been fond of people who looked on the bright side of life, and Zoë had made it into an art form. She neglected to lock doors. She trusted salespeople. She started a conversation with the appliance dealer by telling him exactly how much she had to spend.
Everywhere Alex went with Zoë, whether it was the hardware store or the flooring company or a sandwich shop to get a couple of cold drinks, men checked her out. Some of them tried to be discreet, but some made no attempt to hide their fascination with her jaw-dropping beauty and her grade-A rack. The fact was, Zoë was eye candy, and short of disfiguring herself there was nothing she could do about it. At the sandwich shop, a pack of four or five guys leered until Alex had moved in front of Zoë and sent them a look of imminent death. They had all backed off. He’d done the same thing at other times, in other places, silently warning them away even though he had no right. She didn’t belong to him. But he kept watch over her anyway.
It would be a full-time job to fend off the poachers. Until he’d met Zoë, Alex would have scoffed at the idea that beauty could be a problem for someone. But it would be difficult for any woman to be subjected to that kind of relentless attention. It explained the reason for Zoë’s innate shyness—the wonder was that she ever dared to go out at all.
Now that the work on the Dream Lake cottage had started, Alex wouldn’t have to see Zoë for at least a month, except in passing. It would be a relief, he thought. He would get his head clear.
The first payment was due tomorrow. Justine had offered to drop it in the mail, but Alex had asked to pick it up at the inn in the morning. He needed to take it directly to the bank. He’d laid out his own money for the initial supplies and expenses, and since the divorce there wasn’t a hell of a lot of surplus cash in the coffers.
After working late on the cottage with Gavin and Isaac, Alex went home. He was so tired from the day’s exertions that he didn’t bother scrounging for dinner. He didn’t even reach for the bottle of booze, only took a shower and went to bed.
When the alarm went off at six-thirty, Alex felt like hell. Maybe he was c
oming down with something. His mouth was parched, and his head ached ferociously, and the effort to lift a toothbrush felt like bench-pressing a kettlebell. After a long shower, he dressed in jeans and a tee with a flannel shirt over it, but he was still cold and shaking. Filling a plastic cup with water from the sink, he drank until a wave of nausea forced him to stop.
Sitting on the edge of the tub, he struggled to keep the water down, and wondered wretchedly what was wrong with him. Gradually he became aware of the ghost standing at the bathroom doorway.
“Personal space,” Alex reminded him. “Get out.”
The ghost didn’t move. “You didn’t have anything to drink last night.”
“So?”
“So you’re in withdrawal.”
Alex looked at him dumbly.
“Hands aren’t steady, right?” the ghost continued. “Those are the DTs.”
“I’ll be fine after I have some coffee.”
“You should probably have a shot of booze. Guy who drinks as much as you, it’s better to wean off slowly rather than go cold turkey.”
Alex was swamped with incredulous outrage. The ghost was wildly overstating the case. He drank a lot, but he knew what he could tolerate. Only drunks got the DTs, like the homeless guys in alleys or the barflies who drank the nights away. Or his father, who’d died of a heart attack while recreational diving at a tourist resort in Mexico. After a lifetime of alcohol abuse, Alan Nolan’s coronary arteries had been so blocked that, according to the doctors, he would have needed a quintuple bypass surgery had he lived.
“I don’t need to wean off anything,” Alex said.
It would have been easier to take if the ghost had been mocking or superior, or even apologetic. But the way he looked at Alex, with a sort of gravity touched with pity, was too offensive to bear.
“You might want to take the day off and rest,” the ghost said. “Because you’re not going to get much work done.”