by Nora Roberts
“You want to put my art in your office?”
“I believe I’ve established that.”
One step at a time, Savannah reminded herself. Don’t let him see just how much it would mean. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable with some nice pastels?”
“You have a nasty streak, Savannah. I like it.”
She laughed, enjoying him. “Let’s see what your sister-in-law comes up with first. Then we’ll talk.” She walked back into the kitchen to put on water for the pasta.
“Fair enough. Why don’t you drop by the inn, see what she and Rafe have done there?”
“I’d love to get a look at the place,” she admitted.
“I could drive you over after dinner.”
“Homework.” She shook her head with real regret. “I have a feeling I’m going to be doing long division.”
“In that case—” he picked up the wine and topped off both their glasses “—let me offer a little Dutch courage.”
She hadn’t expected him to stay after the meal was over. Certainly hadn’t been prepared for him to wind things around so that he was sitting beside her son at the kitchen table, poring over the problems in an open arithmetic book.
She served him coffee as he translated the problems into baseball statistics. And why, Savannah wondered, as her son leaped at the ploy and ran with it, hadn’t she thought of that?
Because, she admitted, figures terrified her. Schooling terrified her. The knowledge that her son would one day soon go beyond what she had learned was both thrilling and shaming.
Not even Bryan knew about the nights she stayed up late, long after he slept, and studied his books, determined that she would be able to give help whenever he asked her for it.
“So, you divide the total score by the number of times at bat,” Jared suggested, adjusting his horn-rims in a way that made Savannah’s libido hitch.
“Yeah, yeah!” The lights of knowledge were bursting in Bryan’s head. “This is cool.” With his tongue caught between his teeth, he wrote the numbers carefully, almost reverently. After all, they were ball players now. “Check this out, Mom.”
When she did, laboriously going over the steps of the problem, her smile bloomed. “Good job.” She brushed a kiss over Bryan’s tousled hair. “Both of you.”
“How come I didn’t get a kiss?” Jared wanted to know.
She obliged him, chastely enough, but Bryan still made gagging noises. “Man, do you have to do that at the dinner table?”
“Close your eyes,” Jared suggested, and kissed Savannah again.
“I’m out of here.” Bryan shut his book with a snap.
“Out of here, and into the tub,” Savannah finished.
“Aw, come on.” He looked beseechingly at Jared.
“Actually,” Jared began, “I believe my client is entitled to a short recess.”
“Oh, really?” But Savannah’s dry comment was drowned out by Bryan’s whoop of delight.
“Yeah, a recess. Like an hour’s TV.”
“With the court’s indulgence.” Jared shot Bryan a warning look, laid a hand on his shoulder. “What my client means is, thirty minutes of recreational television viewing is appropriate after serving his previous sentence and taking steps toward rehabilitation. After which he will, voluntarily and without incident, accept the court’s decision.”
Savannah hissed a breath through her teeth. “Lights out at nine-thirty,” she muttered.
“All right!” Bryan pumped his fist in the air. “You should have gone for the hour,” he told Jared.
“This was your best deal. Trust me, I’m your lawyer.”
A grin split Bryan’s face. “Cool. Thanks, Mr. MacKade. ’Night, Mom.”
“Very fast, fancy talking,” Savannah said under her breath as her son dashed upstairs to the little portable in her bedroom.
“I couldn’t help myself.” Feeling a little sheepish, Jared tucked his hands in his pockets. “He reminded me of what it was like to be a nine-year-old boy and desperate for another hour. Are you going to hold me in contempt?”
She sighed, picked up the empty coffee cups, took them to the sink. “No. It was nice of you to stand up for him. Besides, he’d have wrangled the half hour out of me anyway.”
“He deserved it.” Jared grinned when she glanced over her shoulder. “So do I. After all, we slogged straight through that math assignment.”
“You want thirty minutes of—what was it, recreational television viewing?”
“No.” He took his glasses off, slipped them into the pocket of his shirt. “I want you to walk in the woods with me.” When her brow creased and she glanced toward the stairs, Jared took her hand. “We won’t go far. Hey, Bry!” he called out. “Your mom and I are going for a walk.”
“Cool,” came the absent, obviously uninterested answer. Jared took her denim jacket from a hook by the kitchen door. “It gets chilly after sundown.”
