by Tami Hoag
Rachel barely heard his words. They were absorbed into her brain on one level while her conscious awareness dwelled on the man. She felt overwhelmed, enveloped by his masculinity, and she felt her body responding to it. A satiny warmth unfolded through her, down her arms and legs and into her breasts, making them feel heavy and full. Her gaze fastened on his mouth. In a way she couldn’t begin to explain or understand, she could almost taste his lips, could almost feel them on her own. The sensations were so vivid, they frightened her, and she took a step back from him in obvious retreat.
Bryan turned away and speared both hands back through his hair as he dragged in a deep, cleansing breath. Dammit, he swore inwardly, more shaken than angry at the moment. He’d never felt anything quite like the power that had held him in its grasp as he’d stared down at Rachel Lindquist’s petal-pink lips. He shook his head to clear it.
It must have had something to do with a combination of exhaustion and celibacy. Once he might have called it magic, but he couldn’t call it that now. Magic was what he had shared with Serena. All his magic had died with her. What he was feeling now-well, it was something he wanted no part of, certainly. He was there to do a job, that was all. That was all he could handle right now. That was all he wanted to handle.
“Hennessy?” an imperious voice sounded from the top of the stairs. “What in God’s name is going on down there?”
“I wish I knew,” Bryan mumbled to himself, shaking off the last of the sensation that had stunned him so. He planted his hands at his waist and looked up as Addie Lindquist descended the grand staircase.
Addie moved like a queen. She kept her thin shoulders square and her back straight. Age had shrunken her some, but she did not see that as an excuse for bad posture. Her hand skimmed the mahogany banister lightly. She held her head high. Her frazzled braid of silvery blond hair was draped over her shoulder. She looked like she should have been wearing a velvet cloak instead of a flannel nightgown.
“Who’s down there with you?” she demanded, squinting. “Is it Wimsey? The rascal. I haven’t seen him all day. I can’t imagine where he’s taken himself off to.”
“No, it isn’t Wimsey, Addie,” Bryan said, heartily wishing it were the elusive ghost of Drake House. He stepped to the left so Addie would have an unobstructed view of her visitor.
“Well, who is it, then? You’d better not be cavorting with the kitchen help again.”
“She sort of thinks I’m her butler,” Bryan whispered, tilting his head down so Rachel could hear him.
But Rachel wasn’t listening. She was seeing her mother for the first time in five years. When had Addie gotten so old? The beautiful, vital woman Rachel remembered had faded like a photograph left in the sun. Her hair was paler. The vibrant glow that had always radiated from Addie had dimmed. She seemed smaller, and, while she still had a beautiful complexion-something she had always taken great pride in-her face was deeply lined. In the time they had been apart Addie had slipped from middle age to old age. Suddenly the five years that had passed seemed even more of a waste.
As Addie stared down at her, Rachel suddenly felt as she had at sixteen when she’d been caught coming home after curfew. A hundred fears and anxieties tumbled inside her. How would Addie react to her coming here? It was Dr. Moore who had contacted her, not Addie. Addie wouldn’t even accept her phone calls. How would her mother receive her now that she was there in the flesh?
If you leave with that cheap musician, don’t think you can ever come back here, Rachel Lindquist If you leave here now, if you defy me, I will cease to have a daughter.
The ultimatum rang in her ears as if her mother had delivered it only yesterday.
Addie’s gaze settled on the pretty young woman standing beside Hennessy in the hall below her. At first there was no spark of recognition in her mind whatsoever, but, as she moved down one step and then another, she felt her mind shift gears. A quiver of fright ran through her as she realized this was someone she should know but couldn’t place. The feeling lasted only a second or two, but its intensity sapped the strength from her, and she had to pause on the landing before descending the last few steps. Then the fog of confusion cleared abruptly and recognition startled her so, she nearly gasped.
“Rachel,” she said, her pale eyes round with wonder. She didn’t smile or rush forward, but held still. If she moved toward this vision, there was every chance it would vanish. If she was still, she could soak it up greedily and pray that her memory would hold it.
