Time After Time (24 page)

"Right."

Liz tried not to hear the
irony in his voice, but it was hard to miss. It left her feeling
dispirited; she didn't need any more evidence that he had a cynical
view of women. "Stacey might really want to do right by Caroline,"
she ventured.

"You haven't met Stacey"
was all he said. "Jeez," he said, laughing softly, "will you listen
to me? All I've done is carp about the way people try to cope: my
father, Stacey, Keith — I don't even know the guy! — and worst of
all, you."

"Yes," she said lightly.
"What a scoundrel you are."

"Well, I'm sure as hell no
expert on relationships. Forgive me?" he asked.

"Forgive you for what? For
being honest with me?" Liz shook her head, sad that he didn't find
her spunky, glad that he was sorry about it. "In a weird way it's
pretty flattering."

His chuckle, soft and low
and sexy, lingered in the air around them like the scent of roses.
"Forget your career in party planning," he said, tilting her chin
up to him. "You should go into public relations."

The kiss, when it finally
came, was as inevitable as a high tide. His mouth, warm and soft
and interested, closed on hers. She was surprised at how familiar
it seemed, as if it weren't their first kiss at all, but the kiss
that came after they'd already made love.
It's supposed to be electric,
she
thought, disappointed.
We've danced around
this kiss for so long.

And then he probed her
mouth further, and the touch of his tongue sliding over hers simply
blew her away. She made a yielding sound low in her throat, and
Jack Eastman, who probably knew that sound the way Toby knew
knives, had to know that Liz was his for the taking.

Come and get me
was what the sound said.
Oh, lord, here I am. I have waited so long for you; for this.
And I am
ready
.

All that, in one wordless
sound.

He slid his hands down her
back and, still kissing her, began inching her shirt out of the
waistband of her jeans. In a flash she understood that the
restlessness she'd been feeling for the past year had had nothing
whatever to do with forging ahead with her career.

"Liz ... Liz," he
murmured, breaking off the kiss to nuzzle the curve of her neck,
"if you don't want me to keep going ..."

She made another sound, a
moan, which obviously translated as "Are you
crazy?"

He laughed then, a low,
rich, utterly devilish chuckle that maybe should have frightened
Liz but absolutely did not. Instead, she found her hand on the
zipper of his khakis, because she had an urgent, demonic need for
him of her own.

Later, she thought she
must have been possessed.

The cry that ripped
through the night from the upstairs window sent shivers of terror
hard on the heels of the pleasure she'd been feeling.

"Susy!" she cried in
anguish.

She broke away from Jack
and made a blind dash for the back steps. The candle had flickered
out sometime during the kiss; in her haste Liz stumbled over the
first step and sprawled forward, scraping her arm on the concrete
risers. She rose and yanked the back door open, then raced like a
madwoman up the varnished stairs to Susy's bedroom.

She found her daughter
standing on the bed, her arms in front of her, warding off — Liz
didn't know what.

"Susy, honey, what's
wrong, what's wrong?" Liz said, holding her daughter in her arms.
The child was shivering violently and sobbing with fear; Liz lifted
her up and then sat down on the side of the bed, cradling
her.

"I s-saw something," Susy
stammered between sobs. "Over
there."
She pointed to the closed
louvred doors of the closet, averting her head from the sight,
burrowing into her mother's breast. "Is it gone?" she asked in a
muffled voice.

Liz turned on the lamp. "I
don't see anything," she said, listening automatically for the
chime-sound. She made reassuring murmurs while she rocked her
daughter and stroked her hair reassuringly.
This has to end,
she thought.
I'll tear up the letters, burn the box, bury the
pin — this has to end.

"It was kind of pink,"
Susy finally managed to say. "And I could see right through it. It
didn't look like anything," she admitted, "but it was as big as
you." She began to sob again, then checked herself with a brave
little effort. "It was — it was like the wrapping on my Easter
basket."

Despite herself, Liz
smiled. Cellophane? The image was so innocuous, so unlike what she
feared Susy might have seen.
"That's
not a ghost," she said
soothingly. "That's just color that was left over from your dreams.
When you opened your eyes, it was still there. Probably you were
dreaming of a big fuzzy toy rabbit, that's all."

Susy seemed persuaded by
that, and let herself relax in her mother's arms, and finally lay
back down to sleep.

Liz said softly, "Would
you like the door open or closed?"

"Closed," Susy said,
surprising her. "Because if the ghost comes in our house through
the chimney," she explained in sleepy confusion, "then after it got
up the stairs ... I can keep it out."

Liz kissed her and said,
"I'll be right in the kitchen."

Which was where she found
Jack with his sleeves rolled up, washing dishes. He looked so
impossibly domestic, so unlike the imperious businessman-bachelor
with little time or patience for life's more mundane chores, that,
again, she had to smile.

He glanced at her over his
shoulder and caught her appraising look, then eyed her with a
sudden burning one of his own. For one spark of an instant, some of
the backyard electricity crackled again between them. But he knew,
and she knew, that the moment had passed, at least for
tonight.

He said amiably, "Nothing
serious, I take it?"

"Depends who you ask. Susy
thinks so," Liz said with a tired sigh. She felt like a racquetball
after a hard game between two lawyers. Emotionally, she'd been
batted all around the court tonight. And she still wasn't sure if
the game was over.

"I used to have a
recurring nightmare when I was a boy," Jack recollected as he
rinsed the last of the cups. "There'd be some kind of emergency —
usually medical — and I'd have to drive someone to the hospital,
only I didn't have a license. Sometimes I tried driving without
one, sometimes I couldn't find the car or the keys — but I always
woke up in a cold sweat, feeling as if I'd desperately failed
somebody. Oddly enough, the dreams stopped when I turned sixteen
and got my license," he said, flashing her an all-male, all-modern
grin.

