Sleeping Arrangements

Her shoulder was getting sore from leaning against the wall and she found herself twirling a curling strand of hair around one finger.

“Your great-aunt was more than just a client to me. Why don’t you meet me for a drink or dessert after you and your family have finished dinner, and you can ask me all the suspicious questions you like?” He was teasing her, and she was glad he couldn’t see her through the phone.

“Tell the truth. You’re smiling just a little bit,” he said.

She almost laughed.

What are you? Twelve? Why not just ask him to pass you a note during study hall? She stood up straight and shook her head, scowling at how easily she’d been suckered in, despite herself.

“I don’t think—”

He cut her off immediately.

“Don’t say anything. I’ll be at Francesca’s at nine. Do you know it?”

“I don’t care how great their tiramisu is. I’m not waiting an hour for a table just to have coffee and dessert.”

“No waiting. I know the owner.”

“Of course you do.” Everyone else in the city had to call a month in advance for a reservation and hope the maître d’was in a good mood. But he knew the owner. Of course. “Don’t wait for me to order your coffee.”

“Just think about it over dinner.” She waited, already sure that he couldn’t possibly hang up the phone without one last push at her. “Come and share something sweet with me, Addy Tyler. You might be surprised how much you like it.”

She didn’t know if he could hear her softly voiced, “Ha!” as she quietly depressed the off button on the phone, severing the connection. Let him wait. She had no intention of thinking about that man for one more minute of her evening.

The gust of freezing air that announced the arrival of one of her siblings drew goose bumps on Addy’s skin beneath the terry robe. When the chill wind didn’t stop, and the cacophony of sound accompanying it clarified into two feminine voices bickering at top volume, she sighed and headed to the front door.

“Close the door, creeps. There’s snow enough outside without letting it in the house.”

Her sisters turned as one at the sound of her voice. Maxie, the baby, muttered one last dig at Sarah and sprinted over to Addy for a hug. Sarah, with raised eyebrows and a look of supreme frustration tensing her face, turned and shut the door.

Cold air radiated from Maxie’s jacketed body as she squeezed her sister. Maxie stepped back and eyed Addy’s attire, wrinkling her nose.

“Put on some pants. Vorks vonders vith ze chill factor,” she said, her voice rolling with the heavy Russian accent of a wicked seductress from a James Bond flick.

“Dress yourself, brat.” She paused to take in the enormous column of white fur perched precariously on Maxie’s short, spiky curls. “Or maybe not. Nice hat, Ivana.”

“Today I am Russki, nyet?” Her voice lapsed back into its typical American youthful enthusiasm. “I couldn’t resist, Addy. As soon as I saw it, all I could think about was horse-drawn sleighs and daschas in the woods and lots of ice-cold vodka in front of a roaring fire. Can’t you just picture it?”

Even Sarah was smiling as she walked over to the two of them and slung an arm around each sister’s shoulder for a group squeeze. Everyone in the family was used to Maxie’s soaring flights of the imagination and her tendency to dress herself up to suit them. “Of course we can, Max,” Sarah said. “And you can borrow my copy of War and Peace or Anna Karenina if you want to pick up a bit more atmosphere. Just please stop trying to set me up with that guy, okay? You may be acing art school, but postgrad veterinary science is kicking my butt. I just don’t have time for a whirlwind romance right now. From what I’ve read, they seem to take up quite a lot of time and energy.”

“Zat’s vhy zey call zem vhirlvinds, dahlink.” The playful accent was back, and forgiveness floated on the air kisses Maxie blew at Sarah. “And I’ll take whichever book describes the clothes better, please.”

“War and Peace,” Sarah said decisively.

“I don’t know how you read all of those incredibly long books, on top of all that studying,” Addy whispered directly into her sister’s ear as they turned and hugged each other hello. “Give me a nice, uncomplicated set of engineering plans any day.”

Melting snowflakes sparkled like tiny jewels in Sarah’s long, straight dark hair, the only one of the siblings not to inherit their parents’ waves and curls. She poked a careful finger at Addy’s still-muddy tangles. “It keeps me sane. And you liked Jane Eyre. Admit it.”