Rachel. Lord, when had she become a woman? She was beautiful. She was dressed like a cheap Gypsy in faded jeans and a purple sweater that hung to the middle of her slender thighs, but it made no difference; she was beautiful.
Her daughter, the child she had thought lost, was there before her, a woman. Emotions ran riot inside her, joy and regret and anger swirling and tumbling around in her brain and overwhelming her. She could only stand on the landing of the grand staircase and stare and say her daughter’s name. “Rachel.”
Rachel shivered, rooted to the spot. She wanted to rush forward and embrace her mother, but that was not the way of the Lindquists. They had never been the type for hugs and kisses and “vulgar” public displays of emotion. Instead, she tried to swallow down her fears and simply said, “Mother.”
It was a simple word full of complex feelings. There was so much between them, such a complicated history, so many memories, so much pain. Rachel pressed a hand to her pounding heart. Since she had received Dr. Moore’s call, she had thought of little besides her mother and how they would handle the situation. But now she realized that never once in all that time had she allowed herself to recognize the hope she’d harbored for this moment.
Bryan watched the exchange between mother and daughter with interest. What kind of family was this? His mother would have had him in a bear hug the instant he’d come through the door. Addie and Rachel stared at each other as if there were an invisible wall between them.
Perhaps there was.
The look in Addie’s eyes was guarded, almost defensive. Rachel appeared to be more frightened than joyful. Had she caught that second of blankness in her mother’s gaze when Addie had almost certainly failed to recognize her? Bryan tried to tell himself it served her right. She was the one who had left and not come back for five years. She deserved to be frightened. But he couldn’t stop the rush of sympathy that welled inside him. The expression in Rachel’s eyes was a little girl’s, hopeful and repentant. If she had looked at him that way, he knew he would have forgiven her anything.
“Rachel,” Addie said again, stepping down from the landing. She held herself perfectly erect.
This was the daughter she had devoted her life to. This was the daughter who had chosen to throw away all their dreams to chase after a two-bit drifter who had an adequate voice and a beat-up guitar. This was the daughter who had left her. Her deteriorating mind had no trouble recalling these facts while it ignored the attempts at peacemaking. All the old hurt and bitterness boiled inside her anew, obscuring the joy and the guilt. Her mind wasn’t capable of dealing with many emotions at once, and so it seized upon the strongest. Stubborn pride tilted her chin up as she stared into the face that so resembled the ghost of her own past. “What are you doing here?”
Rachel felt disappointment crush her. She didn’t try to stop the tears from springing into her eyes, but she did manage to keep the sorrow out of her voice. “I came to help you. Dr. Moore called me and told me about your illness.” Why didn’t you? Why couldn’t you put that damned pride aside long enough to tell me you needed me?
“Broderick Moore is a Nazi and a fool. There’s nothing wrong with me. I don’t need your help,” Addie said coldly. She turned toward Bryan. “I have Hennessy to help me.”
Bryan took an involuntary step backward. He already felt like a voyeur, watching the interchange between mother and daughter; now he felt like an interloper as well. Rachel glared at him, her violet-blue eyes luminous with tears, and he held his
hands up in a gesture of surrender. He shot a look at Addie. “Addie, you know I’m here only to look for Wimsey.”
“Well, I don’t know why you can’t find him,” she grumbled as her mind tuned out. “He’s all over the place.” She turned and started to shuffle down the hall, her green rubber garden boots scuffing against the marble floor. “I’m going to feed Lester. I’m sure you forgot to do it. No doubt practicing your smooth lines in front of a mirror again. Big Irish rascal.”
Bryan rubbed a hand along his jaw, realizing dimly that he had forgotten to shave. He didn’t know quite what to say to Rachel, who stood in the foyer looking like a piece of crystal on the verge of bursting into a million shards. It suddenly didn’t matter what kind of daughter she’d been, it was obvious Addie’s cold reception had hurt her, and almost certainly the decline of her mother’s mental state had shocked her. He couldn’t feel anything now but sympathy for her and the desire to take her in his arms and hold her.
