Night Scents (10 page)

"No." His jaw seemed stiff. He glanced at Piper with those searing eyes. No way did he believe she and Hannah were there about hummingbirds and bee balm. "I haven't."

Hannah was oblivious to the tension between them. "Piper can show you where the feeders are, should you want to set them out."

"That won't be necessary. I'm a great believer in animals' survival instincts. The hummingbirds will figure out soon enough they're on their own."

Piper rested back on her heels and gave her conniving aunt an I-rest-my-case look. Maybe she'd reassess her opinion that Clate was meant to be the love of her niece's life. But Hannah pressed ahead. "Well, perhaps you'd let Piper set up the feeders in her yard."

"She's welcome to them. Now, I've had a long day. If you two ladies don't mind—"

Piper seized her aunt's hand in an attempt to coax her out of there before she could say anything else, but Hannah didn't budge. Her brow was furrowed as she stared at Clate. Finally, she said, "Someone close to you has died."

His head jerked up. His eyes darkened. Suspicion, fatigue, grief, irritation—Piper sensed a dangerous swirl of emotions as any trace of patience and humor ebbed out of him.

"I'll be back for the feeders another time," she said quickly.

He said nothing. Piper half led, half dragged her aunt down the terrace steps. Hannah seemed in no hurry to go. Probably still trying to read Clate's mind. "Geez, Hannah," Piper said when they were out of Clate's earshot. "Whatever possessed you to suggest that someone close to him died?"

"Because someone did."

"How do you know?"

She shrugged. "It was in his eyes."

Piper groaned as she slipped through the break in the privet, then waited for her aunt to join her. "Well, you see what he's like. You went and conjured up the wrong man. Clate Jackson is impossible."

"Of course he is," Hannah said placidly.

"He hates people, he's mean to birds—"

"He's suffered and survived. He thinks it builds character. You've never been booted from the nest. You can't judge."

"You don't know anything about the man!"

"Oh, but I do."

"Hannah, I swear, you are the most exasperating person I've ever known. You're lucky I love you so much."

She smiled, the corners of her eyes crinkling. "Yes, I am lucky. You'll see to my hummingbirds?"

Piper sighed. Hannah wasn't worried about her hummingbirds until Piper had done some fast thinking to placate Clate. "Of course."

"And my treasure? No more dragging your heels?"

"I haven't been—"

"You have been dragging your heels, Piper. Please don't insult my intelligence by trying to deny it. You missed your chance to act while Mr. Jackson was away. Now you'll have to risk his catching you again."

"Hannah, you've seen what he's like. He'll call the police next time he catches me trespassing."

She waved a hand in dismissal. "Ernie would never arrest you for trespassing on Frye land."

"It's
not
Frye land anymore."

"Phooey," her aunt muttered as she walked around to Piper's driveway and her brand-new, neon-bright raspberry car, complete with its own compact disc player and cellular phone. Hannah Frye was undaunted by modern technology. She'd had the soundtrack to
South Pacific
playing when she'd arrived two hours ago. She opened up the driver's door and looked around at her niece. "I've waited eighty years, Piper. I want to know what really happened to my parents before I die."

"Hannah—"

"If I could, I'd do the digging myself, but I'm afraid I'm just too old."

Piper felt the drizzle damp on her hair. "You're trying to manipulate me with all this talk of getting old and dying."

"I
am
old, and I w/Wdie."

"Neither of which has anything to do with me going up against Clate Jackson."

Hannah sniffed as she slid behind her leather-covered wheel. "Honestly, Piper, I'm tempted to put a spell on you to make you cooperate. You're lucky I don't do that sort of thing."

With that, she flicked on her CD player, pulled her door shut, and eased off toward town and her luxury townhouse with "There Is Nothin' Like a Dame" at top volume.

A crazy aunt and a cranky neighbor. "Just what my life needs," Piper grumbled, and headed off to her studio.

Clate turned up at her door an hour later. She had left it open while she prepared for her evening class. He had changed from his travel clothes into frayed, stained khakis and a denim shirt, making him look untycoonlike, more real, more a man she could understand. She shook off her reaction. What was she thinking? He wasn't a man she could remotely understand!