“Yeah, sure. It was okay. But do you know how long it took me to read that thing?” Addy scoffed out loud, although she’d been wondering for the past month if she should ask her sister to recommend another book to her. Studying civil engineering hadn’t afforded a lot of time to read grand, sweeping love stories, and she’d found herself oddly caught up in the story between the governess and the aristocrat, the tragedy and the joy of it.

“Let me guess. There was a fire at a farm and you had to stop, drop and roll in the pigsty, right?” Maxie’s teasing words and gentle tug at her hair reminded Addy that she still needed to clean up for dinner.

“Trust me, and don’t ask.”

Family dinner at the Tyler family homestead was, as always, a raucous affair, as stories, complaints and triumphs came pouring out of all of them. Addy braced herself for the onslaught of opinion and advice as she dropped her bombshell.

Standing in front of the plate-glass living room window after dinner, her head was full of conflicting voices arguing caution versus a take-the-money-and-run approach. Watching the exhaust billow in clouds from her truck as it sat running on the street in her hopeful attempt to warm the interior before her drive home, she found herself pulling up a picture of the irritating Spencer Reed in her mind’s eye. Dislike wound up with embarrassment, like a ball of snakes, settled heavily in her stomach as she recalled their childish bickering. She tried to remove her emotions from the equation, to look at her great-aunt’s bequest fairly and without prejudice, and found that she couldn’t do it.

No doubt Mr. Spencer Reed would have no difficulty shutting off his emotions and approaching the situation coldly and with a logical mind. But Addy couldn’t stop herself from feeling angry and insulted.

She only hoped she wasn’t letting her dislike of the urbane lawyer, with his pristine suits and polished manner, affect her good judgement.

“Take it, take it, take it, take it,” the voice hissed softly in the quiet room.

After a brief moment of toe-curling startlement, Addy reassured herself that in fact neither the devil nor her subconscious was whispering to her in a disembodied voice from the coziness of her mother’s living room.

“Speak to me, oh wise one,” she intoned.

Her brother, several feet taller than the skinny brass lamp behind which he was attempting to hide, cocked his head to one side and grinned the grin that unraveled scores of women on a Friday night at Sully’s Tavern as he walked over to her.

“I know this whole thing is freaking you out a little bit. I just think you should check it out is all. The woman is dead.” He glanced over his shoulder toward the kitchen, as if expecting their mother to come running to scold. “No disrespect intended, but she can’t hurt you now. Or make you do anything you don’t want to do. So why not take the chance to go after something you’ve always wanted.”

She knew her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes as she hugged him, her handsome brother with the wicked smile and the dark eyes that reminded her so much of their father. He was the only one in her family who knew of her secret dream, probably because it echoed so strongly in him, too.

But she couldn’t explain to him, because she didn’t understand it herself, that somehow she did feel hurt. A small, sharp pain like a bruise had lodged itself in her chest ever since Spencer had told her that her great-aunt was dead.

“How did you get to be so wise at twenty-four?”

“Hey, everyone knows that bartenders are the world’s cheapest psychologists. Besides, I’ve always been smarter than you. Mom still thinks you’re the one who broke her Belleek vase.”

“Christopher Robin…” she warned. She was still ticked about that.

He winced. “Jeez, Addy, don’t say that where people can hear you, will ya?”

Her brother’s given name was a standing joke in the family. Claiming delirium from the pain of giving birth to a boy with such a big, fat head, their mother had years ago absolved herself of all responsibility. Outside the home, he introduced himself by his last name, and all the world knew him as Tyler.

Addy and her sisters were forbidden, on pain of severe sibling torture methods, to mention Christopher Robin Tyler’s given name in public.

“It’s written in the bylaws of sisterhood, baby brother,” she teased. “Thou shalt torture thy brother at any opportunity.” She stood up on tiptoe and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “I get busted out of the union if I let you slide.”

His hands on her shoulders were gentle as he gave her a little shake.

“Just think about it,” he said and walked her back over to the window to keep an eye on the running truck.

“I will,” she promised.

