“True—” Mitch traced the thinning denim over her knee with his thumb “—but Chase is happily married now.”
Lauren tried but couldn’t quite keep herself from leaning into Mitch’s mesmerizingly soft, seductive touch. In fact, she was so aroused, it was all she could do to ask as he continued to stroke her knee with the same slow, thoughtful strokes, “You think his relationship with Bridgett is going to last?”
“Oh, yeah.” Mitch smiled his approval of his older brother’s match. “Absolutely.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” Lauren smiled enthusiastically. “That means the curse is broken.”
“Even if it wasn’t,” Mitch proclaimed determinedly, his hand stilling abruptly on her knee, “I am going to be the exception to the rule. The one person in the family who does live happily ever after.”
“Brave talk.” Lauren returned his teasing look with a smile. “But don’t you think it odd that I would discover this here, now, when I am dating you?” What were the odds of that?
Mitch shrugged, wrapped his arms around her waist and lifted her over onto his lap. “The only thing I consider odd is that I’ve been with you, like this, in such an intimate setting and I haven’t kissed you once today,” he whispered as he lifted her face to his and claimed her with a hot, passionate kiss that shook her to her very soul. It felt so good to be held against him that way, so good to be wanted, Lauren thought. Needing to be closer yet, she wreathed her arms around him and opened her mouth to the insistent pressure of his. And that was when they heard it. The sound of something—or someone—moving in the passageway behind the secret door.
Simultaneously realizing they were no longer alone, Mitch and Lauren broke apart. “Did you hear something?” Lauren demanded breathlessly as she jumped off Mitch’s lap.
“Yes.” Mitch also vaulted to his feet. “And it sounded like it was coming from over there.” Mitch strode to the secret door. Lauren was right beside him as he pressed the lever and watched it open. Just outside the portal, on the floor of the passageway, was a bouquet of fresh spring flowers wrapped in satin ribbon.
MITCH TURNED BACK to her, a quizzical expression on his face. “Don’t look at me,” Lauren said, holding up her hands in a gesture of surrender. “I have no idea who put those there.”
“Well, there’s one way to find out.” Mitch grabbed the flashlight and rushed into the passageway, a determined look on his face. Lauren followed all the way to the end. But there was no one there. Nor was there anyone in the garden. There was, however, a long chiffon scarf, scented with rose perfume, caught on one of the bushes.
“Well, this definitely wasn’t here before,” Lauren said grimly.
Mitch dashed around the house, to the street, while Lauren took a closer look at the garden. She had just searched every nook and cranny of the overgrown garden when Mitch returned. “Did you see anyone?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Although there are several dozen places, whoever left this could have disappeared. Other gardens, houses, back gates.”
“I wonder whom the flowers are for,” Lauren said as she picked up the bouquet of daisies, baby’s breath, lilies, azaleas, lilacs and sweetpeas she had dropped.
“Probably whoever has been trysting in this room,” Mitch said.
“I figured that, silly. I meant who are the lovers?” Lauren persisted.
Mitch’s gaze turned speculative. “I can only think of one person in Charleston who might know,” he said.
“And that would be…?”
“My aunt Winnifred. She’s not just the social doyenne of Charleston, she’s an expert in both the public and private history of the area, too.”
Chapter Eleven
“I’d always heard there was a secret rendezvous place for Captain Douglas Nyquist and Eleanor Deveraux,” the fifty-year-old Winnifred Deveraux told Mitch and Lauren soon after she and her butler, Harry Bowles, had arrived to see the hidden room. “But I don’t think anyone knew where it was until now,” Winnifred said, her patrician features tightening into a problematic frown as she and Harry sat down on opposite ends of the chaise, while Mitch and Lauren seated themselves side by side on the steamer trunk.
“It makes sense, though,” Winnifred continued thoughtfully, smoothing the skirt of her elegant pale blue dress. She settled her trim, petite frame more comfortably on the chaise. “This mansion was owned by Douglas Nyquist’s cousin, at the time Douglas and Eleanor fell in love. And she was reportedly very sympathetic to the young lovers and their predicament.”
