Laura roamed through the corridors of Stonecross, purposefully getting lost in an attempt to calm her mind and return herself to a state of reason. The rest of the house seemed perfectly normal—that was to say, a complete ruin, the way she had left it before her expedition downstairs. Though the kitchen was a little worse for wear after Laura added her own personal touch to the detritus when she dropped the tray of dishes to the floor. Now there were shards everywhere, and some of them happened to be pieces of Laura’s own mind. She had never felt crazy before, not during any of her séances. Not even on the Front, when her hands and gown were drenched in the bloody gore of some poor boy’s insides. She had always been calm, utterly detached, until she went to sleep at night, and the dreams came to lay their horrible hands on her.
Now, it was the opposite. At night, her dreams were sweet, sensual—heavenly. Stonecross was still a part of them, but the war was not. The trouble was, when she woke, the visions went on. And she didn’t understand where they were coming from. She had seen ghosts before, it was true. But these ghosts were different. The kitchen women weren’t sad spirits straying into Laura’s realm, reaching out to her with beseeching hands. They were complete beings, busy living their lives, completely unaware that anything more than moderately unusual was happening. Except for the little one. Tess. Though she played the part of the frazzled underling before her superiors, she had looked at Laura with such wise and knowing eyes. She looked at her and knew she didn’t belong. Not in Tess’s world. And perhaps not in her own.
And it was true; she didn’t belong in her time anymore. It had been destroyed. Laura and every member of her generation were orphans in time. Part of the reason she longed for Stonecross so much was because of the visions it had shown her of another time and place, a gracious, opulent era that dazzled her senses. Perhaps some part of her believed that living there would bring that feeling into her life. With enough money, she could restore Stonecross to its former time and glory, and then live as a guest in the mausoleum she had made. No doubt her psychic sensitivities had been amplified by actually being in the house, and somehow she was seeing more than she usually was able to see when in contact with the dead. After all, Stonecross belonged to them. From inside of it, she was able to see into their lives, to the point where she had been half-convinced the morning before that Alaric Storm himself had being trying to open the front door for her.
And then she had seen him in the mirror.
And then, had somehow lured him, bodiless, into her bed.
But was it his ghost she had seen and felt, or was it something else altogether, something outside of her experience? Her mind reeled, turning over and in on itself, until she felt seasick. She raked her hand through her unruly hair, which hadn’t seen the business end of a brush since the night before and badly wanted a wash and set.
She had paced all the way through the third and fourth floors, and the glint of a dressing-table mirror in one of the bedrooms brought her up short as she walked by. She stood and stared at herself, eyes widening. She started to laugh, throwing back her head and leaning against the door frame.
She looked like an utter and complete harpy. No wonder Tess and her colleagues had given Laura strange looks. It wasn’t only that she was barely dressed; she looked like a hurricane had carried her off during the night. Her hair was a tangle of whorls and ringlets, standing straight up on her head in places. Her eyes were rimmed in shadow, thanks to her failure to wash her face properly before going to bed. Her lipstick had stained her lips in a fairly pleasing manner, but she didn’t think the staff of Stonecross in whichever era Tess lived were used to ladies who wore cosmetics. Laura had little doubt that she had resembled, to their shrewd eyes, someone approaching the status of a streetwalker, or an equally disreputable woman of the stage.
Her mind strayed to the activities in which she had been engaged during her sleep, and she blushed, though there was no one watching, and no one who knew the things she had dreamed. Or about whom she dreamed them. It was just like her, to dream about a dead man with desire. Laura laughed again, and shrugged defiantly, as if in answer to some invisible detractor. She had long been ravaged by ghosts. Perhaps it was time she was ravished by one. She replayed every delicious sensation her unseen lover had teased from her skin. The silken heat of his mouth in such thrilling contrast with the rasp of his jawline. The memory of the way he had clasped and caressed her gave Laura gooseflesh, as though he was with her now, about to touch her again. She imagined him kissing her, his tongue teasing the sensitive seam of her lips until they opened like the heart of a rose. Laura could almost taste his breath, laced with cinnamon and fine whiskey …
She gasped, and shook her head. She was becoming brain-addled again. She would come to her senses once she had freshened up. It was, after all, her own room she had stopped at without realizing it. It was more than time she tidied herself and got dressed, in case she startled an unsuspecting ghostly chambermaid. Though whatever clothing she chose was sure to raise a Victorian eyebrow or two, at least she would have decently combed hair and a scrubbed face.
