Haunting Rachel

by Kay Hooper

  Tom’s voice in her dreams. A note from him. A yellow rose on her nightstand. A gift delayed by a decade and a death.

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” Rachel heard herself say, firmly this time. But even as she did, a faint chill made gooseflesh rise on her arms as she recalled that terrible awakening ten years ago, and Tom’s anguished appearance at the foot of her bed.

  She had not dreamed that.

  “Miss Rachel?”

  Fiona’s voice startled her, and Rachel was thankful to be pulled from her unsettling thoughts. “Yes?”

  The housekeeper didn’t seem particularly surprised to find Rachel still standing in the foyer, then Rachel realized that only a few moments had passed since their earlier conversation.

  “I forgot to tell you before. Miss Lloyd left a note for you on the table by the basement door. A list of pieces your uncle has asked for.”

  Rachel nodded. “Thanks, Fiona. I’ll take a look at it.” She hesitated, then added, “Has Darby finished going through the stored furniture?”

  “Not quite. There’s still a part of the basement left. She’s moved out what you wanted sold and what’s been taken to be repaired, and tagged what’s been gone over and added to the inventory. The rest she said she’d get to next week.”

  “I think I’ll go down to the basement for a little while. I haven’t been down there in years.” Anything to get her mind off other things.

  “Be careful on the stairs,” Fiona warned automatically, as she always did.

  “Yes, I will.” Left alone again, Rachel headed for the basement, her thoughts taking a welcome new turn.

  Her uncle Cameron had always been the artistic brother, uninterested in business; he hadn’t wanted to be bothered by practical things, so he had a business manager who took care of his various investments. As far as Rachel could remember, her father and uncle had never even talked about business of any kind, and as for Cameron recommending that his brother lend someone five million dollars—the idea was absurd.

  And that aside, he couldn’t possibly be the “old friend” to whom Duncan had referred in his journal; the brothers had gotten along well enough, but neither would have called the other an old friend.

  An old bastard, maybe, but not an old friend.

  Cam’s list was on a table beside the basement door, and Rachel scanned it quickly. A few items, none of which interested her particularly except to wonder idly where on earth Cam intended to put everything.

  Leaving the list on the table, she opened the basement door and flipped on the lights as she started down the steps. The musty smell of basements everywhere wafted up to meet her, and for a moment she stopped on the steps, horribly reminded of the dream and Adam’s prison.

  She had to stand there, holding tightly to the railing, and tell herself several times that it had only been a dream, that this was not a prison she was descending into, not a place where people were trapped and tortured. It was just a basement, a space dug out of the earth to provide storage for a family.

  Slowly, she continued down the stairs, and by the time she reached the bottom, her panic had faded. Bright fluorescent lights illuminated even the corners of the huge space, and underneath their cool glare there was nothing that resembled a prison, just the refuse of generations, furniture and boxes full of things ultimately cast off as broken, out of fashion, or simply no longer wanted.

  From the steps she could see a more methodical, spaced arrangement of the things nearest her, and knew it was Darby’s work. Farther away, toward the north side, it looked much more chaotic to her, with chairs piled atop tables, wardrobes pushed up against chests, and little room in which to move among the pieces.

  Rachel walked away from the stairs, along an aisle with tagged furniture on either side, toward the north end of the basement. She looked at a few things in passing, noting that each had been beautifully polished and/or cleaned, and marveled at how much Darby had accomplished.

  By the time she reached the north end, she had become absorbed in looking at what there was to see. She’d known there was a lot down there, but she was surprised at how many beautiful pieces a careful inventory had unearthed.

  No wonder Darby was so thrilled.

  Rachel couldn’t move very far into the section that had not yet been inventoried. She could see boxes and trunks, yet couldn’t get to them because of all the heavy pieces of furniture in the way. And the furniture was turned this way and that, some facing outward, some inward, and some even lying on their sides or backs.

  The only way to get to most of the pieces was to do as Darby had done: Move one thing at a time.

  “I wouldn’t even know what I was looking for,” Rachel muttered.

  “Rachel? What the hell are you doing down here?”

  Cameron was standing near the bottom of the stairs, staring across the room at her.

  SIXTEEN

  his, Mercy told herself, was a mistake. A big mistake.

  She stared at the door for a full minute, gathering her nerve, drew a deep breath, and knocked. Mistake or not, she refused to spend yet another evening pacing in her apartment and asking herself whether she should force the issue or wait.

  She really hated waiting.

  Nicholas opened the door, holding a glass in one hand, and for a moment just looked at her.

  “I need to talk to you, Nick.”

  He nodded slowly and opened the door wider, gesturing for her to come in. “I’ve been expecting you,” he said.

  That surprised Mercy somewhat, especially given the tense scene at the bank only a few hours before. She came into his apartment, eyeing him uncertainly as he closed the door. He looked, she thought, as if he had had a very, very bad day. Coat and tie discarded, white shirt untucked and half unbuttoned, the sleeves rolled up loosely. His hair looked as if he’d run his fingers through it more than once, and there was something almost … numbed about his face.

  “Maybe this isn’t such a good time,” she said slowly.

