Читать книгу At Your Command - Anna Leonard - Страница 4

Your aunt left something for you.

Susannah sat back in her chair and stared at the screen, her head tilted as she tried to parse the words to make sense. Left something for her? The e-mail had come from a clerk at some law firm Susannah had never heard of, with the header: “Regarding the Estate of Susannah Mackenzie.”

She was Susannah Mackenzie. All right, Susannah Mackenzie West. But then she wasn’t the only one: she had been named for her great-aunt, a woman she had never actually met, thanks to a falling-out between the woman and Susannah’s grandmother, the year Susannah’s parents had died. The older Susannah had lived in Paris, and not come back for the funeral. “Just you and me now, Su,” her grandmother had said after her parents’ funeral, and she, grief-bound, an orphan at ten, had never questioned it.

So, curious—she had not known the old woman was still alive, much less that she had died recently enough for there to be legal matters pending—Susannah opened the e-mail.

A brief greeting, and then the news that, yes, Susannah Mackenzie had died the year previous, and that they would be sending her inheritance via registered mail, no need to come into the office for it, this was merely a courtesy notification.

A quick search of the Internet confirmed that the law firm was legitimate; apparently, reading the will out to family members only happened in movies.

Susannah read the e-mail again, chewing on one bitten-to-the-quick fingertip, looking for any clue as to what she might be getting. The lawyer said that it would be delivered, not handed over the way you might talk about a check.

Another time she might have called the lawyer, if only to find out about other unknown relatives, but there were a dozen or more e-mails waiting for her to open and respond to, phone calls she had to return, and a meeting that was supposed to start in ten minutes; an unknown bequest from a woman she’d never met would have to wait for some other time.

The traffic on route 95 to New Haven for her commute home wasn’t terrible, considering it was prime leaf-peeping season, but when she walked up the front steps of her town house that evening, she could hear Maxwell barking, anxious to be let out.

“All right, I hear you, I hear you, wait half a minute, okay?”

As though he understood, the barking paused, followed by the sound of claws against the tile, and even as Susannah let herself into the apartment, thirty pounds of dog pushed against her legs, cold nose pressing into her hand as she bent down to pet him.

“Hey, guy.”

If anyone except her or his dog-walker, Alex, came in the door first, Max was as likely to pin them with a snarl and a glare. With her, he reverted back to the 7-month-old Rottie-mix puppy he’d been five years ago, when he picked her out of the wire cages at the adoption center and demanded she bring him home, and never mind that she’d gone in looking for a kitten.

“Nobody tried to break in, huh? Nobody stole your blankie?”

Max, hearing “blankie,” raced into the living room to retrieve the scrap of yellow cloth, bringing it to her with an air of triumph. She had worried about leaving him alone, with her hours at the office running so long, but so long as Max had his blankie to chew on and Alex to walk with midday, he seemed content.

“You’re probably better off than I am,” she said, dropping the mail onto the counter and reaching for Max’s leash. It had been the kind of day they didn’t warn you about in interviews, for fear of scaring everyone out of the job pool. The meetings had all lasted twice as long as expected, with half as much getting done, and her in-box was still filled with e-mails she’d have to go over and reply to tonight, after dinner.

But first, Max needed walking.

When they returned, Max having done his thing, strained after a squirrel and barked at two cats, the UPS truck was pulled up in front of the complex, and the delivery guy was walking up the steps to Susannah’s unit.

“Hi.” She came up behind him, careful to keep Max safely heeled. “You need me to sign for that?”

The delivery guy gave a quick glance at Max, then nodded. “You number 12J, then yep.”

“Max, stay,” she ordered, just to be on the safe side, and reached for the electronic clipboard, scrawling her name with the stylus and accepting the package, all the while juggling Max’s leash and her keys.

The return address matched the law office that had sent her the e-mail. The package was small, about half the size of a shoe box, and surprisingly light.

“So much for gold doubloons,” she said to Max as she let them both into the apartment, unhooking his leash and looping it over the doorknob. “Maybe it’s bearer bonds? Or uncut diamonds?”

