Miles.
I could see a pale glimpse of muscular chest and lean stomach. I watched the rise and fall of his breathing for long seconds. His dark lashes fluttered against his sharp cheeks and I knew he dreamed. Of what? Of whom?
“O’Keefe,” I whispered, suddenly afraid it wasn’t me.
I dropped to my knees beside him and at the same time his eyes opened, penny-bright against the pale skin of his angular cheeks.
He sat up and leaned over me. I knew he had to see my panic, the memory of horror reflected on my face.
“It’s happening too quickly,” Miles said, angst and shadows in his throat.
The Bride’s threatening manifestations or our attraction or both? I didn’t know.
“I won’t leave,” I insisted.
“Yes. You will,” he replied. “Tomorrow. It won’t be safe to cross the garden tonight, but tomorrow…you will go.”
He held my face and tilted it up toward his as he proclaimed the plan. I ached at the very idea that I wouldn’t get a full week of that touch, so firm yet so gentle.
“Come with me,” I urged, crazy bold and throwing my yearning for him on the line.
“She would only follow, Samantha. If I stay, she stays.”
“But how? Why? I’ve read the stories. She committed suicide two years after she married Dominick O’Keefe. It was a huge scandal because the rumor was that she’d fallen in love with another man while her husband was in Europe on business.”
“I came to the house ten years ago. O’Keefe was my great-uncle, but the house had been empty for years. I thought it would be the perfect place to work, an escape, but with plenty of room for friends when I got tired of sculpting alone. The stories didn’t scare me away.”
“The statues?”
“I thought I’d been inspired. I’ve never worked so hard and so fast. Then, one of my friends noticed that they were all the same. I didn’t care at first. But my friends quit coming. A few tried to get me to read the news stories about old disappearances and violent murders on the property. One day I woke up with the chisel in my hand. It was worn down and my hands were raw and bloody. I must have been working in a fugue for days. I didn’t order any more marble. I packed a bag and left, but found myself creating the same sculpture in clay wherever I tried to travel. And it wasn’t just me. If it had been, I might have thought of seeking professional help. But people around me, wherever I went, saw her, again and again…so I came back here. I thought if I could keep her away from others and somehow fight…”
“Ten years,” I whispered against his trembling fingers.
I kissed them, one after another. Those beautiful, talented, calloused fingers. How horrible that they weren’t free to create what was in his own heart.
“She’s never been like this. It usually takes her a week or even more to manifest,” Miles said. He leaned his forehead against mine. “But I was taken with you before you even arrived. Fascinated by your strength and spirit. You’d been through hell and come out the other side, better and stronger. God, I think I fell in love with you the day I got your second note. The one that said you weren’t afraid of ghosts.”
“I’m afraid of her now, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to give up,” I said.
I didn’t mean it to sound seductive, but I was on my knees and my lips were on his skin. He took his hand away from my mouth and buried the fingers I’d been kissing in my hair. He gripped me firmly, almost desperately, and held me in place…as if I would have moved away. Then his lips descended to mine in a grateful swoop.
My stubborn refusal to leave him was gasoline on the steady flicker of flame that had already been burning between us. I reached for his arm, not to loosen his hold, but to find purchase myself, because when his tongue slid into my mouth I needed to hold on tight. When my tongue licked and swirled and tasted into the depths of his hot, sweet mouth, I held tighter still. Heated exhilaration threatened to vibrate my cells apart.
I’d been careful and controlled for so long, but a woman had to be brave at Thornleigh, and Miles would have made me bold anywhere on earth.
“I wanted to touch you. This morning. When you were touching me,” I confessed against his lips. I reached up to brush my hands along his gaunt cheeks and into the lush, thick waves of his ever-tousled hair.
He groaned even as he sucked my lower lip hotly between his own before lathing it with his tongue.
