Phantom Lover

by Rebecca York

  Still, she saw bushes sway. Not from the wind. Someone was standing about twenty-five feet away, watching her.

  Graves? He seemed to be outside a lot. Had he done something to her car?

  “Graves?” she called.

  He didn’t answer. Of course.

  It was mind-blowing to realize that she’d been on this estate less than a week and so many things had happened. She was tired of people doing things to her, tired of getting caught in one crisis after another and being forced to respond—and not on her own terms.

  Perhaps she was still reacting to the earlier confrontation with Nola. Then she’d forced herself to be polite and cooperative because she’d been caught in Troy’s room. But this was different. She’d been in her own car, minding her own business. Now she was mad enough to march toward the bushes, her hands on her hips.

  “Come out of there and face me, you coward!” she bellowed.

  In response, the watcher backed up, and she got a good look at him. It wasn’t Graves. It was the man who had been staying out of her way since that first night. Abner Sterling.

  He stood for a moment, staring at her. Then he turned and started walking rapidly along the cliff.

  “Come back here!” she called, her anger boiling up, spiraling out of control. She’d conquered the panic attacks, but now she was swept in another direction by her feeling of helplessness. When he failed to heed her order, she stomped after him, unwilling to let him disable her car and run away.

  “Come back here, you coward,” she screamed as she reached the margin of the garden area. Beyond were the headlands, the stretch of wild grass and low plants bordering the cliffs.

  Sterling kept going, picking up speed so that he was rushing along the seaside path in an awkward run. Recklessly, she charged after him, her hair streaming behind her in the breeze blowing off the ocean, her pants’ legs catching against twigs and thorns that overhung the path.

  She came face-to-face with her foolhardy behavior when Sterling suddenly stopped short and turned to confront her. She stared at him, seeing his face screw itself into a contorted mask.

  “Why are you following me?” he shouted across the hundred feet of space that separated them. His hands were clenched, the way his wife’s had been earlier. Only, compared to him, Nola had seemed restrained. Abner looked as if he was about to explode.

  “You did something to my car,” she said lamely, suddenly wondering what she had planned to do if she caught up with him. Force him into a confession? Yeah, sure. He was at least a hundred pounds heavier and a head taller than she was.

  His voice sounded outraged as he answered, “I did not! Where do you get off saying something like that?”

  “You were watching to see what happened,” she shouted back.

  “I was outside. I saw you go to your car. I wanted to see what you were up to.”

  “You can assume I was going to drive it!”

  “I’m not going to assume a damn thing. Not anymore! Not with what’s been going on around here.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You stay here long enough and you’ll find out what it’s like living in an insane asylum with the inmates on the loose.”

  She stared at him, trying to work her way through his statements, starting with his comments about the car and progressing to what sounded like paranoid fear.

  As she stood in the middle of the path he started back toward her, his features distorted, his skin flushed. His jaw was working; his arms were rigid. His eyes were slitted. He looked like a little kid about to have a tantrum and she had no idea what he would do if he caught up with her.

  Turning swiftly on her heel, she began to run back toward the house. Behind her, she heard his footsteps gaining on her. He was going to catch her and she was pretty sure he wasn’t planning to give her a warm handshake.

  Real fear grabbed her by the throat. The headlands were like a wild, open meadow, with steep cliffs on one side.

  The house was too far away to offer help. And if Abner wanted to pitch her over the edge of the cliff, he could just go back home and nobody would find her—maybe for days.

  As she decided what to do, a voice suddenly called her name.

  “Bree. Over here!”

  Her head swung toward a stand of trees about twenty-five yards away.

  Was that Troy?

  It seemed like his voice, but she couldn’t be sure. Not out on the headlands where the wind blowing off the sea distorted all sound. And not just the wind. Almost below the level of consciousness, she heard a deep, rhythmic drumming. A throbbing sound that increased as she altered her course and headed for the trees, detouring around a decaying fallen trunk.

  A little while ago she’d questioned Troy’s motives. Now she didn’t hesitate at the edge of the grove. Without missing a step, she dove into the shadows below the branches.

  Immediately she was plunged into a world quite different from the open headlands. What looked to her like Spanish moss hung in curtains from the branches overhead. And smaller, compact moss and lichens clung to the tree trunks, creating a place that might have been an old Druid grove.

  It was dark here. And mysterious. The forest primeval. But more than that, a kind of charged energy seemed to gather in the air, like a current of electricity building from a storm.

  The humming sound increased, swelling like the beat of a giant drum—or a human heart.

  It competed with the sound of the wind, which was blowing not off the ocean but in a circular whirlwind that moved among the trees, picking up bits of moss, pine needles, bark and plants that grew under the trees.

  Bree shaded her eyes, gawking at the small tornado that never moved beyond the confines of the grove.

  Was she hallucinating? Looking back over her shoulder, she realized that Abner Sterling had stopped short about thirty yards away. He, too, was staring fixedly at the whirl of debris.

  She heard a gasp escape him. He backed away, slowly at first and then more rapidly. Turning, he began running along the cliff again toward the house.

