Midnight Rose (5 page)

“No boyfriend after the gay husband?”

“No one.”

“You’re beautiful,” he said. “Young, personable. If I’d been the one to interview you for the job instead of Martha, I would’ve turned you away based on your appeal alone.” A thread of irritation invaded her good mood. “That’s complete discrimination. And sexist.” “That’s me being careful to avoid hiring someone who’ll touch my son’s life and leave the minute a boyfriend enters the picture. It’s happened once before, two years ago. I told Martha, no more young, single teachers. She didn’t listen.” “I’ll be thirty-three in September,” Kate said, lips thinned in defense. “I’m no fresh-faced coed. And how is a boyfriend supposed to enter the picture when we’re out here in the middle of the far-flung countryside? This place puts Turner’s remote landscape to shame.” Humor softened the lines around his mouth. “As Betty likes to say, the pickings around here are slim.

But drive thirty minutes and you’ll find civilization. It’s not impossible for you to have a life while you’re here, and it wouldn’t be fair to deny yourself that. But I feel ridiculously compelled to remind you that you’ve committed to a three-month trial period.” “I can go without a date for three months,” she shot back. “I took this job because I needed something more substantial than a social life. Working with Jude will be more than enough to fill my needs.” His hand slid around the mug, caressed it. “Ah, but not forever. I’ll hold you to the three months.

Beyond that…the moment you begin to resent your isolation here, don’t delay. Strike out and seek the life you so adamantly deny needing.”

“You sound like you’re trying to get rid of me, Gideon, and I’ve only been here a matter of hours.”

“Just thinking ahead for the advent of your restlessness. All I ask is that you first warn us of its approach, Ms. O’Brien. Give me time to replace you with someone Jude could care for as much as he’ll inevitably care for you.” “I appreciate your frankness,” she said, inexplicably stirred by his probing. “Is this a casual, no-holds-barred exchange? Because now I have a question for you.” The furrow between his brows eased and he sat back. “Go ahead.” “Where’s the woman in your life?”

“There isn’t one.”

She raised her eyebrows. “No one near and dear?”

“I have no driving need for romance.”

“But what about…” Kate hesitated. Gideon was her employer, and she didn’t know him well enough to pry. Still, common sense didn’t usually squelch her curiosity no matter the consequences, and it certainly didn’t now.

“It’s possible to need something less than a relationship,” she said carefully, glancing at him from beneath her lashes. “So, what do you do with those needs?” His left brow lifted ever so slightly, all the reply he offered, and heat sizzled through her nerves.

Silence fell between them, laden with electric tension.

Kate forced her gaze back to her coffee cup and took a sip of the cooling liquid. Eventually she gathered her wits enough to redirect the conversation. “Tell me about your work, Gideon. Jude says you’ve invented a new species of rose.” A fleeting smile brushed his features, as though he knew she retreated from the sudden awkward turn the conversation had taken. “Right now I’m hybridizing and hoping it’ll result in offspring plants with better fertility.” While he told her about his work as a horticulturist, she sat across from him and studied his face. He mesmerized her. She wanted to file him in her mental little black book as handsome, but his features held an element that went far beyond merely attractive. “Otherworldly” came to mind. So did “incredibly sexy” and “completely hot”. The thought made her smile, even though what he was telling her—something about roses and poor germination rates—wasn’t funny in the least.

He paused. “You’re amused?”

Instantly she sobered. “No. It’s not you. Well, it is you. I just…I feel like I’ve known you a very long time. Kind of like what I said in the living room this morning. I feel as though we’ve met before.” Leaning forward, he wrapped his hands around his mug and studied the rich liquid inside. “Were you thinking this before or after you saw me swimming buck-naked last night?” Oh, God.

“That would be after.” She actually managed to sound unfazed. “Martha told me you were out of town. I didn’t know you liked to skinny-dip when I came out on the balcony. I wasn’t spying on you.” “I know. But once you saw me, you could’ve gone inside.”

And given up such an incredible sight?

“Yes,” she said. “I could have. It was just one of those awkward moments when a girl doesn’t know what to do.”

The corner of his mouth quirked. “So she watches.”

“Yes. No.” Kate shifted on her chair and glared at him. “I was mortified. I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

“But it did.”

“Right.”

“I didn’t mind.”

Her gaze flew to his, and for an endless, aching moment they stared at each other, while excitement sent tiny jolts of electricity through her body. Then she shook her head and shoved back from the table, frustration fueling her movements with superhuman speed. “I can start with Jude’s lessons first thing when he wakes up tomorrow, or we can work at night. Whatever he needs. I know his days and nights get turned around because of his sensitivity to light.” She thrust her mug in the sink, paused to make sure she hadn’t shattered it, and started for the stairs.

