by Nora Roberts
He grinned. “I lied.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re not homeroom mother, and you’re not baking cookies?”
“No, that was true. But I have five pounds in the pantry. Hey, it worked.” He was whistling as he walked out the door.
Chapter 6
“Why isn’t Ana here yet? When is she coming?”
“Soon,” Boone answered for the tenth time. Too soon, he was afraid. He was behind in everything. The kitchen was a disaster. He’d used too many pans. Then again, he always did. He could never figure out how anyone cooked without using every pot, pan and bowl available.
The chicken cacciatore smelled pretty good, but he was uncertain of the results. Stupid, he supposed, absolutely stupid to try out a new recipe at such a time, but he’d figured Ana was worth more than their usual Friday-night meatloaf.
Jessie was driving him crazy, which was a rarity. She was overexcited at the thought of having Ana over, and she’d been pestering him without pause ever since he’d brought her home from school.
The dog had chosen that afternoon to chew up Boone’s bed pillows, so he’d spent a great deal of valuable time chasing dog and feathers. The washing machine had overflowed, flooding the laundry room. He was much too male to consider calling a repairman, so he’d torn the machine apart and put it back together again.
He was pretty sure he’d fixed it.
His agent had called to tell him that A Third Wish for Miranda had been optioned for an animated feature by one of the major studios. That would have been good news at any other time, but now he was expected to fit a trip to L.A. into his schedule.
Jessie had decided she wanted to be a Brownie and had generously volunteered him as a Brownie leader.
The thought of having a group of six- and seven-year-old girls looking to him to teach them how to make jewelry boxes out of egg cartons chilled his blood.
With a lot of ingenuity and plenty of cowardice, he thought, he might be able to ease his way out of it.
“Are you sure she’s coming, Daddy? Are you sure?”
“Jessica.” The warning note in his voice was enough to make her lower lip poke out. “Do you know what happens to little girls who keep asking the same question?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Keep it up and you’ll find out. Go make sure Daisy’s not eating the furniture.”
“Are you awfully mad at Daisy?”
“Yes. Now go on or you’re next.” He softened the order with a gentle pat on her bottom. “Beat it, brat, or I’ll put you in the pot and have you for dinner.”
Two minutes later, he heard the mayhem that meant Jessie had located Daisy, and girl and dog were now wrestling. The high-pitched yelps and happy squeals played hell with the headache pulsing behind his eyes.
Just need an aspirin, he thought, an hour or two of quiet, and a vacation on Maui.
He was on the point of giving a roar that would probably pop his head off his shoulders when Ana knocked.
“Hi. Smells good.”
He hoped it did. She looked much better than good. He hadn’t seen her in a dress before, and the swirl of watercolor silk did wonderful things for her slim body. Things like showing off those soft white shoulders under thin straps. With it she wore an amulet on a long chain that had the square of engraved gold hanging just below her breasts. Crystals glinted in it, drawing the eye, and were echoed by the tear-shaped drops at her ears.
She smiled. “You did say Friday.”
“Yeah. Friday.”
“Then are you going to ask me in?”
“Sorry.” Lord, he felt like a bumbling teenager. No, he decided as he slid the screen open for her, no teenager had ever been this bumbling. “I’m a little distracted.”
Ana’s brows lifted as she surveyed the chaos of pots and bowls. “So I see. Would you like some help?”
“I think I’ve got it under control.” He took the bottle she offered, noting that the pale green bottle was etched with symbols and that it carried no label. “Homemade?”
“Yes, my father makes it. He has …” Her eyes lit with secrets and humor. “A magic touch.”
“Brewed in the dungeons of Castle Donovan.”
“As a matter of fact, yes.” She left it at that, and wandered to the stove as he took out some glasses. “No Bugs Bunny this time?”
“I’m afraid Bugs met a fatal accident in the dishwasher.” He poured the clear golden wine into the crystal glasses. “It wasn’t pretty.”
She laughed and lifted her glass in a toast. “To neighbors.”
“To neighbors,” he agreed, clinking crystal against crystal. “If they all looked like you, I’d be a dead man.” He sipped, then lifted a brow. “Next time we’ll have to drink to your father. This is incredible.”
“One of his many hobbies, you might say.”
