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Oh, Lucia was here, and I knew where—not to mention in what state—even though the house wasn’t telling. I hesitated, as any visitor faced with such circumstance might do.

“Mrs. Sullivan? Hello?”

Well, there was no delaying it now and no point dallying over what had to be done. Straight through the kitchen to the greenhouse, just as Nick had said.

Sunshine was playing on the old oak cabinets in the kitchen, making the distant room look like the light at the end of a tunnel. Head down, away we go.

I didn’t look to either side, just trotted down the hall, pulse thumping in my ears. The kitchen was pristine, only a single brandy snifter left on the counter. I paused on the threshold of the greenhouse, swallowed, then opened the door with a flourish and strode into the sunlit room.

The greenery brought me to a screeching halt. The place was bursting with exotic blooms and tropical flowers, pampered beauties that could never have been cultivated by someone without a green thumb.

It seemed that Lucia’s indifference to plants extended only to the outdoor, pedestrian varieties. I almost smiled, having no trouble reconciling that to what I did know of Lucia.

She was a former opera singer, so only the prima donnas would do.

And they were glorious—the doorway was flanked by a bright yellow allamanda heavy with trumpet blooms and an anthurium with blossoms so blood red they didn’t look real.

I forgot my mission for a moment as I stared in admiration. A massive columnea grew down most of the wall that had once been the exterior wall of the house, its orange and yellow flowers gloriously illustrating its common name of Goldfish Plant. The leaves looked like dark green water flowing over the brick wall, water chockfull of goldfish.

Incongruous, but effective. Certainly it was dramatic.

Pure Lucia.

There was only one white-blooming vine and it was one that I couldn’t name, its trumpeting blossoms fringed on the ends of the petals. Obviously Lucia thought the bloom interesting enough to put up with its lack of color. Just beyond that, the bird of paradise held its orange and blue blooms to the sunlight.

And all I could smell was the yellow plumeria. Okay, I felt a little triumphant that I had nailed Lucia’s color scheme in one. This place was like a Hawaiian shirt of giddy color.

I wandered a little further on the wet gravel pathways. Apparently the overhead sprinkler system was automatic, and came on in the mornings. The plants themselves had already dried from their shower and the sun was quickly baking the gravel dry as well.

I rounded a corner, and caught my breath at the display of paphiopedilum orchids. They all had mottled leaves, all held one exquisite blossom skyward, all were tucked back against one wall in orderly rows. It looked as though someone either spent a lot of money on plants or did their own propagation.

How strange for me to have something in common with the Dragon Lady.

The orchids looked like little dragons of a kind, with their mouths open and their tongues out, waiting for a yummy morsel. Of course, they weren’t carnivorous.

But the nepenthes overhead most certainly were. Myriad pitcher plants grew down from planters suspended from the ceiling. Their gaping wet mouths were the one thing they all had in common regardless of their sizes and coloring.

No wonder there were no bugs in here.

But they reminded me why I was there.

I set to work, but it took only a few moments for me to discover that there was nothing in the greenhouse, nothing but marvelous flowers. It was a bit colder than I would have expected for most of these varieties, but then it’s been a while since I did much with hothouses. I scurried through the room again, but there wasn’t so much as a trowel out of place.

There certainly wasn’t a corpse. I would have noticed that.

Which meant someone had lied to me.

The light belatedly went on.

Someone had tricked me. And Fat Philippa had fallen for the lure, willingly becoming the butt of the joke one more time. How many times would it take me to learn? My face heated in recollection of a thousand high school taunts, a dozen tormentors laughing when I stepped right into the humiliating trap of the day.

I had been tricked by the one person I trusted—even knowing I was bucking the odds to bother. I never would have guessed that Nick could be so mean.

Or that I could be so stupid.

But I already knew that his brother could easily be that mean and they were, for better or worse, two of a kind. I spun on my heel and marched out of the greenhouse, slamming the door hard behind myself.

Once a sucker, always a sucker.

I could have sworn the damn house laughed.

