I ran.
Later, I might be ashamed. I might wonder why I hadn’t forced myself to walk calmly down those halls the same way I’d come. But in those moments pure instinct drove me and it drove me straight to him.
Safety in numbers or looking for a big strapping hero to rescue me? Who knew, but I flew. The honest truth was probably somewhere in between. O’Keefe was warm and alive. And, thank God, right where I’d left him.
I came around the corner of the conservatory doors as if the hounds of hell were nipping at my heels. I ran from a room full of statues and an impossible puddle and the absolute certainty that a week would be too long with the Bride but never long enough with Miles O’Keefe.
I stumbled to a stop when I saw that O’Keefe was sleeping. He lay stretched out on the same settee I’d posed on. Even with a freakish dead woman out stalking the night, the sight of him stunned me.
I wasn’t a portrait artist, but I wished I was. Though I knew stick figures would be the only result, I suddenly longed for charcoal, paper and enough talent to capture this moment forever.
He looked younger…and ageless. His shirt was open down the front and his head was thrown back. He might have been a turn-of-the-century lover in a swoon following coitus. Or he might have fallen asleep waiting and wishing…
I took a step toward him and then another. My heart still pounded from fright and exertion—I had sprinted the whole way—but now my pulse also reacted to him.
Miles.
I could see a pale glimpse of muscular chest and lean stomach. I watched the rise and fall of his breathing for long seconds. His dark lashes fluttered against his sharp cheeks and I knew he dreamed. Of what? Of whom?
“O’Keefe,” I whispered, suddenly afraid it wasn’t me.
I dropped to my knees beside him and at the same time his eyes opened, penny-bright against the pale skin of his angular cheeks.
He sat up and leaned over me. I knew he had to see my panic, the memory of horror reflected on my face.
“It’s happening too quickly,” Miles said, angst and shadows in his throat.
The Bride’s threatening manifestations or our attraction or both? I didn’t know.
“I won’t leave,” I insisted.
“Yes. You will,” he replied. “Tomorrow. It won’t be safe to cross the garden tonight, but tomorrow…you will go.”
He held my face and tilted it up toward his as he proclaimed the plan. I ached at the very idea that I wouldn’t get a full week of that touch, so firm yet so gentle.
“Come with me,” I urged, crazy bold and throwing my yearning for him on the line.
“She would only follow, Samantha. If I stay, she stays.”
“But how? Why? I’ve read the stories. She committed suicide two years after she married Dominick O’Keefe. It was a huge scandal because the rumor was that she’d fallen in love with another man while her husband was in Europe on business.”
“I came to the house ten years ago. O’Keefe was my great-uncle, but the house had been empty for years. I thought it would be the perfect place to work, an escape, but with plenty of room for friends when I got tired of sculpting alone. The stories didn’t scare me away.”
“The statues?”
“I thought I’d been inspired. I’ve never worked so hard and so fast. Then, one of my friends noticed that they were all the same. I didn’t care at first. But my friends quit coming. A few tried to get me to read the news stories about old disappearances and violent murders on the property. One day I woke up with the chisel in my hand. It was worn down and my hands were raw and bloody. I must have been working in a fugue for days. I didn’t order any more marble. I packed a bag and left, but found myself creating the same sculpture in clay wherever I tried to travel. And it wasn’t just me. If it had been, I might have thought of seeking professional help. But people around me, wherever I went, saw her, again and again…so I came back here. I thought if I could keep her away from others and somehow fight…”
“Ten years,” I whispered against his trembling fingers.
I kissed them, one after another. Those beautiful, talented, calloused fingers. How horrible that they weren’t free to create what was in his own heart.
“She’s never been like this. It usually takes her a week or even more to manifest,” Miles said. He leaned his forehead against mine. “But I was taken with you before you even arrived. Fascinated by your strength and spirit. You’d been through hell and come out the other side, better and stronger. God, I think I fell in love with you the day I got your second note. The one that said you weren’t afraid of ghosts.”
