Ready & Willing (5 page)

She opened her mouth to say something, apparently reconsidered what she was going to say, and closed it again. But she kept her gaze homed in on his as she stood and tugged her handbag over her shoulder. She started to turn toward the door, then looked back at Nathaniel. “I’m sorry if you think I’ve wasted your time, Mr. Summerfield. But as Shakespeare said—”

“Is this going to be the quote about ‘More things in heaven and earth, Horatio’?” Nathaniel interjected before she could finish. “Because, quite frankly,
Mrs.
Magill, I can dream of a lot in my philosophy. And none of it has to do with ghosts or souls.”

She nodded once, curtly. “Oh, believe me, Mr. Summerfield, I can see you don’t spend much time worrying about your soul. What I’m trying to figure out is why Captain Summerfield was so worried about it. Since it’s abundantly clear that any soul you might have ever had is already long gone.”

And with that, she turned around and headed for the door. Nathaniel told himself he was grateful, even as he watched with something akin to wistfulness the way that long ponytail swayed even more seductively than her hips. The last thing he needed in his life these days was a raging nut job butting into it, even if she was stunning. Having Edward as a client was going to command more of his time than any other client he’d ever had, and it was going to ultimately net him more wealth. Hell, if that caused him to lose his soul, it was just one less thing Nathaniel would have to feel responsible for. He was sitting down to review his contract with Edward before the door behind Mrs. Magill was even closed.

 

Three hours after Audrey Magill left his office, Nathaniel welcomed Edward Dryden into it. They’d gone over every clause in their contract together, had discussed the development in detail, had reviewed and approved all the arrangements left to make. All that was left was to sign on the dotted line—in triplicate—and the deal would be done. Edward signed his name where indicated with a narrow, crowded hand, then offered the pen to Nathaniel. He bent over the desk and placed the pen to paper and was about to scrawl the first of three signatures when his hand stilled. Because something Audrey Magill had said during her long spiel suddenly erupted in his brain.

That was supposedly the gist of what his great-great-blah-blah-blah grandfather had told her, what the late, great Captain Silas Summerfield had come from the grave to say. That if Nathaniel went through with what would undoubtedly be the most financially rewarding deal of his career, he would be left soulless.

Nathaniel didn’t even know if he had an ancestor named Silas Summerfield. He knew little about his family on either side, mostly because he didn’t care. His mother had been estranged from her family, so he’d never met anyone from the maternal side of his family tree. His father had died when Nathaniel was too young to remember him, leaving his mother to struggle to provide for the two of them the whole time he was growing up. He wasn’t big on heredity or genealogy, having never had much of a family to rely on. He knew there were other Summerfields out there—there must be, somewhere—but he’d never given any of them much thought. Present
or
past. And now suddenly, some strange woman—in more ways than one—had come barging into his life because of some dream she’d had about a long-dead relative.

He told himself she was crazy. She must be. One of those people who weren’t content to go through life believing in things they had no business believing in to begin with, but who then had to foist off those bizarre beliefs onto others. They were people whose lives were so empty, and who needed attention so badly, that they had to harass other people to get it. True, Audrey Magill hadn’t looked like that kind of person. She’d seemed normal enough. But sometimes it was the most normal-seeming ones who were the ones you had to watch most closely.

This deal with Edward was the start of great things. The sort of opportunity that only came along once in a man’s career. So what if the land Dryden Properties was developing was originally targeted for quality, low-income housing that would have enabled struggling, single-parent families—families like, oh, say, Nathaniel’s had been as a child—to live better lives? So what if, instead of safe homes for underprivileged kids, a new school to educate them, and a daycare to watch after them while their mothers worked, Edward was going to build overpriced lofts and boutiques for people who had more dollars than sense? That wasn’t Nathaniel’s problem. He wasn’t the world’s moral compass. He was just a guy trying to make a buck.

And this deal would make him a mountain of those.

“Having second thoughts, Nathaniel?”

