Dream Lake by Lisa Kleypas

Author:Lisa Kleypas [Kleypas, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780748119943
Publisher: Piatkus Books
Published: 2012-08-07T06:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

A month passed, and somehow the new direction of Alex’s life held. The ghost had not expected to learn anything from Alex during their enforced association, but as it turned out, he did. Alex had to wrestle his addiction hour by hour, sometimes even minute by minute, but he was about as stubborn as it was possible for a man to be. To the ghost, quitting drinking looked a lot like jumping into the water and hoping that somehow you’d figure out how to swim before you went under.

Alex distracted himself with work, and plenty of it. He did such meticulous handwork on the Dream Lake cottage that any master craftsman would have been proud to claim it. Alex worked long into the nights, sanding, buffing, staining, painting, and in the process he consumed enough candy bars to send a normal person into diabetic shock. Thanks to the ghost’s nagging, Alex also ate regular meals throughout the day, although he would have to eat a lot more to make up for the deficit of calories he’d been used to consuming in the form of alcohol.

Alex saw Zoë on two occasions, once to collect paint swatches. That had lasted about a minute and a half, and then he was gone. The second time, Zoë had come to the cottage for Alex to show her the progress on the remodel. He had been businesslike. Zoë had been restrained. Gavin and Isaac, for their parts, had been so mesmerized by Zoë that neither of them had so much as hammered a nail while she was there.

From all appearances, Zoë’s visit had barely affected Alex. He knew how to build a wall, how to fortify it until nothing could break through. There was no way for Zoë to reach Alex now, and that was probably for the best. Still, the ghost couldn’t stop feeling regretful about it. And Alex refused to discuss exactly what, if anything, he still felt for Zoë. The subject was off-limits.

The ghost understood.

A woman could do that to you—reach that place in your soul where the best and worst of you was kept. And once she was there, she owned that place and never left.

That was why he hadn’t told Alex about his newfound memories of Emmaline Stewart, the scenes unrolling in front of him like a moving-picture show.

Emma had been the youngest and liveliest of Weston Stewart’s three daughters. She was bookish, and funny, and just farsighted enough that she’d occasionally needed reading glasses. Wonderful cat-eye glasses with thick black frames, which she loved to wear to goad her mother, Jane. Emma would never catch a man, wearing those glasses, her mother had said. And Emma had claimed that she would catch the right man by wearing those glasses.

The ghost remembered being alone in the cottage with her, after sharing a picnic beside Dream Lake. She had read to him, a piece she had written about local high schools that had forbidden female students to “paint” their faces, meaning to use lipstick, cheek rouge, or powder.

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