After saying her goodbyes and collecting the copy of Pride and Prejudice Sarah had pulled off their mother’s shelves with a smile at Addy’s hesitant request, she stepped carefully down the slippery walk to her truck, heading for the short but chilly drive home.

When the snowball that exploded against the back of her head turned out not to contain rocks, she realized her baby brother really was grown up after all.

She had deliberately stayed late at her mother’s house, but the temptation to drive by Francesca’s and try to see in the plate-glass window front was nearly irresistible. At the intersection of the street that would let her perform a casual drive-by peek, she pulled over to the curb and sat through three changes of the light.

Had she been able to banish his voice from her head, she might have given in to the temptation to stop and see if he was still waiting for her.

But she couldn’t get him out of her head. So she drove home.

Back in her one-bedroom apartment, she slid naked between the flannel sheets of her bed and pulled the down comforter up to her chin. By the light of a bedside lamp, she opened the covers of the book and tried to still all the noise in her head with the elegant words of another time and place.

She fell asleep in a confusing swirl of clipped British commentary on marriage, money and misunderstandings, with some smart-aleck Chicago commentary on the side. The opening sentence of Jane Austen’s novel trotted on light feet in circles through her mind: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

In her last conscious thoughts before the dreams overwhelmed her, she wondered if, as a woman in possession of a good fortune, she’d have to watch out for rapacious wife hunters. And realized that she’d decided to find out more about Great-Aunt Adeline’s bequest.

Racing out of her apartment building front door at five o’clock the next morning, already running late for a breakfast meeting, she came within inches of flattening the FedEx man.

After catching him and then listening to him crab about early morning deliveries, she signed where he pointed, her handwriting illegible with cold fingers in thick mittens, grabbed the package without examining it and ran for her truck.

Scraping the accumulated snow off her truck warmed her up a little, although the icy vinyl bench seat sucked the heat right back out of her bones when she slid her butt across it.

Hidden patches of black ice and a need to drive defensively amidst skidding semi tractor-trailers necessitated a strict eyes-on-the-road policy. Not until she made the slow turn into her company’s parking lot, rear wheels fishtailing a little bit even at a crawl, did Addy have a safe moment to glance at the return address on the FedEx envelope.

“Damn it!”

Shooting pain lanced up her leg as she rapped her knee sharply against the dash, sliding out of the truck while glaring at the blue-and-white envelope. She hobbled into the building, smacked the offending object onto the middle of her desk and limped off to dig up some much-needed coffee.

Voices echoing from the conference room reminded her that their video teleconferencing call with the client from Japan was about to begin.

She just needed one minute.

Ripping off the cardboard strip labeled Tear Here, she yanked out the pages, and knew that if someone were to see her and ask why she was snarling, she’d be unable to give a good answer.

But just seeing that man’s name on a return address made her want to heave a rock through a plate-glass window.

Preferably his.

A handwritten note was paper-clipped to the top page.

A representative of the firm will be waiting at the following address this evening between 6:00 and 8:00 p.m. if you would like to view the property mentioned in your great-aunt’s last will and testament. I hope you will not allow any previous misunderstanding to scare you off.

Spencer Reed

P.S. The tiramisu was indeed excellent.

Fourteen hours later, Addy was still fuming.

Scare her off? Scare her off?

Her entire day had proved to be one disaster after another, made worse by the fact that she couldn’t keep her mind on her work. Not that she was surprised. How could she concentrate when the strangulation fantasies were running through her head with such startling visual clarity?

Now, spotting an open parking space in the vicinity of the north-side address, she slewed her truck into the gap, grabbed her backpack, jumped out and marched up the block.

Fifty yards ahead of her, silhouetted by the glow of a streetlight, a tall figure leaned casually against a wrought-iron fence.

She didn’t need the benefit of light to know who it was.

Two

Addy skidded to a halt on a patch of ice in front of the gate. He reached out a hand to steady her. She shrugged it off, glared up at his shadowed face and wished she were taller.

“What the hell are you doing here, Reed?”

“Good evening to you, too, Ms. Tyler.”

