Night Scents (2 page)

No, definitely not what she'd hoped for. Her reaction would thrill Hannah.
"He's the man for you, Piper. I know it in my soul."

Her smile frozen, Piper said, "Well. Good morning. You must be my new neighbor. I'm Piper Macintosh. I live just beyond the privet." She pushed through tall, wet, weedy-looking herbs toward the gate, aware of his unrelenting gaze. "I was just digging a little valerian root."

"Is that what I smell?"

"I expect so." She held up the fibrous root with its hairy offshoots and distinct, unpleasant odor. "Sort of smells like a dirty locker room, doesn't it? My aunt, Hannah Frye, wants it for some new medicinal tea she's got in the works. She couldn't think of another immediate source for it but here."

Clate Jackson seemed unimpressed by the desires of an eighty-seven-year-old woman. "Any particular reason you had to collect this root at four o'clock in the morning?"

"Yes, supposedly there is, only Hannah didn't give me the specifics." And Piper hadn't asked, having learned from hard experience that her aunt's reasoning often made sense only to her, which didn't make her any less tenacious. "I wouldn't have agreed to dig it for her, except I didn't think you were here."

"I see." A faint note of amusement had crept into his deep, rasping drawl. "Smarter to trespass when no one's around."

She checked her annoyance. "Really, I don't think of myself as trespassing."

"No?"

"No." Her tone was firm. He would not get to her. "It's sort of like the case of the tree falling in the woods. If there's no one to hear it, did it really make a noise? I figured, if you weren't here, I wasn't really trespassing."

"I am here, and you are trespassing."

"Then I should get out of your way and let you get back to bed." The problem was, he was blocking the gate. The fence was waist high and had spikes, tough to leap over. "If you'll excuse me."

He didn't move, just rocked back on his heels and studied her through half-closed eyes. She'd dragged herself out of bed after barely four hours' sleep and had brushed her teeth, splashed cold water on her face, and pulled on black leggings, her oversized Red Sox sweatshirt, sneakers, and her poncho. Not the sort of attire she'd have chosen to meet her new neighbor. Her hair—dark chestnut, long, and straight—hung in tangles.

"I can't imagine valerian root makes a very palatable tea," he said.

In other words, he didn't believe her story. "All of Hannah's teas taste lousy. One of the local selectmen swears she tried to poison him. But valerian is known to ease insomnia, headaches, nervousness—basically it's a mild sedative."

Jackson glanced away from his trespasser for the first time and took in the small, wild-looking garden. None of the look of the trim, well-planned Frye terrace gardens here. This one was pure Hannah Macintosh Frye. Each plant was carefully identified by its common and Latin names, the poisonous ones marked with a prominent skull and crossbones. Piper had helped Hannah paint each one.

Her neighbor turned back to her. "What is this, some kind of witch's garden?"

"My aunt has considerable knowledge of the medicinal qualities of many different plants." There. That was diplomatic. "Used properly, all of these plants have beneficial qualities, although some are quite poisonous if misused. Monkshood, for example. Even brushing up against it can cause topical numbness."

"Charming."

"My aunt couldn't very well have taken these plants with her to her new condo. She hasn't found a new source for valerian root, and probably a few other plants as well."

Clate Jackson's eyes fell on her. "Mrs. Frye doesn't own this property anymore."

Piper stifled a wave of irritation. This was no time to lecture him on the finer points of life in small-town Cape Cod. "Right."

A strained smile took a bit of the edge off his words. "I'm not being very diplomatic, am I? I didn't get in until after midnight, and I can't say I expected to be awakened by a woman stealing plant roots from my back yard."

Stealing?
Stealing?
Piper's spine straightened. "I wasn't stealing."

"You are removing something from my property. I consider that stealing."

His tone wasn't so much cold as firm, as if he wasn't accustomed to having his view of things countered. Piper had a good mind to shove the smelly, dirty, wet valerian root at him and let him stick it back in the ground or wherever he saw fit. He could have it for breakfast for all she cared. "I can't believe anyone would deny an eighty-seven-year-old woman access to a bit of valerian root. Mr. Jackson, around here it's considered the neighborly thing to do to—to—"

"To sneak onto someone's property before first light and dig up their crops?"

