Man With A Message

She turned at the sound of her name and focused on…? The children. Of course. The children. She looked at them encircling the bed and remembered that they were not her children but the school’s. The kid fix she sought when she couldn’t have her own.

The euphoria of a moment ago collapsed, and with it came the bitter disappointment that always returned to take hold of her when she allowed herself to think about her marriage, her divorce, all the things she wanted that she’d never have.

She gazed into dark-lashed hazel eyes set in a handsome face crowned with short dark brown hair.

She put her fingertips to her mouth, recalling those nicely shaped lips on hers and the renewal she’d believed he’d brought to her life.

But he wasn’t Ben, her former husband. He was a stranger. And she didn’t care what he was doing here, or why she was in bed with the children gathered around her.

The only thing that mattered was that he’d led her to believe the pain was over and life was going to begin again.

It wasn’t, though. And it was all his fault.

She raised a hand and slapped him as hard as she could.

Dear Reader,

Don’t you love a man who knows what to say? “Honey, that tofu-eggplant-pasta casserole was delicious.” “No, harem pants do not make you look fat.” “I know the children are a handful, but you make motherhood look easy.”

Okay, I’m fantasizing. Most men think honesty is more important than hurt feelings. Many seasoned husbands do catch on eventually, but not before their wives learn to deal with bruised egos. And it’s not as though we don’t know the truth; it’s just that we’re hoping our men love us enough to see the capable, slender, clever image we want to project.

In Man with a Message, Cameron Trent is a hero filled with love and compassion for Mariah Mercer, who wants no part of him. Though she continually puts herself at odds with him, he always seems to know what to say to her, how to support and encourage her, and help her make her dreams come true. Maybe we should have him cloned.

Sit back and put your feet up. And you might want to get some chocolate. Cam and Mariah have a rocky road to romance.

All my best!

Muriel Jensen

P.O. Box 1168

Astoria, Oregon 97103

Man with a Message

Muriel Jensen

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

CAMERON TRENT WALKED around the Maple Hill Common in the waning light of a late-May evening. Fred, his seven-month-old black Labrador, investigated bushes and wildflowers at the other end of a retractable leash.

The dog looked back at him, eyes bright, tongue lolling; he was out and about after sleeping in the truck for three hours while Cam installed an old ball-and-claw bathtub in a Georgian mansion near the lake.

Life is good, Fred’s expression said.

Cam had to agree.

Moving from San Francisco to Maple Hill, Massachusetts, situated on the edge of the Berkshires, had been an inspired idea. He and his brother and sister had spent a couple of weeks here as children every summer with their grandparents. It was the only time he could pick out of his childhood when he’d felt happy and safe.

As Cam wandered after Fred, he took in the colonial charm of the scene. A bronze Minuteman, his woman at his side, dominated the square. A colonial flag and a fifty-star flag were just being lowered for the night as Cam walked by. During working hours, the shops and businesses built around the green-lawned square bustled with activity, very much as they had two hundred years ago.

Many of the houses in Maple Hill were Classic Georgian, with its heroic columns, or the simpler salt-box style, with its long, sloping roof in the rear. In Yankee tradition, small boats hung from the ceilings of some porches, and many houses bore historic plaques explaining their history. And Amherst, where he was earning his master’s in business administration was a mere hour away.

He had everything he needed right here. Well almost. He missed his brother, Josh, but he was a chef in a Los Angeles restaurant and raising his wife’s four boys, and it was good to know he was happy.

Whitcomb’s Wonders, the agency of tradesmen Cam worked for as a plumber, had become his family. They were a cheerful, striving group of men who enjoyed working part-time for the company because it allowed them to pursue other endeavors—raise their children, go to school.

Fred came running back to Cam, his head held high so that he could hold on to a giant branch that protruded at least two feet out of each side of his mouth. His tail wagged furiously.

They were in the middle of a serious tug-of-war over the branch when Cam’s cell phone rang. Cam tossed the branch, then answered.

