Chapter Four
Trey
Once Callie and her demon cat had locked themselves in their suite for the night, Trey was still too keyed up from their argument to sleep. Not to mention that it was still light out and he hadn’t gone to bed that early since he was a kid.
Deciding to work off some of his annoyance by doing some sanding on the old card catalog he was restoring, he went down to the lower level, which served as a workshop slash storage area slash garage.
If the water level wasn’t so high, it would be called a basement, but he was certain Callie wouldn’t recognize it as the kind of basement she was used to in Ohio.
And that wasn’t the only thing she’d find out of her realm of experience on the island.
Picking up the sandpaper he’d left on top of the card catalog earlier when he’d gone up to help Bobby with the window, he went to work on a large round water stain in the quarter-sawn oak.
Someone—he had no idea who—had apparently put a house plant on the cabinet and the drip pan must have leaked.
It might have been Khaki, now that he thought about it.
She was always looking for somewhere to get her precious plants closer to the nearest window.
He smiled at the memory. And was hit once again by the pain of knowing he hadn’t been able to tell her how much she meant to him before she died.
He’d lashed out at Callie for tricking Khaki into leaving her this building and the money, but he knew good and well that he hadn’t deserved it.
The truth was that he had ghosted his great-aunt.
It hadn’t been intentional. At least not at first. At first, he’d been so busy with breaking away from the architectural firm where he’d been since he was a lowly summer intern as an undergrad that he barely knew whether he was coming or going.
Then by the time he got enough of a breather to even think about reaching out to Khaki—who by that time had moved to Cincy to live with her daughter, Julie—he’d found out that Monica, his wife of five years, was having an affair with his new business partner, Hollins.
And to add insult to injury, Hollins hadn’t been content with sleeping with Trey’s wife; he’d also aimed to shut him out of the company he’d poured every ounce of creative and financial energy into.
He wasn’t proud of it, but after that final straw, he disappeared into a bottle for a while.
Once his divorce was finalized, he’d decided to return to the one place where he’d always been happy.
Petite C?te Island.
It had been years since Khaki had called either the library or the island her home, but Trey was still well known there, and remembering his great-aunt’s dreams for renovating the library where she and Remy had fallen in love, he’d set to work.
Unfortunately, she’d died before he had a chance to either tell her about it or show her the updates and changes he’d made to the old place.
He’d been on a buying trip in New York when she died and no one in his family—not even Julie, whom he suspected had always been a little jealous of his closeness with her mother—had even told him in time for the funeral.
He’d known the woman who’d managed to convince Khaki to give her the library and a fortune to boot would show up sooner or later, but he had to admit, Callie Jameson was nothing like what he’d imagined.
He wasn’t proud of it, but he envisioned one of two images when he heard the word librarian.
First, there was the sexy librarian—short, hip-hugging skirt, hair in a bun, glasses, all of which could be undone with a few displaced hairpins and a swiped pair of spectacles.
Then, perhaps more realistic, but also more boring, was the dowdy librarian.
This version would take more than a Supergirl quick change to make over.
Callie, when she arrived on the scene, turned out not to align with either one of these stereotypes.
Yeah, big shocker, asshole; real women aren’t mass produced in a factory to match your lewd imaginings. Go figure.
With her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail and dressed in a pair of pink shorts and a purple-and-white LSU tee, she looked more like a college coed than a librarian.
Certainly too young for the likes of him.
He would be forty-one on his next birthday, and if he had to make a guess, Callie was thirty tops.
Didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate the view though.
Besides, he was in no place to get involved with anyone.
Much less the woman he needed to be on his best behavior with so that he could persuade her to sell him the library.
Besides, her cat, Stella, hated him. Everybody knew you didn’t come between a woman and her cat. Especially not when that cat looked like it was mean enough to grow opposable thumbs solely to hold a knife to a man’s throat.
He was still shuddering over the memory of Stella’s heartfelt hiss in his general direction when he heard a screech from upstairs.
Over the past few months, he’d gotten used to the nightly visitations from what he assumed were local kids playing tricks on him because he’d come along and ruined all their fun by putting sturdy locks on the doors leading into the library, as well as on the outbuildings.
He wasn’t sure how they’d managed to get past the locks, but they’d managed it somehow if the ghostly laughter, cackling witches, and what he assumed were meant to be werewolves howling were anything to go by.
The hell of it was, he hadn’t figured out how they were projecting the sound.
There wasn’t a speaker system installed in the building.
As a college library built in the 1800s it had been meant for studying.
Though the acoustics on the second floor, where the main reading room and the stacks were located, were such that sound reverberated throughout the chamber with such force that even someone speaking in their “inside voice” could be heard a hundred yards away.
Tonight, if he didn’t miss his guess, his “ghosts” had decided to play some Halloween cat sounds for the new arrivals.
Wasn’t that a helluva welcome, he thought with a reluctant grin.
He himself wouldn’t do anything to make the library uncomfortable for Callie during her stay here.
