Калинка-малинка для Кощея. Марина Комарова

some reason he was grinning very broadly. “But you prefer Chey.”

      “Well,” she admitted, “Mary is awfully common, especially in my family.”

      “There is nothing at all common about you,” he told her blatantly.

      “I should hope not,” she quipped, ignoring a shiver of delight.

      He reached across the table then, and covered her hand with his, and suddenly the comfortable, chummy atmosphere evaporated. “I think it’s time I showed you the house,” he said silkily, “unless you were serious about that second tart.”

      “Regretfully not,” she said, pulling free her hand and scooting back her chair. “Like your grandmother, I prefer to exercise a little more self-control.”

      “Don’t be fooled by Grandmama,” he said, getting to his feet. “As if Seth doesn’t provide her with enough exercise, she works very hard out in the garden.”

      “Gardening isn’t work,” Viola protested ardently. “It’s pure relaxation.”

      “For you,” he said, bending down again to pluck the boy off Chey’s lap so she could rise. “It’s pure torture for me.”

      Viola pointed toward the weight bench. “That would be torture for me.”

      “To each his own,” Chey said brightly.

      “An excellent theory,” Brodie commented, passing the boy to his grandmother. “I have a theory about self-control,” he went on, reaching out an arm to bring Chey to his side. “General restraint makes occasionally losing it quite enjoyable. Don’t you agree?” he asked in an intimate voice that stopped her heart and closed her throat.

      Chey coughed and muttered, “I, um, prefer not to lose mine at all.”

      “Maybe you just haven’t found the indulgence you can’t resist yet,” he suggested softly.

      She couldn’t have answered that if she’d wanted to, and he knew it. She saw it in his eyes. Abruptly, he dropped his arm and looked to his son. “Don’t wear out Grandmama. Understand?” The boy nodded, two fingers in his mouth. Brodie bent and took his son’s small face into his hands, turning it toward Chey. “Tell Miss Chey, ‘Good to meet you.’”

      “Goo to mwee oo,” the boy said around his fingers.

      Viola pulled his hand from his mouth and instructed him to try again. He managed it better this time.

      “It was nice to meet you, too,” Chey said. She widened her gaze to include Viola. “It was especially nice to see you again, ma’am.”

      “I know you’ll do well for us, dear,” Viola Todd said. Then she looked to her grandson and a silent communication passed between them.

      He bent and kissed first the boy and then his grandmother on the cheek. Straightening once more, he moved toward Chey, lifting a hand to take her arm. Automatically, she shied from his touch. It was a foolish thing to do, foolish and telling, and it brought a flush of embarrassment to her cheeks. Brodie just smiled knowingly and clasped his hands behind him, the hunger in his pale blue eyes as blatant as any declaration. Well, Chey mused as she strode off in front of him, she now knew what it felt like to be a pineapple tart on that man’s plate.

      Chapter Two

      “We’ll start down here on the first floor and work our way up,” Brodie said in a brisk, businesslike tone.

      Chey nodded at that and folded her arms tightly as they passed through the doorway into the central hall side by side. “How many rooms are there?”

      “Twenty-eight rooms on the first two floors, counting the butler’s pantry and linen storage. The third is made up of the laundry, an apartment belonging to Marcel and Kate, the couple who cook and keep house for us, and the attics, which are a virtual warren of irregular cubicles crammed with furniture and junk. Kate and Marcel have just finished renovating their own space, so that need not concern you, and I don’t foresee using the attics for anything other than storage, but you’re welcome to take a look. Much of the furniture appears usable to me, but you would be the better judge.”

      Chey nodded with interest. “These old houses often turn out to be hiding valuable antiques. It’s possible we’ll find some of the original furnishings.”

      “That’s good. I like the idea of authenticity—within reason, of course.” He opened the first door they came to. “This is one of the worst,” he said, “the breakfast room.”

      She peeked inside, leaning past him to do so. The room was indeed a shambles. A plumbing leak had caused the ceiling to fall in and the wallpaper to peel. The carpet had rotted away and left the wood planking beneath exposed. A swinging door, now off the hinges, leaned against one wall. Large, multipaned, ceiling-to-floor windows looked out into the garden room, and like those of many homes of the period, which were taxed according to the number of rooms and doors they contained, the bottom section could be raised to create a direct pass-through. “I assume that doorway leads to the kitchens,” she said, pointing to the vacant space next to the unhinged door.

      “Yes, via the butler’s pantry, which also opens into the formal dining room. We could go through that way since the floorboards are sound, but it’s such a mess I’d rather not take a chance on ruining that pretty suit you’re wearing.”

      She ignored the compliment, quickly withdrawing from the room. “I have to come back and take measurements, anyway.”

      Thereafter, she kept her distance. They made a thorough survey of the entire first floor, which, in addition to the breakfast room and kitchens, included an actual ballroom, a large formal parlor, a formal dining room capable of seating two dozen comfortably, a cloakroom, a billiards room, a “smoking” room, an informal family room, two rest rooms, a “ladies withdrawing room” now claimed by Viola as a type of office, and an antiquated elevator from the 1930s. The kitchen had been completely renovated with modern, restaurant-quality appliances and fixtures, but Chey was relieved to see that the original brick floors, exposed beams and fire ovens had been left alone. The formal rooms were dingy and unattractive, having been last redecorated in the 1950s. The billiards room had been gutted; some of the floor had rotted. The cloakroom and smoking room had been relegated to storage, while the family rooms were shabby and horribly “updated” with shag carpets and cheap paneling. The two rest rooms were barely adequate, and the library, with falling shelves and a fireplace that undoubtedly leaked, was in deplorable shape.

      The second floor had fared better and boasted a long, wide landing that ran the length of the back of the house and opened onto a balcony that overhung the garden room. Two smaller hallways branched off the wider, central one, allowing access to fourteen separate chambers. As in so many older homes, some rooms could only be reached by traveling through others and several doorways had been blocked by previous renovation. A cramped, rickety servants’ stairway plunged straight down into the butler’s pantry, its lower access blocked by a locked door and table. Chey noted that the shaft, which ran all the way to the third floor, provided perfect access for a central air-conditioning system, which had to be a prime consideration, given the hot, sticky Louisiana summer now rapidly approaching. Chey decided to make it a priority issue.

      Brodie had set up a temporary office in a room at the front of the house that opened onto his personal bedchamber, and he’d had special electrical and telephone lines installed there to protect the several computers that he had up and running. The electrician he had employed had done a cursory inspection of the remainder of the house and had reported that some sections had been rewired as recently as twenty years previously, while some rooms utilized wires much older and some were without electricity altogether. Brodie, therefore, had engaged the man to draw up a rewiring schematic and present a proposal, which he now plucked from the metal table that he was using as a desk and handed over to Chey, much to her delight.

      “Thank you,” she told him, tucking the rolled schematic under one arm. “This will make it easier to put together my bid.”

      He