by Anne Stuart
For a moment, Meg felt herself drawn into the notion Ruth’s words were conjuring, and it took everything she had to fight it. “Is this your day for procuring, Ruth?” she asked coolly.
Ruth recoiled as if she’d been slapped. And then she managed a wry smile. “I don’t want him hurt, Meg. If he gave you that ring, it means something, something I can’t even begin to imagine. I don’t want his heart broken.”
“He doesn’t have one.”
“Oh, yes, he does. He most certainly does. And if you hurt him, you’ll have me to answer to.”
“You’re imagining things. I no more have the power to hurt him than I have the power to fly to the moon.”
“Maybe not,” Ruth said. “And I don’t suppose it’s up to me to stop it. If you’ll give me a minute, I’ll get your things packed.”
Sheer panic swept through Meg. “He’s letting me go?” Why did the thought terrify her when it was what she wanted most in the world?
Ruth shook her head. “He’s just moving you. He sent word that it was too noisy here for you. I guess Pastor Lincoln and his bunch of crazies were up to their weekly tricks. Ethan wants you someplace more protected. Nearer his own rooms.”
That would dovetail well with her plan, Meg thought with only a trace of compunction. “Let me help,” she said, crossing the room.
But Ruth had already finished packing Meg’s clothes. “All done. Just follow me. It’s a bit of a hike.” She headed out the door without waiting to see whether Megan would follow her.
Megan stood there for a moment, and then walked to the mural that disturbed and fascinated her. She stretched out her hand, letting her fingertips brush the terra-cotta wall with its erotic etchings, brush the pleasure-suffused face of the young woman, the face of the demon. And then she dropped her hand, stepping away as if burned.
The ring was still in her hand. Moving over, she set it in the middle of her unmade bed, then turned to follow Ruth.
She got as far as the door. “Damn it,” she muttered under her breath. And without thinking, she turned back, grabbed the ring and then raced after Ruth. As she went, she slipped the ring back on her hand. Left hand, fourth finger. And held it tightly in place.
Chapter Ten
Megan began to lose count of the different rooms she’d spent the night in. Except for the tower room, when she was so ill, she hadn’t spent more than one night in any of the rooms Ethan had her moved to. The next three days were no exception. Ruth took her to a Southwestern-style room, complete with exposed beams and corner fireplace, a room simple and beautiful enough to make Meg temporarily resigned to being a prisoner. She even made it through the endless afternoon, evening and night alone, no company but Salvatore’s dour presence when he brought her dinner and returned to take the dishes. He absolutely refused to talk to her, glowering at her instead under his heavy eyebrows, and his huge, hulking body vibrated with disapproval.
He was the one to move her the next morning. Ignoring her questions about Ethan, he took her to a room that looked like nothing more than a Park Avenue apartment. Except that there was no view of skyscrapers—just the edge of the woods beyond the windows of the fourth-floor rooms.
Still Ethan didn’t call for her. Still he didn’t come, even in her dreams. Each room had a video camera, but she simply ignored them, changing in the bathroom, keeping out of range of those vigilant eyes. Not that Ethan was necessarily watching her, she reminded herself in what she was certain wasn’t pique. He seemed to have forgotten her existence. She could have carried her denied anger one step further and decided that now that he’d gotten what he wanted from her, he was ready to dismiss her.
Except he hadn’t gotten a thing from that strange encounter in the darkened hallway. Unless pleasuring someone else was the only way he got his pleasure. Maybe he simply wanted her surrender. Not to take her, just to know that he could have her if he wanted her.
Well, he couldn’t, she told herself self-righteously, striding around the parquet flooring of the apartment-style room. She’d had a moment of weakness, a moment of something bordering on insanity. She’d had plenty of time since then to regain the use of her brain, and she wasn’t going to succumb to a beguiling voice and seductive hands again.
