Spirit and Dust - By Rosemary Clement-Moore Page 0,75

on the shower, which suited me because I called seconds on canapés.

When Aunt Gwenda swept back into the kitchen, she laid a pile of silky fabric on one barstool, then took the other beside me. “I brought you something to sleep in, darling. I can have those clothes washed for you, or we can just toss them out and start over. I’m sure I have something you can borrow.”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly—”

“Of course you could.” She patted my hand. “I wish you weren’t here on business, so we could talk about you. Carson has never brought a girl anywhere near the family before.”

Matthew the butler and I exchanged glances as he refilled my orange juice. “No offense, Miss Maguire, but I can sort of see why. You seem very nice, but …”

“But my brother is a dreadful man.” She gave a what-are-you-going-to-do shrug. “At least I have a lovely home and a delightful niece and nephew.”

I was not going to get an opportunity better than this. “Did you know Carson’s mother?”

“Sadly, no. I understand she was a very talented artist. But I didn’t even know I had a nephew until he came to live with Devlin.”

“What about Alexis?” I asked. “Where is her mother?”

“She moved away ages ago. Remarried now. To some foreign count, can you believe it?”

That was one of the more believable things I’d heard in the past two days. “What’s Alexis like?” I asked. Carson spoke fondly of her, but I still had little read on her personality.

“Very smart. Book smart, just brilliant. She doesn’t get that from our side of the family.” Gwenda poured some orange juice into the remains of what I assumed was her vodka. “But she’s clever, too, like a Maguire. Well, she’d have to be. Devlin is a manipulative bastard, and she had to learn to get around that, learn to work his system so she could have some independence and happiness.”

I couldn’t find fault with that. No wonder Carson was so cautious with his truths, and he’d only been in that environment since he was sixteen. What would he be like if he’d been raised as Maguire’s only son? Probably less conflicted, and not in a good way.

Gwenda patted my hand once more. “You toddle off and have your bath, or a nice hot shower. Second door on the right, down that hall.”

I thanked the butler again for the midnight snack, then took the bundle of pj’s Aunt Gwenda pushed at me and followed her directions. It was weird not feeling a shred of spirit energy anywhere. Full-on apparitions like Cleopatra or Mrs. Hardwicke were rare, but snatches of color, voices, or emotion were the background music of my life. It was sort of lonely without them.

Down the hall, I opened the second door on the right and found my temporary bedroom. I also found Carson coming into the same room through a different door, wrapped in a towel and nothing else.

24

IT WAS A big towel, but there was a lot of Carson.

I mean, he was really tall. And really well built. No wonder he’d been able to toss me over the cemetery fence, then vault it like a bump in the road.

I stood there with my mouth hanging open and, I don’t know, some sound coming out, because he made a shushing motion with the hand not holding the towel and then hurried to pull me into the room and close the door.

“Aunt Gwenda has made an assumption,” he said. “And I sort of let it stand because it’s simpler this way. I swear this was not my idea.”

He was very apologetic and earnest. In fact, he seemed rather panicked that I was going to get the wrong impression. From him wearing a towel. And nothing else. Because no one would get the wrong impression from that.

“Let me put on some clothes,” he said, when I continued to say nothing.

I decided to study the decor while he grabbed a stack of something from a chair and returned to the adjoining bathroom. That was when I noticed there was only one bed. It was a big bed, but there were two of us.

He came back quickly, wearing a pair of sleep pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt. “Look, I can grab the comforter and a couple of pillows and sleep on the floor. It’s not a big deal.”

“That’s stupid.” My brain had finally started working again. “I saw your bruises.” Boy, had I. “You don’t need to sleep on the floor. We’ll