“Mariah Mercer from the Manor says they’re sinking!” Addy Whitcomb told him urgently. “A pipe in the bathroom burst.”

Cam reeled in the dog, who’d just headed off to chase the branch. Repairing the Maple Hill Manor School was a lucrative job for Whitcomb’s Wonders. One of the oldest buildings around, it was a plumbing and wiring disaster. They’d just been contracted to replumb the kitchen in the main building as part of a remodeling project.

“The bathroom in the main building?” he asked.

“No, the dorm. You know, the old carriage house.”

“Okay. I’m in town. I’ll be there in about ten minutes.”

“I’ll call and tell her. And just to reward you, Cam, I’ll find you a really wonderful girl.”

“No favors necessary, Addy.” Addy was Hank Whitcomb’s mother. Whitcomb’s Wonders was Hank’s brainchild, and the men who staffed it provided the source for much of Addy’s Cupid work.

“But I want to!”

“No. Got to go, Addy.”

Fred was disappointed at no more play but enjoyed the sprint across the common toward the truck. Cam let him into the passenger side, then ran around to climb in behind the wheel. The truck’s tires peeled away with a squeal as he headed for the Manor. He’d outfitted his somewhat decrepit old truck to hold his tools and supplies so he was always ready to report to a job.

He tried to imagine what could have caused a pipe to burst. Pipes often froze and broke in the winter, but this was spring. And the Lightfoot sisters, who ran the school, had told him that they’d renewed the carriage house plumbing about ten years ago.

He knew that only a small number of children still boarded at the school, and did so only because of long relationships with the Lightfoot sisters, who’d taken over running the school from their mother in the fifties, after she’d taken it over from her mother, and so on all the way back to pre-Civil War days.

Letitia and Lavinia Lightfoot, who both charmed and intimidated the crew working on the renovation, were in their late seventies and still took pride in the bastion of civility they managed in a world they considered both fascinating and mad.

Cam refocused his attention on a series of curves, then exited onto Manor Road, which led through a thick oak, maple and pine woods to a clearing where the school stood, one of the finest examples of Georgian architecture in western Massachusetts. He turned left toward the carriage house, instead of right toward the main building.

It was dark now and all he could see of the carriage house, a replica of the main building but smaller, were its white columns, caught in the floodlights that illuminated the small parking area in the front. He pulled up beside a van, gave Fred a dog biscuit and spread his blanket on the seat. “Relax, buddy,” he said, patting the dog’s head. “I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

Fred, just happy for the attention, cooperated.

Cam grabbed his basic tool kit and went to knock on the front door. He could hear a great commotion on the other side—children shouting, feet hurrying.

The door opened with a jerk and a little blond girl wearing neon-orange pajamas stood there, pale and breathing heavily. Behind her children ran up and down the stairs with towels and buckets. He heard a boy yelling from upstairs, “Turn the cutoff…it looks like a faucet!”

A younger male voice yelled back, “I don’t see it! I don’t see it!” he said again.

The little blond girl turned to shout up the stairs, “He’s here!”

“Tell him to hurry!” the boy replied.

Cam experienced a weird sense of unreality, as if he’d blundered into a world occupied only by children. Not one adult was in evidence.

“Come on!” The little blonde grabbed his wrist and pulled him inside.

He allowed her to tow him up the stairway, its carpeting soggy. There was water everywhere, inches of it in the narrow upstairs hall.

Water rushed from the bathroom through a large hole in a pipe visible because of the broken tiles in the shower stall.

“Hey!”

The boy’s voice made him look down. He saw a woman lying on her back, apparently unconscious, the boy’s arm keeping her head out of the water. Her face was familiar. Cam had seen her around the school while scoping out the kitchen in the main building.

He dropped his tool kit on a sink and fell to his knees.

“You’re not the ambulance guy?” the boy asked. He was about ten, his dark eyes panicky, his face ashen.

“No, I’m the plumber,” Cam replied, putting two fingers to the pulse at the woman’s throat. He couldn’t detect one, but then, he could never find one in himself, either. “What happened?”

