Seaspun Magic Read online

  Seaspun Magic

  by Christine Hella Cott

  MEN WANTED HER FOR IT, OR IN SPITE OF IT...

  Just this once Arianne Sawyer wished her psychic powers would work for herself not just for other people. Her attractive and mysterious house guest, Leo Donev, was one man whose mind she definitely wanted to read!

  But Arianne's powers had already cost her a marriage. That was why she'd escaped to quiet Port Townsend. She didn't want to risk sharing her secret with another man. Besides, Leo seemed to have secrets of his own.

  She hoped he wasn't planning to use her, as others had. She'd be more vulnerable than ever because of the special magic growing between them....

  CHAPTER ONE

  The screen door slammed behind Arianne as she hurried across the back porch, dragging a full and too-heavy green garbage bag behind her. When she came to the stairs she had to hoist the bag. Arms full and feet in dainty pink slippers she reached blindly for the next step down, then managed the stairs without mishap and gained solid ground.

  Trying to peer over and around the enormous bag of garbage, she navigated the cobbled path leading alongside the house and wished, as she did every time the trash needed taking out, that she was still married. But as soon as the bag had been squashed into a garbage can at the top of the lane, she reneged on the wish, as she did every other time, too.

  Being on her own for the past two years had accustomed her to many things, such as taking out the garbage and changing the oil in her car, but that didn't necessarily mean she had learned to like all aspects of life alone. When it came right down to it, she really appreciated a man holding a door open for her. But perhaps that was because she usually had her hands full, what with diaper bags and bottles of formula and an assortment of toys, not to mention the center of all this attention, baby Rae.

  With Rae being so big and boisterous at eighteen months old, all she could do was simply to hang on to the boy some days! These days he was more boy than baby, too, a constant challenge.

  Arianne was sure Rae had inherited his father's large stature, a fact that would make her ex-husband proud if he knew he had a son. But Reggie didn't know about the baby, because Arianne hadn't realized she was pregnant until a week after their divorce. And at that time she had been in no mood to speak to Reggie, let alone break such devastating news as a baby on the way. In any case, Reggie would have thought it was a ploy to save their marriage. Even if he hadn't, his mother, always "Mrs. Sutherland" to Arianne, would have come up with that brilliant idea. Naturally time would have proven she really was pregnant, but somehow, she'd never got around to letting Reggie Sutherland know he had a child in the world.

  Arianne looked over her shoulder at the house be-hind her, alight in the darkness. Rae was in his playpen inside.

  The boy hadn't inherited much from her side of the family. She was small, soft rather than slim. However, he did have the same unruly mop of curls as she. Fervently she hoped he hadn't inherited one certain twist in particular that she had been forced to hide…

  Shrugging that old worry away, Arianne tried not to think at all as she absorbed the view of a fiery sun sliding into the far distance of a misty blue horizon. The Strait of Juan de Fuca lay before her, east to west, a broad expanse of shipping lanes between the States and the southernmost tip of western Canada. Even as she watched, points of light out in the watery twilit gloom mapped a dotted line of ocean freighters. Ceaselessly they came and went, to and from ports in Vancouver, and Seattle.

  Used as she was to the cosmopolitan bustle of modern Seattle, Port Townsend, composed of a few antique houses clustered on a hill, seemed as confining as its physical location—the sea lapped around three sides of the town and farms circled to the south. But it was beautiful. Craggy rock was contrasted by cream-sand beaches, the swirl of waves on a peaceful summer afternoon by wintry tempests crashing against the foundations of the hill on whose crest her house sat. She had come to like sleepy country living, and Port Townsend was a great place to raise a child.

  Her house, on the edge of town, was like all the rest— a Victorian three-story crumbling elegantly into ruin. At least, it had been fading away until the day she moved in. Glad to have a reason to stave off the sad ruin of neglect, her landlord had pitched in to make the stout old building perfectly sound once more, and another historical landmark was saved in a town that embodied yesteryear.

