The Trouble with Magic (Loveswept) (2 page)

Did he sail? Payton’s eyes shifted from the dinghy bobbing dockside to Harriet’s face. Was she kidding? Of course, he’d sailed before—he lived in Tampa for crissake! But it wasn’t his favorite form of transportation. He had a landlubber’s soul and preferred to be in contact with solid ground at all times. But, be that as it may, on the occasions when water jaunts couldn’t be avoided, he generally consumed a fistful of motion-sickness pills and always,
always
made sure the vessel was considerably bigger than his Uncle Farnsworth’s shoe!

His gaze darted to the vast expanse of choppy, fitful water before him and then back to the catboat.

“Ships sail, Ms. Wheaton,” he said. “I doubt this toy would get fifty feet out before it capsized.”

“It’s perfectly safe,” she assured him with a smile. “I came across this morning in it. Truly.”

“Yes, well, if I’d realized that you were planning an adventure for this afternoon, I would have taken your suggestion to change my clothes. As it is, I’d rather not spend the rest of the day drenched to the bone. Perhaps there’s something else available. ...” he said, looking around, leaving little doubt as to whether he was making a request or delivering an imperative to change boats.

She turned, and he followed her wistful gaze to an exquisite thirty-foot yawl in a slip across the way.

“Yes. That’s more like it,” he said, much relieved.

She laughed softly. “Well, at least you know beautiful when you see it,” she said, bending to cast off the dinghy.

“Can’t you sail a boat that size?” he asked, frowning as the line slipped from the mooring ring. He rubbed the dimenhydrinate patch at the base of his neck and wished he had applied two. It was a precaution he’d taken earlier, knowing that where there was an island, there was also water and that inevitably he’d be crossing it. “My experience is limited but if you refresh my memory, I think I could be a pretty good first mate.”

She moved to the second line without comment.

“Think of it, Ms. Wheaton,” he said, coaxing her. “You’d be in the enviable position of giving me orders for however long it takes us to get to the island and back. I have employees who’d give their right arms for an opportunity like this.”

She looked up and was greeted with a wide, teasing grin that tickled her insides into knots. She laughed.

“I admit it’s tempting, Mr. Dunsmore. I knew I’d live to regret selling that boat.”

“You sold it?”

“I have debts to pay,” she said simply.

He glanced back at the yawl with its polished brass fittings and glossy planking. Its name,
Enchantment,
was proudly painted in brilliant white across the transom. One couldn’t be Payton Dunsmore IV for thirty-six years without developing an acute sense of material worth somewhere along the way. He knew a prized treasure when he saw one, and he intuitively knew the price she’d paid to sell it.

“Maybe we could rent it for the afternoon,” he said, thinking it would be a treat for her, as well as his salvation.

“Would you rent out a boat like that?” she asked, sure of his answer.

He looked to the yawl and then back at the catboat. He loathed the idea of exposing his fears to the woman, giving her an upper hand. He’d rather die than show her any weakness—and very likely would if he didn’t. He opened his mouth to speak and closed it again.

“Trust me, Mr. Dunsmore. I’ll take you out to the island, safe and sound, and I won’t even get your shoes wet.”

She was smiling that beguiling little lopsided smile, and the crazy little curls about her face were whipping innocently in the wind. The glasses and her big dark eyes fairly screamed of her dependability and trustworthiness. He knew better than to rely on her, but ...

“I want a life jacket,” he said.

She smiled at him and sighed with relief.

P
AYTON DUNSMORE WASN’T AS IGNORANT
of sailing as he’d led her to believe, she noticed quickly. They sailed at a close reach, across the wind at a right angle. Instinctively, he felt the change in the wind, knew when to bow to the boom and when to shift his weight for balance. He watched her closely for a while before visibly beginning to relax and seeming almost to enjoy the ride. Almost.

She lowered her gaze, too amused to look at him. Were his earlier qualms due to the size of the dinghy? Or because her sailing skills were an unknown to him? Or to the simple fact that he was about to lose control of the situation?

She had a feeling that Payton Dunsmore was a man who made a point of always being in control—of his business, of his life, of his emotions. Part of her giggled while the rest of her shuddered to think of his reaction when he discovered exactly how much control he’d relinquished to her when he’d stepped into her boat.