“Kate.”

The mildly plaintive note buried in that one word stopped her, but she refused to examine it, or the pleasant shiver it sent down her spine. “What?” she said without turning around.

“We got off to a strange start. I know what happened last night wasn’t your intention, and it wasn’t my intention to be turned on by it.”

She swallowed. “Were you?”

“I was. I think you were, too.”

Kate didn’t reply, just braced for the touch she somehow believed would come at the nape of her neck, for the gentle brush of fingertips at the base of her spine. They hardly knew each other, and yet it seemed he had a right to touch her thus. So she stood in silence, and waited.

She heard the scrape of his chair on the brick, the soft fall of his footsteps, then sensed the close proximity of his body, not quite heat, but galvanic and thrilling all the same. He didn’t touch her, but when he spoke again, his lips were close to her ear. “I’d like us to start over, but I don’t know how to erase the last few hours.” She stared up the shadowed stairwell, inanely wondering how many decades of footsteps had climbed them. A hollow groove was worn into the wood. “You can’t,” she said in a shaky voice. “You can’t make me forget last night, Gideon, or the way you kissed me today. I know you kissed me,” she added when he took a breath as though to argue. “I won’t forget how it felt, and I wouldn’t want to, anyway.

No woman in her right mind would want to. And if it happens again, I won’t mind any more than I’d mind spying on you skinny-dipping in the pool again.”

“Christ,” he said on a groan, and she waited until she was upstairs and past Ferdinand, the flower-sniffing beagle, before she let herself smile.

How quickly we forget our resolve. Gideon leaned in the shadow of the pool house, his attention fixed on Kate’s balcony, where golden warmth glowed from behind partially drawn draperies. A phantom moved past the window. The hot, crimson outline radiating from it told his hungry eyes it was Kate, performing feminine bedtime rituals.

He loved to watch a woman ready herself for sleep, savored the slow, methodic disrobing, the removal of hairpins, the soft whisk of the brush dragging through loosened strands. How he missed hearing the rush of water from behind the bathroom door, the sound of a toothbrush tapped on the edge of a sink, and then her reappearance, fresh-faced, untouched by cosmetics and scented with some mysterious moisturizer.

Deep within the core of his residual humanity, the old melancholy stirred, a yearning for the banal routines of mortal life. And something more. Tonight, gazing at Kate O’Brien’s face over a cup of coffee that he’d merely played at tasting, he’d felt…possibilities.

Love is the great redeemer, the old Franciscan had told him a decade before, pressing the small, wooden box into Gideon’s palm. Through love, all things are possible.

Gideon, newly widowed and desperate for hope, had wept and clutched the box with silent gratitude.

The tiny relic it contained, a vial of sacred blood, held the answer to his deepest desire. Then, of course, the old priest had doused his hope by setting the book atop the box.

Ah, the book. The instruction manual, with its vehement and unarguable laws. Years had passed since he’d touched it. It was the enemy, the cruel tormentor to his gossamer hopes.

Stepping back into the pool house, he retrieved a key from the top of a narrow secretary, opened the cabinet, and withdrew a small, leather-bound manual. The cover was cracked with age, its pages brittle.

He searched the fine print with inhuman speed, vision rapier-sharp as he peered through the darkness and found the verse he sought.

….And through the blood of St. Xanthia shall the cursed find salvation, and having clothed himself in the ways of the righteous, drink from the vial and sustain no injury, and be made whole, the soul restored.

But commit a single infraction before consuming the sacred essence, destroy another creature even for the sake of sustenance, and the blood of Xanthia will deliver the darkness of death, and it will come like a slow oppressor, visiting much agony upon the perpetrator until the end, when God and soul shall be forever parted.

Gideon closed his eyes and pressed the book against his heart. He was the sinner, the soulless one for whom the warning was intended. In the agony of passion he’d destroyed another creature, maybe not directly, but Caroline had died in the end.

Unable to help himself, he’d tasted her, touched her, planted the seed within her that blossomed and drained her life force, day by day, until her fragile human body could serve one purpose only—to deliver their son into a world that proved painful and cruel.

Death had come to Gideon’s wife like a slow oppressor, delivered at his hand. And it would visit him a thousand times more horribly if he drank the vial. There were no amendments to the law of St. Xanthia.

He gingerly returned the book to its keeping place, closed the secretary, turned the brass key and slid it behind the ornate scroll at the top of the cabinet.

Nothing could redeem him now.

“Amazing. Utterly amazing.” Kate squinted at the dark-haired adolescent sitting across from her. “Are you this good with all your school subjects?”

