Magic (10 page)

In the long, sometimes illustrious life of Drake House, not once had the estate been owned by anyone named Wimsey. Nor had any of the owners had any children with the first name Wimsey. These facts Bryan had managed to discover easily enough, checking old records and browsing through the library books he had found. That left a number of possibilities. Wimsey might have been someone’s nickname, or he might have been a servant of one of the families or a friend or an enemy.

Or he might have been, as Rachel had interpreted the name, a whimsy, a figment of Addie’s deteriorating mind.

“No,” Bryan muttered, paging through yet another book. “I don’t believe that.”

Addie was too matter-of-fact about Wimsey. She didn’t bring his name up to garner attention or to divert attention from herself. Wimsey was real to her, and Bryan wanted badly to prove her right, if for no other reason than to show Rachel that ghosts existed as surely as dreams and rainbows and magic did.

Rachel. So responsible and practical and levelheaded. Rachel, who had been avoiding him like the plague for two days—ever since they’d shared that searing kiss at the door of her room. She believed she couldn’t have magic in her life when it was what she needed most. He meant to give it to her.

He’d made his decision. He couldn’t stop thinking about her, couldn’t stop wanting her. It seemed he had no real choice in the matter. He was going to pursue a relationship with Rachel Lindquist whether either of them thought it prudent or not.

A thread of guilt drifted through him, and he sat back in the desk chair with a sigh. Elbows on the arms of the comfortable old chair, he steepled his fingers and his gaze came to rest on the small etched-gold ring he wore on his left pinky. Even in the subdued morning light of the study the ring glittered on his finger, bright and merry and pretty, just like Serena had been.

She would have wanted him to get on with his life. She wouldn’t have wanted him to shut himself off from people the way he had been doing. His self-imposed isolation had closed him off from his gift and his magic. And since he had begun to open up again, he had begun to feel again.

He could feel himself standing unsteadily on a threshold with the cocoon of his grief behind him and the rest of his life before him. Already he could feel himself leaning through the portal toward whatever the future held for him. A part of him was eager and a part of him was sad because of it.

He bent his head and pressed a gentle kiss to the ring Serena had given him, the ring that encircled his finger in warmth, and tears rose up in his eyes as he said his final good-bye.

“Bryan?”

Rachel’s voice preceded her into the study, giving him enough warning so he could clear his throat and squeeze his eyes shut.

“Bryan, are you—oh, here you are,” Rachel said. She stopped uncertainly as she stepped into the study. Her brows pulled together in concern. “Are you all right?” she asked hesitantly.

“I’m … fine.”

He didn’t look fine, Rachel thought. He looked like a man laboring under the strain of some terrible emotion. The idea caught at her heart and squeezed it tight. Bryan was always smiling—except when he was scolding her for not believing in magic. In the short time she had known him, she had seldom seen him be entirely serious. She had never seen him in pain. Until now.

“I was resting my eyes,” Bryan lied. He plucked his glasses off and rubbed at the bleary blue orbs. “Too much reading.”

He settled his spectacles back on his nose and stared up at Rachel. She was worried about him. He could sense her concern. Warmth stirred inside him, and a soft smile tugged at one corner of his mouth.

“What are you searching for?” she asked, approaching the desk slowly, trying not to appear too curious.

She had been forcing herself to steer clear of him, but discovered she was so drawn to him that she kept dredging up excuses to seek him out. Her emotional tug-of-war was wearing her out.

“Proof of Wimsey,” he said.

“You haven’t found any, have you?” It was more a statement than a question. She felt the pendulum inside her swing away from him.

“That doesn’t mean there isn’t any,” Bryan said with forced cheerfulness, “only that I’m not looking in the right places.”

Rachel sighed, her shoulders drooping with resignation. “Do you really think this whimsy is what Mother keeps seeing at night?”

There had been two more incidents involving Addie’s elusive intruder. Both times she had been the only one to see anything. Rachel was no more convinced now than she had been that the apparition was real. Bryan, on the other hand, seemed as sure as ever that it was.

