Someone to Love (11 page)

“Try me.”

“There’s something there in that house and I want to find it. Call it curiosity or maybe just boredom with writing the same old news stories. Whatever it is, I’ve been fascinated with that house since I was nine years old and I think you are too. The people who buy that house are a joke in this village. Some of them don’t last but six months. The estate agency makes bets on how long the new owners will stay. But you…” She trailed off.

“I’m different.”

“You certainly don’t seem to be afraid of whatever you’ve seen and heard in that house.”

“No, ghosts don’t scare me. What
does
scare me is the gossip of this town.”

Nigh gave him a puzzled look. “Why would you—” she began, but cut herself off, then smiled at him. “Do we have a deal? You show me yours, I’ll show you mine?” When Jace didn’t smile, she said, “Sorry. I’ll keep this businesslike. No more tasteless jokes.”

“Come by tonight and show me the retraction you’ve written. Have something to eat.”

“You mean we’ll eat Jamie? Oops, did it again.”

“Ah, yes, Mrs. Browne. I’ll have to ask her…not that she rules me, but she does rule the house. I mean…”

“I know exactly what you mean. Don’t worry about her. I can handle her.”

Jace walked back through the sitting room to the front door, then turned back to her. “What about your boyfriend?”

“He got married six months ago. He offered himself to me but I couldn’t bring myself to give up my life and career to be a housewife.”

“He wanted you to quit snooping in other people’s lives and when you refused he dumped you, didn’t he?”

“Flatter than—What is it that you Yanks say?”

“Flatter than a pancake. Flatter than road kill. Flatter than the lies you made up about me.”

“I’ll fix it,” she said, looking up at him through dark lashes.

“Is it the story you’re after or something else?”

The tone of his voice was unmistakable. “The story,” she said quickly, then smiled. “Don’t worry, I find you attractive enough in that brawny, overmuscled American way, but you’re not my type.”

“Good, you’re not mine either.” He stepped past her to the outside. “Let me think on this. Depending on how good your retraction is, I’ll think about doing some ghostbusting with you.”

“You know,” she said slowly, “the idea of turning Priory House into a tourist attraction would hide whatever you’re really doing.”

“I’ve had enough of people asking me for jobs. Say that I’m a writer. As for interior decoration, that’s not anyone’s business, is it?”

“You own the big house, so everything you do is newsworthy.” She was smiling at him in a way that he was sure had made lots of men desire her, but he didn’t smile back.

Turning, Jace got in his car and drove away.

F
ive minutes after Jace left, Nigh was on the phone to her best friend, Kelly Graham.

“Well?” Kelly said as soon as she picked up the phone, not bothering to ask who it was. She’d been waiting for Nigh’s call for over an hour. “How did it go?”

“Perfectly,” Nigh said.

“Yes? Go on. Tell me every word.”

“He was pretty upset about what I wrote.”

“I don’t blame him. You were OTT. Very, very OTT. What in the world got into you? You accused him of some awful things, and now everybody in the village thinks he’s going to make them rich.”

Nigh looked down at her desk and couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Uh-oh. What’s that silence about?”

“Nothing,” Nigh said. “I was just looking at my notes.”

“No, you’re not. Nigh! What’s going on?”

“Nothing, really. He was just different than I thought he was going to be, that’s all. It’s unsettled me a bit.”

“Different? Unsettled? What are you talking about?”

“Let’s just say that some of the boys down at the pub are going to hear from me. I was told some things that weren’t exactly true.”

“Such as?”

“That the new tenant of Priory House was a drunk, a lout, a rich boy who’d never worked a day in his life, and generally stupid.”

“I see.”

“What does that mean?” Nigh asked.

“You liked him, didn’t you?”

“I can’t say I really
liked
him, but he was more interesting than anyone I’ve met since I returned here.”

“Local boys hold no interest for you? What about David?”

“David is a lawyer, he lives in London, and I’ve been out with him a total of three times.”

“Is that why he called four times while I was there yesterday?”

When Nigh didn’t answer, Kelly said, “So help me, Nigh, if you don’t talk to me I’m going to wake the kids up from their naps and drag them over there with me. You have never experienced hell until you’ve been surrounded by three kids who haven’t had their naps.”

“Yeah, okay, I liked him. Is that what you wanted to hear me say? But he wasn’t interested in me. In fact, I think he may hate me.”

“After what you wrote about him? How could that happen? So what are you going to do now?”

“Move in with him, I hope.”

“Excuse me?”

“Something big is going on at Priory House and I mean to find out what it is. Look, I have to go. I need to talk to some people, then I’m…I don’t know what I’m going to do next, but I have to figure it out. I’ll call you later.” She hung up before Kelly could ask another question.

