No Strings Attached [NOOK Book]

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Her heart pounding, her throat taut, hands shaking with wild excitement swiftly replacing the total disbelief she'd experienced over the last ten minutes, Holly O'Mara could scarcely force her voice to work. Only the need to share this with someone had sent her rushing ashore to her cell phone. "Lily," she asked the moment her sister picked up on the other end, "if you could have anything you wanted, other than world peace, what would it be?"

Dead silence met Holly's question. For a minute, what with the crackling on her phone, she thought maybe her sister hadn't heard her. She paced along the beach hoping for better transmission.

"Um, why not world peace?" Lily asked as if waiting for the punch line.

"Nope, sorry, can't be done. I already asked."

"What are you talking about?"

"Listen, I know you're not going to believe this, but I just found a genie in a jerry-can."

For several seconds there was the faint, frying-bacon sound of interference in the air-waves, then: "You found a what? Where?"

"I found a genie in a jerry-can."

"What's a jerry-can?"

"You know. One of those red plastic cans people keep gas in? For their boats or cars or lawnmowers or whatever?"

"No. I don't know, but I'll take your word for it. About that, anyway," Lily added, meaning, Holly knew, she was not taking her word about the genie.

Didn't matter. She hadn't expected to convince Lily in one shot, but she'd had to tell someone and her other sister hadn't answered her phone.

"I almost missed him," she went on, "because I was so busy keeping an eye out for the sea serpent but Walter insisted I investigate the can and..." Holly let her words trailoff. Okay, it did sound bizarre, but that's the way it had happened.

Again, silence reigned before Lily said, "You're absolutely right. I don't believe you. You've had too much sun."

"The sun's barely up, and it's true! He's wear--"

Lily cut into Holly's words. "Holly, please! You need to come home right now! All that isolation is clearly making you crazy. I bet you've been forgetting to eat properly and you've been drinking too many tisanes or whatever infusions you make out of your weird, wild plants. Either that or you've gotten into a patch of magic mushrooms."

"It's June! Mushrooms grow in the fall.

"Don't change the subject. Have you?" Lily demanded suspiciously.

"What, been drinking tea or munching mushrooms?"Either. Both. Whatever it is, it's given you a strange dream."

"If this was a dream, for sure it would qualify as strange--even creative. Only it's not, Lily. It's real. I'm standing here in broad daylight looking at a genie."

"No, you're not." Lily was very matter-of-fact. As a registered nurse, she'd long practiced that tone with her patients. She'd spent most of her thirty-two years practicing it on her two physically identical sisters. They might be triplets, but their personalities were all their own.

"You're hallucinating," pragmatic Lily went on. "For one thing, a genie, if there were such a thing, would come in a lamp or fancy, gem studded bottle, not a gas can."

"My genie lives in a jerry-can because his bejeweled bottle got broken when it bashed up on the rocks in a heavy storm. He had exactly thirty minutes to find an adequate container, or he'd have gone poof! into genie history. The can was the best of several bad options. He told me so."

"Yeah. Sure." Lily paused, breathing slowly but audibly, then said, "Look, Holly, let's get serious here. You found a jerry-can on the beach, right? I know you. You can't resist any kind of flotsam or jetsam. Remember all the junk you used to drag home because you thought you could turn it into furniture for your Barbie house?"

"I was eight years old!"

"And, of course, you've progressed a lot since then."

Holly recognized sisterly sarcasm when she heard it and treated it with all the respect it deserved. She blew a raspberry.

"Okay," Lily continued, her tone soothing, "so you opened the jerry-can, got a whiff of gas fumes, and it's gone to your head. Put the lid back on the can, take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Keep doing that until you feel better."

"Nothing's gone to my head. The jerry-can doesn't smell at all like gas. It smells sort of like, well, like Uncle Charlie."

That raised a hoot of derision. "Uncle Charlie smelled of his disgusting hair grease and a stinky old pipe."

"That was not 'hair grease'. It was an exotic pomade he had created for him by an expert in Alexandria, and his tobacco was a special blend of aromatic Arabic leaves. I loved it--and him."

"Of course. He was a dingbat."

"He was not!"

"For heaven's sake! He thought he was Lawrence of Arabia incarnate! Too bad he couldn't maintain his seat on a horse. That detracted just a tad from his affectation, wouldn't you say?"