  Port Townsend had sprung up practically overnight in the 1880s in expectation of a great boom. The boom never came because the railway stopped short in Seattle-Tacoma, some forty miles inland across the wilderness of Puget Sound. Presently, as it had for the past hundred years, the outport dozed, gracious and forgotten.

  In the summer, things livened up with a sudden crush of tourists, but now, in mid-October, the place was wrapped in the dreamy aura of a ghost town. It was all but lost in the splendid reaches of the sound and backwoods of the Olympic Peninsula. Reggie would never think to look for her here.

  Although their divorce had been bitter, she knew Reggie Sutherland would be back to argue for a reunion, but she also knew the relationship wouldn't work. It simply boiled down to complete and utter incompatibility. She had loved him too much and he hadn't loved her enough.

  Her blunt request for a divorce, her seemingly cool rejection, had wounded him into snarling, "You'll come crawling back, crawling. You know you will! You'll beg for everything you have now!''

  "What I have now is one crashing headache," she had returned, grimly determined to do what she knew had to be done. If she allowed even the tiniest bit of emotion out it would all come flooding out and she would be begging sooner than even he thought.

  "What a joke—you divorcing me! After everything you've done already! You—"

  "Face it, Reggie. All you're waiting for is a more advantageous time to log a divorce on your income-tax statement! And with elections coming up, a newsworthy divorce like ours is hardly going to make your campaign manager smile, is it? The 'political arena,' as you so aptly put it, is no place to spotlight your private life!''

  "It's not my private life I'm worried about. It's yours! And you damn well know it! You're doing this now just to annoy me, to get your mean revenge!"

  "Simmer down. You' re just mad because I asked you first!"

  "You really are a witch, aren't you!"

  But still, in spite of everything he would be back. She was as certain about that as she was about the sun rising tomorrow morning. Two years ago she'd decided she wasn't proof against him. There was no way she could resist his pleas. Therefore, she'd had to remove herself. So she'd left Seattle, her home and friends behind and headed out with no particular place to go.

  She'd ended up in Port Townsend, had taken a look around and decided to stay. Close enough to Seattle, it was also the epitome of country living. Here it was possible to make ends meet with another mouth to feed, but more important, here she had privacy. No one knew her or anything about her. She had even changed her name back to its maiden name form, and Port Townsenders knew her and her son as Arianne and Rae Sawyer.

  She had kept to herself these past couple of years. Her landlord was also her boss; she worked part-time in Orly Pressmann's dry-goods shop. He let her keep Rae with her in the shop, so she saved on day-care fees, which was a big help.

  Taking all things into consideration, Arianne decided her job was a good one, even if it didn't follow her natural inclinations. And she had a lovely house in a lovely location, and best of all, a happy, healthy baby. She felt secure and established, and that realization gave her confidence. Now the fear of not being able to resist Reggie's pleas seemed absurd—

  After the divorce there had been times when she'd wished she could simply lay down and die, the hurt was so ba
d. How strange to look back on those times with such cool detachment. She didn't care anymore. She really didn't give a damn if she ever saw Reggie again.

  Sighing, Arianne dug her hands deeper into the hip pockets of her blue jeans and hunched her shoulders, trying to stay warm awhile longer in the sharpness of the autumn evening. Loath to return inside just yet, she drank in her few moments of quiet solitude. The sea wind tugged at the curls framing her face and lifted the thick black tousle off her shoulders. In only her sweater, jeans and slippers she shivered.

  Still, she didn't return to the beckoning warmth of the house behind her. Night was encroaching; the edges of the day were turning softly, slowly, from blue to black, and the mystique of it all kept her rooted to the spot.

  At her feet the hill rapidly began to drop away, and a few yards distant, the grassy slope disappeared into a tangle of underbrush. Blackberry briars formed an impenetrable hedge. Farther along cedars and pines grew, but they were so far down the hill she could look right over their tips out to sea. Hers was the very last house at the southwest edge of town, so it was quite secluded.