By the third day, Salvatore had moved her into a room so starkly modern that she thought she might scream. Glaring white walls, abstract paintings, a queen-size mattress on the floor, and chairs she couldn’t even figure how to sit on comprised the furnishings. There were no Stephen King novels in the pure white bookcase that looked like a tulip. There were books on trigonometry, something she found even more terrifying than the undead.
“How long am I going to be here?” she demanded when Salvatore brought her lunch. The food was in keeping with the room—nouvelle cuisine, with more attention paid to the presentation than to the taste. Not to mention the paucity of the serving. She was a woman who liked to eat, and she didn’t consider three curls of parsnip that resembled a snake to be much of a vegetable.
Salvatore shrugged. “You’ll have to ask Ethan.”
“I would, if I ever saw him. Scratch that—I know I’m not going to see him. I mean, if he ever decides to grant me an audience again.”
“Can’t say.”
“Won’t say, you mean.” She glared at Sal. “I want to know what’s happening with my father.”
“I’ll ask Ethan.”
“Don’t you know? I thought you were his dogsbody, his gatherer of information, his faithful manservant and all that jazz.”
“I know. I just have to ask him whether I can tell you.”
There were no words more calculated to put her into a flaming temper. She wasn’t used to having her emotions rage so out of control. Her life in Chicago had been relatively calm and ordered. Too much so, which was why she’d been intent on escaping, on finding adventure. She’d found it, all right, in spades.
She took a deep, calming breath, determined to keep herself from screaming at Sal in rage. “Salvatore, you care about Ethan, don’t you? Like Ruth.”
She almost thought she saw a trace of amusement in Salvatore’s sullen dark eyes. “Not quite like Ruth. But yes, I’d do anything for him.”
“Then can’t you see that he’s making a big mistake keeping me here? He’s just asking for trouble. If my father gets arrested, he’ll have nothing to gain by keeping quiet about me. He’ll send the police out looking, and even Ethan Winslowe couldn’t keep them at bay.”
Salvatore’s expression didn’t change. “What are you asking me to do?”
For a moment, Megan was nonplussed. “Let me go?”
Salvatore didn’t move. “What if I did?”
She didn’t believe it. Didn’t believe the glimmer of hope he’d offered her. “I’d run. I’d get as far away as fast as I could. And I wouldn’t say anything. Not about this place, not about Ethan, not to anyone.”
“Your father’s going to stand trial, and Ethan provided most of the evidence. Aren’t you going to want revenge?”
“If what Ethan said is true, then my father deserves whatever happens to him. I was on my way to Europe when I came here. I promise, if you help me get away, I’ll head straight to New York and take the next plane to England. My father can fend for himself.” She swallowed her own momentary compunction. She pitied her father, she truly did. But she couldn’t save him from the results of his own greed, and she wasn’t going to try.
Sal actually appeared to be considering the proposition. “I’ll think about it.”
“Salvatore…”
“I said I’ll think about it,” he snapped.
“All right. In the meantime, do you suppose I might be able to get some fresh air? I think the rain has let up, at least for now. I’d like—”
“The doors are open to the garden.” He gestured to the wall of what she’d simply assumed were windows. “You can go out there.” He headed for the door and she felt a moment’s compunction for the obvious torment she’d put him through.
“I’ll consider it. In the meantime, do me a favor.”
“Anything.”
“Don’t take off your clothes in front of the camera again.”
She almost fainted. She could feel her skin pale in shock. She’d been so certain it had been Ethan watching her. The thought that Salvatore had been a witness to her ill-advised striptease was horrifying.
Too horrifying to be believed, she realized with a sudden wave of relief. Ethan wouldn’t have let him watch. “Ethan tell you to say that?” she asked, pulling herself together.
She wasn’t imagining the glint of amusement in Salvatore’s eyes. “I’ll say one thing for you, you’re smart,” he acknowledged. “I’ll be bringing your supper early. I have to go into town.”
“Would you…?”
“I told you I’d think about it. In the meantime, you stay put and keep quiet. Ethan doesn’t need any distractions from the likes of you.”
