by Lisa Kleypas
She stood with eyes closed, braced for whatever he would do. An electric quietness surrounded them. She felt him move nearer, and his arms went around her so slowly that a shiver crossed over her like rough light. There was the curious sensation she remembered from before, of being absorbed, drawn in, as if he were feeling her with all his senses, drinking in every breath and blush and heartbeat.
One of his hands came up to her face, angling her jaw upward, his fingers shaping over the fragile bones. A soft brush against her mouth, and another, ephemeral kisses that made her lips feel swollen. Her balance faltered, but he gripped her against the support of his body and held her steady. Bending his head lower, he dragged his mouth along the thin, blood-heated skin of her throat. She felt the tip of his tongue rest against a pulse point, and she went weak, her hands clutching at his shoulders. Slowly he kissed his way up to her jaw, while one of his hands cupped the back of her head to lift it, and finally she felt the full, hard pressure of his mouth on hers, making her dizzy with wholesale relief.
Soft plangent sounds rose in her throat. She reached up to grip his head with her hands, anything to keep his mouth on hers. But the kiss dissolved with a muffled laugh, and he looked down into her dazed face with a tender, mocking amusement she had never seen from him before.
She struggled to speak between ragged breaths. “Alex … please …”
“Shhh.” His lashes half lowered over eyes that were startlingly bright in the heightened color of his face. His gently restless hands moved over her hair, her body, her back.
“I want … ” she tried to say, but the dazzle of heat made it impossible to think. She tried again. “I want …”
“I know what you want.” The hint of a smile burned out, and his head bent again.
He opened her mouth with his, sent his tongue deep. The kiss turned rougher, wetter, acquiring a subtle erotic rhythm. To her mortification, her hips began to roll forward, seeking the hard pressure of him. She couldn’t stop herself. If only she could be somewhere else with him, some quiet and shadowy place where nothing would bother them. Just the two of them away from the rest of the world. The pleasure thickened, her thoughts dissolving. Sensations blended into a sweet ache that seemed to come from outside and inside at the same time. She arched feverishly, trying to bring herself closer against him.
Alex pulled his mouth from hers, and crushed her against his chest. “No more,” he said, sounding shaken. “Zoë … no … be still …”
She shuddered as he held her, his breath rushing in hot bursts against her hair. Linking her arms around his lean waist, she let her fingertips make a timid foray into the top edges of his back pockets, while his heartbeat pressed against hers. It felt as if she might fall to pieces without his hard grip holding her together.
“We’re even now,” she heard him whisper.
She managed a nod, her face hidden.
“I didn’t mean to do it that way.” Alex nipped softly at the outer curve of her ear. “I was going to make it hurt, just a little.”
“Why didn’t you?”
A long, wondering hesitation. “I just couldn’t.”
He eased her away. Zoë forced herself to look into his eyes, and saw that the same force of will that had impelled him to stop drinking was now being repurposed.
This wouldn’t happen again. He wouldn’t allow it.
An oven timer went off again, and she jumped at the piercing sound.
Alex smiled slightly, breaking their shared gaze, and turned away.
Zoë went to the oven without looking back. She heard the back door open and close.
Neither of them had said anything.
Sometimes silence was easiest, when the only word left was good-bye.
Fifteen
A month passed, and somehow the new direction of Alex’s life held. The ghost had not expected to learn anything from Alex during their enforced association, but as it turned out, he did. Alex had to wrestle his addiction hour by hour, sometimes even minute by minute, but he was about as stubborn as it was possible for a man to be. To the ghost, quitting drinking looked a lot like jumping into the water and hoping that somehow you’d figure out how to swim before you went under.
Alex distracted himself with work, and plenty of it. He did such meticulous handwork on the Dream Lake cottage that any master craftsman would have been proud to claim it. Alex worked long into the nights, sanding, buffing, staining, painting, and in the process he consumed enough candy bars to send a normal person into diabetic shock. Thanks to the ghost’s nagging, Alex also ate regular meals throughout the day, although he would have to eat a lot more to make up for the deficit of calories he’d been used to consuming in the form of alcohol.
