In her suddenly tight throat, her breath caught. She hoped Zach would make the investment. She hoped he would see the grandeur, feel the unique atmosphere, appreciate the many years of family customs that had made this place what it was. She hoped he could feel the love that had endured here for so very long.
“You said you’re stayin’ in the area?” Walt asked suddenly.
“Yes. I—I’ll find work. I don’t know what—maybe clerking in a shop in Lake Isabella or Bakersfield. I’ll get a room or an apartment. Someday, when I can afford it, I want to own horses again. Maybe even buy a piece of property near here.”
Old Walt sighed. “I tried. I tried to bring you back sooner, but you wouldn’t listen.”
There was nothing she could say. He was right.
“But you want to stick around finally, and that’s somethin’. I’ll always be there for you, Arabella.” He smiled at her then, kindly—when she didn’t deserve kindness—and, at that moment, she almost broke into tears again.
In the following days, she hung the provocative painting of Bella in her bedroom and took long walks around the ranch. At last she screwed up the courage to go over the bare ground where the fire had claimed the old barn. She almost asked Walt to come along but then decided not to burden him. She had to face it alone.
To help her get through it, she focused on remembering the love she’d shared with her parents, and drew on memories of growing up wild and free and happy. It was a bittersweet exercise, but at last she admitted to herself that Zach had been right about her running away from her feelings. Once she’d started, it had been easy to continue.
It was why she’d run from Zach in Monte Carlo. The powerful emotions she’d felt for him had frightened her with their intensity. She hadn’t known how to handle the vulnerability in herself, or how to accept love from him.
Now that she was home, she realized that what Old Walt had told her so many times was indeed true: she belonged here. Without knowing it, she had healed, and coming back to the ranch had been proof of that. If only she had faced her fears sooner, the ranch and Zach might still be hers.
How many mistakes she’d made. How many wrong turns she’d taken—all of them leading her to sacrifice her extraordinary legacy and to lose the only man she had ever loved.
But it was too late to weep over the past.
She thought of Bella Duprey, her indomitable ancestor, and all the Heart women who came after her. None of them would have wasted a single moment dwelling on mistakes. It was time to get a grip, to trust in herself and the future.
“Get a dog,” she recalled Bella advising. Maybe the old girl was on to something. There was no time like the present to start her new life—she might as well face it with man’s best friend at her side.
That next morning she fired up her sedan and drove to Bakersfield. At a large, noisy pet store there were spotted beagles and limpid-eyed dachshunds, dignified German shepherds and shivering, bug-eyed Chihuahuas. She petted and cooed to them all, but the dog she knew she simply must have was a fluffy white standard poodle. The minute he’d seen her, he’d begun whining and jumping against the glass window of his display case. He was friendly, happy and sloppy, with no manners at all.
When they were introduced face-to-face, she realized he was a bigger dog than she originally wanted, but when he licked her face and then dropped and rolled onto his back, begging her to rub his belly, Arabella knew she couldn’t walk out of the store without him.
She drove back to the ranch, where the dog bounded about madly, frightening the horses, scattering cattle and generally making a terrible nuisance of himself from the minute she let him out of the car. She loved him.
That afternoon, she went up to the attic to look for the trunk that Bella had insisted she find. She dug around until she located a dust-covered chest, banded by metal. It was heavy, but she dragged it out to the middle of the floor, where a shaft of sunlight shone through a high window.
After investigating the attic, her new dog flopped on the floor next to her and put his expressive face on top of his paws.
“Here it is,” she said to him in wonder, “the book Bella told me about. There really is a journal. The Art of Fascination. Wow.”
The dog whimpered his agreement.
“Look how old it is,” she exclaimed. “The pages are brittle.” The journal was divided into sections, one of them listing canine obedience training entitled
“Toddy’s Tricks and Commands.”
She glanced at the poodle and he gave her a quizzical look.