“Then why won’t he let me go?”
Salvatore refused to say another word, slamming and locking the white steel door behind him, and for a moment, Meg worried that she might have pushed him too far, too fast. There seemed a very real possibility that he might help her escape. She had no illusions that he was doing it for her. He was obviously worried about his employer, if that was what Ethan was. He knew full well that her continued presence in the huge old monstrosity of a house was a danger to everyone, particularly to Ethan’s seclusion.
She glanced down at her hands, at the ring she was twisting around her finger with an unaccustomed nervous gesture. It was odd—she didn’t seem capable of leaving it behind. Every time she took it off, she felt edgy and incomplete. She’d ended up wrapping a piece of purple yarn through it to keep it in place. Logical or not, she knew that if she lost it, she’d be devastated.
She glanced out the bank of windows. The day was relatively clear for a change, and she could see the rose bushes beginning to bud. Joseph, she thought. She needed to find Joseph, to sit in the sunlight and talk to him about things no one else would talk about. And she needed to make plans.
With Salvatore gone that night, it would be the perfect time to make her move. The problem was, she had two choices. One, try to escape. Her car was gone now, demolished in flames, and how the hell she was going to explain that to the rental agency in Tennessee was something she didn’t care to think about. How do you tell the bored, gum-chewing employees of Cheap-O Rent-A-Car that you’ve been held prisoner by a deformed madman and your car was destroyed by a white-sheeted, torch-carrying mob?
The other choice was not a wise one, however. Her other choice was not to escape, but to go in search of Ethan Winslowe. Beard the monster in his den, find the phantom and face her fantasies, her nightmares, her terrors. Prove to herself that he was real, human, someone to be pitied, not to be frightened of.
And then she could leave. Salvatore would help her, she knew that. But if she left without seeing Ethan, without facing him fully, then he’d haunt her for the rest of her life.
The choice was made, and it had really been no choice at all. In the meantime, she had to figure out how she was going to get out of this room once Salvatore left for the evening.
It took her a few minutes to figure out how to work the sliding door to the garden, something that didn’t augur well for her success in tracking down Ethan that night. When she stepped into the fitful sunlight, she was shocked by the blanket of humid heat that swept over her. After days of cold, chilly rain, the sudden warmth was a shock to her system, and no sooner did she take a deep gulp of the hot, damp air than her skin began to prickle with an odd chilliness.
“There you are,” Joseph’s soft voice floated over to her. He was at the end of the walled garden, on his knees in the dirt, his cap pulled low over his wispy gray hair, his gnarled hands digging deep in the loam. She moved toward him, rubbing her arms briskly, stopping a few feet away. “I wondered when you’d come to see me again.”
She sank down onto the thick grass, sitting cross-legged. For some reason, she didn’t move closer. It was as if Joseph had an invisible shield around him, one that kept people at a safe distance. Besides, now that she’d grown accustomed to the humid weather, she was discovering it wasn’t as warm as she’d first thought. As a matter of fact, it was downright chilly.
“They keep moving me around. This is the first time I’ve been near an outside door in days.”
Joseph nodded, looking up at her to smile with that sweet, otherworldly smile of his. “So, Megan, have you decided?”
“Decided what?”
“Whether you’ll leave him? Or save him?”
The gentle question was like a fireball in the pit of her stomach. “How could I save him?”
Joseph sat back on his heels and shrugged. “I don’t know if I could tell you. He’s been abandoned by the women in his life. By his own mother, who was so horrified by the sight of him that she kept him a virtual prisoner in this house, surrounded by a few servants and his weak-willed father. By Jean Marshall, who went back to her university and turned her back on him. By Ruth.”
“He wasn’t in love with Ruth,” Meg protested, unsure how she knew that.
But Joseph nodded. “You’re right, he wasn’t. But he cared about her, protected her. By that time, he was almost beyond falling in love. It was the only way he could let her go so easily.”
