"Just to warn you," he said, "there's no working plumbing in the house."
Marley stopped on the first step. "Then, uh, how do you bathe, et cetera?" It was the et cetera that really worried her. She didn't hang with the idea of peeing behind a bush. Flush toilets were her friend. That alone was worth three hundred bucks a night back at the hotel.
"I turned the old kitchen into a bathroom because it was the easiest way to manage it without digging under the foundation of the main house. You'll have to share it with me." He took her suitcase from her slack hand and moved up the stairs to open the front door. "And it's out the back door and across the garden, so you won't be able to dash to the bathroom naked. Unless you really want to. I don't mind."
"Despite my secret yearnings to be a nudist colonist, I think I'll be fine." She rolled her eyes. "Hey, you know what I've been wondering?"
He raised an eyebrow. "I can't even imagine."
"Why is the front door on the second floor? I mean, you have this big dramatic staircase that essentially leads to the second floor, which is really the first floor because you have all first-floor stuff on it, so what's really on the first floor since you're not using it like a first floor?" Okay, that made no sense. Marley stopped in the foyer and clamped her lips shut.
"When the house was built in 1777, the ground-level floor was used for storage only, in case the river flooded. Water could pass through the bottom floor and not damage the structure of the house or the furnishings. Later it was turned into the rooms I have now—the music room, a living area, a weight room."
"You have a weight room?" Something about the image of Damien sweating with his shirt off did strange things to her insides.
"Yes. Feel free to use it."
Marley snorted. "Do I look like I work out?" And even if she did, she would not do it in front of Damien. "But how do you work out without electricity?"
"I open the gallery doors. It lets plenty of light in."
They were still standing in the foyer, and Marley realized Damien was patiently waiting for her to stop gawking at the chandelier and stop touching random candlesticks and the mirror over the nineteenth-century table. "Sorry. Just smack my hand if I touch something I shouldn't."
"You can touch anything you want. I don't believe the past should be carefully preserved as if the world has never moved forward. If I cared enough to take the time and spend the money, I would shock the purists and make this house a home by mixing antiques with comfortable contemporary furnishings."
"You should. You could move back in." Marley thought it would be an amazing thing to do, to restore the house to its former glory by appreciating the past while living in the present, and carefully blending the two.
"I don't think it would be worth the effort. Now let me take you upstairs to the second floor where the bedrooms are."
"You mean the third floor." Marley followed Damien up the stairs.
"If you want to be that precise, sure. But my family has always called it the second floor. The floor with the bedrooms. Where you'll be sleeping."
She was not going to read anything into the way he phrased that. Glancing into the first room on her right, Marley was intrigued by the white shroud around the bed and the simplicity of the furnishings. It was less ornate than the room she had stayed in. "Can I have this room?" It would be embarrassing to walk into the room she'd been in the other night with Damien. The poor man might have flashbacks of her thighs rolling around.
"If you want. But I should tell you this was the mourning room."
Marley stopped just inside the doorway. She glanced at the cross on the dresser. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, this is where dead bodies were laid out on the bed for mourning before burial."
No thanks. A shiver rippled up her back. "Never mind. I'm sure you have another room I could use, right?"
"How about the one you were in the other night?"
"Alright." Damn it.
When they walked in, Marley tried not to blush. Instead, she threw her purse on the dresser and said, "Thanks for showing me around. I shouldn't keep you. Have a good night."
He frowned. "Let me show you the bathroom. And the refrigerator is in the garçonnier."
"Oh, I'm sure I can find everything."
"No, let me just give you a quick tour. I don't want you to feel uncomfortable."
She'd feel more comfortable if he'd leave her the hell alone, but Marley put on a smile and followed him down the stairs and out the back door. "What's a garçonnier?"
"It's the sleeping quarters for teenage boys, traditionally. Once a son turned fourteen he moved out of the big house, even though he took all his meals with the family."
"Why did he get his own place?" Marley twisted her ankle on the gravel path and swore under her breath.
"To allow him to experience independence and to grow into manhood. Which I think means, in essence, allowing him freedom out from under the watchful eye of his mother to grow into manhood with the servant and slave girls."
Of course. It always came down to the penis. "Or maybe it had something to do with the mother wanting his stinky feet out of the house. Have you ever smelled a fourteen-year-old boy? It's not a pretty thing."
Damien laughed. "Maybe. But I live here now and hopefully I don't smell." He opened the door to a white square building with a porch, fifty feet from the pigeonnier. "This is where I sleep, and I have a small kitchenette in here, I don't really cook much so it's not extensive."
The building was small, though bigger than the pigeonnier, and it was decorated in a similar eclectic way, with a modern tubular bed and ornate, gilded portraits on the wall. The refrigerator was stainless steel and stood directly across from an antique mahogany armoire.
It struck Marley that if Damien had redone the kitchen as a bathroom, the pigeonnier as his office, and the garçonnier as his bedroom, he was avoiding living in the big house. It almost seemed like it would have been easier to convert the whole bottom floor of the big house into an apartment for him, instead of his hodgepodge of random buildings.
"I'm sorry everything is so inconvenient," Damien said. "Maybe you should stay in here and I'll sleep in the big house."
Sleep on his sheets? Stare at his clothes hanging in the armoire? That was a seriously bad idea. "No, you don't have to do that. It's fine. I like the big house."