Juliana Garnett (50 page)

The Baron sneaked his fingers beneath the hem of the slinky red dress and crawled them slowly over the smooth, firm skin of her legs. Her dress collected around the stiff white cuffs of his shirt and rode up along with his movements.

“Hey!” Halley shot up, her eyes wide as her body reacted violently to his explorations.

Nick grinned slowly. “Perfect control, hmm?”

“Baron,” she demanded feverishly, “remove your hands from beneath my dress immediately.”

Nick Harrington wasn’t at all used to listening to the pleas of ladies in situations like this because the women usually meant the opposite of what they said. But then, the freckled Contessa was not like anyone Nick had ever met before. He removed his hands and smiled softly. “Sorry, just wanted to know the extent of that control. You’re a pretty sensuous lady, you know.”

“You’re speaking in non sequiturs, Baron. A definite breach of logic.” She swung her bare feet down to the ground and wiggled her toes.

Nick threw his head back and laughed. “Tessa, I think I’m falling in love.”

“Well, good,” Halley said as primly and calmly as she could manage, her palms pushing away the wrinkles on her dress. “You’re following the script nicely, Nick.”

“Nick? Now how did he get in here? It’s not fair, you know, that you know my name and I know absolutely nothing about you.” He sidled closer to her.

She lifted her chin slightly. “Fair? There was nothing on
my
invitation, dear Baron, that said a thing about being fair. Now come.” She stood and looked down at him in the purple shadows. “Let’s head back. All this fantasy has made me terribly tired. I think it’s time I hit the hay.”

Nick watched her as she rose from the bench. A stray beam of moonlight splashed across her face and lit her remarkably honest green eyes. More women than he could count had said the same thing to him in the past four years—in slightly different words, of course, but she was probably the first one who meant she wanted to go to bed … alone … to sleep.

His smile went unnoticed by Halley, who was feeling around the pebbled walkway with her toes in an effort to find the spike-heeled shoes. Beneath that wonderful makeup job and sexy dress, Nick decided thoughtfully, was someone who had never come within fifty miles of a contessa in her life.

“Here, contessa, allow me.” He bent over and picked up her shoes, slipping each one onto an arched foot while she balanced herself with one hand on his back.

“Thank you. I feel like Cinderella.”

“In that case, you’d have to leave one shoe behind, and those pebbles would hurt like hell.”

Halley nodded. “Right.” She comfortably hooked one arm through his. “I’d also have to run off, and
there’s no way on earth I’d be able to manage that tonight.”

“Good.” He looked down and smiled softly. “I don’t want you running off.” He led her carefully back toward the well-lit terrace of the Harrington estate.

Later that night Halley stood barefoot before the French doors of her bedroom. Outside, all was still, except for the gentle breath of a breeze through the giant maple trees and several couples who strolled across the broad expanse of lawn. Tiny gaslights dotted the blackness like fireflies. Halley breathed deeply, then slipped through the doors and out onto the tiny, private patio, shielded from view by a thick, circular hedge of yew bushes and clumps of mulberry.

“A real fantasyland,” she murmured as the breeze ruffled her filmy nightgown.

She thought of her own apartment, a world away on the other side of Philadelphia. It was a cluttered, homey space in the old gatekeeper’s cottage on the Thorne Estate where she worked. Then she looked back through the open doors into the perfectly lit suite to which she’d been assigned for the weekend.
Everything
was perfect. The glistening white-silk and chrome furniture was accented by a slight smattering of pastel colors here and there on the upholstery and wall coverings.

She tried to imagine all her friends and acquaintances here, in this setting. It was hard to visualize. The Thorne Estate had been donated to the community by the Thorne family, and Halley loved her job there as director of the library, which was located in the main house. She loved the tiny cottage that was open to her friends at all hours of the day and night. She thought of them flopping on her couch and ordering pizza, laughing and crying and feeling completely at home. She thought of Archie, the hobo who lived behind the library in the old stable and sometimes came for tea in the gazebo, and the neighborhood
kids who pasted their rubbings from the old cemetery grave markers on her walls.

Halley burst out laughing. No, these were
definitely two different worlds
.

But she
could
picture Nick, the Baron, here. Sure, she could see him easily stretched out on that long, lovely couch in his handsome tuxedo. Even when the wind had ruffled his dark hair as they walked along the path earlier, it hadn’t looked mussed. Nothing about him was haphazard, not his long, lean physique, nor his way of conversing, nor his elegant mannerisms. The Baron von Bluster was definitely not haphazard. But what
was
he, exactly?

Halley looked up into the sliver of a moon that caught her eye and whispered, “A dashing, romantic dream. That’s what the Baron is.”

A piercing scream from out of the darkness shattered her thoughts into a million tiny pieces.

Immediately following was a shot and a bellow and a scuffling of footsteps, although later Halley wouldn’t be able to tell anyone in what exact order these events had occurred.

She stood frozen in place, the hair on her arms and back of her neck standing upright.

And then, in seconds, impulse took over, and without a backward glance she plowed through the carefully manicured yew bushes and ran down toward the lake and the sound, her gown flattening against her body in the breeze.

One

The night wind drove needle-like snow into the young man’s back as he kicked the heavy door closed behind him. There was no heat in the huge main hall of the mansion, and his footsteps echoed in the open emptiness as he stamped sticky snow-flakes from his boots and shook them from his shoulders. Country darkness had fallen outside hours ago, and only a thin slip of muted moonlight poured like liquid silver seafoam down the grand staircase from the tall windows on the first landing.

