Читать книгу: «Wild Iris Ridge»

CHAPTER ONE

THIS WAS, WITHOUT QUESTION, the craziest thing she had ever done.

Lucy Drake stood on the front porch of her great-aunt’s house, shivering at the cold, damp breeze that slid under her jacket.

She ought to just find a hotel somewhere in Hope’s Crossing to spend the night, instead of standing here on the dark and rather creepy-under-the-circumstances doorstep of a massive Victorian mansion after midnight in the middle of an April rainstorm.

If she had an ounce of brains or sense, that is exactly what she would do—climb back into her BMW and head for the nearest hotel. Hope’s Crossing was overflowing with them, and on a shoulder-season April night when the ski tourists were gone, she could probably find hundreds of empty rooms.

Then again, if she had either of those things—brains or sense—she wouldn’t be in this situation. Right now, she would probably be at the end of an eighteen-hour workday, heading back to her quiet condo on Lake Washington with another few hours of work ahead of her before she finally crashed.

Another gust of freezing wind whined fitfully under the eaves and sent the branches of the red maple beside the porch clawing across the roof like skeletal fingers.

She zipped up her coat and reached for the doorknob of the house. Crazy, she might be, but she didn’t need to be cold and crazy, too.

The door was locked, of course. What else had she expected, when Iris House had been empty since December and Annabelle’s shocking death? Even though she had known it would be locked, she still felt a hard kernel of panic in her gut at one more obstacle.

What if she couldn’t get in tonight? What if she could never get in? Where would she go? She had come all this way, two days of driving from Seattle. She had subleased her condo, packed all her belongings, brought everything with her. She would be stranded without a home, without shelter, in a town where the two people she cared most about in the world were both gone.

The lateness of the hour and her own exhaustion from the stress of the past week pressed in on her, macerating her control. She felt it slipping through her fingers like fine-grained sand but she forced herself to take a deep breath.

Okay. Calm. She could handle this. She had fully expected the door to be locked. No one had lived here for months. If she had showed up on the doorstep of the old house and found it wasn’t secure, then she would have cause to worry.

This wasn’t a problem. She knew right where her great-aunt always hid the spare key—assuming no one had changed the locks, of course....

She wasn’t going to go there yet. Instead, she turned on the flashlight app of her phone and used the small glow it provided to guide her way around the corner of the wraparound porch.

The chains of the old wood porch swing clanked and rattled as she sat down, a familiar and oddly comforting sound. She reached for the armrest closest to the front door with one hand, aiming the light from her phone with the other.

After a little fumbling, her fingers found the catch and she opened the tiny, clever hidden compartment Annabelle had created herself inside the armrest.

Only someone who knew the magic secret of the porch swing could ever find the hollowed-out hiding place. She reached inside and felt around until her fingers encountered the ice-cold metal of the key to Iris House.

“Thank you, Annabelle,” she murmured.

She discovered that no one had changed the locks when she inserted the key and turned it. See, there was a bright spot. Next hurdle: What if the security code had been changed since her last visit?

Knowing she didn’t have a moment to spare, she didn’t take time to savor the scents of rosemary and lemon wood polish and home that greeted her inside.

Instead, she bolted to the keypad for the state-of-the-art security system Annabelle had installed several years ago. Her fingers fumbled on the keypad but she managed to type in the numbers that corresponded with the letters H-O-P-E.

The system announced it was now disarmed. Only then did she let herself sigh with relief, trying not to notice how the small sound echoed through the empty space.

She flipped the light switch in the entryway, with its parquet floor and the magnificent curving staircase made up of dozens of intricately turned balusters.

How many times had she rushed into this entryway during the two years she’d lived here during her teen years and called to Annabelle she was home before dropping her books on the bottom step to take up to her room later?

Suddenly she had an image of when she’d first arrived at fifteen, her heart angry and battered, showing up at a distant relative’s home with everything she owned in bags at her feet.

Apparently, things hadn’t changed that much in seventeen years—except this time her bags were still out in the car.

She turned around, half expecting Annabelle to come bustling through the doorway from the kitchen in one of those zip-up half aprons she always wore that had a hundred pockets, arms outstretched and ready to wrap her into a soft, sweet-smelling embrace.

That familiar sense of disorienting loss gnawed through her as she remembered Annabelle wouldn’t bustle through that door ever again.

