Ever After

by Odessa Gillespie Black

  From the shadows behind him, a woman’s hands slid under his arms. They rested on his chest, caressing him possessively, but his face twisted in sorrow. Our gazes met in electric sizzles.

  His lips moved, and his whisper brushed my ear. “I can’t love you.”

  His body slid to the ground, melted into a dark pool of pulsing liquid, and then expanded to become the pond. (Dreams were crazy like that.)

  The woman kneeled beside the pond of black and kissed the water. She jerked her attention to the upper levels of the house. Her beauty faded to a leathery, skin-covered skull, and where there should have been eyes, there were only holes.

  She stood.

  Lightning flashed.

  She was a few feet closer to my window.

  Lightning.

  Below my window she stared up. Her long, tangled hair flapped in the wind.

  Lightning.

  My window slammed outward. Her body shot up from the ground, skeletal hands plunged through the opening, tangling her long nails into my hair. I struggled against her, but she jerked. A sickening thud and breaking bones ended my descent into the flower bed.

  I clung to the footboard post for dear life. After I caught my breath and convinced myself I was out of danger, I got back under the covers. Wrapping my arms around my knees, I rocked myself to calmness.

  Those fingers had felt so real. Could anything distract me after that?

  The letter. Angrily, I tore into the stationery.

  One short page with elegant, calligraphic font.

  My Dear Allison,

  By now, I’m sure you’ve experienced some strange things. You probably have feelings about people at Rolling Hills Manor of which you don’t understand. And you’re probably wondering why I hated you enough to deem you beneficiary of my legacy, but trust me, I have your best interest at heart. Your strong character will bring you out on top of the strange occurrences you will face in the coming days. My number one employee will be of utmost use and interest to you if he isn’t already. I smile as I write this.

  I gave you this house and all my worldly belongings so you could bring love into his life. Do whatever it takes to seduce Cole Kinsley. He may go nuts for a little while, curse me endlessly, and not speak to you, but I promise, he won’t deny you long. Don’t give up.

  Ava

  Well, Cole was right. She was crazy.

  How had this woman known that I would like Cole well enough to stay in the same room with him?

  Oh, Gah.

  I couldn’t even think about what she said she wanted me to do with him. Every nerve livened, and the same deep heat from the dream settled into my face.

  I shoved the sheets off, folded the letter, and stuffed it back in the bedside drawer.

  Ava may have been a cunning businesswoman, but her knack at matchmaking sucked.

  Instead of calming me, Ava’s talk about seducing Cole had added to the nightmare. Now I couldn’t sleep when everyone else was probably passed out cold.

  A little investigative trip to the dangerous fourth floor might shed some light on things.

  If people didn’t go up there, then maybe some old stuff that used to be Ava’s would still be in storage, or maybe I could shake that ghost out of hiding. It would take more than a mystery or a dead girl to scare me off.

  Chapter 8

  Central air had been installed on all floors but the fourth, so the windows hung open. Triangles of intricately woven spider webs curtained the corners of the hallway on both sides. I wiped a cobweb from my brow and tried the light switches. Nothing.

  A chill trickled down the hallway. I shivered even in the heat. Going against the bad feeling, I trudged forward.

  There was something on this floor I needed to see.

  The wood flooring creaked as if the next plank would give way beneath me. Not too far down, on a hall table, a polished but old oil lantern shined in a ray of moonlight. A new box of wooden matches lay beside it.

  “No one ever comes up here.” Thomas’s words taunted me.

  The knick-knacks surrounding the new objects were covered in layers of feathery dust.

  Something sloshed inside the oil lantern. With the touch of a match, it slowly flickered to life. It cast strange shadows across oil paintings of what must have been Ava’s distant family. The paintings were either on the floor, leaned against the old wallpaper, or hung crooked on the wall. Too many of them were lopsided to bother righting.

  I tipped the lantern toward the bottom corner of each painting.