More likely it was old letters or photographs; of interest if they shed light on that twenty-year-old rift between her grandmother and grandaunt, but no real value.

Normally she would have put the package aside, to be looked at after dinner, but it wasn’t every day you got an inheritance, much less a mysterious one, and curiosity won out over hunger. Susannah took the box with her over to the sofa, kicking off her shoes and curling her legs under her as she tore off the wrapping, revealing a plain white box, tinged with a yellow that suggested it was several years old, at least, underneath. “Curiouser and curiouser,” she said.

At her feet, Max curled up and tucked his nose under his paws, completely disinterested now that his needs had been satisfied.

Lifting the lid of the box revealed a black jewelry box, about the size of her palm. Susannah felt her heart beat faster in anticipation, which surprised her. She wasn’t much for jewelry: a simple gold cross on a chain, a few earrings she picked up at craft fairs, and her college signet ring the sum total of her possessions, but maybe there was something about old jewelry that was different?

“What do you think, Max? A bracelet? A necklace? A diamond ring?” Visions of being able to sell it for enough money to buy a new car flashed through her head. Max lifted his head to look at her, yawned, his muzzle opening wide and showing off his pink tongue, then returned to his snooze position.

Lifting the lid, Susannah wasn’t sure if she was disappointed, or enchanted. The object that lay on the white velvet bed was barely the length of a toothpick, about the width of her pinkie. But the metal had the white-gold tone that even Susannah recognized as platinum, and the design, a combination of squares and arches set with tiny square-cut diamonds around a larger sapphire, was clearly Art Deco in origin. Considering what little she knew about her great-aunt, it was probably a real antique, not a reproduction.

“It’s a pin,” she told Max. “A bar pin. Like you’d wear …” She had no idea how you would wear such a thing, actually. She supposed it could be worn on the lapel or a suit, or in a scarf. Since her job didn’t call for formal suits—they had gone to business casual years ago—and she wasn’t one for scarves, it seemed useless.

“But pretty,” she said, picking it up and holding it in her palm. The metal felt warm against her skin, and the diamonds seemed to flash even in the dim light still coming in from the windows, while the sapphire drew the eye into its depths, the color turning darker the longer you stared into it.

Should a brooch this small be so heavy?

Forcing herself to look away, Susannah found a cream-colored envelope in the white box: the kind you didn’t see any more except on wedding thank-you notes. Inside the envelope was a folded sheet of stationery, with a note written in ink, in beautiful, if shaky, script. “Your grandmother disagreed, but this belongs to you, now.”

Huh. “I suppose it makes sense,” Susannah said to Max, her thumb running the length of the pin thoughtfully, as though petting it. “Great-Aunt Zannah didn’t have any kids, never even married, so I’d be the only one to inherit, if this was a family heirloom. I suppose the money went to a charitable cause, or something. But why wouldn’t Grandma want me to have it?”

Max’s ear twitched in his sleep, but he had no answer.

A quick Internet search had turned up no information about the brooch, which had no markings on the back to indicate marker or origin. She fell asleep with it resting in its box on her night table, and dreamed of rain-slicked streets she had never been to, old-fashioned automobiles and faint hints of music, and under it all the sound of a voice in her ear, whispering something important that, when she woke up, she could not remember.

Susannah wasn’t at her best in the morning, and the dreams had left her even more muzzy-headed, as though she hadn’t slept at all. Coffee and a hot shower helped, but she got dressed by rote, sliding into a pair of gray pinstripe slacks and silk top with a Mandarin collar—slightly dressier than she normally would wear to the office. A quick glance in the mirror as she fixed her hair into its usual neat ponytail, and she stopped for a long moment, considering.

“I shouldn’t, until I have it appraised,” she said to her reflection. “I really shouldn’t.” But even as she was debating, her hands were taking the pin out of the box where it rested on her dresser, and attaching it to her collar, fastened at her throat.

She had never been the wear it immediately sort, but the desire to use the pin was too strong to resist, as though it were a crime to leave it hidden in the box a moment longer.