  Bree watched him retreat, breathing out a little sigh. Then she turned back toward the darkness under the trees.

  The deep beating seemed to crest. The spiral of pine needles and debris was about fifty feet from her, staying steady, in one place, and as she stared at the roiling current, her eyes widened. Through the curtain of the whirling matter, she thought she saw a human form. A man. The whirlwind obscured the outlines of his body. And he was shadowed by the mass of tree branches blocking out the sun, so that she couldn’t be absolutely sure that the image wasn’t some trick of the light or the swirling debris.

  She remained transfixed, straining her eyes, trying to make out details. As far as she could see, he was about six feet tall and well-muscled, dressed in jeans and a dark flannel shirt—like the one laid out on the chair in Troy’s room.

  She called his name.

  The only answer was the throbbing rhythm that remained as an underlying sound and the swirling of the air currents as they flung bits of debris against the tree trunks.

  Then, all at once, the wind ceased, as though it had never been, and there was utter silence around her. Even the drum had stopped.

  “Troy!” she tried once more. She seemed to be always calling his name, she thought, with uneven success.

  Without conscious thought, she hurried farther under the canopy of trees, making for the spot where she’d seen him last.

  Her eyes were focused ahead of her and she wasn’t watching where she was going. Her foot caught against a hidden tree root and she stumbled, pitching forward. She was going to hit the ground; her arms came up to break her fall. But before disaster struck, strong arms captured her and set her back on her feet—the way they’d done when she’d almost stumbled into the pit.

  Though she didn’t know how it happened, Troy was standing behind her. She caught her breath, leaning into the solid wall of his body.

  “Troy.”

  “Yes,
it’s me.”

  She’d come out of the house thinking it was dangerous to trust him. Now she closed her eyes, resting quietly against him. He was strong, capable of defending her from all danger. At least it felt that way here in this secret grove.

  Time had no meaning in this place. And it seemed that the ordinary laws of the universe failed to penetrate under the branches that blocked out the light above her. It might have been seven years ago, when they’d first met, first gotten close.

  So much had happened since then. But here she could pretend for a little while that none of it had transpired. Because she desperately wished that were true. If only they hadn’t been torn apart all those years ago, everything would be different.

  Troy pulled her into an even darker spot, where tree trunks and low branches created a private place, just for the two of them. As he had before, he kept her close, his hands moving over her shoulders, down her arms, making her skin tingle.

  Somehow, out here in the open air, he felt more real, more solid than he had at any of their previous meetings, and when he spoke, his voice was strong and decisive. Yet his words broke the spell she’d let herself fall under.

  “You’re safe in the grove. They’re afraid to come here.”

  “Why?”

  “They sense my presence in this place.”

  “Troy, please, let’s get out of here. Away from the estate.”

  His hands opened and closed on her arms. “I can’t.”

  There was a kind of bleak anguish in his voice now. She might have tried to turn. But she knew from experience that he wanted her to stay where she was.

  “You have to take Dinah and leave. Get her out of here to somewhere safe. Promise me you’ll do that.”

  “I…”

  “Promise.”

  “Yes. All right. I’ll take her away. If you can’t do it yourself.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Troy, what’s going on? Did Nola and Abner Sterling do something to you?”

  She heard him drag in a breath and let it out in a frustrated rush. “I don’t know. There are still things I don’t know!”

  Her heart turned over as she heard the frustration in his voice. But still, she needed as much information as she could get. “You told me about the accident, but something else happened later,” she said. “You were hurt, weren’t you? Can you tell me about it?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  She felt him shake his head.

  “But you remember some things!”

  “Yes. If I could answer all your questions, I would.”

  “Would you?”

  “Yes.”

  She desperately wanted to believe him. Trying a different tack, she asked, “Where are you staying? Somewhere in the house?”

  “Out here.”

  “Out here?”

  “It’s as good a place as any.”

  “You have a shelter? A safe place?”

  “I have what I need.”

  Again, she wanted to make him give her details, but she was pretty sure it would only frustrate him more.

  Striving for a positive note she said, “You sound stronger.”

  “You’re making me stronger.”

  Her eyes blinked open. “Me? How?”

  “When I hold you, I feel your strength. When I touch you like this.”

  His breath warm on her skin, he took her tender ear-lobe between his strong teeth and delicately played with it.

  “Oh!” Her eyes drifted closed again because she wanted to concentrate on nothing besides him.

  “I love the way you respond to me. You always responded to me so sweetly.”

  She couldn’t answer. She could only prove his point by arching into the tingling caress. Just a small thing, his mouth on her ear, but she had never felt anything so erotic.

  He continued his playful attentions, down the sensitive column of her neck, teasing her with his lips, his teeth, his tongue.

  No longer holding her in place, his hands slid down her sides, tracing the shape of her hips. Then, slowly, he slid them back upward, along her ribs and then to the undersides of her breasts, where he stroked along the rounded swells.

  It was only a light touch. Maybe the lightness of it was what drove her mad. She felt her nipples contract to tight points, heard her own indrawn breath.

