Читать книгу It's In His Kiss - Julie Kistler - Страница 11

A Monday in July

Maiden Falls, Colorado, 2004

“ROSEBUD? Get up here! We got a live one for you!”

Secure in her hidey-hole tucked under the eaves in the attic, Rosebud concentrated on page 203 of East of Eden, pretending she had not heard the ghostly call to arms from Miss Arlotta. She had no desire for an assignment, no matter how “live” it was.

“Troubled couple on the road to bedroom bliss, blah, blah, blah,” she muttered. It wasn’t her fault that the entire group of scarlet women—once so good at helping men stray—had been roped into service as celestial matchmakers for honeymooners too pathetic to know how to pleasure each other.

After all, she hadn’t even spent one day as a soiled dove herself. What did she know about pleasure? On her very first night in Miss Arlotta’s establishment, just hours after choosing her nom de harlot, she had passed into the afterlife with all the rest of them. Nobody knew exactly what happened, although the Maiden Falls Gazette had claimed it was due to a gas leak, offering the smug opinion that it was exactly what Miss Arlotta deserved for having airs above her station and making her tawdry social club the first place in Colorado outside Denver with gaslights. Whatever the cause, every girl in the place, plus Miss Arlotta and the beau who’d been visiting her that Sunday night, had ended up as dead as cold mackerel, most still tucked into their beds.

As for Rosebud…She’d just been caught in the wrong place at the absolute wrong time.

Of course, that argument had not swayed anyone in this household. Judge Hangen, Miss Arlotta’s gentleman friend, had shot back that he, too, had been erroneously stuck in Bordello Purgatory by virtue of bad timing, that there was no leniency provision for girls who hadn’t technically had the opportunity for harlotry, and Rosebud was going to have to play by the same rules as the rest of them. Case closed.

“It’s completely unfair!” she said angrily, slapping down her book, unable to concentrate when she thought about the terrible injustice of her predicament.

She’d only managed to make it through the 109 years since all their mortal lives had ended by keeping her nose firmly stuck in her books. She’d started with Little Rosebud’s Lovers and Lady Audley’s Secret, which she’d been in the process of unpacking from her valise when she passed over the threshold into the spirit world on that fateful night. But she’d tired of reading and rereading just those two, so she’d quickly learned to steal (or borrow, as she preferred to call it) interesting items from visitors to the Inn at Maiden Falls.

In the first dark years, she’d had to depend upon newspapers and the occasional dime novel left by the workmen and ruffians who’d wandered through. Thank goodness the old brothel had been turned into a gaming house, a speakeasy, a saloon, then completely restored and polished up into a high-class honeymoon hotel. The clientele and the reading material had picked up nicely.

Years ago, someone had discarded Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which she quite adored. The naughty bits in that one always cheered her up. Not to mention East of Eden, and more recently several issues of Entertainment Weekly and a DVD called Buffy the Vampire Slayer that was really quite extraordinary. Things had become so much more interesting since her day!

She used to have to sneak into empty guest rooms to use the televisions, but then one day she’d tripped over something in the Inn’s business office called a computer. Which was connected to another bizarre concept called the Internet. Which opened up a whole new world of possibilities for a smart girl who found the modern world quite fascinating.

No one seemed bothered by the assortment of packages from strange and exotic merchants that arrived at the Inn at Maiden Falls. They always thought the mysterious electronic devices, movies, books and music had been ordered by the proper people at the Inn. Rosebud was very careful to fill out all the proper paperwork and purchase orders on the Accounting Department’s computers. It wasn’t stealing if she charged it to the Inn. Exactly.

“Well, I do bargain shop. And I return every book and movie that isn’t an absolute necessity, right back into the Inn’s library,” Rosebud noted as she slipped East of Eden onto her bookshelf next to Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask. “Besides, how else was a girl supposed to keep herself entertained for 109 years?”

“Rosebud?” Miss Arlotta’s voice barked. “Get your pretty behind up here! Where are you, anyway?”

