a television talk-show host and then to the man who was now her husband, Will’s brother, Aaron. It was part of Celia’s job to know how to find just about anything anyone might need on very short notice.
“Celia reminded me about this house,” Jilly told him.
“And suggested that you give Caitlin a call.” He was getting the whole thing into perspective now, she could see it in his face. He was accepting the fact that she had been tricked every bit as much as he had.
Caitlin Bravo was a hopeless matchmaker when it came to her sons. And Aaron and Cade were all taken care of now. Only Will had yet to find a wife.
The son in question nodded wearily. “Okay. You called Caitlin. She offered you this place.”
Jilly nodded. “Your mother was smart. She played it just right. She told me all about how primitive the setup would be, reminded me of all the old stories about your grandmother.” The house had once belonged to Caitlin’s mother, Mavis McCormack, known to everyone in Will and Jilly’s hometown as Mad Mavis. People whispered that Mad Mavis’s ghost still haunted the old house. “But somehow,” Jilly added, “your mother forgot to mention that you would be up here, too. Isn’t that surprising?”
“Not in the least.” Will stared at the woman across the table from him. She’d taken off her big coat and her funny hat, shoved up the sleeves of her red-and-green turtleneck and dug right into the food he’d offered her. She had wild brown hair with gold streaks in it and sparkly gray-blue eyes under thick, straight, almost-black eyebrows—eyebrows so heavy they should have bordered on ridiculous. Yet somehow, they didn’t. Somehow, they looked just right on her.
Attractive? All right, he’d admit it. She was a good-looking woman. If you liked them slightly manic and obsessively upbeat. She had her own business—Image by Jillian, it was called. She counseled fast-track execs and other professional types on how to dress for success—business casual, with flair. She also wrote an advice column, Ask Jillian. The column had started out as a weekly, but recently it had gone to Monday through Friday in the Sacramento Press-Telegram.
Yeah, he knew all about Jilly Diamond. His mother had made sure of that.
“I’m here every year,” he reiterated grimly. “And Caitlin knows it.” He was thinking that he wouldn’t mind strangling Caitlin as soon as he could get his hands on her. He was thinking that she deserved strangling. After all, he’d made it crystal clear to her that Jillian Diamond was not the woman for him.
The woman who wasn’t for him said, “Well, Caitlin didn’t tell me you’d be here, or I promise you, I wouldn’t have come.”
At first, he’d thought otherwise. The last time he’d seen her, at that party of Jane and Cade’s a couple of weeks ago, he could have sworn she was interested. It hadn’t been anything obvious. Just the feeling that if he looked twice, she would, too.
He didn’t have that feeling anymore. Now, she looked no happier to be stuck with him than he was to have found her at his door.
And that was absolutely fine with him.
He heard a strange, soft rumbling sound and saw something furry in his side vision. Her cat. It had emerged from the bathroom and was sitting beside his chair, looking up at him, eyelids lowered lazily, an expression of near-ecstasy on its spotted face, its orange, black and white tail wrapped around its front paws. The rumbling sound, he realized, was coming from the cat. The damned animal was purring so loudly, he could hear it over the howling of the wind outside.
Jillian said, “Okay, Will. Now you tell me. What are you doing up here all alone for the holidays?”
He turned from the scary look of adoration in the cat’s amber eyes and gave it to her straight. “I hate the holidays. I want nothing to do with them. I accept the fact that there’s no way I can avoid this damn jolly season altogether. But I give it my best shot. I decorate nothing. I don’t send a single Christmas card. I shop for no one. And I keep my calendar clear from the twenty-second on. I come up here to my eccentric dead grandmother’s isolated house. I remain here until January second, without television or an Internet connection, with only a transistor radio to keep up with the weather reports and my mobile phone in case of emergencies.” He indicated the Dostoevsky at his elbow. “I catch up on my reading. And I do my level best to tell myself that Christmas doesn’t even exist.”
She stared at him, one of those too-thick eyebrows lifting. He waited for her to ask the next logical question, which was “Why?” When she did, he would tell her to mind her own damn business.
But she didn’t ask. She only said, softly, “Hey. Whatever launches your dinghy.”
They did the dishes together, not speaking. She washed and he dried.
As he hooked the dishtowel on the nail above the sink, he said, “There’s a bedroom down here, off the living area. I’m in there. You get the upstairs all to yourself.” He gestured at the door beside the one that led to the bathroom.
Jilly got her suitcase and her purse and followed him up a narrow flight of steps to a long, dark, spooky attic room. He flicked a wall switch at the top of the stairs. A bare bulb overhead popped on. In the hard, unflattering glare it provided, Jilly took it all in, from the single small window at the head of the stairs to the dingy gray-blue curtain in a pineapple motif at the opposite end.
Someone had taken the time to Sheetrock the slanted ceiling and to paint it and the low walls bubble-gum pink. Too bad they hadn’t bothered to cover the nails or tape the seams. The floor was the same as downstairs—buckling speckled linoleum. Three single beds were arranged dormitory style, with their headboards tucked under the lowest line of the eaves.
Oh joy, Jilly thought.
“There’s a double bed in the other room.” Will gestured at the curtain. “You’d probably be more comfortable in there.”
She went through, set down her things and turned on the small lamp by the bed. This area was pretty much identical to the one she’d just left: Sheetrocked and painted pink, with a single dinky window at the end opposite the curtain. The head of the bed butted up under the windowsill.
Will was standing by the curtain. “Everything okay?” He didn’t look as if he cared much what her answer might be.
“Fine.”
He left her, ducking back through the curtain. She heard his steady tread as he crossed the first room and went down the creaking stairs.
The bed, which was made up already and covered in a threadbare chenille spread, consisted of a set of box springs and a mattress on a plain metal frame. Jilly dropped to the side of it. The springs complained and the mattress sagged beneath her weight. Lovely. She looked at the window and saw her own reflection, ghostly, in the glass. Up here, under the eaves, the eerie sighing of the wind was even louder than downstairs.
She glanced at her watch. It was just seven-thirty. It would be a long, long night.
However. She did have her phone. And she had a few pointed questions for Celia. For instance, did Celia know that Will would be at Mad Mavis’s old house? Was Celia in on the matchmaking scheme, along with the devious, domineering Caitlin?
Jilly had a hard time believing that. For one thing, Jilly had never so much as mentioned to either of her closest friends that maybe—just possibly—she might have considered dating Will Bravo. And she’d also been