Amusement had crept back into his tone. It was even worse, Piper decided, than suspicion and irritation. Clutching the foul-smelling valerian root in one hand, her trowel in the other, she marched another few steps closer to him. He'd moved back from the gate. He would let her go home with fair warning. He wasn't going to turn his only neighbor in to the police on his first night in town.

As she shot him a sideways glance, she saw, against the slowly brightening sky, that he had a small scar on the outer corner of his left eye, another longer, deeper scar on his collarbone. She decided she might be wise not to make too many assumptions about Clate Jackson.

Nonetheless, she held her ground. "You're determined to put as negative a face on this as you possibly can, aren't you? My aunt planted every one of these plants—"

"And sold them to me. Look, I don't want to—"

Piper paid no attention to his conciliatory tone. "She lived in this house for twenty-five years, not counting the year she lived here after she was orphaned at age seven. She needs some time to adjust to her new life. Around here people understand that."

"I'm not from around here."

His words—matter-of-fact, spoken in an easy Tennessee drawl —brought Piper up short. No, he wasn't from around here and didn't want to be. There'd be no getting involved with the locals, no establishing ties with the community beyond finding someone to mow his lawn, sell him food and supplies, and clean his house.

"Miss Macintosh—"

"Piper." But she spat it out through half-clenched teeth, just daring him to treat her like a small-time nuisance. "We're neighbors, remember?"

"Piper, then." His tone was cool and deliberate and he stayed on the i longer than any northerner ever would, the result giving her name an unexpected lazy, sexy quality that rippled up her spine. "I'll let this one go. Take your aunt her valerian root. Next time we meet, I hope it will be under better circumstances."

He thought he was being magnanimous, Piper realized in disbelief. Magnanimous would have been to offer her all the valerian root she wanted, to have Piper tell her aunt that she was welcome to any of the herbs and other medicinal plants she'd left behind, just to call ahead next time. Instead, Clate Jackson thought he was being magnanimous simply because he wasn't having her arrested for trespassing and stealing.

"You know," she said coolly, "one of these days a hurricane's going to churn up the east coast and try to rearrange your little Cape Cod refuge here. You're going to want good relations with your neighbors, and if you haven't noticed, I'm it."

His eyes darkened, but she thought she noticed—or imagined— a slight glimmer of humor. "Miss Macintosh, I'd cut my losses while I could and get on home. You wouldn't want me to change my mind."

"Gladly," she said, just like her ten-year-old nephew, and marched through the gate.

Never mind Hannah's pronouncements on the subject, Piper did not consider Clate Jackson a likely prospect for the love of her life.

She decided a quick retreat was a more judicious course of action than arguing about the true meaning of magnanimity. The sky had turned a dusty lilac, daylight coming fast. She was normally a feet-flat-on-the-floor type, but Hannah's talk had thrown her off. Salt in the fire, muttered spells, casting out into the universe for a man whose attraction to her niece was so powerful, so irrevocable, that it would draw him to a place and a community he didn't know or understand.

It was weird stuff, and the physical reality of Clate Jackson— the muscles, the stubble of dark beard, the piercing eyes, the scars —wasn't helping, never mind that he showed no sign of looking upon her as anything beyond a pesky neighbor, a trespasser, and a thief. He had bought the Frye House not for its history or the prospect of a new community, but for its private, coveted location on a spit of Cape Cod occupied only by it and its neighbor, a tiny half-Cape that Piper was in the process of restoring. Surrounded by thirty acres of his own and a sprawling wildlife refuge of marsh, dunes, woodland, and an undisturbed coastal pond, the Frye House was an ideal and rare spot on the fragile, often overcrowded arm of land that jutted out into the Atlantic Ocean.

Gad, she thought. I have to get out of here.

"Well," she said, glancing back at him, "I guess I should thank you for your understanding." Such as it was, she added silently. She beamed him a fake smile. "And I'm sorry for having gotten you out of bed."

A narrowing of his deep blue eyes stopped Piper short, making her regret her ill-chosen words. He smiled sexily, deliberately. "No problem."