The boy appeared close to tears. “I busted the pipe looking for gold. She came in, slipped on a towel in the water and fell and hit her head. I’m not supposed to move her, right? I mean, she could have broken something.”

Gold? Cam didn’t even take the time to try to figure out what that meant. He did a cursory exploration of arms and legs and detected nothing out of place. She didn’t seem to be bleeding. He decided that getting her out of the water took precedence over maybe causing her further injury.

“Is there a dry bed anywhere?” He slipped his arms under her and lifted her. She was small and fragile. Water streamed from her all over him as he stepped back to let the boy lead the way.

“In here!” The boy beckoned him into a room two doors off the bathroom. Cam noticed absently that the doors had hand-painted signs with kids’ names on them.

A pack of children followed them and gathered around the bed as Cam lay the woman down.

She looked younger up close than he’d thought. Her dark hair, now drenched, was pulled back into a tight knot, and she wore a silky, long-sleeved blouse, through which he could see her lacy bra. A long blue cotton skirt lay clumped around her, also heavy with water. She’d struck him as stiff and matronly when he’d seen her at the school. How different his impression of her now.

He wrapped the coverlet around her.

He leaned close to tell if she was breathing. He felt no air against his cheek, heard no sound. Where was the ambulance? He’d taken a CPR course a few years ago, but he couldn’t remember it now. So many pumps, so many breaths.

“She’s gonna die!” one of the little girls said tearfully.

“No, she won’t!” the boy said.

“She won’t!” another boy repeated.

“She won’t!”

Cam glanced up, wondering why he kept hearing double, then realized he was seeing double, too. Twins.

The woman made a scary, choking sound and the children cried out in unison.

Knowing he had to do something, he shooed the children aside, leaned over the woman, pinched her nose and placed his mouth over hers.

She was cold and still in his arms, like a marble statue.

He blew air into her mouth, raised his head to see if it was having an effect. When he couldn’t detect one, he covered her mouth again and breathed into it. After several more breaths, a curious thing happened. He felt the first infinitesimal sign of life as a small, almost sinuous exhalation swelled the breasts under his chest.

Disbelieving, he breathed into her again, and that same subtle ripple occurred in the lips under his.

He put a hand to her ribs, feeling for an intake of breath, even as he gave her another one of his.

When he felt the probing tip of a tongue in his mouth, he thought he was hallucinating—giving her too much of his air, not keeping enough for himself.

Then her lips moved under his, and before he could raise his head in surprise, one of her hands went into his hair in a caress that paralyzed him momentarily into helplessness.

As he hovered above her in shock, her body arched up to his and she expelled a little moan. “Ben,” she murmured against his lips.

For an instant, everything in him rose to the challenge. Yes! This was what life was supposed to be about! Man and woman entangled, seeking solace and pleasure in each other, their bodies a mutual haven. He’d have given a lot at that instant to be the Ben she sighed for.

Then reality reclaimed him and he sat up abruptly, the children all staring, not sure what they’d seen.

His heart was beating hard, then his brain snapped to attention. This kind of thing won’t work for you, it told him. You have a past. Allison had thought it wouldn’t matter, but eventually it did. You’re starting over, but you’ll only get half the dream….

The woman opened deep brown eyes, and after a moment of searching the room, a puzzled line between her brows, she focused on him. A small smile of what appeared to be—he wasn’t sure…surprise? delight?—curved her pale lips.

No one had ever looked at him that way—as if he represented home at the end of a long journey. He still leaned over her, a hand on the mattress on either side of her, unable to move or speak.

MARIAH SURFACED FROM her chilled dream to find that the last year had all been some kind of terrible misunderstanding. Ben was back the way she remembered him at their wedding—the loving, solid partner around whom she’d centered her hopes, rather than the angry and confused man he’d become after she’d lost four babies and refused to try again to get pregnant.

Then his mouth had been hard and condemning. Now it was pliant and…life giving.