Alex saw Zoë on two occasions, once to collect paint swatches. That had lasted about a minute and a half, and then he was gone. The second time, Zoë had come to the cottage for Alex to show her the progress on the remodel. He had been businesslike. Zoë had been restrained. Gavin and Isaac, for their parts, had been so mesmerized by Zoë that neither of them had so much as hammered a nail while she was there.
From all appearances, Zoë’s visit had barely affected Alex. He knew how to build a wall, how to fortify it until nothing could break through. There was no way for Zoë to reach Alex now, and that was probably for the best. Still, the ghost couldn’t stop feeling regretful about it. And Alex refused to discuss exactly what, if anything, he still felt for Zoë. The subject was off-limits.
The ghost understood.
A woman could do that to you—reach that place in your soul where the best and worst of you was kept. And once she was there, she owned that place and never left.
That was why he hadn’t told Alex about his newfound memories of Emmaline Stewart, the scenes unrolling in front of him like a moving-picture show.
Emma had been the youngest and liveliest of Weston Stewart’s three daughters. She was bookish, and funny, and just farsighted enough that she’d occasionally needed reading glasses. Wonderful cat-eye glasses with thick black frames, which she loved to wear to goad her mother, Jane. Emma would never catch a man, wearing those glasses, her mother had said. And Emma had claimed that she would catch the right man by wearing those glasses.
The ghost remembered being alone in the cottage with her, after sharing a picnic beside Dream Lake. She had read to him, a piece she had written about local high schools that had forbidden female students to “paint” their faces, meaning to use lipstick, cheek rouge, or powder. High school girls across Whatcom County had objected to the regulation, and Emma had interviewed principals of three different schools about the controversy.
“The wearing of lipstick leads to the ruin of the first barrier of a girl’s nature,” Emma had quoted one of the principals, her eyes bright with amusement behind the glasses. “Next come cigarettes, then liquor, and after that, unmentionable acts will occur.”
“What unmentionable acts?” he had asked her, kissing her cheek, her neck, the soft little space behind her ear.
“You know.”
“I do not. Describe one for me.”
Emma had laughed deep in her throat. “No.”
But he had persisted, kissing and teasing, trying to pull her hands to his body. She had giggled and feigned reluctance, knowing how to provoke his desire.
“Just tell me which body parts are involved,” he’d said, and when she’d still refused, he’d made suggestions about just what might constitute an unmentionable act.
“Dirty language isn’t going to get you anywhere,” she’d told him primly.
He had grinned. “It’s already gotten me past the first four buttons of your blouse.”
And she’d flushed and gone still as he murmured softly to her, pulling all the little buttons free of their moorings …
The remembered physical intimacy with Emma was intoxicating. And yet the desire and pleasure that a soul could experience was far deeper and more profound than any mere physical sensation.
The day tha
t he would see her again was approaching. But the fierce anticipation was tempered by the feeling that something was wrong, that there was something he needed to know, to set right. He was grateful for the time Alex spent at the cottage; it had given him enough gossamer filaments to be woven into a memory or two. But that wasn’t enough. He needed to go back to Rainshadow Road … something had happened there that he needed to remember.
After going through the storage space where she and Justine kept odd pieces of furniture and framed pictures and other items they had never found use for, Zoë had gathered an assortment of objects for the Dream Lake cottage. Among them were a set of vintage metal bowling alley lockers, each square little door painted a different color … a retro wall clock shaped like a coffee cup … a teal blue Victorian cast-iron bed frame. She had also tagged some pieces of furniture from Emma’s former apartment that had been sent to Friday Harbor, things like a set of leather club chairs, a wicker trunk table, a collection of teapots that would be displayed on a set of built-in bookshelves. The quirky mixture would fit well into the new clean lines of the remodeled house, and Zoë knew that her grandmother had always enjoyed touches of whimsy in her surroundings.
