Her Passionate Plan B Read online

  Try as she would to bring the picture into focus, the man waiting at the altar wore jeans, a leather jacket and western boots. A man she’d first seen only hours earlier. A man with a crooked grin and a wicked gleam in his eyes, and as she saw him waiting at the altar, all she could think of was—

  Too much stress. She had flat out lost her mind.

  Recovering her lost train of thought, she looked guiltily at the broken rocker. “I really am sorry, Mr. Magee. It’s just that—well, I guess it gets to me, dealing with all these personal effects. As a rule I’m never involved in that sort of thing, but Mr. Snow didn’t have anyone else and I hated to think of strangers pawing through his belongings. He was—he had too much pride for that.”

  He didn’t say a word, just stared at her with those enigmatic blue eyes. Flinging her hands out in a gesture of helplessness, she said, “Look, I liked the man, all right? He was my friend as well as my patient, and this is one last thing I can do for him. So if you don’t mind—”

  “Just get the hell out of the way so you can finish, right?” he said softly.

  She turned away, blinking rapidly. Oh, dammit, not again!

  Across the room under a small stained-glass window sat a humpback trunk. That, too, would have to be gone through. She’d almost sooner cart it down to the river and throw it overboard unopened.

  “Daisy?”

  “What!” she snapped without turning around. Daisy the unflappable, known far and wide for her composure, was coming apart at the seams, leaking embarrassing emotions all over the place.

  “It’s chilly up here and you’re not wearing enough clothes. Let’s go down and see if what’s her name can brew up some coffee, okay?”

  “Faylene,” she said, grasping any excuse to cut short the tour. “Her name is Faylene Beasley, I told you that twice already. She worked three days a week for Mr. Snow and one day each for my two best friends, and I don’t know why I’m telling you all this because I never babble.”

  He nodded soberly and led the way, probably expecting her to collapse from overwrought nerves. If she happened to fall and break a leg, he’d be just the type to compound the fracture by sweeping her up in his arms, leaping aboard his white horse and galloping off to the nearest emergency room. God save her from amateur heroes.

  “My grandmother might have sat in that rocking chair,” Kell said quietly after closing the attic door. “I don’t know if Blalock explained or not, but my dad and Uncle Harvey shared a mom.”

  “I believe you mentioned it once or twice.” Uncle Harvey? Daisy knew exactly what he was trying to do. He was trying to stake his claim. But it wasn’t up to her to decide.

  They reached the front of the second-floor hall, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the newly waxed floor, his worn, western-style boots making whispery sounds. He continued, saying, “Half Uncle Harvey, if you want to get technical. Anyhow, Blalock said Harvey had never married and it’s usually women who save stuff. Guys just toss it or cover it up with more junk. So my grand-mom was probably the one who stashed that old trunk up there.”

  “So?” She should have sent him packing when he first showed up. Let Egbert deal with him, this wasn’t part of her job description.

  Oh, sure—like housecleaning and sorting through tons of stuff was?

  “So there might even be a few old pictures of her and her two sons up there, you reckon?”

  He waited for an answer and she didn’t have one. As far as she was concerned he could have any pictures he found. He could even have that box of mending for all she cared. She’d leave it to Egbert’s interpretation of Harvey’s will and whatever he found out about the cowboy’s claim.

  If he thought turning on the charm would win her over he was flat out of luck. She’d already been vaccinated. What had happened upstairs had been a momentary aberration, not a sign of weakness on her part.

  Daisy waited for him to leave. When he didn’t, she turned toward the kitchen. Let Faylene deal with him.

  His leathery-woodsy scent and whispery footsteps were right behind her. “Don’t you think it’s significant that both Harvey and Evander had names with V in them? I mean, what are the chances?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t hear many names with V in them, do you?”

  “Victor, Vance, Vaughn, Virginia—Virgil.”

  “Hmm…never thought of those. Remind me not to play word games with you.”

  If his smile was meant to disarm, it wasn’t working. “I never play games,” she informed him.