“What’s in it?”
“Apples, honeysuckle, starlight. You can give him your compliments, if you like. He and the rest of my family should be here for All Hallows’ Eve. Halloween.”
“I know what it is. Jessie’s torn between being a fairy princess or a rock star. Your parents travel all the way to the States for Halloween?”
“Usually. It’s a kind of family tradition.” Unable to resist, she took the lid off the pan and sniffed. “Well, well, I’m impressed.”
“That was the idea.” Equally unable to resist, he lifted a handful of her hair. “You know that story I told you the day Daisy knocked you down? I find myself compelled to write it. So much so that I’ve put what I was working on aside.”
“It was a lovely story.”
“Normally I could have made it wait. But I need to know why the woman was bound inside the castle all those years. Was it a spell, one of her own making? What was the enchantment that made the man climb the wall to find her?”
“That’s for you to decide.”
“No, that’s for me to find out.”
“Boone …” She lifted a hand to his, then looked down quickly. “What have you done to yourself?”
“Just rapped my knuckles.” He flexed his fingers and shrugged. “Fixing the washing machine.”
“You should have come over and let me tend to this.” She ran her fingers over the scraped skin, wishing she was in a position to heal it. “It’s painful.”
He started to deny it, then realized his mistake. “I always kiss Jessie’s hurts to make them better.”
“A kiss works wonders,” she agreed, and obliged him by touching her lips to the wound. Briefly, very briefly, she risked a link to be certain there was no real pain and no chance of infection. She found that, while the knuckles were merely sore, he did have real pain from a tension headache working behind his eyes. That, at least, she could help him with.
With a smile, she brushed the hair from his brow. “You’ve been working too hard, getting the house in order, writing your story, worrying if you made the right decision to move Jessie.”
“I didn’t realize I was that transparent.”
“It isn’t so difficult to see.” She laid her fingers on either side of his temples, massaging in small circles. “Now you’ve gone to all this trouble to cook me dinner.”
“I wanted—”
“I know.” She held steady as she felt the pain flash behind her own eyes. To distract him, she touched her lips to his as she absorbed the ache and let it slowly fade. “Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome,” he murmured, and deepened the kiss.
Her hands slid away from his temples, lay weakly on his shoulders. It was much more difficult to absorb this ache—this ache that spread so insidiously through her. Pulsing, throbbing. Tempting.
Much too tempting.
“Boone.” Wary, she slipped out of his arms. “We’re rushing this.”
“I told you I wouldn’t. That’s not going to stop me from kissing you whenever I get the chance.” He picked up his wine, then hers, offering her glass to her again. “Nothing goes beyond that until you say so.”
>
“I don’t know whether to thank you for that or not. I know I should.”
“No. There’s no more need to thank me for that than there is to thank me for wanting you. It’s just the way it is. Sometimes I think about Jessie growing up. It gives me some bad moments. And I know that if there was any man who pushed or pressured her into doing what she wasn’t ready to do I’d just have to kill him.” He sipped, and grinned. “And, of course, if she thinks she’s going to be ready to do anything of the kind before she’s, say, forty, I’ll just lock her in her room until the feeling passes.”
It made her laugh, and she realized as he stood there, with his back to the cluttered, splattered stove, a dishcloth hanging from the waist of his slacks, that she was very, very close to falling in love with him.
Once she had, she would be ready. And nothing would make the feeling pass.
“Spoken like a true paranoid father.”
“Paranoia and fatherhood are synonymous. Take my word for it. Wait until Nash has those twins. He’ll start thinking about health insurance and dental hygiene. A sneeze in the middle of the night will send him into a panic.”
“Morgana will keep him level. A paranoid father only needs a sensible mother to …” Her words trailed off as she cursed herself. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. It’s easier when people don’t feel they have to tiptoe around it. Alice has been gone for four years. Wounds heal, especially if you have good memories.” There was a thud from the next room, and the sound of racing feet. “And a six-year-old who keeps you on your toes.”
At that moment, Jessie ran in and threw herself at Ana.
“You came! I thought you’d never get here.”
“Of course I came. I never turn down a dinner invitation from my favorite neighbors.”
As Boone watched them, he realized his headache had vanished. Odd, he thought as he switched off the stove and prepared to serve dinner. He’d never gotten around to taking an aspirin.
