The Marquis And The Mother-To-Be. Valerie Parv

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      The key he tried to insert into the front-door lock didn’t fit. He frowned, trying some of the other keys. None of them worked. With a snort of annoyance, he walked around to the kitchen door, coming up short at the sight of a car parked behind the house. Had Mathiaz sent someone anyway?

      On closer inspection, Eduard found the vehicle unlocked. It was a few years old and looked barely road-worthy. The only clue to the driver’s identity was a straw sun hat trimmed with silk flowers lying on the front seat. Curious.

      The key he tried in the kitchen-door lock didn’t work either. Experimentally, he turned the handle and to his surprise, the door swung open. What was going on here?

      He had expected the place to smell musty after being unused for more than two years, but the air was surprisingly fresh. If he hadn’t known better, he would swear he could smell baking. Just as well he didn’t believe in ghosts, because the place was starting to seem haunted.

      The ghost was young and female, he decided, as he ducked under a row of lacy undergarments hanging from an improvised line in the kitchen. Evidently she hadn’t gotten around to haunting the lodge’s laundry yet.

      The kitchen was vast, as befitted the size of the lodge. He saw no sign of the ghost herself, but evidence of her presence was everywhere, not only in the line of laundry, but also in the washed plates and cup neatly stacked beside the sink.

      He left his bag in the kitchen and made his way along the gallery hallway to the bedroom wings. This part of the lodge was also occupied, he found to his annoyance. The novelty was fast wearing off, as he saw that someone had made herself at home in the room he usually preferred. It looked out onto the distant hills, although the view was obscured by overgrown trees now. He planned to attack them while he was here.

      Evidently his ghost liked the room for the same reason he did, because the drapes were drawn right back and the window was open, letting a ginger-scented breeze into the room. Whoever his ghost was, she was tidy, and had good taste in bedrooms, although she was fairly lax when it came to security.

      He froze as a hard cylindrical object bored into the small of his back and a female voice said, “Don’t move. I have a gun and I know how to use it.”

      Returning to the lodge after her walk, Carissa Day heard the helicopter before she saw it. She watched it swoop low then disappear behind the tree line, heading toward the township of Tricot on the other side of the river. She wondered what had brought it here.

      She hoped there wasn’t a medical emergency in the town. When she had made an appointment with the local doctor soon after she arrived, he had explained that urgent medical cases had to be flown to the hospital in Casmira, some fifty miles south. He had plainly disapproved of a foreigner taking up residence so far from help when she was pregnant.

      She had told him that apart from being plagued by morning sickness, which he’d assured her would pass as her pregnancy progressed, she was fine.

      “Is your husband joining you?” he had asked.

      She had taken a firm hold of her temper before saying, “No.”

      To his credit the doctor hadn’t pressed the issue and she hadn’t explained further. This was her baby and no one else’s. Now they had the lodge as a home and future source of income, they had everything they needed.

      She stopped and stretched, pressing both hands into the small of her back. She had assigned herself a daily walk partly for exercise but mostly because she was in love with the lush rain-forest countryside surrounding her new home, and wanted to explore every inch of it while she still could.

      Now the helicopter rotors had stopped beating, she could hear only birdsong and the whisper of leaves. Perfect peace. Her eyes misted in appreciation of the beauty around her.

      A fragment of Yeats came into her mind: “Was there on earth a place so dear…” She might have been born in Australia but she loved Carramer with a fierceness that surprised her at times. Her baby was going to love it, too. She couldn’t imagine a more healthy, nurturing environment in which to bring a child into the world than right here.

      She was determined to do better as a sole parent than her father had done. Graeme Day had been too preoccupied with the demands of diplomatic life to accommodate his children’s emotional needs. Their father had treated her and Jeffrey like miniature adults, expecting them to adapt to the different places they were dropped into, as easily as he did himself.

      Sometimes they had and sometimes they hadn’t. To Carissa, Carramer was the only posting where she had felt at home. She had been heartbroken when her father announced they were returning to Australia. Too young to remain in the country alone, she had vowed to return as soon as she got the chance.

      Her brother had thought she was crazy. “Give me the bright lights, big city” was Jeff’s motto. Carramer had its share of cities, too, but Carissa felt more at home in the lush, tropical regions barely touched by the hand of civilization.

      She sighed. Home still needed a lot of work if she was to turn it into the bed-and-breakfast haven of her dreams. It wouldn’t happen by itself. Time she got back and made herself useful.

      When she emerged from the rain forest into the clearing, the first thing she noticed was the kitchen door standing ajar. She knew she had closed it when she went out, had even been tempted to lock it until she asked herself who on earth she expected to break in here.

      It looked as if she was going to find out.

      Skirting the car, which appeared untouched, she peered around the door before going in. The kitchen was empty. Her laundry had dried on the makeshift line, and the smell of her morning’s baking lingered in the air. But it was overlaid with a pine-and-leather scent that hadn’t been there when she left. Silently she stripped the line of clothes, dumping them on a chair. If she had to make a fast exit, she didn’t want obstacles in her way.

      She looked around for a weapon. A rolling pin would do the job but might be turned against her, she remembered from the self-defense lessons she’d taken as a teenager. The gleam of metal on the windowsill caught her eye. She picked up the old cigar tube she’d found when she arrived. She turned it over in her hands, an idea growing in her.

      The pine scent led her down the hallway. Careful to avoid those floorboards she knew were prone to creak, she reached her bedroom and felt her heartbeat quicken. Someone was in the room. Common sense told her to call the police in Tricot. But what were the odds they could reach her before the intruder heard her talking and came to investigate?

      For now she was on her own.

      Through the three-finger gap in the doorway she saw the man look around. He was a head taller than she was, with chestnut hair cut in a military style. He half turned and she swallowed. Lord, he was big, wide at shoulder and hip and narrow everywhere else. His aristocratic profile tugged at her memory, but before she could pinpoint the reason, he turned away again.

      She took stock of his clothing so she would be able to describe him to the police when she could safely contact them. White shirt, the sleeves rolled back over tanned forearms, open at the neck. The shirt was tucked into snug-fitting denims held up by a plaited leather belt slung cowboy-style around his hips. As he moved to the window, the gleam of his boots jarred her. What kind of prowler polished his boots to a mirror shine?

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