He glanced up at the question to see Edward smiling at him, but there was something in the smile that wasn’t quite genuine. As if the man honestly feared Nathaniel was about to change his mind. As if, should Nathaniel do that, there might be consequences. Consequences beyond the financial ones outlined in the contract.

Nathaniel shook the feeling off. Edward Dryden just wasn’t much of a smiler, that was all.

“Of course not,” he said as he dragged the pen across the line, leaving his signature in its wake. He repeated the action two more times, on two more copies of the contract. Then he tossed the pen onto his desk and turned to shake Edward’s hand.

“No going back now,” the other man said with a laugh.

“No way I’d want to,” Nathaniel assured him. “It’s a done deal.”

As those last words left his mouth, Nathaniel felt a strange twinge in his chest, right in the area of his heart. Nothing scary, nothing that made him think he needed to head to the nearest ER, just . . . weird. Something weird. He felt as if something in his chest, something surrounding his heart, fluttered a little franticly and then just . . . evaporated. He couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. As if a part of him suddenly panicked, then disappeared. And then, suddenly, he was overcome by cold. Cold so strong, it actually made him shiver.

Unconsciously, he lifted a hand to his chest and pushed against his breastbone, where he’d felt the emptying sensation, as if that might allay the uneasiness that was rushing into him almost as quickly as the cold.

“You okay, Nathaniel?” Edward asked. “You look a little pale.”

Nathaniel nodded, even though he didn’t feel okay at all. “I’m fine,” he lied to the other man. “It’s nothing. Probably just something I ate.”

Yeah, that was it. He’d eaten something that disagreed with him, that was all. Because in spite of what Audrey Magill had tried to tell him, it couldn’t be something he lost.

Four

THE SECOND TIME AUDREY SAW CAPTAIN SUMMERFIELD,
it wasn’t in her dreams in the middle of the night. No, the second time she saw him, it was just past noon, when she entered her kitchen pantry to retrieve a can of tuna to make her lunch. She tugged on the string dangling from the bare bulb overhead, spilled some frail white light into the tiny confined space, and saw him standing right in front of her, framed by a bag of Oreos and a can of artichoke hearts on one side, a jar of Kalamata olives and a box of Cheerios on the other.

She uttered a startled little cry at his sudden appearance, leaping backward a step and nearly dropping the butter knife she’d been holding absently . . . but now suddenly clutched with great intent. Before she recognized the intruder as the man in the painting upstairs, a million thoughts dashed through her mind in a second’s time. That someone had broken into her house again, that this time the intruder was going to try to do more than fling about hats and portraits, that the only thing standing between her and the great beyond might very well be her faded Levi’s and University of Louisville tank top and the blunt blade of her Oneida flatware.

Then, when she recognized the man in her pantry as Silas Summerfield, her thoughts went zinging off into a new direction. That she was seeing things that weren’t there, doubtless because she was still carrying around some anxiety about the break-in to her house the day before. Or maybe the hallucination was due to a lack of sleep, since it wasn’t easy to catch Zs when one was lying wide awake in one’s bed, jumping at every creak and groan one’s house made because one was still carrying around some anxiety about the break-in to her house that morning.

Even worse, when Audrey had finally managed to go to sleep, her dreams had been filled this time with images of Captain Summerfield’s great-great-however-many-greats grandson, and that had been even more bizarre than the dreams about Silas. It had been bad enough confronting Nathaniel Summerfield in person. Though, truth be told, that wasn’t entirely because he’d behaved like such an infuriating ass. It was because her reaction to him—even with the infuriating ass part—had been wholly unexpected and in no way welcome.

