Bewitching: His Secret Agenda

by Carla Neggers

  Hannah fastened her cool academic’s gaze on him without an inkling, he suspected, of the elemental response it produced in him. He could have hauled her off to her cottage and made love to her all night.

  He might yet.

  No, he thought, not might. Would.

  “I suppose,” she said reasonably, “there are a number of reasonable theories to fit the supposed facts. But as I said, I’ll manage my biography of Priscilla Marsh without the Harling Collection.”

  She climbed to her feet in a lithe movement that made him think of what they were going to be like in bed together. Considering her preoccupied state, Win thought, delaying the inevitable perhaps hadn’t been wise.

  “Thanks for the pie, Thackeray.”

  The old man jerked his head toward Win but addressed Hanna. “Is he going back tonight?”

  Win shook his head, answering for himself. “No.”

  “You’re going to stay at Hannah’s cottage?”

  She nodded, answering for her guest.

  Thackeray Marsh thought that one over. “This fellow thinks you’re a thief, and you still want to put him up for the night?”

  “We’ve called a cease-fire,” Hannah said steadily. “I’ve paid him back for every nickel I...appropriated.”

  And Win had already burned her check. Its ashes were in his fireplace in Boston.

  Thackeray grunted. “I’ll keep my shotgun loaded by my bed. You just give a yell if you need me.”

  Hannah had the gall to thank him.

  On their way out, Win whispered into her ear, “I thought you said he didn’t have a shotgun.”

  She grinned. “He’s full of surprises, isn’t he?”

  Outside it was pitch-dark, the air downright cold, the wind gusting at at least thirty miles an hour, but Hannah Marsh seemed at ease, in control, downright perky. Win heard the gravel crunch under his feet. She seemed hardly to be hitting the ground at all. She darted ahead of him, familiar with every rock, every rut in the road to her cottage, while he stumbled along behind her.

  He caught up with her. “I suggest,” he said, slipping his arm around her slender waist, “you watch your yelling tonight, unless you want me blown to bits.”

  She turned her eyes upon him, luminous now in the starlight, and smiled softly, playfully. “Now what could possibly make me yell in the middle of the night?”

  “I can think of several things.”

  He slipped one hand under her sweatshirt, touching the hot, smooth skin.

  “Your hand’s cold!”

  “Serves you right.”

  But she didn’t pull away. “Of course,” she said, “I won’t be the one Cousin Thackeray will shoot.”

  “Then the risk is all mine, isn’t it?”

  She shrugged, leaning against his shoulder. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “What’s your risk?”

  The gravel crunched under her feet as she came to a stop, staring at him with wide, serious eyes. “Falling for a Harling.”

  “Is that a bigger risk than getting shot?”

  “It could be.”

  “Hannah...”

  “But I’ll take it,” she said quickly, and darted away, into the night.

  CHAPTER NINE

  NOW THAT DARKNESS enveloped the cottage, Hannah felt even more alone with Win Harling...and surprisingly content with the situation.

  He lay stretched on the floor in front of the fire, staring at the blue-and-orange flames. She was on her rocking chair, rummaging through tins and old cigar boxes filled with scraps of paper, clippings, coupons and recipe cards. Mostly she was trying not to think how damned appealing Win’s thighs looked.

  “What are you doing?” Win asked finally.

  “Looking for a recipe. I’ve got one last pint of wild blueberries from last summer in the freezer and thought I’d make blueberry scones. Thackeray gave me the recipe—it’s from his mother. They’re wonderful.”

  “Uncle Jonathan makes blueberry scones,” Win said. “He insists they’re only worth making with wild blueberries. The cultivated varieties won’t work.”

  Hannah grinned. “Cousin Thackeray says the same thing. Do you suppose those two are twins, after all?”

  “Don’t ever suggest that to them.”

  “Scandalous, isn’t it? They’d probably call a truce between the Marshes and the Harlings and string us up together.”

  “Hannah,” Win said dryly, “no hanging metaphors tonight.”

  She felt a rush of warmth at the way he said “tonight,” as if it were just one in a long string of nights they would have together. But she didn’t want to dwell on thoughts of the future and the choices it might bring, only on the present. She concentrated on the familiar smell of oak burning in the fire, the familiar sound of the gentle ebbing of the tide just beyond her cottage. Then Win moved, adding an unfamiliar sound, an unfamiliar presence as he put another log onto the fire.

  “Here it is,” she said, withdrawing a yellowed three-by-five index card. On it, in black ink now faded by time, Cousin Thackeray’s mother had neatly printed her recipe for luscious blueberry scones.

  Hannah jumped up and headed for the kitchen.

  Win followed.

  “You don’t have to help,” she told him.

  “Okay.” As he leaned against the sink, she noticed his narrow hips, the muscles in his thighs. “I’ll watch.”

  She scowled. “You’re in my way.”

  So, he sat down at her small kitchen table, in front of a double window that looked onto her back porch. On the table itself stood only a wooden pepper grinder; there was neither cloth, napkins nor place mats. Hannah thought of Win’s metal folding chairs and ugly dining room wallpaper and smiled, unembarrassed by her own simple existence. Never mind the fact that he could easily afford to turn the Harling House on Louisburg Square into a showpiece, that he wouldn’t need a mortgage to buy Marsh Point.

