She bit down so hard on her lip that she tasted blood.
“I’m the sorry one, Marc,” she murmured, breathing deeply.
A wave of trembling seemed to sweep over her, and she ground down on her teeth, turning to him and wondering how she was managing to talk and move so deceitfully. But she was doing just that. She smiled as if all were totally clear between them. “By the way,” she murmured, “who was that man?”
“What man?” Marc frowned.
“The one who came to the table to ask about the drinks.”
“Oh.” Marc shrugged. “I don’t know. Jerry answered him, but then he left, mumbling a thank-you as if he hadn’t even heard.”
Breathing suddenly became a lot easier, Serena discovered. She lay back in the seat and closed her eyes, unaware that Marc still held her hand. Minutes later they reached the Golden Hawk.
“You know,” Marc murmured as he walked her to the kitchen door, “I should really move in to work on the book. I’ll be spending half my time here to begin with—it would be much easier.”
“I’d have nowhere to put you,” Serena replied. “The three rooms are already rented for the summer. I have my usual two older couples, and Martha rented out the last room for the summer a week ago—to some old professor researching the ‘clinical psychology’ of the witchcraft trials.”
Marc took her key and inserted it in the lock and led her into the kitchen, smiling as he closed the door behind them and pinned her lightly against it. “You know,” he whispered huskily close to her face, “you could break down and let me sleep in your room.”
She had to laugh; was he teasing or was he serious? They had been through this before; he had often hinted at marriage. And he knew she still didn’t feel herself a widow long enough to try it again.
“No answer?” he queried with a long sigh that was dramatic. “Oh, cruel vixen, I’ll keep suffering!” He moved even closer for a good night kiss.
It was the strangest kiss she had ever received. Her mind and body swept back stubbornly to that touch of lips at the pond, and suddenly she felt nothing. Not a stirring, not warmth, certainly not passion. And at the same time, a great sadness hit her. She should love Marc. She should want him, but she didn’t.
Guilt, and a pain more terrible than ever before, rose within her, and she made herself return the kiss. Feigned passion was better than none. He deserved so much more.
And when he released her, murmuring a soft, “Ummmm,” she brought a tremulous smile to her lips. “See you later,” he murmured insinuatingly, stepping aside, reopening the door, and leaving her with a blown kiss—a charade of a newlywed spouse leaving only to park a car or put out the garbage before returning.
Serena chuckled at his antics, then sobered painfully. What was the matter with her? She had lost her head at the pond, and she was ready to throw a decent relationship away because of it. How stupid. Absurd. She shouldn’t have done what she did, but she had. It was over. And she had seen Joe Jock—he was real, too real. He had come after her in the pond, enjoyed a wild interlude, then run off to keep his dinner appointment with another woman!
She had done the same thing.
But I didn’t go after him, she excused herself.
Musing, she turned to lock the door, telling herself she should be grateful that nothing further had happened in the lounge.
“I thought you weren’t married.”
The sound froze her rigidly. Now she was hearing things. This time, it couldn’t be, it absolutely couldn’t be,
But as she turned slowly, horror restricting her every motion, she began to see things as well as hear them.
It was him, leaning against the shadow of the refrigerator. A scream rose in her throat, but it gave no sound. He straightened and began walking toward her, skirting the heavy oak table that sat in the middle of the room. He was stripped of jacket and tie. His shirt was a pale beige that now opened at the neck to contrast sharply with the dark bronze of his skin and the darkly curled hair that rose in the vee created by the opened buttons.
“You told me you weren’t married,” he repeated, pausing just before her. Not close enough to touch, but close enough so that she could smell his pleasantly masculine scent, feel the electricity of his body heat that seemed to be generated in lashing waves.
“He’s not my husband,” she heard herself saying stupidly.
He paused with a very dry grin that was more snarl than smile and a disdainfully mocking brow arched high. “Then my Lord, Mrs. Loren, you do get around.”