When Liz didn't respond,
he said, not without sympathy, "So she's in one of those
monster-in-the-closet phases?"

Liz laughed bleakly and
said, "You might say that — only the monster's a ghost."

"Ah." He wiped his hands
on the dish towel and hung it back on the hook. "Well, lots of
different things go bump in the night."

Instantly Liz pictured
herself with him in bed, which she knew was not what he'd meant at
all. "Speaking of ghosts," she said, recovering with an awkward
laugh, "don't you think it's funny how only the mansions get
haunted, never the three-bedroom ranches?"

"You've deduced this
scientifically?" he asked with a wry smile.

"I've read stories," she
said, riding roughshod over his irony. "Let's take East Gate. Just
... for example. I'll bet that over the years there've been all
manner of sightings and unexplained goings-on there."

"Nope," he said, leaning
back on the counter and watching her with a sideways look. "Can't
say as there have."

"Nothing at all? You never
had a crazy aunt who saw, well, something going up or down the
staircase or ... maybe by the clock?" she finished in a tiny,
failing voice.

"Nope."

"You never took a
photograph and ended up with strange vapory columns in it that you
couldn't explain?"

"Nope." The smile on his
face was gradually settling into a straight line that ran parallel
to the square set of his clefted jaw. Liz found herself getting
distracted again, thinking how impossibly like an old-fashioned
screen star he looked, when he said seriously, "What exactly have
you been seeing, on and around the Eastman property?"

Liz couldn't quite face
him for the answer. She turned and made a business of cleaning off
the kitchen table, picking up a bottle of A1 steak sauce with one
hand, the pepper grinder in the other. Suddenly, arbitrarily, she
remembered that her T-shirt was still half in, half out of the
waistband of her jeans. Very carefully, blushing furiously, she put
the bottle of steak sauce and the pepper grinder back on the table,
then casually began tucking her shirt back into her jeans. If she'd
been a cat, she could have hidden her embarrassment in a fit of
grooming.

But alas, she wasn't a
cat. "I've been seeing an Eastman, I think," she murmured, more
embarrassed now than ever. And yet, what else could she say? It was
the truth, whether or not it was stranger than fiction.

Jack made a wry, almost
comical grimace and rubbed his chin with his thumb and forefinger
as he considered his response. "Which Eastman?" he merely
asked.

"It's the artist who
painted in the studio that used to be on this property during the
1890s. I don't know his first name. He was a younger brother,
dashing, impulsive, somewhat scandalous in his behavior. But not
for an artist," she quickly added, amazing herself by defending her
ghost. "For a while he was in love with one of the servants at East
Gate," she said to explain her last remark.

The half-amused expression
on Jack's face disappeared. In its place a puzzled look took over;
then that, too, got lost behind a curtain of scarcely veiled
suspicion. "How do you know all this?" he asked evenly, folding his
arms across his chest.

Liz didn't need a clinical
psychologist to translate his body language: he had assumed the
role of defender of All That Was Eastman. "It's in the letters I
found," she said haplessly. She felt like a teenager caught smoking
in the girls' bathroom. But she wasn't guilty of
anything.

Except, apparently, of
having an overactive imagination. She could see it in Jack's eyes:
he thought she was impressionable at best, hysterical at worst.
"The only one who even remotely fits your description is
Christopher Eastman," he said at last.

"Who is—?"

"My
great-great-grandfather. As for his scandalous behavior, I know
nothing of it," Jack added grimly. "He married a woman whose
portrait hangs in the entry hall. As a matter of fact, he
painted
the
portrait."

Liz went blank for a
moment, calling up in her memory the various paintings that hung in
strategic locations above the paneled wainscoting of East Gate's
grand hall. Then it came to her. She knew exactly which one he
meant. It wasn't the subject so much as the style of the artist
that she remembered: it was different from all the rest, and yet —
now that she thought about it — disturbingly familiar.

"The blond woman in the
blue gown?" she asked.

"That's the
one."

"Hmm. And his death wasn't
... untimely?" she asked, grasping by now at straws.

"He lived a long and
healthy life."

"As an artist?"

"No, he gave all that up
to run the shipyard and to manage other scattered real estate the
family owned at the time. A hundred years ago," Jack explained with
a dark flush, "the Eastman empire was farther away from bankruptcy
than it is now."

"Oh. I'm sorry," Liz said,
fixating on the bankruptcy part. "These are such hard
times."

He was just as glad to
change the subject. "Our customers have been hit hard. Commercial
fishermen are running out of fish, and mom-and-pop boaters are
running out of leisure. The recession didn't help, and neither did
the luxury tax, despite its repeal. Few have the money to keep
boats for business
or
pleasure.

"The only real scandal in
our family nowadays," he added ironically, "is the amount of the
shipyard's receivables."

Liz remembered seeing some
very fine yachts when she visited the yard. "But surely," she
argued, despite her reluctance to provoke him on such a sensitive
matter, "the rich are still getting richer."

He arched one brow at the
hostility in her manner, so predictable whenever she spoke of the
wealthy. "Yeah, but they can cut better deals at other yards in
less prime locations than ours, and they are. Look, it's getting
late; I really ought to be going." He looked around the homey
kitchen as if he were doing one last sweep of a hotel room before
checking out. "Thanks for supper. I hope your cat's none the worse
for wear."

"Not a snowball's chance
in hell," she said with a wan smile.
Leaving? Just like that?