Ready & Willing (9 page)

“That last,” he said, sounding grateful she had supplied the word, since he hadn’t really known what to call it himself. “That means weird and dreamlike, doesn’t it?”

“Pretty much. So what happened after I left the other day?”

He seemed reluctant to go into detail, but began, “I had an appointment”—he stressed that word a little more than was actually necessary; somehow Audrey refrained from rolling her eyes—“with a client of mine. A man I’m representing on a real estate deal he’s developing downtown.”

Audrey nodded. “Edward Dryden.”

He said nothing to confirm or deny her assumption. Probably that client confidentiality thing, though she couldn’t see how his acknowledging the fact that Dryden was a client would violate any kind of confidentiality. He sidestepped an admission again when he asked, “How familiar are you with the development he’s completing on Main Street over the next three years?”

“I only know what I’ve read in the paper about it.”

What Audrey didn’t add was that she’d gone online last night and pilfered the archives of the
Courier-Journal
to read everything she could about both men and the deal they were pursuing together. Main Street was an up-and-coming area with significant renewal, renovation, and revitalization going on in some areas, and entirely new buildings going up in others. What Dryden Properties had planned would contribute to the latter. They wanted to open a shiny new complex that would encompass nearly a full city block, with retail and entertainment on the first two floors and expensive condos on the four upper floors. The design was in keeping with the historic feel of the area, but it would still draw young professionals and single urbanites who wanted to live and play near where they worked downtown.

Nathaniel Summerfield, who specialized in commercial law, was acting as Dryden’s attorney, since Dryden had recently parted ways with his previous counsel under circumstances that still weren’t clear to Audrey—or anyone else, judging by the tone of some of the articles she’d read. But Nathaniel had also invested heavily in the project himself. Though that wasn’t unusual, because he evidently had interests in a lot of downtown real estate and upcoming projects.

“So what was so surreal about the meeting?” Audrey asked now.

“It wasn’t the meeting itself,” he told her. “It was what happened afterward.”

She waited for him to go on, but he seemed to need prodding. So she prodded, “What happened afterward?”

He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it as if he wanted to give what he was going to say more thought. Audrey sat patiently and waited. She understood surreal. Surreal was her life at the moment. It did give one pause.

Finally, Nathaniel said, “Right after I finished signing the contracts with Edward, I felt this . . . sensation.”

“What kind of sensation?”

He lifted his hand to his chest, over his heart.
Or rather, what would have been his heart
, Audrey thought,
if he’d had one.

“Right here,” he said, his voice softer now.

“Like chest pains?”

“No. Like nothing I’ve ever felt before. I don’t really even know how to describe it.”

“Try.”

“Like something inside me just . . . disappeared,” he said, sounding genuinely mystified. “Nothing physical,” he hastened to add. “But something that was a part of me nonetheless. One minute it was there, and the next it just . . . dissolved. And then I was overcome by cold. And I’ve been cold ever since. I thought maybe the air conditioner here in the office was on the fritz, but the cold followed me to my car. Even when I turned on the heated seat—high—I couldn’t stop feeling cold. I’ve used an electric blanket the last two nights, but that didn’t help either. I’ve been drinking hot coffee constantly, but I still feel so damned cold.”

Wow. He actually sounded distressed. Maybe the guy wasn’t quite as loathsome as Audrey had first thought. Maybe he
did
have a soul. Or, at least,
had
had one. Before he’d gone and thrown it away by being a soulless, heartless jerk.

Okay, soulless jerk, she amended. Obviously he had a heart. Otherwise he wouldn’t be alive. He just hadn’t ever used his heart for the stuff it was supposed to be used for, that was all.

“But even worse than the cold feeling,” he said, “is the feeling that something is gone.”

“Like maybe a soul?” she asked.

He frowned at that and immediately dropped his hand back to the desk. Where his eyes had begun to show what looked very much like fear, they suddenly went flinty again. Anything that had made Nathaniel seem as if he might, maybe, possibly, perhaps believe what she’d told him and was open to change fled in that moment. And any hope Audrey had that there might, maybe, possibly, perhaps be hope for him went with it.

