Charon's Crossing (A Paranormal Romantic Suspense Novel) (48 page)

"Well, what do you think?"

Hiram snorted. "Since when do you care what me or anybody else thinks, Mr. Attorney?"

Amos stopped the car and looked at the handyman.

"I am asking your opinion. Do you wish to give it?"

Hiram Bonnyeman sighed and leaned back in the seat.

"I think Elvira and Ada were right. That girl's actin' strange."

Amos sighed, too, and flexed his hands on the steering wheel.

"I agree. I don't quite understand it, but... Perhaps she's become ill. Perhaps she has a history of illness."

"Don't you know?" Hiram said sternly. "Goodness sakes, man, you're her lawyer!"

"I was her father's lawyer. There's a difference. He didn't tell me anything about the girl, except that he thought she, of all the people he knew, would benefit the most from inheriting that bloody pile of stone."

Hiram snorted. "Man must have been crazy. Elvira's great-grandma was alive when we got married. Old lady spooked the life out of everybody on this island, talkin' of things she'd seen out at Charon's Crossin'."

"Oh, don't let's get back to that," Amos said impatiently. "Whatever that girl's difficulty is, it has nothing to do with ghosts."

"What, then? Why would she buy all that stuff, make out as if she was laughin' and talkin' with somebody, if she hadn't seen somethin' nobody else could see?"

"How would I know?" Amos said with sharp impatience and started the car again. "I'm an attorney, not a psychiatrist."

"You think that's what she needs? A head doctor?"

"I think she needs to get off the island and back into her own life. And she will do exactly that next week, when she flies to Florida to meet her young man and they return to New York together."

"I agree," Hiram said with an emphatic nod of his head.

Amos nodded, too, and let out the clutch. "Just another week," he said, "and then Miss Kathryn Russell will be gone."

He stepped hard on the gas, and the car shot out the open gates that marked the boundaries of Charon's Crossing.

* * *

Long after the dust of the car's passing had cleared, Matthew was still standing inside the gates, his hands wrapped tightly around the bars, his eyes fixed sightlessly on the distant horizon.

Chapter 19

"Those interfering old men!" Kathryn, standing at the kitchen sink, up to her elbows in hot, soapy water, glared at Matthew while a kettle boiled on the stove. "Get down the rest of those glasses, will you please?"

Matthew eyed the shiny array of glassware, dishes, pots and pans and assorted odds and ends that lined virtually every surface in the kitchen. Kathryn had been scrubbing and polishing since dawn and from what he could tell, she showed no signs of stopping.

"Kathryn," he said gently, "this is foolish. There isn't any reason to be so angry."

"Angry? Do I look angry?" She plucked a wine goblet from his hand, glowered at it as if it were the enemy, then plunged it into the water, "I am not angry. I don't know where you got that idea."

"They meant well. Surely, you know that."

"Ha!"

"It is true. The both of them are worried about you."

Kathryn jerked another glass from his hand and submerged it in the water.

"Amos was so worried that he took off without so much as a by-your-leave within days of my arriving on this island." The water roiled as she swished the glass through it. "And Hiram was so worried that he put me dead last on his list of people who had jobs that needed doing."

"Kathryn, sweetheart—"

"Jason's another one," she said furiously. "You should have heard him this afternoon!"

"This afternoon? You spoke with him today?"

"I called him while you were reading." Kathryn plucked a goblet from the soapy water, rinsed it off, and set it into the dish drainer. " 'Jason,' I said, 'I'm really sorry to tell you this over the telephone but there's no other way.' " She looked at Matthew, her eyes snapping. "I'd expected him to be upset, I guess, even angry, although he must have suspected I was going to break things off after the way things went when he was here, but—"

"You ended your engagement?"

"Of course."

Matthew knew it wasn't right to feel so pleased. There was no sense in pretending Kathryn would not marry eventually, and even to hope such a thing was selfish and cruel. He loved her; he wanted her to find happiness.

But not with that fop, Jason. Not with any man he knew, for that matter. It was one thing to think in broad, philosophical terms, to tell himself that she deserved a rich and full life once she left Elizabeth Island...

And another entirely to have to envision her in any arms but his.

The goblet he'd been holding shattered in his knotted fist. He blinked and looked down dumbly as shards of glass bit into his flesh and rained to the floor.

"Matthew?" Kathryn swung towards him, her eyes wide. "Oh, what happened? Are you cut?" She grabbed his hand and a thin line of blood oozed up across the palm.

"I'm all right."

"You're not. You're bleeding."

"I'm fine, for God's sake." Matthew snatched back his hand, wiped it on the seat of his jeans, and glowered at her. "Perhaps it would have been kinder to have given the man such news when you see him next week in Florida."

"Let me see that hand, please."

"Kathryn, dammit—"

"Do you have any idea how often you say that?" Kathryn took his hand, tugged him onto the terrace and into the sun, and peered intently at the cut. "Kathryn dammit? As if it were all one word."

His throat constricted as he looked at her bent head. Sunlight had put glints of flame into the dark silk which had parted to fall forward over her shoulders, exposing the delicate curve of her neck. God, how he loved her!

"If I say it as one word, and say it often," he said gruffly, "it is because you specialize in irritating me."