She sounded perturbed, and Rosebud knew she was going to have to show up just so the boss didn’t figure out how it was possible for her to be missing and unaccounted for. As far as Rosebud knew, no one else had figured out how to master the fine art of slipping under Miss A’s radar, which was just one of her singular skills.

“As long as I have to be a ghost, I may as well be good at it,” Rosebud said tartly to no one in particular. Louder, letting her voice float over to the main part of the attic, she called, “Coming, Miss Arlotta.”

“Well, I hope so! Where ya been, girl?” the madam demanded.

“Just resting,” Rosebud returned coolly as she slid her vaguely corporeal form into place in front of the desk.

“Like you got anything to rest from. Get a move on. I got a job for you.”

Although she was only partially visible at the moment, preferring to affect a sort of shimmery, translucent look so as not to let on how very good at materializing she’d become, Rosebud offered an innocent look. “Me? I thought I was on suspension. Isn’t there anyone else you’d rather give it to?”

“The place is hoppin’ all summer. We need every hand on deck.”

“Hand? On deck?” Rosebud echoed doubtfully.

“Every girl has to pull her weight, darlin’. So far, you have one notch in the Bedpost Book. Total. One notch,” Miss Arlotta said grimly. “We been here 109 years and you got a sum total of eighteen black marks, no gold stars, and one lousy notch. And I’m still not convinced that one wasn’t just dumb luck.”

Rosebud said nothing. As a matter of fact, her one notch in the Bedpost Book, for successfully helping a guest couple turn up the heat on their honeymoon, had been an accident. Annoyed with a young woman who simply would not shut up, Rosebud had filled up the bathtub and knocked her into it. She figured the little twit had to be quiet if she was under water. How was she supposed to guess that the silly groom would find his dripping wet bride particularly erotic?

“Let’s just say you aren’t exactly hotfootin’ it on the road to that Big Picnic in the Sky,” the boss went on. “After the way you spun the bed around on the last couple I gave you, I ought to leave you on permanent suspension. Scared the living daylights out of ’em and sprained the groom’s leg when he tried to jump out.”

“I really deserve suspension,” Rosebud agreed, batting her eyelashes and trying to look contrite. The truth was, she liked being suspended. As long as it lasted, she was free to read and watch movies to her heart’s content. And she was expecting the six-hour DVD of Pride and Prejudice to arrive at the front desk any day. Surely her suspension could last long enough to get through Pride and Prejudice.

“If you don’t ever get your ten notches in the Bedpost Book, me and the judge are stuck here like two pigs in tar, right along with you,” Miss Arlotta explained impatiently. “You know that. This ain’t just for you. Me and the judge can only move on after all you girls are gone.”

“Yes, but—”

“No buts. Everybody knows you’re not carrying your load. That crazy Flo, who hasn’t been happy a day since 1895 on account of her corset problems, has got more notches than you. You’re a smart girl, Rosebud. I’m giving you a job that ought to be a walk in the park.”

Bad choice of phrase, considering the goal they were all trying to reach was the Big Picnic, where they looked forward to walking in the park throughout eternity. Rosebud wasn’t so sure about it, however. She wanted to be certain there was a wide-screen TV and a stack of DVDs and books waiting or she didn’t really want to go.

The madam interrupted her thoughts, snapping, “You better make this one work, Rosebud, or I don’t know what I’m gonna do with you. Get off your fanny and go see the bride. Name of Vanessa Westicott. She’s rich and spoiled, just like you used to be, so she ought to be a kindred spirit.”

Rosebud chewed her lip. Funny how she could still feel pain when she bit down, considering the lip wasn’t technically there. “I don’t suppose there’s any way to get out of this?”

“Nope. Get to it. She’s in the lobby, looking over the place right now. While she gets showed around, you can give her the once-over and think up a plan.” Miss Arlotta narrowed her eyes. “With all those books you read, you ought to be real good at that.”

“MAYBE I CAN GET this over with and get my notch in the Bedpost Book lickety split, just in time for my DVDs to arrive,” Rosebud mused as she wafted down to the lobby.

