Chapter Seven

Rain continued for several hours while I sheltered myself in my room. It wasn’t courageous. It wasn’t even necessary because I think Miles was avoiding me. He’d dropped me down at the foot of the stairs and disappeared before I could even wipe the rain from my eyes. I was shaken by my extreme response to his touch and startled by the sudden storm that had interrupted our foreplay. Because that’s what it had been. Without the wind and rain, I would have begged for more right there in the garden, but I don’t think I would have had to beg. I was completely out of practice with this kind of passion, but I was pretty sure I knew what would have come next.

Him. He would have. If I’d had any say in the matter whatsoever.

Nature here at Thornleigh was a bitch.

I was pacing the floor of my room by the time the rain stopped. I wanted to see Miles again, but I was also too keyed up to face his rejection. He could have carried me to his bedroom when the storm hit. He hadn’t. For some reason, he’d dropped me like a hot potato and retreated to his studio instead.

There was really only one course of action open to me if I wasn’t prepared to leave. I dressed for a cold, wet run, hoping that I wasn’t becoming mired in fascination with a madman.

* * *

He had retrieved the ruined sketch pad from the rain. I shouldn’t have invaded his studio uninvited, but everything between us felt so unfinished yet full of potential. I feared our passion. I feared his artistic obsessions, but, most of all, I feared being kept away from him by cowardice.

The open door beckoned me and I went inside. Instead of O’Keefe, I found the soggy sketch pad. It sat on a table not far from the easel he’d used for my first sitting. Water must have dripped from the sketch pad because I had to be careful of the puddles on the floor.

I didn’t know where Miles had gone. Back to the garden to wander its paths…alone?

My restlessness urged me to the table and I tried to look through the pages he’d filled that morning. I expected nothing but smudges of black and gray, but I was pleasantly surprised. Deep, down inside, I tightened and warmed when I saw a glimpse of what he’d seen. My tight-tipped breasts, my hungry eyes—there wasn’t much left on the pages, but what was left was intimate. Me, but translated through his eyes and perceptions.

Not the Mourning Walk woman. Whatever obsession possessed him, I had somehow broken it or he’d broken it for me.

Had that been why he’d retrieved it from the garden? Because even ruined it was evidence of his strength and sanity?

Then I saw the corner of another pad peeking beneath a pile of crumpled pages that had obviously been torn and discarded from between its covers. When I dug it loose and opened it, this pad told a more frightening story.

It was the sketch pad from the first night by the fire and our first session in this very room. I saw myself determined to be whole and beautiful and brave. I saw my muscles and my scars.

But I also saw her.

He had smudged her out again and again, but as I flipped the pages I remembered his frustration and I saw her taking over the session. He had tried to focus on me, but through the course of the pages she began to manifest more and more. The last pages he’d torn out and crumpled. I reached with shaking fingers to unfold a few. The familiar figure of Mourning Walk again and again.

“She haunts me. I can never escape her influence for long.”

I jumped and whirled, guiltily dropping the papers I had no right to peruse.

O’Keefe stood in the doorway with his wet hair and clothes plastered to his skin. He hadn’t waited for the storm to pass. He’d gone back out into the deluge. Even startled, I couldn’t help noticing the way his lean figure showed beneath his white shirt, gone translucent with moisture. I couldn’t help admiring the way his dark dripping hair framed his angular face. I had always convinced myself that I was looking for the lightest of relationships, but it was the dark in Miles that drew me. He wore angst well.

“You are the first person that has ever broken her hold on me. When I’m with you, when I’m drawing you, she almost fades away,” Miles continued.

He came forward, the brown of his eyes shadowed, so wide and haunted in his face.

“Was she your lover?” I asked. Afraid of the answer.

Miles didn’t appreciate the question. He stopped, laughed hoarsely without humor and used his strong hands to push his wet hair back as if he was frustrated beyond measure.

“You know who she is, Samantha. If you would only accept it,” he said.

Was I ready to accept that this man who fascinated me to distraction was haunted by an actual ghost? Or would pretending otherwise help me to make sense of a world that had long ago lost any semblance of rationality?

Miles didn’t give me time to come to a conclusion. He took several strides to my side and took me by the upper arms with his damp hands.

