“I think what Dad’s trying to say is that you’re his houseguest, not the new maid he hired,” Mike informed her sternly.
“I don’t mind doing my share,” Sam said cheerfully, deliberately addressing her words to Miguel and not the man standing in her way.
“Your ‘share,’” Mike told her pointedly, moving the plates out of her reach in case she had intentions of picking them up again, “will be going over the diaries, not clearing the table or putting the dishes into the dishwasher.”
The last part caught her attention and she looked at Mike. “I wasn’t going to put the dishes into the dishwasher,” she told him.
“Oh?” He didn’t believe her, but he was curious to hear what she was going to say.
“No, I was going to wash them myself,” she said. Before Mike could say something derogatory, she turned her attention to Miguel and said, “Washing dishes helps me clear my head.”
Her explanation was also an appeal to the older man for understanding. There were reasons behind her doing what she did and she wanted to be free to follow her instincts, no matter how trivial they might sound to someone else.
Miguel spread his hands in a gesture that was meant to remove him from the center of the confrontation. “If you find that it really helps you, then how can I tell you not to do it?” Miguel asked with an indulgent smile.
Sam’s eyes smiled her thanks as a warm wave of kinship washed over her. She reached for the plates again, picking them up so that she could finally take them into the kitchen. She paused just for a moment before Miguel’s chair.
“If I could have picked a father,” she told the patriarch, “he would have been just like you.”
“I am flattered,” Miguel said. Then her words replayed themselves in his head. They took on more import. “Wait, you never knew your father?” he asked.
Sam shook her head. “No, I was never that lucky,” she replied, directing her words toward Mike before she disappeared into the kitchen.
Miguel looked after her thoughtfully before he turned his attention back to his sons. “Did you hear what Samantha said? Consider yourselves lucky,” he said to his sons, pretending to be serious.
“Well, I do,” Ray readily declared, looking off in the direction Sam had gone in. “Lucky to be living in a house where that hot little number is going to be staying—how long is she supposed to be here again?” he asked, looking from his father to Mike, waiting for an answer and obviously hoping that the woman’s stay would be a lengthy one.
“Too long,” was Mike’s response while Miguel told his youngest, “About six weeks was what she had told me.” And then Miguel frowned at Ray. While he loved all his children equally for different reasons, his youngest was a test to his patience. There were times when it seemed as if Ramon went through a woman a week. At this point, Forever had run out of potential marital partners—he’d been with every woman under ninety except for Miss Joan.
“Ramon,” Miguel warned his son, “you are to be a gentleman.”
“Nothing less crossed my mind, Dad,” Ray told his father with a grin, elaborately crossing his heart for his father’s benefit. “You don’t have dibs on her or anything, right?” he asked Mike.
In response, Mike uttered something under his breath akin to a growl.
Ray interpreted the disgruntled sound to mean what he wanted it to. “Okay, then, I’ll take that as a no.” His grin broadened. It was the same grin that so many women found to be fatally charming. “Which means that she’s fair game—”
“You listen to me and you listen good,” Mike said to his brother in a low, steely voice that left no room for any doubt. “She’s not any kind of a ‘game,’ she’s a person. A person Dad hired to do a specific job. You’re not going to hang around her, you’re not going to annoy her and you’re not going to get in her way in any manner, shape or form. You’re going to let her do her job and then she’s going to take her money, her single suitcase and her laptop and she’s going to go—is that clear?”
“What are you getting so bent out of shape about?” Ray asked.
“Because there’s got to be at least one woman left in the state that you haven’t—and won’t—put your mark on. Think of it as a challenge,” he ordered his brother. His implication was clear. Either Ray left Sam alone, or he would make Ray leave her alone. “Now is that clear?” he repeated.
“Clear,” Ray mumbled, obviously not overjoyed to be giving this answer.
“Good.”
With that, Mike walked out of the house.
There was nothing but stunned silence in Mike’s wake lingering in the dining room for at least a couple of minutes.
And then Miguel banished the silence by venturing a guess. “I think that your brother is interested in our houseguest.”
Ray laughed, but rather than deny his father’s assumption, he heartily reinforced it.
“Oh, yeah. Big-time,” he agreed, bobbing his head up and down. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen big brother quite this edgy before, either,” Ray went on to observe.
“That is because Miguel never liked being restricted, and caring about someone restricts a person, it puts up boundaries.”
“This,” Ray predicted just before he left the room himself, “should be very interesting.”
* * *
WHICH WAS THE exact thought that Sam had a little while later, after she had finished the dishes over Rosa’s very vocal protests. As she put the last dish away, Miguel called her into the living room. When she came in, he showed her the dust-encrusted box filled with the diaries and journals he had discovered during his quest to organize and clean up the attic.