Jude shrugged, pushing back from the table to regard her with a hauntingly familiar expression. So like Gideon, especially in the dim light they used to study by. “I’m okay at most stuff. I like algebra best, though.” Clicking her pen, she glanced at the eighth-grade mathematics textbook in front of him. He’d made mincemeat out of every challenge she’d thrown his way. “Ever tried geometry?” “Yeah.”

“Aced it?”

A smile crept across his mouth. “Sorta.”

“How about trigonometry? Or calculus?”

“Dad says I could do both if I tried. But none of my other teachers thought anything about it.”

“How many other teachers came before me?” she asked, watching him carefully.

He shrugged. “Maybe eight or nine.”

Eight or nine?

The look on her face must have betrayed her astonishment, because he smiled a little. “You probably wonder what I did to scare them off.”

She gave a helpless laugh. “I have to admit I’m curious.”

“I get sick too often to keep a teacher. Dad ends up having to let them go.” His dark gaze darted to hers. “But will you stay, even if I can’t study sometimes? Even if I get too sick to have lessons? Because I always get well again. So you’ll stay, right?” Kate paused, lost for an answer. “I don’t know the future, Jude. If you get sick again and your dad decides I’m not needed, then I’ll have to go. But not for three months,” she added quickly when disappointment darkened his face. “I can guarantee three months of my special brand of torture, and some nightmarish trigonometry assignments with your name on them.” The humor returned to his features and the tension left his thin shoulders. “I’m ready for some good math,” he said, pushing away the eighth-grade text with a discriminate finger. “Not this easy stuff.” “Then your wish is granted.” She scrawled a reminder across the back of her notebook to search for a more advanced text for him. He was, undeniably, gifted. “I don’t have a math skills test that suits your level, so let’s move on to reading comprehension, and I’ll make a run into Christiansburg to see what I can find this weekend.” Jude perked up. “Dad’ll let you borrow his car when he gets back from the convention tomorrow night.” The thought of slipping behind the sleek sedan’s steering wheel dampened Kate’s palms. “Or maybe Mrs. Shelton will let me use hers.” “Dad’s is cooler.”

“No doubt,” she said dryly.

Rubbing at a smudge on the gold inlaid table, Jude sighed. “I wish I could go to Christiansburg.

Just…walk outside and get in the car and drive away.”

Kate watched him with a carefully blank expression, while inside, her heart thudded with sympathy and a strange relief. With very little effort on her part, he opened up more with each passing hour. He was obviously lonely, tired of being so singular and isolated. “If we went after dark, do you think your dad would let you come with me?” The light faded from his eyes. “He’d say no. I’ve been too sick lately.” She offered him a sad smile. “You can go with me another time, Jude. And if you just feel like getting out of here sometime, maybe we can take an evening drive.” “There’s nothing to see in the dark.”

She didn’t bother to argue. He was right; this far out in the country, their activities were sorely limited.

“Do you like to swim?” she asked. “You’ve got that great big pool all to yourself.” He shrugged. “It’s okay. The underwater light hurts my eyes so I have to swim in the dark, and last time I jammed my finger against the side of the pool. But sometimes I do play tennis with my dad. We use glow-in-the-dark balls.” “Good for you,” she said, making a mental note to dig out her racket. “I play, too, but I could definitely use some practice.” She slid aside the book and propped her chin in her hand, treading carefully. The growing intimacy between them was fragile, and she knew Jude wanted to trust her. “What other kind of sports do you like?” He rolled his eyes in speculation. “I like soccer. Basketball’s okay. And definitely football.” “Of course.”

“Miami rules.”

She blocked the statement with a raised palm. “I beg to differ, hailing from the Pittsburgh area originally.

And I’m not about to tell you what team I root for.”

“Gee, that’s a real mystery,” he said, laughing. “But too bad, so sad. You have to like Miami if you’re going to live in this house.”

“Says who?” she demanded with mock indignation.

“Says my dad.”

They exchanged smiles, and for the hundredth time in the last few days, Kate caught a glimpse of the beautiful man Jude would soon become. He was extraordinary, and thank God he didn’t know it yet.

“Okay, quit distracting me. We’re going to read Lord of the Flies .” All business again, she slid the book across the table to him. “Here’s your copy.” Scowling, Jude flipped through the paperback. “It looks weird.” “It is weird. And spooky, and interesting. Go to it. You don’t have to read in the living room. Read wherever you’re comfortable, and when you’ve finished two chapters, I want you to sum up each chapter in your new literature journal. A complete paragraph, okay? Do I need to refresh you on what that is?” “Opening sentence, three body sentences, and a closing sentence. I know.” He stood, dragged the novel from the table, and ambled toward the foyer. “I’ll be in the conservatory,” he said with a heavy sigh.