It had been six weeks since Alex had started remodeling the cottage. True to his word, the kitchen had been completed, and so had the main bedroom and bathroom. Since the original wood flooring had turned out to be unusable, Zoë had agreed to let Alex install laminate flooring in a honey maple shade, and she had to admit that it looked beautiful and surprisingly natural. The second bedroom and pocket bathroom still had to be completed, and the garage hadn’t been built yet, which meant that Alex would be spending time at the cottage after Zoë and Emma had moved in. Zoë wasn’t certain how she felt about that. On the recent occasions when she’d seen him, the strain of mutual discomfort had made them both awkward.
Alex looked healthier, more well-rested, the shadows gone from beneath his eyes. But his rare smiles were as thin as a knife blade, his mouth was hard with the bitterness of a man who knew he would never have what he truly wanted. His remoteness wouldn’t have bothered Zoë nearly so much if she hadn’t seen the other side of him.
With Justine’s help, Zoë would spend a couple of days getting the cottage ready with dishes, bed linens, pictures, and other things to make it cozy and welcoming. Then she would go to Everett and bring her grandmother back to the island.
Emma’s nurses had provided frequent updates about her physical therapy and the course of medications they had put her on. They had also warned her that Emma had already started to show signs of “sundowning,” which meant that late in the day or in the evening, she might become agitated, and ask repetitive questions more frequently than usual.
Over the course of several conversations, Colette Lin, the elder-care consultant, had also helped Zoë to understand what to expect in the future. That whenever some of Emma’s abilities were lost, they were not likely to come back. That she would have sequencing problems, doing things in the wrong order, until something as simple as making a pot of coffee or doing laundry would be impossible. Eventually she would deteriorate to a point when she would start to wander and get lost, and then she would have to be taken to a secure locked facility for her own safety.
It was difficult to read Emma’s moods, especially over the phone, but she seemed to be facing her illness with the same mixture of pragmatism and humor she’d shown all her life. “Tell everyone my dementia is early-onset,” she’d told Zoë with a mischievous chuckle. “That way they’ll think I’m younger.” And another time, “Every night, no matter what you make us for dinner, tell me it’s my favorite meal. I won’t remember if it is or not.” When Zoë had told Emma that she’d found a home-care nurse to stay at the cottage in the mornings while she worked, Emma’s only question was, “Does she do manicures?”
“I know that inside she has to be scared,” Zoë told Justine, the night before they started to move things into the cottage. “It’s like little pieces of her are being chipped away, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.”
“But she knows she’ll be safe. She knows you’ll be there.”
“She knows that right now.” Zoë began to pet Byron, who had just crawled onto her lap. “But she may not always know it.”
After handing a glass of wine to Zoë, Justine poured another and sat on the other side of the sofa. “It’s weird, when you think of it,” she said. “About what you are, when you take away the memories and desires.”
“You’re nothing,” Zoë suggested morosely.
“No, you’re a soul. A soul on a journey … and life on earth is just part of that journey.”
“What do you think happens after we die?”
“According to my family—at least, on my mother’s side—some souls are lucky enough to go up to the ultimate life force. Heaven. Whatever you want to call it.” Justine crossed her legs and settled more comfortably into the corner of the sofa. “But other souls, who’ve made mistakes during their lives on earth, have to go to a sort of waiting place.”
“What kind of waiting place?”
“I’m not exactly sure. But it’s their chance to understand what they did wrong and learn from it. The coven calls it ‘Summerland.’ ”
Byron curled himself into a doughnut shape on Zoë’s lap and began to purr. Zoë sipped her wine and studied her cousin with a perplexed smile. “Did you just say ‘coven’? As in witchcraft?”