She saw a group of the other ghostly girls lounging around in what had once been their front parlor, as transparent and indistinct as their lingerie, but she didn’t join them. The only two she’d really liked among the bunch—sweet Sunshine and cantankerous, shoot-from-the-hip Belle—the one who’d been smoking the cigar in the parlor on the day Rosebud arrived—had already passed over the threshold into the Great Beyond. And the others were so dreary.

She hadn’t realized, when she’d signed on for this job all those years ago, that hookers were not, as a rule, incredibly bright. Flo and her whining about her too-tight corset (stuck that way until someone figured out how to loosen her ghostly corset strings) got old very quickly, while Mimi and her fake French accent and Desdemoaner, nicknamed for all the caterwauling she used to do while in the throes of passion, were downright annoying. And then there was the Countess.

“Countess, my eye,” Rosebud griped, just thinking about it. “I have more class in my little finger than that chippy has in her entire body.”

Flo, Des, the Countess, even lush and lovely Lavender…All they ever talked about was men. They seemed to enjoy helping hapless couples jump the hurdle into marital bliss, but they also whined constantly about how much they wished they could get in a few licks with the grooms they were assigned. Which was, of course, against the rules.

The rule itself didn’t bother Rosebud nearly as much as all the complaining about it. She didn’t have much sympathy for the hapless honeymooners they were supposed to be helping, but she wasn’t going to pine over how sad it was she didn’t get to engage in spectral sex with their grooms, either.

But for the moment…For the moment, she was going to have to see about this Vanessa person and make some move to help the poor, pathetic girl with her honeymoon, at least enough to earn another notch in Miss A’s infernal Bedpost Book and keep the boss off her back for a while. Even Rosebud, the least successful ghostly good-time girl in the place, knew very well that Miss Arlotta and the Judge wielded mighty powers. Nobody was sure where their authority came from or exactly what they were capable of, but they all knew not to mess with Miss A.

But where was the sexually inept bride-to-be? Rosebud glanced around the check-in desk, but she didn’t see her target. She saw two front desk clerks, a bellman and several couples who were clearly honeymooners. One coosome twosome was canoodling on a velvet settee behind a potted palm, while another groom had his bride in his lap while he fed her little tidbits of crackers and cheese from the buffet set up for the cocktail hour. Everybody else was more of the same. Lovey-dovey, gooey-schmooey. Rosebud rolled her eyes. Clearly they didn’t need help. Other than that…

The only other person in the lobby at the moment was a man by himself. Oooh. Yummy. Dark suit, dark hair, tall, broad-shouldered, and quite delicious to look at from the back side.

She squinted at him, wishing she knew how to get new spectacles over the Internet. The ones she’d passed over with were the best 1895 had to offer, but they left the modern world a bit too fuzzy.

Especially when there was something this good to look at.

She swooshed past the potted palm couple, making the woman shiver and cuddle closer to her husband. Rosebud ignored them, intent on getting a better look at the intriguing man by the window. But he was still facing the other way, pulling back one of the heavy drapes to gaze out the front window of the Inn.

“Turn around,” she whispered, vainly attempting to plant thoughts in his head. If only Belle were still here. She was so good at that.

Unfortunately Rosebud didn’t share Belle’s skills. Manipulating gadgets and electronics, remembering and recreating music she’d heard only once, a knack for remaining unnoticed by Miss Arlotta’s all-seeing eyes, and the ability to make herself so 3-D it would knock your socks off…. Those were her talents. Not that they did her a particle of good at the moment.

Rosebud cocked her head to one side, trying to figure out why she was so intrigued by this man. Yes, she liked the looks of him, but it was more than that.

She felt oddly drawn to him. It was the strangest thing. She just had to know who he was, what he was doing there, and especially what he looked like. All of him, dadblast it!

“First time for everything,” she murmured. Out of all the men who’d wandered through the Inn over the years, this was the first one who’d made her feel this curious warmth, this shiver of anticipation and…And what seemed to be lust.

