How to Run with a Naked Werewolf (33 page)

Deacon Whitney ran a billion-dollar company and he still wore comic book hero T-shirts.

And of course he would show up before she was fully recovered from a siege of vomiting and possible hallucinations. As the helicopter and its hair-wrecking winds disappeared into the horizon, she did her best to straighten her mussed clothes and look presentable. She took one last breath-freshening sip of her soda and followed the others to greet Mr. Whitney.

Deacon was all long, lean limbs and angular lines, with high, sharp cheekbones and a jawline most matinee idols would sell their mothers for. But his hair was a shaggy, curling mess of light brown, completing the “disgraced aristocrat” look as much as the rumpled business casual clothes. Much as he had when they’d first met at his corporate offices, Deacon gave Nina the immediate impression of being uncomfortable with his surroundings. He’d covered it quickly enough, with easy, unaffected charm and firm handshakes all around, but Nina recognized the look of someone who was stressed and uneasy. She’d seen it in the mirror every morning for months.

Despite the kindred twinge she felt for another neurotic, she was determined to stay as far away as possible from Deacon Whitney. She’d dealt with easy charm before. She’d had more than her fair share of men whose money made the world go round, who thought they were so damn smooth they could lie to your face and get away with it. Nina had no interest in falling prey to that brand of man again, even if it came wrapped in a yummy, geek-chic package.

Jake stepped close and whispered something in Deacon’s ear. Deacon frowned and glanced at Nina. Suddenly self-conscious, she combed her fingers through her hair. “Excuse me for just a second,” Deacon said.

Leaving the trio of contractors to their own devices, Deacon and Jake wandered down the lawn a bit, clearly having some discussion of details. Deacon seemed unhappy, glancing over at Nina and then at the house, shaking his head. Jake shrugged and, judging from the smirk on his face, had just made some completely inappropriate comment. Deacon rolled his eyes skyward, as if asking heaven why he’d been saddled with this man as his friend. Deacon’s expression of exasperation was too well practiced. And Jake was too good at blithely ignoring it.

Jake poked Deacon’s shoulder, making Deacon roll his eyes again. So Jake nudged a second time, shoving him toward Ben, Cindy, and Nina.

“Jake just reminded me that ‘nice, nondouchebag’ employers’ greet people by name and make some effort to be sociable,” Deacon said, his cheeks flushing slightly. “So, hello, I’m Deacon Whitney, owner of this very large pile of bricks. Please excuse the dramatic entrance, but I’ve never been fond of boats.”

Nina would have liked to have known about the nonboat option. But perhaps there was no nonboat option for nonbillionaires.

“I chose each of you, not because you’re the biggest name in your field, but because you presented the most original ideas and I was excited to see what you would do with the place.”

“Not me,” Jake interjected cheerfully. “I was chosen because of
favoritism
.”

Deacon sighed and continued on as if Jake hadn’t spoken. “So, thank you for joining me here this summer and giving me your full time and attention in what I’m sure is your busy season. I promise the project will be worth your while. If you have any questions or concerns, don’t be afraid to come to me or Jake, here. And if you will follow me, we can get settled into the staff quarters.”

Nina had expected Whitney to take them into the main house to bunk in an abandoned guest room. But he led the group down an overgrown pebbled path around the house to a series of low-slung bungalow structures flanking the coach house and the stables.

“The original mistress of the house, Catherine Whitney, ordered the architect to build separate staff residences,” Cindy whispered to Nina as they trudged past the jagged remains of the greenhouses. “Even though the other cutthroat but ever-so-elegant Gilded Age ladies kept their servants close in case they had some urgent need for warm milk at midnight.”

Cindy Ellis started cleaning inns and B&Bs after her dad passed, she told Nina, working her way up the food chain. Her big break came when Martha Stark’s rotten teenage son had thrown a wild party, wrecking several rooms of her mansion on Cove Road while Martha was out of town for the weekend. Normally, Martha would have deferred to her own housekeeper for such a regular occurrence. But Martha was due to host her anniversary party in just a few days and poor
Esther couldn’t handle the cleanup
and
the party prep.

Cindy thought her father would be proud of what she’d built, her own operation, with her own staff and the pleasure of assessing each challenge as it came along to determine how she could use it as a way to grow. Even if those problems included a slightly eccentric boss, annoying male coworkers, and what appeared to be an enormous
Scooby Doo
set just waiting to launch spooks at her.

Nina intentionally lagged behind to put a bit more space between them and the men. “Do you know anything about Catherine’s . . . ?”

Cindy made an indelicate choking noise as she mimed being strangled. Nina frowned but nodded.

“About as much as you probably heard around the ghost story circles when we were kids,” Cindy whispered. “A celebrated society wife flees her much-older husband’s luxurious, recently completed summer retreat in 1900, only to be found the next morning floating in the bay not two hundred yards from her front door. She had suspicious bruises around her throat. There were a lot of whispers about the Whitneys’ marriage before the murder, and Mrs. Whitney’s history of spending so much time with the architect that designed their house didn’t help matters. The husband, Gerald, was immediately suspected and put through the indignity of being questioned by the police, but they either couldn’t or wouldn’t charge him with his wife’s murder. Gerald never recovered from the ordeal. The loss of his entire fortune in a series of bad investments sent him into a downward spiral, health-wise. He died in
1903 and their children, Josephine and Junior, were sent to live with relatives. The house was left fully furnished, clothes in closets, objets d’art still on the shelves, everything. The family never managed to recover their reputation or fortune. The house was abandoned, fell into disrepair, and here we are.”

Nina stared at her, hazel eyes wide. “Jake was right about you.”

