Home Sweet Home (A Southern Comfort Novel) (7 page)

Grace had wondered about the turret and the window seats and the oddly shaped rooms. She felt as if they’d been designed just for her. She wanted to know more about Ree Summers.

Fortunately, Henry seemed willing to tell her.

“But she never moved into the house,” Henry said ominously.

“Oh, no! What happened?” asked Grace, imagining a mill collapse or a bicycle accident or consumption.

“Nothing as dire as what you’re thinking,” said Henry quickly.

“Worse,” interrupted Helen. “It was a man.”

“What?”

Henry shot Helen an annoyed glance, and continued. “Nelson Summers’s success drew the attention of logging men around the country. He had developed efficiency measures that ensured his mill had one of the highest outputs in the region. Now he is regarded as an equal to Henry Ford in terms of business acumen and—”

“Here’s the good stuff,” said Helen. “So this guy Charles Beaumont comes to town, and he’s a young up-and-comer in the industry and wants to learn from Nelson Summers. And he does. Works under him for a while, but soon he gets restless for his own mill. Meanwhile, he keeps hearing about Nelson’s daughter, who’s building a house and who’s kind of a weirdo. But he’s never met her.”

“They ran in different circles,” explained Henry. “Although Charles showed such promise that he was soon allowed into Nelson’s inner circle.”

“Which meant he got to go to all of the fancy dinner parties.” Helen took over the story again. “Which was a big deal for a guy like Charles Beaumont, who came from nothing and was doing that whole American Dream, pull yourself up by your bootstraps thing. So one night, he goes to a dinner party at Nelson Summers’s house, and whom should he meet, but—”

“Canapé?”

“Jake!” exclaimed Helen. “Grace, this is the guy I was telling you about. Jake, we were just telling Grace the Spinster House story.”

“Oh, you mean the one where the crazy lady builds her dream house but then runs off with some West Coast logging magnate before she can even move in?”

“Yes,” grumbled Helen. “Thanks for spoiling the ending.”

“I know Jake,” Grace said to Helen, as if Jake weren’t standing right behind her.

“Of course, if Mary Beth sold you the house. He probably took the picture when you moved in, right?”

“What are you doing here?” she asked Jake, ignoring Helen. “I thought you hated professors?”

“Hello, son.” Marilyn, the English Department secretary, came over and gave Jake a kiss on the cheek. Grace’s head was spinning. She was not used to small towns where everybody knew each other. And where the beloved English Department secretary was the mother of her realtor and her arch-nemesis.

“Grace, I was so pleased when Mary Beth told me Jake had been doing some work on your house for you.”

“Yeah,” said Grace, dumbly.

“He’s a good boy,” she said, patting Jake’s cheek. Jake blushed and rolled his eyes.

“Be a good boy and give me one of those canapés,” Henry said, reaching forward. Grace watched, fascinated, as Jake’s face turned an entirely different shade of red.

“So, what I was saying about the Spinster House,” said Henry, his mouth full of canapé, “is that, like all good, older houses, it has a legend attached.”

“Oh, that old legend,” said Marilyn, waving her hand dismissively.

“What legend?” asked Grace. Because if the legend was that she would get a cat and die alone, she was pretty sure she was going to move.

“The house is destined to be bought only by single women,” said Helen with unnecessary glee.

“Because a single woman of good fortune must be in want of a house?” asked Grace. Only Helen laughed.

“It’s just a legend,” chided Marilyn.

“Anyway, that house on Walnut Street is a wreck. Nobody, single or not, would live there,” said Jake.

“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong, as I was just telling these ladies here,” said Henry. His chest puffed up and he went on in a conspiratorial whisper. “I uncovered documents in a musty back room of the library—the public library,” he added when Helen, who knew the Pembroke Library like the back of her hand, started to protest. “It turns out that Ree owned both pieces of land, and she built on each of them. The one commonly—and erroneously—referred to as the Spinster House was actually a home designed for unwed mothers. It is much larger than the one Grace owns.”

Helen and Henry started arguing about the authenticity of the documents, and legend and proof, and a lot of other complicated things that Grace was too distracted to follow.

“Hey, are you okay?” Jake gently grabbed her elbow. “You look like you’re going to pass out.”

Which is funny, Grace thought, because I feel like I’m going to pass out. Instead, she turned to Jake. “If your sister sold me a house for spinsters,” she said, leveling her most menacing gaze on him, “I will kill her.”

The house felt the vibrations of a truck in the driveway and felt the faint stirrings of the charge that sparked between Grace and Jake. But then only one set of footsteps came up the walkway, and the only voice in the foyer was Grace talking to the cat. Maybe the cat had been a mistake. Grace acted as if she preferred the cat to Jake.

Vulnerable and safe at the same time. Grace felt both ways around Jake, but she just wasn’t getting how important it was. And, frankly, neither was Jake. If Grace could see that Jake could make her feel this way, maybe she would spend less time talking to the cat.