“It’s not lust,” she said under her breath. She wasn’t like the other girls with their constant urge to merge. “Just curiosity.”

Maybe if she blew on his neck. Or in his ear. Or flickered the lights in the parlor. How about a little jolt of electricity transmitted through a pinch to his adorable derriere? If she gave him a tiny shock, surely he would have to turn to face her.

She checked behind her to see if any of the other girls had noticed him (or her fascination with him) but they seemed to be intent on some silly bickering over a card game in the far corner. She was safe for the moment, if she could just get him to turn around…

“You’re supposed to be looking for a woman.” Miss Arlotta’s aggravated tone rang in Rosebud’s ear, making her jump. “Tell me, does that gent look like a woman?”

“Not even a little,” Rosebud responded without thinking.

“The gal you’re looking for is in the ballroom,” the boss interrupted. “She’s about decided she doesn’t want her wedding here. If she walks, your goose is good and cooked. So get a move on.”

Much as she hated to tear herself away from the mysterious man at the window, Rosebud knew she had no choice but to leave him behind. Drat.

“Miss A told me my bride was in the lobby,” she complained out loud, reluctantly floating away from the man at the window. “How was I supposed to know she’d be in the ballroom?”

“Did you hear that? I could swear I heard a female voice talking about the ballroom, right in my ear,” the woman with the crackers whispered as Rosebud swooped past. “And I can feel a chill.”

“They say this place has ghosts,” her husband told her, holding her close.

Real wizards, those two. But Rosebud had forgotten herself for a moment. Apparently her long suspension had made her people skills rusty. Inaudible, you ninny, she told herself. Neither seen nor heard. She managed to keep her mouth shut as she flashed into the ballroom to catch up with her new assignment.

And there she was. The bride du jour.

“I don’t like the looks of her at all,” Rosebud remarked as she sailed up to take a position behind the main chandelier. “She looks like the Countess, doesn’t she? And every bit as snooty.”

Vanessa Westicott looked sharp, in every sense of the word. Her hair, as dark as Rosebud’s own, was pulled back into a severe knot at the back of her neck. From the pained expression on her face, the knot was too tight. She was pretty, very thin, and dressed in a snappy little black outfit with a skirt that Rosebud found scandalously short. And the woman was wearing high-heeled, pointy black boots that were not going to be comfortable as she toured the Inn.

Right now she was peering up at the chandelier Rosebud was swinging from, pinching her mouth together and making her unhappiness quite clear to one of the hotel’s wedding coordinators, a sweet young woman named Beth, who was giving her the grand tour.

“Wicked Witch of the West,” Rosebud whispered, swirling around the woman for a closer look. She’d watched The Wizard of Oz a few weeks ago, so the image was fresh in her mind. “All she needs is a green face.”

“What did you say?” Vanessa turned on her guide. “Green plates? Why in the world would I want that?”

“I didn’t say anything about green plates.”

“Well, I don’t like this ballroom, no matter what color scheme we use on the table settings,” Vanessa snapped. “The lighting is terrible.”

“These chandeliers are reproductions of what was here in 1895, without the gas, of course,” Beth said quickly.

But Vanessa had moved on, tapping her pointy foot on the parquet floor. “What kind of wood is this? I don’t like it. I prefer walnut.”

As if she would recognize walnut if she fell over it. Rosebud rolled her ghostly eyes. Princess Vanessa was a pain. A royal pain.

It went on that way as the tour continued, with Beth leading Vanessa on to the next space, a lovely, intimate private dining room recommended for the rehearsal dinner, and then up to the guest rooms. But the bride-to-be’s list of demands just kept getting longer, and she wanted it all at rock-bottom prices.

Beluga caviar. Cristal champagne. Special lace tablecloths from Belgium. Special caterer. Special masseuse. And on and on, down to her insistence on the Inn’s best honeymoon suite, although all the linens were going to have to be changed. She required Egyptian cotton with 800-thread counts, of course.