Cindy’s own eyes narrowed at Jake, who had been frequently checking over his shoulder to make sure the girls were keeping up. “What did Rumson say about me?”

“That you were good at organizing,” Nina said, nudging her with an elbow. “That summary of the Whitneys’ sordid past was succinct and factoid-packed.”

Cindy blushed. “Oh, well, I like to keep things tidy.”

“Ladies?” Jake suddenly called from inside the dorm. “If you keep lollygagging, you’re going to miss the tour.”

The servant quarters were spartan, but it was obvious an effort had been made to make them comfortable. As they walked down the long hall of bedrooms, Jake explained that the original architect, John Gilbert, had designed a series of vents in the ceiling that allowed warm air to rise out of the room and kept the occupants cooler in the summer months.

The individual rooms were eerily quiet, each with two simple iron-frame beds, recently stripped of their ancient feather-tick mattresses. Ben’s crews had done basic renovations to three of the rooms, patching up holes in the plaster, painting, and giving the floors
a thorough cleaning. Deacon had taken the butler’s room, the largest in the building and the only one with a private sitting room. But in what Nina considered a remarkable show of fairness by their employer, each of the “new” rooms was decorated with the same simple queen bed, pale wood dresser, and nightstand. Ben’s and Jake’s rooms also included drafting tables. Nina imagined the queen beds were an accommodation for the sheer size of Ben’s six-foot-“good-God-how-tall-
is-
this-guy?” frame.

Nina spent most of the tour staring up at the wainscoting and crown molding. It seemed bizarre that the architect would devote those decorative touches to a utilitarian building that guests of the Crane’s Nest would never see. She looked over her shoulder to see Deacon watching her while Jake chattered about updated plumbing. Just as her brain managed to communicate the “smile like a normal person!” message to her face, he looked away, to the tablet Jake was shoving in his face.

They found the ladies’ dormitory, which was a mirror image of the men’s building save for the larger bedrooms. The Crane’s Nest required more maids than footmen and valets, so the younger women slept four to a room in the same iron bed frames. The recently updated kitchen shared a door with the men’s dorm, so the mostly female cooking staff could provide for both sides during their off hours. Nina guessed that the multitude of locks on the ladies’ side of the shared door had been employed overnight to protect the servants from temptation.

Nina’s first night as a resident of Whitney Island was not a momentous one. Dinner had been a stilted, awkward affair, with the team seated around the long dining table in the men’s dorm, scarfing down take-out Japanese food that Jake had ferried across from the mainland in a cooler. Jake tried valiantly to get a conversation going, bringing up Deacon’s love for a particular sashimi bar in Boston near his corporate headquarters and funny stories from Jake’s family’s travels to Kyoto when he was a teenager. But it didn’t work. Ben was good for an ice breaker every few minutes, but the minute portions of rice and raw fish seemed inadequate fuel for him and he couldn’t seem to maintain a steady stream of conversation. Deacon seemed to thaw a bit when the group started making checklists and plans: cooking rotations, the shower schedule, a first day to-do list to determine exactly how far in over their heads they were with this project. They’d finished dinner and settled down to brass tacks, each presenting their immediate plans for the house—stabilizing/rehabbing the interior structures, salvaging what few furnishings and antiques were left—and how they would work around each other to prevent delays and power-tool-versus-garden-implement hissy fits.

Curled in her solitary bed that night, Nina dreamed she was pulling the sheets tight over a mattress. The mattress was hers. The sheets were hers. But the arms stretching out in front of her belonged to someone else. A large diamond winked from her ring finger, flanked by sapphires. The sleeves of her dress were beautifully cut blue muslin, rolled to the elbow as the soft white
hands smoothed the counterpane. She was pleased that she was able to provide clean, comfortable rooms for her staff. She knew how hard the servants worked to keep a home running. And while she certainly didn’t need to make up the beds, she found a certain satisfaction in seeing to them herself. She could walk down the rows of rooms, seeing a freshly made bed in each, and know that she’d done
something
productive with her day. Besides, the servants wouldn’t arrive for a few days anyway. And it seemed inhospitable to welcome them to their new home with bare beds.

She bent over the far corner of the mattress, tucking the sheet tightly. And when she rose up, she felt a large hand slide down the small of her back and give her backside a pinch. She squealed and the man’s other hand clapped around her mouth, pressing her back against his chest.

“Well, look what I found here,” an affectionate male voice whispered against her ear. “A pretty piece of skirt already bent over the bed.”

A thrill of fear and something more rippled up her spine as those hands slipped around her hips and pressed her bum against a solid male frame. Teeth closed gently over her earlobe, tugging insistently. She relaxed into the masculine embrace, sighing as the mouth moved from her ear to her neck. The hand cupped her chin, tilting her head back toward him. His grip tightened, moving to her throat, squeezing the breath from her lungs. Nina scratched and coughed and fought, but he was just too strong.

Suddenly, the pressure at her throat disappeared.
The scene shifted and she was underwater, watching waves roll over her head. She tried to swim to the surface, but she was held in place by a growing pressure around her legs, tugging her down like an anchor, crawling up her body like greedy grasping hands until it settled around her throat. She reached upward, trying to claw her way toward air, toward light, but was unable to make any progress. Now she saw herself, her arm extended over her head in some obscene ballerina’s pose. Her delicate blue muslin sleeve fluttered against the water like an angel’s wing, and she watched its motion as it slowly turned brown and disintegrated with age. The sleeve rotted away, leaving a grotesque, decaying limb behind, sloughing and dissolving until all that was left were bleached ivory bones reaching up toward the light.

In her head, she could hear screaming.

Nina bolted up from the bed, clawing at her throat and gasping for breath.