That wasn’t far enough.
I was back in the silken ivory robe with nothing but another of the thin panties beneath and I was supremely conscious of my nakedness with a sexy artist I was painfully attracted to only a few feet away. Every muscle I possessed tightened when he turned and walked to me. The pacific breeze barely made it to us through the maze of vine and roses. What did was sweetened and heavy. It flowed over me—over us—like a caress. It lifted a rumpled lock of his mahogany hair and from there it wafted against my neck, playing with the silk to brush it aside.
I shivered, but not because of the breeze.
Miles reached to arrange my robe, and like the breeze his effort was to brush it aside.
I licked my lips to stave off nervous tension and I tasted sea salt and green growing things and suddenly the bitter hint of charcoal because Miles measured my lips with the slightest slide of one digit from side to side over the full swell of my lower lip.
I didn’t believe in lust at first sight. It had never happened to me. Not before the attack and definitely not since. But this wasn’t professional detachment between us. There was passion barely contained in his fingers. There was desire in the depths of his dark, dark eyes. I had no doubt the same heat was reflected in mine.
Even knowing I would have to bare myself again to him, I had followed him to his garden. Though its pathways had unaccountably frightened me, though the statues throughout its briary depths disconcerted me, I was here on this chair willingly, oh, so willingly, as silk slipped to puddle around my waist.
O’Keefe stepped back to his easel. It seemed a retreat. As if he quickly put distance between us when my bare breasts were revealed. My nipples peaked in the soft, heavy breeze and I waited and hoped for him to leave his pad and come to me again.
He began to sketch as if he were putting out a fire or kindling one—I don’t know which—but his movements were hurried as if each second he wanted to capture tried to evade his grasp.
He didn’t speak.
But he did place.
My limbs. My face. My hair.
From easel to me he stepped and back again.
And, always, each time, I anticipated his touch, then held my breath while the pleasurable pain of it assailed me and then sighed with loss when he stepped away once more. The careful, impersonal touches that came and went sensitized my skin. Each time his touch left me, the breeze continued his inadvertent seduction.
Finally, after what seemed the longest pause as I held my breath waiting, he pulled the silk from me. The move wasn’t quick. He looked into my eyes as inch by inch of the material parted from my body. Like his touch and the breeze, the silken slide of material against my skin was a seduction, only this time he watched my reaction as I licked my lips and trembled and sighed.
He dropped the robe to the side on the ground, but he didn’t look where it fell. He continued to watch me and because he held my attention I saw the rise and fall of his chest and the flush of want on his skin.
Yes. I was outside under the midday sky and, yes, I was nude save for a triangle of ivory silk that hardly covered my pubic curls, but we were all alone except for the lurking statues and I was too taken by his artistic storm to care.
There was decadence to my willingness to let go. Pure and wanton, the desire to forget my nervousness about statues and dolls and sketches came over me. When it fully claimed me, tingles of awareness flared to life and I knew if my hardened nipples didn’t betray me dampened silk would.
He stepped back to his sketch pad. I couldn’t see his work—it was hidden from me. I could see only his focus and I saw when the sketch pad wouldn’t hold it, when it shifted fully back to me. Not as a subject of artistic fascination. The flowing movement of his pencil slowed to a stop as if forgotten in his hand. His attention left the pages in front of him.
This time when he stepped toward me I saw the hard swell of his erection beneath his slim-fitting gray trousers. This time when he touched me it wasn’t to arrange. He had also seen the damp evidence of my arousal, as I’d known he would. Did he ever miss any detail? I was only embarrassed for a second because when his hand cupped my cheek to test its warmth, his fingers trembled.
“I thought if we came out here I would have to sketch and nothing more,” Miles murmured.
At first my lashes brushed my cheeks, but he’d inspired more boldness in me than that. I looked up to see the reflection of the heightened color I could feel on his face.
“Nothing more?” I asked. It might have been in an effort to coax or tease, but my voice sounded mournful and hungry. Impossible to banter with this man who so obviously burned when my body burned in return. And this after being stiff and frozen for so long.
His hand trailed down from my cheek and I was reminded of my scars. I hadn’t thought about them, not once, even bared to the glare of broad daylight. He traced the slight raised white lines with several fingers like a road map to my heart, all the while watching his hand. When it rested there against the quickened beat, he raised his gaze back to my face.
I didn’t care. I didn’t care that I was scarred. I didn’t care that the speed of my heartbeat gave even more of my desire for him away. I didn’t care about anything but his touch.
“You amaze me,” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
He put one leg beside me on the chair so he could lean down. With his hand over the scars over my heart, he whispered, “Because you’re so determined to live in spite of the darkness.”
He leaned more, sudden and quick, and his mouth stopped my reply before I could formulate one. Honestly, his lips stopped everything. My heartbeat, my breath, the very air around us—like dust in sunlight I was suspended in his kiss. But only for seconds because his move freed me to move in turn.
I lifted my hand to his face to cup the lean, hard angle of his jaw. It was slightly rough with stubble, but I smoothed over it, measuring its sharpness and enjoying his indrawn breath. With his gasp, the full, expressive lower lip I had craved got caught in my teeth, but I soothed and salved the bite with my tongue. His tongue slid past my lip as his hand slid from my heart down, down to my thigh. Then his fingers found the bit of damp silk that had betrayed my desire in the first place. No barrier. No barrier at all. I was glad because he teased the wet cloth aside to find the other heart of me and I had to reach for his neck to keep from dissolving to the ground.
The garden. Oh, the garden. It had been made for this.
That certainty filled my thoughts even as my body tightened around his rhythmic caress.
“Yes,” I cried into his mouth. None of it mattered. Not the statues or the dolls or his repetitive sketching of Mourning Walk. Only this mattered. His touch and the two of us coming together in spite of it all. The ferocity of the orgasm he gave me made everything else go away. In those seconds, even the memories of the attack that never left me, that never let me relax or relent, faded to nothing. I opened my eyes and his face filled my world. His eyelids lowered, his breath came quickly between his well-kissed lips and his concentration was given over to pleasuring me.
But as I found release a sudden cold rain began to fall. I blinked as droplets splashed into my eyes. The sun, so warm for much of the morning, was gone, and the sky had gone cloudy and black.
Wind from nowhere and everywhere whipped the rose bushes into a dancing frenzy around us. Within their tangle, I could see flashes of white revealed, grief-stricken statues all around.
“Here. Let me…” Miles shouted.
He picked me up and ran for the house.
I still wanted to touch him. I still wanted to share with him the same pleasure he’d given me. But I couldn’t protest. There wasn’t time.
Driving rain pelted us, but before I buried my face in his shoulder I looked back to see his sketch pad blown onto the ground with rivers of rain washing its pages clean.
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.
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