She didn’t realize straightaway that anything was different about the room when she entered it. If she registered the oddly pleasant tingle that crept over her bare skin as she crossed the threshold, Laura was too distracted to blame it on anything more paranormal than a chilly draft. She walked over to the washstand, upon which stood a very convenient ewer of water, and splashed some water into the basin. She leaned over and began scrubbing her face with the bracing liquid, and had begun to pat it dry with a fresh flannel before she understood what had happened.
She hadn’t brought any water up to her room. She was going to get some when she went down to the kitchen for breakfast, but then she had fled before she could.
Laura looked into the mirror in front of her, and saw that it was not in the least marred by the years it had sat unused. It shone as brightly as if it had only been polished an hour before. She stared into her own wide eyes, her face stripped clean and pink, her freckles showing like they had when she was a schoolgirl and had yet to apply her very first dusting of powder.
Behind her, the bedroom in which she had slept had taken on the aspect of a previous incarnation. The wallpaper was fresh and bright, the carpet free of the destruction moths would wreak in decades to come. The windows sparkled where they peeked through the beautifully arranged drapes, open just enough so that a single shaft of light illumined the bed. It was made up in the same linens and spread beneath which Laura had dreamed the night before.
Beneath which, in Laura’s place, there now slept a man.
Alaric. It could be no other.
Laura’s breath caught in her throat. Her heart began a painful timpani—it felt like an animal scrabbling to get out. She swallowed it back down and crept across the carpet to the bed, her bare toes curling in anticipation. She touched the bed with the tips of her fingers, trailing them over the lush blue brocade that felt fully solid beneath her hand. The man beneath it stirred, and her heart leapt back into her mouth, but he didn’t wake. He lay on his back with one long arm flung out and the other cradled behind his head, the smooth muscles flowing into a rippling expanse of shoulder.
This was the man who had set her dreams on fire. She felt as though she had already memorized him, as if she had been born knowing his face.
Laura leaned closer, drinking in every inch of him with her eyes.
The delicious curve of his lower lip had softened in his sleep amidst the gleaming copper stubble that stippled his jaw, and Laura longed to trace it with her tongue, marking his lips as hers. The prominent nose with its aquiline contour. The fan of golden eyelashes glinting like feathers of gold. Tousled auburn hair clung to his brow, curling down the length of his long, taut neck. His skin was warmly hued, not like the skin of most red-haired people she knew. It was like living bronze, only paler, minutely freckled. Only a lover could ever have seen the texture of the golden hair that grew over his forearms and dusted his finely molded chest.
Jealousy washed over her in a seething wave as she wondered how many women had seen him in a similar state of undress. She wanted to erase every trace of them from his golden skin. It had been marked enough already. She could see that he truly had been a soldier. Scars hatched his flesh in random places, all of them faded nearly back to the same shade as his skin. None of them marred him in her eyes, however. Each faded wound only served to deepen the affinity she felt for him.
Affinity.
What a perfect word. It described what she felt for him and what she felt for Stonecross so succinctly, she need never use another.
She reached out reflexively to brush the hair from his brow, but she couldn’t touch him. It was as if she was made of water. Her hand seemed to part around him, or go through him. She couldn’t tell which. Tentatively, she placed her hand upon the counterpane where it covered his abdomen, her touch light as air. She could feel the shape of him, but she knew that if she pressed too hard, her hand would simply slip through him, though she had a feeling the bedclothes would remain solid. She remembered back to the moment when Tess had laid the laden tray in her hands. For a moment, their fingers had touched, and it felt so peculiar. Perhaps they hadn’t touched at all. Perhaps they had simply intersected, like random shafts of light.
Laura touched her fingers to her cheek. She had washed her face in Alaric’s basin, and dried it with the towel she had found there, no doubt laid out for him by one of the chambermaids. When the apparition faded, would she find her skin as badly in need of a good scrub as it had been before? What were the rules to the things that were happening? Clearly, she could touch anything inanimate—anything that could still exist in her own realm as well as his. If she pressed too hard when touching him, would her hand grasp right through his flesh to catch hold of his eternal bone? For surely his skeleton must rest somewhere. That part of him was still with her in her own world, whereas no part of her could be with him where he was. So how could she even be standing here? It was all too impossible. She didn’t understand it.
At that moment, Alaric opened his eyes.