“Oh, it’s just a joke my mother and her friends have,” Justine said with a dismissive little wave of her hand. “They’ve called their group a coven forever. They even named it. The Circle of Crystal Cove.”
“Are you part of it?”
Justine made a scoffing sound. “Do you ever see me with a broomstick?”
“I don’t even see you vacuum.” Zoë smiled down into her wineglass, but looked up as a thought occurred to her. “What about that old besom broom in your closet?”
“My mother gave it to me as a rustic decoration. I like to keep it near my clothes because it smells like cinnamon.” She made a comical face as she saw Zoë’s expression. “What?”
“What’s the word for when people go astray from their religion?”
“Lapsed.”
“I think you might be a lapsed witch.”
Although Zoë said the words lightly, Justine gave her a strangely intent glance before asking with a grin, “Would it make any difference to you if I was?”
“Yes. I’d want you to cast a spell to make my grandmother better.”
Her cousin’s expression softened. “I’m afraid spells can’t take her off the path she’s on. If I tried, things would only get worse.” She stretched out a long leg and rubbed Byron’s furry bulk with her foot. “All I can do is be a friend to you both,” she said. “For whatever that’s worth.”
“It’s worth a lot.”
The next morning, after making breakfast at the inn, Zoë called Emma. “Guess what I’m doing today?” she asked brightly.
“You’re coming to visit me,” her grandmother guessed.
“Close. Today and tomorrow I’ll be busy getting the cottage ready, and the next day, you and I are moving in together. Just like old times.”
“Come get me now, and I’ll help.”
Zoë smiled, knowing that even though the offer was sincere, Emma wouldn’t be of any practical use. “I can’t change the schedule,” she said. “Justine and I have everything worked out. Her boyfriend Duane is going to help us, and—”
“The man from the motorcycle gang?”
“Well, it’s not really a gang, it’s a biker church.”
“Motorcycles are noisy and dangerous. I don’t like men who ride them.”
“We like the ones who have big muscles to help us move furniture.”
“Is Duane the only one helping you? Those club chairs are very heavy.”
“No, Alex will be there.”
“Who is he?”
“The contractor. He has a pickup wi
th a trailer hitch.”
Mischief edged her grandmother’s tone. “Does he have big muscles, too?”
“Upsie,” Zoë chided, and felt her color rise as she remembered the hard strength of Alex’s body pressed to hers. “Yes, as a matter of fact he does.”
“Is he attractive?”
“Very.”
“Married?”
“Divorced.”
“Why did he—”
“Don’t get any ideas,” Zoë said, laughing. “I’m not interested in a love life right now. I want to focus on taking care of you.”
“I’d like to see you find a good man before I’m gone,” Emma said wistfully.
“You’d better hang around then, because at this rate it’s going to take me a while.” Hearing the back door of the kitchen open, Zoë turned to see Alex walking in. She smiled at him, her heart beginning to beat faster.
“When are you coming to get me?” Emma asked.
“The day after tomorrow.”
Her grandmother sounded perturbed. “Did I already ask that?”
“Yes,” Zoë said gently. “It’s fine.” At the periphery of her vision, she saw Alex looking at a pan of muffins on the counter, and she gestured for him to take one. He complied without hesitation. Zoë went to pour him some coffee, while she said on the phone, “I’d better get busy now.”
But the minor mistake had made Emma anxious. “Someday I’ll look at you,” she said, “and I’ll think ‘that’s the nice girl who makes me dinner’ and I won’t know you’re my granddaughter.”
The words caused a painful tug in Zoë’s chest. She swallowed hard and poured some cream into Alex’s coffee. “I’ll still know who you are,” she said. “I’ll still love you.”
“That’s awfully one-sided. What good is a grandmother who doesn’t remember anything?”
“You’re more to me than what you remember.” Zoë slid an apologetic glance to Alex, knowing that he disliked to be kept waiting. But he seemed relaxed and patient, his gaze averted as he ate the muffin.
“I won’t be myself,” Emma said.