“Who was Jean Marshall?” I’m not jealous, she told herself firmly. I’ve never even seen the man, he frightens me. I’m simply curious. The more I know about him, the better my chances of escape are.
“A physics professor at Princeton.”
“What?”
“How do you think Ethan survived most of a lifetime in this place, never going anywhere, seeing anyone? His family imported the best tutors and paid them enough, supported their research projects, to ensure that they kept their mouths shut about what they did or didn’t see. It worked fine until Jean Marshall showed up. Ethan was in his early twenties then, and he fell head-over-heels in love with her.”
I’m not jealous. “What happened?”
“Well, to give her her due, she fell in love with him, too. But she was a young, ambitious woman, used to city lights and lots of people. She wasn’t ready to bury herself out here, and Ethan couldn’t face people. When she found out she was pregnant, she had an abortion and left him with nothing but a note.”
“Oh, God.”
“She was afraid her child would carry Ethan’s burden…” Joseph let the words trail. “Ethan understood her fears. He never blamed her, and I think he would have felt better if he had. Instead, he just drew himself in more firmly here. He made an arrangement with Ruth when she was in need, but there was honest caring on both sides. He just wouldn’t let himself care too much. And since she married, there’s been no one for him. No one at all.”
“And you think I’m that someone?” Meg demanded, summoning up an anger to squash down other less-acceptable emotions.
“I couldn’t say. You’re here, aren’t you?”
“I want to leave.”
He simply looked at her out of eyes wise and ancient, and then he shook his head. “When Salvatore leaves tonight, you could go.”
She didn’t bother to ask how he knew. “I want to see Ethan first.”
“Not wise. Once you see him, it will be harder for you to escape.”
“Why?” she asked. “Is he so afraid of having his deformities viewed that he would keep me here…?”
“It’s not that simple. Not at all. You’re already tied to him. You know it, even as you struggle against the bonds. If you see him, those bonds will only grow stronger, and before long, you’ll never be able to break free.”
“The others did.”
“Ah, yes. But if you left him, he would die,” Joseph said simply.
Meg shivered in the cool air, rubbing her hands along her upper arms. “Don’t be ridiculous. People don’t just die like
that.”
“‘Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love,’” Joseph quoted. “Maybe not. But if you get any closer to him, if you don’t leave now, I wouldn’t count on anything. Ethan isn’t like other men. His life has been entirely different, his emotions, his power are unlike those of other men. If you’re going to leave him, leave now.”
“I’m not ready to go,” she said stubbornly.
Joseph closed his eyes for a moment, weary. “Then it’ll be on your head. Choose wisely, Megan. His life will rest in your hands.” Joseph rose, backing away from her. The sun had gone behind a cloud, casting the garden in shadows, and a light, misting rain had begun to fall.
“But Joseph…”
“My faith is in you, child. If you want to find him, keep turning left. If you want to leave, turn right.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Turn left, child. Always left.” And he vanished into the billowing mists, leaving her alone in the garden, shivering.
MEG HAD NO WATCH, AND THE ever-changing weather beyond the wall of glass could give her little clue as to the time of day. Salvatore brought her a tray of cold meats and salad, thumping it down on the white lacquer table, and one look at his dour face warned Meg not to ask again. He was obviously wrestling with what was best for Ethan. She might or might not take that decision out of his hands.
She waited for his footsteps to die away, then tried the steel knob on the white door. Firmly locked. She’d have no choice but to go through the gardens, find a way over the wall.
But she’d wait until darkness fell. She wasn’t quite sure why—Ethan could see more clearly in the dark than she could. The fitful daylight would only hinder him if he tried to stop her.
But still she waited, picking at her food, pacing her room, ignoring the video camera that watched her with its unblinking eye. They’d taken her sneakers, taken her jeans, taken anything of comfort that might aid her escape. She had no choice but to make do in bare feet and one of those filmy caftan-type things Ruth had hung in her closet.