Jayne Ann Krentz (10 page)

“Not funny.” She hugged herself and rubbed her arms briskly, as though warding off a chill. “I guess you'll have to stay here.”

“Don't go overboard with the gracious hospitality routine. I don't mind walking back to Dreamscape. It's not that far.”

“No.” She turned away abruptly. “You can have the downstairs guest room. I'll get some blankets and a pillow.”

He watched her climb the stairs. She had been a little too quick to suggest that he stay here, he decided. The expression in her eyes was wrong, too. He wondered how much of this new, brittle tension derived from the scene on the sofa earlier and how much came from Winston's prowling at the door.

Logic told him that a few kisses wouldn't have rattled her this much. She wasn't a teenager, after all. She was a confident woman who had built a thriving business. It would take more than a sexy tussle on the sofa to throw her. In any event, he was pretty sure that if she really
had
been upset by the small skirmish, she would have been more than delighted to let him walk home in the fog.

Instead, she had insisted that he stay here.

He glanced at Winston. The dog was stretched out on his belly on the rug, nose on his paws, dozing. Hannah had said that it was the second night in a row that he had gone on alert.

Hannah and Winston were both accustomed to life in the city, Rafe reminded himself. They had merely overreacted to whatever small creature had wandered too close to the house. But if Hannah wanted him to stay here tonight, who was he to argue?

An hour later he was still awake. Arms folded behind his head, he stared up at the deep shadows on the ceiling. He was intensely aware of the fact that Hannah was just out of sight upstairs. He pictured her in a nightgown. Maybe a frilly little see-through number that showed a lot of skin. Fat chance. More likely a sober, long-sleeved flannel thing that fell to her ankles.

Either one sounded interesting, now that he considered the matter. Very interesting, in fact. He was hard as a rock.

Logic told him that a few kisses shouldn't have rattled him this much. He wasn't a teenager, after all. It took more than a sexy tussle on the sofa to throw him.

Right.

He awoke at dawn when a cold nose was thrust against the bottom of his bare foot. The shock brought him to a sitting position in a hurry.

“Sonofa—” He broke off when he saw Winston. “No point in calling you that particular name, is there? You are a son of a bitch. And don't think it hasn't occurred to me that the big dramatic act last night at the door might have been just your deliberate attempt to disrupt the mood of the evening.”

Winston gave him a meaningful look.

“Things were going pretty damn good until you showed up and made like Mr. Macho Watchdog.”

Winston turned and trotted to the door. There he sat down and stared intently at Rafe.

“Okay, okay. I get the point.”

Rafe shoved aside the blankets and got to his feet. He found his trousers and reached for his shirt. After a short search he discovered his low-cut boots fooling around with some dust bunnies under the bed.

“All right, let's go.”

He opened the door to a damp, fog-bound morning. Winston stepped smartly outside and headed for the bushes at the edge of the porch. Rafe went down the steps and followed the little path that led to the storage locker used to house the garbage cans. There were no signs of animal tracks in the vicinity and no claw marks on the wooden lid.

Having concluded his personal business, Winston hurried over to see what was going on at the garbage can locker. Rafe watched him closely.

Winston sniffed a bit, but his interest in the locker appeared casual at best. After only a couple of minutes he headed on down the long drive toward the trees that veiled the house and gardens from the narrow road.

Rafe followed, watching to see if the dog paid any unusual attention to any particular point along the way. Winston's progress was slowed by numerous pauses, but none appeared to be any more intriguing to him than another. When he got close to the edge of the property, Rafe decided it was time to call him back.

“Hannah will chew me out but good if she finds out I let you play in traffic.” Not that there was much on this quiet road, especially at this hour of the morning.

Winston ignored him, displaying a breathtaking disdain for a clear and reasonable command. Rafe concluded that the attitude was either the result of generations of fine breeding or something that had rubbed off from Hannah. He was inclined to credit the latter.

“Come back here.” Rafe walked more quickly toward Winston, intending to grab him before he reached the road.