An affable silence settled over them. Both were introspective; both were aware of the other—though Payton’s attention was divided by the profuse amount of water and the way it rolled and pitched and tossed the tiny boat. Harriet would direct his attention to prominent points of interest and relate a bit of the history of each. He would nod and take note.

It was a piece of good fortune that he was better looking—more human looking than he’d looked in his pictures, she mused, admiring his strong profile as he watched Cedar Island growing small in the distance behind them. If push came to shove, and she was forced to carry out her plan, his good looks were going to make everything so much easier.

She liked his thick dark hair. And she liked that he was due for a haircut. A small riot of curls behind his ears was in dire need of being clipped back into perfection—to match the impeccable fit of his suit and the shine of his shoes. She was warming to the idea that he wasn’t the immaculate, flawless man he appeared to be.

A wave broke and a sudden gust of wind sent a spray of water into his face. She shrugged and grimaced apologetically. He was oblivious to the smile he sent her in return.

It wasn’t half bad, sailing open waters in something the size of a standard bathtub. As a matter of fact, the ride was so smooth that if he didn’t think about it, he could think of other things.

For example, he couldn’t get over his impression that she was perhaps the most beautiful woman he’d ever come across. It was ludicrous. His women were generally of the ravishing variety—strikingly attractive faces, luscious bodies, benign personalities. The nicest thing he could say about Harriet Wheaton was that she was a troublemaker with an ordinary body and an interesting face.

Still, his fingers were itching to touch her. When their eyes met there was a peculiar clutching in his belly that he couldn’t remember experiencing since his high school days. There was even a strange euphoric sensation in his chest when he’d catch glimpses of her with the wind in her face and the excitement of sailing in her dark, dark eyes. It was very queer.

“Jovette Island is up ahead there,” she called to him over the sound of rushing wind and lapping waves. He turned to look. “When we’re close enough, we’ll come about to get a better view of the house.”

The island was almost a mile long at its furthest points and forty acres at its widest. Like most of the other one thousand eight hundred-odd islands in the strait, its slopes were thickly quilled with pines and hardwoods. And along with so many of its neighbors, it had become part of a playground for the rich in the late eighteen hundreds.

Payton had all the data. Jovette Island boasted a soaring Victorian manor with twenty-three rooms, eight bathrooms, jutting towers and turrets, a veranda and a gazebo. But its history went back further than the house’s architecture for it also had a small log cabin preserved on the northeastern, the Canadian, side of the island.

The house had a two-color slate roof and was dark olive-green, trimmed in gold and terra-cotta on the bargeboards, scalloped friezes, and porch brackets, with just a touch of Indian red here and there for accent.

“Those are the original colors, aren’t they?” he asked, turning to look at her with some degree of respect.

He was certainly no authority, but somewhere along the way, he’d heard that most Victorian homes had been painted white in later years to impress people with their unique lines and size. However, true Victorians, were not only colorful in their thinking and in their life styles, but also in the tints they applied to their homes.

“Yes, they are,” she called back, equally impressed with his knowledge of Victorian architecture. He had nice hands, too, she noticed distractedly. Big hands. If he were to touch a woman with those hands, the woman would know it, from the roots of her hair to her toenails, she’d know it. “My father did it,” she said abruptly.

“What?”

“The house was white once,” she said. Making a sweeping gesture with her hand, she added, “Like all the others. But my father was a bit of an amateur historian. And of course he came to love the house, so he restored it after my mother died. People said he was crazy to paint it those colors, but I love it.”

“Why after your mother died? Wouldn’t she have approved?”

She shrugged. “I’m not sure. I always thought it was more a matter of not wanting to hurt her feelings by changing too many things on the island. ... It was her island, you see. Then it was mine.”

“Not your father’s?”

“He wasn’t a Jovette.”

“Neither are you.”

She laughed. “It’s a blood thing. My ancestors were French,” she shouted over the wind and water, grinning. “Blood’s very important to the French, you know.”

“Well, I do now,” he said, shaking his head and turning back to look at the house, revamping it in his mind.