J
ake had absolutely no intention of seeking Grace out again. He saw the way she was at the barbecue, then the way she was at the Professor Party. It was as if there were two different Graces. One was awkward and could barely talk, one laughed and smiled and charmed. From afar, he liked the Grace at the Professor Party much better, but what kind of person could make small talk in one situation, and be completely unintelligent in another?

She annoyed him; that was the only reason he couldn’t get her out of his head. Not her surprising sense of humor, or the fact that she needed him. Definitely not the way that red dress clung to her curves. He did not care at all about that. Just because he’d been reliving it for the past several days, that meant nothing. She meant nothing to him.

Nothing.

So what if he went out for a run on Tuesday morning, and he happened to run by her house? He’d been too lazy this summer and needed a good, long workout.

And if he happened to look over at her house as he was running by, it was just general neighborly curiosity. He had put a lot of work into that house. Of course he’d be interested in seeing how it was holding up.

He was not, however, expecting to see Grace waving frantically at him. From the roof above her porch.

It wasn’t that far to jump. She probably could’ve made it. But Grace was not a huge fan of heights, and when she saw Jake running by, she knew she was saved.

She shouted, but that didn’t have any effect. So she waved so hard that she nearly threw herself off the roof—which would have solved her problem, but was exactly the solution she was trying to avoid. He saw her, then meandered across the street, pulling at his ear buds. When he got to her yard, he just stood there, hands on his hips, eyebrow in the air.

She tried very, very hard not to notice that his shirt was tucked into the waist of his running shorts. And that sweat was running down his chest. And that as he stood there, no doubt judging her, he shone in the sun like a radiant god.

She nearly fell off the roof again.

Too bad he was such a pain.

“What are you doing up there?” he asked.

“I’m stuck.”

“Why don’t you just climb in the window?”

Grace turned around to look at the window, then back at Jake. “Gosh, why didn’t I think of that?” Did he think she was some kind of idiot? She might have very limited practical abilities, but she wasn’t an idiot. She had a PhD, dammit.

“The window is stuck.”

“You’re stuck because the window is stuck?”

“Yes, can you stop shouting and come get me out of here?”

He disappeared from view, but then he came back. “Locked.”

“Crap,” she muttered. Stupid Todd and his safety reminders.
“Lock your doors,” he said. “It’s not a good idea for a woman living alone to leave an invitation like that to intruders.”
Like an intruder wouldn’t just break her window. And now here she was, stuck on the roof where she would surely die. She couldn’t die; she had classes to prepare for.

“I’ll try the back,” said Jake. But she knew the back door was locked because she’d gone out in the morning to start weeding the garden and when she tried to get back in, she found herself locked out. So she had to come in the front door. Which she’d promptly locked behind herself in the interest of safety.

Jake came jogging back. “Uh, I don’t suppose you left any windows open downstairs?”

She shook her head. “Air conditioning.”

“What about that ladder we used for wallpapering?”

She thrust her thumb toward the window behind her. “Still in the office. I can see it from here if that helps.”

“Not at all. Okay, I’m coming up.”

“Wait, how—” How is that going to help? she started to ask. But then she got distracted by shirtless Jake swinging a leg over her porch railing and pulling himself up and over the edge of the roof.

Muscles, she thought. I might die.

“Okay,” he said, a little out of breath from his gymnastic routine. “What’s going on up here?”

“Muscles,” she said.

Muscles, she said out loud, to the man she didn’t like and who didn’t like her but whom she was hoping to convince to save her from certain death atop a ten-foot roof.

He looked at her with that confused look on his face that she was becoming really familiar with. Well, she was confused, too. And not just because of Muscles.

“I came out here to paint the trim,” she said, indicating the paint and brush she had leaning against the house. “So I closed the window, and when I was done, I tried to open it, but it’s stuck.”

“Did you paint the window shut?” he asked, as if she were an idiot.

“No, smarty. I wasn’t painting the windowsill. I was doing up there,” she said, pointing to the trim that had, until about an hour ago, been peeling and shabby-looking.

“You did a nice job.”

“Thanks. I sanded it first and everything.”

Jake looked around, so she added, “The sandpaper blew away. Hey, are you going to try this window, or what?”

“Step back, little lady,” he said, and sauntered up to the window. What a goof, she thought. What a saunter.

And those back muscles. Good grief, they danced as he tried to pull the window up. Then they strained and his neck started turning red.

“Must be locked.” He shaded his eyes and peered into her office.

“Lock’s broken.” She shrugged when he looked back at her. “It’s on my list of things to fix.”

“I can take a look at it.”

“I don’t want to bother you.”

“It’s no bother. It’s a lot less bother than being stuck on a roof.”

“Sorry. In my defense, it wasn’t my idea for you to climb up here with me.”

Jake moved to the edge of the roof and peered down, hands on his hips. Grace took a tentative step toward him, and the edge.

“Well, we’re going to have to climb down,” said Jake with a decisive nod.

“But—” Grace tried to think of a good reason why she couldn’t climb. She had weak wrists. She had vertigo. She didn’t want to die falling from a ten-foot roof. “I can’t.”

