Sierra shrugged and rubbed her hands up and down her arms. There was a definite chill in this room that she hadn’t detected downstairs. And there was no sign of Ruby up here. Sierra sensed another presence but saw nothing suspicious. Still, she trusted her instincts. “You can stay up here. There’s no kitchen upstairs.”
“Not a problem,” Ronan said
“You probably eat out a lot, huh?”
“You could say that,” he drawled with an enigmatic look that she found surprisingly sexy.
She opened the bathroom off the bedroom and checked that out. Nothing special there. Sink, toilet, bathtub. “Okay then. But before I print up an agreement, I will need references from you. If they turn out okay then you may temporarily stay up here and I’ll stay downstairs. Hopefully our paths won’t cross very often and we can get this worked out when my lawyer returns. What about your lawyer?”
“I don’t need one.”
She wasn’t about to advise him to get legal representation, a move that might only make her own situation more complicated. While she was certain that her claim on the house and the land would stand, there were ways of dragging things out in court.
She didn’t need more complications.
There was another doorway to the left of the stairs. Sierra turned the rusty doorknob. In her haste to enter, she nearly flattened her nose against the door, which stubbornly refused to open.
“Allow me,” Ronan said.
Reaching around her, he managed to encircle her in his arms under the pretext of opening the door. She could feel the heat radiating from his bare chest through the back of her cotton top.
“It seems jammed,” he said. He was so close that his voice resonated through her like the bass turned full throttle on a sound system in a muscle car.
She had three options. She could try to duck under his arm but that would mean rubbing against his body, probably not the best idea. She could try again to open it herself. Or she could tell him to forget it and say they’d try the room later.
That seemed the best option but she couldn’t resist giving the knob one last try, which meant putting her hand over his.
The door gave way so suddenly she almost tumbled onto the floor. Ronan grabbed hold of her, preventing her from falling.
“I’m okay,” she told him and herself.
Quickly moving away from Ronan, she studied her surroundings. A big window faced the front of the room and a set of French doors with a tiny balcony was at the back. The room was very large but had nothing in it aside from a large framed black-and-white photograph on one wall, of a middle-aged man smoking a cigar. He had a receding hairline, a bulbous nose, and heavy jowls. His smile was more sinister than cheerful.
The cold came creeping in. She could feel trouble here, but she didn’t know if her attraction to Ronan was to blame or if it was something else. The cold certainly didn’t come from Ronan. There was definitely another presence up here. But she had other things to deal with first, including the female ghost downstairs.
Sierra told herself that she could do this. She would write up a very carefully worded agreement and have Ronan sign it today.
“If you’ll give me three references, I can check them out right away,” she told Ronan.
She returned downstairs and checked the rooms on that floor. A large parlor in the front led into a dining room toward the back of the house. The few pieces of furniture dated to that period. No modern Ikea pieces here.
The kitchen was dated and could use a good scrubbing.
The bedroom faced the front of the house and was on the other side of the central staircase. It was large and clean. Hardwood floors had been worn to a warm patina by generations of feet.
There was no furniture in the room. Her cousins must have taken their beds with them when they left. They were twice her age and she wasn’t close to them so she didn’t know any of the details of their stay. The only reason they’d given for not staying in the house was that “Life is too short.”
“I’ll take the ground floor. You may temporarily stay upstairs. I’ll write out a temporary agreement,” she told Ronan, deliberately repeating the word. “That doesn’t mean that I in any way think you have a right to stay here or have any rights to this property. But it is February, as you said. And it is cold outside. I just want to be clear so you don’t get your hopes up.”
Ronan didn’t deal with hope. He’d hoped that he could break free during the many decades of his long indenture, but that hadn’t happened. He’d hoped that his sister had been spared the curse that his sire had cast on her soul, but that hadn’t happened. So he didn’t believe in hopes and dreams. He dealt with facts. And the fact was that he had to get his mission accomplished. Failure was not an option.