* * *
It wasn’t what he would call a quiet, romantic dinner. He had lit candles and clipped flowers in the garden he’d inherited when he’d bought the house. They had the meal in the dining alcove, with its wide, curved window, with music from the sea and birdsong. A perfect setting for romance.
But there were no murmured secrets or whispered promises. Instead, there was laughter and a child’s bubbling voice. The talk was not about what the candlelight did to her skin, or how it deepened the pure gray of her eyes. It centered on first grade, on what Daisy had done that day and on the fairy tale still brewing in Boone’s mind.
When dinner was over, and Ana had listened to Jessie’s exploits at school, along with those of Jessie’s new and very best friend, Lydia, she announced that she and the child were assuming kitchen duty.
“No, I’ll take care of it later.” He was very comfortable in the sunset-washed dining alcove, and he remembered too vividly the mess he’d left behind in the kitchen. “Dirty dishes don’t go anywhere.”
“You cooked.” Ana was already rising to stack the dishes. “When my father cooks, my mother washes up. And vice versa. Donovan rules. Besides, the kitchen’s a good place for girl talk, isn’t it, Jessie?”
Jessie didn’t have any idea, but she was instantly intrigued by the notion. “I can help. I hardly ever break any dishes.”
“And men aren’t allowed in the kitchen during girl talk.” She leaned conspiratorially toward Jessie. “Because they just get in the way.” She sent Boone an arch look. “I think you and Daisy could use a walk on the beach.”
“I don’t …” A walk on the beach. Alone. With no kitchen duty. “Really?”
“Really. Take your time. Jessie, when I was in town the other day, I saw the cutest dress. It was blue, just the color of your eyes, and had a big satin bow.” Ana stopped, a pile of dishes in her hands, and stared at Boone. “Still here?”
“Just leaving.”
As he walked out in the deepening twilight with Daisy romping around him, he could hear the light music of female laughter coming through his windows.
“Daddy said you were born in a castle,” Jessie said as she helped Ana load the dishwasher.
“That’s right. In Ireland.”
“A for-real castle?”
“A real castle, near the sea. It has towers and turrets, secret passageways, and a drawbridge.”
“Just like in Daddy’s books.”
“Very much like. It’s a magic palace.” Ana listened to the sound of water as she rinsed dishes and thought of the squabbles and laughing voices in that huge kitchen, with a fire going in the hearth and the good, yeasty smell of fresh bread perfuming the air. “My father and his brothers were born there, and his father, and his, and further back than I can say.”
“If I were born in a castle, I would always live there.” Jessie stood close to Ana while they worked, enjoying without knowing why, the scent of woman, and the lighter timbre of a female voice. “Why did you move away?”
“Oh, it’s still home, but sometimes you have to move away to make your own place. Your own magic.”
“Like Daddy and me did.”
“Yes.” She closed the dishwasher and began to fill the sink with hot, soapy water for the pots and pans. “You like living here in Monterey?”
“I like it a lot. Nana said I might get homesick when the novelty wears off. What’s novelty?”
“The newness.” Not a very wise thing to suggest to an impressionable child, Ana mused. But she imagined Nana’s nose was out of joint. “If you do get homesick, you should try to remember that the very best place to be is usually where you are.”
“I like where Daddy is, even if he took me to Timbuktu.”
“Excuse me?”
“Grandma Sawyer said he might as well have moved us to Timbuktu.” Jessie accepted the clean pot Ana handed her and began to dry, an expression of deep concentration on her face. “Is that a real place?”
“Um-hmm. But it’s also a kind of expression that means far away. Your grandparents are missing you, sunshine. That’s all.”
“I miss them, too, but I get to talk to them on the phone, and Daddy helped me type a letter on his computer. Do you think you could marry Daddy so Grandma Sawyer would get off his back?”
The pan Ana had been washing plopped into the suds and sent a small tidal wave over the lip of the sink. “I don’t think so.”
“I heard him telling Grandma Sawyer that she was on his back all the time to find a wife so he wouldn’t be lonely and I wouldn’t have to grow up without a mother. His voice had that mad sound in it he gets when I do something really wrong, or like when Daisy chewed up his pillow. And he said he’d be damned if he’d tie himself down just to keep the peace.”
