Authors: Lisa Kleypas
Dream Lake
Lisa Kleypas
is the author of a number of historical romance novels that have been published in fourteen languages. In 1985, she was named Miss Massachusetts and competed in the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. After graduating from Wellesley College with a political science degree, she published her first novel at age twenty-one. Her books have appeared on the
New York Times
bestseller lists. Lisa is married and has two children.
Visit her website at
www.lisakleypas.com
Friday Harbour Series:
Christmas Eve at Friday Harbour
Rainshadow Road
Contemporary:
Sugar Daddy
Blue-Eyed Devil
Smooth Talking Stranger
Wallflower Series:
Secrets of a Summer Night
It Happened One Autumn
Devil in Winter
Scandal in Spring
Hathaway Series:
Mine Till Midnight
Seduce Me at Sunrise
Tempt Me at Twilight
Married by Morning
Love in the Afternoon
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 9780748119943
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Lisa Kleypas
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
Contents
To Tonia Boze
,
For inspiring me with your strength, optimism, and compassion, and for giving me the courage to try things I never thought I could do.
Love always
,
L. K.
One
The ghost had tried many times to leave the house, but it was impossible. Whenever he approached the front threshold or leaned through a window, he disappeared, the sum of him dispersing like mist in the air. He worried that one day he might not be able to take shape again. He wondered if being trapped here was a punishment for the past he couldn’t remember … and if so, how long would it last?
The Victorian house stood at the end of Rainshadow Road, overlooking the circular shoreline of False Bay like a wallflower waiting alone at a dance. Its painted clapboard siding had been corroded from sea air, its interior ruined by a succession of careless tenants. Original hardwood floors had been covered with shag carpeting, rooms divided by thin chipboard walls, wood trim coated with a dozen layers of cheap paint.
From the windows, the ghost had watched shorebirds: sandpipers, yellowlegs, plovers, whimbrels, plucking at the abundant food in tidepools on straw-colored mornings. At night he stared at stars and comets and the cloud-hazed moon, and sometimes he saw northern lights dance across the horizon.
The ghost wasn’t certain how long he had been at the house. Without a heartbeat to measure the passing seconds, time was timeless. He had found himself there one day with no name, no physical appearance, and no certainty of who he was. He didn’t know how he’d died, or where, or why. But a few memories danced at the edge of his awareness. He felt sure that he had lived on San Juan Island for part of his life. He thought he might have been a boatman or a fisherman. When he looked out at False Bay, he remembered things about the water beyond it … the channels between the San Juan Islands, the narrow straits around Vancouver. He knew the splintered shape of Puget Sound, the way its dragon-teeth inlets cut across Olympia.
The ghost also knew many songs, all the verses and lyrics, even the preludes. When the silence was too much to stand, he sang to himself as he moved through the empty rooms.
He craved interaction with any kind of creature. He went unnoticed even by the insects that scuttled across the floor. He hungered to know anything about anyone, to remember people he had once known. But those memories had been locked away until the mysterious day when his fate would finally be revealed.
One morning, visitors came to the house.
Electrified, the ghost watched a car approach, its wheels ironing flat channels in the heavy growth of weeds along the unpaved drive. The car stopped and two people emerged, a young man with dark hair, and an older woman dressed in jeans and flat shoes and a pink jacket.
“… couldn’t believe it was left to me,” she was saying. “My cousin bought it back in the seventies with the idea of fixing it up and selling it, but he never got around to it. The value of this property is in the land—you’d have to tear the house down, no question.”
“Have you gotten an estimate?” the man asked.
“On the lot?”
“No, on restoring the house.”
“Heavens, no. There’s structural damage—
everything
would have to be redone.”
He stared at the house with open fascination. “I’d like to have a look inside.”
A frown pulled the woman’s forehead into crinkles, like a lettuce leaf. “Oh, Sam, I’m sure it’s not safe.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“I wouldn’t want to be responsible for you getting hurt. You could fall right through the floor, or a beam could drop on you. And there’s no telling what kind of vermin—”
“Nothing’s going to happen.” His tone was coaxing. “Give me five minutes. I just want a quick look.”
“I really shouldn’t let you do this.”
Sam flashed her a grin of renegade charm. “But you will. Because you just can’t resist me.”
She tried to look stern, but a reluctant smile emerged.
I used to be like that
, the ghost thought with surprise. Elusive memories flickered, of past flirtations and long-ago evenings spent on front porches. He had known how to charm women young and old, how to make them laugh. He had kissed girls with sweet tea on their breaths, their necks and shoulders dusted with scented powder.