But Winston stopped of his own accord before he got as far as the pavement. He veered left toward a stand of dripping trees and began to sniff the ground with great authority.

“Just like you knew what you were doing,” Rafe said quietly.

Winston flitted briskly from one tree trunk to another, pausing to sniff intently in several places. Eventually he lifted his leg. When he was finished he turned to Rafe as if to say that he was satisfied.

Rafe walked into the stand and took a close look at the tree Winston had marked. He knew that his human senses were abysmally inadequate for the task at hand.

He crouched to get a closer look at the ground at the base of the tree. Unfortunately the pebbles that covered the earth made it impossible to detect any footprints. Always assuming that there were any there to detect, Rafe thought.

He looked at Winston, who was watching him with an inquiring expression. “You know, if one of us had gotten both your nose and my brain, we'd be in great shape.”

Winston gave the equivalent of a canine shrug, then turned and went quickly along the drive toward the house.

Rafe straightened. He was about to set off after the dog when he caught a glint of silver foil out of the corner of his eye. A closer look revealed a tightly wadded candy wrapper lying on the ground near the point Winston had marked.

Not exactly a major discovery. A stray breeze could have blown it into the stand of trees. It might have been tossed from a passing car or fallen off the garbage truck.

Or it might have been dropped by someone standing in this very spot about midnight last night.

He picked up the discarded wrapper and went back down the drive to where he had parked the Porsche. He unlocked the door, opened the glove compartment, and rummaged briefly inside. No luck. He looked at Winston, who was waiting, head cocked, on the porch.

“Used to be a time when I carried a spare razor and a few other basic necessities with me for just this sort of occasion,” he explained. He shut the door and pocketed the keys. “But I got out of the habit.”

His social life had never really picked up again after his divorce, he reflected. Probably because he had not worked very hard to get it up and running. He'd had other interests to occupy him.

He stopped once before he went up the steps and plucked a few sprigs of the mint that were growing beneath the garden's water faucet.

Back inside the house he spent a few minutes in the downstairs bathroom, where he discovered that none of the Harte males had left a razor behind.

“Thoughtless,” he told Winston. “But, then, what do you expect from a Harte?”

He listened to the silence upstairs for a moment before he wandered into the kitchen and started opening cupboard doors. He found the usual assortment of aging condiments and spices that tended to get left behind in a vacation cottage. Salt, pepper, sugar, a half-empty bottle of vanilla extract, and an unopened jar of maple syrup. The last item was the real thing, not caramel-colored sugar water, he noted.

He took the vanilla extract and the syrup out of the cupboard and went to check the contents of the refrigerator. The eggs and milk were fresh. The loaf of dense, rustic-style bread baked by the New Age crowd who had taken over the old bakery near the pier was a day old.

Perfect.

Hannah came awake with a start and found herself gazing into the depths of the impenetrable fogbank that hovered outside the window. For a few disorienting seconds she thought she was still in Portland trying to hold together the unraveling threads of a disastrous wedding reception.

Then she smelled the exquisite aromas from downstairs. Reality returned, jolting her out of bed.

Rafe. He had not vanished discreetly at dawn as she had expected. He was down there making himself at home in her kitchen. She had been so sure that he would be gone by the time she awoke.

She looked at the foot of the bed. There was no sign of Winston. What had become of her faithful pal?

Now that was a really dumb question, she thought. Winston was a truly fabulous dog in many respects. But in the end, he was still a dog. If she wanted to find him, she had only to follow the smell of food.

She staggered into the bathroom, the last wisps of the familiar anxiety dream trailing after her. She'd been plagued by the wedding-reception-from-hell nightmare for months before she had made the decision to sell Weddings by Harte.

She gripped the edges of the white pedestal sink and stared at herself in the mirror. Her hair hung in lanky tangles. There was a sullen, surly look in her eyes, and the flush in her cheeks was unbecoming, to say the least. She could not face Rafe in this condition. Her only hope was a shower.