  “Please,” she moaned, her head falling back against his shoulder. All those years ago he had been careful with her. Respectful. Kept his hands from straying to intimate places.

  Now he had changed the rules. Slowly, he drove her closer to insanity, his hands inched upward, finding the undersides of her nipples and touching her just there. Stroking back and forth, the light contact more stimulating than if he had taken her firmly in hand.

  Her whole body tuned itself to him, to that slight but commanding caress. Breath sawed in and out of her lungs as she waited, suspended in an unbearable anticipation of need. And when his fingers finally circled her nipples, she cried out with the intensity of it.

  She was weightless, boneless, unable to stand without the support of his rock-hard body behind her. One of his arms circled her waist. The other worked the buttons of her blouse, opening them one by one, exposing her skin to the cool air—another distinct sensation on her heated flesh.

  He pushed the shirt to the sides, under her raincoat, then tugged the cups of her bra down so that he could free her breasts to the air and his touch.

  She let him do what he wanted. Let him tease and torture her, out here in the open air, under the branches of the trees.

  One hand slid down her body again, finding the juncture of her legs, cupping and stroking the center of her need.

  “Troy, I don’t care what you look like now. I have to turn around and hold you, kiss you.”

  “Stay,” he warned, his voice turning harsh and husky.

  She couldn’t obey. She had to reach for him.

  “No!”

  Chapter Nine

  The spell snapped. Troy pulled away from her, leaving her gasping and swaying on her feet. She would have fallen if she hadn’t reached out and caught herself against the rough trunk of a tree.

  She stared after him, seeing his retreating figure clouded by the whirlwind of pine needles and moss that had heralded his arrival. He had left her the way he had come, and she could only stand in the twilight of the grove, watching until he had disappeared in a screen of underbrush.

  She found her voice then, calling after him, but she knew he wouldn’t answer. He had set the rules for how they would interact, and she had dared to break those rules. Her face flushed as she looked down at her disheveled clothing. She was outside, half naked. But at least her coat helped hide her from view. Quickly she pulled herself back together.

  Too shaky to stand on her own, she pressed her shoulders against the tree trunk, catching her breath and thinking about what had just happened.

  Over the years she had learned to stay in control of herself, she thought as she ran shaky fingers through her hair. Even when she’d become more assertive, that ability to remain steady had stood her in good stead. But today she was too off balance for control. First, she’d succumbed to a panic attack, then she’d run after Abner Sterling and finally she had let Troy sweep her away on a tide of passion. Back to a time that never was but should have been.

  She stayed in the grove, trying to get herself together, physically and emotionally. She laughed when she found her purse strap was still slung over one shoulder—a testimony to a woman’s ability to hang on to her pocketbook come hell or high water.

  As she exhaled a deep, steadying breath, her eyes probed the shadows under the trees. Could she figure out where Troy had gone? She took a step forward, then stopped.

  Now that he was no longer with her, the grove gave her the creeps. It was dark and shadowy, the perfect place for an ambush if someone wanted to come after her. But it was more than that. If she believed in bad vibes, then this place had them.
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  Quickly she started back toward the house. As she retraced her steps she kept a lookout for Abner Sterling. Apparently he’d been scared off by Troy’s trick with the swirling debris.

  Troy’s trick.

  Somehow he’d done those things. But how?

  She was dealing with phenomena she didn’t understand. Yet she desperately needed some explanation. Troy had said that people were afraid to come to this place. Had he set up machinery to make it seem like it was haunted? Did he have audio speakers and fans spread out under the trees? That would be a way to do it. She couldn’t think of any other scenario.

  Unless…

  A small shiver traveled over her skin as she recalled the swirling matter from the forest floor. She wasn’t a fanciful thinker but now she couldn’t help wondering if Troy had developed some kind of supernatural powers. The idea was crazy. She never would have considered something so off the wall. But it fit so well. The way he appeared and disappeared, the way he knew what was going on.

  “The Shadow knows,” she murmured, remembering the old radio show her mother had listened to on tape. In the serial Lamont Cranston had traveled to the Orient where he’d acquired the ability to “cloud men’s minds.”

  She laughed at the phrase. Probably that meant hypnosis or some other unspecified mind-control technique. Actually, there was an Alec Baldwin movie based on the old shows. Bree had rented it for her mom, and she remembered watching the parade of supernatural plot twists with a jaded eye. Now she was thinking about them in a different light.

  Troy was doing things she couldn’t explain in any conventional terms. Appearing and disappearing, making himself invisible, calling up a whirlwind of debris under the trees. At least it had seemed as though he’d done that. Unless she considered the possibility of some freakish weather conditions.

  So, was he using hypnosis on her—and everyone else around here? Take that first night in the tunnel, when he’d disappeared and she’d crossed to the far side of the open pit, looking for him. She’d come to a rockfall and she’d had no idea where he’d escaped. But suppose he’d been there all along and he’d made it impossible for her to see him? Or suppose he’d only made the pile of rocks seem real? That was another possibility.