"I brought your hummingbird feeders," he said in that rasping, sexy drawl.

"Oh. That wasn't necessary. I could have fetched them myself."

"I'm sure."

His wry tone kept his response from being totally insulting. He set the feeders just inside the door as he gave her small studio a quick scan. It wasn't expensive, high tech, or elegant. Having scavenged what she could from her father and brothers, Piper had built floor-to-ceiling shelves, now crammed with supplies, books, equipment, and a big sawhorse worktable made out of two-by-fours and a slab of birch plywood that she'd sanded and stained herself, with much unsolicited advice from Macintosh & Sons.

She noticed Clate taking in the array of flowers, leaves, spices, bits of root, citrus peel that she'd spread out on the table for her evening class. "Relax, I didn't swipe anything off your property."

"You're working?"

"I have a potpourri-making class tonight."

"Your classes meet in here?"

"Most of them. I teach my cooking classes in the keeping room in my house."

"You enjoy crafts," he said.

"I don't really view what I do as crafts, but skills once needed to survive or maybe to make life more pleasant. If I were transported back a century or two, I could probably make a go of it." She grinned suddenly, adding, "Except I'd miss the Red Sox, of course. Or maybe not, the way they play half the time. Point is, I like knowing how to make dyes, pottery, how to weave, make dress patterns, grow vegetables, cook on an open hearth."

"Your aunt taught you?"

"Hannah? No way. She says only someone who grew up with permanent-press sheets would want to learn how to tat. I don't romanticize the past. I just think some of these lost skills help connect us with previous generations, make us more confident, less mystified by a handwoven place mat."

He smiled. "I don't know if I've ever been mystified by a place mat."

"Well, you know what I mean. There's something—I can't explain it, but I love getting a beautiful red dye from plants that grow in the marsh outside my door, knowing how to do it. Besides, it's fun."

"Right."

She laughed, even as that long, southern
i
rolled up her spine. "You don't get it, do you? Well, neither do my brothers. They think I should have gone to law school."

Her laughter faded, and when he said nothing, she became aware of the stillness of her surroundings. No radio, no television, no cars, not even much in the way of birds and sea. The gray, drizzly weather contributed to a heightened sense of intimacy, as if the fog and rain had enveloped them in their own world, separate from the rest of Frye's Cove.

Piper shook off the feeling. She'd been spending too much time with Hannah. "Thanks for the feeders. Hannah will be relieved to know her hummingbirds are being taken care of."

"You two are quick on your feet, I'll give you that much."

"Are you suggesting—"

He held up a hand. "I'm not here to argue. If you and your aunt want to pretend you were on my property to look after hummingbirds, you go right ahead."

"We're not pretending anything."

"Ah-huh."

They weren't. They simply hadn't explained everything. She and Hannah both cared about the fate of the hummingbirds that had come to rely on feeders at the Frye house. That just had nothing to do with why they'd been there.

Which Clate obviously knew.

Instead of further dancing around the truth, Piper kept her mouth shut. Clate made no effort to pretend he wasn't studying her and her studio. She fingered a dried rosebud, trying to look as if she didn't care if he scrutinized her all night. And, damn it, she didn't, because not in a million years of scrutinizing her would he guess that she was thinking about how she was going to dig under his wisteria and satisfy Hannah there was no treasure buried there.

"You're aware, I assume, of what people are saying about your aunt."

Heat radiated up from her neck to the roots of her hair. She dropped the rosebud and shot him a look. His intensity was disconcerting, unnerving, utterly mesmerizing. "What people?"

"People in town. I've hardly spent any time at all here, and already I've heard things."

"Hannah's an old woman, and she's lived in Frye's Cove all her life. People talk. I wouldn't pay any attention—"

"Then she doesn't fancy herself a witch?"

Piper took a breath. Who had he been talking to? But he'd never tell. Clate Jackson was the kind of man who listened to and remembered everything, but said nothing unless it was to his advantage. "Hannah's beliefs are her business and no one else's. I will say this: the witches I know are kind, knowledgeable, self-reliant, attuned to nature—and they make a vow to do harm to no one."