Love of her life, right. He was just another rake. It was an old-fashioned word that suited most of the men she'd encountered. Their idea of romance was sex and a hot meal. She liked sex, and she enjoyed good food, but she wanted more. Hannah's talk of the love of a lifetime had fired Piper's imagination. It involved a linking of souls that was seductive—and utterly hopeless.

Nearly slipping on the wet grass, she scooted down the well-kept, sloping lawn that gradually bled into marsh and water. She didn't linger over the sunrise. She had Hannah's valerian root, and she'd met Clate Jackson, and that was enough for anyone before sunup.

Sleep eluded Clate after he went back inside. He put on a pot of coffee and sat at his rickety antique kitchen table while it brewed. The kitchen was located in a one-story ell, a later addition to the main body of the old house. A double, small-paned window looked out on the terraced gardens bursting with late spring flowers, the early morning sun glinting on everything from creamy yellow day lilies to clumps of black-purple irises.

The smell of the strong, dark coffee eased his tension. He hadn't met Hannah Frye in person. He knew she was elderly and presumed she was eccentric, given that she'd sold him a house that had been in her husband's family for more than two centuries. Everyone in town, apparently, had assumed she would live there until her death, then the house would go to her husband's granddaughter by his first marriage. But she'd had other ideas, and the granddaughter apparently hadn't minded. Since he didn't plan to involve himself in the affairs of the people of Frye's Cove, Clate didn't care.

Nor did he care about living in an historic cightccnth-ccntury house. He knew nothing about the Fryes and little about Cape Cod. He couldn't say why he'd even picked New England, except that it was far removed from the pressures of his life in Nashville.

He poured himself a mug of coffee and returned to the drop-leaf table, staring again down across the terraced gardens toward the water. He'd opened windows when he came in late the night before, and now he could hear the gentle wash of the incoming tide, smell the salt on the breeze, hear the water and shorebirds calling. Privacy, isolation, solitude. After a long, intense winter, their promise had finally lured him to this quiet, beautiful spot.

All he had to do now was to keep his nosy neighbor at bay.

With a heavy sigh, he leaned back in his antique chair and sipped his coffee, shifting his attention to his new kitchen. New to him, at any rate. Except for minor repairs, he guessed the house in general hadn't been touched in twenty years, at least. The kitchen appliances were in reasonable working order, and the cupboards were a rich, dark cherry, built around windows and doorways that had sagged and settled with time. He doubted if there was a level square foot in the entire house. Whatever minimal work they'd done over the centuries, the Fryes had preserved the architectural integrity of their historic house: the wide pineboard floors, the stone fireplace, the post-and-beam construction, the moldings and wainscoting, the suffocatingly low ceilings. No expert in old houses, Clate knew enough about construction to realize that much more could be done to update the place without sacrificing its authentic characteristics. But he didn't expect he'd bother, not for a while, perhaps not at all.

He set down his mug. It wasn't old-lady fussy, but of sturdy, dark brown pottery. Leave it to a Yankee, he thought, suddenly amused.

And he thought of his trespasser.

Piper Macintosh. A hell of a name. Yankee to the core, no doubt about it. Green eyed and porcelain skinned, she had a fetching spray of freckles across her nose and dark, straight hair with a hint of red. She hadn't expected him and didn't like him. She'd clearly planned her herb-stealing escapade for when he wasn't around. Made sense. But he'd decided to leave Nashville suddenly, on impulse, as if running off to Cape Cod could postpone the inevitable.

But it couldn't. He'd learned that lesson early in life. Running left you with the same problems, just different scenery.

He shot to his feet, refilled his mug. Gulls swooped and swarmed down in the marsh. He'd have to get used to the lay of the land up here, the smells, the sounds, the colors. A walk on the beach and a trip to town for provisions would occupy him for the day. If necessary, he'd again remind his one and only neighbor that her aunt no longer owned the property next door. Things changed.

Eventually, he supposed, he'd have to decide what to do with Hannah Frye's weird little garden, the poisonous plants, the skull-and-crossbones markers.

But not today. Today he would feel his way into life on Cape Cod and wait for the call from home.

He hadn't lived in the tiny, hardscrabble village in the Cumberland hills where he'd grown up since he'd left at sixteen. But like it or not, it was home, and when the call came, he knew he wouldn't be ready.