She felt something dig into her palm and realized she was still clutching the key from the front porch. She slid it onto the table, making a mental note to return it to its hiding place later then took another of her cleansing breaths.

Right now she needed to focus. She desperately needed sleep and a chance to regroup and regain a little perspective.

The air inside Iris House was stale, cold. She walked through turning on lights as she headed for the thermostat outside the main-floor bedroom Annabelle had used the past few years when it became harder for her to reach the second or third floors.

The heating system thermostat was set for sixty-two degrees, probably to keep the pipes from freezing during the winter, but the actual temperature read in the mid-fifties.

She tried turning the heating system off and then on again—about the sum total of her HVAC expertise. When no answering whoosh of warm air responded through the vents, she frowned. Annabelle used to complain the pilot light in the furnace could be tricky at times. Apparently this was one of those times.

Lucy was torn between laughter and tears. What did a girl have to do to catch a break around here? She had walked away from everything and packed up her life to come here, seeking the security and safety she had always found at Iris House.

With all the possible complications that could have ensnarled her journey here from Seattle, she had finally made it and now a stupid pilot light would be the one thing keeping her from reaching her goal of staying here.

It didn’t have to be a stumbling block. Last time she counted, the old house had nine fireplaces and she had seen a pile of seasoned firewood against the garage when she pulled up. She didn’t have to heat the whole house, just one room. She could pick one and spend a perfectly comfortable night in front of the fire then have a furnace technician come in the next day.

And wasn’t that some kind of metaphor for her life right now? Who ever said she had to fix every disaster she had created right this moment? She only had to focus on making it through tonight then she could sort the rest of it out later.

Considering none of the beds likely had linens at all—and certainly not fresh ones—for tonight she would bunk on the sofa in the room Annabelle had used as a TV room, she decided, and deal with the rest of the mess in the morning.

“You can do this,” she said aloud.

Hearing her own voice helped push away some of the ghosts that wandered through the house. Annabelle. Jess. Even her younger self, angry and wounded.

Energized by having a viable plan of action, she quickly headed out into the rain again and grabbed an armload of wood from the pile, enough to keep the cold at bay for several hours, at least. Trust Annabelle to keep her woodpile covered and protected so the wood was dry and ready to burn. Her great-aunt had probably cut it all herself.

Back inside, she dropped the pile of wood on the hearth in the cozy little den and found matches and kindling sticks in a canister on the mantel.

She was so not a Girl Scout, but Annabelle had insisted both she and Jessica learn the proper way to light a fire. Those long-ago lessons bubbled back to the surface, and in moments she had a tidy little blaze going.

Perfect. In no time, the room would be cozy and comfortable.

She added a larger split log and watched the flames dance around it for a moment before they caught hold. Already the house felt a little warmer, not quite as empty and lonely.

She yawned, tempted to curl up right this instant on the sofa and drop off. No. She would sleep better in a nightgown, with her teeth brushed and her face washed. Closing the door to the room behind her to hold on to the heat, she headed out for one more bone-chilling trip to the car for the suitcase that held her essentials.

She carried the case straight to the bathroom just off the kitchen and made it through her ablutions with bleary eyes. After grabbing a couple of blankets out of the linen chest in the downstairs guest room, she opened the door to the den—and was greeted by thick, choking black smoke.

For an instant, her exhausted brain couldn’t quite process this latest disaster in a depressingly long line of them. Then in a wild burst of panic, her synapses started blasting messages, one after the other, and she had the presence of mind to slam the door shut.

Smoke. Blaze. Iris House was on fire.

“No! No, no no!”

It was probably just the chimney not drawing correctly. That’s all. Calm down. She would just put the fire out and air out the room and all would be fine.

Fire extinguisher! Where was the bloody fire extinguisher? Annabelle always kept one under the kitchen sink, she remembered. She raced back and yanked open the cabinets then blessed her great-aunt’s independent, self-reliant mindset. The fire extinguisher was attached right to the inside door.

Lucy yanked it off and quickly scanned the instructions, then stopped long enough to grab a dishcloth out of a drawer to cover her mouth before charging back to the den.

She couldn’t see any flames through the smoke, which further reinforced the idea that a chimney draw issue was to blame. She hoped, anyway. At the same time, she wasn’t completely stupid. If she couldn’t deal with the problem on her own, she would call the fire department.