  His smile widened into a grin. “Ri-ight.”

  They were still standing there when something struck the side of the house. Daisy said, “Oh, no—it’s probably a bird. I’d better go see if it’s hurt. Sometimes in the late afternoon the sun reflects on the glass and—”

  She was hurrying toward the front door when the same sound came again. This time they stared at each other, then both looked in the direction the sound had come from.

  Kell said, “Upstairs.”

  Daisy said, “Outside.”

  “Might be a branch,” he murmured. “The wind’s picked up.”

  “Oh, great. That means more raking. I’d forgotten about the yard.” In an unspoken truce, they hurried outside and looked for signs of a stunned bird among all the pecans, pine cones and broken branches littering the unkempt lawn.

  “What about a lawn service?”

  “Some crews came by right after the storm and collected whatever Faylene and I could drag out to the road. We cleared off the porches and the driveway, but we never got around to doing anything more.”

  “You do the yard work, too? I thought you were a nurse.”

  She shrugged. “As long as I’m living here rent free, I try to earn my keep. Anyway, it’s easier to do things myself than try to find someone else to do it, especially now.”

  Especially now after the hurricane? Kell wondered. Or especially now that she was out of a job? “What about gutters?” he asked, remembering the one he’d seen dangling when he’d first driven into the yard.

  “Gutters,” she repeated. “Well, shoot. I told Egbert they needed repairing, but he said repairs could wait until the estate was settled.”

  “Which will be…?”

  “Six months, I think. I’m not sure—Egbert needs time for any creditors to come forward, anyway, or any other—” She broke off and he finished for her.

  “Or any other claimants. Don’t worry, I’m not.” She shot him a skeptical look—she had it down pat. Kell didn’t bother to set her straight. “Place is a mess, isn’t it?” he mused.

  She flashed him a smile that disappeared almost before it could register. The tip of her nose was still slightly pink, but it didn’t affect the impact. Funny, he thought, because he usually liked his ladies groomed to a high polish. She was anything but.

  “If it was a chunk of gutter banging up against the side of the house, I might be able to reach it and pull it down.” He knew damned well she didn’t want him here. The thing was, the more she wanted him to leave, the more determined he was to hang around. “So why don’t I take care of it now?”

  Right. Magee to the rescue. He knew what gutters were for, everybody knew that. He even knew roughly how they were attached to a house. The rest he should be able to figure out.

  Shielding his eyes from the low sun, he stared up at the dangling section of gutter. If he’d needed an entrée, this just might be it. He could offer to tack up hanging stuff and saw off whatever couldn’t be nailed back up. Men’s work, he told himself, unconsciously bracing his shoulders.

  When it occurred to him that researching his family tree might not be the sole reason he wanted to hang around for a few days, he was quick to deny it. No way, he told himself. The lady was…interesting, but not his style. Besides, he didn’t do overnighters.

  “Oh, yeah, that definitely needs to come down,” he murmured as they stood shoulder to shoulder and gazed up toward the eaves. “Lucky thing it didn’t
hit that window with all the stained glass.”

  Nodding, Daisy turned toward the back door where Faylene waited with a market basket of assorted hand tools. “Told you that thang weren’t gonna stay up there if the wind shifted.”

  Kell reached for the basket, but Daisy beat him to it. Faylene said, “Want me to help you get the ladder out? While you’re up yonder, you might want to whack off that big limb hangin’ over the screen porch.”

  “Where’s the ladder? I’ll get it,” Kell said, all but flexing his muscles to prove his prowess.

  “I know I’ve seen you summers before,” the housekeeper said thoughtfully. “You weren’t one o’ them bachelors on the TV, were you?”

  He grinned and shook his head. “No, ma’am, not in a million years, Ms. Beasley.”

  Granted, he was a bachelor, and he’d definitely been on TV, but never in the context she’d mentioned. Before the housekeeper could recall where she’d seen him he turned away, pausing only when he reached the bottom step and hesitated.

