Read Online Ready & Willing by Elizabeth Bevarly - Free Book Online Page B

you. You are the perfect vessel to assist me,” he concluded.
    “Why?”
    “Because,” he said, “we Summerfield men are notoriously susceptible to beautiful women. Particularly those who have jet hair and eyes the color of a springtime sky.”
    Her mouth fell open at that. “You thought you could pimp me out to your great-great-whatever grandson?” she asked incredulously.
    He looked at her blankly. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Magill, but once again, the language barrier impedes my understanding of the conversation.” Although he was reasonably certain he understood the implications of what she was saying, and it wasn’t a particularly flattering image. Nor was it, he was afraid, an altogether inaccurate one. So he hurried on before she could saying anything else, “If your husband has never returned to you, Mrs. Magill, it is doubtless because you have done nothing to sully his name or his memory.”
    When she looked up at him then, he saw that her eyes were filled with tears, and he cursed himself, both for being the cause of them and for feeling so irritated at their appearance. “I am sorry, Mrs. Magill,” he said, doing his best to mask his annoyance. “But I’m still not certain how this works myself. There are some things I know with confidence—though I don’t know how I know them—and other things that are a complete mystery.”
    She hesitated a moment, then asked, “What do you know with confidence?”
    “I know that where my portrait goes, I go. I am bound to it.”
    She seemed to brighten some at that. “Then I can give it to someone else, and you’ll haunt them?”
    This time Silas was the one to hesitate, waiting to see if the answer would come to him. It did. “You cannot,” he told her. “At least not yet. You were sent into the shop for the express purpose of buying it.”
    She shook her head. “No, I went into that shop looking for a chair.”
    “So you think.”
    “So I know.”
    “Mrs. Magill, there are forces at work here beyond both you and me. That, too, is something I know with confidence.”
    She eyed him warily. “Forces,” she repeated. “Like . . . a supreme being?”
    It was more her tone of voice than the question itself that caught him off-guard. “Do you not believe in a supreme being?” he asked, unaccustomed to such an idea.
    “Not in the traditional sense, no.”
    “Then in what sense do you believe in one?”
    She gave a little shrug. “I’ve always kind of considered myself an Emersonian Transcendentalist. That there’s divinity in everyone, and we achieve it by living a good life and being good people.”
    “Emerson’s essay ‘Nature,’ ” Silas said, recognizing the philosophy and naming the title of the work in which Ralph Waldo Emerson first introduced it. “I find comfort in the knowledge that people still read Emerson. Though I myself found his suggestions in that particular work to be unsound.”
    “You read Emerson when you were alive?”
    “Don’t sound so surprised, Mrs. Magill. I read a great deal when I was alive, on a great many subjects. Yes, I read Emerson. However,” he added, “I am reasonably confident that Mr. Emerson had nothing to do with my arrival in the shop up the street.”
    “And where were you before you arrived in the shop up the street?” she asked.
    Silas tried to recall, but could not. “I don’t quite remember. I only know that I entered the shop at roughly the same time you did.”
    He gave it some more thought, to see if any other ideas or images made an appearance in his head, then wasn’t altogether surprised when a few vague ones did. “I have a somewhat indistinct remembrance of comfort and tranquility. And an absolute absence of fear.” He waited for more impressions, but there were none. “Perhaps as time passes,” he said, “I shall be able to remember more.”
    She studied him in silence for a moment longer, then nodded, once. With one quick swipe, she palmed her eyes, his cuff links still fisted