  Nicholas crossed his sparse living room to the corner wet bar and splashed more whiskey into his glass. “For some discussions, there’s no such thing as a good time,” he said coolly. “Drink, Mercy?”

  “No thanks.” She hesitated. “How many does that make for you?”

  “I have no idea. It’s a new bottle.” Which was now half empty. He turned back to her and lifted the glass in a mocking toast. “Don’t worry. I’m not driving anywhere tonight.”

  In all the years Mercy had known him, she had never seen him even finish a drink of whiskey, much less consume several. It was scaring her to see him like this; for all his coolness and seeming detachment, he was curiously out of control. “Nick, this isn’t like you.”

  “Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do.”

  She shook her head. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Just say what you came here to say, all right? Not that you have to.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Mercy didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

  He shrugged, swallowed half his drink, and went to sprawl in a big armchair by the cold fireplace. “I mean, it isn’t like I’m going to be surprised. I’ve been expecting it.”

  “Expecting what?”

  He lifted his glass in another mocking toast and said matter-of-factly, “Expecting you to tell me it’s over.”

  It was definitely not what she had expected.

  After the first moment of surprise, Mercy dropped her shoulder bag on the sofa, shrugged out of her jacket, and moved across the room to sit down on the big hassock in front of his chair. In the same matter-of-fact tone she said, “How long have you been expecting it?”

  “Oh … from the beginning.” He was staring at his drink rather than at her. “Since the day after our first night together, I suppose.”

  “Why?”

  “You want a list? Because I’m an ugly bastard and you’re a beautiful woman who can have any man she wants. Because I’m prickly as hell, with
a foul temper and worse moods, and I’m no picnic even on my best days. Because there’s eleven years between us in age and a few lifetimes in experience. Because even the best lover in the world can’t make a woman’s heart respond to him the way her body will.”

  Nicholas shrugged and finished his drink in one swallow. “I tried, God knows. Tried not to crowd you, not to ask too much of you. But I knew it was only a matter of time. The other night … I knew everything had changed. After that, I couldn’t hide the way I felt from you. Couldn’t be casual anymore. What I felt wasn’t something you wanted. So …” He looked at her at last, his pale eyes wearing a hard sheen. “So I was expecting you.”

  Mercy drew a shaky breath. “Well, as a matter of fact, that wasn’t what I came here to say.”

  “No?”

  “No. I came here to ask if—if I was right in believing that you wanted it to be over.”

  He leaned his head back against the chair, heavy lids dropping to veil his eyes. “And now you know. The answer is no.” His voice was still cool and matter-of-fact.

  Mercy wasn’t about to leave it there. “Then why do you keep pushing me away? Shutting me out?”

  “Have I been doing that?”

  “You know damned well you have.”

  “If you’re talking about bank business—”

  “This isn’t about the bank. This is about us. You know everything about me, don’t you, Nick? All my favorite things, the way I feel about politics and religion. Where I shop, and who my doctor is, and where I get my car fixed. You know where I come from, who I am.”

  “So?”

  “So I don’t have a clue who you are. I told you that the other night. And you let me see a little bit. And the next day you were miles away again. So far out of my reach I couldn’t even touch you. So I figured you just didn’t want me even that close ever again.”

  “It isn’t a question of what I want.” For the first time, his voice roughened. “It’s a question of what I can survive.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know you don’t.” His smile was twisted. “Let’s put it this way. When it is over between us, I will survive losing you. I’ll even survive losing the pieces of myself you’ll take with you, the pieces you … own despite everything I’ve tried to do to keep myself intact. But I couldn’t survive much more than that.”

  Mercy was having a difficult time believing this. Her heart was thudding and her hands were cold, and she was very, very afraid she might be hearing only what she wanted to hear. So she drew a deep breath and asked the one question that mattered to her.

  “Do you love me, Nick?”

  He closed his eyes, his face very still except for the muscle that moved suddenly in his jaw.

  And the glass in his hand shattered under the force of his grip.

  “My God, Nick—”

  When she pried his fingers open, she found only one cut, and though it bled profusely, it didn’t seem dangerously deep. With her efficient nature kicking into gear, she wrapped his hand in a clean dish towel, then found gauze, bandages, and antiseptic in his medicine cabinet. Sitting on the edge of the hassock with his hand across her lap, she carefully cleaned the wound and bandaged his hand.

  Through it all, Nicholas sat silent, his gaze fixed on her. He seemed to feel no pain, obediently flexing his fingers when she asked him to but not moving otherwise.

  Mercy cleared up most of the broken glass by simply gathering it into the dish towel, which she laid aside on the bare coffee table with the bandages and antiseptic. She could feel his eyes on her, but hardly knew what to say to him. Finally, she found an ounce of lightness somewhere and said, “You didn’t have to slice your hand open to avoid the question, Nick. A simple no would have been enough.”

  “Of course I love you, Mercy.” His voice was very quiet. “I’ve always loved you.”

  She looked at him then, and felt her heart catch at the utter desolation in his face. “Nick—”

  “I hadn’t planned to stay so long in Richmond, you know. Before you came to work for the bank, I was out of the country more often than in. But then you came. I took one look at you when Duncan introduced you as his new assistant, and I knew I’d be staying for good. Whether you ever wanted me or not, I couldn’t walk away from you.”