“Yeah, you’re right. Why would Bella write about dog training when she was a madam? I thought she’d have some really wicked sex tricks.” Arabella shrugged and set aside the leather-bound book for a moment. Digging into the trunk again, she found a long crimson gown, its velvet fabric crumbly between her fingers. She held it up. The neckline plunged. “Wow,” she said again.
Laying the gown aside, she drew out a deck of moldy playing cards and when she expertly cut them, a few broke apart in her hands. Next came a wooden box with a painted tiger on the lid. The tiger sported green gems for eyes, and the gambler in Arabella recognized it immediately as a faro box. Instinctively, she found and pressed the hidden lever and a card fell out onto the floor. She smiled. The old gal had cheated.
Next to where the box had been placed in the trunk, she found a jewel-studded dog collar. The stones appeared to be very good imitations. Suddenly, she remembered the small stone mausoleum that marked a grave site on the hillside. Engraved on the granite headstone was the inscription Toddy: A faithful and loving companion.
Getting to her feet, she fastened the collar around the poodle. “Your name is Toddy the Second,” she announced. Petting the dog’s cottony head, she crooned, “Good Toddy. Good dog.” When she got the chance, she promised herself she’d read the journal section on dog training.
Waning sunlight glinted off a crimson stone on the dog collar, and something about the flashing light made Arabella pause. Bending over, she inspected the jewels more closely. During her many years of gambling, there had been times when her opponents had offered to wager various pieces of jewelry, and she had had to learn to distinguish real from fake.
A deep fire burned in the red stone. It was a ruby. Real. And probably worth a small fortune. Arabella gasped. The stone next to it glowed like the sea on a clear day. An emerald. And the next—a sapphire.
Slowly she straightened, and stared into space. So this was part of her legacy from Bella. The gems were real. Probably the tiger’s eyes on the faro box were, too. All at once, she felt faint, and sank bonelessly to the floor.
How ironic. All along she had had the wherewithal to save Heartbreak Ranch, and she hadn’t even known. For a moment, she thought she might cry again.
Sensing her mood, Toddy nudged her with his head.
“It’s all right, Toddy,” she said heavily. “Maybe it was meant to be this way.”
Never a great believer in leaving matters to fate, Arabella wondered if she ought to, for once, trust in the future. Whatever the worth of the gems, she knew that Zach wouldn’t sell the ranch back to her. He was far too proud, and too upset with her to simply hand the deed back over.
No, she had to find another path. She would stick with her plan to read Bella’s journal and perhaps find a way to go on.
Finally, at the very bottom of the chest she found various vials and colored bottles. One greenish-colored one was in the shape of a nude woman; others were tall and thin, some squat and pear-shaped. Uncorking a short, fat amber bottle, Arabella took a careful sniff, then reeled back, her eyes watering. It smelled of herbs and chemicals and other odors she couldn’t place. But she knew one thing—it was powerful stuff.
Putting everything back inside the trunk except the journal and the collar, which she left on Toddy, she closed the heavy lid and pushed the chest back against the wall.
That night, in her bed, she began to read. On a bedside table her lamp was turned low.
Toddy snored, taking up most of her mattress.
If she’d been disappointed before, she was now shocked with delight. “The Texas Tongue Massage,” she whispered aloud. She bolted up in bed as fantasies of performing the startling act with Zach flooded her mind. The possibilities were intriguing. Bella Duprey certainly knew her stuff. Arabella also liked the part entitled “Things to do with Champagne.” There were sexual positions, recipes for aphrodisiacs and advice on manipulating the man of the lady’s choice. By the time Arabella put the journal down, it was very late. It was an incredible manual by an incredible woman.
Except nothing in the yellowed pages seemed to be of any value to her. There was no hope for her. She rubbed her forehead tiredly as her heart sank. No hope at all.
She reached out to turn off the light when, just as before, she noticed the room had grown unnaturally cold. A ribbon of smoke began to frame the painting of Bella Duprey. Slowly the whorl of fog took shape.
Bella.
Toddy sat up and started whining.