“I have spent so many years doubting my own sanity. I lose days, even weeks at a time, but when I come to myself again I am surrounded by her and I know that the influence preying on my mind is coming from without not from within,” Miles said.

I looked up at his clenched jaw and the ferocity in his eyes, but I couldn’t help feeling the restraint he exercised in his grip on my arms. Was he driven by madness or was he driven mad by an evil entity that stalked the corridors of Thornleigh? In the end, did the why of his nightmare matter? At some point, didn’t I have to worry that his torment would spill over into violence?

“You’re right. I can’t protect you. Not from her and not from whatever I am when she’s influencing me,” Miles said, hoarsely. Ever observant, he must have seen the fear and doubt in my eyes.

He turned away from me and with a sudden, violent move he used both arms to sweep all the scattered sketch pads and loose papers to the floor.

I couldn’t stay. Not when every instinct I possessed was urging me to flee. I thought I heard him call my name, but I was already out the door, my feet carrying me away even as my heart urged me to stay. Then I definitely heard the sound of his easel crashing against the wall, and my heart was silenced by fear.

* * *

The stormy beach was calm in comparison to O’Keefe. I made my way down to the sand as quickly as I could on the rain-slickened stairway. I wouldn’t run toward Mary’s shack and the decaying dolls. I would run in the opposite direction and maybe, just maybe, I could leave the chaos behind.

I ran as far as I could before dark and then I turned around to run back. I had poured it on for my final sprint to the finish as if I was completing my normal routine when I saw her. Far above me, on an outcropping that jutted straight from the gardens, a lone figure stood. She looked out at the waves while her hair and white gown billowed behind her. I came closer and saw her gown was diaphanous and molded wetly to her nude form beneath. When she lifted her arms to place her hands on the slight rounded mound of her stomach, I stutter-stepped to a stop and shock flowed over me as well as dread.

It was her.

The sculpture I’d seen at La Roux. The one so like the sketch O’Keefe had mailed me that even now rested propped on the dresser in my room. The woman he’d sketched again and again and again. The one who had haunted him for years.

I didn’t shout or scream when she lurched and stumbled forward. I did run again as fast as I could to the craggy shore that should have held her broken body. Except, of course, it wasn’t there.

I wasn’t calm. Don’t be fooled by my lack of screaming. I had used up my quota of those on a bloody day I’d like to forget. The level of my upset could be measured by the scrapes on my knees and my broken nails. You see, I fell down to the ground to check the rocks for broken bits of white marble. She had seemed to come from the garden, after all.

The Thornleigh Bride. She had brought me here. Her sculpture created by O’Keefe and displayed in my aunt’s gallery had captured me, heart and soul. Why hadn’t I realized until just this moment that the sculptures in the garden were also the same woman, recreated again and again and again? Not in her peaceful moment before the fall as in all the sketches, but in the moment when gravity claimed her and she began her violent descent.

Only the incoming tide interrupted my search.

Cold saltwater spray foamed around my knees and hands, stinging and startling me back to reality.

* * *

I was damp, sandy and shaking when I made it back to the house. I kept expecting to see her again—every sound, every movement made me jump. I’d had my share of life-changing experiences—I didn’t want another. But I was in the middle of one nonetheless. The edges of my perceptions had broadened to encompass anything that might come at me from the shadows—statues come to life, suicidal apparitions, and a broken and bloody zombie bride shuffling up from the stormy surf.

Oh, yeah.

My nerves were fried.

I needed solid ground beneath my feet and a universe where ghosts stayed on the pages of a book—where they belonged.

What I got was Miles O’Keefe.

My hair had fallen from its clasp somewhere between the Bride’s impossible leap and my insane search for her almost-fifty-year-old corpse in the breaking waves. It hung in wild and wet clumps of curls all around my face. I blamed it for my headlong dash right into O’Keefe’s solid form, but rest assured a big part of the blame lay in the fact that I was looking over my shoulder.

I would have stumbled backward—he was that big and I was moving that fast—but his hands came up to my arms and gripped them to stop me.

“Oh,” I cried out. But I didn’t shriek or start flailing because I instantly recognized his warm touch on my cold skin.

“Samantha,” he said.

Just my name.

And everything stopped.

My flight. My fear. The butterfly-wing beating of my heart.