* * *

He should have warned her.

He sat in the truck, fidgeting with impatience, and was convinced three different times that his watch had stopped.

He could feel a thousand eyes on Phil’s Beast. It wasn’t exactly the most inconspicuous vehicle she could have had. It was also emblazoned with her company logo and phone number, a detail he hadn’t expected. Stress, grief and a lack of sleep hadn’t left him as sharp as he liked to be.

There was something else at work too.

He’d felt it the night before but dismissed it. This morning, in full sunlight, his attraction to Phil couldn’t be so easily denied.

And this unexpected protectiveness was a thousand times worse. He didn’t want Phil to go in that house, he didn’t want her to expose herself to a scene he’d never forget, he didn’t want her to be embroiled in his problems again.

He wanted to take her to Bhutan and had very nearly said so.

He was losing his edge.

But he could see Phil there so easily. He could picture her putting up with the trials of travel with good humor, showing the same delight of discovery that had once motivated him to travel. Her kitchen was filled with the same jubilant use of color, the same disregard for convention in pairing this with that, the same joy of being alive that he associated with certain cultures.

He traveled alone as a matter of principle, or at least kept to himself when in a group. Travel was his private domain and he had never even considered the possibility of a travel companion.

Let alone a woman. A lover.

Phil. Who had once been head-over-heels crazy about his brother and might very well still be.

He should remember that detail.

Instead he relived his first sight of her in fifteen years. Something had quickened in him as Phil walked unsteadily up her driveway, something that wouldn’t have been surprising with any other woman on the face of the earth.

But in association with Phil, lust was an unwelcome accomplice. She was the only person beside Lucia he could trust and the one he had ever trusted with a greater measure of the whole truth. She had kept his secret, whatever her reasons. He owed her respect—not lust.

But when had Phil become a girl?

It seemed like a ridiculous thing to think of a woman more or less his contemporary and he had felt like an idiot as soon as he had asked her, but still. Phil had always been a jeans-and-baggy-sweatshirt-teenager, with a mouth and a half.

She had always been a bit plump, had a zit or two, and wore her heart on her sleeve. He knew she had befriended him purely to get closer to his brother, but she was such good company that he couldn’t take offense. Knowing that she adored Sean, even from afar and anonymously, made her the kind of girl who could be a pal instead of a pursuit.

The kind of girl a guy could easily called “Phil”.

Now he couldn’t believe that he had ever thought her safely genderless. That primal part of him had noticed the sheer length of her legs and the way her skirt hitched up when she got into the truck. And he’d watched those legs as she stabbed at the gas pedal, even when she drove like a lunatic and a desire for personal longevity should have ensured he was watching the road.

He’d studied her surreptitiously in the rear view mirror, searching for some clue that she wasn’t really the Phil he knew. He’d never seen his Phil wear any makeup, let alone a lipstick that made her lips look so soft and tempting. Her reddish tangle of hair—which had so often been impatiently snatched back in an elastic—now swung against her jaw line in a smooth auburn bob, the cut accentuating the creamy length of her neck.

It wasn’t so much that she had slimmed out, for she still wasn’t built like a model—he thanked the gods for that—but Phil carried herself with confidence, she dressed with the same verve that colored her words and her kitchen. She as comfortable in her own skin as she had once been awkward, and she was unabashedly feminine.

The result was as sexy as hell.

If Phil hadn’t recognized him so obviously, he might have assumed she was the older sister of the Phil he had known, or a distant cousin with a passing similarity of build.

But this
was
Phil, for all the changes in her appearance. Funny, straightforward, blunt and clever, honest and caring. The same Phil, but blossomed. She had always been cute, but never seemed to do much about it. A guy had to look to see it, at least in those days. Phil had always had a little secretive smile that was femininity squared.

Come to think of it, that smile had often surprised him, too.

And he’d always wanted to kiss it off her lips. As teenagers who were friends though, he’d been pretty sure she’d deck him if he did. Even then, he had been certain one kiss would change everything.