“Dangerous thinking, Hennessy,” he mumbled to himself. “Don’t get involved. Make a note of that-don’t get involved.” He patted his shirt pocket, looking for his pencil, but it was gone again. “And don’t forget to shave tomorrow.”
“What was that?” Rachel asked. If she could not function in any other way, she could at least be polite, she thought ruefully. Wasn’t that one of the Lindquist rules of deportment? A hysterical little laugh threatened but never emerged from her throat.
Bryan blushed a bit. “Nothing.”
Rachel hugged herself, trying to ward off a chill that came from within. “I suppose I shouldn’t have expected anything better than that,” she murmured to no one in particular. Her gaze followed her mother down the hall into the nether reaches of the big house. “She never wanted me here before. Why should she want me here now?”
“You tried?” Bryan blurted out. Shame crawled around in his stomach. It hadn’t occurred to him that Addie’s side of the story might have been biased.
Rachel gave him a cool look, her pride returning to rally around her. “There are lots of things you don’t know, Mr. Hennessy.”
Bryan pushed his glasses up on his nose and nodded. “Oh, yes. I readily admit there are lots of things I don’t know.” He tossed her his most inane grin in an effort to lighten her mood and said, “ ‘A man doesn’t know what he knows until he knows what he doesn’t know.’ Thomas Carlyle. I’ve adopted that as my motto.”
“I see,” Rachel murmured, though she clearly didn’t.
Bryan was unconcerned. The point was, Rachel’s eyes had lost their tragic quality. She was no longer staring after Addie with an expression of shattered hope. She would have to deal with those feelings later, he knew, but at least the intensity of the impact had been defused.
He stuffed his hands into the front pockets of his jeans and gazed up at the chandelier, his blue eyes drowsy with thought. “Of course, John Wooden once said, ‘It’s what you learn after you think you know it all that counts the most.’ For instance, did you know that an alligator’s length in feet is the distance between his eyes in inches?”
Rachel opened her mouth to comment, then closed it and simply stared at him. How had he gotten on this topic? Who in his right mind would try to measure the distance between an alligator’s eyes? The man was a lunatic. A rumpled, handsome lunatic.
She shook her head, deciding she had to be a little off the beam herself to be going on this way about how sexy this strange man was. Finally she decided to ask a question that seemed more pertinent. “Who’s Lester?”
Bryan sobered and sighed. “There is no Lester. Um… your mother thinks she owns a parakeet.” He shrugged apologetically. “If she does, I haven’t been able to find it.”
“Oh.”
“I keep meaning to buy her one, but I forget things. I’m sure I’ve written myself a note about it,” he said, pulling a fistful of paper scraps from his pants pocket. He sorted through them, frowning.
“That’s all right,” Rachel said.
Addie thought she owned a parakeet. This man, who was a virtual stranger, intended to buy her one to placate her. How sweet. What a sweet, sexy, rumpled con man he was. Her heart warmed, then she caught herself and shuddered, cursing her wildly swinging emotions. She felt as if she were trying to keep her balance on the deck of a ship pitching violently in a stormy sea.
Stuffing his notes back in his pocket, Bryan watched her from under his lashes. She looked so lost. In a way it made him think of Addie at the instant her mind snapped from normal to non-functioning. But then Addie would retreat into her fantasies. Rachel didn’t have that option.
Without thinking, he took a step toward her. Odd, but he felt almost as if he’d been pushed toward her. When he caught himself he had already begun to reach out to her. Stopping in his tracks, he slapped his hands together and tried to look decisive. “You must have a suitcase or something out in your car. I’ll go get it.”
He turned and let himself out, taking big gulps of the cool night air as he crossed the porch and jogged down the steps.
“Holy Mike, that was a close call, you moron,” he grumbled to himself. His sneakers crunched on the gravel drive as he headed for a beat-up little Chevette that was parked beside Addie’s old Volvo wagon.
The farther he got from the house, the steadier he felt. The sea air was refreshing. Moisture from the fog that had rolled in at sunset dampened his skin. He leaned against the roof of the little car and let the sound of crashing waves wash the tension from him.