  Down the hill on her left was an historical naval fort, very pretty and fresh-looking with the rows of buildings painted a crisp white and green. The fort continued along the shore around a small bay. To her right the hill circled out of sight and into town. From her location in the trees she could see only one other house toward the town.

  Jill McKinly lived in that house. She had moved in about a year ago with her two children. She and Arianne had become friendly, as they were both divorced and the same age, twenty-seven. They baby-sat for each other often, an inexpensive convenience.

  Arianne's neighbor was a hairdresser by profession, but in Port Townsend, where there were already two established hairdressers, a third wasn't needed. Instead, Jill opened a bed-and-breakfast establishment. In her first year of operation she made enough in the busy summer months to squeak by the winter with no further income. Actually, she and Arianne had more than their age, divorce and children in common; they both had to support themselves and their families entirely.

  Arianne had quickly come to like her outspoken neighbor. Too reserved herself, she admired Jill's quick, slapdash way of expressing herself.

  "We're blemished peaches, you and I," Jill had said at their most recent kaffeeklatsch the past Saturday night. "And you know what happens to blemished peaches!"

  Arianne had choked on a giggle. "Well, I have a pretty good idea, but why don't you continue?"

  "We get left off the shelf, of course! The guys pick all the sweet young things, and here we are on yet another Saturday night, drinking coffee instead of champagne and heating formula instead of dancing. We don't have the comfort of strong arms at home. We don't even have the comfort of strong arms once in a while! And to top it all off, we get to pay for the dubious privilege of single motherhood all by ourselves!"

  Arianne bit her lip. She could have approached Reggie for financial help, and as city alderman in Seattle, he would have been quick to pay—probably whatever figure she named—but...

  It was the way he'd behaved during their quick divorce, certain that she was out for all she could get, that had at the time made her vow never to ask him for a dollar. Arianne thought she'd rather do anything than ask Reggie Sutherland for a dollar...ever. She had, after all, left everything behind, even the calf-length mink coat he'd given her their last Christmas together. She had left it hanging in the closet, and as she'd walked out, he'd thrown it after her in a fit of temper.

  Arianne shivered again, not entirely from the chilly air. She knew she wasn't one hundred percent healed yet. Her pride still smarted occasionally at the memories. During those last few months of marriage, Reggie had treated her like a total stranger. Of course, she never should have taken up her admittedly curious career again, especially not behind his back. But, then, he never should have had that affair, either!

  Arianne smiled faintly to herself. The point of all this retrospection was, it didn't matter. It was all ancient history, as old as the house in the gathering darkness behind her. She was secure, established, happy. Well, maybe she wasn't exactly happy, but, then, what could one expect from life? She had suffered and won out. She had her baby. What more did she want?

  A fierce buffet off the windswept, restless blue strait swirled around the maple in her yard, rattling the branches and shaking a few more scarlet leaves onto the cushion of green lawn. It was going to be a clear night, without rain, and that was why it was cold enough to make her teeth chatter.

  A few lines of a Christmas carol popped unexpectedly into her mind: "Christmas is coming. The geese are getting fat...."

  Arianne stood without moving, not even shivering. The gay little verse plunged her heart into despair. Everything was absolutely fine; she had no complaints, and yet, at the moment, she could have wept like a fool.

  It was the thought of Christmas, she knew, that provoked this flood of despair. Two years ago, her very first Christmas on her own, she had moped, very pregnant and very lonely, crying her eyes out. Her second Christmas, she had had an eight-month-old to occupy her every minute and things had been better. This Christmas...well, Rae still wasn't old enough to appreciate much more than all the chocolate he was going to eat. But next Christmas would be terrific…

  Suddenly she didn't want to go back inside the house. What would she do with herself after Rae fell asleep, on yet another long Saturday night with nothing but the winter wind for company? The thought of an evening knitting in front of the television struck her as so hopelessly dull that that alone was almost enough to bring tears to her eyes.