  He doesn’t want to buy it, she thought suddenly. He wants to prove the Marshes appropriated it from the Harlings....

  She wouldn’t dwell on that little problem right now.

  “Are you going to just sit there and watch me?” she asked somewhat irritably.

  He shrugged, obviously amused, knowing just what kind of distraction he was. “Why not?”

  Why not, indeed? She tore open the refrigerator door and dug around inside until she found a bottle of beer behind smidgens of leftovers of this and that she’d promised herself would go into a pot of soup. More likely they’d end up in the garbage.

  She handed Win the beer. “It’s my last one.”

  “Don’t you want it?”

  “I’m not much on beer. I bought a six-pack for friends who came to visit—oh, around New Year’s, I guess it was.”

  “Your last company?”

  “Hmm? I don’t know....” She thought a few seconds. “No, I had friends over a couple of months ago.”

  “A couple of months ago,” he repeated.

  “I do more entertaining in the summer, and I’ve been so involved with my work I haven’t had time for a lot of outside activities. I get out for dinner every once in a while with friends.” She pulled her pint of wild blueberries from the freezer. “And I see Cousin Thackeray just about every day.”

  “Do you like living here in Maine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your cousin has no children,” Win guessed.

  She looked around. “Are you trying to ask me if I’m his heir? If so, yes, I am. He plans to leave me Marsh Point. Then, if you Harlings want to go toe-to-toe with me over who rightfully owns it, that’s fine. I’ll take you on. Just leave Thackeray alone.”

  Win didn’t respond at once, but sat back in his oak chair and stretched his long legs, taking up m
ore of her small kitchen than anyone had since she’d banished Cousin Thackeray’s old Irish setter. The man simply wasn’t built on the same scale as her cottage.

  “So, you’re protecting your cousin,” he said at length.

  “I’m not protecting anyone. I have nothing to hide. I’m just giving you fair warning: I won’t let Cousin Thackeray lose Marsh Point.”

  “Especially to a Harling.”

  “Especially.”

  She set to work on her scones. She got out her chipped pottery flour canister and her sugar container, of airtight plastic so the ants wouldn’t get into it, the salt and baking powder. All the while she was intensely aware of Win’s eyes on her. Finally she thrust the blueberries at him. “There might be a few stems and leaves floating around,” she told him.

  He insisted on doing a thorough job, spreading the blueberries on paper towels and examining every single one of them for stems, leaves, brown spots, bird pecks. Hannah was amused. “I usually just dump the lot into the batter and hope for the best.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, “should I ever eat anything else I haven’t supervised you cooking.”

  Besides the scones, supper included eggs, scrambled with fresh chives, and a carrot and raisin salad she threw together because she figured carrot sticks were too ordinary for company. Or maybe because she needed to do one more thing before sitting down kitty-corner to Win at her own kitchen table. She tasted none of the food, not even the scones. All her senses were focused on the rich, handsome, sexy rogue of a Bostonian who had come, it seemed, to dominate her very being.

  “Are the scones like your uncle’s?” she asked.

  “Very much. It could be the same recipe.”

  But he was no more interested in discussing wild blueberry scones than she was. She could see it in his eyes, in the tensed muscles of his arms. He was as preoccupied with her as she with him.

  It was not a comforting thought.

  After dinner, they moved back into the living room, and for the first time in years, Hannah wished she owned a television set. She would have loved to turn on the news or have the idle chatter of a sitcom in the background. With just the crackle of the fire and the rhythmic washing of the ocean, it was as if there were nothing more in her world than the little cottage on Marsh Point and the man who’d come to visit.

  Except that he hadn’t come to visit. He had come to find out if her desire to examine the Harling Collection had prompted her to ransack his uncle’s apartment and steal an old diary, so that she could later steal a rare and valuable copy of the Declaration of Independence.

  He had come to find out if she was a thief.

  “There are sheets in the bathroom,” she said suddenly.

  Win glanced at her from his spot in front of the fire. He had left plenty of room for her to join him, but she’d flopped into her rocker again, well out of reach. She could feel the warmth of the fire licking at her toes. Her fingers, however, were icy cold.

  “For the bed in the guest room,” she added.

  “Ahh. I see.”

  She thought he did.

  Still, she found herself trying to explain. “There’s no point...your uncle...my cousin...this business about the Harling Collection and the Declaration of Independence...” She lifted her shoulders and let them fall again. “You know.”

  “I know,” he responded. His voice was soft and liquid, filled with understanding. There was none of the hardness or defensiveness she would have expected.

  Didn’t he care?

  She jumped up and snatched a tome on the Puritans from a pile of books next to her desk. “I’m done in. I’ve had a long day. I’ll check the guest room and make sure everything’s in order before I turn in. Do you want me to make the bed?”

  “No,” he said calmly, “I’ll get it.”