“There’s nothing good about it,” she snapped, the words exploding in cloudy puffs of her breath in the icy air. “What are you doing here?”

His tone was carefully modulated to soothe. She felt as if she was being handled, and resented it.

“My note said—”

“Your note,” she interrupted, “said a ‘representative’ of the firm would be here. Not you.” A sharp poke at his shoulder emphasized her final word.

Addy had a split second to note that she might as well have poked a brick wall, for all he moved, before the recoil of her own rude gesture threw her off balance again, her low-heeled boots skating out from beneath her.

Spencer yanked her up against his body, one arm wrapped around her waist, the other hand cupping her elbow. The heat of him radiated through his tailored black coat, cashmere no doubt, and she blamed her momentary dizziness on the sudden warmth. She was aware that she should be backing away from him.

Neither of them moved.

Light reflecting softly off the snowdrifts lit a glimpse of summer sky in his eyes as his gaze slid over the contours of her face, coming to rest on her lips. She experienced it like a physical caress and felt her mouth soften in response. Dazed, she was already visualizing the kiss when his voice broke in with the hard crash of reality.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”

“What?”

Blood rushed to her face as she jerked herself out of his arms, embarrassed to realize that she’d been mooning over the man like a lovesick teenager hoping for a kiss at the end of a first date.

She reached out a hand to the fence and steadied herself, feeling the twist of wrought iron radiate cold like an icy bone in her clenched fingers.

“I thought you might not come,” he repeated patiently, tucking his hands carefully into his coat pockets. “Based on the outcome of our first meeting.”

“Based on the—” She sucked in frigid winter air and welcomed the cold pain in her lungs as it swept the fog from her brain. “So you lied. And on top of that, you implied in your little note that I’d be too scared to show up.”

“I thought that might get you here, even if it was only to yell at me. And since I am in fact a representative of the firm, I wasn’t lying, strictly speaking.”

“Tell me, Counselor, are the intimidation tactics part of your hourly billing, or did you charge my great-aunt extra for that?”

“I did what I had to do.”

Back on firmer ground, squared off against him like a prizefighter in the ring, she grabbed on to her anger and used it as a shield against other more confusing emotions. In the swirl of anger and attraction, of unwanted hurt and even more unwanted awareness of the man standing in front of her, the scents of old leather and warm vanilla spices still lingering on her clothes from where she’d been pressed up against him—Jesus, the man even smelled rich—one thing was clear. She should be asking herself the same question she’d thrown at him. What the hell was she doing here?

She didn’t need this, any of it, and she didn’t want it.

The realization settled like a burlap sack of wet sand on her shoulders, with none of the elevated light and joy she somehow thought she should feel upon deciding to walk away from her great-aunt, Spencer Reed and this entire mess.

“You did what you had to do.” She repeated his words, rolling them slowly around in her mouth as if they were part of a new dish whose taste she wasn’t sure she cared for. “Oh, that’s right. I forgot. The rules of polite society don’t apply to you, do they? You’re a lawyer.”

She opened her mouth, the torrent of scathing words near to bursting the dam, when she realized that she was just prolonging the encounter. Her teeth clicked sharply together as she snapped her jaw shut, shook her head, turned and walked away.

“Addy, please.”

The voice, low and quiet, calling her name the way a friend or a family member or a lover would, made her pause, though she didn’t turn around. She’d known the man for less than two days and it already seemed like every time she tried to walk away from him, he managed to get one last word in.

“Just take a look at the place, please.” The words slid around her like a gentle hand, curling around her elbow and tugging softly in his direction. “We’ll both go inside and get warm, I’ll explain some of the details to you and you won’t take any potshots at my profession.”

Her bark of laughter startled them both.

She had to see the look on his face after that, and the need brought her back to him where he stood in front of the wrought-iron gate up to his ankles in snow and looking perplexed by her sudden burst of laughter.

“You’ve got to be kidding.” All at once, her humor in the situation was genuine. “My potshots at your profession?”

For once, Spencer’s reserved facade slipped. She could see the physical moment when he remembered his comments to her the day before, and watched him visibly flinch. The sheepish grin and the brow slightly lifted in guilty acknowledgement begged her forgiveness, and the words swiftly followed.