Mitch would have been, too. To be in love with someone and not be able to see and be with that person would be a lousy way to have to live. If he were in that situation—in love with someone his family did not sanction—he wouldn’t care what anyone said. He would move heaven and earth to be with her.
“What do you know about what happened back then?” Lauren asked, appearing as if her sympathies were squarely with the young lovers.
Seemingly in no hurry to get to the social occasion she had scheduled for that evening, Winnifred smiled and lifted a delicate hand. “It was arranged from the time he was a child that Captain Nyquist would marry Dolly Lancaster. The match made sense. The Lancasters were merchants and the Nyquists were seamen. Both families stood to profit. As the children were growing up, both families were very prosperous, but as Douglas and Dolly reached marrying age, the Nyquists invested a great deal of money on a sleek new ship design that didn’t quite pan out, and the Nyquists fell on hard times financially.”
Just like the Heywards now? Mitch wondered silently. “How did Dolly feel about marrying someone who was no longer as wealthy as she was?” Mitch asked curiously, wondering if there were even more parallels in these two situations than they knew.
Winnifred lifted her hands in a helpless gesture. “Dolly wasn’t happy that Captain Nyquist’s wealth was diminished, but she felt that over time, with help from her family, Douglas Nyquist would be able to recoup his family fortune.”
“That was probably true, wasn’t it?” Lauren interjected, looking as caught up in the story as Mitch. “I mean, all businesses have their ups and downs. But if you know how to make a business a success, you can overcome your mistakes and do it again. You just need the time and opportunity.”
“And funds,” Mitch added, wondering, even as he spoke, how Lauren would react to that. But instead of looking guilty or self-conscious over the subtle parallel he was trying to make, Lauren merely nodded earnestly, agreeing.
“Yes,” Lauren said. “It always helps to have some capital to start with. I wouldn’t have been able to build up my own real estate business if my father hadn’t believed in me enough to underwrite my office costs the first couple of years.”
Was that why Lauren was working so hard behind the scenes to bail her father out now? Mitch wondered. Assuming, of course, her father was in some sort of financial trouble because he had fallen into one of the major pitfalls of business and expanded much too fast.
“Anyway, as I was saying,” Winnifred continued informatively as she touched a hand to her beautifully coiffed hair, “about the time Douglas and Dolly reached marrying age, Douglas met Eleanor, and fell head over heels in love with her. But Douglas knew he was promised to Dolly and that his father—Joseph Nyquist—was counting on him to marry Dolly and bail the rest of them out financially, so Douglas followed through with a ring and a proposal and tried very hard to live up to his obligations.”
“But in the end he couldn’t,” Mitch guessed, remembering all too clearly how miserable it had been to be married to a woman who didn’t love him any more than he loved her, in the end.
“Right,” Winnifred said. “And although Dolly didn’t actually love Captain Nyquist, Dolly was very upset when he broke it off with her. At first Dolly tried to get Douglas back with a charm offensive. When that didn’t work, she tried pressure from their families and friends.”
“But that failed, too, didn’t it?” Lauren guessed.
Winn
ifred nodded. “Yes. And that was when Dolly began to get obsessed with the hurt and humiliation she had suffered at Douglas’s hands. Meanwhile, Eleanor—who wouldn’t give Douglas the time of day until he had ended things with Dolly—realized that she loved Douglas as much as Douglas loved her, and Eleanor wanted to be with him more than anything. But Eleanor’s heart went out to Dolly because she knew how angry Dolly was. So Eleanor told Captain Nyquist that until Dolly found another beau, or her family could make another match for her, Eleanor wouldn’t see Douglas publicly or let him court her. But as months went by, and Dolly showed no signs of even thinking about marrying anyone else, Eleanor and Douglas became very impatient. And they started seeing each other on the sly, in their secret place. Dolly heard rumors of their trysting and she swore the two of them would never find any happiness. And to make sure of that, she went to a gypsy and put a curse on Eleanor and Douglas’s love for each other.”
“They didn’t believe the hex had any power, did they?” Mitch interrupted.
“No, they didn’t, until Captain Nyquist’s ship went down just off the coast of Charleston in a tropical storm.”
