Читать книгу Man With A Message - Muriel Jensen - Страница 7

CAMERON TRENT WALKED around the Maple Hill Common in the waning light of a late-May evening. Fred, his seven-month-old black Labrador, investigated bushes and wildflowers at the other end of a retractable leash.

The dog looked back at him, eyes bright, tongue lolling; he was out and about after sleeping in the truck for three hours while Cam installed an old ball-and-claw bathtub in a Georgian mansion near the lake.

Life is good, Fred’s expression said.

Cam had to agree.

Moving from San Francisco to Maple Hill, Massachusetts, situated on the edge of the Berkshires, had been an inspired idea. He and his brother and sister had spent a couple of weeks here as children every summer with their grandparents. It was the only time he could pick out of his childhood when he’d felt happy and safe.

As Cam wandered after Fred, he took in the colonial charm of the scene. A bronze Minuteman, his woman at his side, dominated the square. A colonial flag and a fifty-star flag were just being lowered for the night as Cam walked by. During working hours, the shops and businesses built around the green-lawned square bustled with activity, very much as they had two hundred years ago.

Many of the houses in Maple Hill were Classic Georgian, with its heroic columns, or the simpler salt-box style, with its long, sloping roof in the rear. In Yankee tradition, small boats hung from the ceilings of some porches, and many houses bore historic plaques explaining their history. And Amherst, where he was earning his master’s in business administration was a mere hour away.

He had everything he needed right here. Well almost. He missed his brother, Josh, but he was a chef in a Los Angeles restaurant and raising his wife’s four boys, and it was good to know he was happy.

Whitcomb’s Wonders, the agency of tradesmen Cam worked for as a plumber, had become his family. They were a cheerful, striving group of men who enjoyed working part-time for the company because it allowed them to pursue other endeavors—raise their children, go to school.

Fred came running back to Cam, his head held high so that he could hold on to a giant branch that protruded at least two feet out of each side of his mouth. His tail wagged furiously.

They were in the middle of a serious tug-of-war over the branch when Cam’s cell phone rang. Cam tossed the branch, then answered.

“Mariah Mercer from the Manor says they’re sinking!” Addy Whitcomb told him urgently. “A pipe in the bathroom burst.”

Cam reeled in the dog, who’d just headed off to chase the branch. Repairing the Maple Hill Manor School was a lucrative job for Whitcomb’s Wonders. One of the oldest buildings around, it was a plumbing and wiring disaster. They’d just been contracted to replumb the kitchen in the main building as part of a remodeling project.

“The bathroom in the main building?” he asked.

“No, the dorm. You know, the old carriage house.”

“Okay. I’m in town. I’ll be there in about ten minutes.”

“I’ll call and tell her. And just to reward you, Cam, I’ll find you a really wonderful girl.”

“No favors necessary, Addy.” Addy was Hank Whitcomb’s mother. Whitcomb’s Wonders was Hank’s brainchild, and the men who staffed it provided the source for much of Addy’s Cupid work.

“But I want to!”

“No. Got to go, Addy.”

Fred was disappointed at no more play but enjoyed the sprint across the common toward the truck. Cam let him into the passenger side, then ran around to climb in behind the wheel. The truck’s tires peeled away with a squeal as he headed for the Manor. He’d outfitted his somewhat decrepit old truck to hold his tools and supplies so he was always ready to report to a job.

He tried to imagine what could have caused a pipe to burst. Pipes often froze and broke in the winter, but this was spring. And the Lightfoot sisters, who ran the school, had told him that they’d renewed the carriage house plumbing about ten years ago.

He knew that only a small number of children still boarded at the school, and did so only because of long relationships with the Lightfoot sisters, who’d taken over running the school from their mother in the fifties, after she’d taken it over from her mother, and so on all the way back to pre-Civil War days.

Letitia and Lavinia Lightfoot, who both charmed and intimidated the crew working on the renovation, were in their late seventies and still took pride in the bastion of civility they managed in a world they considered both fascinating and mad.

Cam refocused his attention on a series of curves, then exited onto Manor Road, which led through a thick oak, maple and pine woods to a clearing where the school stood, one of the finest examples of Georgian architecture in western Massachusetts. He turned left toward the carriage house, instead of right toward the main building.

It was dark now and all he could see of the carriage house, a replica of the main building but smaller, were its white columns, caught in the floodlights that illuminated the small parking area in the front. He pulled up beside a van, gave Fred a dog biscuit and spread his blanket on the seat. “Relax, buddy,” he said, patting the dog’s head. “I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

Fred, just happy for the attention, cooperated.

Cam grabbed his basic tool kit and went to knock on the front door. He could hear a great commotion on the other side—children shouting, feet hurrying.

The door opened with a jerk and a little blond girl wearing neon-orange pajamas stood there, pale and breathing heavily. Behind her children ran up and down the stairs with towels and buckets. He heard a boy yelling from upstairs, “Turn the cutoff…it looks like a faucet!”

A younger male voice yelled back, “I don’t see it! I don’t see it!” he said again.

The little blond girl turned to shout up the stairs, “He’s here!”

“Tell him to hurry!” the boy replied.

Cam experienced a weird sense of unreality, as if he’d blundered into a world occupied only by children. Not one adult was in evidence.

“Come on!” The little blonde grabbed his wrist and pulled him inside.

He allowed her to tow him up the stairway, its carpeting soggy. There was water everywhere, inches of it in the narrow upstairs hall.

Water rushed from the bathroom through a large hole in a pipe visible because of the broken tiles in the shower stall.