Coughing, eyes burning from the smoke, she activated the fire extinguisher and sprayed toward the logs.

The fire sizzled and spat at coming into contact with the chemical as the extinguisher did its job.

Okay. Crisis averted.

She hurried and unlatched the window to let some of the smoke out. Just as she turned around, she heard an ominous crackling and a loud, angry roar from overhead.

Her stomach turned over. She had heard that sound once before, in one of the upstairs bedrooms one memorable wintry January day when she was seventeen. This was more than a problem with a poorly drawing flue. This was a chimney fire.

In that previous fire when she was living here, that had been a case of an old bird’s nest falling and igniting. This could be another one or perhaps creosote buildup had ignited.

Whatever the reason, this was a nightmare. Chimney fires burned hot and fierce and could burn through the masonry, the walls. Everything. In addition, flying debris could ignite the roof and take down the entire hundred-twenty-year-old historic mansion.

She couldn’t burn down Iris House. She had nothing else left.

Though she knew it was risky, in one last desperate effort, she aimed the fire extinguisher up the chimney, adrenaline shooting through her as fast and fierce as those flames, until the chemical ran out then she scooped up her purse and raced for the door with her phone in hand, already dialing 911.

Apparently, someone beat her to it. She ran out onto the porch just as a couple of guys in full uniforms were running out of a fire truck parked behind her car, lights flashing. Another engine was just pulling up behind it.

Somebody must have seen the smoke pouring out the window and called it in. Yay for nosy neighbors.

“Is there anybody else inside?” one of the firefighters asked her.

“No. Just me. It’s a chimney fire, centered in the den. Go to the end of the hall, last door on the right.”

“Thanks.”

“Oh, am I so glad to see you guys,” she called to the third firefighter she encountered as she headed down the steps of the porch.

This one wasn’t in turnout gear, only a coat and helmet that shielded his features in the smoke and the gloomy night. She had only an impression of height and impressive bulk before he spoke in a voice as hard and terrifying as the fire.

“You won’t be so glad to see us when we have you arrested for trespassing, arson and criminal mischief.”

Lucy screwed her eyes shut as recognition flooded through her.

Oh, joy.

She should have known. Brendan Caine. He was probably the reason she hadn’t wanted to call the fire department in the first place. Her subconscious probably had been gearing up for this encounter since she saw that first puff of smoke.

It would have been nice if she could have spent at least an hour or two in Hope’s Crossing before she had to face this man who just happened to despise her. Not the way her luck was going these days, apparently.

She lifted her chin. “How can I be trespassing in my own house, Chief Caine?”

He jerked his head up as if she had lobbed a fireball at him. In the glow from the porch light, she saw his rugged features go slack with shock. “Lucy? What the hell?”

She tried for a nonchalant shrug. “Apparently, having the chimneys cleaned is now at the top of my to-do list.”

“You did this?”

“The furnace wouldn’t kick on so I thought I would warm the place up with a fire”

“The pilot light has been dicey all winter. I’ve been meaning to have somebody in to look at it. I’ve had to relight it a couple times a week.”

Of course. He only lived about four houses down the street—and since Annabelle had been Jessica’s great-aunt, too, Brendan would naturally feel responsible for looking after Iris House.

“I didn’t know how to light it and I was freezing,” she said. “I just figured I would stay warm with a fire tonight and deal with the furnace in the morning.”

“And you never thought to go to a hotel?”

“Why go to a hotel when I happen to own a twenty-room mansion?”

Before he could answer, the two firefighters who had first charged into the house came out. “Chimney fire,” one said. “Looks like some creosote ignited. It’s mostly extinguished but we’ll need to head up to the roof to put out any hot spots.”

She wanted to sit right down on the porch steps and sob with relief—but she would never do that in front of Brendan Caine, of course.

He pulled out a radio and issued instructions in it that were completely beyond her understanding, something about a ladder truck.

“I want my paramedics to take a look at you,” he said to her after he finished.

“That’s not necessary. I’m fine.”

“It wasn’t a request,” he said, his tone hard. “We need to be sure your lungs are okay after breathing all that smoke.”

He spoke to a couple other guys who had just pulled up. “Redmond. Chen. Run vitals on Ms. Drake here. Let me know if you think we need to transport her to the E.R.”