“Eleanor must have been devastated,” Lauren said, shifting slightly closer to Mitch.
Winnifred nodded as she settled more comfortably on the chaise. “And worse, Eleanor blamed herself for Captain Nyquist’s death. She felt that if she had put her own desires aside and made him marry Dolly, he would still be alive. She was inconsolable. And she caught pneumonia that very winter, and later died of what some say was a broken heart.”
Mitch turned to Lauren, wanting to finish this part of the story himself. “Since then, as legend goes, every Deveraux has been doomed—at least where love is concerned.”
“Although Mitch doesn’t believe that,” Winnifred added for Lauren’s sake.
Mitch shrugged. “There’s no disputing that the family doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to romance, but I think we Deveraux have made our own mistakes, independent of any curse.”
Lauren didn’t act as if she disagreed with Mitch’s thinking. “What happened to the Nyquist family?”
“The Nyquists sold their mansion at 10 Gathering Street and moved to Virginia for a fresh start,” Harry added.
Winnifred smiled at her devoted butler with longstanding affection. “Harry’s quite the history buff.”
“As well as timekeeper,” Harry said, consulting his pocket watch. He looked at his employer fondly. “If you don’t want to be late for your soiree, we’d best be on our way.”
“Well, we can’t have that, can we?” Winnifred quipped when Harry helped her to her feet.
“Thanks for stopping by,” Lauren murmured. She and Mitch walked Winnifred and Harry to the front door.
“My pleasure!” Winnifred beamed.
“What should I do with the letters?” Lauren asked, concerned.
“Why not keep everything as is for right now?” Winnifred suggested. “Until I talk to my brother, Tom, and see what he wants to do.”
“That sounds fine,” Lauren said.
As soon as the door closed, Mitch turned back to Lauren. Her dark brown eyes had a distant, bemused expression. “Why so pensive?”
Lauren shrugged and she led the way up to the second floor, down the hall to the east wing. “I was just thinking about Eleanor and Captain Nyquist,” she said as she beckoned Mitch into a suite of rooms that she had cordoned off as her private living quarters during the upcoming renovations.
As they walked in, Mitch checked out the changes she had made. The card table and folding chairs she’d brought in the night before were resting against a wall. She’d had a big four-poster bed delivered that was so high off the floor a stepstool was required to get into it; a nightstand, complete with clock, light and telephone, beside it. A brocade sofa still encased in plastic sat before the window, overlooking Gathering Street. There were shopping bags of brand-new stuff bearing a popular department store logo stacked willy-nilly, and several rugs of different sizes that needed to be unrolled and placed. Mitch noted she had her work cut out for her just trying to bring some order to the space.
Frowning sympathetically, Lauren continued, “Douglas and Eleanor never really got to be together. Publicly, anyway. Douglas’s father must have felt so bad after his son died. I mean, the curse aside, Joseph Nyquist was responsible for keeping his son from the love of his life. That would be hard to live with.”
“I don’t feel sorry for Joseph Nyquist,” Mitch said, admiring the antique mahogany table and four chairs Lauren had set up before the fireplace. He turned back to Lauren, ready to lend a hand in any way she needed. “What kind of father asks his son to bed a woman to bail him out?”
Lauren took a mattress pad out of the plastic cover and carried it over to the bed. Once there, she opened it and shook the wrinkles out of the quilted fabric. “Maybe Joseph didn’t want to do it but the family didn’t have any other options. You heard Winnifred. Times were tough and then there were forces they couldn’t control—like the failure of that new ship design.”
Or, in our case, Mitch thought, increased competition from the little guys and e-commerce. Mitch walked over to help Lauren make up her bed. “Would you do it?” he asked casually as they struggled to tuck the springy elastic edges around all four mattress corners.
“What?” Finished, Lauren reached for the contoured sheet.
“Bail your father out that way,” Mitch supplied as they quickly made up the bed with soft taupe sheets and covered it all with a silky damask bedspread in the same hue as the linen.
Lauren walked over to get four down pillows. She brought them back to the bed and shot him a haughty look. “He’d never ask me.”