"Well, maybe, but you loved him, too." All three girls had. He'd been their father's uncle, and the main male influence in their lives. He'd never forgiven his nephew for abandoning his wife and babies. He'd seen it as his family responsibility to take up the slack. Which he had done with a vengeance. He was determined that his brother's granddaughters would never forget they were members of the great O'Mara tribe.

"Yes, naturally," Lily sighed. "I adored him too. We're a very loving family, which is why I'm still having this insane conversation with you when I should be getting my sons up, fed, and off to day-care so I can get to work. So, I suggest you take that jerry-can and fling it as hard as you can into the outgoing tide and wave it a fond good-bye. And lay off those weird concoctions you make."

"I do not make 'weird' concoctions."

"Then it has to be the jerry-can. I'm telling you, get rid of it and its supposed inhabitant. And come home."

"I sublet my apartment for the next three months, remember?"

"You can stay with us. It'll give me a better chance to find you a nice man to settle down with."

"Oh, sure. Right. Like that last one you found for me."

"You're simply too picky. What was wrong with him?"

"I don't like lawyers. I was married to one once, remember."

"Al's actions don't reflect on the whole profession."

"Maybe not," Holly conceded, "but lawyers are too, well ... practical for me. They have no spirit of adventure. No imagination. Everything's cut-and-dried, black-and-white, right-or-wrong, and they all think they're the only ones who can possibly be right. They're as left-brained as ... as accountants! And that one you fixed me up with last month had buck teeth, a receding chin, and an ego bigger than a super-tanker."

"He wasn't that bad."

"That's what you think."

"Well, okay, I have to admit he wasn't exactly God's gift, but you'd been without a date for six months, Holly, and I thought it was time."

So had Holly, which was why she'd agreed to date the dork.

She didn't say so, of course, but instead went on the offensive. "And what about you? You've been widowed for nearly five years and have had maybe two dates in all that time."

"I have my kids. I'm not alone." Lily puffed out an audible breath of air, giving Holly a picture of the left side of her sister's dark, curly bangs flying up and away from her bright blue eyes. "All I want is for you to be happy."

"I'm happy," Holly said. This was an old, tired argument and not one she wanted to get into.

Lily laughed. "Sure you are. That's why you have these weird fantasies about genies and things."

"This is no fantasy! Dammit, he flies. On a magic carpet. He nearly scared the liver out of me when he came rushing out of that can. He even scared Walter, and you know how laid-back he is."

"Hmm..." For a moment, Holly thought her sister might just begin to believe. She had much greater faith in Walter, Holly's Siamese cat, than she did in Holly herself. But, no such luck.

"Walter must have been reacting to the gas fumes or to your quirky emotional state, but trust me, he's far too sensible to think he saw a genie."

"Dammit, he did! I did. I do. I am. I--" She broke off as the sound of chopper blades came whop-whop-whopping over the headland. "Quick!" she said. "Back in the can!" The genie and his carpet schlooped into the can as if there were a vacuum inside just as the helicopter clattered into view, flying low.

"What was that all about?"

Shouting over the noise of the rotors, Holly explained. "I don't want anyone to see him!"

"I'll just bet you don't." Lily sounded resigned as well as amused. "Now come on, Hol. Joke's over. I'm not dropping everything and dashing up there to the backside of nowhere to visit you, whatever kind of hoax you try to pull to get me there. I told you I'd bring the kids up for a couple of weeks later on in the summer."

Holly hated being so transparent, but she'd really hoped the genie would be enough temptation to jolt Lil out of her rut. "Dammit, I was going to give you one of my three wishes!"

"So generous of you! But he's your genie, and they're your wishes, so why don't you make one them for the stud-muffin of the century?"

"For you?"

"No, idiot, for you!"

"If I wanted a 'stud-muffin', I'd go and find my own, not rely on you or a genie to provide him. Why do you think I'm still single four years after my divorce?"

"Lack of trying?"

"You," Holly said, "are a snot, and I have to go now. Ted's knocking and he sounds impatient."

"Who's Ted?" The mere mention of a male name obviously perked up Lily and piqued her interest. "Your landlord? A neighbor? Is he young? Single? Interesting? Interested?"

"Ted's the genie."