  “I wondered if you knew where you were going,” Daisy said dryly. “The shed’s around back. The ladder’s hanging on the outside wall—at least it was before the storm. It might be over in the next county by now.”

  “No problem. I passed a hardware store on my way here.”

  “You’re not buying any ladders,” she said, as if she suspected him of trying to ingratiate himself. Sharp lady. “There it is,” she said. “You take one end and I’ll carry the other.”

  “Be easier if I just balance it on my shoulders.” He could tell she wanted to argue, but instead, she marched off toward the house, giving him a perfect view of her shapely, well-toned backside. In a starched uniform she might be able to pass herself off as a dragon, but in rumpled shorts, a T-shirt and grimy athletic shoes, with her hair tumbling from the shaggy wad on top of her head, she was—

  Suffice it to say that dragon was hardly the word that came to mind.

  They worked surprisingly well as a team. Having been treated for various sports-related injuries, Kell had seen the way nurses slapped tools into the palm of an attending physician. He wasn’t particularly eager to have her slap anything in his hands, especially not a hammer, nails or a screwdriver, so he selected a few basic tools and tucked them under his belt, took a deep breath and started climbing.

  Three rungs from the top he braced himself, held on and shifted his weight experimentally, waiting to see if the ladder was going to settle any deeper into the damp earth. Eyeing the nearby stained-glass window, he called down, “She’s one fancy house, all right. Tall, too.”

  Daisy was watching him, shading her eyes with a slate shingle she’d picked up from the debris on the ground. “Be careful up there,” she warned.

  “I’m always careful. What’d you say it was called, Victorian?”

  “I didn’t say.” Then, as if relenting, she said, “Gothic. I think.”

  “Ri-ight, that’s what I thought it was.” When it came to architecture, he didn’t know Gothic from gator eggs.

  Kell knew better than to look down. Truth was, he wasn’t that great on heights. A pitcher’s mound was about as high as he felt comfortable unless he was flying, preferably first class, preferably in an aisle seat and preferably with a shot of single-malt whisky in hand to settle his nerves.

  Daisy steadied the ladder with both hands while he reached out to unscrew the single screw holding the gutter to the eaves. He called down to warn her to stand back just as the screw came loose and the section of copper gutter fell to the ground.

  “Ouch!”

  Kell twisted around to see what had happened. When the ladder tilted under him he let out a yell and sailed off to one side. They both ended up on the damp ground, with Daisy frowning at a ten-inch scrape on the outside of her leg where the falling gutter had grazed her. Kell massaged his butt and pulled out the cluster of pecans he’d landed on. The yard was littered with the damned things.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “What were you doing, trying to amputate my leg?”

  “I warned you to stand back.”

  “You warned me after the thing was already falling.”

  He stood up, flexed his limbs to be sure they were still working, then held out a hand. “Sorry, I guess my timing was off. Gutter work’s a little out of my line.”

  Ignoring his hand, she stood and then leaned over to examine her injury. “I’d better go put something on this. Did you break any bones when you fell?”

  “I didn’t fall, I jumped.” He followed her into the house. “That thing’s probably going to stiffen up on you once it starts healing.”

  “Jumped, ha! Nice six-point landing, though.”

  “Two feet plus two hands equals four, not six. Do the math.”

  “You left out the two cheeks,” she quipped, slipping through the back door he held open. Glancing over her shoulder, she grinned. “Hope you didn’t bruise anything valuable.”

  Well, what do you know? The lady had a sense of humor after all. He liked that in a woman, he really did. He’d been right about that mouth of hers, too. Without a lick of paint on it, she had a smile that could melt steel-belted radials.

  Kell asked if she was up on her tetanus shots and she withered him with a look. “I am a nurse,” she reminded him. “What are you, by the way? You never did say.”

  “Hungry, at the moment. Kinda tired, too, come to think of it. It’s been a long day.” He didn’t feel like getting into his life story, it only complicated things. He either came off sounding like a failure or a braggart, and actually, he was neither.