“I’ll never recover from this morning. Never. I was in agony. I wanted to taste you, to explore every inch of you with my tongue. To only be able to barely touch you—and even that was out of line. The whole time I was as controlled as I could be, but, still, touching your skin—ever so slightly—was decadent. When I saw what my touch had done to you, I had to…”
“You don’t always…?” I asked, heat flaring in my cheeks.
“No. Of course not. It’s usually a very visual and detached process. But with you…”
“I wanted more,” we both said at the same time.
Miles slid his hands down to my arms and pulled me up while he fell back on the settee. Now, we lay together with me spilled and sprawled over his reclining form. I kissed him again, slowly taking his mouth the way I’d wanted to when I’d first entered this room. He was a lean man with a cut jaw, everywhere straight lines and angles, until you discovered the lush fullness of his sensual lips. Here was his passion and artistry while all else was tight and spare. I licked across the full swell of his lower lip, teasing the tip of my tongue just inside to find sweet moisture. A soft exhale of pleasure was my reward.
He shifted our bodies again while I kissed him, and I found myself straddling his obvious arousal, hard between my legs.
I rocked against him, using my plunging and receding tongue to mimic with our mouths the true fuck I desired. My sleep shorts were blessedly brief and thin, but the long, thick ridge of his erection was bound behind denim.
I made a noise into his mouth that was half pleasurable moan and half disgruntled protest. His hands left me long enough to unzip and loosen. The move was all I needed to encourage me. I rushed my hands down to help free him. It wasn’t graceful. I was shaking and eager and my hands warred with his, fumbling and bumbling, but all I cared about was claiming whatever we had together while we still could.
My shorts came off much easier than his jeans. But not fast enough. We wanted this, he and I, for the same desperate, life-affirming reasons.
I’m more of a craftsman than an artist.
I run. I once designed jewelry. I’ve been known to appreciate a sunset or two from the high peak of a mountain I’ve conquered.
I couldn’t tell you how beautiful Miles O’Keefe was when he was naked between my thighs. Did I say he wasn’t exactly tall, dark and handsome? Well, it was true. He was so much more. He was the thrill of the finish line, the glow of the sunset and the challenge of the mountain all together in masculine form, and when his oh so talented fingers found the bud of my slick clitoris, I cried out. I opened my thighs wide to his touch and the hot shaft of his penis. He didn’t penetrate. He teased. Spreading my labia with his fingers, he thrust his hips so that he would slide and grow slick against me. The calloused pads of his forefinger and thumb plucked and played until I stiffened and clenched and then, only then, did he urge himself up and into my tightened folds. I shuddered my release as he thrust deep inside me. I tried to open to him, but I was tight and pulsing. He rocked against the incredibly snug fit and I came again in a sudden arch of pleasure before the tremors of the first had passed.
I tasted salt this time when I kissed him again and I knew it was sweat, but also tears. When he came, I held him and made promises about forever that I intended to keep.
Chapter Ten
I woke to cool morning air and moisture on my face. I wasn’t surprised at the rain, but I was shocked to find myself in it without having any conscious recollection of rising and walking outside. I did remember pulling on my shorts and T-shirt sometime in the night, but my we
t, cold feet on the grass and rain falling on my bare arms and face made no sense to my groggy, sleep-clouded mind.
I blinked against the pelting drops and shivered.
But I couldn’t turn back and go inside.
I. Couldn’t.
My feet wouldn’t move.
Only a dizzy, slight sway resulted from my desire for warmth and shelter. My whole body leaned this way and then that as if urged by a gentle breeze and not every muscle I possessed straining to break free. My feet remained where they were, as immovable…as stone.
“No,” I said, but there was no one to hear me. No living person anywhere. All around me, the Bride statues watched, forever locked in sympathy.
I was in the garden.
I shifted my gaze because my head wouldn’t move. Where was the real Bride? I tried to look from statue to statue to statue, but I couldn’t see them all clearly. My position and the rain made clarity impossible. White forms everywhere and no way of knowing if one of them wept and bled and perpetually drowned while she also waited to pounce. I could see nothing but marble overcome by grief and roses.