But there was no hesitancy in the man’s stride as he walked through the shadowed quiet of the hall. He had crossed this floor uncounted times since he had taken his first faltering steps here twenty-seven years ago, when his mother had released his baby fingers and watched in laughing excitement as he toddled into his father’s outstretched arms. Gone was that laughing mother
with the gentle hands and the whispered fragrance of gardenia. Gone was the father with the moustache that made his kisses tickle.

Walking in the cavernous gloom, alone except for the tiny burden under his pullover that he supported with both hands, the man felt no unease. His nature was at times a whimsical one, but even as a child he had never been fearful. And he was not completely devoid of company.

“I’m home, Chaucer,” he called softly in the darkness. Hampered by the limitations of human hearing, he missed the owl’s silent flight, though he could feel the slight draft from its wings brush his wind-stung skin, and the light weight of padded feet coming to rest expertly on his shoulder with a subtle shift in balance. There was a musical trill of greeting. The man resettled the burden under his pullover and withdrew one hand, dragging off a suede glove with his teeth. He reached up and gently scratched the owl’s silky breast with a friendly finger.

“We have company, old son,” he said, the very attractive voice husky from the heavy cold outdoors. “Orphans. Orphans of the storm. How are your parental instincts functioning?”

A wing, lifted indignantly, touched the back of his head as the owl hissed, and that drew a slight laugh from the man.

Together they passed under the high cool ceilings, going by the small dry fountain and ceramic pool. In the vast dining room, a huge chandelier dense with dusty prisms sparkled above them in the dimness, and answered the man’s footsteps with a faint chime. Beyond, he passed the summer dining room and the butler’s pantry. At last
he came gratefully into the kitchen, where the antiquated central heating had been puffing a steady, pillowy warmth. His hand hit the upper button of the old-fashioned light switch, flooding the warm wide expanse of the room with cheerful yellow light, and his eyes, night-adjusted, stung. He registered the fact briefly, instinctively, by its biology: the rapid decomposition of rhodopsin in the eye.

Crossing the parquet floor, he knelt by a low cupboard, withdrawing a cardboard shoe box. Working one-handed, he lined the box with a clean dishtowel, and then set it on the rosewood work table. With utmost care, he reached under his pullover and brought out his two tiny orphans, supporting them carefully in his cupped hands. He brought them level with his face and looked at them closely.

“Well,” he said softly. “Welcome to my nest.”

The two little owlets blinking sleepily at him from his palms were balls of gray down, all beak and brilliant lemon-yellow eyes that were beginning to focus on him with alert annoyance at having been roused from their sleeping place next to his warm, dry skin and his soothing heartbeat. They seemed suddenly to remember that they were hungry and began to chatter loudly.

The adult screech owl on the man’s shoulder shot off like a catapulted weight and swept up to perch on the high cupboard, hunching his wings and watching the noisy duo with evident disgust, clacking his beak before turning his head pointedly away.

“What’s the matter, you old bachelor?” the man asked with amusement. “Aren’t you cut out for
fatherhood? Anyone would think I haven’t told you time and again that birds of a feather flock together.” The screech owl raised his ear-tufts and turned his head back enough to give the man a sardonic half-lidded look. Smiling back, the man said, “So. Let’s get on with seeing what we can do about ensuring the survival of the species.”

He deposited the owlets gently in the box before shrugging out of his jacket. They kept him busy for the next hour, their voices rising in penetrating squeals while he chopped raw beef for them, keeping it in the oven just long enough to take off the chill, then mixing it with the downy roughage he gathered by slitting open a panel of his down jacket, leaving that panel a little leaner than it had been that afternoon.

The tiny owls ate like Roman senators at an orgy. Chaucer seemed to be so amazed that he sailed down again to watch the proceedings from the man’s shoulder, and then walked up to the top of the man’s head for a better view.

As the man fed the owlets, he clucked to them and talked to them, first apologizing for the lack of mouse meat, and then telling them all sorts of interesting facts about their eyesight and hearing, their population density in the region. He started to go into their mating cycle, but stopped, laughing, and promised them they could hear about that when they were a little older. At long last, they’d had enough—first one, then the other, began nodding sleepily and ignoring the proffered bits of feather-wrapped meat.

The man tucked the tired infant owls back under his pullover and sat down. The tingling of relief to his legs and back reminded him that he’d been on
his feet since two o’clock in the afternoon. He said to Chaucer, who’d returned to perch on his shoulder, “Why don’t you make me a sandwich, you old feather duster?”

Chaucer walked down his arm, the razor-sharp talons daintily applied, and stepped off to stand on the table, blinking first one intense saucerlike eye, then the other.

The man stretched one graceful, supple-fingered hand and scratched the owl behind the ears, chuckling softly, and then yawned and closed his eyes for a moment … man and wild creature in a still tableau.…

The silence was broken when he opened his eyes again and looked at his watch, giving a soft curse. He was due soon at work.

The nestlings didn’t like much being taken from next to his skin and put back into the box, even though he made them as comfortable as he could. He carried the box up the great staircase to his bedroom and left it there with the door closed. There was no point in testing Chaucer’s patience. Then he collected fresh clothes from the drying room near the kitchen, stripping off his hiking clothes and pulled on clean wheat-colored jeans, leather boots, and a V-necked white sweatshirt.

To Chaucer, sitting on the edge of the laundry basket examining a clothespin in one claw, the man remarked, “You probably wonder, don’t you, old son, why I never talk about what I do to support us all?” The owl began chewing thoughtfully on the clothespin, giving him a wise look. “The truth is, there’s no intelligible way to explain it. Humans have particularly odd forms of entertainment. But it pays what we need to support this
rockpile, and now we have two new mouths to feed.”

The man pulled on his jacket again and strode out through the new snow to an old station wagon, whistling resignedly.