In contrast to the casual manner, his eyes looked serious, focused and very blue. Actually, they were almost the same shade of blue as the airline pillow and the baby blanket in Celie’s dream, she realized. The fact unsettled her again. Was that why she’d suddenly remembered the dream? Baby blankets, baby-blue eyes, his daddy’s blue—
No. Surely not.
I’m just tired.
The flight landed on time, their bags were waiting for them on the carousel, and Nick’s personal driver Leo whisked them away from the airport in Nick’s personal limo within minutes. Since her apartment was almost on the route to his home in Upper Arlington, Nick dropped her there as usual.
“You look wiped,” he told her. He wasn’t being unkind, she understood, he was just making a statement of fact. His gaze flicked over her, taking in the creases in her knee-length charcoal-gray skirt, and around her eyes and mouth.
Her nerve endings heated under his regard in an unexpected way, and she nodded, feeling awkward. “Yes, I am,” she answered. “It’s good to be home.”
“Take the morning off, okay? Come in at around two. If you need longer, just call and let me know.”
“I’ll be fine. Two o’clock.”
“You sure?”
“We have the regional figures to go through,” she reminded him. “And meetings to prepare for.”
“We do. Okay, then. Two o’clock it is. Have a good night.”
Leo had already opened the trunk to collect her bags and carry them to the door for her. Nick watched as Celie followed the older man to the side door that led up to her apartment. She had a straight back, a tidy walk, a taste for very efficient and very tailored professional clothing, and glossy dark hair that would have bounced in time to her footsteps if it hadn’t been so neatly twisted and clipped high on her head.
Something moved in the corner of his vision. A curtain in one of the Victorian mansion’s six apartments, maybe, wafting in the night breeze. Nick’s muscles tingled with a sudden urge to chase after Celie and snap the clip off her hair so that its clean, silky bounce would become fact instead of imagination.
He resisted the urge, disturbed by how unexpected and how strong it was. He could almost feel her hair in his fingers. He kept watching as she reached her door, just ahead of Leo. Typically, she had her key already in her hand.
Of course she did. He would have been surprised if she hadn’t, and Celie Rankin almost never surprised him. This was one of the things he liked about her.
She wouldn’t let Leo bring her bags up the stairs, and disappeared inside within seconds. Leo headed back to the car, while Nick kept watching the big old house. A series of lights came on, showing Celie’s progress up the stairs. Finally, the big, round turret room at the front of the second floor lit up. He saw a faint shadow through the drapes as she moved across the room.
Celie was a great executive assistant. Nick had kept her up until well after midnight in his hotel suite last night, working on her laptop, and he suspected her mind had been buzzing too fast afterward to wind down and permit her some good rest. No wonder she seemed tired, and a little offline.
He never had that problem. He’d learned very early in his life the trick of switching off and disappearing deep into the haven of sleep. As a young child, sleep was the only place in his life where he’d felt safe. Now his facility for deep, unbroken sleep allowed him to function at a higher level than many people during his waking hours, and he rarely remembered his dreams.
“Okay, Leo,” he told his driver, dismissing Cecilia Rankin from his mind. He picked up his cell phone. “I’m going to call for some takeout and bring it over to Sam’s, since he hasn’t eaten yet. Can we swing by the Green Dragon, next?”
“I’m glad you’re back,” Celie’s creaky-floored old apartment seemed to say to her.
The chandelier in the middle of the turret room’s ceiling sparkled, and when she opened a window, a cool evening breeze wafted in. The antique clock on the side table by the door clacked like a percussionist playing out a rhythm. Eight o’clock, it read. Time to eat, her stomach said.
No problem, there. As efficient at home as she was at work, she kept the refrigerator in her little kitchen well-stocked with quick-to-prepare meals. Toss some frozen cheese ravioli into a pot of boiling water, heat a creamy pasta sauce in the microwave, tear up a few lettuce leaves, and she could eat in ten minutes.
Celie caught sight of her cherry-red robe hanging on a hook in the bathroom, and into her mind jumped the idea of taking a quick shower while the ravioli cooked, then eating in the robe and her matching slippers.
As a child, she’d been allowed to do that, when she was tired. Her mother would bundle her up on the couch with a crocheted blanket over her knees and a little tray table, spread with a linen place mat. She would eat a big bowl of homemade soup and fresh hot biscuits, and she’d feel so deliciously cosseted and safe.
She hadn’t done anything like that for years. Since her dad’s death, when Celie was seventeen, she had had to be the adult, the responsible one, the one who did the cosseting. It had seemed to frighten her mom if the daughter she depended upon displayed any sign of softness or vulnerability.
“You’re exhausted. Baby yourself a little tonight, Celie,” the robe on its hook seemed to say, but she ignored it and stayed in her clothes, afraid that if she gave in to the impulse she might fall asleep on the couch with the ravioli still boiling on the stove and not wake up until the kitchen caught fire.
She ate her meal, prepared for bed and fell asleep before ten.
The sound of a baby crying came to her ears after several hours of good rest. It seemed so close that it startled her awake. Or—But, no, was she awake? She found herself at the window, although she didn’t quite remember how she’d gotten there. Had she walked? Or floated? Someone whispered a sound. Soothing the baby? Or calling her name?
The cries still came. In this room? They sounded close enough, but no. She looked around. There was no baby here. Outside, then? Downstairs?
The sound seemed distinct and real—as real as sounds and senses could feel in a dream, heightened more than they were in daily life.
Celie pushed the curtain aside and looked out. She’d kept the window open, as the April night was mild. The street looked quiet. She couldn’t see anyone. Maybe the crying came from the apartment below. It sounded a little fainter to her ears, now. The couple downstairs didn’t have a baby of their own, but they could have visitors staying with them.
She stepped back, and was about to let the curtain fall back into place when something on the windowsill gleamed in the moonlight and caught her attention. She picked it up. It was a hat pin, old-fashioned, with a long shaft of dull, dark gray metal and a big glass pearl at one end.
And that means I’m definitely dreaming, she realized, as part of the dream. Because I’ve never seen this before.
The glass pearl was pretty, and she imagined a dark-haired young woman with a wide, mobile mouth and friendly eyes, standing in front of a mirror and reaching her hands up behind her head as she used the hat pin to fasten a broad-brimmed creation of straw and chiffon into place on her thick pile of hair.
“This is a very nice dream,” she told the woman. “If only that little baby would stop crying.”
“Nick will go to him and soothe him back to sleep,” the woman said. Her smile at once began to calm Celie’s concern.
And a few seconds later, the baby stopped crying, so the woman pinning her hat must have been right. Nick had picked him up. Of course he had! Celie could see him with that little dark head settled