Laura’s own eyes widened at the sight of them, heavy-lidded with sleep. They were beautiful, like smooth cabochons of Baltic amber blinking in the single beam of light. Laura couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. Not even when he smiled with infinite sweetness, clearly able to see her, and reached out to take her wrist in his hand. She sensed only an oddly thrilling pressure that made her feel as though her bones were melting. He was reaching right into the core of her, and setting it on fire. Laura was no longer flesh and blood, but a torch, burning.
“Hello, Ghost Girl,” he said, his voice more than the murmur she had deciphered in the dark the night before. It was low and deep, hoarse with sleep and last night’s whiskey. She felt it in the stem of her spine. It climbed up her back until she could feel it stroke her neck, as tactile as his fingers against her skin were not.
“Am I dreaming again?” he said, when she didn’t reply.
Laura opened her mouth to speak, but couldn’t make a sound. She shook her head, and then tried harder. “I don’t think so. Unless I am, too.”
He smiled again, and she wasn’t certain he believed her. He sat up, pulling her toward him. And she went, though she didn’t think he could really have coerced her if she didn’t want to go to him.
As if she ever wouldn’t. At this point, he could lead her off of the cliff over which Stonecross was perched, and she would barely hesitate before composing her body into her very best swan dive. It was a strange thought, and she shivered, pulling away from him slightly. Her mind was turning wild again—dangerous. Laura had had such thoughts before, but she had always managed to turn them back. Many of the girls who worked on the Front felt that way at one time or another. War did things to women, things it didn’t do to men. The genders seemed to suffer in separate hells. She wondered if she wasn’t a touch mad beneath her seeming composure. She had never thought so before, but coming to Stonecross was changing everything she thought she knew. Now, she knew nothing—and felt everything.
Laura looked at Alaric’s hand holding fast to her forearm. It looked strange, like he really was holding on to something inside of her. To some part of her more real than anything she could see.
He looked at the place where they touched, too, his face taking on an expression of bemused disbelief. “Are you certain we’re not dreaming?” he said.
“I’m not certain of anything, Mr. Storm,” she said as lightly as she could.
His eyes widened. “You do know my name. I thought I had dreamed that, at the very least. Does that mean that your name really is Laura?”
She nodded. “It is. Laura Dearborn. Can you … feel me?” She tugged her arm slightly, and his hand seemed to slide through her, until he held nothing but empty air.
“I feel … something. Like … a sort of vibration that feels solid until I press past it, as if you are made up of molecules that move only just fast enough to make you seem real. I’ve read of such things.” He looked at her almost sternly. “Are you real?”
“Yes. As real as you are,” she said, laughing shakily. She trembled all over. She felt cold in her extremities. She didn’t quite feel as certain as she sounded. “I’m just not … where you are. Or rather, when. At least, that’s what I think.”
His brow furrowed, his amber eyes darkening. “This is extremely odd. I wonder if I might still be asleep.”
Laura came closer, pressing her thighs against the bed. She reached out to trace his cheekbone lightly. She could feel nothing more than the vibration he spoke of. “Do you wish to wake up?” she asked in a tremulous voice. “For me to go away, and leave you in peace?”
In wordless answer, he closed his eyes, and attempted to press his cheek against her palm. He turned his face, nestling his lips against her palm in a slow, searing kiss she wanted very badly to be able to feel. He reached for her and gathered her essence up, gently urging her to climb up on the bed.
She did as he wanted, straddling him cautiously. The crumpled yellow silk slip she still wore rode up over her pale thighs, and his eyes caressed the curves of her body the way his hands could not. All he need do was look at her, and she was naked before him, stripped utterly bare. Not physically, though that would be wonderful. It was a different sort of nakedness, one she had never shared with any of the men who had been her lovers. She could barely remember them now, here with him. He made every single man she had ever known slide from her memory like darkness from the light of day.
She placed her hands lightly on his shoulders, careful not to put any more pressure on him than she had to. Though it looked as though she was really touching him, it was a pretty illusion, one she would take in place of the real thing if she must. She had no other choice. When his hands grazed the lengths of her naked thighs, she leaned forward, as though to nuzzle his neck.
She could smell him.
The rich musk of his sleep-heated skin rose to her nostrils beneath the scent of his soap, like bergamot and oakmoss, and a hint of the lavender that kept his linens sweet. She recognized it as the scent that clung to the sheets she slept in the night before, as though Alaric had only just risen from her bed. Or had just slid into it. She had experienced that before, in dealing with spirits. They often left spectral scents behind to enchant the living into a false state of connection.