“Just to the woods,” she insisted as she shrugged into the jacket. From there, she could hear Bryan if he called her.
“Just to the woods,” Jared agreed, and closed his hand over hers. “Do you get lonely out here during the day, by yourself?”
“No. I like being by myself.” She walked outside with him, where the air had a faint snap and the sky was so clear the stars almost hurt the eyes. “I like the quiet.”
They went down the uneven steps that had been hacked into the bank, then across the narrow lane to where the woods began with shadows.
“I kissed my first girl in here.”
The just-greening trees opened to welcome them in. “Did you?”
“Yep. Cousin Joanie.”
“Cousin?”
“Third cousin,” Jared elaborated. “On my mother’s side. She had long golden curls, eyes the color of the sky in June, and my heart. I was eleven.”
Comfortable with shadows and starlight, she laughed. “A late bloomer.”
“She was twelve.”
“So, you liked older women.”
“Now that you mention it, that might have been part of the attraction. I lured her into the woods one balmy summer evening, when the sun was going down red behind the mountain and the whippoorwills were starting to call.”
“Very romantic.”
“It was an epiphany. I drew together all my sweaty courage and kissed her near the first bend in the creek, when the air was full of summer twilight and the smell of honeysuckle.”
“That’s very sweet.”
“It would have been,” he mused, “if my brothers hadn’t followed us and hidden to watch. They screamed like banshees, Cousin Joanie went tearing back to the farm. Of course, my brothers ragged on me for weeks after, so I had to take on each of them to save my honor. Devin broke my finger, and I lost interest in Cousin Joanie.”
“That’s sweet, too. The rites of passage.”
“I’ve learned a few things since then, about kissing pretty girls in the woods.”
When he turned her into his arms and his mouth moved over hers, she had to admit he was right. He’d learned quite a number of things.
“Where is cousin Joanie now?”
“In a nice split-level in the ’burbs of Virginia, with three kids and a part-time job selling real estate.” With a sigh, he pressed his curved lips to Savannah’s brow. “She still has those gold curls and summer eyes.”
“One more ghost in the MacKade woods.” She looked back through the trees. She could see the lights she’d left on in her cabin. Her son was safe there. “Tell me about the others.”
“The two corporals are the most famous. One wore blue, the other gray. During the Battle of Antietam, they were separated from their companies.”
He slipped an arm over her shoulders so that they walked companionably, their strides matched. “They came upon each other here, in the woods, two boys barely old enough to shave. In fear, or duty, or maybe both, they attacked each other. Each one was badly wounded, each one crawled off in a different direction. One to t
he farm.”
“Your farm?”
“Hmmm… A Union soldier, torn open by the enemy’s bayonet. My great-grandfather, no friend of the North, found him by the smokehouse. The story is that he saw his own son, who he’d lost at Bull Run, in that dying boy, so he carried him into the house. They did what they could for him, but it was too late. He died the next day and, afraid of reprisals, they buried him in one of the fields, in an unmarked grave.”
“So he’s lost,” Savannah murmured. “And haunts the woods because he can’t find his way home.”
“That would be close enough.”
“And the other corporal?”
“Made it to the Barlow house. A servant took him inside, and the mistress was preparing to tend to him when her husband shot him.”
She didn’t shudder. She was well used to cruelties, small and large. “Because he didn’t see a boy, but the wrong color uniform?”
“That’s right. So the mistress of the house, Abigail Barlow, turned from her husband and went into seclusion. She died a couple of years later.”
“A sad story. Useless deaths make for uneasy ghosts. Still, it always feels—” she closed her eyes, let the air dance over her face “—inviting here. They just don’t want to be forgotten. Do you want to know where they fought?”
Something in her tone had him looking down at her. “Why?”
She opened her eyes again. They were darker than the shadows, more mysterious than the night. “To the west, fifty yards, by a clump of rocks and a burled tree.”
He felt cool fingers brush the nape of his neck. But her hands were in his. “Yes. I’ve sat on the rocks there and heard the bayonets clash.”
“So have I. But I wondered who. And why.”
“Is that usual for you?” His voice had roughened. Perhaps it was what they spoke of in the night wood. Or perhaps it was her eyes, so dark, so depthless, that he knew any man would blissfully drown in them.