Drake House stood on a cliff overlooking the bay on the very northern edge of Anastasia. Because of the lay of the land and the size of the estate, its nearest neighbor was a quarter mile away. The house on its lonely precipice was a giant sentinel, a gaudy reminder of a bygone age.
It might have looked like a happy, magical place once with its turrets and gingerbread and gables. Now, run-down and in dire need of a coat of paint, it looked like something out of a horror movie. The land that stretched out before it had at one time been a beautifully manicured lawn. There had been gardens and even a maze. He’d seen pictures of it in Anastasia’s Architecture: A Pictorial Essay. The gardens had long since gone to weed and the maze had become a tall, tangled mass of wild brambles.
The few people who came to visit Drake House called during daylight hours, bowing to superstitions they would never voice. Most of them came to browse through the antiques Addie had collected to sell. The kids of the town sometimes came to the end of the driveway at night. Bryan had seen them-groups of four or five kids who weren’t brave enough to come any closer. They stood down at the gate, shoving each other through the portal but never farther. They were thoroughly convinced the place was haunted. They were also scared to death of Addie.
Addie. Bryan glanced up at the house and caught a glimpse of her silhouette as she passed a window. He knew she was going to all the bird cages she had collected, filling the little dishes with seed. In the morning he would clean the trays out before she got up, or she would be upset thinking there was something wrong with Lester. It never seemed to bother her that Lester wasn’t in any of the cages. Unless, of course, she was seeing birds that weren’t actually there. Ghost birds.
He found his pencil and a crumpled bit of paper and made a note of that, then shook his head as he tucked the scrap of paper into his hip pocket and forgot about it. Addie could be fairly lucid. At times she was sharp as a tack. Then in the blink of an eye she would be talking to people who weren’t there, feeding birds she didn’t own.
It was a sad situation, but it wasn’t any of his business, he reminded himself. He’d dealt with his own sad situation; he didn’t need to get wrapped up in another.
Rachel watched her mother go from bird cage to bird cage, panic tightening her throat. Addie couldn’t be this bad already. The possibility that she was terrified Rachel. The further her mother retreated from reality, the less chance there would be for them to reconcile.
In her own mind, because she had only just le
arned of the problem, Rachel felt as if her mother had just developed this illness. She wanted to forget that Addie’s decline had doubtless begun several years earlier, and her mother had either ignored or hidden it for a long while.
Addie had moved to Anastasia upon her retirement from teaching music in Berkeley, not long after Rachel had gone on the road with Terance. According to Dr. Moore, the people of Anastasia had labeled her erratic behavior “eccentric,” and, by the good doctor’s own admission, the town had more than its share of oddballs, so Addie hadn’t really stuck out. It was only after she had backed her Volvo clear across Main Street and into the front of the movie theater that anyone had thought to alert Dr. Moore.
“Mother, it’s very late,” Rachel said wearily. She leaned against the door frame of the parlor, letting it support her weight for a moment. Now was not the time to try to deal with any of this mess-the illness, the emotional baggage, Bryan Hennessy. “You should be in bed.”
Addie set her birdseed down and turned toward her daughter, arching a brow. Resentment burned through her. She resented Rachel for leaving her, for abandoning their dreams, for trying to tell her what to do now. She resented the fact that it had taken a call from that idiot Moore to bring her daughter home. The pressure of her feelings built inside her like steam, which she vented on Rachel.
“I won’t have you telling me what to do, missy,” she snapped, eyes flashing. “I’m not some incontinent old woman who needs to be taken care of like a child.”
Rachel reined in her own ready temper, forced a sigh, and hung her head. She was so tired. She’d driven clear from North Platte, stopping to sleep only once for just a few brief hours. Before the marathon drive had been the marathon fight and subsequent end of her relationship with Terence. And before that had been the devastating news of her mother’s illness. All of it weighed down on her now like the weight of the world on her shoulders. At the moment she would have given anything for someone to lean on, just for a minute or two.