  CKK 1878, CKK 1923, CKK 1985, CKK 1998.

  Storage boxes skirted the walls of a large sitting room.

  Tablecloths and napkins with worn and yellowed folded edges. Didn’t she throw away anything?

  I pushed them to the side and searched on.

  More linens and drapes. She must have kept a little of everything just in case.

  The rest of the boxes appeared to be extras of every sort a household could use.

  The few pieces of furniture were covered with dust cloths, and the fireplace was sealed off.

  The deeper I got into the room, the more the lantern gave it an eerie, horror movie, mass-murderer-storage-bin feel, much like my bedroom just after the dreams. Every few seconds I swung the lantern around to check the dark corners.

  When I decided to give up and leave the room, an old trunk with a shiny latch glimmered under my lantern. Every molecule in my body was magnetized to the object.

  I popped the lid.

  Countless old documents. Useless.

  Newspapers. Useless.

  Antique brown pictures from the late 1800s or early 1900s. My reason for existence.

  It was the oddest impulse, but I knew the pictures.

  I gently turned a yellow-edged one over. No date on the back or writing. On the front, a man, a woman, and a guy I would have fallen for had I lived in those days stared back at me. Upon further inspection, the younger man reminded me of Cole.

  Maybe an ancestor?

  He was a history book of facts about the place.

  I couldn’t see enough of the room to properly search through. I’d come back in the daylight. Maybe Cole would come with me and shed some light on who the guy was in the picture. All I’d have to do was threaten to come up here alone, and he’d be on my shirttail, acting like he hated me the whole way.

  The nighttime view from the window I’d seen the ghostly woman took my breath away, although it led me back to my nightmares.

  The beautifully sculpted lawn had no corpses and unfortunately no hot, sweaty versions of Cole. And there’s where I’d landed in the flower bed. Flowers had been replaced so it appeared to have never happened.

  A soft, whispery breeze propelled the pale sheer curtains outward. The cool air came in little gusts. The dream guy with no face and green eyes played on the backdrop of my eyelids.

  A chill prickled my spine. I froze.

  The picture in the chest. It had been my dream guy.

  I opened my eyes and started back to the room for the picture.

  With the next rush of wind, the outline of a woman formed through one of the lifted sheers. When it rested against the wall, a woman with a hideous gray face stood a few feet away. Her straggly brown hair bushed out from her head. With her approach, a thick, putrid odor thickened the air. Her head jerked and flopped, in no certain pattern, as if her neck were broken.

  Something swatted the lantern from my hand.

  The lantern glass exploded, oil spewed, and flames burst down the old runner rug.

  Drapes hissed, wallpaper blistered, and a wall of flames separated us.

  Black smoke choked me. I went for the window.

  An earsplitting cackle roared over the blaze.

  The flames fizzled out, leaving no sign of the fire. Nothing charred. Nothing singed.

  My throat closed. A sharp stab of fear seized my chest.

  Stretching its arms out, the ro
tting corpse of a woman loped toward me. She shoved me backward.

  From the floor, a man rose up from nowhere. A roar of rage escaped him as he lunged for her.

  Diving to the side to avoid her, I stumbled. There was nothing to hold on to so I tumbled out the window and dangled by one arm.

  A strong arm reached out and pulled me up. Cole’s face was wrought with worry as he tugged and pulled.

  * * * *

  Minutes later, I was in my room being bandaged up. Again.

  Cole sat with me on the bed.

  “You’re bleeding.”

  “It’s becoming a habit.”

  “You see now why I wanted you to leave?”

  “Not exactly.” I was determined.

  My thigh wasn’t the only place bleeding. My elbow and upper arm were scraped too.

  Cole brought a first aid kit from the bathroom. They probably stocked every room with one since I got here. He took care of my arm in silence while I thought of a good way to ask him how he got to me so fast.

  “Now that you know there’s a ghost here, will you consider taking my advice?”

  “How did you get to me so fast, and where did you come from? It’s like you weren’t there, then you were.”

