Shadows of the Past

by Frances Housden

  Shaking his head, and looking unsteady on his pins, the older guy tried to follow, but his weight was too much for the rickety table. The overhanging lip he grabbed came down on him as wormy wood sighed under the extra pressure, the leg snapped, toppling the table as it bowed inward, and the oil lamp hit the wall.

  Paraffin dripped down the dank stonework onto the floor, its fumes curling in swirls of blue above flames dancing tall, dancing higher, greedy for photographic paper.

  The dark boundaries of the crypt melted in a flurry of light as it pushed back the walls to expose the once-impressive last resting places of an earlier colonial society. Empty now, they stared out of the walls like hollow eye sockets.

  Franc leaped back from the flames. He had to free Maria.

  Locked in Franc’s arms, Maria’s relief mixed with trembling exhaustion as he hugged her, groaning, “Thank God, you’re free.” He’d been terrified the flames would get them both before he could release her.

  He swung her into his arms just as a keening howl surfaced above the crackle of flames. Through the pall of smoke, the chaplain scrabbled armfuls of photographs off the wall.

  As if she weighed nothing, Franc lifted Maria over the burning table. “Run up the stairs, don’t stop and don’t look back. Jo should have found the entrance by now; tell her to call the fire department.”

  She saw him turn back as her feet hit the foot of the stairs. “Noooo, you have to come with me!”

  “Sorry, hon. I can’t leave him to roast.”

  She couldn’t obey; couldn’t leave him. She took three steps then turned back. It was the stuff of nightmares. The chaplain screamed as the photographs in his arms caught fire, turning him into a human torch. And worse, as Franc tore her crumpling images from his arms the chaplain clasped him in a bear hug.

  Maria couldn’t breathe, couldn’t find the air to carry the scream in her throat, and just as she passed out, huge hands caught her and a voice, Rowan’s voice, said, “Get her outside, Jo.”

  Chapter 18

  When Franc woke, someone was caressing the tips of his bandaged fingers. “Maria?” His throat was dry as a bone from the drugs they’d given him and her name came out in small pieces. Then, turning his head, he saw his sister.

  “Sorry to disappoint you, kiddo, it’s only little old me.”

  He gave her a smile that made his face hurt, his skin felt so tight. “Jeez, that smarts. Feels like I fell asleep on the beach and got me a sunburn.” The top sheet on the hospital bed lay around his waist. It looked as if he’d lost all the hair on his body from the neck down—well, not that far down.

  “You’re lucky it isn’t more than that, there are one or two bad spots on your hands, but the doctors say they will heal without grafts. Hell, Franc, what were you thinking?” Tears welled in her eyes. “God, I wish I could hug you, but since I can’t, I have to scold you. Don’t ever do anything like that again. It just seems like yesterday since we really found each other again. And I can tell you, brother. We were without family for too long, I don’t want to lose you again.”

  “Quit, sis, you’ll have me bawling like a calf needing its ma if you keep that up.” Then he grinned, sheepish like. “Yeah, I’ve discovered family isn’t such a bad thing. And what about the chaplain?”

  “He didn’t make it. He didn’t deserve your help, either. Trying to pull him out was carrying humanity too far.”

  Franc was silent for a minute. He’d always carry the picture of the guy going up in flames, but he wasn’t going to let it make him an emotional cripple. That would mean the bastard had won. With Maria’s family’s help, the guy had almost succeeded in creating a victim last time round, it wouldn’t happen again.

  Franc chased the image out of his mind; there were more important issues at stake. He lifted the sheet between the finger and thumb of the hand his sister hadn’t appropriated to peek under it. “So, what’s the rest of the damage, anything major?”

  Jo shook her head and gurgled with laughter, it was a sweet sound. “You men. Honestly, at a stretch I’d say everything’s working as well as it ever did, depending on how good you are at boasting. And the Jellic men never were modest.”

