"Hannah—"
"If I could, I'd do the digging myself, but I'm afraid I'm just too old."
Piper felt the drizzle damp on her hair. "You're trying to manipulate me with all this talk of getting old and dying."
"I am old, and I w/Wdie."
"Neither of which has anything to do with me going up against Clate Jackson."
Hannah sniffed as she slid behind her leather-covered wheel. "Honestly, Piper, I'm tempted to put a spell on you to make you cooperate. You're lucky I don't do that sort of thing."
With that, she flicked on her CD player, pulled her door shut, and eased off toward town and her luxury townhouse with "There Is Nothin' Like a Dame" at top volume.
A crazy aunt and a cranky neighbor. "Just what my life needs," Piper grumbled, and headed off to her studio.
Clate turned up at her door an hour later. She had left it open while she prepared for her evening class. He had changed from his travel clothes into frayed, stained khakis and a denim shirt, making him look untycoonlike, more real, more a man she could understand. She shook off her reaction. What was she thinking? He wasn't a man she could remotely understand!
"I brought your hummingbird feeders," he said in that rasping, sexy drawl.
"Oh. That wasn't necessary. I could have fetched them myself."
"I'm sure."
His wry tone kept his response from being totally insulting. He set the feeders just inside the door as he gave her small studio a quick scan. It wasn't expensive, high tech, or elegant. Having scavenged what she could from her father and brothers, Piper had built floor-to-ceiling shelves, now crammed with supplies, books, equipment, and a big sawhorse worktable made out of two-by-fours and a slab of birch plywood that she'd sanded and stained herself, with much unsolicited advice from Macintosh & Sons.
She noticed Clate taking in the array of flowers, leaves, spices, bits of root, citrus peel that she'd spread out on the table for her evening class. "Relax, I didn't swipe anything off your property."
"You're working?"
"I have a potpourri-making class tonight."
"Your classes meet in here?"
"Most of them. I teach my cooking classes in the keeping room in my house."
"You enjoy crafts," he said.
"I don't really view what I do as crafts, but skills once needed to survive or maybe to make life more pleasant. If I were transported back a century or two, I could probably make a go of it." She grinned suddenly, adding, "Except I'd miss the Red Sox, of course. Or maybe not, the way they play half the time. Point is, I like knowing how to make dyes, pottery, how to weave, make dress patterns, grow vegetables, cook on an open hearth."
"Your aunt taught you?"
"Hannah? No way. She says only someone who grew up with permanent-press sheets would want to learn how to tat. I don't romanticize the past. I just think some of these lost skills help connect us with previous generations, make us more confident, less mystified by a handwoven place mat."
He smiled. "I don't know if I've ever been mystified by a place mat."
"Well, you know what I mean. There's something—I can't explain it, but I love getting a beautiful red dye from plants that grow in the marsh outside my door, knowing how to do it. Besides, it's fun."
"Right."
She laughed, even as that long, southern i rolled up her spine. "You don't get it, do you? Well, neither do my brothers. They think I should have gone to law school."
Her laughter faded, and when he said nothing, she became aware of the stillness of her surroundings. No radio, no television, no cars, not even much in the way of birds and sea. The gray, drizzly weather contributed to a heightened sense of intimacy, as if the fog and rain had enveloped them in their own world, separate from the rest of Frye's Cove.
Piper shook off the feeling. She'd been spending too much time with Hannah. "Thanks for the feeders. Hannah will be relieved to know her hummingbirds are being taken care of."
"You two are quick on your feet, I'll give you that much."
"Are you suggesting—"
He held up a hand. "I'm not here to argue. If you and your aunt want to pretend you were on my property to look after hummingbirds, you go right ahead."
"We're not pretending anything."
"Ah-huh."
They weren't. They simply hadn't explained everything. She and Hannah both cared about the fate of the hummingbirds that had come to rely on feeders at the Frye house. That just had nothing to do with why they'd been there.
Which Clate obviously knew.
Instead of further dancing around the truth, Piper kept her mouth shut. Clate made no effort to pretend he wasn't studying her and her studio. She fingered a dried rosebud, trying to look as if she didn't care if he scrutinized her all night. And, damn it, she didn't, because not in a million years of scrutinizing her would he guess that she was thinking about how she was going to dig under his wisteria and satisfy Hannah there was no treasure buried there.