  He twitched but didn’t answer.

  “Where’s the other blood coming from?” He searched the bed and found the cut on my upper thigh. Dabbing some peroxide on a cotton ball, he dipped his head forward.

  The modernized wall lamp lights in the room were on the brightest setting, but at best they gave off an amber glow. The ambience lit Cole’s chiseled features perfectly. His hair fell forward as he treated my skin as if he were correcting damage to a priceless painting. Then he did the oddest thing. He let his forefinger trail my birthmark.

  As his finger traced the little moon, sizzles tingled as if a single jolt of electricity reverberated under my skin. The sensation escalated to an intense rage of need settling in my stomach.

  “Cole?” I whispered.

  “I knew it.” He closed his eyes and stood. He halted, his head lifting as his posture straightened. He remained at my knees a total of three seconds.

  I counted.

  Before I could take the next breath, Cole’s body crashed down on me. A man I’d never met before had invaded Cole Kinsley’s body and scooped me up into an embrace. We were a tangled, breathless mess of arms and lips all over the bed.

  “I never thought I’d see you again.” His desperate words came in whispers as his lips grazed my neck. Cole pressed me back and searched my face. With coarse but gentle, work-hardened hands, he coaxed my hair back from my cheeks. “I won’t let her take you. Not again.”

  In an attempt to take a few head-clearing breaths, I inhaled, but my heart thrashed so hard against my chest it interfered.

  Cole’s body trembled uncontrollably, and before I could begin to care what in the world had possessed him, his mouth dropped down to cover mine. There was something frantic about the way his kiss searched me. As Cole’s lips worked against mine, his body quaked.

  With some effort, Cole pulled away.

  Eyes closed, his face twisted, mangled with agony.

  Cole collapsed and buried his lips in my hair as he inhaled and exhaled deeply enough to hyperventilate. His body shuddered so violently it rattled the bed.

  Cole rolled off me to the far side of my bed.

  My heart stammered. Groping for him, I flipped in the direction he’d gone.

  He’d fallen onto the floor.

  I scrambled over to find him. My pulse skittered to a crashing halt.

  There was no one there. In fact, there was no one else in the room with me.

  Chapter 9

  There was no way Cole could have disappeared so quickly. He had been there. No trap doors under the bed, no secret passageways behind the headboard.

  No human could disappear that fast.

  I flopped back on the bed.

  I’d had on pajama shorts before I’d dressed myself and gone to the fourth floor. The first aid kit still lay open on the bed, the cotton balls spilled on the floor. Could I have stumbled down here myself, prepped my wounds, and fallen asleep?

  The comforters and sheets were rumpled. Even more proof. He had been in the bed.

  * * * *

  The silvery Saturday morning sun cascaded through the window, warming my face. I pressed my blankets down with a sigh and winced when I hit my elbow and sore leg. The pain brought a flash of memories from the night before, but they wouldn’t string together into coherent recollections.

  Dizziness caused me to sway. I held fast to the bedpost. Before I could sanely search Cole out and torture him into submission, I’d need to find the pictures and present them as proof.

  On the fourth floor, the center sitting room was much different in the daylight. Half the boxes, including the crate with the pictures, were gone.

  Their disappearance was an even better excuse to find Cole and question him.

  * * * *

  I stepped into the barn and stopped cold.

  Cole’s normally dark complexion was pale, and at least two-day-old stubble speckled his terse jawline. His eyes sank in into purple rings. Low hanging jeans and no shirt would have normally given me a nice view of his corded muscles working, but today he had to be twenty pounds skinnier.

  Sampson munched hungrily as Cole murmured to him.

  In last night’s dream, his voice had sounded the same. Too real not to have been there.

  Cole didn’t turn at my approach.

  “Where were you last night?” I leaned against the barn door.