She lifted his hand, pressed a kiss to the tiny cut, then looked up at him and laughed.

"What you're trying to say, Captain, is that I piss you off. It's inelegant, but if you're going to be a twentieth-century male, you'll have to learn the lingo."

Matthew smiled. It was impossible to do anything less, with those blue eyes of hers teasing his but then his smile faded, his frown returned, and he pulled his hand from hers.

"I am not a twentieth-century male, Kathryn. That is what you refuse to accept."

"Don't be so stubborn." She put her hands flat against his chest, reveling in the steady drum of his heart. "This is 1996 and here you are. What else would you call yourself?"

"A freak of nature," he said coldly, "or of darkness. I am not certain which."

"Honestly, Matthew, in some ways you're as impossible as Jason. When I told him I wasn't going to meet him in Florida, that I'd decided to stay here, at Charon's Crossing—"

"You told him what?"

Damn, Kathryn thought, oh damn! She hadn't meant to break the news this way. Matthew was going to try and talk her out of it, she was certain of it. Well, she was just as certain that she wanted a life with him and not with Jason. She'd made a decision. Sooner or later, he had to be told of it and now was as good a time as any.

"I'm not going back," she said softly. Her eyes met Matthew's. "I told that to Jason when I phoned him."

A muscle knotted in Matthew's jaw.

"What do you mean, you're not going back?"

"How much more clearly can I put it, Matthew? I love you. You love me. And we want to be together. Isn't that right?"

"Kathryn." He shook his head, knowing the rest even before she said it. "Listen to me, Kathryn..."

"No. You listen to me, for a change." Her words were rushed, with an almost desperate intensity. "I'm going to live here, with you, at Charon's Crossing."

"Dammit, Kathryn!"

She laughed and looped her arms around his neck. "You see? You're doing it again."

"Kathryn, this is no time to be clever." Matthew put his hands on her waist to keep her from settling against his chest. "There is nothing for you here. This house is little better than a ruin!"

"We'll fix it up together. You can figure out what we need in the way of lumber and paint and all the rest, and I'll go into town and buy it."

"Don't be crazy!" He reached one hand behind his neck, clasped her wrists, and drew her arms down between them. "What sort of life would you have here, madam? In a house in the middle of nowhere, with a man who is not a man."

"You're all the man I'll ever want," she whispered.

She lifted herself towards him, eyes languorous and lips half-parted, and he breathed an oath and pushed her back.

"I am not a man at all," he said coldly. "Shall I walk through a wall by way of reminder?"

She stared at him and then her mouth began to tremble. "All right," she said. "Okay. You come up with a better plan, then." She crossed the terrace with quick steps, turned and glowered at him. "If I could travel back in time to be with you, I would do it. But I can't. This isn't like some—some old 'Star Trek' episode, where characters can float back and forth through a hole in the space-time continuum."

" 'Star Trek'? What is—"

"Dammit, Matthew!" Kathryn stamped her foot. "Do not do that! I'm not going to let myself be sidetracked. You know what I mean. We aren't caught in—in some kind of time warp!" She took a deep breath, then blew it out. "You can't enter my world."

"The woman speaks the truth at last!"

"So I—I thought about the possibility of entering yours."

Matthew frowned. "I don't under..." His face whitened and he strode to where she stood and caught hold of her. "Do you mean, you thought of dying?"

"Matthew! You're hurting me!"

"Are you insane?" he demanded in fury. "There is nothing romantic about death, and nothing predictable, either. I know only what happened to me, not what happens to anyone else. Do you have an answer to the question people have been asking since time began? Nay, Kathryn, I think not!"

"I think not, too. I mean, I don't know what happens. That's why I gave up the idea. Why are you getting so angry? And would you please let go? You're going to leave fingerprints on my arms!"

"I ought to leave handprints on your bottom!" A muscle knotted and unknotted in his jaw. "Just because I ended up here is no guarantee that you—"

"I keep telling you, I realized that! That's one of the reasons I've come up with this plan!"

Matthew's eyes narrowed. "What plan?"

"The one I was explaining before you flew off the handle!" Her expression softened. "I'm going to stay here, with you."

"For how long? You cannot expect to shut out reality forever."

Kathryn smiled. "That's exactly what I do expect. I'm never going back, Matthew. Don't you understand? I'm going to stay with you forever."

He could not help himself. Her soft words sent his heart racing before he realized how futile they were.

"Nay. You cannot."

Kathryn laughed softly and moved into his arms.

"Have you forgotten everything I told you? The world has changed, my love. Women don't let men tell them what to do anymore."

"Kathryn, listen to me. You might as well sentence yourself to life imprisonment."

"Imprisonment? To live the rest of my life with the man I love in a tropical paradise?" She laughed again and put her arms around his neck. "Nay, Captain, I think not."

"Think, Kathryn. You would lack all the wonderful things in your books."

"Indeed. Air pollution, noise, traffic jams..." Her sigh was long and dramatic. "What a tragedy."

"You would have no one to talk with but me."

"Ah. Yet another tragedy."

"You have a life in the world, Kathryn, a career you've said you enjoy."

"The wonder of computers. Wait until I show you what happens with a phone jack, a modem, and an adaptor."