His intensity didn't let up, his eyes, even with the gray light, that searing, unsettling blue. "Not intentionally, presumably."

"You mean Stan Carlucci." Piper could hear the weariness in her own voice. "He's never going to let that one little mistake go. Well, you can forget whatever you've heard. Hannah doesn't go around deliberately poisoning people, not even Stan, who's as big an ass as they come."

Clate was staring at her in such a manner that she decided, belatedly, that perhaps he hadn't heard about Stan Carlucci's misfortune. She swore softly to herself. The best defense was sometimes a good offense, but other times it was knowing when to keep your mouth shut.

"And Stan Carlucci is who?" he asked mildly.

"A local selectman. I—you—" She winced, calming herself, then cocked her head at him. "Urn, what exactly have you heard about Hannah?"

A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth, only increasing Piper's dread about just what he'd heard. He fingered a cinnamon stick. She noticed a tiny scar on his thumb, the dark hairs on his tanned wrist. "I gather there are competing theories as to why she sold her property and how I ended up as the purchaser."

Piper swallowed. When she was ten years old, she had vowed never to let anything her great-aunt did embarrass her. Hannah's actions were a reflection on her, and she was accountable for what she did, and Piper loved her unconditionally, totally.

But her aunt had never before claimed to have conjured up a rich, sexy Tennessean for her one and only niece.

Clate rested those mesmerizing eyes on her. "You've heard these theories, too, I take it?"

She cleared her throat. "Probably not all of them."

"You want me to run them by you?"

"Please."

He smiled. He knew she didn't want to hear the first thing about any competing theories. This was revenge, pure and simple, for having caught her trespassing again and then lying about it. Piper raised her chin, determined to hear him out without squirming.

"Let's see if I can remember." He narrowed his eyes a moment, as if thinking. She didn't for a second believe he didn't have this entire scene rehearsed. "First is the ghost theory. Supposedly Mrs. Frye believes one of my ancestors is haunting her former house—"

"Not true."

"No, I didn't think so. Then there's the devil theory."

The devil theory? Piper hadn't heard that one. "Go on."

"The devil made her cast a spell on me to lure me north so I could buy her house and land and build a resort that would forever change the destiny of quiet, picturesque Frye's Cove."

"That's crazy. Hannah's no tool of the devil. She's a sweet, caring woman."

"What about me?"

Piper shrugged. "I can't vouch for you. I hardly know you. Did you buy her land for a resort?"

He gave her a small, mysterious smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "That's irrelevant. In this particular theory, we're both tools of the devil, not just me."

"Just because Hannah has unorthodox interests doesn't mean she's evil. That's just people's ignorance of what real witchcraft is, not that Hannah's even a witch. So you can cross that theory right off your list if it means Hannah's involved with the devil."

"All right." He boldly settled onto a high stool at her worktable. The smell of spices, orange, lemon, lavender, and roses mingled with the cool, salty scents of the fog and the rain. "Well, then we come to the romance theory."

Piper was silent.

"The romance theory," Clate went on in that smooth, all-too-sexy drawl, "has it that your aunt sold her house as part of a spell to summon a man to Cape Cod who would fall in love with her niece."

"The man being you," Piper said neutrally, "and the niece being me."

"Presumably."

She cleared her throat. "Well, all these theories are very interesting, but Frye's Cove is a small town, and people will talk. Right now I have work to do."

"You haven't dismissed this particular theory."

"I haven't? Oh. Well, consider it dismissed. My love life isn't anyone else's business, and I'm sure yours isn't either."

"It's not, but that doesn't stop people from trying to make it their business."

No, it certainly didn't. Hannah Frye for one. Suddenly restless, Piper grabbed a bolt of blue calico cloth from the shelf behind her. She would cut swatches for simple potpourri sachets. "I'm not so desperate for a man that Hannah would need to conjure one up for me." Not, of course, that Hannah had acted out of a sense of Piper's desperation. She maintained it was all because of a dream, the universe urging her to provide Piper and the love of her life the little push they needed to get together.

Clate held his ground. "This isn't about you or me. It's about your aunt and whether she thinks she got me up here through some kind of spell."