The big-framed young man bounded to the front porch and shouldered the door open when it stuck. As he stepped into the entrance hall, he turned wary, as if he expected something to jump out at him. Each footstep broke through a scurf of dust, raising ashy plumes from the floor and making him sneeze.
Such a human sound. The ghost had forgotten about sneezing.
Sam’s gaze moved across the dilapidated walls. His eyes were blue even in the shadows, whisks of laugh lines at the outer corners. He wasn’t handsome, but he was good-looking, his features strong and blunt-edged. He’d been out in the sun a lot, the tan going several layers deep. Looking at him, the ghost could almost remember the feel of sunlight, the hot slight weight of it on his skin.
The woman had crept to the front doorway, her hair surrounding her head in a silver nimbus as she peered inside the entranceway. She gripped one side of the door frame as if it were a support pole on a lurching subway train. “It’s so dark in there. I really don’t think—”
“I’m going to need more than five minutes,” Sam said, pulling a small flashlight from his key chain and clicking it on. “You might want to go out for coffee and come back in, say … half an hour?”
“And leave you here all alone?”
“I won’t cause any damage.”
The woman snorted. “I’m not worried about the
house
, Sam.”
“I’ve got my cell phone,” he said, patting his back pocket. “I’ll call if there’s a problem.” The smile lines at the corners of his eyes deepened. “You can come rescue me.”
She let out a dramatic sigh. “What exactly do you think you’re going to find in this wreckage?”
His gaze had already left hers, his attention recaptured by his surroundings. “A home, maybe.”
“This place was a home once,” she said. “But I can’t imagine it could ever be one again.”
The ghost was relieved when the woman left.
Directing the flashlight in slow arcs, Sam began to explore in earnest, while the ghost followed him room by room. Dust lay over fireplace mantels and broken furniture like gauze veils.
Seeing a torn section of shag carpeting, Sam lowered to his heels, pulled at the rug, and shone the light on the hardwood flooring beneath. “Mahogany?” he murmured, examining the dark, gluey surface. “Oak?”
Black walnut
, the ghost thought, looking over his shoulder. Another discovery … he knew about flooring, how to sand and hand-scrape and tack-clean it, how to apply stain with a wad of wool fleece.
They went to the kitchen, with its alcove designed for a cast-iron stove, a few scales of broken tiles still clinging to the walls. Sam directed the beam of light to the high trussed ceilings, the cabinets hanging askew. He focused on an abandoned bird’s nest, let his gaze fall to the ancient splatters of droppings beneath, and shook his head. “I must be crazy,” he muttered.
Sam left the kitchen and went to the staircase, pausing to rub his thumb over the balustrade. A streak of scarred wood shone ruddily through the grime. Placing his feet carefully to avoid perforations of rot on the steps, he made his way to the second floor. At intervals he made a face and let out a puff of breath, as if at some noxious odor. “She’s right,” he said ruefully, as he reached the second-floor landing. “This place is nothing but a teardown.”
That sent a jolt of worry through the ghost. What would happen to him if someone razed the house to the ground? It might extinguish him for good. The ghost couldn’t conceive that he had been trapped alone here only to be snuffed out for no apparent reason. He circled around Sam, studying him, wanting to communicate but afraid it might send the man screaming from the place.
Sam walked right through him and stopped at the window overlooking the front drive. Ancient grime coated the glass, blunting the daylight in soft gloom. A sigh escaped him. “You’ve been waiting a long time, haven’t you?” Sam asked quietly.
The question startled the ghost. But as Sam continued, the ghost realized he was talking to the house. “I bet you were something to see, a hundred years ago. It would be a shame not to give you a chance. But damn, you’re going to take some serious cash. And it’s going to take just about everything I’ve got to get the vineyard going. Hell, I don’t know …”
As the ghost accompanied Sam through the dusty rooms, he sensed the man’s growing attachment to the ramshackle house, his desire to make it whole and beautiful again. Only an idealist or a fool, Sam figured aloud, would take on such a project. The ghost agreed.
Eventually Sam heard the woman’s car horn, and he went outside. The ghost tried to accompany him, but he felt the same dizzying, shattering, flying-apart sensation that always happened when he tried to leave. He went to watch from a broken window as Sam opened the car’s passenger door.
Pausing for a last glance, Sam contemplated the house slumped in the meadow, its rickety lines softened by swaths of arrowgrass and clustered pickleweed, and the bristled tangles of chairmaker’s rush. The flat blue of False Bay retreated in the distance, shimmers of tidepools beginning at the edge of fecund brown silt.
Sam gave a short nod, as if he’d decided on his course.
And the ghost made yet another discovery … he was capable of hope.
