Better Homes and Hauntings

by Molly Harper

  “I’ve missed you,” he whispered against her forehead. “It’s been too long. A man shouldn’t have to wait for time alone with the woman he loves. Promise me it won’t always be like this. Promise me that one day, it will just be you and me, and we’ll have all the time in the world together.”

  The language was a little flowery for her favorite sensible computer genius. “Deacon?”

  Without answering, he crushed his mouth against hers. Images flashed through her mind, crinolines and satin-covered buttons. A beautiful blond woman—Catherine—threading her fingers through dark hair and pressing that head to her breast. She gasped. He kissed her again, increasing his efforts, biting the length of her neck until he reached the sensitive place where her neck and shoulder met. Another image, of Catherine’s fingernails scraping down a bare male back, leaving raised red welts.

  Nina jerked away from Deacon.

  He kissed her forehead, the bridge of her nose, and both of her eyelids and finally pressed firmly against the line of her mouth. “Please.”

  Pushing her back into the sand, Deacon threw one leg over Nina’s hips, pinning her to the ground. She blew out a shaky breath as he rolled his hips, the smooth weight of his erection grinding into her jeans. She clawed at his shirt, tugging it around his shoulders.

  “Catherine,” he whispered.

  Nina stopped cold. Did he really just call her by his dead several-times-great-grandmother’s name? He kissed her, rolling his hips again, and Nina felt the pleasant rush of warmth between her thighs. It would be so easy to ignore it, to pretend she hadn’t heard. He felt so good against her, and it had been so long for her. Would it really be so wrong to just—

  “Catherine,” he whispered again.

  Damn it.

  But before she could push him away, Deacon’s hands stole up the line of her shoulders to her neck. His thumbs rubbed along the hollow of her throat, pressing until it was difficult for Nina to breathe. She pulled away, gasping, clawing at his fingers as they tightened around her throat.

  Nina shoved Deacon’s shoulders until there was space enough for her to sit up. While Deacon’s eyes were blank and unfocused, his lip was curled back in concentration, as if he needed every neuron in his brain zeroed in on controlling his hands. Nina grunted, swinging her hand back and smacking the side of Deacon’s head.

  “Ow!” he yelped.

  “Deacon?”

  Deacon’s eyes were glazed over, and his breathing was heavy.

  “Deacon, who are you right now?”

  He blinked, still too unfocused to answer. “What?”

  “Who are you right now?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You called me Catherine.”

  Deacon’s brow furrowed, and he pushed to his knees. “What?”

  “You called me Catherine, and you said a bunch of stuff about missing me, asking me to promise you that we could be together again. And then you started squeezing my throat. Deacon, I don’t think it was you. I think someone was speaking for you.”

  “No.” Deacon stood and shook his head, backing away from her. “No, that’s not possible. No.”

  “Deacon, do you think you’re being influenced by the house?”

  “No.”

  “Because I think we all are to a certain extent. The important thing is that we choose whether we resist that influence or let it run us over. We still have a choice! We always have a choice!”

  “Get back to the house, Nina. Don’t stay out here alone!” he yelled as he stumbled back through the grass.

  Nina groaned, flinging herself back to the sand. She couldn’t believe that Deacon had run off like that. After everything they’d seen, how could he deny that something supernatural had just happened? Who had spoken through Deacon? Was it Jack Donovan? Or Gerald Whitney? Had she and Deacon somehow stumbled onto a meeting spot used by Jack and Catherine during their days on the island? Had they been discovered in this spot where they’d kissed in secret, hiding from the prying eyes of Catherine’s husband? Had Gerald found them here on the beach and strangled her?

  Poor Catherine. Poor Jack. Both long dead but clearly trapped in the unhappiness that had kept them so preoccupied during their lives.

  Had they felt like this? This confused, jumbled mess of emotions that left her unable to think straight? She stared up at the sky, running her fingertips along the lines of her kiss-swollen lips.