“I don’t believe in souls,” he said crisply, his voice as adamant now as it had been the day before. “Or heaven or hell or any other spiritual hoo-ha. When a person dies, he dies, and that’s the end of it.”

“Then stop talking to me and go schedule an EKG and echocardiogram,” she told him. When he said nothing in response and only continued to scowl at her mulishly, she continued, “The fact that you agreed to see me today after dismissing me as a lunatic two days ago means you must think on some level that what happened to you after I left has something to do with what I told you would happen a few hours earlier.”

He leaned back in his chair again, but there was something in his demeanor that suggested he didn’t feel nearly as relaxed as he was trying to look. “Is my PPO going to cover the charges for this psychiatric evaluation?” he asked. “Or is mental illness not covered by my healthcare provider?”

Amazingly, Audrey
didn’t
pick up the heavy onyx-and-rosewood desk set that was easily within her reach and hurl it at him. “Look, I don’t believe in eternal reward or damnation, either,” she ground out, “but I certainly believe something happens to us after we die, and I absolutely believe in souls. How can you not? What do you think makes people alive, if not a soul?”

He seemed taken aback by the question. “I don’t know. Some type of energy or something.”

She nodded. “Right. A soul.”

He made a face at that, but didn’t pursue it.

“Look, whatever you want to call it,” she said, “there’s something in people that makes them do more than live and breathe. Something that makes them human. It’s what gives them the capacity to feel joy and sorrow and anger and a host of other emotions. It’s what makes people grieve when they lose someone, what makes them fall in lo—” She stopped herself before concluding
fall in love in the first place
not entirely sure why she did. The ability to love was the most ultimate gift a soul enabled a person to enjoy. It felt almost sacrilegious to speak of it in anything other than hushed, reverent tones. Or speak of it at all in the presence of someone unworthy of the gift who probably didn’t believe in love, either.

“Souls are what make people human,” she said simply.

He muttered something indistinct under his breath that mostly sounded like he was snarling. Jeez, only two days without his soul, and he was already turning into an animal. No, worse than an animal. Because animals had souls.

She shook her head, losing patience now. “Either you believe me about this, Mr. Summerfield, or you don’t,” she said.

“I don’t,” he immediately assured her.

Audrey felt like snarling herself. She didn’t believe
him
when he said that. There must be some part of him that was open to further discussion about this, otherwise he would have had her tossed out on her keister. There had been three other people out in the reception area when she entered, and they’d all doubtless attained the nirvana of having an appointment.

But what was she supposed to do if he refused to acknowledge the possibility of something that was seemingly impossible? It would be pointless to stay here trying to convince him when he was clearly unwilling to be convinced. All it would do was make them both angrier at the other than they already were.

So, with a final sigh, she stood to leave, even going so far as to turn and take a few steps toward the door. But she couldn’t go without one last attempt to sway him. Spinning around, she tried to meet his gaze . . . but found he wasn’t looking at her face. Although he had stood when she had, his own gaze was still trained on a level with the chair, even as it had followed Audrey’s moving person. Meaning he had been looking at her ass as she made her way out. She should have been incensed. So why was that unwelcome heat splashing through her midsection again?

Because
you
need to find out if
your
healthcare provider covers mental illness,
she told herself. Honestly, this being haunted stuff wreaked havoc with a person’s sanity.

“Mr. Summerfield,” she said, feeling strangely disappointed when he lifted his gaze to look at her face. “I don’t know the details of this relationship you have with Edward Dryden, so I don’t know why this is true. But I do know that if you continue to represent him through whatever this project is, and if you profit from it, then you will lose your soul forever. As it is, right now, your soul is in a place that’s inaccessible to you. You can’t get it back by yourself. You need someone to help you.”