“Hey!”

The boy’s voice made him look down. He saw a woman lying on her back, apparently unconscious, the boy’s arm keeping her head out of the water. Her face was familiar. Cam had seen her around the school while scoping out the kitchen in the main building.

He dropped his tool kit on a sink and fell to his knees.

“You’re not the ambulance guy?” the boy asked. He was about ten, his dark eyes panicky, his face ashen.

“No, I’m the plumber,” Cam replied, putting two fingers to the pulse at the woman’s throat. He couldn’t detect one, but then, he could never find one in himself, either. “What happened?”

The boy appeared close to tears. “I busted the pipe looking for gold. She came in, slipped on a towel in the water and fell and hit her head. I’m not supposed to move her, right? I mean, she could have broken something.”

Gold? Cam didn’t even take the time to try to figure out what that meant. He did a cursory exploration of arms and legs and detected nothing out of place. She didn’t seem to be bleeding. He decided that getting her out of the water took precedence over maybe causing her further injury.

“Is there a dry bed anywhere?” He slipped his arms under her and lifted her. She was small and fragile. Water streamed from her all over him as he stepped back to let the boy lead the way.

“In here!” The boy beckoned him into a room two doors off the bathroom. Cam noticed absently that the doors had hand-painted signs with kids’ names on them.

A pack of children followed them and gathered around the bed as Cam lay the woman down.

She looked younger up close than he’d thought. Her dark hair, now drenched, was pulled back into a tight knot, and she wore a silky, long-sleeved blouse, through which he could see her lacy bra. A long blue cotton skirt lay clumped around her, also heavy with water. She’d struck him as stiff and matronly when he’d seen her at the school. How different his impression of her now.

He wrapped the coverlet around her.

He leaned close to tell if she was breathing. He felt no air against his cheek, heard no sound. Where was the ambulance? He’d taken a CPR course a few years ago, but he couldn’t remember it now. So many pumps, so many breaths.

“She’s gonna die!” one of the little girls said tearfully.

“No, she won’t!” the boy said.

“She won’t!” another boy repeated.

“She won’t!”

Cam glanced up, wondering why he kept hearing double, then realized he was seeing double, too. Twins.

The woman made a scary, choking sound and the children cried out in unison.

Knowing he had to do something, he shooed the children aside, leaned over the woman, pinched her nose and placed his mouth over hers.

She was cold and still in his arms, like a marble statue.

He blew air into her mouth, raised his head to see if it was having an effect. When he couldn’t detect one, he covered her mouth again and breathed into it. After several more breaths, a curious thing happened. He felt the first infinitesimal sign of life as a small, almost sinuous exhalation swelled the breasts under his chest.

Disbelieving, he breathed into her again, and that same subtle ripple occurred in the lips under his.

He put a hand to her ribs, feeling for an intake of breath, even as he gave her another one of his.

When he felt the probing tip of a tongue in his mouth, he thought he was hallucinating—giving her too much of his air, not keeping enough for himself.

Then her lips moved under his, and before he could raise his head in surprise, one of her hands went into his hair in a caress that paralyzed him momentarily into helplessness.

As he hovered above her in shock, her body arched up to his and she expelled a little moan. “Ben,” she murmured against his lips.

For an instant, everything in him rose to the challenge. Yes! This was what life was supposed to be about! Man and woman entangled, seeking solace and pleasure in each other, their bodies a mutual haven. He’d have given a lot at that instant to be the Ben she sighed for.

Then reality reclaimed him and he sat up abruptly, the children all staring, not sure what they’d seen.

His heart was beating hard, then his brain snapped to attention. This kind of thing won’t work for you, it told him. You have a past. Allison had thought it wouldn’t matter, but eventually it did. You’re starting over, but you’ll only get half the dream….

The woman opened deep brown eyes, and after a moment of searching the room, a puzzled line between her brows, she focused on him. A small smile of what appeared to be—he wasn’t sure…surprise? delight?—curved her pale lips.

No one had ever looked at him that way—as if he represented home at the end of a long journey. He still leaned over her, a hand on the mattress on either side of her, unable to move or speak.

MARIAH SURFACED FROM her chilled dream to find that the last year had all been some kind of terrible misunderstanding. Ben was back the way she remembered him at their wedding—the loving, solid partner around whom she’d centered her hopes, rather than the angry and confused man he’d become after she’d lost four babies and refused to try again to get pregnant.

Then his mouth had been hard and condemning. Now it was pliant and…life giving.

But why were they surrounded by children? They’d never be able to have their own. And he hadn’t wanted to consider adoption—

“Mariah?”

She turned at the sound of her name and focused on…on Ashley? Of course. Ashley. She looked at the children circling the bed and remembered that they were not her children, but the Manor’s. The kid fix she’d sought when she couldn’t have her own.

The euphoria of a moment ago collapsed, and with it came the bitter disappointment that always returned to take hold of her when she allowed herself to think about her marriage, her divorce, all the things she wanted that she’d never have.

She gazed into dark-lashed hazel eyes set in a handsome face crowned with very short dark brown hair.

She put her fingertips to her mouth, recalling those nicely shaped lips on hers and the renewal she’d thought he’d brought to her life.

But he wasn’t Ben. He was a stranger. And she didn’t care what he was doing here or why she was in bed with the children gathered around her.

The only thing that mattered was that he’d led her to believe the pain was over and life was going to begin again.

It wasn’t, though. And it was all his fault.

She raised a hand and slapped him as hard as she could.