Ready & Willing (20 page)

“I don’t recognize this word ‘suburb,’ ” Silas said.

“That’s because you’re not a baby boomer,” Audrey told him.

He started to say he didn’t recognize that phrase, either, then feared she would throw out something else he didn’t understand, so refrained. It was amazing how much language could change in only a few generations. But then, having looked around Audrey’s house and watched her use the things she used so matter-of-factly, particularly the computer, and having looked out the windows at the varying modes of transportation available and the speeds at which they traveled, he realized it wasn’t just language that had changed so drastically.

He wondered again about his fate, once Audrey succeeded in helping his great-great-et-cetera grandson. Even if he could continue to haunt her house and be a part of this brave, new world in some way, did he really want to be? There was nothing in this time that harked back to his own. Even his old house bore no resemblance to the place he had called home. Her music was different, her fashions were different, the ways she entertained and expressed herself were different. The sounds, smells, and sights of his time had been replaced by new ones, as had the customs, practices, and laws. In the seventy-some years that had passed since his death, the entire world had become a place he never could have imagined. Did he truly wish to remain in such an alien environment?

He watched Cecilia sip her champagne once more, noting the way she again closed her eyes as she did so, as if it might enhance her relishing of the experience. He watched the way she sighed with delight and smiled once she’d completed the action, as if such a simple pleasure brought her the utmost joy one could find. And he wondered how much pleasure, how much joy, she had been denied in her life.

Perhaps, he thought, there were some things that didn’t progress. Some things that never changed, no matter how sophisticated and technologically advanced society grew. The enjoyment of champagne, for example. The pleasure of looking at a beautiful woman. The satisfaction that came with quiet conversation. The contentment of agreeable company. None of those had been altered by evolution, not really. Oh, the champagne may have been cold water in primitive times, and the conversation little more than grunting, but the pleasure received was the same, no matter the era or the age. Human beings, regardless of when and how they lived, had always claimed the same requirements. Nourishment and companionship. And if one was very, very lucky, that nourishment would include finer things like champagne, and that companionship would flourish into love.

“I need to tally the sales and make the bank deposit,” Audrey said, her very down-to-earth statement pulling Silas’s head out of the stars.

“Go ahead,” Cecilia told her. “I’ll clean up down here.”

“And I shall keep her company while she does,” Silas volunteered.

Both women opened their mouths to say something, then both closed them at the same time. Audrey only nodded mutely in a way that could have meant anything, and Cecilia smiled silently in a way that meant nothing.

Another vacant smile, Silas noted with something akin to anger. But it wasn’t anger for her. It was for whoever the bastard was who had robbed her of so much. Maybe, he thought, he did still have work to do here. Work that didn’t include his great-great-et-cetera grandson. Work that might, perhaps, take rather a long time to complete.

 

WHEN CECILIA HEARD SILAS’S ASSURANCE THAT HE
would keep her company while she closed up, a ruffle of something fuzzy and flittery skittered up her spine that she’d thought she would never feel again. It was that feeling a thirteen-year-old experienced when she caught the cute boy in school looking at her, the feeling a sixteen-year-old experienced the first time she kissed the boy she’d been crushing on for months, the feeling a twenty-six year-old experienced when . . .

Well. When a handsome man said he would keep her company while she closed up shop. The fact that the handsome man in question just happened to be invisible was beside the point.

The point was that, for the first time in a long, long time, Cecilia was interacting with a man who didn’t make her hyperventilate—in a bad way, she meant. In fact, she was interacting with him in a manner that made her breath catch in her chest in a way that felt kind of nice. She almost did feel like she was thirteen again and the cute boy in school was looking at her. The feeling was that innocent, that pure, that sweet. At thirteen, she’d been a happy, carefree kid who embraced all sorts of romantic notions about love. By twenty-six, every last one of those notions had been dashed and battered and trampled to bits. If it took a ghost to make her feel like a dreamy adolescent again, then . . .