“Your great-grandfather was a farmer who saw a young boy dying and tried to save him. Mine was a shaman who saw visions in the fire and tried to understand them. You still try to save people, don’t you, Jared? And I still try to understand the visions.”
“Are you—?”
“Psychic?” She laughed quickly, richly. “No. I feel things. We all do. The strongest part of my heritage accepts those feelings, respects them, honors them. I followed my feelings when I left Oklahoma. I knew that I’d find where I belonged. And I took one look at that cabin, at those rocks, these woods, and I knew I was home. I watched you walk across the grass that first time, and I knew I’d end up wanting you.”
She leaned forward, touched her lips to his. “And now, I know I have to get back and put my son to bed before he raids the refrigerator.”
“Savannah.” He caught her hands again before she could turn away. His gaze was intense on her face, almost fierce. “What do you feel about where we’re going?”
She felt the heat, then the cold, then the heat once more, slide up her spine. But she kept her voice easy. “I find that when you look too far ahead, you end up tripping over the present. Let’s just worry about the now, Jared.”
When he lifted her hand to his lips, Savannah realized that now was going to be trouble enough.
She waited until the end of the week before she acted on Jared’s suggestion and detoured by the Barlow place. The MacKade place, she corrected, amused at herself for having picked up the town’s name for the old stone house on the hill.
The Barlows hadn’t lived in it for over fifty years. The last family, a couple from the north of the county, had bought it, lived in it briefly, then abandoned it twenty years ago. It had been up for sale off and on during those decades, but no one had taken the plunge.
Until Rafe MacKade.
Savannah considered that as she turned off the road and up the steep lane. Someone had begun to clear the overgrowth of brush and brambles, but it was going to be heavy going. Someone, she decided, was going to need a lot of vision.
The house itself was three stories of beautiful stone. Tall windows, arched windows, mullioned windows, gleaming. Most had been boarded up only months before—or so Savannah had been told when she was cornered by Mrs. Metz in the market.
There were double porches. The one that graced the second floor was in the process of being torn down. It needed to be, Savannah mused. It was rotted and sagging and undoubtedly treacherous. But the lower one was obviously new, still unpainted, and straight as a military band on parade day.
Scaffolding ran up the east wing, and piles of material sat under plastic tarps in the overgrown yard. She pulled up beside a pickup that was loaded with debris and shut off her engine.
When she knocked, she heard an answering shout, faintly irritated by the tone of it. She stepped inside and stood, shocked and swamped by the deluge of sensation. Laughter and tears and horror and happiness. The emotions rolled over her, then ebbed, like a breaking wave.
She saw the man at the top of the steps. Smiled, stepped forward. “Jared, I didn’t expect to see you. Oh.”
She saw her mistake immediately. Not Jared. The eyes were a darker green, the hair slightly longer and definitely less well-groomed. Jared’s face was just a bit more narrow, his eyebrows had more of an arch.
But that MacKade grin was identical, as sharp and lethal as an arrow from a master’s bow.
“I’m better-looking,” Rafe told her as he started down.
“Hard to say. The family resemblance is almost ridiculous.” She held out a hand. “You’d be Rafe MacKade.”
“Guilty.”
“I’m—”
“Savannah Morningstar.” He didn’t shake her hand, just held it while he gave her a long, practiced once-over. “Regan was dead on,” he decided.
“Excuse me?”
“You met my wife last weekend at her shop. She told me to think of Isis. That didn’t do me a hell of a lot of good, so she said to think of a woman who’d stop a man’s heart at ten paces and have him on his knees at five.”
“That’s quite an endorsement.”
“And dead on,” he repeated. “Jared said you might be coming by.” He tucked his thumbs in his tool belt.
“I don’t want to interrupt your work.”
“Please, interrupt my work.” He aimed that grin again. “I’m just killing time until Regan gets home from the shop. We’re living here temporarily. Want a beer?”
This was the kind of man she understood and was at ease with. “Now that you mention it.”
But she hadn’t taken two steps behind him when she stopped dead in her tracks and stared at the curve of the staircase.
Intrigued, Rafe watched her. “Problem?”
“There. It was there, on the stairs.”
“I take it Jared told you about our ghosts.”
She felt weak inside, jittery at the fingertips. “He told me there had been a young Confederate soldier, that Barlow had shot him after a servant had brought him into the house. But he didn’t say—he didn’t tell me where.”