“I see.” Ana pressed her lips hard together to keep the proper seriousness on her face. “I don’t think he’d like you to repeat it, Jessie, especially in those words.”
“Do you think Daddy’s lonely?”
“No. No, I don’t. I think he’s very happy with you, and with Daisy. If he decided to get married one day, it would be because he found somebody all of you loved very much.”
“I love you.”
“Oh, sunshine.” Soapy hands and all, Ana scooted down to give Jessie a hug and a kiss. “I love you, too.”
“Do you love Daddy?”
I wish I knew. “It’s different,” she said. She knew she was navigating on boggy ground. “When you grow up, love means different things. But I’m very happy that you moved here and we can all be friends.”
“Daddy never had a lady over to dinner before.”
“Well, you’ve only been here a couple of weeks.”
“I mean ever, at all. Not in Indiana, either. So I thought maybe it meant that you were going to get married and live with us here so Grandma Sawyer would get off his back and I wouldn’t be a poor motherless child.”
“No.” Ana did her best to disguise a chuckle. “It meant that we like each other and wante
d to have dinner.” She checked the window to make certain Boone wasn’t on his way back. “Does he always cook like this?”
“He always makes a really big mess, and sometimes he says those words—you know?”
“I know.”
“He says them when he has to clean it up. And today he was in a really bad mood, ’cause Daisy ate his pillow and there were feathers all over and the washing machine exploded and he maybe has to go on a business trip.”
“That’s a lot for one day.” She bit her lip. Really, she didn’t want to pump the child, but she was curious. “He’s going to take a trip?”
“Maybe to the place where they make movies, ’cause they want to make one out of his book.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“He has to think about it. That’s what he says when he doesn’t want to say yes but probably he’s going to.”
This time Ana didn’t bother to smother the chuckle. “You certainly have his number.”
By the time they’d finished the kitchen, Jessie was yawning. “Will you come up and see my room? I put everything away like Daddy said to when we have company.”
“I’d love to see your room.”
The packing boxes were gone, Ana noted as they moved from the kitchen into the high-ceilinged living room, with its open balcony and curving stairs. The furniture there looked comfortably lived-in, with bold, bright colors in fabrics that appeared tough enough to stand up under the hands and feet of an active child.
It could have used some flowers at the window, she mused. Some scented candles in brass holders on the mantel. Perhaps a few big, plump pillows scattered here and there. Still, there were homey family touches in the framed photographs, the ticking grandfather clock. And clever, whimsical ones, like the brass dragon’s-head andirons standing guard on the stone hearth, and the unicorn rocking horse in the corner.
And if there was a little dust on the banister, that only added to the charm.
“I got to pick out my own bed,” Jessie was telling her. “And once everything settles down I can pick out wallpaper if I want to. That’s where Daddy sleeps.” She pointed to the right, and Ana had a glimpse of a big bed under a jade-colored quilt—sans pillows—a handsome old chest of drawers with a missing pull, and a few stray feathers.
“He has his own bathroom in there, too, with a big tub that has jets and a shower that’s all glass and has water coming out of both sides. I get to use the one out here, and it has two sinks and this little thing that isn’t a toilet but looks like one.”
“A bidet?”
“I guess so. Daddy says it’s fancy and mostly for ladies. This is my room.”
It was a little girl’s fantasy, one provided by a man who obviously understood that childhood was all too short and very precious. All pink and white, the canopy bed sat in the center, a focal point surrounded by shelves of dolls and books and bright toys, a snowy dresser with a curvy mirror, and a child-sized desk littered with colored paper and crayons.
On the walls were lovely framed illustrations from fairy tales. Cinderella rushing down the steps of a silvery castle, a single glass slipper left behind. Rapunzel, her golden hair spilling out of a high tower window while she looked longingly down at her prince. The sly, endearing elf from one of Boone’s books, and—a complete surprise to Ana—one of her aunt’s prized illustrations.
“This is from The Golden Ball.”
“The lady who wrote it sent it to Daddy for me when I was just little. Next to Daddy’s, I like her stories best.”
“I had no idea,” Ana murmured. As far as she’d known, her aunt had never parted with one of her drawings except to family.