Cindy's own eyes narrowed at Jake, who had been frequently checking over his shoulder to make sure the girls were keeping up. "What did Rumson say about me?"
"That you were good at organizing," Nina said, nudging her with an elbow. "That summary of the Whitneys' sordid past was succinct and factoid-packed."
Cindy blushed. "Oh, well, I like to keep things tidy."
"Ladies?" Jake suddenly called from inside the dorm. "If you keep lollygagging, you're going to miss the tour."
The servant quarters were spartan, but it was obvious an effort had been made to make them comfortable. As they walked down the long hall of bedrooms, Jake explained that the original architect, John Gilbert, had designed a series of vents in the ceiling that allowed warm air to rise out of the room and kept the occupants cooler in the summer months.
The individual rooms were eerily quiet, each with two simple iron-frame beds, recently stripped of their ancient feather-tick mattresses. Ben's crews had done basic renovations to three of the rooms, patching up holes in the plaster, painting, and giving the floors a thorough cleaning. Deacon had taken the butler's room, the largest in the building and the only one with a private sitting room. But in what Nina considered a remarkable show of fairness by their employer, each of the "new" rooms was decorated with the same simple queen bed, pale wood dresser, and nightstand. Ben's and Jake's rooms also included drafting tables. Nina imagined the queen beds were an accommodation for the sheer size of Ben's six-foot-"good-God-how-tall-is-this-guy?" frame.
Nina spent most of the tour staring up at the wainscoting and crown molding. It seemed bizarre that the architect would devote those decorative touches to a utilitarian building that guests of the Crane's Nest would never see. She looked over her shoulder to see Deacon watching her while Jake chattered about updated plumbing. Just as her brain managed to communicate the "smile like a normal person!" message to her face, he looked away, to the tablet Jake was shoving in his face.
They found the ladies' dormitory, which was a mirror image of the men's building save for the larger bedrooms. The Crane's Nest required more maids than footmen and valets, so the younger women slept four to a room in the same iron bed frames. The recently updated kitchen shared a door with the men's dorm, so the mostly female cooking staff could provide for both sides during their off hours. Nina guessed that the multitude of locks on the ladies' side of the shared door had been employed overnight to protect the servants from temptation.
Nina's first night as a resident of Whitney Island was not a momentous one. Dinner had been a stilted, awkward affair, with the team seated around the long dining table in the men's dorm, scarfing down take-out Japanese food that Jake had ferried across from the mainland in a cooler. Jake tried valiantly to get a conversation going, bringing up Deacon's love for a particular sashimi bar in Boston near his corporate headquarters and funny stories from Jake's family's travels to Kyoto when he was a teenager. But it didn't work. Ben was good for an ice breaker every few minutes, but the minute portions of rice and raw fish seemed inadequate fuel for him and he couldn't seem to maintain a steady stream of conversation. Deacon seemed to thaw a bit when the group started making checklists and plans: cooking rotations, the shower schedule, a first day to-do list to determine exactly how far in over their heads they were with this project. They'd finished dinner and settled down to brass tacks, each presenting their immediate plans for the house-stabilizing/rehabbing the interior structures, salvaging what few furnishings and antiques were left-and how they would work around each other to prevent delays and power-tool-versus-garden-implement hissy fits.
Curled in her solitary bed that night, Nina dreamed she was pulling the sheets tight over a mattress. The mattress was hers. The sheets were hers. But the arms stretching out in front of her belonged to someone else. A large diamond winked from her ring finger, flanked by sapphires. The sleeves of her dress were beautifully cut blue muslin, rolled to the elbow as the soft white hands smoothed the counterpane. She was pleased that she was able to provide clean, comfortable rooms for her staff. She knew how hard the servants worked to keep a home running. And while she certainly didn't need to make up the beds, she found a certain satisfaction in seeing to them herself. She could walk down the rows of rooms, seeing a freshly made bed in each, and know that she'd done something productive with her day. Besides, the servants wouldn't arrive for a few days anyway. And it seemed inhospitable to welcome them to their new home with bare beds.
She bent over the far corner of the mattress, tucking the sheet tightly. And when she rose up, she felt a large hand slide down the small of her back and give her backside a pinch. She squealed and the man's other hand clapped around her mouth, pressing her back against his chest.
"Well, look what I found here," an affectionate male voice whispered against her ear. "A pretty piece of skirt already bent over the bed."
A thrill of fear and something more rippled up her spine as those hands slipped around her hips and pressed her bum against a solid male frame. Teeth closed gently over her earlobe, tugging insistently. She relaxed into the masculine embrace, sighing as the mouth moved from her ear to her neck. The hand cupped her chin, tilting her head back toward him. His grip tightened, moving to her throat, squeezing the breath from her lungs. Nina scratched and coughed and fought, but he was just too strong.
Suddenly, the pressure at her throat disappeared. The scene shifted and she was underwater, watching waves roll over her head. She tried to swim to the surface, but she was held in place by a growing pressure around her legs, tugging her down like an anchor, crawling up her body like greedy grasping hands until it settled around her throat. She reached upward, trying to claw her way toward air, toward light, but was unable to make any progress. Now she saw herself, her arm extended over her head in some obscene ballerina's pose. Her delicate blue muslin sleeve fluttered against the water like an angel's wing, and she watched its motion as it slowly turned brown and disintegrated with age. The sleeve rotted away, leaving a grotesque, decaying limb behind, sloughing and dissolving until all that was left were bleached ivory bones reaching up toward the light.
In her head, she could hear screaming.
Nina bolted up from the bed, clawing at her throat and gasping for breath.
© J Nash photography
MOLLY HARPER is the author of How to Flirt with a Naked Werewolf and The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf as well as the acclaimed Nice Girls vampire series and several spinoffs also set in the supernatural small town of Half-Moon Hollow. Her stand-alone novel And One Last Thing . . . was nominated for a RITA Award, and she has also written a sexy original ebook series, the first of which is My Bluegrass Baby. A former humor columnist and newspaper reporter, she lives in Kentucky with her husband and children. Visit her at mollyharper.com or at singleundeadfemale.blogspot.com.
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books by molly harper
In the land of Half-Moon Hollow
Nice Girls Don't Have Fangs
Nice Girls Don't Date Dead Men
Nice Girls Don't Live Forever
Nice Girls Don't Bite Their Neighbors
Driving Mr. Dead
The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires
A Witch's Handbook of Kisses and Curses
The Naked Werewolf Series
How to Flirt with a Naked Werewolf
The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf
How to Run with a Naked Werewolf
The Bluegrass Series
My Bluegrass Baby
Rhythm and Bluegrass
Also
And One Last Thing . . .
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