Then, triumph! My feet began to move. One shuffling step at a time. Not back the way I must have come toward the house and my new lover, but forward, through brambles and bushes.
“No,” I said again. My thrill at moving trailed away, leaving nothing but fear in its place. I willed my body to stop. I ordered my feet to quit. I strained every muscle again. For nothing. Long wicked thorns pierced and pulled at my cold, wet skin, but even the pain didn’t make me pause.
I became wetter still. The rain-heavy leaves trailed across and over my face and arms and legs until I shivered and shook. But I walked onward still. Ever onward.
I wanted to see the ocean. My lover’s garden was no longer the refuge it had once been for me. I knew I had to let him go and prepare to accept my husband’s return.
The alien thoughts slithered across my brain on its surface rather than up from its depths. Not mine, but hers.
Married for two years with nothing to show for it but a gloomy house full of empty rooms and a husband constantly at work, building his wealth. Always gone. Always on to the next acquisition and the next.
Now I could hear the ocean pounding two hundred feet below. The garden was thinning. A stiff breeze pushed my damp hair back from my face. I thought I heard my name called—shouted—from far behind me. But he called “Samantha” not “Maria” so I didn’t turn to answer.
Maria O’Keefe.
I was eighteen when we married. He is twice my age. A worldly man who loves his portfolio, his investments, his possessions more than he could ever love a trophy bride. Then, after many long, lonely nights…another. A younger man who gave me all the attention I could crave and the one gift that might make my husband love me.
My hands lifted to cup my flat stomach.
Maria had hoped the timing would be right. That her husband would accept the child she carried as his own. The man her husband had hired to build her an elaborate rose garden had moved on to the next wealthy man’s project without ever knowing that he had given Maria so much more than warmth and roses.
Now I stepped from the garden. One stride. Two. Three. I approached the cliff’s edge just as I’d seen the Thornleigh Bride approach it yesterday evening.
“Oh, my God,” I said when I came to the edge. The dizzy suck of gravity pulled on my body. “No.”
I looked out to sea with my hands on my stomach. I felt Maria’s hope. Her love for the tiny life that had fluttered beneath her fingers where I felt nothing but my own lean muscle.
Why had she jumped? None of what I was feeling was suicidal.
Fear, yes, but that was all mine. I seemed to be reenacting a fatal scene from nearly fifty years ago…and I knew what came next.
Suddenly, I wasn’t alone.
Several paces away, the bride appeared. She was as she’d been in the ballroom. Pale-eyed and ghoulish. Her white dress torn and sandy and wet. I smelled blood and roses.
“Not alone,” she said, wetly through foamy lips. “He followed.”
“Samantha!” Miles shouted from the edge of the garden.
I couldn’t turn. All I could do was stare at the gray sea as she had done and try to keep an eye on the ghost with my peripheral vision.
“You’re too close to the edge,” Miles warned.
I knew it. But there was nothing I could do. I swayed as I had in the garden, back and forth, as the ocean air whipped my hair wildly around my face.
“He followed,” the ghost bubbled.
It wasn’t Miles she referred to. Alien thoughts were still in my head. When the push came, I jerked and stumbled and I knew what she had known as she fell: Dominick had killed his unfaithful bride and her unborn child. She’d been a tainted possession no longer fully his.
The fall had happened over and over and over again. Maria O’Keefe had plunged to her death again and again.
But not today.
Because Miles had followed me, too, and his lunge to save me trumped nearly fifty years of murderous jealousy.
I fell, but back into his embrace and we both tumbled to the ground several feet shy of the ledge.
“She was pushed. She didn’t jump,” I gasped into his chest.
“I’ve got you,” he replied.
“She didn’t jump,” I repeated.