Simply put, the moment Audrey had laid eyes on the man, she’d responded to him in a way that she hadn’t responded to a man for a very long time. Not since she’d laid eyes on Sean Magill, come to think of it. And even with Sean, there hadn’t been that electric zing of immediate awareness. When she’d first met her husband, at a dinner party thrown by mutual friends, she’d thought him cute and funny and sweet, and she’d been charmed by him. But there had been no explosion of heat in the pit of her belly, the way there had been with Nathaniel. And when she’d shaken Sean’s hand the first time, there had been no tingle of odd anticipation as there had been with Nathaniel. What on earth she could have possibly been anticipating, she couldn’t have said. She only knew that, the moment her palm connected with his, she’d felt . . . hopeful somehow. As if something . . . major . . . was about to happen between the two of them.

She’d told herself that helping the man keep his soul was pretty major, but there had been something else there, too. Of course, once she’d realized what a jerk the guy was, that feeling of anticipation and hopefulness had fizzled. All she’d anticipated then was leaving, and all she’d hoped for was a swift departure. But the heat in her belly hadn’t fizzled at all, and that had bothered her a lot. Heat was the last thing she wanted to be feeling for a man—any man. But most especially one like Nathaniel Summerfield, who was the complete antithesis of the man with whom Audrey had fallen in love.

Nathaniel, however, was the least of her worries at the moment. Because at the moment, there was a hallucination of his great-great-however-many-greats grandfather standing in her pantry, and that bothered her way more than bizarre dreams about either of them had. Bizarre dreams meant too much Chunky Monkey. Hallucinations meant . . .

Well. They just weren’t good, that was all.

She squeezed her eyes shut tight for a moment—but didn’t loosen her hold on the knife—then opened them again. Nope, Silas was still there. Dressed the same way he’d been in her dream, in black trousers and an open, collarless white shirt, its cuffs, wider than was fashionable these days, rolled back to his elbows. But where he’d been cordial and reserved in her dream, now he looked kind of angry and intense. He stood with his legs spread wide, his hands fisted on his hips, his dark eyebrows arrowed downward. His square jaw was set rigidly, and his black hair was in disarray, as if he’d swept both hands through it in frustration only moments ago.

“Madam,” he said, addressing her as he had in her dream the night before, “you have failed me most egregiously.”

Wow. He even sounded real. She truly had to get to bed earlier tonight. She closed her eyes again, this time accompanying the gesture with three long, steady breaths. Then she opened them again.

Silas was still there. Only now he looked even madder.

“I assure you I am no hallucination,” he told her.

Oh, well, if her hallucination was telling her he was no hallucination, of course Audrey should listen to him.

She started to say something along those lines to Silas in retort, then decided that if she started talking back to her hallucination, she might as well start talking to the box of Cheerios behind him. And then to someone in the mental health field who might be able to help her separate fantasy from reality. So she only grabbed the can of tuna she’d come into the pantry for, tugged on the light string again to turn it off, completed two steps backward, and pushed the pantry door closed. Then she inhaled another deep breath and turned around.

Only to find Silas Summerfield standing in front of her again.

This time Audrey did drop the knife. And the can of tuna, too. And although she tried to close her eyes again, she found that she could not. Because the afternoon sun was streaming through the windows over the sink behind him . . . and through the good captain, too.

He’d seemed opaque enough in the pantry, but in the bright sunlight, he was vaguely translucent. She could just make out the line of her countertops behind him bisecting him at the waist, along with an occasional droplet of water from her perpetually drippy faucet that fell from just below his heart. When she studied his face closer, she could just discern the branches of the sugar maple outside the window, as craggy and jagged as his eyebrows.

In spite of her musings the day before about the door to the afterlife sometimes being left ajar, and in spite of what she’d said to Silas’s great-great-however-many-greats grandson, Audrey told herself she couldn’t possibly be seeing what she seemed to be seeing. Her house couldn’t possibly be haunted by the ghost of Silas Summerfield. Not with a manifestation like this. Whenever she saw one of those ghost-hunter shows on TV, the evidence of hauntings was always as nebulous as the spirits themselves. Smudges of gray on camera film, wisps of faint light on video, scratches of sound on tape.

In spite of all that, too, Audrey heard herself say, in a rather shaky voice, “You’re . . . you’re not real.”

He arched an eyebrow at that. “Am I not?”