He said nothing for a moment, only studied her in a way that made it feel as if someone had doused the heat in her belly with gasoline. Then he asked, “Why should I even care about that? I mean, what difference does a soul make anyway? If it’s gone, the only thing I’ve suffered is being cold all the time. What I’ll gain from this arrangement with Edward is potentially worth tens of millions of dollars.”

Audrey’s shoulders slumped in defeat. Even if there was something reasonable about being haunted by this man’s angry, worried ancestor, there was no reasoning with a greedy SOB like Nathaniel Summerfield.

“Besides,” he continued, “I’ve already profited from this deal, Mrs. Magill. Edward paid me a hefty retainer up front, and I’ve billed him for nearly a hundred of hours of work I and my associates have performed on his behalf.”

“You can still rectify the situation,” she told him. “According to your great-great-however-many-greats grandfather . . .”

“This would be the grandfather who’s been rotting in his grave for decades?” Nathaniel asked, not even trying to hide the contempt in his voice.

Audrey bit back a sigh, feeling less angry and irritated now than she did weary and hopeless. “Yeah, that’s the one. Except he’s not the Summerfield who’s been rotting for years. Trust me.”

Nathaniel frowned at that. But all he said was, “And what pearls of wisdom fell from my grandfather’s cold, dead lips?”

“He’s not the Summerfield who’s cold, either,” she couldn’t help reminding him. Before he could snap back with another retort meant to discredit a man . . . ghost . . . whatever . . . whom Audrey held in eminently higher esteem, she continued, “He told me that until the development is completed, and those buildings go up, your soul is still salvageable. As long as there’s still time to undo what you’ve done, extricate yourself from Dryden, and make sure the project is scuttled, there’s still time to have your soul returned to you.”

To his credit, he hesitated before replying, almost as if he were honestly giving thought to what she said. Then, “Why would I undo what I’ve done?” he asked. “It’s going to make me very rich.”

Audrey straightened to her full height, which even in her highest pair of heels left her a good six inches shorter than he was. “Then you’d better invest in a lot of warm clothes. And you might want to brush up on your Dante. I hear the
Inferno
gets colder the deeper into the circles you go. And you, sir, are the kind of person who’s going to be going very deep indeed.”

Instead of being offended, Nathaniel smiled. A smile that was as lacking in warmth as he was himself. But all he said, as he extended a hand toward her the way men do when they want to shake hands and end an encounter, was, “Mrs. Magill, I’d like to say it’s been a pleasure.”

Yeah, he’d like to,
Audrey thought,
but he wouldn’t.

And he didn’t. He only added, “Please don’t come back . . .” He hesitated a telling moment before concluding, “. . . without an appointment.”

“Oh, believe me, Mr. Summerfield, I have no intention of ever coming here again.”

Not sure why she bothered, Audrey accepted his proffered hand, intending to give it a single, vigorous shake to illustrate her annoyance and then release it. But she was so startled by the way his expression changed when she closed her fingers over his—and even more startled by how cold his hand was—that she couldn’t bring herself to let go.

His skin was like ice. And probably not just his skin. That kind of coldness must go clear down to the bone. It was the sort of chill that made her start to feel cold, too. Then she realized no, that wasn’t true, that her own body heat began to warm his fingers as she held onto his hand. Not a lot, but there was definitely some improvement. Nathaniel seemed to notice it, too, which was probably what had caused him to suddenly seem so . . .

What? she wondered as she studied him back. Just what was that expression supposed to mean? What, exactly, was it that entered his eyes just then?

Nathaniel was no help, because he said nothing. Only parted his lips slightly and closed his fingers more snugly over hers.

Since the conversation seemed to be over—it had probably been over before she even walked into his office a second time—she pulled her hand from his and turned to leave. Or, rather, she tried to pull her hand from his and turn to leave. But instead of releasing her, Nathaniel gripped her fingers tighter and began to tug her closer.

“Mr. Summerfield,” Audrey said, tugging back, ignoring the way the heat in her belly suddenly blasted outward, filling her chest and her womb and parts of her best not thought about.