But the man whose scent enthralled her now was no specter. No more than she.
Laura closed her eyes as his hands continued their exploration, sliding over her hips and up her back. She was imagining the dream she’d had the night before, when he was bodiless but tactile. A vision conjured purely from her own mind. The mind was so much more powerful than the body. She could almost believe that the things he had done to her in her sleep were real, even though it was clear to her now that they couldn’t touch each other. She had felt him, though. So completely. She had almost been convinced that he had felt her, too, from within the great yawning chasm of Time that had somehow closed for a moment, sealing them inside a temporal bubble, together but apart.
As if reading her mind, Alaric murmured, “It seemed so real last night.”
She leaned back, breaking his hold on her. She felt his hands ripple through her as though she was indeed made of water. “Last night? You mean, you were … with me?”
Alaric flushed crimson, squeezing his eyes shut like a chastened schoolboy caught dipping his sweetheart’s pigtails in an inkwell. “I … was imagining you,” he said, smiling guiltily. “While I was … alone.”
She felt heat rush over her like wildfire.
He had been thinking about her in an intimate way, and the potency of his thoughts had somehow awakened a response in her subconscious mind.
“What time was that?” she asked, just to be sure.
“About midnight,” he said. “After something very bizarre happened in my dressing table mirror that I don’t like to mention. You will think me mad.”
Laura nodded, blushing madly. “I was there. That was … a game I was playing, that a silly girl taught me when I was young. Are you telling me it was real for you, too?”
“It was the strangest thing I’ve ever experienced,” Alaric told her. “My face changed in the mirror. It melted into yours. I thought I was imagining it. I thought you were a fantasy. And that was why I … continued. Fantasizing.”
Laura laughed, covering her face with her hands. Alaric tried to pull them away, and she let them slip down until she was looking him in the face again. “After that, I fell asleep at about midnight. Like you, I was alone. And then, suddenly, I wasn’t. You were there with me. Touching me. Like a lover.”
He stared at her, shocked into silence. In his eyes, Laura could almost see every touch and caress he had lavished her with replaying in his mind. He groaned, and raked his hands over his face. “God, what you must think of me!”
“Alaric, you did nothing I didn’t want you to. I’m no shrinking violet.” She made an ironic gesture at the tableau their bodies had made on the bed. “As you may have guessed by now.”
“I didn’t know that you were … real. Unless I have finally gone mad, and this is yet another figment of my addled brain.”
Laura traced the outline of a particularly brutal scar, a reminder of the things that had tormented him. Though he couldn’t see them, Laura had scars of her own. “I understand that feeling,” she said softly.
He shook his head. “You cannot. No woman can.”
“Perhaps not in your time,” she said. “Though I think Miss Nightingale would disagree. I assure you, Mr. Storm—many of the women of my generation understand your pain all too well.”
He studied her with deepening interest, and something like respect, as though she had confirmed something he had suspected. “Will you tell me about it?”
“Sometime, if you like,” she said lightly, grazing his chest with her fingernails. Though he couldn’t feel them, his flesh quivered, rippling beneath her hands. “Although I can think of much more diverting pastimes.”
His mouth twitched into a smile. “Pastimes that would only drive us mad, as we cannot feel their effects.”
“We did last night,” Laura said.
“Yes, but how?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. It must have been a psychic connection that had nothing to do with … whatever is happening now.”
“That sounds shockingly like Spiritualistic claptrap. Table turning, and I don’t know what nonsense.”
Laura raised an imperious eyebrow and gave him a sound thump on the chest. A blow that went right through him, though he gasped, laughing. “It isn’t claptrap. I happen to be a psychic medium. Which is no doubt how all of this is even possible. So mind your manners, sir.”
He raised his hands in mock surrender. “My lady, I do apologize.”
“I am not a lady.”
His eyes raked over her, sending a delicious tremor through her gossamer form. “So I see. And I am heartily glad. Ladies are not generally my favorite species.”
She dropped her eyes, looking up at him through her lashes. “Do you have one of your own?” she asked softly. “A lady, I mean.”
He flushed again, and opened his mouth to speak.
Just then, there was a smart, albeit diffident, knock at the door. Laura’s heart gave a great leap, and she sprang from the bed just as the door swung open, her knees and elbows raking through his chest and thighs as if he wasn’t there. She dove for the curtains just in time.