The whispers started almost immediately after.

She noticed it first in the car. Barely audible; she had thought at first the open window had picked up a man’s voice outside when she stopped for a light, but then it happened again, when she was parking outside her building, and a third time riding up in the elevator to the ad agency where she worked. People were talking, the usual low murmurs of the day starting to roll, but none of it matched the voice in her ear, soft and male, and saying something she couldn’t quite make out.

The same voice, she realized, from her dream.

That realization made her edgy and paranoid, to the point where she was jumping every time someone spoke to her.

“Less coffee,” she told herself, straightening the pin at her collar.

The paranoia made her convinced that she’d seen the same man twice during her lunchtime walk around the building, standing by the grease truck in the parking lot, watching her. But when she looked back, he was gone.

“You need more sleep,” she told herself. “Time to switch to decaf.”

Be careful, she thought she heard the voice whisper to her. Be careful.

“Zan? “Rose, who worked in the cubicle across the hallway from her, was staring at her as though she’d just done something unexpected. “You okay?”

She put her sandwich and soda down on her desk, then looked over at her friend. “Yeah, I’m fine. Why?”

“You just told me to shut up, and I hadn’t said anything.”

Mortified, Susannah clapped a hand over her mouth, then dropped into her chair, and apologized. “I’m so sorry I was … talking to myself. I’m totally stressed over the campaign, and the stupid e-mails keep coming …”

Rose laughed, turning back to her own computer terminal. “Yeah, everyone’s got their tighty-whities in a twist. Hang in there. When they finish this assignment it will be all highfives and cocktails—until it starts up again.”

“Gee, that makes me feel ever so much better …”

Her sandwich tasted like dust, and she put it aside. By midafternoon, the whispers were a near-constant; never again loud enough to be understood, never intrusive and, after that one time, never enough that she was tempted to talk back, but it was keeping her from concentrating.

The dreams, the weird whisper… Rose was right, it would all go away once they put this project to bed, and she could take a few days off.

By the time she got home that night, it was well past dusk, and all she wanted to do was collapse. Thankfully, Max had been a good boy, so there was no unpleasant surprise waiting for her on the floor.

“As much as I love you, boyo,” she said, sinking onto the sofa, his large brown eyes intent on hers, “sometimes I think a cat would have been a better choice. Or a goldfish.” She groaned, leaning back and wiggling her toes, freed from her heels, and reached up to touch the brooch again, meaning to unhook it from her blouse. “And I really wish we had someone else around to make dinner. That would make me happy.”

“Your command, Madame.”

Her startled yelp could probably have been heard through the walls of her unit, all the way down the block, and she wouldn’t even pretend that her scramble off the sofa was anything close to dignified, but the man standing in front of her didn’t seem to notice anything was wrong. He stood there in her living room like it wasn’t a problem at all, as cool and calm as if he were an old friend who’d been invited in.

Susannah looked around wildly. The door was still closed, a dozen paces behind him. She had not heard him come in, had not seen him—had he been there all along? Had he broken in, been waiting? Why hadn’t Max alerted her?

Susannah stared at the stranger, her heart pounding a hundred miles an hour, her previous exhaustion gone under the rush of adrenaline and fear. The fact that he didn’t look like a psychotic rapist/murderer wasn’t at all soothing; she’d watched enough crime drama to know that it was always the decent-looking ones who were really dangerous. And the figure in front of her was more than decent: taller than she was, so he had to be at least five-eleven, and dressed in a sober, almost old-fashioned looking brown suit that showed off broad shoulders and slender hips, all the way down to spit-polished leather shoes and up to sleekly-styled brown hair over a face that was just a shade too rough to be called handsome, with impossibly long lashes over dark blue eyes. If she’d seen him in the street she’d probably wonder what commercial she’d seen him in; he had that kind of not-handsome-but-interesting face.

All that ran through her head in an instant, a purely feminine assessment, even as she was trying to decide if she could get past him and out the door, having rejected the cell phone as being out of reach and therefore useless. Would anyone hear her or come investigate if she screamed?