  “Where are you staying?” Daisy uncapped a bottle of Betadine and studied the scrape on her leg.

  “I spent last night at a motel out on the highway. I’m not sure, but I think the owner’s name is Bates.” He leaned against a counter and watched as she carefully mopped the raw area with a damp cotton ball. “Maybe you can recommend another place, preferably one near a decent restaurant.”

  “There’s a motel in town, but it’s been closed ever since the storm. Something about a mold problem.”

  “What about restaurants? Most of the ones I saw looked closed, too. Don’t folks around here eat?”

  She capped the bottle and set it aside. “Most of them live around here. They don’t have to rely on restaurants. There are some nice ones in Elizabeth City—motels, too. That’s only about eighteen or twenty miles on the other side of Muddy Landing.”

  “Yeah, I found that out when I was exploring the countryside late last night, looking for the Muddy Landing city limits.”

  “Oh.” She glanced at him, then looked away, almost as if she was embarrassed by the fact that he was hungry and homeless and it was growing dark outside.

  Kell did his best to look hungry and homeless until finally she broke. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, I suppose if you’d like to you could spend the night here. There’s certainly enough room.”

  He barely managed to suppress his triumph when Faylene came in, bristling with mops, feather dusters and cleaning rags. “Plenty of rooms upstairs,” the housekeeper declared. “None of ’em made up, but I guess I could dig out some sheets. Daisy, my bingo’s at seven and I need to run home and change first, so if you’re lettin’ him stay, I’ll do up that corner room.” She measured him with narrowed eyes. “It’s got that big ol’ bed. I ’speck it’ll fit him all right.”

  “Thanks, I really appreciate that,” Kell said before the offer could be withdrawn. “I was thinking about buying a camper and some bedding just so I could get a decent night’s sleep.”

  Daisy knew the minute the invitation left her lips that she’d spoken too hastily. The way she reacted to this man on a purely physical level was totally illogical. “Although I suppose I really should check with Egbert first,” she murmured.

  He barely hesitated before saying, “Blalock? Good idea. By now he’s probably checked out my bona fides. Mind if I help myself to a glass of water?”

  The crazy thin
g was, she knew very well she was being manipulated, only she couldn’t quite figure out how he was doing it. How could any man who looked like a cross between George Clooney and that Joe Millionaire Evan Marriott elicit sympathy simply by asking a simple question about motels?

  While Faylene put away her cleaning gear, Daisy leaned against the refrigerator and watched him down the glass of ice water he’d poured for himself. All right, so he was tall and well built—what was so unusual about that? And blue eyes were hardly uncommon. They only seemed that way because of his deep tan and his jet-black hair—not to mention eyelashes any woman would envy. As for his body—

  She was a nurse, for heaven’s sake. She knew what men’s bodies looked like. Just because those old jeans of his worn low on his narrow hips happened to bag in all the right places and hug in a few others, that didn’t mean what they concealed was all that special. Underneath his clothes he was probably bowlegged, chicken-breasted and hairless.

  In fact, some men actually worked at being hairless to the point of shaving their heads and waxing their bodies. Personally, she’d always liked a moderate amount of hair on a man’s body.

  Good Lord, her brain had been taken over by an alien. “What?” she snapped.

  “I said, maybe I could buy you dinner?” He set his glass in the sink. “In exchange for a place to sleep, I mean? Or we could order takeout if you’re too tired to go out. I can pick it up if delivery’s a problem out here.”

  Daisy dropped down onto a chair, wincing as the wound on the side of her left leg protested. “I told you everything’s still closed since the storm. That includes the ones that do takeout.”

  “Never mind, then. I’m not really hungry. A bed I don’t hang off of will be fine. This has been a long day.”

  Well, shoot. If he was going to be nice about it—“Look, if you don’t mind fried chicken, I’ve got some soaking in buttermilk in the refrigerator that needs to be cooked. How good are you at making salad?”