  She couldn't pop in on her one neighbor, either, because Jill's four-year-old had developed appendicitis, with further complications, and two days ago had to be rushed off to Seattle. While Erin was in the hospital, Jill and her baby Lucy were staying with Arianne's mother in the city. Jill had promised to call her with more news tomorrow.

  Arianne sighed to herself. She really didn't want another upheaval, another man in her life, now that it was finally calm. And yet, devoting her whole life to her son wasn't turning out to be completely satisfactory, either. She found herself wondering rather desperately, was this really all there was?

  She'd have to learn to entertain herself, she concluded. Perhaps she'd become the world's best knitter. On second thought, though, one could only "knit one, purl two" for so long, before a primal scream edged up the back of her throat.

  Arianne turned from the mesmerizing pull of a pink-and-gold-spangled horizon toward the house. Jill's place, to her right was covered in darkness. The naval fort, FortWorden, on her left, was dark, too, as always. She'd only seen it in use in the summer as a tourist attraction. It looked rather lonely now, so still in the blanketing night shadows.

  Just as she began the walk to the house a car came around the hill from town, its headlights making a dazzling arch through the trees. It could only be coming to Jill's house, or hers, for the road was a dead end. Arianne stopped to watch its progress. The vehicle slowed at Jill's driveway.. .but didn't stop.

  Arianne's heart thumped in quick gladness. Company!

  But who could it be? Somebody selling hockey tickets for one of the minor leagues, most likely. She sighed again. She turned toward her house, in a hurry now to be warm. But hardly had she started than she stopped once more, a thought shocking her into a halt.

  Jill had had an unusual booking last week, a bed and breakfast for one adult male. Not that that was unusual in itself; it was the time—the middle of winter! "To recuperate by the sea" was the reason given. Not knowing the exact date of her guest's arrival, Jill had asked Arianne to take in the invalid should he come while she was away in Seattle on Erin's emergency.

  The car stopped at the top of the lane by the collection of garbage cans. On the gatepost right beside the car was the street number of her house, and after a fractional hesitation, the car eased into her lane. A second later she was bathed in the glare of headl
ights, and in a few minutes more the somewhat shabby vehicle came to a complete stop in front of the house.

  Arianne hurried to catch up to it. When she reached it, the engine was off and the owner was stepping out onto the driveway.

  Golden light poured out the windows of the house, illuminating them both. Arianne stared, taken aback. She had been expecting an elderly man. If this was her bed-and-breakfast guest, he wasn't nearly sick or old enough!

  "Arianne Sawyer?" he inquired politely.

  "Um...yes!" She stumbled over a suitable reply. He'd caught her unprepared. For the life of her she couldn't remember his name. Foreign sounding, she thought.

  "I'm Leo Donev. Jill McKinly made new arrangements for me?"

  "She, um, got ahold of you, then?" Arianne felt as if she were babbling.

  "She left a message with my answering service. I hope her son is okay?"

  "Well, yes, as far as I know. She's calling again tomorrow." There was a moment of unexpected silence. Cold gusts off the ocean ruffled his full head of hair. He wore a leather bomber jacket, very fine and expensive looking, a contrast to his shabby car. While crisp autumn leaves swirled around them, his glance slid down

  her small shape, clad in only a sweater, jeans and incongruous plush pink slippers.

  Taking a deep breath, Arianne gathered aplomb. But before she could say anything, Leo Donev hinted pleasantly, "Do you think we could go inside?"

  With a touch of the jitters Arianne started forward. "Yes, it's freezing. Let's go in____"

  Once at the bottom of the front stairs he took her arm casually, perhaps because he had little faith in the stability of her footwear, and the most subtle whiff of an enchanting men's cologne went wafting past her nose.

  Badgered by Jill and wanting to help her friend in distress, Arianne had agreed to take in the invalid. Jill had pointed out that he did have good references and was sure not to stay too long. Besides, with Christmas on the way, the rather lucrative return was enticing. And the guest was willing to pay extra for an out-of-season stay.