“Très bien, ma chère, you have obtained a dog,” she said, her voice warbly and soft. “And such an animal—he is exactly like my beloved Toddy!”
Arabella made a strangled sound in her throat. She couldn’t believe this was happening again.
Bella went on. “But what is this that you have given up? You are a Heart woman. You are descended from a line of strong, courageous females. Will you dishonor their memories by abandoning the game?”
“Game?” Arabella whispered. She pulled the covers up to her chin and stared with wide eyes at the smoky vision. She was dreaming again. Or fantasizing. Or something.
The woman waved a hand. “Of course it is a game. Are not affairs of the heart played by strategy and wits? She who is the cleverest wins, n’est-ce pas?”
“Bella,” Arabella began tentatively, “may I ask a question?”
“Questions are good. They mean you are thinking.” The apparition nodded in approval.
“I’ve heard all kinds of stories about you from my mother and grandma. But neither of them seemed to know—did you really love Sam Heart?”
The spirit’s aura seemed to take on a sorrowful glow. “I believed you would ask questions regarding your own love affair,” she mourned. “I do not wish to speak about events that are long gone.”
“I think you loved him,” Arabella pressed. “That’s why you reacted so strongly when you discovered he was going to humiliate you. A woman scorned—that sort of thing?”
Silence filled the room as Bella looked down at her diaphanous hands. “It is true. I loved him in spite of what he planned to do.” She raised her head and said with a Gallic shrug, “But there is nothing to be done now. We must concentrate on you.”
Arabella drew a difficult breath. “Why shouldn’t I give up? I’ve lost everything. I don’t want to offend you, but losing the ranch doesn’t hurt half as bad as losing Zach.”
Bella brightened and the air around her began to shine with an incandescent light. “There is always a way to snare a man,” she said with renewed confidence. “And he is coming very soon.”
“Zach’s coming? Here? But my time’s not up. He said I had thirty days!”
“Oui, he comes tomorrow. But do not worry. You have only to use your wits and instinct,” Bella said with an airy wave of her hand. “And a few of the suggestions found in my journal.”
She made it sound so easy. Arabella frowned. “How can you be sure?”
Bella stretched. Her aura shimmered as she boasted, “I have friends in high places who are never wrong.”
“What’ll I do?” Arabella rubbed her temples. Was Zach really coming to take over the ranch so soon?
“Surely you found something in my journal that appeals to you? Did you read each section carefully?”
Arabella lowered her eyes. “Not all of it. But what I did read was of no use.”
Bella frowned. “Impossible. What are this man’s likes and dislikes? You have lain with him, non? What makes his blood run hot?”
Though Arabella thought of herself as a modern woman, she blushed. She wasn’t used to discussing such things with other women, and when that other woman just happened to be her great-great-great-grandmother...
Reining in her embarrassment, Arabella tried to think back to when she and Zach had been together.
“My perfume!” she said suddenly. “He used to tell me how my scent aroused him. He said it made him think of making love to me.”
“Magnifique,” Bella trilled. “Everything is solved.”
“How?” Arabella peered at her ancestor.
“Not to worry, ma chère. You yourself have come up with the answer. Now, you have only to find the relevant part in my journal and...voilà! You shall lead this Zach by the nose!”
CHAPTER FIVE
“AROMATICS,” Arabella read aloud. As crazy as it seemed, she was going to try. She had nothing left to lose. Zach would be here tomorrow, no doubt, to claim the ranch and throw her out. But Bella’s reminder had fired her resolve. She was a Heart woman, and Heart women had always done whatever it took to win the men they loved.
Hopefully, with the help of Bella’s journal, she could win Zach’s heart again.
Deep into the night she bent over the journal, her bedroom illuminated only by a single low-wattage bulb. “A delightful mix of aromas and fragrances formulated to bring joy and beauty into your private world.” She looked up from the book to peer at Toddy. He sat, patiently panting, as she read. Bella had evaporated, or dissipated, or whatever it was that ghosts did when they disappeared.