Serena closed her eyes briefly and swallowed, realizing he thought she did jump from bed to bed adulterously. What the hell did she care what he thought? They should never have met; he didn’t own her—what a thought—he appeared to think absolutely nothing of their interlude. And how dare he condemn her when she had seen him with …
A shaft of jealousy whipped through her, which made her more furious than she had been to begin with. “You’re trespassing again,” she said hotly. “I don’t know who you are or what the hell you think you’re doing, but this time I want you off my property—before I call the police.”
His second brow joined the first in a high arch, and with his grin becoming exasperatingly pleasant, he crossed his massive arms over his muscled chest. “Do you call the police on all your guests, Mrs. Loren? Is that part of the inn’s particular brand of hospitality.”
“Guests,” Serena repeated blankly. She shook her head disbelievingly. “I have no rooms,” she murmured, wondering how he had gotten into the kitchen to begin with. “My last was just rented,” she continued to stutter, praying suddenly that she hadn’t become involved with a dangerous lunatic. “Really. I haven’t got a room in the place. There are only three. I have two elderly couples who come every summer, and, and … a college professor. Dr. … umm … O’Neill. Really. You can look at the register.”
He was laughing at her. Dear God, he was a lunatic. And he was taking a step closer. He reached to touch her chin, and she could do nothing but freeze.
“My lovely Mrs. Loren, please don’t look so worried. I am Dr. O’Neill.” He stepped away from her, with something that was very dark and dangerous in his tumultuous hazel eyes. He turned to walk for the hallway door with a brisk step, then paused, spun on a heel, and faced her once more.
“It was truly a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Loren. Truly a pleasure.”
With a slight salute he smiled that deathly pleasant smile and left her.
CHAPTER THREE
SHE HAD ENDURED A truly rotten night. Finding Marc at her front door hauling a large package at seven thirty A.M. did little to improve her mood.
“What on earth are you doing?” Serena demanded, her tone hinting at her irritation as he pushed through the open door with his prize. “Marc, I have to get ready for work—”
“I know, I know, Serena,” Marc replied with enthusiasm underlying his impatience. “But I found this just half an hour ago, and I had to show it to you.”
Serena stood back with a frown as Marc dragged his slim, three-by-four-foot brown, wrapped package into the hallway and began to tear away at the paper. “I was passing Mrs. Lund’s flea market in Danvers, and I saw it—you know how early she sets up—and I practically drove off the road. Not that I knew what it was at first, but, well … just a second here, and you’ll see what I mean! Voila!”
The paper fell away, and Serena gasped. It was an old painting—faded and chipped, but pricelessly old. Yet what held her in stunned amazement was not the obvious historical value of the piece, but its subject. The woman who stared from the canvas with a soft smile on her lips belying sad, knowing eyes was uncannily familiar. Serena stared at a very similar face each morning as she put on her makeup.
“Told you!” Marc said smugly.
Serena bent for a more thorough scrutiny of the painting. The woman was clad in a gray wool dress highlighted only by a large white collar in typical Puritan conservatism. She sat upon a stiff-backed chair, her hands
folded demurely in her lap. Her hair was dark; it was drawn back from her face severely, but a few wisps of curling ebony escaped that severity with an undeniable defiance to softly frame her face.
Serena couldn’t possibly pretend to deny that the face was like her own. Although the colors of the oils utilized by the artist were fading, it was apparent that the woman was intended to have blue eyes—deeply blue, dark to a point of violet. The cheekbones were slimmer than Serena’s, the chin sharper; the nose lacked the little insolent tilt of Serena’s, but still, despite the drastic difference in hair shade, the woman in the picture and Serena bore a startling resemblance.
“Well, Eleanora, what do you say?” Marc teased.
Serena glanced at him sharply. “How do you know this is Eleanora?”
“Oh, Serena! You disappoint me!” Marc said, clicking his tongue. “Look closely at the hands.”
Serena peered closely at the canvas once more. One of the elegantly folded fingers bore a ring, and as Serena narrowed her eyes, she realized that the ring was formed of a delicately carved E.
Serena sat back on her heels and glanced at Marc. “It’s something, all right,” she murmured. “I can’t believe it’s appeared now, after all these centuries—if it’s authentic, that is. Where did Mrs. Lund say she got it?”