  She didn’t blame Deacon for running, she supposed. If she was confused, she could only imagine what it was like for Deacon, who was far more connected to the Crane’s Nest than she. Still, it sort of sucked to have what was a pretty epic kiss interrupted by ghostly possession. Ghosts were so damn rude.

  “Well, I’m glad we avoided that first-kiss awkwardness,” she muttered.

  JAKE HATED TO admit that he actually checked under his bed before he slid between the sheets. It was demoralizing to be frightened of your own bed when you were a grown man.

  After an afternoon of publicly berating obnoxious interior decorators and inappropriate eye sex between coworkers, the group had been exhausted. They’d eaten Cindy’s clam chowder for dinner and retired early. Honestly, the sheer amount of blushing and head ducking between Nina and Deacon had been enough to make Jake want to call it a night. He had done all he could to avoid bed, spending a few hours sketching in the living room and taking a long, hot shower.

  Walking into his room, he could make out the shape of a human figure under his sheets. “N-no, no, no,” he stuttered, backing against the door and fumbling for the light switch.

  “Jake?” Cindy sat up in his bed, rubbing her eyes. The sheets fell from her shoulders, puddling around her waist, revealing a very sensible pair of pink striped cotton pajamas.

  Jake edged forward. It looked like Cindy, and it sounded like Cindy. But what if this was some sort of trick? He picked up a pillow at the end of the bed and tossed it at her, stepping back out of range. The pillow landed against her face with a soft thwap.

  She shook her head, sputtering. “Is this some sort of payback for the can of polish?”

  “Sorry. I thought maybe you were Catherine again.”

  “I just—I couldn’t sleep,” she said, toying with the sheet. “I’ve already had my go-round with the ghostly stuff, but hearing Dotty’s story about waking up with—I can’t seem to close my eyes. Dotty and Nina drank some sort of stinky herbal tea to help them conk out, but I couldn’t stand the taste. I don’t want to feel like they have to stay up to babysit me. And I just sort of ended up here.”

  To Jake’s recollection, that was the only time Cindy had ever apologized to him. This must be serious. He lifted the sheets, telling himself that he wasn’t checking to make sure that she had legs and was a real person. He slid under the sheets and adjusted the pillows beside her, tucking his chin over her shoulder.

  “Is it weird, trying to sleep on the wrong side of the dorm?” he asked. “What do you girls even do over there at night?”

  “Oh, you know, lounge around in our undies, feed each other grapes. We have tickle fights on Tuesdays.”

  “I knew the legends were true,” Jake grumped into her hair.

  She chuckled.

  “Want to talk about it?” he asked.

  “Decidedly not,” she told him. “It’s a little humiliating to realize you’re a grown woman who’s afraid of sleeping in a room by herself. Also that you’re smart enough to recognize that you should probably leave an employment situation that is basically insane, but you don’t want to do it because you’ll lose some of the closest friends you’ve ever made.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t have a lot of girlfriends,” Cindy admitted. “I haven’t always had time to maintain those kinds of friendships. Here I don’t really have a choice. We’re just naturally together, because we’re all on the crew. And I’m afraid of what’s going to happen when we leave here.”

  “I’m sure we’ll have ‘I Survived Renovating the Crane’s Ne
st’ reunions every summer,” he assured her. “With T-shirts and everything.”

  “That’s not funny,” she said, slapping at him. But she was laughing and relaxing into his arms all the same. “And thanks for not making any jokes about finally getting me into bed.”

  “Hey.” He turned her over to face him. “This is not a joke. I’m—I don’t want to use the word ‘honored,’ because you would call bullshit on me, but I’m really happy that you trust me enough to come in here. And I’m not going to do anything to screw that up. I don’t want to ever give you reason not to trust me again, Cindy, I mean it. And if that means that we wait until we’re off-island before anything serious happens between us, I’ll wait with a smile on my face. But I just—I won’t waste the second chance you gave me.”