That wouldn’t be sportsmanlike. But if the delinquents who spent their summers on island wanted to interfere with the new owner’s ability to get a good night’s sleep, well, there wasn’t a whole lot he could do about it.
Hell, it wasn’t like he hadn’t tried. And if Callie decided to rent a cottage on the beach for the rest of the year, with plans to sell the library building to him—at a discount for all the work he’d put into renovating it—once her mandatory year on Petite C?te was up, he wouldn’t be disappointed.
He was trudging up the stairs from the ground floor to the main one, where the lobby and hallway leading to the bedrooms was, when he heard Callie’s voice over the yowling of the Halloween cats. “Stellll-aaaah! Stellll-aaaah! C’mere little girl!”
When he stepped out into the hall, he almost swallowed his tongue at the sight of a truly fine ass covered in nothing but a thin pair of pajama shorts as Callie bent to peer under the hall tree he’d picked up at an estate sale in Houston last summer.
Painted in tropical blue, one of the bright colors he’d placed throughout the house to make the library less of an institution and more of a home, it was a piece he’d been looking forward to showing to Khaki.
But he’d just have to be content to know in his gut—which he did—that she’d have appreciated it.
“You do a mean Stanley Kowalski impression,” he said, once he’d put his eyeballs back in his head. The sound of his voice must have startled Callie though, because she nearly leapt out of her skin.
“Oh my God!” She whirled around and clapped a hand to her chest. “Don’t scare me like that!”
“I don’t know how you can be scared with this racket,” Trey shouted over the recorded cat sounds, which continued to reverberate through the building.
“I can’t find Stella,” she shouted back. “I think she wants to fight whatever these cat sounds are!”
That almost made Trey laugh but he stifled it at the last minute. Still, he couldn’t stop himself from saying, “My money’s on Stella.” He didn’t care if it had been thirty years since those cat recordings had been made. Stella had enough meanness in her to take on a zombie horde of demon cats.
Callie hadn’t heard him, thankfully, because she just shook her head and shouted above the din, “I have to find her. She’s in a new place and I don’t want her to get scared. And she’s already upset at this god-awful racket. Where is it coming from?”
“I don’t really know,” Trey hollered back. “It comes from a different location every time.”
Then somehow managing to make herself heard above the electronic feline voices, a piercing meow from Stella—what other cat would be here to add to the chorus?—sounded. And without a backward glance, Callie rushed toward the stairs that led up to the reading room and took them two at a time.
Not knowing whether the troublemakers who’d set up the audio haunting were up there, or if someone else might be, Trey took off after her, deciding that if either of them got hurt it would be what he deserved for his earlier thought, hoping Callie would get scared off by the kids and their pranks.
When he got to the top of the steps, which branched out into the reading room to the right and the open metalwork stacks to the left, he didn’t need to call out to Callie to decide which way she’d gone.
He heard her steps reverberating on the metal floors of the stacks as she hurried through them in search of Stella.
Then, as he heard Stella’s yowls compete in volume and ferocity with the cats on the recording, it stopped, and all that was left was Stella howling. Now it was almost as if she was angry at having her opponents leave the field before they’d completed their fight.
“Stella!” he heard Callie cry in relief up ahead as he turned the corner of a row of shelves and saw Callie gripping the bars of what everyone had always called the cage—a ten-by-ten gated enclosure where restricted books were kept. “Get her out of here!”
To Trey’s surprise, the cat had somehow managed to lock herself in. Which was weird because he couldn’t remember a time, well, ever, when the cage had been locked.
“Why do you have a jail in this place?” Callie demanded, turning her accusing gaze on him. “It’s a library, for Pete’s sake. Why would you want to lock people up in it?”
Pulling the giant ring of keys from where he kept them clipped on his belt loop, Trey sent up a little prayer to the library gods that there was a key for the cage on it, otherwise he was going to be dealing with a very angry librarian.
“The college it was attached to was Catholic,” he explained as he thumbed through the attached bits of metal, “and they used it to keep students from gaining easy access to books that were deemed sinful or inappropriate for general use.”
“Wonderful,” she said, raising her eyes heavenward. “Censorship in all its glory.”
“Hey, I didn’t make the rules,” Trey said with a shrug, even as he found what he thought had to be the right key. “Pretty sure that was the pope’s deal.”
Just then, he turned the key in the lock and it gave a satisfying click.
Pushing past him into the little room, Callie scooped up Stella, who instead of showing the thanks Trey felt Callie deserved, the cat seemed annoyed at being picked up at all.
And Trey didn’t miss the look of disdain the cat sent his way from her perch on Callie’s shoulder.
As if to say, “I might have to put up with this drama but at least somebody loves me, human.”
Glancing away so that he didn’t succumb to temptation to start an argument with a cat, he looked down.
And that was when he saw it. Tucked into a corner of the cell—or whatever they were going to call the cage—was a little black gadget.
When he leaned down to examine it closer, he saw it was a Bluetooth speaker.
So that’s how they’d been doing it. And all it had taken for him to figure it out, he thought wryly, was a cat.