SUMMER HOUSE, the understated brass plaque embedded in the tall stone pillar said. But the plaque lied.
Summer House wasn’t a house. It was an Italian villa, a sumptuous estate fit for a decadent prince. A baroque fantasy of pink marble and red terra-cotta and gray pietra serena stone. An orgy of arches and ornamentation, loggias and sculptures and formal staircases descending into shadowy gardens.
Matthew left his car by the gate and walked up the long driveway, stunned. Summer House didn’t belong in Upstate New York, tucked into the dense birch and hemlock woods of the Adirondack Mountains. It belonged in the rolling hills of seventeenth century Italy, where lemon trees grew in huge clay pots, and silvery olive trees twinkled in the Tuscan sun.
And yet here it stood.
It was slightly crazy.
It was extremely beautiful.
And it was, quite literally, falling apart.
Matthew, who had finally reached the front door, was hardly an expert, but decay cried out even to the untrained eye. Half a dozen windows on both floors were cracked and taped. The stone walls were pitted in places, crumbling away to dust in others. Many of the statues had lost noses and fingers and other protruding body parts.
And Nature, which obviously had once been banished from these formal Italian gardens by an army of landscapers, was marching boldly back, reclaiming its territory inch by inch.
No one answered the bell. In fact, Matthew couldn’t be sure the bell even worked. He reached up to use the ornate brass knocker, but as he touched it the thing swung free at one end, a loose screw rattling to the ground.
Good Lord. He found the screw and managed to reattach it temporarily, although the threads were nearly stripped. He backed up, and his foot landed on a small sliver of broken glass. As he bent to retrieve the pieces, he balanced himself on a terra-cotta finial, which rocked on its base, threatening to topple.
He caught it somehow and righted it, but he glanced around with a deepening doubt. This place was a minefield of disrepair, and it was way out of his league.
Natalie Granville might be the answer to his prayers, but he definitely wasn’t the answer to hers. She didn’t need a handyman. She needed a miracle.
He moved back down the steps, ready to leave, almost glad that no one had answered the door. He’d just get back in his car and—
But suddenly he heard a sound. A soft, fairylike singing that came from around the east side of the house. The sweet, elderly spinster, the naive Natalie, perhaps?
Curious in spite of himself, he followed the sound, crunching across broken stones with thick weeds growing in the cracks, ignoring the staring eyes of a dozen armless statues that lined the path like wounded soldiers in the war against decay.
As he approached the corner of the house, he caught a glimpse of something soft and white fluttering in the breeze. What was it? It looked like a long, white gauzy stream of lace. He squinted, confused. It looked like a ghostly wedding veil.
He moved closer. It was a wedding veil. A woman stood at the end of a wide back terrace, and she wore a long white wedding dress, her head crowned with the beautiful, flowing, fluttering lace.
But she wasn’t a living, breathing woman. She was a stiffly silent, white marble statue.
Matthew blinked. And as he watched, the soft singing began again. Something weird and disbelieving skimmed across his nerve endings. He was the last man on earth to entertain nonsensical notions. Still, he couldn’t have stopped himself then if a Minotaur had barred the way.
His gaze fixed on the marble bride, he rounded the corner.
And then, finally, he saw the other woman. The young, blond, bikini-clad beauty who was walking the balustrade like a tightrope, singing merrily to herself as she put one bare foot in front of the other.
Now that he was close enough, he could tell she had a lovely voice, but her words were badly slurred, and he noticed that she clutched a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in one hand, holding it out as if for balance.
The balustrade was wide—at least eighteen inches—but it was slick in spots with mildew. And besides, the woman was clearly drunk. He saw her weave slightly, and he began to move fast. She held on for a few wobbling seconds, just long enough for him to reach the balcony.
The bottle fell first, crashing to the terrace and smashing into a hundred pieces. But, two seconds later, the woman fell the other way, and landed neatly in Matthew’s arms.
For a couple of seconds she was utterly silent, her mouth open as she stared, wide-eyed, in shock and breathless disbelief. She instinctively wrapped her arms around his neck, and her face was so close to his that he could count the tiny, pale freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose.
Six.
She was ridiculously light in his arms. She probably wasn’t more than five-four, maybe one-ten? She had a mass of untamed blond hair that fell in soft curls over his arm. Her skin was slippery and warm, and it smelled of coconut oil.
After a couple of seconds, he began to register just how very little she was wearing. He decided he ought to set her down, but her arms were still wrapped around his neck, so it was awkward.
Finally she recovered her breath.
“Gosh,” she said. “It’s a good thing you caught me, isn’t it?”
He smiled. “Yes.”
“I could have broken something. A leg. An arm.” Her eyes widened even more. “I could have broken my neck, just the way my grandfather always used to say I would.”
“Yes,” he agreed, though privately he doubted it. The fall was only a couple of feet, and she was so drunk she probably would have landed limply and safely on the grass.
“So I guess it’s a very good thing you were here.”
“I guess so.”
She nodded sagely, as if they’d solved something important. With a soft sigh, she dropped her head comfortably against his chest.
And jerked it right back up.
“Hey, wait a minute,” she said, concentrating so hard her brow wrinkled. “Why were you here?”
He debated with himself. Since he’d changed his mind about applying for the handyman job, he probably shouldn’t even mention it. On the other hand, he’d hate for her to think he was just some weirdo prowling around.
He looked into her slightly unfocused eyes. They had swirls of gold in the brown, like melted butterscotch being stirred into chocolate syrup. She was very young, very gorgeous, and he was suddenly aware of the warm thrust of her breasts against his chest.
He cleared his throat. “Do you think you’re steady enough to stand up on your own?”
“Oh. Sure.” She helped extricate herself, and she did pretty well, except that she had to take two steps before she found her balance. She frowned, as if trying to hang on to her train of thought. “You were going to tell me—”
“Someone put up an ad for a handyman,” he said, deciding that honesty was his best course. The grandfather she’d mentioned probably took a dim view of trespassers. “I was thinking of applying.”
“Really?” She tilted her head. “You don’t look like a handyman,” she said. Then she flushed and placed her palm against her forehead. “Oh, that was dumb, wasn’t it? I mean, there isn’t any particular way handymen look, is there? It’s just that you’re so…”
She bit her lower lip as she studied him, apparently searching for the telling detail. “I know. It’s because you smell so good. Darryl smelled like when you open the refrigerator, and you can just tell you’ve left the hamburger in there way too long.” She wrinkled her nose. “You know that smell?”
He