Better Homes and Hauntings (27 page)

While Deacon’s employees grumbled among themselves and exchanged bills, another pair of dark eyes watched the couple from the bar. Angry, vicious dark eyes zeroed in on the redheaded dirt-grubber, the pretender sucking up all of the attention and opportunities that belonged to the more deserving.

JAKE PADDED DOWN
the hall from the shower room to his bedroom, whistling a little tune under his breath. Thunder rolled outside, making the lights flicker under the strain of the storm. The helicopter had barely dropped them off in time, before the rain started. The sight of Nina, Cindy, and Dotty hustling across the lawn, high-heeled shoes in hand, trying to protect their dresses from the rain, still had him smiling. He wrapped the towel around his neck, squeezing the last drops of water from his thick hair.

“Good night!” he called down the hall, receiving a grunt from Deacon in return. His best friend was currently facedown on his bed, exhausted from the effort of being social all evening. Jake grinned, nudging his bedroom door open. Before he could flick on his light switch, he saw the curvy feminine shape outlined against his bed by the lightning outside. Her back was turned to the door. He grinned, quietly shutting the door behind him.

Cindy.

To say he was surprised to find her waiting for him was a massive understatement. They’d had a very nice time at the party, and he’d taken pains to behave like a gentleman. He hadn’t even made any double entendres, and with Deacon’s employees’ discussions of hard drives, he’d had ample opportunities. He’d walked her to her door, and she’d offered him a sweet, perfunctory kiss on the lips.

But here she was, in his bed, her long blond hair falling in damp waves over his pillow.

He sincerely hoped she hadn’t actually meant to crawl into Deacon’s room, because that would have been demoralizing.

“Hey, doesn’t this break about a dozen of your rules?” he whispered. “Not that I mind, but you were pretty firm about the whole ‘no-fly zone’ thing.”

Jake tried to remember how many drinks she’d had during the party. Surely two or three martinis weren’t enough to have her mistaking his room for hers. As much as he wanted her there, he didn’t want her to act now and regret it later, undoing all of the trust he’d built with her.

The lightning flashed, and the windows practically rattled with the force of the thunder. Cindy stayed completely still, save for the rise and fall of the blankets as she breathed. Jake wondered if she’d fallen asleep while she was waiting for him. He wouldn’t mind that, he supposed. He didn’t know if he would be comfortable doing anything besides spooning, with Deacon just a few yards away. He was a man who appreciated his privacy.

Tossing the towel aside, Jake lifted the blankets to
slide in beside her. For a moment, he couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing. Or, rather, what he wasn’t seeing. There were no legs under his sheets. Trembling, he leaned over the bed, trying to get a better look at her face.

“Cindy?”

The figure rolled toward him, thick wet coils of faded blond hair hanging over a face blued by water and time. She was falling apart, right before his eyes, her skin hanging loose, rotting from bones it wasn’t quite connected to anymore. The drooping lips were purple and ragged. Her eyes were white, opaque as milk, and staring up at him, pleading, silently screaming for help. Jake scrambled back, losing his footing on the rug and ramming his back into his dresser. The woman crawled over the sheets toward him, peering over the edge of the mattress while he sprawled on the floor.

“Gerald,” the figure whispered, before fading away.

Jake stared at the bed and the sheets left rumpled by what should have been a figment of his imagination. But figments didn’t leave behind rumpled sheets. Which meant that there was a ghost in his bed. And given the blond hair and the “recently waterlogged” appearance, it was the ghost of Catherine Whitney.

“What the
hell
?” he yelped.

A few moments later, Deacon came thundering into the room. And Jake suddenly realized there was no way he was going to explain this situation, not with the lightning crashing outside and the wind howling. It was just too creepy, as if verbalizing what he saw would make it more real.

Also, he was going to have to wash those sheets.

“What’s going on?” Deacon demanded. “This whole shrieking-in-the-middle-of-the-night thing is getting old really quick.”

“Uh, I saw a spider,” Jake said. “A big one.”

“You saw a spider?” Deacon asked. “That made you scream like a girl and knock your dresser into the wall so hard it knocked over my nightstand?”

Jake held his hands a few inches apart. “Big one.”

Deacon frowned down at him.

“Sorry,” Jake said. “I think I’ll sleep out on the couch.”

Deacon scoffed. “What?”

Jake stared at the bed, which he doubted he would ever think of as comfortable again. “I don’t know where it went. I’m not sleeping in a room with a big spider.”

Deacon objected. “But with the storm—”

“I’ll be fine,” he insisted. Because there was no way he was going to be able to answer,
I’m pretty sure your great-great-grandmother’s ghost just tried to cuddle with me.

“All right, good night,” Deacon called over his shoulder.

“Good night.” Jake padded back down the hallway with considerably less pep in his step, clutching his blanket to his chest like a shield.

What had just happened? Sure, he’d had visions in the house. He’d felt strange sensations. But hadn’t Dotty said that full apparitions were a rare occurrence? Why would Catherine Whitney appear to him in that waterlogged, corpse-like state? In his previous experiences with Catherine, she’d appeared young and beautiful and anatomically intact. Why would she suddenly try to scare him? Were they getting closer to the truth of her
murder? Was it that couples in the house seemed to be pairing off and that made her angry or jealous? Was she trying to warn them about something?

He would talk to Dotty about it in the morning. For now, he was just going to sit and stare at the walls until the sun came up.

THE NEXT MORNING,
Deacon sat in his office, drumming his fingers on his desk, waiting for Regina to arrive. He loathed the idea of allowing her back onto the island, anywhere near Nina, but he wanted to handle this meeting in person.