With no little skill, she maneuvered the tiny boat into irons, into the wind, several boat lengths from the dock and let the wind act as a brake, bringing it to a standstill close to the mooring rings. He jumped out while she brought the sail down and then tossed him a line.

“So? Are your shoes wet?” she asked, coming to stand next to him on the dock. They both looked down at his still shiny—and still dry—shoes. “I’m glad I didn’t say anything about your hair or your jacket.”

He looked up into her eyes and felt the clutching in his abdomen again. He knew an overpowering urge to reach out, grab her into his arms, and kiss the smirk off her face—and then he wanted to slap himself back to his senses. Was he losing his mind?

“They’re not too bad,” he admitted, checking both jacket and hair with one hand. Then, feeling incredibly magnanimous, he added, “You’re a fine sailor.”

“Thank you,” she said, pleased by his praise.

They stood on the dock, staring hard at each other for a long moment before an awkwardness set in and they looked off in different directions.

“I ... I suppose we could start the tour here,” she said, pointing. “The boat house has three slips. It’s weather tight. The roof was new four years ago.”

“What about this dock?” he asked.

She shrugged, and he watched her eyebrows raise in that intriguing little quirk of hers.

“The piling’s been the same for as long as I can remember, though I recall my father replacing some of the boards after a storm once or twice.” She stomped her foot twice. “I believe it’s very solid.”

He nodded, and she turned to lead the way up to the house. The dock ended at a small rock ledge cut into the side of the hill. From there, broad, shallow steps had been carved into the granite foundation of the island in a zigzag, forming an S to the top of the bluff.

All along the path the shrubs and trees grew thick and plentiful, and he imagined that in the warmer months the underbrush would be lush and lavish as well. The deciduous trees stood tall and ancient and bare of life at the moment, but they, too, added only splendor to the possibilities he was envisioning.

A low rock wall circled the cliff that looked down on the cove sheltering the boat house and dock from harsh weather. Between it and the flagstone patio in front of the house was an entire field of neatly clipped grass and carefully tended flower gardens.

“I accept your apology,” he said, looking around with an appraising eye.

“For what?” she asked, startled.

“For not asking me here in the summer or fall, when this place must be spectacular.”

She smiled, again affected by his praise.

“We call it the Bride’s Garden because the women of my family have always tended it, and until my mother, of course, all the women came here as brides.”

“No male heir, huh?” he said, walking across the lawn toward the house.

“Well, yes, there was a son before my grandfather died. But my mother’s brother was killed in Germany during World War II, and my grandmother, a Jovette by marriage herself, had no one else to leave it to but my mother.”

“Then she married a Wheaton, and the island eventually came to you.”

“Right.”

“And up until you, it’s always belonged to a Jovette?”

“Since the early sixteen hundreds, yes.”

He stopped cold. “That’s over three hundred years.”

She turned grave eyes on him. “I know that, Mr. Dunsmore.”

Attempting to hang on to a legacy that was three hundred years old would undoubtedly be an awesome responsibility—certainly one he found difficult to imagine, his own family being a mishmash of steprelatives and in-laws. There was a tightening in his chest, and he encountered a wave of sympathy for her before he pushed it aside and reminded himself that her indebtedness was none of his doing.

“You know,” he said slowly, his expression wary. “I’d be reluctant to mention this, except that I’m sure it’s already occurred to you, but with everything else you’ve done to interfere with the sale of this island, why didn’t you try to get it declared an historical landmark?”

She shook her head and started across the stone terrace to the front door. “I’d have to open it to the public, and then it might as well be a resort.” She spoke as if resort were another name for Den of Iniquity. “It’s a home, Mr. Dunsmore. Not a tourist trap.”

He could have let her comments pass, he had a vague understanding of her feelings for the place, but ...

“I don’t know,” he said, stepping into the house behind her and taking a slow appreciative survey of the spacious foyer, the graceful curve of the staircase to the second floor, the highly polished antiques. “I don’t seem to be having any trouble seeing this as a small, intimate lobby ... maybe a quiet little bar in this room over here and ... How big is the dining room, Ms. Wheaton?”