Nigh got into her yellow Mini Cooper and drove into the village. She had a vague plan of confronting Lewis and Ray and telling them just what she thought of their little prank. But the truth was that it was Nigh’s own fault. Had she been away from Margate so long that she’d forgotten how the village worked? Lewis and Ray had been the school prats, horrible boys who thought it was funny to glue a kid’s homework to his desk, or to put indelible marker on a kid’s face. They never did anything really bad, meaning they’d never burned any buildings down, but their idea of a practical joke had caused a lot of tears.

What had made Nigh think that now that they were grown and had kids of their own that they had become upstanding citizens? Two nights ago, she’d sat in the café and listened to them go on and on about the Yank who had taken over Priory House. Nigh had flown in from the Middle East just the night before. She was nearly comatose with jet lag, and she’d listened to the boys—she couldn’t think of them as men—as they told her their “fears” for the sweet little village of Margate. At the time, her weary mind had confused the problems in the Middle East with the “problems” in an English village.

Now she was seeing what she’d been told for what it was: revenge served cold. In the sixth grade, she’d seen Lewis taunting a first grader and Nigh had hit him in the nose so hard he had to be taken home. Like the bullies they were, neither of the boys ever again bothered Nigh or anyone else when she was around.

So they got her back at last. It had taken years, but they did it.

When she got to Lewis’s house, she slowed down, meaning to turn into his driveway, but she didn’t. To bawl him out would give him no end of pleasure.

Instead, she found herself on the road to Aylesbury. Every piece of clothing she owned was worn out and stained. And her shoes weren’t much better. And she needed a new tube of mascara, and maybe a lipstick or two. Maybe she’d take a little time off and do some shopping.

Nigh arrived at Priory House at ten minutes to seven. Jace hadn’t given her a time for dinner, but she knew that Americans ate early. She pulled into the courtyard and tried to still the butterflies in her stomach. This was, of course, preposterous. Twice in her life she’d been in places where bombs were going off, so why was something like having dinner with this American making her nervous?

She looked down at her dress. It was a deep blue silk, cut on the bias, and fit like a second skin. It was made by some designer Nigh had never heard of, but who the clerk assured her was “famous.” And her heels had to be at least four inches high. Her ankle twisted on the gravel as she headed toward the front door, but she quickly righted herself.

As Nigh walked under the archway, she hesitated. Which door should she use? She was an invited guest, so she should use the front door. On the other hand, she was a resident of the village and she’d been there as a child, which made the kitchen entrance more likely.

For a moment she gritted her teeth. Was she insane? She had twice eaten dinner at Buckingham Palace, yet here she was…okay, she thought, admit it, Nigh, you’re scared of Mrs. Browne.

“I’m not going to be,” she said aloud, then started for the front door. Before she reached it, Mrs. Browne appeared out of nowhere.

“Use the front door now, do we?” Mrs. Browne asked. “And all tarted up too, I see. The American strike your fancy? Going after him now, are you?”

“I have been invited to dinner,” Nigh said, her nails cutting into her palms. “Mr. Montgomery invited me and—”

“He didn’t tell me he was invitin’ anybody, but it’s not my place to ask. If he’d’ve told me he’d asked
you,
I’d’ve told him a thing or two. What a nasty bit you wrote about him in the paper. It’s a wonder he didn’t use an American gun on you. That’s what they do in America, you know. Shoot you. But it’s nothin’ to me what he does on his own time. Or who he does it with.”

“Where is he?” Nigh asked, her teeth clenched, torn between wanting to use her fists on the horrid little woman and running to hide in her mother’s skirts.

“Out in the stone round, he is. You do remember where that is, don’t you? You used to snoop around here well enough when you were a child, so you should remember. This place was a trainin’ school to you, weren’t it? I hear you snoop all over the world now.”

This is ridiculous! Nigh thought and took the slump out of her shoulders. “That I do. I snoop everywhere, so maybe I’ll just tell Mr. Montgomery what happened to the brandy that was supposed to come with this house. You and your old girlfriends still filling the empty bottles with cold tea?”

Mrs. Browne put her nose in the air and stalked away.

“Great, Nightingale,” Nigh muttered. “That’s two enemies you’ve made in one day. You should have stopped at Lewis’s house, bawled him out, and made it three.”

High heels were not made for walking across soft English lawns. After the third time she sunk down to her heels, she took the shoes off and carried them. The “stone round” that Mrs. Browne referred to was the local name for a beautiful eighteenth-century stone gazebo. It had a round floor, columns, and a beautiful domed top. At least it had once been beautiful. The last time she saw it, Hatch was using it to store plastic bags full of greensand.

As she walked through the trees, down the little-used path toward the gazebo, she had a lovely idea. What if Montgomery had set up dinner in the gazebo? Candlelight, a damask-covered table. Would he serve oysters? What delectable thing from Jamie Oliver had Mrs. Browne prepared for tonight? As hateful as the woman was, she was a renowned cook.