“This suite is the only thing you’ve got that’s even slightly acceptable for my honeymoon,” she sniffed, running a finger over the edge of a mahogany side table.

Hrmph. Rosebud might not have been the happiest hooker on the premises, but after 109 years, she had a certain loyalty to the place. Besides, she’d once lived in the lap of Denver society—during an era far more elegant than this one—and she knew there was nothing wrong with the Inn at Maiden Falls or its rooms or its chef or its linens or anything else.

And certainly not the gorgeous suite they were standing in, the one they called the Lady Godiva Suite, which reminded Rosebud of the inside of a candy box with its deep reds and pinks and chocolaty browns. Like the rest of the Inn, it was full of antiques and featured a beautiful, sensual pre-Raphaelite painting, one of the odalisques, over the fireplace in its sitting room. Right now, there were fresh flowers, a display of fine chocolates and a bottle of excellent champagne on ice, all awaiting tonight’s lucky guests.

Rosebud adored this room. She hoped Beth told Princess Vanessa to zip her narrow scarlet lips very soon, or she might just have to shove her out the window of the Lady Godiva Suite.

“But if she dies on the premises, with my luck she’ll be stuck here with the rest of us into eternity,” she grumbled.

The wedding coordinator was more diplomatic. “I can look into some of your other requests, but I can’t promise you this suite,” Beth said gently, referring back to her notes. “The Inn is insanely popular, and your dates are awfully soon. Are you at all flexible about, say, midweek? We may even be booked for those, but that’s your best shot.”

“You do know who my fiancé is, don’t you?” Vanessa asked, raising one dark sliver of an eyebrow.

Rosebud was curious about that herself. Who would willingly hitch themselves to Vanessa’s wagon?

Beth blinked. “I’m aware that his uncle is one of our owners, yes. To be honest, that’s why we’re trying to accommodate you. Normally you’d have to book at least a year ahead. If not two. Because your fiancé’s uncle made a special request, we will do everything we can. But we can’t squeeze out someone who’s already reserved the space. I’m sure you understand.”

“I’m not sure I want to get married here, anyway,” the bride said with a frown. “Retro-Victorian kitsch is so yesterday. The whole place just reeks of Nothing Special to me.”

“Oh, it’s very special.” As Beth led her charge into the hallway, Rosebud ignored the locked door and lazily passed through the thick wood to join them. “We don’t really advertise it, but the Inn has a unique reputation.”

The bride-to-be looked a bit more interested. “I heard that Daphne Remington got married here, but I never thought she was all that. What level are you talking? Jennifer and Brad? Gwyneth and Chris? Or real royalty?”

“Although our clientele includes some very fine names, it’s not about that,” Beth said quickly. “It’s more the atmosphere.”

Vanessa lifted her narrow shoulders in a shrug. “I’m not feeling any atmosphere.”

“Well, you see…”

“Yes? What?”

“Around the turn of the century, it was a bordello,” the wedding coordinator confided. “A fancy bordello. There’s this theory that the women who worked here are still here, sort of, um, hanging around the rafters, if you get my drift.”

“Like, ghosts?” There was that eyebrow again. “Ghosts of old hookers? Is that what you’re saying?”

“In so many words, yes.” Beth smiled as they neared the elevator. “Let’s just say that everyone seems to have a really good time when they stay here, and we think it may be because there are some lusty spirits giving them a little boost. I’ve seen and heard some things—”

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Vanessa said flatly. “It all sounds ridiculous to me. And obscene. Ghost hookers. Yechhh.”

Obscene? Rosebud took issue with that. She had never done anything obscene in her entire life, and none of the others, not even the Countess, fell to that level. What was wrong with helping honeymooners have more fun?

“Just between you and me,” the bride-to-be went on, “I’m only considering it because of the family connection. But I don’t know…”

“We have a lot of happy brides and grooms,” Beth put in.

“Yes, but we’re no ordinary bride and groom. We’re very choosy.”

Which did not come as a surprise to Rosebud.