“She says not. She seems to think it’s some other entity. Odd that she’s never spoken of other ghosts before, only Wimsey,” he reflected, clearing a fat book aside so he could stare at his charts. “And there’s been almost no activity recorded in the parts of the house where these last three sightings have been.”

“So?”

“So,” he drawled, beckoning Rachel nearer still. He swept a hand across his blueprint of the house on which he had drawn a numbered grid and jotted down smaller numbers that were circled. “Sightings are almost always concentrated in specific areas. This very room, for instance, and the foyer.” He tapped his pencil to two separate grid blocks, each of which was crowded with a cluster of little numbers.

“This looks very … scientific,” Rachel said, surprised. She might have decided Bryan was no con man, but that didn’t mean she had decided to accept his so-called profession.

He gave her a wry look. “Yes, they try to train us properly at Transylvania U.”

Rachel felt a blush creep into her cheeks. “You said the other night you and Jayne went to college together.”

“Yes.” Mischief twinkled in his deep blue eyes. “She majored in witchcraft and druid rituals. Ask her to change a man into a toad for you sometime. She’s quite good at it.”

“Stop it,” Rachel commanded, narrowing her eyes at him. Laughter threatened, and a smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. “I’m trying to extricate myself gracefully.”

Bryan winced. “Sounds painful.”

“You’re not making it any easier.”

“Sorry,” he said, utterly unrepentant. “Jayne and I and two other friends you will no doubt meet soon attended Notre Dame. I got my master’s at Purdue.” Rachel’s eyes widened comically. Bryan chuckled. “And you thought you Californians had cornered the market on weird.”

Her brows lowered ominously, and she tapped a finger to the blueprint. “You were explaining this to me.”

“All right,” he conceded. Maybe he would be able to convince her with a logical scientific explanation. Somehow the idea didn’t appeal to him as much as simply having her believe did. He took a deep breath and began. “Many parapsychologists believe all places are ‘haunted’ by memories of past events. Some places more strongly than others, naturally, say the scene of a violent death, for instance.”

“Why can’t I see this whimsy of Mother’s? I heard her talking to him in the hall this morning, but when I stepped out to look, there wasn’t anybody with her.”

Bryan shrugged as he wrote himself a note to check the hall tape recorder. “Maybe you haven’t got the right kind of psychic sensitivity. You don’t want to believe in him; that doesn’t help. People tend not to see things they don’t want to see.”

“Why doesn’t he appear to you? You want to see him.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why my equipment hasn’t picked anything up either, but then, these things are never predictable. If they were, we wouldn’t call them ‘paranormal,’ would we?”

“I’m sorry,” Rachel said, shaking her head, “but I still don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Neither do many psychic investigators. As a whole, we tend to be a very skeptical lot.”

“You seem anything but skeptical.”

He grinned at her, and Rachel felt her heart lurch. She reminded herself that this was exactly why she’d been avoiding him. He made her body react entirely against the better judgment of her mind.

“I’m one in a million,” he declared happily.

That was for sure, Rachel mused, watching him as he leaned toward her. She thought he was going to kiss her again, and her lips buzzed with the memory of the kisses they had shared. But he touched the tip of his nose to hers instead, and smiled the most devastatingly sexy smile. Heat washed through her, and she unconsciously wet her lips with the tip of her tongue.

“Did you have sweet dreams the other night, angel?” he asked in a voice so soft it was like a caress.

Rachel’s cheeks bloomed red.
Sweet
was probably not quite the word to use regarding the dreams she’d had.
Erotic
was far and away the most accurate. She didn’t understand it. Bryan was hardly the first good-looking man she’d ever known. And she was categorically against getting involved with him. Why then did she continue to go on feeling such a fierce attraction?

It made no sense. But then, little that had gone on in the past few days had made any sense. It was this blasted old house, she decided irrationally. The sooner she was out of it, the better for all concerned. Her life was pointed down a very narrow road. There was no room for a dreamer to tag along.

Bryan drew back, a gleam of satisfaction in his eye. She had dreamed about him. That bit of news was certainly a balm to his bruised male ego. He decided not to gloat; it wasn’t his style. Instead, he produced three small red foam balls from nowhere and began to juggle.