Lily's laughter rang out. "Dear Brainless One, now I know you've lost it! Genies have names like Mohammed Muktar or Abduhl Abulbul Ababa. They do not have names like 'Ted.'"

"Suit yourself," Holly retorted. "When you find a genie, you can call him anything he wants you to. But mine has asked me to call him Ted and--all right, all right! I'm coming!" She said a quick good-bye and disconnected.

Luke Nathan impatiently shoved back the large leather executive chair in what had once been his grandfather's office on the third floor of the tower at the corner of the old family home. Damn the woman's hide anyway! She spelled death to concentration. He stood at the window, scanning the bay below for a glimpse of her.

Nothing! He stepped outside and climbed the narrow flight of stairs spiraling around the tower to the topmost level that jutted up above the steep-pitched, cedar shake roof of the house. Above a waist-high parapet, the top of the tower was glassed in all around under an octagonal roof. On a clear morning such as this, he could see the white cone of Mount Baker in Washington State, the snow-capped mountains of Vancouver Island floating above a fog-bank lying somewhere in the middle of Georgia Strait, and Texada Island guarding the entrance to Malaspina Strait. Merry Island light winked at him four times a minute.

He picked up his binoculars and swept the lagoon and the waters beyond. However often he reminded himself he didn't have time to waste, with only three months in which to complete his project, the woman in his mother's house on the beach kept intruding. Unwittingly, to be sure, but intruding nonetheless.

He knew his mother didn't think for one minute he'd be able to meet her challenge, but a dare was something he was congenitally unable to pass up. Even if he lost and would, thereafter, be forced to hold his peace on the subject of the unproven anomalies in which she liked to believe, he had to try to prove his contention. He needed evidence indisputable in a cour of law--evidence no one could ignore.

The woman, however, he could and would ignore. He actually made himself believe it and stomped back down the stairs, not having spotted her anywhere within the fine, three-hundred-sixty degree panorama spread below.

Other days, he'd seen her and her cat wandering along the paths that led in and out of the woods on the six acres behind the house, or scouting the tops of the bluffs, always carrying a big basket over one arm and what looked like burlap sacks festooning her shoulders. Periodically, she'd crouch and snip at something growing on the ground, or reach high, clipping leaves and twigs from trees and shrubs. She shoved her mysterious gleanings into the various bags she carried until they were stuffed fat. Once, he'd seen her drive slowly up the switch-back road from the beach, her bright blue Jeep Cherokee lurching from rut to rut. Hours later, she'd returned.

Most of the time, though, she was out of sight, and those were the times she was most troublesome. Where was she? What was she doing? And why was she doing it? The questions plagued him.

After another futile and restless hour viewing a series of blurred, jerky, and undoubtedly spurious images of the Sasquatch, sometimes known as Big Foot, he gave up, strode downstairs and out to the front deck. He'd take one more look with the binoculars he kept on the main floor, see if he could spot the woman and figure out what she was up to. Then maybe he'd be able to settle in to work for the rest of the day.

He didn't need the second set of high-powered binoculars he'd left standing on the broad rail adjacent to the tripod that held the slowly panning video camera. He could see her quite clearly, just angling her boat into the dock, her Siamese cat like a figurehead in the bow.

With visible difficulty, she unloaded a pile of fat, dripping sacks, presumably stuffed with seaweed which, other mornings he'd watched her cutting at low tide along the inside of Goose-Poop Island, a tombola that sheltered the lagoon. At low tide, the lagoon turned into a landlocked pond with boulder-studded sandbars stretching from both ends of the tombola to the shore.

The cat made one graceful leap and landed in a wheelbarrow beside the boat.

Again, the woman hefted the sacks one by one, using her knee to help nudge them up from the dock and into the wheelbarrow. After the first one landed, the cat gave her a pained glance, leaped out and stalked away up the ramp, clearly offended from his triangular face to the tip of his flaglike tail.

Luke chuckled. He liked a cat with attitude.

But he also liked watching the cat's owner in action. The dripping sacks soaked her shorts and her legs beneath them, imparting a wet gleam to her skin.

Finally finished loading the sacks, she set a red jerry-can atop the seaweed, grasped the handles of the wheelbarrow, and started the long walk up the ramp toward the shore. He could almost hear her wet sneakers squishing.