But why were they surrounded by children? They’d never be able to have their own. And he hadn’t wanted to consider adoption—

“Mariah?”

She turned at the sound of her name and focused on…on Ashley? Of course. Ashley. She looked at the children circling the bed and remembered that they were not her children, but the Manor’s. The kid fix she’d sought when she couldn’t have her own.

The euphoria of a moment ago collapsed, and with it came the bitter disappointment that always returned to take hold of her when she allowed herself to think about her marriage, her divorce, all the things she wanted that she’d never have.

She gazed into dark-lashed hazel eyes set in a handsome face crowned with very short dark brown hair.

She put her fingertips to her mouth, recalling those nicely shaped lips on hers and the renewal she’d thought he’d brought to her life.

But he wasn’t Ben. He was a stranger. And she didn’t care what he was doing here or why she was in bed with the children gathered around her.

The only thing that mattered was that he’d led her to believe the pain was over and life was going to begin again.

It wasn’t, though. And it was all his fault.

She raised a hand and slapped him as hard as she could.

CHAPTER TWO

“NO, MARIAH!” BRIAN, standing beside the stranger, caught her wrist. “He saved your life! I broke the water pipe—remember?—and you slipped on the towel and fell and hit your head. He carried you in here. He didn’t kiss you. He gave you artificial…you know.”

“Resuscitation,” Ashley said knowledgeably. “But I think you kissed him.”

“Yeah,” Jessica said. “I saw it.”

“Me, too,” Peter confirmed.

“Me, too,” Philip chimed in.

Mariah groaned and put her hands to her face. If she didn’t get herself together soon, she had no hope for her future. Once the school found out she was French-kissing strange men in front of the children, she’d have to take the job her sister, Parker, had offered her—working in her massage studio in the basement of city hall. Then she’d never get to Europe.

Mariah felt movement on the bed, and when she lowered her hands, she saw that the stranger was gone.

Brian took off after him, calling over his shoulder, “We’re going to cut off the water!”

The screeching of a siren could be heard outside.

“I’ll let the ambulance men in,” Ashley shouted as she left the room.

The children stood back and Mariah sat up. She was horrified that an ambulance had been called.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to get up,” Jessica said worriedly, sitting beside her.

Mariah’s intention was to tell her that she was fine, but she realized suddenly that she wasn’t. Her head ached abominably, and suddenly everything around her was wobbling.

Two men in white shirts with some kind of insignia on them burst into the room. One cupped her head gently with his hand and leaned her back into the pillows. “What’s your name, ma’am?” he asked.

“Mariah,” she replied weakly.

“I understand you’ve had a fall.”

That’s an understatement, she thought as she battled nausea. The Fall of Mariah Mercer could be a play in three acts.

WITH THE LITTLE BOY NAMED Brian shining a flashlight into the dark corners of the basement, Cam found the cutoff and turned it off. When he raced back upstairs, Brian at his heels, the paramedics were putting a protesting Mariah on a gurney.

“I cannot leave the children!” she insisted. “There are eight children under ten years of age…”

“We’re here, dear. We’re here.” The Lightfoot sisters appeared in the hallway, looking as though they’d just stepped out of a family portrait, circa 1930-something. They wore their usual long black dresses with lace collars. Letitia, the elder sister, had a small gold watch attached to her generous bosom. Lavinia, younger and smaller, had a sprig of silk violets pinned at the waist of her dress. Cam had had several meetings with them to discuss the kitchen renovation, and he’d found them surprisingly sharp in business, considering their vintage clothing and their charmingly old-fashioned approach to education.

“Ashley called us.” Letitia put an arm around the girl’s shoulders. “You gentlemen take good care of Mariah!” she admonished the paramedics, who were heading for the stairs. “I know your mother, Matthew Collingwood. I’ll have a word with her if Mariah isn’t returned to us in perfect health.”

The paramedic pushing the gurney cast a smile over his shoulder. “Don’t worry, Miss Letty. She’ll be fine. Watch the stairs, Charlie.”