“I’m perfectly fine. I don’t need to be checked out, and I certainly don’t need to go to any E.R!”

One of the paramedics, a big, burly bald guy with a mustache and incongruously sweet features gave her an apologetic smile. “It won’t take long, ma’am.”

They led her over to a waiting ambulance. Had Brendan called out every truck in his entire department? For the next ten minutes she sat mortified on a stretcher while they checked everything. Oxygen levels, normal. Blood pressure, slightly high—no big surprise there. Temperature and reflexes, all as they should be.

“Everything checks out,” the bald guy said.

“I told you it would.”

“Sorry, ma’am. We have to follow procedure. The chief can be a stickler about that.”

“Am I free to go?”

“As far as we’re concerned.”

Not knowing what else to do, she retreated to the safety of her car and for the next hour watched as the Hope’s Crossing volunteer fire department scrambled across the various roof levels, climbed up and down ladders and peeked through windows, checking out every inch of Iris House.

Finally, they seemed to be certain the fire was completely out. The ambulance peeled away first then one engine after another until only the first ladder truck and the SUV that said Fire Chief on the side were left.

When Brendan walked onto the porch, speaking into his radio, she finally gathered the courage to climb out of her vehicle and approach him.

The rain had stopped, but the April night was still cold, with a damp wind that seemed to burrow beneath her coat.

He looked surprised to see her again, as if he had just remembered her existence—and probably would have preferred to forget it.

“I guess you’re okay or the paramedics would have taken you to the hospital.”

“I’m fine. Just like I told you. What are the damages to the house?”

“Too soon to say. You’ve got smoke damage, definitely, though it seems to be isolated to the TV room. We’ve got the windows open, airing things out.”

“That’s a relief.”

“It could have been a lot worse.”

She shivered as all the nightmare images that had been parading through her mind seemed to march a little faster. “I really do appreciate everyone. Please tell your department thank you for me. I’m sorry to call them out of their beds in the middle of the night.”

“It’s part of the job,” he said, his tone dismissive. He tilted his head. “Now, you want to tell me what the hell you’re doing here? Why didn’t you tell anyone you were coming?”

She shrugged. She couldn’t tell him everything, the personal and professional humiliation she had left behind. “Spur-of-the-moment decision.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t end up fried to a crisp.”

What would have happened if the creosote hadn’t ignited so quickly? If it had smoldered for an hour or so, until she was sound asleep just a few feet away from the fire? She would have died of smoke inhalation first and then been fried to a crisp.

Cold panic dripped down her spine, but she clamped down on the nerves before they could flood her completely.

“I know.”

He gave her one of those dark looks that could mean anything. “You can’t stay here tonight. You understand that, right? We need to make sure the house is safe tonight, with no lingering hot spots. You’ll have to find a hotel.”

If she had only done that in the first place, they wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.

“I can do that,” she said.

Of course, he didn’t invite her to stay at his house. They didn’t have that kind of amicable relationship, despite the fact that she was godmother to his children or that his late wife had been not only her cousin but her dearest friend in the world.

“I still can’t quite wrap my head around you showing up in the middle of the night like this. You should have let me know you were coming. I could have made sure the pilot light was turned on for you, and none of this would have happened.”

She was tempted to remind him caustically that she didn’t need his permission to visit her own house. He might be watching over it, but she had been Annabelle’s only surviving heir.

Iris House should have been Jessica’s. She had adored the place, and she and Annabelle had always talked about turning it into a bed and breakfast one day after the children were grown, with Jess running the day-to-day details.

But Annabelle and Jess were both gone. Lucy was the only one left, the sole owner of this rambling old Victorian mining mansion she had never wanted in a town she had once been so eager to leave. Since her own dreams had just burned up hotter than any creosote fire, she had decided to borrow Jessica’s for a while.

“Like I said, spur-of-the-moment decision. I didn’t think things through.”

“How very unlike you,” he said, his voice dry enough to make her bristle.

She was too tired to fight with him tonight. Instead, she changed the subject. “How much damage do you think the fire caused?”

“We won’t know until we inspect things in the morning. From what I could see, the fire seemed to be contained to the chimney. I doubt you’ll see any structural damage but we can’t be certain until at least tomorrow. It might be Monday or Tuesday by the time we know anything.” He paused. “Are you planning to stick around that long?”

She glanced at the house, feeling that steady, relentless dribble of panic again. “Yes,” she said, lips tight.