Marc laughed. “She’s had it for years and years, but didn’t know it—it was painted over. Her nephew is an art student—he told her about a month ago that he believed that there was a painting beneath the seascape she thought she had. They were both quite excited—Mrs. Lund thought she might be harboring a masterpiece. She was quite disappointed to discover she wasn’t holding a Raphael or the like. Eleanora’s artist was an unknown, I’m afraid. It’s rather surprising that the portrait was painted at all at that time!”
Serena nodded vaguely and shrugged. “I would have it authenticated anyway, if I were you. Not,” she added dryly, “that I think you paid Mrs. Lund an exorbitant sum.”
“Fifty bucks!” Marc laughed.
“Marc,” Serena complained, “that’s highway robbery! How could you do that to the poor woman?”
“Poor woman! She’s loaded! And I’m a struggling author—”
“That’s not the point—”
“And you’re missing the point! Serena, that is you! Aren’t you feeling tingles?”
Serena sighed with clenched teeth. “Marc—I don’t know what you’re getting at, but that isn’t me. I grant you the resemblance is startling, but don’t go getting on one of your kicks. If anything—” She broke off as the doorbell began to ring.
“I’ll get it,” Marc murmured dourly.
From her crouched position in the hallway, Serena watched as Marc opened the door.
To her horror she saw that it was the guest who had first disrupted her entire life, then added insult to injury by stealing even her sleep with the audacity of being in her house.
He had apparently been jogging. A leather band held slick wet hair from his brow, and he was clad in a pair of loose shorts and a tank top. Little of his astounding physique was left to the imagination, and yet he was a man apparently unaware of his remarkable assets. He was leaning against the doorframe breathing heavily, his bronze skin glistening with a sheen of perspiration as Marc opened the door.
Serena felt her own breath catch; the picture had erased him from her mind for a heaven-sent interlude, but now a wave of new horror and humiliation washed over her like an entire ocean. She had spent part of her sleepless night wondering how she would deal with him when she saw him again, and how she would deal with his inevitable meeting with Marc. But surely Marc would recognize him only as the stranger in the restaurant, and he was a stranger. Surely a stranger wouldn’t say anything in front of Marc, especially when that stranger was apparently well versed in one-night affairs.
In those few seconds her mind spun so quickly it was almost as if everything that happened did so in slow motion.
Marc didn’t even recognize him as the stranger in the restaurant. He took one look at the he-man build and started to absently close the door with a casual, “Deliveries to the rear, please.”
A hand came out to stop the door from closing. “Excuse me—I’m not delivering anything.”
Serena would have laughed at the noticeable irritation in the painfully civil protest except that she was feeling pathetically unnerved. Her blood had seemed to heat at the sound of his voice; her hands became instantly clammy. She had to concentrate merely to stand, and then, once she was on her feet, she found herself plunging in and nervously chattering at a frantic pace.
“Marc, this is, uh, Dr. O’Neill. He’s taken the third guest room for the summer. Dr. O’Neill, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine, Marc Talbot. Dr. O’Neill is a—” For the life of her, Serena couldn’t remember exactly what Martha had said the “old Doc” did. “He’s a—”
“Psychologist,” Justin O’Neill offered dryly. “Clinical psychologist.”
The two men shook hands somewhat warily. Serena was aware that Marc’s reaction to O’Neill was not dissimilar to her own. The man had no right being any type of an intellectual. He should have been driving a semi-truck, or wielding a hockey stick—or fighting off lions with his bare hands in a Roman arena.
“Sorry to have interrupted you,” O’Neill apologized with a sarcasm only Serena seemed to notice. “I forgot to take the main door key with me.” He released Marc’s hand, and his piercing hazel eyes with their sardonic depths turned to Serena.
“You weren’t really interrupting anything, Dr. O’Neill,” Serena returned with what she hoped was a cool nonchalance. She kept wondering how Marc didn’t sense the tension in the small hallway, tension that was so thick it might be cut with a knife.
But Marc didn’t seem to think anything. After a moment he appeared to accept the psychologist/jogger with little thought. His appearance, in fact, seemed providential.