She whipped the long-sleeved nightgown off over her head and stepped beneath the hot spray. Seizing the shampoo in both hands, she went to work with near-violent determination. It had not been a good night.

When she emerged a short time later she felt infinitely better. She pulled on a sweater and a pair of jeans, brushed her freshly washed hair behind her ears, and anchored it with a headband.

She took another look in the mirror just before she left the room. With dismay she realized that she still looked a little too pink. Probably because of the shower, she decided. All that heat and steam. The effect would surely fade quickly.

She squared her shoulders, opened the bedroom door, and stepped out into the hall.

By the time she got downstairs her mouth was watering. She saw Winston sitting just inside the kitchen doorway. He rose to greet her with his customary gallantry, but it was clear that he was distracted by what was going on in the vicinity of the stove.

Rafe looked just as she had known he would look in the morning. Incredibly sexy, right down to and including the shadow of a beard that gave the hard planes of his face an even more dangerous cast than usual.

It really was not fair. A gentleman would have been gone by dawn. But, then, no one had ever called Rafe Madison a gentleman.

“Right on time.” Rafe's eyes gleamed as he surveyed her with one swift, all-encompassing look. He picked up an oven mitt. “You can pour the coffee.”

She watched as he removed a pan from the oven. The faint scent of vanilla teased her. “What is it?”

“French toast.” He put the pan on the stove and tossed the mitt onto the counter. “Baked instead of fried. Sort of a cross between a bread pudding and a soufflé.”

She gazed at it longingly. “It's beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.”

He grinned. “Thanks.”

So the man could cook. She already knew that. It was not a sufficient reason to fall in love. Lust, maybe, but not love.

She dragged her gaze away from the golden-brown French toast and saw that Rafe was watching her with an odd expression.

“I'll get the coffee.” She whirled around and seized the pot.

Rafe arranged the French toast on two heated plates and carried the food to the table. Hannah studied the casually elegant fashion in which the puffy, golden-brown triangles had been positioned. There were little sprigs of fresh mint on top of the toast. The syrup in the small pot in front of her was warm.

She picked up her fork. “You know, there's a theory in some quarters that you turned to a life of crime in order to support yourself after you left Eclipse Bay.”

He nodded. “I've heard that theory.”

“But after dinner the other night and breakfast this morning, I think the evidence is clear that you went to a blue-ribbon culinary academy instead of jail.”

He looked up very quickly.

She paused with a bite of French toast poised in midair. “Good heavens, I was joking. Did you really take cooking classes?”

He hesitated. Then shrugged. “Yes.”

She was fascinated. “When?”

“After I got married. In the back of my mind, I think I always had this idea that when you were happily married, you ate at home most of the time. But Meredith wasn't big on cooking, so I took over the job. The better I got at it, the more restless and unhappy Meredith became.” Rafe made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “After a while I realized that she wasn't real big on staying at home, either.”

She gazed at him in disbelief. “Meredith left you because you're a fantastic cook and because you like to eat at home?”

“Well, those weren't the only reasons,” Rafe admitted. “She might have been willing to tolerate my cooking if I had agreed to go to work at Madison Commercial. But I refused, so in the end she gave up on my future prospects and left.”

Hannah savored another bite of French toast while she thought about that. “I'm sorry your marriage didn't work out.”

“You should be. I figure it's your fault that it bombed.”

She nearly dropped her fork. “
My
fault. How in the world can you blame me?”

He met her eyes across the short expanse of the table. His mouth curved slightly. “That night on the beach you told me I didn't have to follow in my father's and my grandfather's footsteps when it came to marriage, remember? So a couple of years later, I figured I'd give it a try. I mean, after all, it was advice from Miss Overachiever herself. How could it be wrong?”

“Now, hold on one dang minute here.” She aimed the fork at him. “You can't blame me just because you chose to follow my perfectly good advice and then messed it up by picking the wrong woman.”