Hell, the rotation of the planet as far as I was concerned.

All. Stopped.

Because his big, solid body against me and his fingers on my skin and the deep scratchy uttering of my name created a sudden, inevitable cocoon that nothing else could penetrate.

I forgot about looking over my shoulder at what might have followed me from the beach and looked up instead into a pair of coffee-colored eyes so rich, so bottomless, that no mere supernatural encounter could possibly compete.

“O’Keefe…” I began.

But it wasn’t going to be about ghosts or him calling me a cab. It wasn’t going to be about the torment that was his constant companion or my fear that he would one day break. It was going to be about me wrapping my legs around his lean waist and taking him. Here, there, against the wall or on the floor, anywhere so long as it was soon. Very, very soon.

I didn’t get to proposition him, though, because he pulled me closer, hard, knocking the air from my lungs as I impacted his chest. Then he leaned down and took my chilled, open lips with his.

Hot, so hot.

I’d been outside in damp drizzle and ocean spray. I was cool to the bone, even cooler because of my fright.

O’Keefe had changed out of his wet clothes and he’d been in his studio with the space heaters turned up to supersonic. At least that’s what he felt like. I slowly thawed into him while his lips moved over mine and his amazing hands roamed. He molded and shaped my muscled rear with his strong fingers. He lifted my hips until even with our height difference I could cup the heat of his erection with the V between my legs. By the time our tongues twined, I was warmed all the way to my core.

I was out of practice, but I took on the intensity of his hungry kiss as if it was a challenging triathlon I needed to conquer. I licked into his sweet, spicy mouth and, I swear, I almost took control. He moaned around my tongue and his body formed into me. I fully expected to wind up on the floor and I braced for it, but then suddenly he shifted us until the wall was at my back.

And I wasn’t in control. Not at all.

The hot press of his cock found my heat. The full length of his body crushed me to the hard paneling. And all I could do was wrap my arms and my legs around him and hang on.

I’d never been pleasured so thoroughly fully clothed. I writhed against him, too far gone to care that there were clothes in our way. My body didn’t care. I was climbing to the happy place and we were barely acquaintances.

And that’s when fingers of frigid air prickled across my skin.

“No,” I gasped and O’Keefe wrenched back, separating our lips and bodies with a sudden jerk.

I would have fallen if he’d let me go. That was how utterly given over to his embrace my body had become.

“What is it?” I asked.

But I knew. Not a what. A who. A she. The Thornleigh Bride didn’t want O’Keefe and me to kiss. The air in the hall had gone to ice. When I spoke, white puffs accompanied my words.

“You shouldn’t have come. I shouldn’t have asked you here,” O’Keefe said.

He pulled farther back and away and let me slide to my feet. He plunged his hands into his hair to smooth the waves we’d mussed. And, also, I thought, to keep from reaching for me again.

“A week,” I reminded him.

All the stories I’d read about Thornleigh had referenced a one-week grace period of safety before…what? There hadn’t been any specific consequences. Strange disappearances. Crazy tales of narrow escapes. No one should ever stay beyond a week. Period.

“We have several more days,” I insisted, as much to the icy air as to O’Keefe himself.

“I’m not so sure….” O’Keefe replied. He reached out to touch my freezing cheek and his fingers felt even cooler against my skin. “But I won’t ask you to leave. I can’t.”

I wanted to tell him I wouldn’t go even if he did, but I was shivering and my chattering teeth might have made the sentiment sound less firm than it actually was.

“Go to your room and stay there until morning. Things are always…better….in the morning.”

I wanted to ask him to come with me. His fingers hadn’t smoothed the dark waves of his hair. If anything, he was more rumpled than ever. My fingers twitched and I longed to plunge them into those curls to grip and pull him close. I met his eyes and the darkness there stopped me. He might say yes. He would say yes. I could feel myself slipping into the black abyss of those eyes—the hunger. My God, his hunger ran deeper than mine.

And what might come after the icy air if we continued where we’d left off?

I thought about the rain-soaked pad from that morning. The one that had only been filled with me. Those drawings said so much about what was growing between us, but I remembered how the other pad had made me feel. The one where O’Keefe had struggled against the ghost’s influence. Could a dead woman feel jealousy? The very idea chilled me to the bone.