“A clinical psychologist, eh?” Marc queried, and Serena winced inwardly, as she knew what was coming by his self-satisfied tone. “A man of science—just whom I’d like to see at the moment.” He beckoned to Justin O’Neill to come around to see the painting. “Take a look at the picture, and then take a good look at our Mrs. Loren. What do you say?”
O’Neill stared at the picture for a long time. Then he turned his fathomless gaze back to Serena. “I say it’s a bit of a resemblance,” he remarked, then shrugged. “An extraordinary resemblance, Mrs. Loren.”
“Extraordinary,” he said, but not “uncanny.” Despite the fact that she still wished the man might disappear into a hole in the earth, she was suddenly grateful for his tone. Yes, it was extraordinary—but interestingly so, nothing else.
She didn’t know she had been holding her breath until she expelled a long sigh. Then she closed her eyes momentarily. She was in the middle of an “extraordinary” turmoil, trying to control the shiver that had come over her since he had come near, but if she didn’t get herself together, she was going to be up an “extraordinary” creek; the chamber of commerce would be revoking their endorsement if she didn’t get her business opened on schedule this morning in the height of the summer tourist season.
“Well,” she murmured, lowering her eyes from both men, “if you’ll excuse me, I want to get some breakfast and get out of here.”
“Think Martha will feed me?” Marc inquired hopefully.
“She never refuses you,” Serena said dryly, biting her lip as she realized she had just informed her intimate stranger that this other man was a frequent guest. What difference did it make? She didn’t even know if he had realized yet that she wasn’t an adulteress.
What do I care what he thinks? her mind shrieked. He seduced me and disappeared and then had the utter gall to reappear.
The stranger passed her with his infuriating smile, and she dimly realized that he had excused himself to shower for breakfast. She had to blink to come back to life once more, and coming back to life was misery. She was so physically aw
are of him again as he brushed her, aware of his very masculine scent, aware of the glistening bronze muscles.
He didn’t get them just from jogging, she thought resentfully. How had a city college professor become so darkly tanned, so incredibly sinewed? It wasn’t fair.
“Serena, I swear I don’t know what is wrong with you lately. You’re continually off in some kind of dream—”
“Oh, sorry, Marc,” Serena murmured, whirling around quickly. “Come on, let’s go to the dining room.” Once more she was moving like a whippet, having realized that if she hurried, she could be out of the dining room before Dr. O’Neill reappeared.
“Wait a minute,” Marc said. “Just let me set the painting before the wall.”
Serena left Marc adjusting his portrait and hurried into the kitchen. It was exactly eight, and Martha was piling a plate high with blueberry biscuits. “Take these, will you, dear?” Martha told Serena, handing her the plate without bothering to wait for a reply. “The Bakers and the Donnesys aren’t having breakfast this morning,” Martha told Serena, her brown eyes sparkling as she smoothed back neat gray curls before reaching for the massive coffeepot. “They all left at the crack of dawn to go whale watching.”
Serena laughed, the sparkle in her eyes matching that of Martha’s affectionately. The Donnesys and the Bakers were all four on the far side of seventy, but more active, life-loving people she had yet to meet. She had looked forward to their coming for the summer leaving their southern retreats to stay at the inn. “Good for them!” Serena said, but then her smile faded as she followed Martha from the kitchen to the elegantly cared for dining room. Only one of three tables had been set—Martha had planned for Dr. O’Neill to join them.
“I heard Marc’s voice,” Martha said with a shade of exasperation. She wasn’t terribly fond of the number of meals she afforded the young man. “So I assumed he was staying.” The prim note left her voice. “Wait until you meet Dr. O’Neill! You’re really going to enjoy him, Serena! Not that he’s a thing like I expected—I mean a professor?—but you’ll see! He’s doing a book up here, you know. Kind of a heavy thing, I take it. He’s totally against the witchcraft trials being presented historically as cases of fraud and the like—he was trying to explain to me how very terrible and physical the clinical type of hysteria could be! And he can tell you all sorts of fascinating things! He’s studied voodoo and African arts and Indian shamans and—but he’s not at all the bookish type. Like I said, just wait till you see him, dear—my Lord, I do run on.”
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