Around Arabella were spread the bottles and vials from Bella’s trunk, as well as bundles of brittle dried herbs she’d found at the bottom. The herbs were probably useless after all this time, but she used some anyway. She’d brought everything down from the attic to her bedroom.
In a pot set over an electric hot plate she’d taken from the kitchen, she melted paraffin wax, which she mixed with a scented formula for candle-making. She laid out a clean handkerchief, to be anointed with fragrance, and a light bulb, which she would douse with her concoctions.
“Like lovers, the jasmine flower responds to the moon.” Glancing out her bedroom window, Arabella was gratified to see a full moon shining down. She picked up a clear bottle with a few drops of amber liquid in the bottom. In Bella’s careful handwriting it was labeled Essential Oils. Below that was a list of ingredients. Leaves, petals, roots, flowering tops and even bark, from at least a dozen plants, were mentioned. She unstoppered the top and took a shallow sniff.
A fragrant, pleasurable scent escaped from the bottle and drifted around the room. Without thinking, she smiled. The recipes in Bella’s book explained that plants “inhabit the interface between dark and light, earth and sun, take energy from both and concentrate it into usable substances for the sensual woman.”
She scrutinized the label of another bottle. It contained oil extracted from blossoms of the ylang-ylang tree of Madagascar, jasmine from the south of France, damask rose from the Balkan Mountains in Bulgaria. There was distilled lavender and chamomile and Palmarosa oil.
“Communicate to the man in question that you want him and that you will have him—and have him now. With his olfactory senses heightened, you must be sweetly demanding.”
Arabella raised her brows. This looked good—she could do this. Zach was a man with an excellent sense of smell; he loved perfumes. For the first time since leaving him, she felt hope.
Frowning in concentration, she knew she needed a room, somewhere to use the aromatics on Zach. But where?
Not the house—too many people coming and going. The branding shack? Too far away and not enclosed enough to hold in the aromas. However, there was a rather large tack room in the aluminum barn. It had a door that shut tight and a small bed used for any bunkhouse overflow at branding time. Right now, the room was empty.
The longer she thought about it, the more it seemed like a fitting place—a new barn, a place for
new beginnings.
It was nearly dawn when she crept downstairs, a silent Toddy keeping pace. Her arms full of her seduction implements, she let herself into the yard and crossed it to the barn. It was dark, but once inside the tack room, she set a small lamp on top of a counter and plugged it in.
With a broom, dust cloth and fresh bedding, she worked until the room was clean. Rows of oiled saddles gleamed on the walls next to neatly hung hackamores, bridles and harnesses. At last she surveyed the results with satisfaction. Her things were placed strategically about the room. Everything was ready.
Now all she needed was Zach.
* * *
LATE THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Old Walt caught Arabella dozing with her head on the kitchen table in the ranch house.
“We got company,” Walt said as he hovered in the doorway with his hat in his hands.
Arabella sat up, rubbed her eyes and shoved her hair back from her face. She’d spent half the night getting ready for Zach and most of the morning fretting.
“What did you say?” she mumbled. Next to her empty coffee mug sat the remains of a half-eaten lunch.
“Company’s here. Somebody just landed a plane out in the meadow.”
“A plane?” Her heart began to beat triple time. Instantly she thought of Zach. He’d told her he’d kept his pilot’s license current—could it be him?
Walt had a horse saddled and waiting for her, so in moments they were mounted and cantering toward the twin-engine Cessna that had been set down in the meadow. Tracks from the aircraft’s landing gear had flattened the dried grass in a long furrow. Zach was lucky he hadn’t hit anything, the nut. As she and Walt rode toward the plane, the pilot stepped out from beneath one of the wings.
The dark-haired man stood beside the aircraft and waited calmly. As she approached, she sensed his quiet intensity and couldn’t help but be affected; her heart began a slow, measured thudding. As always around Zach she felt a hard tug of attraction.
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