A Darker Shade by Laura K. Curtis

Author:Laura K. Curtis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: River Hills Press

Matt arrived in his typical good humor, apologizing almost the moment he set down the tray for the fact that he wouldn’t be able to stay.

“A nor’easter off the coast changed direction. It wasn’t supposed to land here at all. If I were wrong half as often as the weathermen, I’d lose my job. The house itself is perfectly safe, but a good blow shuts everything off. No phone, no internet—much as I would love to be shut in here with you, I can’t lose touch with the office right now. I’ll have to take off right after lunch.”

“I understand.” I glanced at the pale gray light seeping around the edges of the curtains. “Are you sure you should wait until afternoon to go?”

“Trying to get rid of me?”

The teasing and the blush I felt rising in response only exacerbated my confusion and discomfort. Matt was handsome, caring, easy to talk to. So why could I not encourage the flirtation? Why did I dream of a far darker, more somber face when I slept at all?

“I don’t want you to get caught in a nor’easter is all.”

Still, I had a purpose beyond food or flirtation for allowing him to bring me breakfast and over a plate of soft-boiled eggs and toast, I asked whether the third floor of the house had been open when he had visited as a child.

“Open? Like, in use?”

“Yes. We’ve changed one of the rooms into the schoolroom—I don’t know whether Hailey mentioned it—and I wondered what they’d been in their heyday. Obviously, someone loved billiards, but that table could be ten years old or fifty or a hundred. And the other rooms don’t give many clues.”

“That pool table.” He shook his head. “It sorely tempted us. But we were never allowed to use it. In fact, the whole room was off limits because Thane’s father used it as his office. In the summers, when we spent the most time here, he locked himself into that room and wrote, and woe betide the child who interrupted him!”

“He wrote? He didn’t build boats?”

“Oh, no. The boat business came from Thane’s mother’s side of the family. As did this house, come to think of it. His father is a professor of American history at a university in Connecticut, but you know what they say about ‘publish or perish’ for professors, so he was forever scribbling away in the billiards room. In fact, one summer he put a giant piece of plywood over the table to create a second desk. Thane and I snuck in there one day and were horrified to see stacks of paper from one end of the thing to the other. Old paper. Dusty, greasy, yellowing, with indecipherable handwriting. That’s not the appropriate use of a pool table. Still gives me nightmares.” He winked.

“I bet. What about the other rooms?”

“They didn’t particularly interest us. I can’t say anyone told us to stay out, but we really didn’t have a reason to go in, either. We spent most of our time outside.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.