She sighed and enjoyed another sip of her champagne. Okay, so maybe the fact that Silas was invisible
was
the point. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that, for the first time in years, Cecilia wasn’t frightened of a man. And if that was because the man was insubstantial and lived with someone else and would probably only be around long enough for him to rescue the soul of one of his descendants, at least it was something.

She turned her attention to the shop and smiled. The place was a wreck. But that was good, because it meant they’d been inundated with customers, and the majority of them had made purchases. Cecilia and Audrey had worked shoulder-to-shoulder from the moment the latter had unlocked the front door, often literally, helping customers choose hats. Many of the women who’d shopped today had even bought two hats, since many of them attended both the Derby and the Oaks, the race run by fillies the day before Derby. And it went without saying that a woman couldn’t wear the same hat or dress to
both
races. That would be an unforgivable faux pas in Louisville.

Derby hats might be a seasonal business, Cecilia thought, but having guesstimated the sales figure for today alone, she knew Audrey would be
juuust fiiine
covering her annual expenses.

She shook her head at the amounts some of the women had paid. Four figures, many of them had added to their credit cards today. More than a thousand dollars for hats, of all things. Of course, they were
gorgeous
hats, into which she knew Audrey put
a lot
of work. But they were still hats. And when Cecilia thought about what a thousand dollars could also buy, things like food and clothing and a roof over one’s head . . .

She sighed. Ah, well. Hers was not to judge others. People who worked hard deserved to be paid well, and if that wasn’t always the case, it wasn’t up to her to criticize. If she had a thousand dollars to blow on hats, she’d do it, too. Probably. And it wasn’t like she hadn’t lived
very
well when she lived with Vincent. He’d opened accounts for her in all the chic downtown boutiques, had bought expensive jewelry for her birthday and Christmas, let her drive one of his Mercs whenever she wanted. And his penthouse had claimed every luxury a person could want, from the Sub-Zero fridge to the cedar sauna.

Of course, there had been that small matter of him controlling every aspect of her life the whole time she was with him—even if she hadn’t realized that at first. And his domineering and his ugly mood swings. And then the back of his hand. And her being absolutely terrified of him there toward the end.

She wondered how many other women were trapped in the same situation? Maybe even one of the women who had been in the shop today—maybe more than one—whom Cecilia had so envied for the ability to spend so much so frivolously. To the outside world, Cecilia’s life in San Francisco would have looked pretty damned good. She’d been envied by a lot of women, having come to work for Vincent’s restaurant right out of cooking school and catching the rich boss’s eye right off the bat. She’d had nothing when she met him. She’d never known her father, and her mother disappeared when she was sixteen. She’d spent the two years before college in a foster home and had gone to Berkeley on a handful of scholarships and by working three jobs.

When she started working for Vincent, she’d been living in a tiny apartment in a crappy neighborhood and had had to rely on the BART to get around. Two months later, she was living in his penthouse and driving his cars, wearing the diamond earrings he’d bought for her and arraying herself in Badgley Mischka. Hell, Cecilia would have envied herself, too.

She pushed the thought away and tried to think about something besides San Francisco and Vincent Strayer and what her life had once been. Her life wasn’t that anymore, and it would never be that again. She was utterly content to remain alone for the rest of her days. It was infinitely preferable to being with the wrong man. And any man was the wrong man, as far as she was concerned.

She drained the last of her champagne and went about tidying up, always feeling Silas’s presence, even if neither of them said a word. After returning hats to their proper places and straightening up the displays, she went to the small room at the back of the shop where Audrey kept the bits of ribbon, lace, and accessories that her clients used to design their own hats. It hadn’t gotten as messy today as she would have expected, probably because Audrey had enough orders now for custom hats that she was no longer able to guarantee delivery of those by Derby day, two weeks hence. Someone had carried an already-completed hat in here, though, Cecilia saw, and set it on a shelf. So after setting the room to rights, she took the hat back out to the living room/showroom to try and figure out where it went.