If he still had the slightest bit of doubt lingering about hiring someone so young to tackle something of such importance to him, she hoped that she had obliterated it with her reverence for the box and its contents.
“It’s like touching history,” she told him in a hushed voice.
Miguel nodded, no doubt pleased to hear her describe it that way.
“You did say that you wanted to get started tonight,” he reminded her. His tone almost sounded like an apology for showing her the journals.
“Oh, yes, of course. Absolutely,” she said with feeling.
Feeling almost beside herself with anticipation, Sam didn’t know where to begin. She felt she had to do this just right. Her other projects had been very different in comparison. Doing those she would take what were at times disjointed scenes and endless pages of incoherent ramblings and turn them into a coherent, interesting whole that in turn drew its share of devoted readers.
But in each case, she was dealing with contemporary biographies, written about and supposedly by famous or semifamous people of the present day. None of them represented a sense of history, there was no feeling of reaching across the bridge of time to touch another world that had long since faded away.
This project, however, was different.
This project was important.
Realizing that her host probably thought she’d been struck dumb, Sam looked up at him, flashed a smile and asked, “Where can I work? I’m going to need some room to take the books out and go through them, perhaps arrange them chronologically without crowding them in case the bindings are flimsy—which they probably are,” she suddenly realized.
They were over a hundred and fifty years old; how could they be anything but fragile and flimsy?
“You can work in the study,” Miguel immediately offered. The study had a good, sturdy desk, its walls were lined with shelves overflowing with books and the morning light was excellent in that room. It was the perfect place to work.
Overhearing, Mike was quick to protest the study being lost to him. “Dad, that’s where I’ve got the accounting books for the ranch.”
His objection implied more than that to her. It mea
nt that he did whatever paperwork he had to for the ranch in this room.
She didn’t want to throw Mike out of what was clearly his office. “Maybe I can just bring the journals and diaries up to my room.”
She tried to remember if there was a desk in that room. There had to be, right? And if there wasn’t, Sam decided in the next minute, she could certainly improvise. Even when she was a little girl, she’d never been one to be hemmed in by just one idea, just one approach to a problem. Flexibility had always been the key in everything she did.
“No need,” Miguel told her. He looked at his oldest. “Surely you can work out a schedule where you will not be in each other’s way.”
“Of course,” she agreed immediately. “You just tell me when you need the space and I’ll be sure to make myself scarce.”
Mike sincerely doubted that she could accomplish something like that. She hadn’t even been there a day and he could already tell if she’d been in the room by the scent of her perfume or cologne or whatever it was that smelled like a combination of honeysuckle and her.
“See?” his father asked in response to Sam’s offer to share office time. “You cannot ask for anything better than that.”
Yeah, he could, Mike thought.
He could ask for this woman not to be around at all. He could ask for his world not to be disturbed, to continue just the way it had been going, letting him run the ranch for the most part while his brothers and sister did whatever it was that they did—which these days usually meant getting married and having babies. He had no interest in either.
He neither wanted to have his own happiness depend on the happiness of someone else—he’d seen enough of his brothers’ entanglements to know that was the way it went—nor did he yearn to have a tiny human being suddenly roaming the earth composed of his genes and someone else’s. He was perfectly content keeping to himself and doing what he was good at—which in this case meant running the family ranch.
“Yeah, whatever,” he murmured in response to Sam’s suggestion.
Mike started to leave the room, only to have his father foil his getaway by saying, “Miguel here will take these books into the study for you.”
He was offering Sam a warm body to do her bidding, Mike thought, disgruntled.
“That’s all right,” Sam was quick to refuse the offer. “I can do it. I’m stronger than I look,” she added when she saw the older man open his mouth to protest her doing any such thing.
“I am sure that you are,” Miguel replied diplomatically. “But indulge an old man—I would prefer to have my son take these books into the study for you than to watch you bend beneath their burden.” He turned toward his son. “Miguel?”
Mike made no reply. Instead of talking, he picked up the box in one sweeping motion.
It was a damn sight heavier than it looked, but he was determined not to make a sound.
Only when he had the box properly balanced did Mike look expectantly at his father. “Any particular place in the study?”
Instead of answering his son, Miguel looked toward Sam. “Perhaps you should accompany him into the study,” he suggested. “Then you can have Miguel put the books where you can best get to them and they will not be in your way—or his,” he added, glancing at Mike, “when you are working on something else.”
Exactly what else did he expect her to be working on, Sam wondered, then decided that he was probably referring to Mike’s work, not hers.
The old man was up to something, Mike thought. And it didn’t take a brilliant mind to guess what.
Too bad the old man was going to be disappointed because no way was he going to be matched up with anyone, even a woman as attractive and as self-sufficient as this one was. The fact that she didn’t ask to be indulged or placated, didn’t play the part of the helpless little woman, were all points in her favor, as was the fact that she was probably the prettiest woman he’d ever seen up close and personal.