“Would you prefer red meat or fish?”

The question was so absurd, she forgot about screaming and stared at him.

“What?”

He tilted his head, as though surprised at having to repeat such a basic question. “Your dinner, Madame.” He had a hint of an accent, but she couldn’t quite place it. “Would you prefer red meat or fish? Or perhaps coq au vin, although it is a bit late in the evening to begin …”

The thought that Rose was right, that she’d finally broken down and was hallucinating occurred to Susannah, especially when she looked down and saw Max, not lunging at this stranger, or even growling, but sitting contentedly between the two of them, looking from one to the other as though the stranger was a welcome friend.

“What the hell, Max?” she asked him, her voice sharp, and he just wagged his tail once, as though to say “don’t worry, everything’s fine.”

Her watchdog, who distrusted everyone until she introduced them, was acting as though this guy had been around for years.

Some of the panic faded, enough that she was able to go on the defensive, pretty sure that if the stranger tried anything violent, Max wouldn’t stay nice. “How the hell did you… Who the hell are you?”

A look of puzzlement crossed his face. “You summoned me, Madame.”

The world tilted, in some way she couldn’t determine. “I … summoned you.”

“Yes, Madame.” His voice was polite, almost deferential, to match the calm expression on his face, but she could pick up a hint of exasperation behind it, as though he thought she was mocking him somehow. “You wished for dinner. If you would inform me as to your preferences, I will prepare it for you.”

“I … wished …”

“Madame? Were you not informed as to the terms of your bequest?”

Susannah’s legs gave way, and she sat on the sofa in an unlovely pile, making Max get up and shove his nose under her hand, worriedly. Tilted, hell: the world had gone down the rabbit hole while she wasn’t looking, that was the only possible explanation. “You … dinner … the brooch?”

He seemed to suddenly understand something she didn’t, and his posture relaxed a hint: still at attention, but no longer quite so tense. “My name is Anthony, Madame. As you are now owner of the brooch that holds me, it is my duty to serve your pleasure.”

Once upon a time, Susannah had been fanciful. She had read romantic novels, and sighed over heroes she now recognized were flawed and possibly dangerous. She had devoured fantasy novels where magic saved the day, and mysteries where the heroine unraveled plots to put the villain away.

But faced with a man in her apartment who was telling her that he was a … a genie, for lack of a better word, bound to serve the owner of the brooch her great-aunt had willed to her… . Susannah’s practical side revolted.

She had taken the pin off her blouse, almost pricking her fingers in her haste, and started to throw it across the room, but something stopped her, keeping her fingers closed around the tiny bar.

Whatever else, it was valuable, if it was real. You didn’t throw valuable things away. And … she had already become fond of it, in one day. It was a link to a family she never knew, an unexpected present.

“You can’t be serious.” Her usually generous mouth was set firmly, and she crossed her arms across her chest as she glared at him. “I am not going to let you … what?” It was too insane to even consider. And yet …

She had heard his voice before. All day, whispering in her ear, the hint of an accent—French, she realized—at odds with the crisper tones underneath. American, but not local.

Great-Aunt Zannah had lived in Paris.

No. Impossible.

“Madame, you must accept the inheritance.” His calm voice broke slightly, showing a hint of near desperation, as though he expected the world to end if she refused.

“Don’t call me that. My name is Susannah.” It was a delaying action, and she knew it. Why was she arguing with this man? Good-looking, with a voice that was just sexy enough to make her toes curl, saying he was here to do whatever it took to make her happy. Your command, had been his actual words. Whatever she asked for …

“You show up here, break into my house and offer to cook me dinner …” It was insane. Worse, it was absurd. And yet, it happened. This was either the most elaborate practical joke she had ever seen, or—

Or it was real.

“Madame.” He sounded slightly offended. “I did not break in. You signed for me.”

The package. The delivery guy. Genies came parcel post? And who said he was allowed to have a sense of humor? Because that was definitely the hint of a smile on his lips, and his eyes had a crinkle of laughter in them, quickly.