Ah. Right there. On the empty display stand by the secretary. There was a big gilt mirror hanging near it, and as she passed it, she couldn’t quite keep herself from trying on the hat, to see how it would look on her. There were some women who couldn’t wear hats successfully, even if both the woman and hat in question were beautiful. Sometimes it was because something about their faces simply did not accommodate headwear. Other times, it was because they simply didn’t have the right attitude. Not that most hats required a good deal of sass or sophistication, but a woman needed at least a little audacity.

Cecilia wouldn’t have thought she would be suited to a hat like the one she held, a pale, frilly number piled with yellow silk roses that were topped with white ostrich feathers, and sporting a brim that was wide enough to put out someone’s eye if she wasn’t careful. After all, she hadn’t been audacious since . . . ever. But she was delighted to discover that the moment she perched the hat on her head, she was transformed. In a good way. The yellow color gave her complexion a mellow tone and brought out flecks of gold in her brown eyes. She tilted her head one way, then the other, putting the feathers into softly moving motion, and that made her smile. A few more turns of the head and she might very well take flight.

“You look lovely, Cecilia.”

Silas’s voice, coming from directly behind her, made her jump. He’d been so quiet that she’d figured he must have drifted off. Literally, since that was what ghosts did. She turned slowly around and saw nothing—not that she was surprised by that—but smiled at the place where she suspected he stood. Closer than she would have thought she would be comfortable with, but making her in no way uncomfortable.

“Thank you,” she said. Then she swiftly removed the hat from her head and repositioned the lacy ribbon she’d used to tie back her hair. Hair that was so short, it didn’t need ribbon to hold it back. Hair she’d wanted to make look nice for her first day on the job. Because why else would she have bothered with a frivolous decoration like that?

“Don’t take the hat off on my account,” Silas told her. “You do look lovely in it. It reminds me of the sort of thing women wore in my time. Except that on them, I always thought such hats a ridiculous affectation. You, however, carry it off with aplomb.”

She chuckled at that, a nervous sound, and fiddled with one of the roses, as if it were loose, even though it wasn’t. Strangely, her nervousness wasn’t because she was in the presence of someone male who, however invisible he might be, had the potential to hurt her. It was because she was in the presence of someone male who, however invisible he might be, didn’t alarm her at all. Even stranger, she was beginning to think that wasn’t because he was invisible.

“I don’t think I’m much of a hat person,” she told him, setting the hat carefully back on its stand.

“I disagree,” he replied. “You have a beautiful face. And it’s made more beautiful when it’s properly attired.”

She blushed at that. No one had ever called her beautiful before. Not even Vincent, when he was trying to coax her into having sex when she wasn’t in the mood. He’d used other words to describe her and her body parts, words he’d thought were erotic and arousing but which had made her feel dirty and cheap. When she’d told him that, though, and asked him to stop, he’d only laughed and pushed her back onto the bed and crammed his tongue into her mouth. Maybe if he’d called her beautiful instead, he wouldn’t have had to do that.

Again, she pushed thoughts of Vincent away. He didn’t bear thinking about anymore.

“It’s nice of you to say that, Silas,” she told him. “Thank you.”

“I wasn’t being nice,” he said. “I was being honest.”

His voice was warm velvet when he spoke, something that fired sparks of heat through her entire body. Telling herself she was just trying to change the subject, and that she really didn’t have any interest in his answer other than that, she asked, “What were the women of your time like?”

She heard him sigh. “They weren’t like you and your employer, of that much I am certain.” He hesitated, and when he spoke again, his voice was thoughtful. “Although perhaps I speak too quickly when I say that. Women of my time were, like women of your time, of varying types and conditions. Although the majority were not like you and Audrey, there were a marked number who were strong-natured and claimed many admirable traits.”

She smiled at that. “And to you, an admirable trait would be . . . what?”