He clenched his teeth as he watched her struggle to push her heavy load up the steep ramp. She looked much too small and frail for such a task. Curiosity as to what she was doing with the stuff gnawed at him as it had since he'd first seen her on his arrival two days before. His mother had said nothing about anyone's occupying the beach house.

Which raised the question, what if she was a squatter?

Thanks to the terrain, the point of land where his house stood, and the lagoon below it, were cut off from other properties along the shore. This provided great privacy--but a lack of security he'd never before considered. The driveway in from the highway started nearly two miles away and no one else used it. The woman would have little chance of being spotted. If she'd heard his mother was to be away, and that neither he nor Sam was in the habit of visiting this house, she might just be gutsy enough to give it a try.

His grandparents had used dead seaweed as fertilizer for their raspberry canes. Was his mother's guest--assuming she was a guest--fertilizing something? Had there ever been a garden at the beach house? He didn't think so but...

Hoo-boy! He recalled the low-flying chopper whose noise had wakened him early. The cops? On one of their regular searches? Or had they been responding to a tip? If she was cultivating an illegal substance, she wouldn't be the first, but she'd sure be the first to do it on his family's property. It wouldn't look good for him if she was.

Brand new Jeep Cherokees didn't come cheap, so the woman had funds.

So much for his decision to ignore her. As an officer of the court, wasn't it his duty to make sure she didn't have thriving young pot plantation soaking up the good of the seaweed and the heat from the sun reflected off the sheer rock face behind the beach?

Of course it was.

He rubbed a hand over his bristly jaw and headed for the bathroom instead of the cliff stairs. As an officer of the court, it was also his duty to appear in public well-groomed and properly clad, even if he was on leave of absence.

Especially with a cute chick on the beach below.

"I," Ted intoned self-importantly when Holly responded again to the banging from within the can, "do not care to be kept incarcerated any longer than I must be, Mistress."

Ted sat tailor-style in the air just outside the shed under which she'd built her drying system. His silk-clad bottom hovered at her shoulder-level as he perched on a brightly colored, fringed carpet predominantly red, deep purple, and kelly green with splashes of pure white. The gentle breeze rippled the fabric of his baggy yellow pants and flipped back one pointed corner of the ornately embroidered vest that barely covered his brown, Buddahlike belly. He wore a matching gold brocade turban from which an amber-colored jewel dangled over his forehead. Both glittered as he tossed his head.

"That ... container is plastic, I hope you realize," he griped. "It's truly a great insult to an entity of my stature who's used to far better things. I do wish you'd hurry up and find me better quarters."

"Give me time." She hauled up a heavy sack and joggled its dripping contents to spill them into the drum.

"You consider your seaweed more important than your genie's accommodations?"

"I did offer you my empty peanut butter jar, didn't I?"

"Bah!" He issued a long-suffering sigh that rippled his translucent shape. "It is your duty to provide me with a decent place to live, Mistress. Either that, or make your wishes known and let me go so someone more understanding will find me and treat me as I am accustomed."

"Which is?"

"Not being ordered peremptorily into a can I would prefer to avoid, Mistress."

"I won't tell you to get back in your can if you'll agree to quit calling me that."

He puffed out an even gustier sigh. "I can't call you anything else, Mistress."

"All right then. In you go." She jerked her chin toward the jerry-can and he rolled his eyes in disgust--or maybe despair--as he and his carpet tapered into a stream narrow enough to enter the opening. Dropping the empty bag, she said, "I'm going inside to put on a pot of coffee. Would you rather be left in the sun or the shade?"

"Left?" came the hollow sounding voice from inside the can. "You can't leave me, Mistress. You must take me with you wherever you go."

"What do you mean, I 'must'? I'm the mist--er--owner, here, aren't I?" Did that explain the strange compulsion she'd experienced earlier this morning when she'd found herself taking the gas can with her on her second collecting trip? Was the damned genie in control of her? The notion was decidedly unsettling. "Don't I get to make the rules?"

For a moment, Ted's turban appeared at the neck of the can, followed by his jewel and his almond-shaped eyes. For the first time, she noticed he had no eyebrows. "No, Mistress," he said, "you do not." Then he disappeared.