  She threaded her fingers through his hair, leaning up to kiss him. All of the things that she’d been holding back from him she gave him now. True affection, trust, sincere pleasure, and, if not her love, then the promise that one day soon, they might be headed that way. “You’ve got a deal. We’ll wait.” She looked strangely vulnerable, her eyes wide and without guile as she stared up at him.

  Wait a minute. Cindy didn’t do guileless. “If you’re messing with me right now, that’s just mean,” he told her.

  She laughed, pulling him down to the mattress, snuggling her head against his chest. “You’ll figure it out eventually.”

  The Ficus: A Previously Unknown Source of Shame

  DEACON SCRUBBED AT his face, the code on his screen morphing into indistinguishable blurs. Sounds from the activity in the house, the constant buzzing of electrical saws, made it through the soundproofing in his office walls no matter what he did. It was frustrating, but then again, it was amazing how much work the crews were able to get done now that Regina’s designs weren’t hanging over the house like a pall.

  After Nina’s rather spectacular F-bomb display, Deacon lamented the idea of hiring another decorator. Anthony sheepishly admitted that he hadn’t, in fact, ordered any of the specialty flooring or vinyl wallpaper Regina had planned on using, which had held up the renovation process. He just couldn’t stomach the idea of the house looking like a strip club. After Deacon stopped laughing, Jake agreed to take over the decor—with Dotty’s help—basing it on the house’s original design.

  The house, at least the first floor, was finally beginning to look like a home. The entry hall had been returned to its former splendor. The parquet gleamed like caramel under the warm lights of the energy-efficient chandelier. The walls were cleaned and newly painted in a warm cream. It wasn’t exactly homey and quaint, but it was warm, and it would be comfortable.

  Deacon closed his laptop, folded his arms over it, and smacked his head against his forearms. He didn’t even hear Nina walk through the door, using the special code he’d given her. She nudged his arm gently. He started but smiled happily when he saw her face. They hadn’t spent much time alone since the kiss on the beach. So far, Nina seemed to be pretending it hadn’t happened, which was OK with him. He couldn’t quite process the idea that he’d lost control over his body while kissing Nina. He had no idea what he’d said or done. He remembered kissing her—and being very grateful that he was kissing her—and then he “drifted away,” as if he’d fallen asleep. There was a blank white space in his memory, and then he woke up to Nina shaking him. The fact that he couldn’t remember talking to Nina troubled him. His brain had never failed him. He didn’t just blank out for minutes at a time. If he couldn’t trust his brain, his increasingly shaky belief in the concrete world that he could see and touch, what could he trust?

  Nina.

  The girl in question was standing in front of his desk, beaming down at him, practically dancing on the toes of her sensible shoes. He could trust Nina.

  “I have something to show you,” she said.

  Deacon’s expression suddenly turned horror-struck. “Don’t look!” he exclaimed, throwing himself bodily over his desk.

  “What—what are you doing?” She laughed. “If you’re going to spend time on that sort of Web site, you should at least lock your office door.”

  “No, it’s nothing like that.” Wincing, he stood and revealed a mangled brown bunch of dead plant bits hanging limp from a little plastic pot on his desk.

  Her jaw dropped. “How do you kill a ficus? It’s like the cockroach of the plant world. They’re impossible to kill.”

  “I don’t know!” he cried. “I watered it every day. I gave it plant food. I even talked to the damn thing. Clearly, it was suicidal. It wanted to die. This was a mercy killing.”

  “This is either the most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen in my life or the most adorable.”

  Deacon frowned. When Dotty had told him Nina thought he was “adorkable,” he’d been thrilled, but now, it seemed . . . less cool. It sounded as if she thought of him as her goofy little brother.

  “I wanted to tell you that it’s been all-clear on the Rick front,” Deacon said, clearing his throat. “I’ve been monitoring the security-video feeds. Other than the occasional squirrel or seagull, I haven’t seen anything. In fact, he hasn’t showed up on any of the security feeds since we arrived.”

  “Which would suggest a ghost destroyed my greenhouse, which would be so much better.” Nina sighed. “Or he could be paying someone on our staff. He could be waiting until the day crews arrive and sneaking into dock on the south side of the island. Don’t underestimate him.”