  “When can I see Maria?” He paused midthought. “She’s okay, isn’t she…you got her out of there?” He watched Jo lick her lips and imagined the worst.

  “She’s fine,” she replied. “Her parents arrived in the wee small hours and took her home.”

  “Damn, they’re not going to do that to her again. I won’t let them.” He went to throw the covers back then remembered his naked state. “Do you mind leaving a minute? I have to get dressed.”

  She threw up her hands as her eyebrows shot skyward. “Into what? Your clothes were singed and that’s putting it mildly. Your shirt disintegrated.”

  “Hell, I don’t care, get me a hospital gown, anything to cover my ass so I can get out of here.” And he didn’t care, he had to get to Maria before Pietro and Rosa swamped her again in a huge wave of concerned parental love.

  Jo’s silence was broken only by the cogs he could see turning inside her head. “Rowan should have a gym bag in the back of my car. Should be some sweats and a T-shirt in it. The T-shirt might drown you, but will be all the better for that. You don’t want anything clinging to your chest.”

  Yes he did.

  He wanted Maria clinging to it and the sooner the better.

  Jo paused in the doorway and for the first time he took in the room and realized she must have paid for a private one. “Wait a minute,” she said. “How are you going to drive?”

  “I don’t care. Call me a cab.”

  “To Matheson’s Bay? No way, I’ll drive you.”

  Maria was packing. She remembered the last time she’d done this, less than two weeks ago with Franc standing watching. It wasn’t the same, she missed him already. How could her parents have bundled her home and left Franc behind in hospital?

  How could she have let them?

  It was no good blaming them, she should have stood up to them, instead, and because of the trauma she’d gone through she’d let the old ways take over. Mamma’s voice saying hush and Papa holding out his arms in the way he’d done when she was little when he’d thought he could solve all her problems and kill all her dragons for her.

  No more. She had to get back to making her own decisions about her life, and if her dreams ever came to fruition, hers and Franc’s lives together.

  He just had to love her.

  All morning she’d imagined him waking up and not finding her beside him. The palpitations she’d been experiencing on and off were nothing to do with last night. Each time she thought of him, her breath thinned, faded away until a large fist took her heart in its grip and set it racing. Racing toward Franc.

  Toward the man she’d told Mamma she loved, and as the saying goes, Come hell or high water, he was going to be hers.

  Rowan’s feet weren’t much bigger than Franc’s, though his brother-in-law’s shoes slipped down the backs of his heels as he bounded up the steps of the house at Falcon’s Rise.

  Rosa stood at the top, the blue shutters behind her making a picture with her red dress and white apron. She actually looked pleased to see him. “Franc, let me look at you.” She gave him the once-over she’d given Maria on Christmas Eve, but this time her hands didn’t touch, just fluttered over him. “Should you be out of bed?”

  “I’m perfectly fine, Mamma. Where is she?”

  She raised her eyebrows as he called her Mamma. Well, hell, why not? It was how he’d come to think of her.

  “Up in her room, packing to go to you.” Rosa spent a moment smoothing the creases out of her white apron, as if she needed to keep her hands busy. When she raised her eyes, there was a question in them just for him. “She told me if we wanted to find her, she’d be at your apartment.”

  “Damn straight! That’s where she belongs, with me.”

  She nodded. “Good, you know where her room is.”

  He w
ent across the hall and had a foot on the bottom step when he remembered his sister. He turned, wincing as he automatically reached for the ball gracing the foot of the banister. “Mamma, this is my little sister, Jo. She takes her coffee black with two sugars.”

  Rosa smiled and held out her hand to Jo. “Not so little, but I’ll look after her.”

  What was it with women? The smile on Jo’s face had the same about-to-burst-with-pleasure creases as Mamma Costello’s. “Don’t mind me, kiddo. Mrs. Costello and I have a wedding to plan, take your time.”

  “I intend to take more than that. See you later.”