When she screwed the cap back on and tried to leave the can in the shade of one of the drying-drums, she found she could not unwrap her fingers from the handle.

"Damn bossy genie," she muttered as she thumped the jerry-can on the counter in the kitchen.

"Watch it! That hurt. You knocked me off my ottoman."

She envisioned him splayed on the bottom of the jerry-can beside a fringed, red brocade ottoman, his round belly and jowly face both quivering with anger, his turban askew and--Oh, heavens! Her imagination was getting wilder by the minute. Maybe Lily was right and she should lay off her new tea blend for a few days to see if Ted would disappear?

She filled the coffee maker and turned it on. No, she decided. Not even she could imagine a genie, new tea blends notwithstanding. Besides, she'd never made a hallucinogenic or toxic tea in her life! She was a highly trained professional with a degree in pharmacology.

Still, corroboration wouldn't hurt.

She snatched up her phone to march outside and call her other sister but found herself forced to grab the jerry-can in her free hand.

"This is ridiculous!" she said, and slammed the can down hard again on the porch railing before she stomped down the steps. She heard no voice from within. Maybe she'd knocked him out. As she made to move away, it was as if a rope around her waist had suddenly gone taut. Try as she might, she could not take one step farther. All she could do was back and up grab the can. Then, she found no difficulty in leaving the vicinity of the house.

With angry motions, she flipped open the phone and jabbed the hot-button to call Rose, her other sister, to beg her to come at once. She definitely needed someone to confirm the genie's existence.

"I should have known Lily would get to her first," Holly grumbled to the cat as she returned to her job. Walter sat nearby washing his ears with one paw. "How could Rosie not believe me? Of all people to call me nuts. At least I don't go around jumping out of airplanes with eighty-year-old men strapped to my belt." Which was what Rose had planned for the day, making it impossible for her to come and see Holly's genie. That much, Holly had gleaned through Rosie's ever-increasing spates of giggles.

Walter looked at her and said, "Awww" with deep and sincere sympathy for the cavalier treatment she'd received at the hands of her sisters.

She stroked his silky head before she firmly clamped closed a freshly filled drum. She gave it several turns by hand to distribute the weed evenly. One more drum--four bags of sodden weed--to go.

"I'm not crazy, am I?" she asked Walter as she grabbed another bag around the middle and staggered to her feet. She should have built the drying system closer to the ground. Maybe she could use one of her wishes to ask for some muscle? Or how about an entire summer's worth of product already collected and processed? Then she could just lie in the sun and play with Walter for the next three months.

Yeah. And succumb to cabin fever in seventy-two hours. "Busy" was her middle name.

She glanced at Ted, who floated just above his jerry-can, overseeing her work, a smug grin on his swarthy face. Walter gazed at the genie, his expression one of rapt adoration. "If I wasn't convinced you see him, too, Walter, I might have doubts. But you do, don't you?"

"Ya-ah," Walter said, without looking away from the genie, then, abruptly, he spun in place, his back arched, tail fluffed, teeth bared. He growled and hissed with unprecedented ferocity, staring at a point somewhere behind Holly.

She whirled, fully expecting a huge, slavering dog, or a bear, or a cougar, or all three. The weight of the sack in her arms sent her off balance. She stumbled, and the man who had startled Walter lunged forward to catch her just as Walter leapt at him, throwing him off stride.

The man tripped, bashed into Holly and her sack, they both went down with a forty-pound bag of wet seaweed squished between them.

"Oof!" she said.

"Oof!" he replied, then followed up with "Well, at least we appear to speak the same language." He flattened his hands on the grass beside Holly's shoulders and lifted his top half off the bag of seaweed. "Are you all right?"

Holly tried to reply, but she had no breath in her lungs. Whether this was due to having a couple of hundred pounds of man on her, his bare legs tangled with hers, his lower body pressed much too intimately to hers, she couldn't say. She couldn't say anything.

She could only look at him.

His slate-gray eyes crinkled at the corners as he gave her a killer smile. Looking almost reluctant, he slid his legs away from hers, slowly, much too slowly, skin gliding over skin, then rolled aside and rose lithely to his feet. Reaching out with one hand, he offered her assistance in getting up.

All Holly wanted to do was pull the sack over her face and slither backward on her bottom until she'd put at least thirty feet between them--or, preferably, the front door of her house.