A Haunted Romance (5 page)

Dalton turned his head, pointedly ignoring Trent. “Anyway, then the attic stairs crashed down on me. Of course, since Trent’s here, I understand who might have been playing pranks.”

Trent shrugged. “Hey, I was outside, so don’t look at me.”

How strange, thought Chelsea. She looked up into the attic speculatively, wondering what was up there. Her brother might not have even had time to look it over. On the other hand, it might be filled with spiders. She shuddered. Or ghosts. She gritted her teeth to stop from shuddering again.

Dalton got to his feet and dusted himself off. “Just one of those things, I guess. Old houses, funny noises.”

Chelsea nodded, thinking of the shriek last night. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, just startled. A little bruised, maybe.”

Trent eyed the attic stairs speculatively. Was he interested in what was up there too? Maybe there were more of his paintings. Or maybe he was just curious by nature. Whatever it was, he wasn’t in a hurry to leave.

“I’m going to go clean your gutters,” said Dalton. “I’ve got a ladder in my SUV.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” asked Chelsea. Getting the gutters clean would be nice—probably essential if it hadn’t been done in nearly a year. But she was starting to feel guilty about all the help she was getting.

“Yep, right as rain.” With that, Dalton headed away. Whatever made Trent want to avoid Dalton earlier seemed to be mutual.

After he’d gone, Trent nodded toward the attic. “Have you looked up there yet?”

Chelsea shook her head. “Hadn’t even given it a thought until now.”

“If there’s another painting in there like the last one—‘all my charming things were to be sold: my Burne-Jones drawings: my Whistler drawings: my Monticelli: my Simeon Solomons: my china.’”

“Huh?”

“Oscar Wilde,” Trent explained

“He might have owned my painting?”

Trent shook his head. “I doubt it. The paintings he owned have been cataloged. Yours is unknown, as far as I could find on the Net. An expert on the Pre-Raphaelites would be able to tell you more. Oscar just owned paintings by the same painter, that’s all, and treasured them.” He grinned. “I suspect he’d have treasured the one in your bedroom more from what I know of him.”

Chelsea didn’t doubt that. She remembered vaguely that Wilde had gotten into all sorts of trouble with the vice cops of his day, but she was a bit hazy on the details. In any case, the man sure could write.

“I think I’m going to give my brother a call and ask him if he’s been up there. Get a spider report.”

“Or ghosts?” asked Trent.

“If it comes up.”

Trent looked thoughtful. “Dalton’s sure a strange fish. I wonder what his game is this time. Well, don’t go up there without me unless your brother says the place is fine. I’m less worried about either spiders or ghosts than I am about the possibility of you falling through a rotted floorboard and getting hurt.”

“You don’t think he heard a ghost?”

“Who knows? If I was a ghost, I’d tell Dalton to get lost too. Eh, he’s probably all right. He’s made it clear that he doesn’t approve of me, and I return the favor in my weaker moments. He’s helpin’ you out, so that’s all good.” Trent smiled, as if to prove that he was over it. “Promise not to do the attic without someone in the house in case there’s a problem?”

Chelsea nodded. “Promise.”

“All righty.” Trent looked at the ladder, found the middle, and tapped it to fold it up. The whole thing sprang back into place. “Pat and Joann must have added this. There’s no way it came with the house. The hinge is still shiny, and the wood’s in perfect condition. Pretty strange for it to just fall on someone with no warnin’. Maybe he caught somethin’ on the pull.”

There was a string hanging down from it, Chelsea noticed, just barely in reach for her. It was above Trent’s head and would have been above Dalton’s too. It seemed pretty unlikely that he would have caught it on anything by accident—he’d have had to be carrying something above his head, and he hadn’t needed anything tall for plastering.

“I’ll go call my brother.”

Trent nodded, looking at the attic door for a few more seconds. Then he headed back downstairs.

Chelsea pulled out her cell phone and dialed Arnold.

“Yeah?”

Arnold had such a charming way of answering the phone.

“Hey, it’s Chelsea. How are you?”

“Fine.”

Got that out of the way. Good. “Did you ever go up into the attic of Aunt Pat’s old house?”