  Maria closed one case and zipped it up. If she hadn’t been half-dead with exhaustion last night, Papa wouldn’t need to make another trip in to Auckland.

  She’d grabbed the last of her clothes from the closet. The drawers she had already emptied, now she rolled up the clothes in her hands, hangers and all, and stuffed them in the second suitcase. There, she was done. She didn’t live here anymore. She heard footsteps on the stairs, hurrying. “I’m almost done, Mamma.”

  The door opened behind her and when she recognized the face in the dressing-table mirror, her heart flipped in her chest and began racing again. The only voice that could do that to her said, “Well, I’m far from done, Maria.”

  She ran to him, went to throw herself into his arms, then came to a dead stop as the white bandages stood out against the baggy navy sweats and T-shirt he wore, so unlike himself, as Franc never looked sloppy. “Can I touch you?”

  “You betcha! I’ll go crazy without your touch. Come here, hon, and I’ll show you how crazy life can get.”

  She ran her hands up the top of Franc’s arms and onto his shoulders. She touched his jaw, gently running a fingernail against the brush of the dark stubble that was already growing on his face.

  She reached up, his eyebrows needed the singed tips trimmed away, but apart from what looked like a brush with the sun, she liked what she saw. “You’ll do.”

  Franc held her loosely in his arms. “Stings a bit, but I’d better do for you. What you see’s going to have to last the rest of your life.”

  “Say that again.” Now she really felt shocked. It didn’t matter that this, this moment was what she’d longed for all along; the reality far outweighed her imagination. She wanted to lean on him and press her body against his, but feared she’d hurt him. Maria placed her palms on his shoulders and held the rest of her body clear in case she scraped the burns hidden under his T-shirt. Last night when Rowan and his team had pulled Franc out of the crypt, the medics had cut the tattered clothing off Franc’s chest before closing the ambulance door with them both inside. All she’d needed treating had been her bruised wrist.

  “I want you with me.”

  “I didn’t want to leave you, big guy, not if you still want me. I was packing to go home…to see if you’d still have me.”

  His swathed hands came up and framed her face in white, like the wedding dress she’d always dreamed of having. “Where else would you go? You’re mine, hon, for better or worse.”

  “Is that a proposal?” She held her breath waiting for the answer.

  “I guess it is, better be since Mamma and my sister are downstairs planning a wedding. Want me to get down on one knee?”

  Why was she hesitating? Say yes, her heart screamed, but her conscienceOne last thing, Franc. One last shadow to sweep away. The chaplain, or should I say James Arblaster, his name was on the back of the photo.” She nodded in the direction of the bed. “I took it out of the frame to throw it away.”

  “I don’t blame you, hon. He was a talented photographer but misguided. Arblaster thought of the image he created as the end product, while I know you’re a work of art in the making. The older you get, the more beautiful you’ll grow in my eyes. I love you, Maria.”

  “Thank heavens, for I love you, too, Franc. But I have to tell you, although I asked Arblaster, and he said he had never raped me, I can’t be certain he was telling the truth.”

  The line of his mouth flattened and his jaw thrust forward. Maria dreaded what he might say.

  “Do you think that matters to me? I said I love you, Maria. And I know, no matter what happened before we met that the first time we made love, you surrendered your innocence to me. And no one can tell me any different. Or change my mind. Will you marry me, hon, be my family for as long as we live?”

  “Of course I will. Looks like that summer fling you promised me will be stretching out some.” She stood on the tips of her toes, stretching to meet his kiss.

  “An everlasting summer, a promise is a promise.” Those were the last words spoken for a while, as Franc bent his head and kissed her, the way he’d wanted to from the moment the goddess gate-crashed his life and turned it upside down. What more could an ambitious guy ask for but to be happy for the rest of his life?

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-7755-1

  SHADOWS OF THE PAST

  Copyright © 2004 by Frances Housden

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office, Silhouette Books, 233 Broadway, New York, NY 10279 U.S.A.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

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