“Well, now!” The sisters shooed the children toward the back of the house. “While Miss Lavinia calls the janitorial service to clean up the water, we’re going to camp here. Where are the sleeping bags from our hiking trip during spring break?”

Jessica and her sisters pulled down the attic stairs and fought over who would climb up to get them.

Letty tried to enlist Brian’s help, but he turned to Cam. “I could help you,” he whispered pleadingly.

“Ah…I’m sort of using him as my assistant,” Cam said. “Is it all right if I keep him for another hour or so?”

Letitia appeared concerned. “If you keep a close eye on him. He’s eager to help and sometimes…” She was obviously searching for a diplomatic explanation.

Cam understood. “He’ll be right beside me at all times.”

Brian gave him a grateful look.

“All right, then,” Letitia replied. “Brian, I’m counting on you to do exactly as you’re told.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he promised.

“Good.” Cam put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “For safety’s sake, I’m going to turn off the power. With water everywhere, I don’t want anyone touching light switches, even where it’s dry.”

“Right.”

He was about to ask Miss Letty if she had a flashlight to lead the children in the dark house, when she shouted up the attic stairs, “Jessie, bring the camp lanterns down with you, too!”

Cam grabbed the flashlight from his tool kit and, with Brian glued to his side, hurried back downstairs to shut down the power. He handed Brian the flashlight.

“This is so cool!” Brian said. “Nothing exciting ever happens around here.” Then apparently he realized what he’d said and looked sheepish. “I mean, I know it’s all my fault and it’s caused everybody a lot of trouble. And you probably charge a whole lot.”

“Yeah, I do.” With all the circuit breakers flipped, Cam and Brian stood in darkness except for the glow from the flashlight. “And the guys who have to clean up the water cost a bundle, too.”

Brian sighed. “I was going to take everybody to Disneyland for summer vacation if I found the gold.”

Cam turned him toward the stairs and let him lead the way with the light. “You mentioned that before. What gold are you talking about?”

The boy told him a story about a Confederate spy trying to escape to the South with a satchel full of gold. “He was in this building when he was shot, and the Yankees and the Lightfoots who owned the Manor then found the satchel, but not the gold. Everybody knows the story.”

“I’ve never heard it.”

“Mr. Groman told me. He teaches here, you know. Some rebel soldier stole it off a train and hid out with it in the carriage house. When they tiled the bathroom floor, they covered up the blood!”

The kid had a flair for theatrics, Cam thought, and was probably destined for a career in front of a camera.

They climbed the stairs, Brian holding the light to his side for Cam’s benefit. “But if it hasn’t been found in a hundred and fifty years…”

“A hundred and thirty-seven,” Brian corrected him.

“A hundred and thirty-seven,” Cam said obligingly, “why did you suddenly think you’d find it in the bathroom wall?”

They’d reached the main level. Brian waited while Cam closed and locked the basement door. “Because I thought about it. They didn’t find it when they tore up the floor to put down new stuff, so where else could it be?”

“Somewhere in the attic?”

“Looked there.”

“And you probably checked the basement.”

“A couple of times.”

“Maybe this spy had an accomplice and passed it on or something.”

Brian frowned. “I guess that could be. But that’s not in the story.”

They made their way carefully toward the stairway to the second floor. “There’s probably an old newspaper account of the incident,” Cam suggested. “In the library. Old newspapers are scanned into the computer. Or maybe they could help you at the Mirror.”

Brian grinned in the near darkness as they went up the stairs side by side. “Maybe Mariah will take me,” he said hopefully. Then suddenly his expression turned doubtful. “If she can forget that I almost killed her.”

Cam ran a knuckle down his own cheek, remembering her slap, and patted Brian’s shoulder. “I don’t think she was as near death as it seemed. Apologize first, then ask her.”

In the bathroom once again, Cam tore out more tiles to get at the pipe connection while Brian held the flashlight for him.