  “I’m not, believe me. I just don’t want you to get stressed about it,” he said. “And with that in mind, I want you to take this.” He pulled a plain black plastic runner’s watch from his front pocket. He wrapped the band around her wrist and snapped the catch.

  “I can’t take that!” she exclaimed. “For one thing, there’s a really good chance I will summon the SWAT team accidentally while climbing into the shower. And two, if I take this one, you won’t have a watch that summons the SWAT teams. And since you’re a lot more likely to be kidnapped between the two of us, you should probably keep it.”

  “Actually, I’ve had this one made for you,” he told her, trying to shake the images of her climbing into the shower. He held up his wrist to show her that his watch was still where it always was. “I’m giving the others their watches at dinner.”

  She lovingly stroked the face of the nondescript watch, making his heart do funny flip-flops. If she was this happy with a stupid plastic watch, how would she react if he presented her with diamonds? For the first time in his life, he wanted to buy a woman lavish, expensive gifts. If it made her smile, he would buy all of the diamonds. “Thank you.”

  But then again, Nina didn’t seem the type to get excited over cold rocks. She would want something warm, something alive. A puppy. He would get her a puppy and name it Max.

  “So what brings you to witness my secret shame?” he asked.

  “Two things,” she said, producing a small gift bag from behind her back. She’d picked up the present on a rare trip to the mainland, implementing several seasickness patches in order to go shopping with Dotty.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s one of those digital photo frames,” Nina said as he unwrapped it. “Jake helped me set it up. We loaded some old photos from when you were kids, from college, from the early days at your office, and, er, from this summer. I thought you’d like it, since it fits with the whole digital-age theme you have going on. But it gives the room a little personality.”

  He plugged the frame into a multibranch jack shaped like a tree. The frame immediately came to life, scrolling through various pictures. It stopped on a shot that Dotty had taken of Nina, bent over a flower bed with the sun shining through her hair, a corona of red-gold light forming a halo around her head. Her head was down, her eyes nearly closed, as if she was saying a prayer over newly planted seedlings.

  “This is great,” he said, placing the frame right next to his laptop. “Really, it’s one of the most thoughtful presents I’ve ever receive
d. Thanks very much.”

  Nina beamed at him, making his chest ache.

  “Now, what was the second thing?”

  Her grip around his wrist was unexpected and quite strong. “Well, Deacon, I’m going to lure you out so you can get some fresh air. You’ve been in here all day, after being in here all day yesterday. It’s not healthy.”

  “That’s very sweet, but I have a lot of work to do. My unanswered e-mail count for the day is now in the triple digits.”

  “Deacon, get out of the chair.”

  “Did Dotty send you?” he asked, eyes narrowed as she pulled him away from his desk.

  “No, human decency and concern for my employer sent me.”

  “I have work I need to do,” he said, even though he didn’t resist as she pulled him through the rooms of the house to the back door.

  She paused outside of the silver pantry, near the kitchen, where they could hear Anthony’s workers installing new appliances and kitchen counters.

  “But it’s raining,” he protested.

  She tugged on his hand. “It’s misting. The real rain won’t settle in until this afternoon.” When he groaned, she planted her hands on her hips. “OK, Deacon, I didn’t want to resort to this, but I took your cell phone earlier and hid it somewhere on the property.”

  He gasped, patting his pockets for his phone, which was indeed missing. How had she managed to walk into his office, take his phone from his pocket, and walk out without him noticing? Jake was right. He did have tunnel vision when he was working. “You wouldn’t.”

  “I would.”

  “You didn’t!”

  “I did,” she said, completely unrepentant. And darned if she didn’t look cute when she was all pleased with herself for phone thievery. “Come on.”

  “Wait,” he said, pulling on her hard enough to make her stumble back into him. He absently patted his shirt and pants pockets, pulling out a mini-tablet, an iPod, an e-reader, and a backup cell phone.