  Mercy slipped to her knees between the hassock and the chair, her body leaning into his, almost between his thighs as she reached up to touch his face. “Nick …”

  “I don’t want your pity, goddammit,” he said thickly. “Don’t do that to me.”

  “It isn’t pity.” She slid her fingers into his hair and pulled his head toward her. “You stupid man. I love you.”

  His breath rasped and his fingers bit into her waist for a moment. “Mercy, don’t say that unless—”

  “Unless I mean it? Do you want me to show you my diary entry from nearly five years ago? Started work at the bank today. I like my boss. But when I shook hands with his partner … God, it happened so fast. How can it happen so fast? How can I love a man I don’t even know?” Her lips feathered across his cheek toward his mouth. “I love you, Nick.”

  His arms went around her and held her with a strength just this side of painful, and his mouth slanted across hers wildly. For the first time, he held back nothing of himself or his need for her, and Mercy was almost crying when he gathered her up and carried her to his bed.

  After the first surprised moment, Rachel moved back across the basement toward the stairs and her uncle. “I thought you’d gone out,” she said.

  “I went off without my sketch pad, and Kathie wants a sketch,” he said more or less automatically.

  “I don’t have it,” Rachel said lightly, assuming he referred to his date that night.

  He frowned. “I know that. The basement door was open. I wondered who was down here. Are you looking for something, Rachel?”

  “No. I wanted to see how much progress Darby had made.” She paused, then heard herself ask, “What are you looking for, Cam?”

  “Me? I told you. Just came back to get my sketch pad.”

  Rachel got to the bottom of the stairs and stood there, looking up at him gravely. “That isn’t what I meant. What are you looking for in the furniture, Cam?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Cam turned and went back up the stairs.

  Rachel followed. She found him in the living room, which was his favorite place in the house. He had poured himself a scotch, and was standing by the cold fireplace, gazing up at the painting of his brother that hung above it.

  The painting was his own work.

  “We didn’t like each other very much,” Cam said when she came in. “You knew that?”

  “I knew you were very different.”

  “That’s one way of putting it. Another is that we were encouraged to compete in a way that wasn’t healthy for either of us.”

  “Brothers often are.”

  “Yes.” His mouth twisted. “But our father—your grandfather—was a master of the game. He started when we were young, and he never let up. I was pushed into sports because Duncan excelled at them, and never mind that I wasn’t athletic. Duncan was tortured with art and music lessons despite the fact that he loathed them.”

  Rachel came farther into the room and sat on the arm of a chair, watching him. “I had no idea. Dad never spoke of anything like that—and I never knew Grandfather.”

  “No, he died not long after you were born.”

  Rachel nodded, and waited.

  “He was one of those people who thrive on conflict. Everything had to be a struggle, a battle of wills. He made our mother miserable, browbeat the servants, alienated the rest of the family. Life with him was … hard.

  “Duncan and I were pushed all the time. And our father blew hot and cold with both of us, promising things he never delivered, threatening punishments. Full of praise one day and scathing criticism the next. It was like living in a mine field, never knowing when th
e next step would cost an arm or a leg, or some other piece of yourself.”

  “It sounds horrible.”

  “It was.” He leaned a shoulder against the mantel and gazed at her steadily. “And it only got worse as we grew up. We both had to fight for our identity, to struggle against his domination. Leaving home for college gave us our first taste of independence. First Duncan, then me. But we had to come back here because he commanded it. And neither of us was strong enough to win that battle.”

  “Cam, why are you telling me this?” Rachel felt uncomfortable, keenly aware that she was learning things her own father had not chosen to tell her in his lifetime.

  “So you’ll understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  Cameron hesitated, then drew a deep breath. “From the time we were old enough to understand, our father talked about how he meant to leave his fortune when he died. That was the carrot he held out in front of us, and the stick he beat us with. When one of us was in his good graces, he was promised the entire fortune, everything— the other was taunted that he’d be left out in the cold. It went on for years. And he even went so far as to have two different wills drawn up. One promised everything to Duncan, the other promised everything to me.”

  “That isn’t how he left his estate,” Rachel said slowly.

  Cameron’s smile was brief. “Oh, but it is.”

  “You have Grant property. Real estate, stocks. They came from your father.”

  “No. They came from Duncan.”

  Rachel understood immediately. “Grandfather went with the will naming Dad—and Dad deeded you part of the estate.”

  “Half. He said he’d be damned if he’d live under our father’s rule a moment longer, that those wishes and intentions meant nothing to him.” Cameron shrugged. “So I got half the money, which I at least had the sense to invest, and Duncan got the other half—and built it into a major fortune.”

  “So Grandfather lost.”

  “Did he? He made my brother and me virtual strangers, Rachel. Each of us reminded the other of our father and his torments. So, not long after our father died, I moved to the West Coast. In the nearly thirty years since, I’ve come home only for brief visits. Until last year, when Duncan invited me to stay here while my place was being renovated.”