Arnold snorted. “No. Eventually I would have gone up there with an ax, but as I imagine you’ve noticed, the door doesn’t open.”

Oh
. “How about the closet in the master bedroom?” She could just imagine what her brother thought about the paintings.

“You’ve found that too, huh? Who locks a closet from the inside, anyway? You’ll have to take the door off at some point, I guess.”

“It was locked when you were here?”

“I sure as heck didn’t lock it,” Arnold replied. “Not even sure
how
you’d lock it—there’s no mechanism on the outside. Aunt Pat’s idea of a joke, I imagine. Stupid bitch.”

Chelsea gritted her teeth. There was no sense in getting into it with Arnold, though. “All right, thanks, was just curious.”

“How’s it going there?” asked Arnold.

She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of recounting what had happened. Besides, she had just gotten laid. She grinned. “Fine, fine.”

“Okay, anything else?”

“Nope. Bye!”

“Bye!”

She clicked the phone off and frowned. The attic had been shut—obviously Arnold had tried the door and couldn’t open it, and now all of a sudden it opened without anyone touching it intentionally? And the closet was worse, like a locked-room murder mystery. She’d always wanted to have Cat solve one of those, but she’d never quite figured out one that would work as anything more than a puzzle. Cat wasn’t the sit-around-and-solve-puzzles type—she was a woman of action.

It just made no sense.

She heard bumps above her, almost but not quite in a regular rhythm. They’d stop and start, stop and start. It took her a moment to realize it was just Dalton on the roof. She figured he’d just be using a ladder and shifting it, but she supposed you could do it faster if you crawled or walked around up there.

See, she told herself, a logical explanation.
And just because I don’t know the logical explanations behind the other things doesn’t mean there aren’t ones.

Chapter Three

At four, the gutters were finished. Trent had worked nearly eight hours in the garden, eating the lunch he’d brought for himself outside. The floors, walls, and ceilings were all reasonably clean.

“Want me to get you some groceries?” asked Dalton.

“Um, that would be very nice.” She was getting spoiled rotten.

“Make me up a list, and I’ll be on my way.”

She wrote a few necessities down on a notepad. She wasn’t much for fancy, but she figured the men deserved a nice steak after all the work they’d done, and it was good to have a few things besides TV dinners around.

She ripped off the top sheet and handed it to Dalton. “Thanks very much. You will be staying for dinner, won’t you?”

“Is Johnston going to be here?”

Oh, jeez. Men could be such children. “I intended to invite him too, yes. He’s been working hard.”

Dalton nodded. “I’ve got to get home and work out, so I’ll just drop the stuff off and then go home.”

“Are you sure? I make a mean steak.”

Dalton smiled. “I can almost taste it. Some other time, then?”

Chelsea nodded. She waited until Dalton was on the road before shaking her head. “Men.”

“Yeah, annoying buggers, aren’t they?”

She whirled, and Trent was right behind her. He had a flashlight in his left hand that for a moment she thought was some kind of club until she saw who it was and what he was carrying. She hadn’t realized she was that on edge.

He grinned.

Chelsea put her hand to her chest. “Don’t sneak up on me like that! I nearly had a heart attack!”

“Sorry about that.” The grin on his face, though, didn’t disappear. “Is Dalton done for the day?”

“He went to buy me groceries.”

Trent’s eyes narrowed, and the grin vanished. He stroked his chin. “That was nice of him.”

“Yeah.” She remembered how that hand had felt stroking her a few hours before. Dalton was nice and well built. But Trent was flat-out sexy.

Trent looked around. “You’ve really spruced the place up.”

“Oh, not too much,” said Chelsea. It was still unfurnished, but there was something very nice about the large expanses of bare wooden floor now that the dust was off. “Want to see the upstairs?”

“Sure,” he said.

She led the way. After what they’d done on the table, showing him the bedroom seemed like a dangerous idea. She’d need his help getting a mattress for that bed, though, because there was no way she was going to be able to carry a queen-size in her Jetta.
And then we’ll just have to try it out
. The heat rose in her face. She wasn’t in love with Trent, just in lust. Letting it drop and leaving it at one quick tryst seemed like the best plan. If they kept at it, her heart might get involved, and she didn’t feel like having it broken. Not that it was likely to be an issue. He probably wouldn’t want sex with her again anyway. No sense in getting worked up over a quick fuck.