I pulled back to look at the ghost. As I watched, it changed. It became more solid, a corpse standing beside us on the cliff. Like a sudden gruesome time-lapse, waves of foamy water rushed out of its eyes and nose and mouth. I cried out, but the process was inexorable. Its torpid flesh rotted away. Blackened muscle was revealed, then bleached bone. The dry gray bones collapsed and turned to nothing but a pile of dust. Then the dust began to blow away.
“It wanted someone to know what happened,” I said. Maria’s thoughts were gone. The alien touch on my brain had evaporated as if it had never been. But I was left with that last certainty. It had wanted someone to know. Whatever had been left of Maria, it had wanted someone to know.
The obsessions it had caused in Mary and in Miles, the compulsions it had caused in Mrs. Scott and me—the dusting, choosing the book with the poem, possibly even my desire to be sculpted—everything it had done had been in an effort to communicate the truth about the unborn child’s murder. I would never know how much of my unwillingness to leave had been because of my growing feelings for Miles and how much of it had been because of the Thornleigh Bride’s influence. I only knew I was glad that I had stayed.
“You almost died,” Miles replied. He pulled me closer to his chest and farther from the edge.
“I almost died before, but that didn’t stop me. Maybe she knew I could take it,” I said.
“Maybe she knew I wouldn’t let you fall,” Miles added.
* * *
Dominick O’Keefe had never remarried. Rumors say he was never the same after his young wife’s “suicide.” Rumors aren’t always wrong. I couldn’t imagine what the haunting put Maria’s murderous husband through, but he died alone in 1983, refusing to see anyone and widely known as insane.
Maria had believed that her husband didn’t love her. But what about the rose garden? Had it been a grand romantic gesture that had ended in tragedy? Or just another symbol of his growing wealth? She’d been so young and inexperienced. And he’d been a very dangerous man to try to fool.
It took Miles months to complete the bronze sculpture that now stands on the cliff facing the sea. It’s a memorial. He created Maria as she might have been if she’d lived and a little boy a few years old. She holds his hand, tightly and safely, on the edge of forever.
I still get jumpy when it rains.
Tonight is stormy and Miles is in his studio. Which means I’m left to think about the night I followed the Thornleigh Bride to the ballroom.
Thank goodness we have guests. Some of his friends and some of mine. My aunt has visited several times with homemade apple pie from Abingdon. I was a
ble to give her several silver pieces for La Roux. I’d crafted them in a new workshop just off the massive kitchen in a room that had once been a pantry. Thornleigh is rarely as empty as it was…although all the marble statues are gone. Overactive imagination or not, I’d always thought them sentient. I’m glad to know they’ve been delivered to eager museums, galleries and private collections across the globe.
Beautiful, but not here is good.
Mary moved off Thornleigh property and now lives with Mrs. Scott. I don’t think we’ll ever see either of them again. When the ghost let Mary go, she “woke up” surrounded by thousands of moldy dolls. I try not to think about that much.
I hear a step in the hall. It isn’t midnight yet, but the thunder has grown louder and closer, which means my husband will come to me. Neither of us are big fans of bad weather.
“Not asleep yet?” Miles asks.
He comes into the master bedroom and closes the door. The room has been completely redone in a modern style with contemporary furniture, which almost helps you forget you are in a once-haunted house.
Forgetting is fully accomplished when I step into his arms.
“As if,” I say and lightning flashes to illustrate my point.
“Nights like this weren’t made for sleeping,” Miles agrees.
I look up into his dark eyes and a thrill goes through me. He is slightly tanned now because I occasionally drag him from his studio for fresh air and sunshine. But he still looks as if he’s been touched by a taste of “nevermore,” and he will always be possessed by his art and emotion, if not by a ghost.
I reach up and bring his face down to mine with handfuls of his mahogany hair. It’s damp—he’s been in the garden. I don’t question what drives him to still pace those pathways; I simply take his full lips with mine to help him forget.
I’ve been possessed, too. Driven and ridden by dark deeds best absorbed and forgotten.
I still run, but I’m also designing jewelry again. Our wedding rings were my first creations since the attack, but they weren’t the last.
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