  Cole stood slowly, faced the barn wall, and worked his jaw. Sick or not, he was still breathtaking. After dropping a pile of horse manure too close to my feet, he angrily stabbed a pitchfork into a pile of hay and moved over to pick up a shovel. “My time off the clock is none of your business, boss.”

  “Since I’m your boss, I think I have a right to know if you were meddling around in the house.”

  Cole turned an icy glare on me. “Did you search me out to nag me to death, or is there something I can actually do for you? If not, I have important things to do. This house doesn’t run itself.”

  I pulled my eyebrows up. “Actually, I do have some questions.”

  “Imagine that.” He swung back to the stall and scooped more nasty brown stuff out of Sampson’s stall. Plop. A bit landed on my foot.

  “If you would be so kind, please don’t throw manure at me. You do enough of that anyway. Now, did you move the crate on the fourth floor?” I shook the hay and poop off my shoe.

  “I thought I told you to stay off the fourth floor,” he hedged.

  “I think you’re a little confused with how the whole boss/employee dynamic works.”

  “Well, you’re falling into the role of formidable dictator quite nicely.” His muscles twitched. Oh, gah.

  “The only thing I want rule over is your heart,” I said, determination building.

  Cole stood straighter, holding on to the shovel for support.

  “And since that subject is off limits, maybe you can shed some light on something else. Last night, something tried to hurt me on the fourth floor, and I ended up back in my room patched up good as new. You can call me crazy if you’d like, but I think you were there.”

  “How inventive.” He bent back to lift another scoop.

  “You wouldn’t admit to it, if you had been there. How long has your family been,” I paused searching for the proper wording, “affiliated with this house?”

  “Almost a century. Why?” Plop. Another scoop landed near me. I wanted to kick him, but if I let him make me mad, I would forget all the things I wanted to ask.

  “I found some pictures that appeared to be from the 1800s. In one, a young guy in the picture reminded me a lot of you. Not so much in looks, but in that smart-ass expression on his face you seem to have more and more often lately.”

 
; Cole propped the shovel against the wall and turned. He hooked his thumb in his belt loop and propped a foot on the barn wall, knee out. A small, sarcastic grin played on his lips now.

  I’d stop that.

  I stepped closer, my eyes raking over his pectoral muscles as they rose and fell with each breath.

  His smile fell away. His breath touched my face now. “So, now you think it was me in the picture?”

  “I know it wasn’t you, silly. That would make you over a hundred years old. So you can quit with that I’m-too-sexy-for-my-shirt grin.”

  Cole flicked his brow. “You said it, not me.”

  “I did no—just shut up. That’s not what I meant.” What was I saying? I hated it when he got me frustrated.

  “So what are you saying, Allie?” Cole’s sexy gaze raked over my face and continued down.

  “What I’m saying is when I looked at the picture, his eyes held me, the same as yours do, when you aren’t being stubborn. The pictures were in a crate on the fourth floor.” A flash of the guy without a face in old clothes crashed into me. I took a mind-clearing breath. “And I’ve dreamed about that guy and you before. Many times.”

  “Who needs to make real friends, now?” Cole tilted his head forward, closer.

  “You’re not hearing me. I’ve dreamed about you and the guy in the pictures before I came here. How could I dream about people I’ve never met?”

  The smile fell from his face, his eyes trained heavily on me. “Girls dream about their perfect guy all the time. It just so happens I look like yours. Trust me, that’s where the resemblance ends. I’m not rocket-scientist intelligent. I don’t like long walks on the beach or candlelit dinners.”

  “The crate is gone. I think someone knew I found the pictures and moved them.”

  “You have a terribly over-active imagination. And since you spend so much time dreaming, maybe you also dreamed the whole evening?”

  “I know the crate was there.”

  He raked his hands through his sweat-dampened hair and turned from me. “You probably had a dream about the guy because you’ve probably seen other pictures of him before. There are pictures around the house of him. He was the guy who was supposed to marry the girl. The girl who’s room you invaded when you decided to sleep in the master suite.”