Regina’s inviting Rick to the charity party was unconscionable. Before, he might have tried to write it off as coincidence. It was possible that they’d met on a work site or even when Rick had bid for the job at Deacon’s office. Regina spent a lot of time skulking around his office.

He couldn’t take the path of least resistance with Regina anymore. It was far more likely that Regina had looked up Nina’s employment history, found out about the harassment reports, and connected with Rick in order to harass Nina even more. His blinders were off, particularly after he (somewhat illegally) accessed
Regina’s EyeDee account and saw that she had recently sent an EyeContact request to Rick Douglas. And in a private message, she’d told him, “I think I can help you make sure a ‘mutual friend’ gets what she deserves. Discuss off of EyeDee,” and sent him an e-mail address to contact her. Regina had used Deacon’s own software to get at Nina. And he simply couldn’t allow that.

His laissez-faire approach in dealing with Regina had emboldened her. Because he didn’t react when she pushed a little, she figured he wouldn’t do anything to stop her when she pushed a lot. He shouldn’t have agreed to the trade-off she’d suggested. He should have just made it a simple no-interest loan. But he hadn’t wanted to embarrass Regina. He’d wanted her to feel as if she was earning her money, giving her the sense of accomplishment he got from earning his. His mistake was assuming that she cared about that sort of thing.

He heard the telltale
click-clack
of expensive designer heels long before the knock on his office door. But he made her wait until he was ready to get up from his desk and get this meeting started. He didn’t want her to have any sort of impression that she was an eagerly anticipated guest.

“Deacon,” Regina purred. “It’s been too long.”

“It’s been a few days,” Deacon countered, his tone cold and dismissive. He moved back around his desk and dropped into his chair. He didn’t bother offering her a seat. But undeterred by his rudeness, she followed him around the desk and balanced her ass against it.

“Yes, and in all that time, you haven’t called me. It’s going to be very difficult to complete this project if you don’t communicate with me. I want you to be comfortable
telling me anything. Any little thing. And just to start this new level of honesty on the right foot, I should tell you that I think your little gardener has designs on you.”

Deacon resisted the urge to grin. For some reason, it made him inappropriately smug that Regina had noticed Nina having a reaction to him and vice versa. He wished he could find a way to let Nina know she’d made Regina jealous and insecure without looking like a total jerk. Nina deserved to know that she had that kind of power. “And what if she does?” he asked. “I don’t see how that would be any of your business.”

“Deacon,” Regina wheedled. “There’s no reason for us to do this silly dance. We should make our relationship official. We make sense. We’re from the same social circles. Our backgrounds are similar. Our lifestyles fit each other.”

“That would be awesome, if I were looking for a tennis partner. But I think relationships require a little bit more than that, Regina.”

“Oh? Like what?”

Deacon’s brain immediately went to Vodka Pursuit and blueberry waffles. He thought of their circle of friends and the clash and complement of personalities. He thought of shy smiles he had to work like hell to get and how they seemed so much sweeter, knowing that he’d earned them. Those insubstantial and yet completely necessary aspects of a life together.

Regina scoffed. “Like love? Love is for children and poor people, Deacon. People like us know what makes for a successful marriage. Marriages that last, that establish successful careers and social standing.”

“Would we be having children in this scenario, or would they be raised by their polo coaches?”

“Children would be negotiable,” she said. “After a reasonable amount of time.”

“Negotiable?”

“I would need some sort of incentive, I think, to bring children into the agreement,” she said, hooking her leg over his and sliding into his lap. She fussed with the collar of his button-down, smoothing it over his chest.

Deacon managed not to recoil, but he did enjoy saying, “I think you need to leave. Also, you’re fired. Consider your debt paid in full. I don’t want to have anything more to do with you.”

Regina’s expression didn’t change, but he suspected that was because of Botox. She unbuttoned his top button. “You’re making a mistake. I would hate to leave this job on bad terms, Deacon. The press might get wind of the story. And who knows what sort of details they might print?” She leaned close, as if to kiss him, and he was grateful when she stopped short of touching his lips. “And then lawsuits are filed, pending deals go wobbly, and you might not be able to finish this project without me.”

It was Regina’s turn to pull back when he flashed an almost feral grin at her. “Details like inappropriate conversations or unwanted sexual advances?”

“I—I wouldn’t be able to control what ended up in the news,” she stammered, trying to maintain her calm, seductive tone.

“Well, I think
I
probably could, considering I have videotaped you every time you’ve met with me in this office or my offices in Boston. Oh, including this conversation,
which would probably reduce your credibility with pretty much everybody.”

And just like that, Deacon parted his legs, letting her drop to the floor on her ass. She scrambled to her feet just in time to see an image of her fall playing on the large-panel screen on Deacon’s wall.

“You videotaped me without my knowledge?” she shouted. “That’s illegal!”

He shrugged. “Technically, I did it with your knowledge. It was on the fourth page of our employment contract, under ‘Confidentiality.’ It’s not my fault that you don’t read what you sign.”

She snarled at him, possibly the least ladylike thing he’d ever seen her do.

And he just smiled. He was going to have to show Nina this footage at some point. Much, much later, when they were on steadier terms and the sight of Regina in his lap wouldn’t make her nervous.

Regina calmed her expression and straightened her dress. She snagged her briefcase from Deacon’s desk and turned on him. “Mr. Whitney, you will be hearing from my lawyers.”

“I know your lawyers!” he called after her as she minced down the hallway in her high heels. “And they like me better than you!”

NINA WAS GOING
over a checklist with George, her grader, when Regina stormed outside. Cindy turned at the scrape of heels on the stone walkway. Jake and Dotty were also nearby, discussing Dotty’s lack of progress on her curse research. But unfortunately for Nina, she was the first person Regina laid eyes on.