Someone to Love Read online

  She broke off when she heard a sound she’d never heard before. She stopped and listened, but she heard nothing unusual. She turned toward the house again. Just a few more feet. What if the old door into the house that was concealed in the paneling now had a heavy piece of furniture in front of it? That had happened once and she’d had to wait until those owners moved out before she could go snooping again. Not that she ever went into the house when people were in residence, but…Well, maybe she had once, but that was when she was thirteen and the seventeen-year-old boy who lived there was gorgeous. He—

  Nigh almost cried out in relief when she reached the end of the tunnel, then cautiously pushed on the door. Please let it open, she prayed. Please, please. The door swung open with a loud creak, but she wasn’t worried because she knew that it opened onto a narrow stone spiral staircase, a leftover from when the house was a monastery. No one inside the house would hear the rusty hinges. The stairs led straight up to the top tower, to a door cleverly hidden in the wooden floor.

  When she at last stood on the stone steps, she let out a sigh of relief. She wouldn’t do that again. Those timbers were too old to risk it again. The stone steps up to the tower were dirty and cold and Nigh wished she hadn’t come through the tunnel. She was suddenly aware that she was very cold, very hungry, and very dirty. She longed for a tub full of hot water and lavender-scented soap.

  She started up the stairs, planning to leave the tower at the door that led into the chintz bedroom, when she heard a noise behind her in the tunnel. Did she leave the door open? Had some animal followed her into the tunnel? A dog? A wolf?

  “Damn!” she heard and her mouth dropped open. It couldn’t be!

  Bending, she pulled open the four-foot-tall door she’d entered the staircase by and held her candle inside as far as she could. In the dark she saw movement, then Jace Montgomery came into the light.

  “Damned dangerous,” he said, scowling. “I think half those timbers are rotten. They’re staying up by memory. That was really stupid of you to go through there. And to think that you did that when you were a kid! Your father should have taken a belt to you.”

  Nigh was too astonished at his presence to say a word. Heedless of what was left of her new dress, she sat down on the stone step and looked up at him while he brushed cobwebs off his body.

  “How…?” she began.

  “How did I follow you? Pioneer ancestors. But then you made as much noise as a herd of water buffalo. I had an idea that if I challenged you, you’d want to show off and enter the house in your secret way. You seem to want to beat everybody at every game. Damnation, but that was a scary thing. I’m going to have engineers shore that thing up with some good ol’ American steel. Forget those old beams.” He glared at her. “You should have better sense than to go through something like that. So how do we get out of here? I don’t know about you, but I’m freezing and I’m hungry.”

  “Up one flight,” she managed to say, still in shock from her fear of the tunnel and his following her.

  He stepped over her, swinging one long leg over her head to reach the step above her. “Well, come on. Don’t just sit there. You have the candle. Speaking of which, I think I’ll put electric lights in that tunnel.”

  “Sure, why not?” she said, recovering herself. “How about a bar too? Ice maker, some cut-glass liquor dispensers. What about a barbecue?”

  “Not a bad idea, although we have England’s weather, so what do we need with an ice maker? Okay, so where’s the door?”

  “I found it when I was nine, so why can’t you find it at your age?”

  “Guess I’m not as clever as you are,” he said.

  Smiling, she reached down about knee level and pressed a little piece of iron that couldn’t be seen from above. She’d been able to see it more clearly when she was younger because she’d been shorter.

  “Cute,” Jace said as the door swung open and they were in the chintz room. Ann’s room. He half expected to see her there, but it was empty except for the furnishings he and Gladys and Mick had put in there. Closing his eyes for a moment, he inhaled. He could smell her.

  “I’ve always loved the smell of this room,” Nigh said.

  Jace looked at her sharply, but he didn’t tell her that the lovely fragrance came from Ann Stuart.

  “I don’t know about you, but I want a shower before I eat.” He looked her up and down pointedly.

  Nigh looked down at herself. Her dress was ruined. There were three torn places along the hem and there was too much dirt to ever fully come clean.

  “You want the master bedroom bath?” he asked, then laughed at her expression. “You can have it all to yourself. I’ll use this one.”

  She looked at him a moment. “Ann’s bath.”

  “Didn’t I tell you that she gets in the shower with me?”

  He laughed when Nigh frowned. “Go on. Look in the drawers in the bedroom and get some clean clothes. I have some sweats in there that you can tie on. I’ll meet you downstairs as fast as possible.” With that he half pushed her out of the room and shut the door behind her.

  Standing in the hallway, Nigh hesitated. It was really, really stupid of her, but she almost felt jealous of a ghost.

  She shook her head to clear it, then headed for the master bathroom. If she remembered correctly, there was a huge bathtub in there. She hoped there was enough hot water to fill it.

  “You took long enough,” Jace said when she entered the kitchen. “The English love of bathtubs.”

  “The English love of warmth in any form,” she said as she looked at the food spread on the big oak kitchen table. “I see you didn’t wait for me.” She picked up a black olive and ate it, which only served to reminded her how hungry she truly was. In the next minute she was at the table stuffing herself, and the more she ate, the more Jace piled on her plate.

  “Have you tried this?” he asked repeatedly as he ladled something else onto her plate. “What about this?”

  “Are you trying to get me fat?”

  “You’re skin and bones. Do you eat anything besides cucumber sandwiches?”

  She started to tell him that she was too often in Jeeps racing across a desert while helping the cameraman haul hundreds of pounds of equipment to be able to eat three squares a day. But she didn’t tell him. “Better than fried chicken.”

  “Touché,” he said, smiling and dishing out more buttered parsnips.

  “So what do you think Ann wants?” Jace asked as he refilled Nigh’s wineglass for the third time.

  From the emphasis on “you,” she could tell that he had his own ideas of what Ann’s restless spirit wanted. “To at last be buried in the sanctified grounds of the churchyard?” she asked. “Isn’t that what spirits falsely accused of suicide usually want?”

  “So how do we do that?”

  Nigh looked down to cover her smile. She liked that he said “we.” “If any of what you’ve said is true, then the important thing is to find proof that she didn’t kill herself. If she wasn’t a suicide, then she could be buried in consecrated ground. What about you? What do you think she wants?”

  “The burying thing was my first idea too, but I don’t know…sometimes I think it’s something else. In the vision I had, when I saw her with her cousin, I got the idea that she was pretty spunky.”

  “Spunky?”

  “Sassy. Cheeky, I guess you Brits would call it. She really seemed to know herself well. She knew what her life was going to be like if she didn’t marry, and she was a realist about her future with the philandering Danny Longstreet. I wonder what he was like?”

  “Probably like his descendant.”

  Jace paused with his hand reaching for a piece of bread—homemade whole wheat rolls with honey in them. “You mean there are Longstreets still in the village?”

  “Only one. Most of them have moved away.”

  “So what’s this one like?”

  “We’re the same age and we went to school together. Very handsome,”