Moonlight in the Morning Read online

“Are you trying to kill me?” Tris didn’t speak for a moment. “Now I’ll never get to sleep! But that aside, I called for a purpose.”

  “Which is?” She was smiling broadly. It felt good to be desired by this man.

  “I want to ask you to do another favor for me.”

  “More lists?”

  “No. Would you check on my house while I’m away?”

  “Of course,” she said. “I’d be glad to.” While he told her where he had a key hidden, she thought how she liked the idea of seeing inside his house. And she loved the thought of seeing the playhouse where they’d had one of their moonless nights together.

  “Hey! You wouldn’t like to help Nell and me come up with colors to paint the playhouse, would you?”

  “I can resist anything but colors. Any preferences?”

  “None.”

  “Won’t Nell have some if it’s her playhouse?”

  “Good idea,” he said. “I’ll tell her about you, and you two can discuss it tomorrow.”

  “You want me to talk to her?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

  Jecca couldn’t think of a reason not to, but she was already wondering how to talk to a child she’d never met.

  “So what are you really wearing?” he asked.

  “A surgical gown.”

  “I love those things! No backs to them.”

  She laughed. “You’re horrible, you know that?”

  “Sometimes I am. I better go to bed. My plane leaves very early. Will you miss me?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “I will.”

  “Anything I can bring you back from Miami?”

  “How about one of those muscle guys from the beach?”

  “How about if I buy you a new bikini and you model it for me?”

  “That’s possible. Can I swim in your pond?”

  “You can swim in my bathtub. With me.”

  Jecca laughed. “Good night, Cupid.”

  “Good night, Psyche.”

  Smiling, she clicked off her phone and snuggled down under the covers. Yes, she was going to miss him.

  Jecca awoke early the next morning and she felt full of energy. She told herself it was because she was at last going to get to work on her watercolors, but what was in her mind was seeing Tristan’s house, and the playhouse.

  She didn’t want Mrs. Wingate and Lucy to be suspicious, so she kept herself calm during breakfast. She scrambled eggs with green peppers while Lucy cooked sausages. Mrs. Wingate made toast and set the table.

  Jecca didn’t want to appear to be in a hurry, but the meal seemed to go on forever. When she got out the door, her portable art kit under her arm, she practically ran to the path to Tristan’s house.

  It wasn’t difficult to find the playhouse. The path to it had been wo st hdiv heighrn down by generations of Aldredges, and Jecca hurried down it.

  Her first sight of the playhouse was a mixture of delight and horror. The delight was from the beautiful design of the building. It was like a miniature Victorian house, with carved posts on the tiny porch, cutout trim along the steep roof. There was no mistaking that the little house came from a different era.

  Her horror came because she was Joe Layton’s daughter. When she was little, she would go with her father to construction sites to deliver loads of lumber and supplies. She’d followed her dad, her hands full of crayons and an old toy bunny rabbit, and listen to the men go over whatever was wrong with a building. By the time Jecca was nine, she could look at a house and tell what needed to be repaired.

  Right now she saw that the pretty little playhouse was in desperate need of renovation. A gutter was loose, roof tiles were cracked, windows needed caulking, the door hinges were about to come out. And unless she missed her guess, there was dry rot in a couple of places.

  Besides the work that needed to be done, the paint was cracked and peeling. It was down to the bare wood in places.

  “Not good,” she said as she turned the knob of the front door and ducked to go in.

  She was glad to see that the inside was much better than the outside, but it still needed work. Long ago, the interior walls had been painted a lovely cream color, but they now showed the marks of years of use. There were a few pieces of child-size furniture, all of it homemade, with faded, worn slipcovers that someone inexperienced had run up on a sewing machine. “Lucy could do better,” she said.

  For a moment, Jecca stood just inside the door, looking at the place and remembering how Tristan had led her through it in the darkness.

  When she glanced around, she saw a couple of lamps. Turning, she saw a light switch beside the door, and she laughed. If he’d wanted to, Tris could have lit up the place for their meeting.

  Jecca was glad he hadn’t.

  To the right was a doorway. Again she ducked before entering a small room that had a child-size bed built into an offset in the wall. It was like a large window seat and covered with a spread that was threadbare from years of use and washing.

  For a moment all Jecca could think about were the hours she’d spent snuggled up with Tristan on that bed. Such sweet memories!

  She went back outside to walk around the playhouse. It really did need quite a bit of work before it could be painted. Even then, the old layers would have to be removed, scraped, and sanded, before new paint could be applied.

  Jecca opened her art box, removed her camera, and began to take photos. She took some long shots of the building, but she also made many close-ups of places that needed work done.

  “Dad would have a fit,” she said aloud. To him, this would be an historical building and he’d feel that to let it rot like this was an injustice. She could imagine his saying the owner should be put in jail. Her dad was serious about historic preservation!

  She put the camera away and got out her sketch pad. She needed to make drawings of the building from different angles so she could try a variety sry thatof colorways. When she met Nell, Jecca planned to show her several possibilities for painting the little house. She could see using colors of the forest, greens and rust browns. Or she could use earth colors of sand and cream. Children’s primary colors could also work.

  It took Jecca a couple of hours to make the sketches. They were simple but they showed the house from different angles. She needed to photocopy her drawings so she could color them in different ways. Lucy had a copier in her apartment, but to use it would give away what she was doing.

  Jecca glanced to the left and thought how close Tristan’s house was. In her fascination with the playhouse she’d nearly forgotten her promise to look after his home. She found the key he’d spoken of in the pretty little corner cabinet in the living room of the playhouse.

  She packed up her art kit and started down the path that she’d traveled only at night. A few branches had fallen, and she moved them. Tris had said that with his arm in a cast he couldn’t keep the area clean.

  When she reached the house, she paused to look at it. To her left was a truly splendid lake: the water a dark blue-green, very calm, with ducks floating on the surface.

  She took a couple of steps and saw that farther down was a little island that came close to the mainland. Connecting them was one of those bowed bridges that curved upward and was reflected in the water below.

  The artist in Jecca was so transfixed by the beauty of it that for a moment she couldn’t move. If she lived here, she’d have a small gazebo built on the island, a place where she could go to paint or to just be quiet. She could see all of it in her mind.

  It was a while before she could look away, and she saw two big stone pots where she and Tristan had picnicked. Contrary to what he’d said, there were two of them, which meant that it hadn’t been necessary for her to lean against him. But she was glad she had.

  She couldn’t refrain from her habit of looking at the house as a builder would. There were some places that sagged, but all that she could see was in much better shape than the playhouse was.

  If she hadn