But he wasn’t in the market for a better half or any half at all.
He was in the market for peace and quiet, something, he had a hunch, he wasn’t going to be able to get much of for the next six weeks—if not longer because as far as he knew, she could very well draw the whole process out.
He told himself to focus on the light at the end of the tunnel, even if that tunnel seemed to be damn long right now.
“You coming?” he asked in an exasperated voice. Not waiting for an answer, Mike walked out of the living room and headed toward the study.
The sound of clicking heels on tile told him she was right behind him.
He allowed himself a slight, momentary smile. Getting her to act the way he wanted her to wasn’t all that difficult, he thought. All he needed was the right incentive, the right bait and this potential one-hundred-and-ten-pound problem would be no problem at all.
Or at least he could hope.
Chapter Nine
Sam realized that she kept losing track of time. Not just for a few hours or once in a while, but what amounted to every day for the past three weeks. She was that immersed in her work.
The whole thing was akin to stumbling across one of those wonderful books that pulled you in the moment you first opened it, propelling you into a world that was far removed from your own and just too exciting to leave. That was how she began to work every morning. Once started, she really hated to put whatever journal she was reading down and the temptation to just “turn another page,” “read another passage,” or “come down to the end of the next paragraph” was just too seductive for her to voluntarily stop.
Since she’d begun wading through the various diaries, journals and the collection of independent notations that were made years later—if the difference in handwriting and quality of the paper were any indication—Sam had found that she had a hard time remembering to stop reading in order to get something to eat.
Time ceased to have any significance for her because she wasn’t running according to current schedules or timepieces. She was back approximately one hundred and forty-five years in the past, feeling the emotions of a girl more than ten years her junior. Each fear Marguerite experienced became her fear, each moment of heart-racing anticipation became hers, as well.
When she read these journals, it felt as if she were Marguerite.
It had been like this for three weeks. She only stopped when someone knocked on the door of the study, more likely than not startling her, to announce that it was time for lunch or dinner. Some of the time, the messenger who pulled her back into the twenty-first century was Miguel or Rosa. But of late, she’d noticed that Miguel—she was certain he had to be the one behind this change as to who was coming to fetch her—had Mike call her back to the present-day world.
This time around, it took more than a passing knock, or even a loud one to rouse her. It took persistent knocking, not because she was so utterly wrapped up in what she was reading but because she’d fallen asleep over the journal she’d been reading and studying so closely the past few hours.
Three weeks of little to no sleep had finally caught up to her and the last thing she remembered was that her eyelids had suddenly each weighed approximately one ton apiece.
Startled, she sat up, trying to focus her foggy brain as quickly as possible. When she did, she realized that Mike was no longer merely knocking on the door. He had opened it and walked in.
“Found a new way to absorb what’s written in those books?” he asked her, amused.
Still half-asleep, Sam stared at him, trying desperately to orient her brain to her surroundings. A moment earlier, she’d been running through the forest, trying to elude a stray band of renegades who had just killed her entire family.
Somehow, her own family, which technically consisted of her mother and the man her mother had married, the man who had whisked her mother off to another s
tate before the ink was dry on the marriage license, had blended with Marguerite’s family. It was those people she had lost, those people she’d been mourning as she ran breathlessly through the woods, trying to save herself from being kidnapped—or worse.
In her dream, she’d lost sight of where Marguerite ended and she began. For a moment, before her surroundings started coming into focus, she’d been embedded in a world that had been gone for close to a hundred and fifty years now.
Returning to the present, to the study in a ranch house in Forever, Texas, wasn’t as easy as it might have seemed at first.
Mike’s words made no sense to her, even when she replayed them in her head. Clearing her throat, which felt as if it was clogged with dust mites, she asked, “What?”
“Your face,” he pointed out with more amusement than she’d seen him display since she’d arrived in Forever, “it was plastered against the journal. I thought that maybe you’d found a new way to absorb the story faster.”
His words finally penetrated.
“Oh, my God.”
Sam’s eyes widened in stunned horror as she realized what she’d done. Her head was on the desk, which meant that she’d rested her cheek against the pages of the journal she’d been reading when she’d dropped off to sleep.
Her hand flew to her face. There were natural oils on the skin that could have easily come off onto the pages that were opened and stained them, causing the writing, which was faint in some places to begin with, to blur.
Her heart sank at the prospect that she could have damaged the journal.
“What’s the matter?” Mike asked, looking around the room, wondering what she could have just seen to set her off like this. As far as he could see, nothing appeared to be out of place.
“I could have ruined some pages,” she cried, picking up the journal and holding the pages she’d just been napping on up to the light.
Mike looked at her, apparently not seeing why she should be panicking about the matter.
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