“Well, not every property is right for every couple,” the wedding planner noted. “Maybe you’d be happier choosing a different location.”

Good for you, Beth! Give her the boot! But Vanessa didn’t seem to have noticed the message behind Beth’s tactfully phrased words.

Frowning, the bride-to-be muttered, “Ned seems to think this place is our only option with so little time to plan.”

Ned. So that was the name of the poor bridegroom shackled to the Wicked Witch.

“If time is the problem, maybe you should consider pushing back the date,” Beth said helpfully. “A year, even two, would open things up. You might even want to pick your date based on when you can get your first choice of location.”

“Wait another year? Not a chance,” Vanessa declared. “I’ve been waiting for Ned to propose for two years. I know him. If I don’t pounce, he’ll back out. So I’m pouncing. If that means getting married in this dump, so be it.”

Dump? As the elevator arrived, Rosebud briefly contemplated letting Vanessa get stuck in it for a good, long time. But she wasn’t that good with elevators, plus that would trap Beth, too, and that hardly seemed fair.

Perhaps a small slip and fall…But there were no raw materials hanging around in the hallway to create any interesting tricks, so she had to let it go. For now.

“Let’s go down to my office and look at what exactly we have available in August,” Beth said soothingly as she pulled back the brass door to usher Vanessa into the elevator. “Once everything is set, I know you’ll love having your wedding here at the Inn.”

As those two rode the elevator down, Rosebud took her own route, sliding smoothly through the floors and showing up ahead of them at the sales office. As she dawdled by the door to Beth’s office, she mused, “What to do? What to do?”

There were so many dirty tricks it would be fun to pull on Vanessa when she came back for her wedding in August. “Floods and blizzards and all that good stuff were really more Sunshine’s thing, but I might be able to screw up a little plumbing and generate a nice-size flood.”

“Don’t even think it,” Miss Arlotta’s voice admonished her sternly. “Remember the Bedpost Book, with all those black marks and no gold stars and only that one little notch? If you do anything to monkey with this bride’s happy honeymoon, you are going to be one sorry sister. Count on it.”

“Yes, but she’s extremely unpleasant,” Rosebud argued. “It shouldn’t be my job to sentence some poor man to a life sentence with that. She’ll eat him alive before their first anniversary.”

Miss Arlotta’s head popped up in front of her, fully visible. Just her head. This was not only highly unusual, but it was downright frightening!

“We don’t get to pick ’em. We just have to make ’em happy. Shape up, Rosebud,” she barked. “You’re skating on thin ice.”

At that, the head popped out of sight, just before Beth and the bride turned the corner and headed that way. Trying to forget the disturbing image of Miss A’s disembodied head hanging in the air, Rosebud focused on the task at hand. She was going to have to swallow her dislike and make this work, because the boss had made it crystal clear she didn’t have any other choice. And even Rosebud was afraid of Miss Arlotta’s powers, murky as they were.

“How hard can it be?” she asked. “I’ll make sure stupid Vanessa enjoys a torrid honeymoon, and then…”

But wait a second. Vanessa and Beth weren’t alone. There was a man with them. A handsome man. Rosebud stared. Dark hair, dark suit. The man from the window. And yet…

If she’d had a jaw at that moment, it would’ve dropped to the floor. She knew him.

“Ned, I’m so glad you decided to join us.” Vanessa swiped her thumb across his cheek to remove a smear of red lipstick. “Now that you’re here, darling, you can tell me all the reasons you like this place, and maybe I can be persuaded to like it, too.”

Rosebud was absolutely thunderstruck. Miss Arlotta’s warning echoed in her mind. You’re skating on thin ice…

She didn’t care if she was skating on icebergs. She knew him! The clothes and the cut of his hair might be different, but his eyes and his smile and the way he carried himself, exuding confidence and charm, were exactly the same, the same as Edmund Mulgrew, the man who had turned her from an innocent girl into a fallen maiden so long ago.

Edmund?

For the first time in 109 years, Rosebud felt her heart go pitter-patter.