Rachel stared at him, bewildered. That was all right, he decided. It would do her some good to be thrown off balance on a regular basis. It was too easy to picture her letting her life settle into a rut of dreary, dutiful routine. If she didn’t learn to look around for magic and rainbows now, she certainly wasn’t going to start in a year or two. The struggle to cope with Addie’s illness would have worn her down and extinguished all belief in dreams and happiness. He just couldn’t let that happen.

“Did you have a question?” he asked.

“What?”

“When you came in here, did you have a question, or dare I hope you came seeking out my pleasant company?”

Rachel gave herself a mental shake and gathered her wits. She straightened away from the desk, looking suddenly very purposeful. She was wearing a soft blue prairie-style dress with a simple shirtwaist and gathered skirt. A big turquoise pin was fastened at the throat of the stand-up collar. Her hair, which had flowed like fine champagne down her back the night they’d kissed, was up now, secured in a sensible knot at the back of her head. Wild tendrils curled around her face.

Bryan thought she looked like a schoolmarm—a very pretty, vulnerable schoolmarm.

“Perhaps you’ve come to discuss our relationship,” he suggested.

Rachel nearly bolted. “We—we don’t have a relationship,” she said, sounding more rattled than resolute.

“I beg to differ,” Bryan argued with a charming smile. He caught the red foam balls and clutched them to his chest, his expression turning melodramatic. “Or were you just leading me on when you kissed my socks off?”

“I was not leading you on!” Rachel protested. He made the whole incident sound as if she had planned it.

“Well, then …” He shrugged innocently, implying that if she hadn’t been leading him on, then she had been seducing him with a purpose.

Rachel ground her teeth and refused to rise to the bait. She wasn’t getting involved with him. She wasn’t even going to argue about getting involved with him.

“I was wondering if you knew where my mother keeps the books for her antiques business. I’ve been looking all over for them. I have to get started on them so I can find out exactly where we stand financially.”

“Did you ask Addie?” He settled back down on the desk chair.

“Do you honestly believe she’d tell me?” she questioned, unable to keep all the bitterness out of her voice. She and Addie seemed no closer to a reconciliation than they had five years before. It didn’t help that Rachel had been to see her mother’s lawyer to find out where they stood legally and financially. Talking about power of attorney and conservatorships did not make for ice breaking.

“Have you spoken with her about selling the house?” Bryan asked.

“No.”

“She isn’t going to like it.”

“Then I’ll have to deal with her anger, because there isn’t any other way,” Rachel said stubbornly. The frustration of the past few days boiled up anew inside her. “I have a good job waiting for me in the city. We need the money.”

“There’s always another way, Rachel,” Bryan said, his disapproval of her plan subtle but clear.

“Oh, really?” Rachel arched a brow as her temper flared up. She crossed her arms in an effort to keep from trying to strangle him. “What is this wonderful alternative? Maybe you could enlighten me. So far I’ve discovered that this house is probably worth less than Mother owes the bank because it’s falling down around our ears. The electric company is threatening to discontinue service because she hasn’t paid the bill in months. The doctor bills we’re going to incur will wipe out my own bank account all on their own.”

“You need to have a little patience,” Bryan insisted. “Something will turn up.”

Rachel felt as if a switch had been flipped inside her, letting anger pour forth unchecked. Something will turn up. That had always been Terence’s line. He’d forever been telling her to lighten up, loosen up, that the future would take care of itself. She’d seen firsthand that wasn’t the case. Nothing ever just “turned up.” She had learned the hard way that the world had two kinds of people: People like Terence who believed in rainbows, and people like her who accepted responsibility.

It made her angry to think that Bryan belonged to the first group, the group she knew better than to get tangled up with. And deeper down it made her angry that she had to belong to the second group. Her life would have been a whole lot brighter with a rainbow in it, but she couldn’t have one, and she didn’t have time to go chasing it, at any rate. She had responsibilities.

She was angry with him. Bryan could feel the heat of it, he could see it burning in her eyes. He had stepped on a nerve. He opened his mouth to smooth things over, but Rachel didn’t give him the chance.