“And I’ll continue to apologize for my massive and completely unprofessional lack of courtesy yesterday morning. What do you say?”

Addy bit her lip, chewing off her raspberry-flavored Chap Stick and feeling the last bit of warmth seeping out of her body. She started to shiver. Lord, it was cold.

Spencer took a step toward her, bringing his face clearly into the light for the first time. The skin of his face as it followed the sharp contours of his cheekbones was pale. She wondered abruptly if he’d been standing outside this gate and waiting for her since six o’clock. She’d stubbornly delayed until the last minute before driving over here, a gesture that had felt independent at the time but now seemed merely childish.

“Addy.” He stood close enough now to encompass her in his shadow, the streetlight behind him making a golden halo out of his hair. He lifted a hand and nudged her chin up with gloved fingers until her gaze met his again. She was conscious of her own breathing, the scratchiness of the knit wool cap pulled low on her brow, the dull ache in her fingers and toes. If she didn’t pay attention, she might forget to take her next breath.

His thumb scraped lightly along her jaw. Tucked a rampant curl behind her ear. Her ears were ice.

“Addy, it’s not really me that you’re mad at here.”

Like the ice of a frozen lake cracking beneath the blades of a skater, the moment shattered. Irritated again, she snapped a wave at the gate.

“Let’s get on with it, Reed. And keep the psychoanalysis to yourself. If I want a therapist, I’ll hire one who doesn’t know how to sue me sixteen ways from Sunday.” She raised her hands in the air, cutting off any response. “Sorry.”

“Right.” He exhaled sharply. A set of keys jangled in his hand as he wrestled with the frozen lock on the gate. “Sorry about the hedges. Your great-aunt meant to have them cut back, but time got away from her.”

For the first time, Addy noticed the towering wall of hedges pressing against the fence, leaning heavily over the iron spikes capping the fence rails. Branches struggled to squeeze through the narrow gaps between rails, reaching out to snag unwary pedestrians. Icicles as thick as her wrists pulled heavy boughs earthward in dangerous arcs.

“Jesus,” she breathed. “It’s the briar wood surrounding Sleeping Beauty’s castle.”

When Spencer laughed, she simply raised an eyebrow at him. “You know, all those knights in shining armor impaled themselves on the thorns and died horribly painful deaths in those hedges.”

“Well, then, I guess it’s a good thing I left my armor at home today,” he said, swinging the gate wide open before her. “Come on in, Sleeping Beauty.”

“Right,” she muttered as she stepped onto a clean-swept walk that drew a straight line to the front door. Or presumably it did. At the moment, with the snow-laden heights of the hedges blocking off the street, the yellow wedge of light arcing in from the gate was the only illumination. Although she could pick out the outline of the house—high, peaked roofs and other mysterious shapes—against the light of the city sky, details of the building itself were invisible.

“Got a flashlight, Reed?”

“Dammit. If the power’s out again…” Spencer brushed past her. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

“Again?”

She stomped her feet and crossed her arms tightly against her chest. After a minute or two, a light flickered from what looked like a porch. The man had apparently dug up his own flashlight.

“I’m going to check the fuse box…” His voice echoed slightly, as if reaching out to her from far off instead of across the lawn. “…be just one more minute.”

Three minutes later, after a particularly stiff gust of wind dumped a load of snow off a branch two feet in front of her head, Addy gave up on waiting. She’d damn well rather stand in a dark hallway than out here in the Arctic Circle. Picking her feet up high with finicky cat steps through the newly dumped snow, she approached the darkened house.

When the lights snapped on, she threw a hand in front of her face, reflexively blocking the sudden glare.

And then lowered her hand one millimeter at a time, her mouth hanging open and her eyes painfully wide.

It was a castle.

Towers and turrets. Candles flickering in sheltered sconces. The hedges, threateningly visible in the sudden light, loomed over her like the encroaching boundaries of an ancient forest. She could almost swear she heard horns, dying faintly away on the cold night air, calling the hounds to hunt.