“I’m afraid of her now, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to give up,” I said.
I didn’t mean it to sound seductive, but I was on my knees and my lips were on his skin. He took his hand away from my mouth and buried the fingers I’d been kissing in my hair. He gripped me firmly, almost desperately, and held me in place…as if I would have moved away. Then his lips descended to mine in a grateful swoop.
My stubborn refusal to leave him was gasoline on the steady flicker of flame that had already been burning between us. I reached for his arm, not to loosen his hold, but to find purchase myself, because when his tongue slid into my mouth I needed to hold on tight. When my tongue licked and swirled and tasted into the depths of his hot, sweet mouth, I held tighter still. Heated exhilaration threatened to vibrate my cells apart.
I’d been careful and controlled for so long, but a woman had to be brave at Thornleigh, and Miles would have made me bold anywhere on earth.
“I wanted to touch you. This morning. When you were touching me,” I confessed against his lips. I reached up to brush my hands along his gaunt cheeks and into the lush, thick waves of his ever-tousled hair.
He groaned even as he sucked my lower lip hotly between his own before lathing it with his tongue.
“I’ll never recover from this morning. Never. I was in agony. I wanted to taste you, to explore every inch of you with my tongue. To only be able to barely touch you—and even that was out of line. The whole time I was as controlled as I could be, but, still, touching your skin—ever so slightly—was decadent. When I saw what my touch had done to you, I had to…”
“You don’t always…?” I asked, heat flaring in my cheeks.
“No. Of course not. It’s usually a very visual and detached process. But with you…”
“I wanted more,” we both said at the same time.
Miles slid his hands down to my arms and pulled me up while he fell back on the settee. Now, we lay together with me spilled and sprawled over his reclining form. I kissed him again, slowly taking his mouth the way I’d wanted to when I’d first entered this room. He was a lean man with a cut jaw, everywhere straight lines and angles, until you discovered the lush fullness of his sensual lips. Here was his passion and artistry while all else was tight and spare. I licked across the full swell of his lower lip, teasing the tip of my tongue just inside to find sweet moisture. A soft exhale of pleasure was my reward.
He shifted our bodies again while I kissed him, and I found myself straddling his obvious arousal, hard between my legs.
I rocked against him, using my plunging and receding tongue to mimic with our mouths the true fuck I desired. My sleep shorts were blessedly brief and thin, but the long, thick ridge of his erection was bound behind denim.
I made a noise into his mouth that was half pleasurable moan and half disgruntled protest. His hands left me long enough to unzip and loosen. The move was all I needed to encourage me. I rushed my hands down to help free him. It wasn’t graceful. I was shaking and eager and my hands warred with his, fumbling and bumbling, but all I cared about was claiming whatever we had together while we still could.
My shorts came off much easier than his jeans. But not fast enough. We wanted this, he and I, for the same desperate, life-affirming reasons.
I’m more of a craftsman than an artist.
I run. I once designed jewelry. I’ve been known to appreciate a sunset or two from the high peak of a mountain I’ve conquered.
I couldn’t tell you how beautiful Miles O’Keefe was when he was naked between my thighs. Did I say he wasn’t exactly tall, dark and handsome? Well, it was true. He was so much more. He was the thrill of the finish line, the glow of the sunset and the challenge of the mountain all together in masculine form, and when his oh so talented fingers found the bud of my slick clitoris, I cried out. I opened my thighs wide to his touch and the hot shaft of his penis. He didn’t penetrate. He teased. Spreading my labia with his fingers, he thrust his hips so that he would slide and grow slick against me. The calloused pads of his forefinger and thumb plucked and played until I stiffened and clenched and then, only then, did he urge himself up and into my tightened folds. I shuddered my release as he thrust deep inside me. I tried to open to him, but I was tight and pulsing. He rocked against the incredibly snug fit and I came again in a sudden arch of pleasure before the tremors of the first had passed.
I tasted salt this time when I kissed him again and I knew it was sweat, but also tears. When he came, I held him and made promises about forever that I intended to keep.