So, he’d been half-right.

The scary part was that now she was looking at him as though she was thinking much the same thing. It bothered him, it bothered him a lot. Because even if Phil didn’t have him confused with his brother—the jury was still out on that one—he thought he knew her well enough to understand that she didn’t play to the same rules as he did. Phil would expect the traditional commitment route: trip to the altar, house in the ‘burbs, 2 cars in the garage, 2.2 kids and a golden retriever.

That wasn’t Nick Sullivan’s style. He was mobile, uncommitted, content with what he could carry and no more. He didn’t do long term. Never had. Never would.

Some things really don’t change.

His every instinct said ‘run like hell’ but he was stuck here, hiding in Phil’s truck like a coward, waiting for her to finish what he should have insisted on handling himself. As a man who lived for the moment, this was a moment he’d pay good money to see done.

He certainly wasn’t doing a very good job of leaving no mark of his presence, but then he should be used to screwing that up by now. He scowled and focused on the heavy oak door, willing it to open.

He should at least have warned Phil about the house. He should have told her about the costumes, the stage props, the collections. The stuffed lynx over the door had been known to startle the occasional visitor and those thieves, well, a psychoanalyst could have made a career out of Lucia.

Phil had never been across the house’s threshold— no one who was not blood or a favored acquaintance of Lucia’s entered that place. She would be surprised, disoriented, maybe even frightened. The realization almost sent him vaulting over the seat, his own best interests be damned.

But Phil
hadn’t
screamed.

Which, in a way, was worse.

The house brooded silently, as it was wont to do, keeping its secrets to itself. He had become so used to it that he became jaded to its eccentricities. In fact, there had been a time when he naively thought everyone lived like his grandmother, surrounded by improbable souvenirs, posed and positioned for maximum effect.

What was taking her so long. He wanted to pace but the truck wasn’t quite that big. He drummed his fingers.

Phil had to be in the kitchen by now, surely? He checked his watch and found that precisely two minutes had elapsed since she crossed the threshold. What if she was sickened by what she found?

He should never have let her go.

He gritted his teeth and gave her one more minute.

Just one. The second hand sweep in his watch moved with paralyzing slowness. He lasted a full thirty seconds, then started to climb into the front.

But Phil came out of the house in that very moment. To his astonishment, she looked as cool and as composed as when she entered it. She shrugged and ran her fingers through her keys, an elegant lady disappointed.

He sat back, realizing belatedly that Phil was playing her role, part of a cover story he had pretty much forgotten. But she was evidently made of sterner stuff than that—and a lot less transparent than he remembered. She smoothly slid behind the wheel, started the truck without a word and backed out of the driveway. The only hint that something was amiss was the way she squealed the tires when she shifted into drive.

She said absolutely nothing.

It was as though he had become invisible.

“Well?”

Phil cast him a glance in the rear view mirror that could have frozen his marrow. Her lips tightened and she looked back at the empty road ahead, still without speaking. She turned onto the highway and hit the gas pedal so hard that Nick fell back against the seat.

When he sat up, they were merged into the increasing commuter traffic and headed toward Boston again.

“Aren’t you going to the police station?”

“No.”

There was trouble in that word, big trouble. He had heard women embue a single word with volumes of meaning before and he knew he’d likely hear it again before he died.

But this time, he didn’t know why the woman in question was so angry.

“What do you mean? That was the whole point of this little charade.” He leaned over the front seat. “We need to get the cops. Lucia’s dead!”

“I don’t think so.”

Phil changed lanes with a savage gesture, nearly dispatching a Chevy to the ditch. The driver honked at her, she lifted her chin and put the pedal to the floor. The truck began to rattle, but Phil showed no signs of easing up on the gas. She ducked and weaved between the commuter traffic, her grip so tight on the wheel that her knuckles were white.

He debated the merit of distracting her while she drove like a madwoman. Then she nearly peeled the side off a Cherokee and it didn’t seem as though they had a lot to lose.