“Sure you can.” He gave her a confident smile. “You won’t fall. I’ll make sure.”

Damn that smile. That smile made her believe that she could make it off the roof alive. That she could rappel down a mountain if she wanted to. That smile made her consider hang-gliding.

“Okay, I’m going to go first,” Jake said, tucking his killer smile away and getting down on his haunches. “Watch what I do. You just have to put your hands and feet where I do, and then I’ll be at the bottom to catch you.”

Grace kneeled by the side of the roof as Jake slowly lowered himself down. “
Catch
implies that I will be falling.”

“Grace,” he grunted. “Don’t argue semantics when I’m climbing off a roof.”

She watched him climb down. She watched his hands as they gripped the cornice, then leaned further to see his feet touch the top rail of the porch. He shifted his hands for a more secure grip, then gently swung his legs out behind him. She held her breath as his hands disconnected, and then he was crouching on the grass, smiling up at her.

“See? No problem,” he said, wiping sweat off his forehead.

“No problem!” she called out, hoping she sounded more enthusiastic than manic. But she was not confident of that.

“Lie down flat,” he instructed, and she did. He’d gotten down alive; he was obviously an expert.

“Okay,” she called from her flat position on the roof.

“Now swing your legs over, nice and slow.”

Was he crazy? If she swung her legs over, she would be half off the roof and then she would die.

“Grace?”

“Legs over,” she muttered to herself, and swung one leg down. She felt Jake’s hand above her knee.

“Great, now one more,” he said.

“One more,” and she slowly inched her foot off the roof until there was no more roof, and then there was just air and her one leg flying toward her other one with far more momentum than she could control, and she started to slide.

“Whoa! Okay, slow down, I got you,” said Jake, and he did. She was hanging on to the edge of the roof with her fingers with a grip she could not sustain, but she felt his arms strong around her legs, his face pressed into her stomach.

“Grace—” His voice was muffled by her shirt. “One hand at a time, let go.”

“I can’t,” she said.

“Sweetheart, I can’t hold you like this for much longer.”

“Are you calling me fat?” Perfect time for jokes, Grace!

“No, Grace, I’m calling you gravity. Come on, one hand. Just move it from the roof to my shoulder.”

So she did it. She let go with her right hand, but she couldn’t reach his shoulder, not while still holding on to the roof. So she grabbed on to his hair. He yelped, she apologized, but she still held on to the roof with her left hand.

“Grace.” His voice sounded both muffled and strained now. “Other hand.”

Even though she knew if she let go of the roof she would bend backward and fall to her certain death, Grace did as Jake asked. When she let go with her left hand, her whole body felt heavy, but Jake had her in a tight grip and he let go enough for her to slide down his body, and then her feet were on the grass, and she was not dead.

Instead, she was out of breath and face-to-face and chest-to-chest with a very sweaty Jake. Some of the sweat might also have been hers. They were so close it almost didn’t matter.

“You okay?” he said, pushing a strand of hair off her face.

She nodded. She wasn’t capable of speech.

His eyes were brown, but they had flecks of yellow in them. She hadn’t noticed that before.

“You sure? You look kind of pale.”

“I don’t like heights,” she croaked. Where had her voice gone?

“You did really well, Grace.”

“I did?”

“Yes. You were very brave.” She knew he was just saying that to make her feel better. She had been an idiot and a chicken. He probably said that to all of the women he pulled off roofs.

But his words felt almost as good as his arms, so she just let all of Jake surround her and leaned her cheek on his chest. His heart was still beating fast. Well, he had just pulled her off a roof.

“Of course, we’re still locked out.”

“Crap,” she said into his chest. She reluctantly pulled away and took the few steps to the front door. Just for kicks, she tried the handle.

The door swung open.

Grace swung toward Jake.

“I swear it was locked!” He took a step back and threw his hands up. “It wouldn’t open!”

Grace didn’t care. She was suddenly very, very tired. She was tired of her strange house doing weird things when Jake was around. She was tired of her heart doing strange things, too. When he’d been holding her out in the yard, it felt good. He felt strong and sure and safe. That was three seconds ago. Now the old Jake was back. Jerk Jake was unpleasant, but she was, somehow, more comfortable with him.

“Grace—”

“I’m glad this is funny to you, Jake. Let’s see how many crappy situations we can get the Professor in before she blows a gasket! Well, that’s it, Jake. You win. You’re better than me at everything. I won’t call you again.”

She started to slam the door, but his foot was in the way. “Grace—” he started again, and there was real hurt in his eyes. But she had seen those hurt-looking eyes before. Those eyes were liars.

“You win, Jake,” and she shoved him back and slammed the door in his face.

The house was beginning to think it had lost its knack. But after one hundred years of happy couples, that could not possibly be the case. They were so close. Standing in the yard in each other’s arms, Grace and Jake gave off electricity in waves. So the house thought they had worked hard enough, that now was the time for them to really get together.

Wrong again.

The house let go of its tight hold on the upstairs window. What was the point?