She had no reason to tell this man who disliked her so intently that she would be here for the immediate future, that she had nothing left but this smoke-damaged house that sat in the rain like a graceful grande dame.

“You can call the fire station and leave the name of your hotel once you figure it out. I’ll get in touch with you as soon as I know whether the house is safe to inhabit.”

She could afford a night or two in a hotel, but she would have to come up with another solution if this dragged on longer than that—especially if she was going to pour all her resources into pursuing Jess’s dream. Again, nothing she was willing to share with Fire Chief Caine.

“Thanks,” she murmured.

He studied her for a minute longer and she knew she must be a mess—bedraggled and sooty and smelling of smoke and fire extinguisher chemicals.

“Welcome back. I guess.”

* * *

SOMETHING WAS UP.

Brendan frowned as he watched Lucy Drake slide back behind the wheel of her fancy BMW. She sat for a moment gazing out the front windshield into the darkness as if she couldn’t quite remember how to put the car in gear.

He was aware of a tiny, wriggling concern, like a slippery earthworm in the garden he couldn’t quite grasp.

Usually, she was brash and confident, striding through the world with her designer suits and leather briefcases.

On her rare visits to Hope’s Crossing before Jess had died, Lucy would blow in with a backseat full of expensive gifts for the kids and for Jess and story after story about her exciting life in Seattle as the marketing director at a hugely successful and rapidly expanding software company.

Yeah, the circumstances were rough tonight. It had to be a rude welcome for her to come back to Iris House and end up with a chimney fire five minutes later.

That didn’t completely explain the way she had been acting. The woman who had just headed away looking lost and alone didn’t seem at all like the fiercely driven go-getter who usually made no secret of her disdain for him.

Don’t you think you can do better than a washed-up jock with more muscles than brains?

He pushed away the bitter memory he hadn’t realized still haunted him somewhere deep inside to find he wasn’t alone in his contemplation of Lucy’s little red BMW.

Pete Valentine, one of his volunteer firefighters who ran a successful plumbing business the rest of the time, stood at his elbow. The other man licked his bottom lip with a greedy sort of look as his gaze followed her taillights. “Lucy Drake. She’s still as hot as ever. Man, she used to make my balls ache in high school.”

He glowered at the locker room talk which, unfortunately, wasn’t all that uncommon among his crew at times.

Pete was married to a nurse at the hospital. If she heard him talking like this, Janet would probably give him a whole new definition of aching balls.

Pete seemed to take his silence as tacit permission. “Something about that whole badass-Goth-girl thing just did it for me, you know? Especially because she was so smart on top of all that attitude. Honor roll, the whole thing. I sat behind her in Mrs. McKnight’s English class senior year, and I spent the whole semester trying to get a peek beneath all that black leather, if you know what I mean.”

He had always thought he liked Pete, but right now he wanted to take one of the attack fire hoses to him, for reasons he didn’t quite understand.

“Yeah, well, how about we don’t take any more visits down your horny teenage memory lane while we have a job to finish?” he growled.

Pete blinked at his tone and his glare. “Uh, sure, Chief. Sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just surprised to see her, that’s all.”

Yeah. Join the club, Brendan thought as Pete hurried away.

He never would have guessed when he tucked the kids in at home with Mrs. Madison and drove past this very house on his way to his shift that evening that he would be back here—and facing Lucy in the process.

Though her car was long gone, he still couldn’t help gazing down the road where she had traveled.

He hadn’t missed how evasive she had been when he’d asked how long she was staying. He had to hope it was only a day or two.

Some people just tended to shake things up wherever they went, to spawn chaos and tumult without even trying. Lucy had that particular gift in spades—as tonight clearly indicated.

He and Carter and Faith were finally digging their way out of the deep, inky chasm Jess’s death had tossed them all into. They were finally settling back into a routine, moving forward with one steady foot in front of the other. His kids didn’t need Lucy to aim all that chaos in their direction and shake up the world that was finally feeling calm for the first time in two years.

No sense in worrying about it, he thought as he turned back to the fire and all the details he needed to do in order to clear the scene and send his engines back to the house.

One thing about Lucy. She never stayed long in Hope’s Crossing. In a few days, no doubt she would be packing up her little red car and heading back into the fray, to Seattle and her high-powered career and the world where she belonged.