  He doesn’t care, she thought. She had been projecting her own desire onto him, thinking that because she wanted him that he must, therefore, want her. Which he had. Definitely. Only clearly not as much as she had him. Or at least he didn’t now, which was the whole point.

  I’m not making any sense.... I must be more tired than I thought.

  As she flounced from the living room, she noticed he was hoisting a fat log onto the fire and arranging it with his bare hands, as if oblivious to the flames. “Don’t set yourself on fire,” she called over her shoulder.

  “Too late,” he said, half under his breath.

  She slammed into the guest room. It was freezing. The curtains were billowing in the wind and the shade was flapping. Hannah quickly shut the window. When had she opened it? Not this morning. Yesterday? The day before? It had rained buckets one night.

  She ran one hand over the twin bed.

  Damp.

  No, she thought, soaked.

  She tiptoed out to the bathroom, got a couple of towels and hurried back, spread the towels on the mattress and patted them down so they could absorb as much moisture as possible. She let them sit a minute while she returned to the bathroom and grabbed sheets. If she made the bed, maybe Win wouldn’t notice the wet mattress.

  Her job done, she scooped up the damp towels and carted them off to her room, where her guest would be less likely to run into them. Given his suspicious mind, he’d think the worst.

  “Making the man sleep in a wet bed is pretty bad,” she admitted under her breath.

  But what was the alternative?

  She wouldn’t think about it. The alternative, she knew, was too tempting...too much like what she really wanted. Instead she pulled on her flannel nightgown—it was a cool night, after all—and climbed into bed with her book on the Puritans. It was dry stuff. She gave up after a couple of paragraphs and picked up a mystery that lay on her night table.

  About forty minutes later she was dozing between paragraphs, fighting nightmares, when footsteps in the hall startled her. Then she remembered she wasn’t alone. It wasn’t so much that she had forgotten Win’s presence as that his footsteps were a tangible reminder of it.

  “Good night, Hannah,” he said softly.

  “Good night. If you need anything, just give a yell.”

  In a few minutes he yelled, all right. “Hannah!”

  He was back at her door in a flash, but Hannah casually dog-eared her page and yawned before she looked up. The door stood open now.

  “Oh, dear,” she muttered.

  Send a man to lie on a cold, wet mattress, she thought, and pay the consequences.

  J. Winthrop Harling was standing in her doorway in nothing but his shorts. As shorts went, they weren’t much. But Hannah’s attention was riveted on what they didn’t cover. Long, muscular legs. A flat abdomen. A line of dark hair that disappeared into the waistband of his shorts.

  He, of course, seemed totally unaware of his near-naked state.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked innocently.

  “The mattress is wet.”

  “It is?”

  “Clammy, cold, wet.”

  “You aren’t the sort of guest who would be too polite to point out something like that, I see.”

  His eyes seemed to clamp her against her headboard. “I’m never too polite.”

  “Well, I left the window open when it rained the other night. I suppose a little rain must have gotten onto your bed. I didn’t notice when I made it up.”

  “Liar.”

  Succinct and accurate. She sighed. “Can’t you make the best of the situation?”

  “Oh, yes.” He leaned against the doorjamb, suddenly looking quite relaxed, even more darkly sexy. “I can make the best of the situation.”

  Her heartbeat quickened. She waved her hand in the direction of the living room. “You can always camp out by the fire. I have a sleeping bag you can borrow. It’s good to twenty degrees be
low zero.”

  “A good hostess,” he said, “would give me her bed.”

  Her mouth went dry. “But I’m already in it.”

  As responses went, she could have done better. Win took a step into her room, her space. But just one step was enough. “Exactly.”

  There was no undoing, she thought, what she’d already done. She had told him he could stay. She had told him in effect that she wanted a relationship with him. A romantic relationship. A physical relationship. She had let him see a part of her she usually kept hidden. Oh, she could still send him packing. It wasn’t too late. And he’d go. He’d already made it plain that he understood when no meant no.

  But she didn’t want him to go. She had made her choices and there had been reasons for them, even if there were also very good reasons for choosing the opposite.

  She knew, with a certainty that had escaped her earlier, that she wanted him to stay.

  Something in her expression must have told him so, for he took another few steps into her room. She didn’t stop him.

  Finally he stood next to her bed, staring down at her. “Flannel, hmm?”

  “It’s a year-round fabric in Maine.”

  “How practical.”

  “I bought Cousin Thackeray a nightshirt just like this one for his birthday last year. I’ve had this one for...I don’t know, it must be going on four years. It’s got a couple of holes.” She held up one arm so he could see the burn hole in the sleeve. “The fire got me one morning.”

  “Hannah...”

  “You know, don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m a rube or anything. I’ve lived most of my life in the city. And here we’re just a couple of hours from Boston. Just because I sleep in a flannel nightgown doesn’t mean I’m unsophisticated. I’ve turned down teaching positions at Ivy League colleges.”

  “Hannah...”

  “I’m sometimes torn between city and country.”

  “Hannah...”

  “It’s just that Marsh Point is the only real home I’ve ever known. My mother did the best she could after my father died, but she was chasing her own demons—and rainbows. We all do.”