Her legs felt heavy as she walked to the stairs, as she followed the compulsion to go up. The cold was like a blade through the heart, through to the bone. Her knuckles went white on the rail.
“Here.” She could barely get the words out. “Here on the stairs. He could smell roses, and hope, and then… He only wanted to go home.”
She shook herself, stepped back one step, then two before turning. “I could use that beer.”
“Yeah.” Rafe let out a long breath. “Me too.”
“Do you, ah, do that kind of thing often?” Rafe asked as he popped the tops on two beers in the kitchen.
“No,” Savannah told him, very definitely. “There are some places around this area…this house, the woods out there…” She let the words trail off as she looked out the window. “There’s a spot on my bank where I planted columbine, and areas of the battlefield that break your heart.” With an effort, she shook off the mood and took the beer Rafe offer
ed. “Leftover emotions. The strong ones can last centuries.”
“I’ve had a dream.” He’d only told Regan of it, but it seemed appropriate now. “I’m running through the woods, my battle gray splattered with blood. I only want to go home. I’m ashamed of it, but I’m terrified. Then I see him, the other soldier, the enemy. We stare at each other for a dozen heartbeats, then charge. It’s bad, the fight. It’s brutal and stupid and useless. After, I come here, crawl here. I think I’m home. When I see her, when she speaks to me and tells me it’s going to be all right, I believe her. She’s right beside me when someone carries me up the stairs. I can smell her, the roses. Then she shouts, looks at someone coming toward us down the stairs. When I look up, I can see him, and the gun. Then it’s over.”
Rafe took a long drink. “What stays with me the longest, after it’s over, is that I just wanted to go home. I haven’t had it in a couple of months.”
“Maybe that’s because you are home.”
“Looks that way.” Suddenly he grinned and tapped his bottle against hers. “A hell of an introduction. Are you up to seeing the place, or do you want to pass?”
“No, I’d like to see it. You’ve done some work in here.”
“Yeah.” The kitchen had a long way to go, Rafe mused, but the counters had been built and were topped by a warm slate blue that showed off the creamy ivory of new appliances and gleaming glass-fronted cabinets of yellow pine. “Regan put her foot down,” he explained. “A workable kitchen and a finished bath and she’d handle living in a construction site for a while.”
“Sounds like a practical woman.”
“That she is. Come on, I’ll give you the tour.”
He took her arm and started back down the hallway. “I’d like to start upstairs,” she told him before he could open the door to the right.
“Sure.” Most people liked to start with the parlor or the library, but he was flexible. As they started up, he felt her hesitate, brace. Just as he felt the hard shudder move through her as they continued. “No one feels it anymore,” he said. “Not in weeks.”
“Lucky for them,” Savannah managed, grateful when they reached the top of the landing. She looked beyond the tarps, the buckets and tools and saw sturdy walls that had been built to last.
“We finished—” He broke off as she turned away from the bedroom he and Regan shared. A room that had belonged to the mistress of the house and had been lovingly repaired, redone and furnished. Saying nothing, he followed her to the opposite wing.
The door had been removed from this room, a room with long windows that faced the outskirts of town. The walls had been painted a deep green, the wide, ornately carved trim a bone white to match the marble of the fireplace.
The floors had been recently sanded. She could smell the wood dust. The little room beyond—the valet’s room? she wondered—had been roughed in as a bath.
“The master’s room,” she murmured.
“We thought it was likely.” Fascinated, Rafe watched her walk from door to window, from window to hearth.
Oh, it had been his, Master Barlow’s, she was sure of it. He would have studied the town from here and thought his thoughts. He would have taken one of the young maids to bed in here, willing or not, then slept the dreamless sleep of the conscienceless.
“He was a bastard,” Savannah said mildly. “Well, he didn’t leave much behind.” With a smile, she turned back to Rafe. “You’re doing a wonderful job.”
Rafe rubbed his chin. “Thanks. You’re a spooky woman, Savannah.”
“Occasionally. I read palms in a carnival for a while. Pretty tedious work, really. This is much more interesting.” She moved past him, back into the hall, and headed straight for the mistress’s room. “This is beautiful,” she murmured.
“We’re jazzed about it.” From the doorway, Rafe scanned the room himself. He could smell roses, and he could smell Regan. “It’s going to be our honeymoon suite.”