She showed him the room that was to be her office. The plaster was still curing, but at least the hole was fixed.

“You gonna try to find paint to match the mauve in here, or gonna pick a whole new color and do the whole room?”

“I thought I’d do the whole room. Something neutral. I’ve always liked that earthy Mediterranean look, you know?”

Trent nodded. “Looks good on plaster walls.” He was looking at her books. She couldn’t blame him. She always did the same thing when she went over to people’s houses, but she’d only brought a single box of them. Most of them she’d written. She liked having them there for inspiration, to remind herself that she could indeed write and finish a book.

“Cat Connors.” He pulled one from the shelf. “These are great. You’re a careful reader to have kept them in such great condition.”

She glowed. He liked her books! She wouldn’t mention that the books were in great condition because she’d never opened them. They stood in marked contrast to the worn style guide and the dictionary.

Suddenly her heart beat a little faster. There was a picture of her on the inside cover. She was all in makeup, her hair freshly done—she didn’t think it looked much like her. But with the book and her side by side, along with the fact that she had the complete set of them and only a few other books—she took the book from him and put it back on the shelf. “Yeah. They’re good, aren’t they? I like them too. I mean they’re really…okay.”

He raised a single eyebrow again, and that stopped her babbling.

“So shall we tackle the attic?” he asked.

“Yeah.” She took a breath, relieved. That neatly solved the issue of avoiding the bedroom too.

The attic stairs came down as easily as they’d gone up and without a sign of whatever had given her brother trouble. Maybe he’d pushed when he should have pulled, although it seemed pretty obvious. She and Arnold didn’t see eye to eye on much, but he wasn’t stupid.

Neither she nor Trent mounted the stairs. She really wanted him to go first, in case there were spiders, but she didn’t want to ask and admit she was scared. Besides, black widows were a legitimate thing to be scared of. It wasn’t just a case of arachnophobia.

He moved closer to her, away from the stairs, until she could smell him. He’d been working outside all day, but it wasn’t a bad smell, just a very male one.

She looked up at him, afraid he would kiss her, hoping he would. Once their lips touched, she knew the rest would follow.

His eyes were full of desire, but he didn’t move even closer. “It’s too bad Dalton’s coming back with groceries.”

“Yeah.”

“The attic,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“One of us needs to go first—you’re the owner, you decide who.”

“Yeah.” She shook her head. “I mean, why don’t you go first, if that’s all right.”

“As you wish.” He kissed her. It was just long enough to take her breath away and leave her wanting more when he drew back. He turned, climbed the ladder, and she followed. It was a nice angle for butt watching, and she had to admit she liked the view.

He offered a hand to help her up when he reached the top.
Hopefully that means there aren’t any spiders.

“Be careful. My sister-in-law said there were poisonous spiders in the shed, so—”

“Yep.”

She didn’t think that was a reassuring response. He played his flashlight around the room, and she heard sounds of things scattering. Mice, probably. She didn’t rule out very large spiders. Still, they were moving away, and that was the right direction.

There were a couple of chests in the attic, wrapped in plastic, and several large cardboard boxes, also wrapped in plastic. The chests looked ancient. The boxes, on the other hand, all bore the same packing company logo and were almost new. A small bed frame stood in the corner, its mattress long rotted until only the fluffy, dusty remnants were left.

The attic was tall enough at its center to stand, even for Trent. There were a couple of dormer windows, but they were boarded shut. The attic had an actual floor, not just beams and insulation in between like her parents’ attic. But if it had been lived in once, that had been a long time ago, maybe whenever the mattress on the bed frame had been intact. She didn’t really want to investigate that just yet—God only knew what creatures lived there. By comparison the chests and boxes seemed quite clean, as well as being much closer.

Trent lifted one of the boxes. “Books, I’d guess, from the weight of them. I wouldn’t open this stuff up here, though—the mice will have a field day with it once it’s out of the plastic.”

She had an empty bedroom on the second floor, and she wasn’t sure what she was going to do with it. “Can we bring everything down the ladder? I mean, the boxes and the chest?”