“He asked you to date me,” Mitch pointed out as they slipped the cases on the pillows.
With a beleaguered sigh and a very pointed look at him, Lauren qualified, “My father did that because he wants to see me married. And, for some reason I can’t begin to fathom, has decided you are the man of my dreams.”
Mitch liked the sound of that—he wanted to be the man of Lauren’s dreams—even if she wasn’t yet convinced that was the situation at all. But he couldn’t let himself be distracted from his mission here, which was to find out what was really going on behind the scenes. “Suppose your dad did ask you to marry for purely monetary reasons.” Mitch walked around to her side of the bed. “Would you volunteer to help him?”
Lauren kicked off her shoes and climbed up the stepstool. Kneeling on the bed, she arranged the pillows the way she wanted them against the headboard. “One hundred years ago I wouldn’t have had much choice—I would have had to do what my father asked.”
She was ducking the question, Mitch thought. Subtly changing it to something easier to answer.
Mitch turned his glance from the snug fit of the khaki slacks across her hips and waist, and walked over to get several bolster pillows, in the same damask silk as the taupe spread. “I’m talking about now,” he said. “He kicked off his shoes and climbed up onto her massive four-poster bed, too.
Lauren sighed. “Today is different.” Lauren took the bolster pillows from him and sitting cross-legged on the bed, began arranging them.
“How so?” he asked. Deciding to test out the bed, Mitch stretched out lengthwise on the king-size mattress. To his pleasure it was just as comfortable as it looked.
Lauren shrugged and sat back, with her hands braced behind her. She was sitting on the hem of her shirt, and the fabric of her much-laundered denim work shirt pulled across her full, round breasts.
Looking intrigued by the intensity of his questioning, she tilted her head consideringly at Mitch. “Women have choices. We don’t automatically have to do what our fathers ask of us,” she said softly after a moment.
“Suppose your father asked you to marry someone for the sake of the family business and you had to make a choice and this was the only way to save Heyward Shipping.” Mitch rolled onto his side and propped his head on his h
and. He was more aware than ever of the clean, sexy fragrance of her hair and skin—of the mounting desire he felt for her, the desire that could send his judgment to Hades. “What would you do?” he pressed on relentlessly, doing his best to keep his suspicions hidden about what Lauren and her father might or might not be up to, under wraps. “Would you marry the man?” He searched Lauren’s dark brown eyes for the truth concealed deep within her. “Or say no to the betrothal and the deal that would save your family business.”
LAUREN STARED AT MITCH. What had gotten into him? She didn’t like his questions. And didn’t see any need for them, either. “No,” she said firmly. “I would not.” Instead, she would urge her father to find another way to rescue Heyward Shipping. Deciding to push back on him with a series of very revealing questions of her own, she asked, “What about you, Mitch? If you had lived fifty to one hundred years ago, would you have married to save the family business?”
To Lauren’s dismay, Mitch didn’t even hesitate. “Of course,” he told her matter-of-factly. “That’s the way things were done.”
Lauren hitched in a deep, bolstering breath, and tried not to think about how being this close to him made her feel—which was hot, restless and full of desire. “What about now?” Lauren pushed on boldly, trying hard not to notice how the soft, knit fabric of his charcoal-gray polo shirt defined his broad shoulders and nicely muscled chest. “Would you marry to save your family’s business today?”
This time Mitch did hesitate. “I suppose,” Mitch said reluctantly at last, half his mouth curling down into a frown, “if there were no other way, I would marry rather than see the Deveraux Shipping Company bite the dust. But if that were my agenda,” he said, an unexpected edge creeping into his low tone as he looked her straight in the eye, “I’d at least be honest about it.”
Was there an accusation there? Lauren wondered uneasily. Or was it just her imagination that Mitch was taking this all a little too personally? Aware her heartbeat was picking up, and that she was a little too fond of the intoxicating sandalwood and spice fragrance of his after-shave, Lauren studied him. “You’d really hurt someone that way,” she noted pragmatically, doing her best to keep the depth of disappointment to herself. She’d thought Mitch was so much more romantic and passionate than that!
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