Smiling, Nigh contemplated the evening ahead. In spite of the bad that had gone on between her and Jace Montgomery, she’d felt the physical attraction. He was a very good-looking man and she was, well…she wasn’t bad to look at either. So maybe he had forgiven her about the newspaper, and maybe he was ready for something a little more personal to begin…

When Nigh stepped through the trees and saw the gazebo, it wasn’t what she’d hoped for. Jace Montgomery was there with what looked like a machete and he was clearing away years of vines and weeds. He was drenched in sweat and what skin was showing from under his dirty shirt was grimy.

When he saw Nigh, he looked startled, as though he’d forgotten their dinner date, but then a slow smile spread over his face. Forgotten or not, obviously, she had misinterpreted his invitation. He’d meant sandwiches and a bottle of beer, while she had taken him to mean a tuxedo in the moonlight. Nigh felt over-dressed, foolish, and extremely embarrassed. She wanted to say that she was going to a party afterward and that’s why she was dressed up, but she didn’t. She did hide her high heels behind her back.

“You brought the retraction,” Jace said. “You can put it over there. Sorry if I don’t stop, but…” He trailed off as he shrugged in the general direction of the mess surrounding the gazebo.

“No, sure,” she mumbled, wishing she could sink into the ground and disappear. She should, of course, leave, but she’d have to go past Mrs. Browne’s windows. To be seen that she, Nigh, had thought she’d been invited to a real, sit-down dinner but wasn’t would be too humiliating. To be fair to herself, usually, when men asked her out they made an effort.

She watched him slash at some vines and pull them off the stone work. “Ann’s grandfather built that.”

“Did he? Nice man?” he asked.

“No. None of Ann’s male ancestors were nice.” Jace was tugging on a vine, but she could see that it was caught on a pillar. She thought it was possible that the vines were stronger than the marble. Pull too hard and the whole thing could collapse—on them.

She dropped her shoes into the grass and removed a pair of garden shears from the nearby wheelbarrow. “Wait,” she said, then stepped onto the floor in her bare feet and began to cut the vines that clung to the column. Unfortunately, some of them were beginning to take root, so she had to use her nails to disengage them. So much for that afternoon’s manicure.

Jace held the vines and pulled as she loosened them. “So what was the grandfather like?”

Nigh thought for a moment. “I think his death tells everything. He drowned when he was just twenty-eight years old. He made a bet with another young man that he could swim across the lake underwater. They all waited for him to come up, but he didn’t. Seems he got his foot caught in a pile of old bricks that were buried at the bottom of the lake. His father had thrown the bricks in there so the lake would require less water to fill it. He left everything to his only child, Ann’s father, who was only four years old. Not a penny was left to his young wife, yet the will required her to live in Priory House. He didn’t want to leave a rich widow behind. Mother and child ended up living in just a few rooms and had only two people to help them take care of this whole place.”

“Ah, the English love of primogeniture,” Jace said, pulling on the vines as Nigh cut them away from the column.

“Don’t knock it. It’s kept the big estates intact. Ow!” She sucked at her finger where a vine had lashed back and cut it.

“You’re going to ruin your dress if you do that,” Jace said. “Why don’t you just leave what you wrote, I’ll read it later, and call you.”

Nigh gave him a little smile. For one thing, she hadn’t written anything down. Trying on shoes and dresses, then having wet nail polish precluded writing something she didn’t want to write in the first place. Second, she’d rather die than go past Mrs. Browne’s kitchen windows and let her see that she had not been invited for dinner after all. “No, that’s okay,” she said. “It’s been a long day and I could use the exercise.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. A truly rotten day. You should have seen what I read about myself in the newspaper this morning.”

For a moment Nigh looked at him in astonishment, then she gave a tiny smile. She wasn’t about to laugh out loud. His tone was deadpan, so hers could be too. “Yeah, well, I imagine you can handle whatever is dished out to you.”

“You’re right. At first I was in such a rage that all I could think about was lawyers, but then I calmed down and decided there were other ways to handle the problem. I put up six notices in town that the writer of the article was taking applications and interviewing for the twenty-eight jobs that would be available at the new Priory House Ghost Center.”

“You didn’t,” Nigh whispered.

“’Fraid so.” He smiled at her.

“I think I may be sick,” she said.

Jace unbuttoned his sweaty shirt, removed it, and handed it to her. “In that case, you’d better cover up your new dress.”

Nigh just stood there looking at his bare upper torso, at what seemed to be acres of sun-bronzed muscles. What did he do all day? Wrestle bulls? That’s the only thing that would account for a body like that. He said nothing, but smiled at her in a knowing way. Nigh took his shirt and looked away. She was damned if she was going to let him see what she thought of his six-pack abs.