Victoria House (Haunted Hearts Series Book 2)

by Denise Moncrief

  Heat surged through her. The urge to meet him halfway was so strong she had to press her fingernails into her palms until they hurt to keep from giving in to the desire to be with him. There were many things she had come to regret the next morning. She didn’t want Gray to be one of them.

  “Tori?”

  “Hum?”

  “What are you thinking?”

  She held her breath. If she lay still and ignored his question, would he push her to respond to his obvious interest in pursuing the potential that lay between them?

  She wanted him. Oh, she wanted him badly. It was obvious the desire was mutual. So why was she waiting? What made her hesitate? True, she didn’t really know the man that well, but when had that stopped her in the past?

  Maybe because every other relationship she’d had fell apart once she’d had sex with the man. Those brief relationships had left her feeling used, as if the only thing the guy wanted from her was her body. More than anything in the world, she didn’t want that to be the way it was with Gray. If they were going to be together, she wanted it to last longer than a few months. She sensed that he could be a man that never bored her. A man that could drive her to distraction while charming the pants off her. A man she couldn’t live with and couldn’t live without.

  Sex before its time always complicated everything.

  Tori was not a tease. She vowed never to allow them to get into this situation again—where she was in bed with him, anyone’s bed, even a ghost’s, knowing he wanted more than she was ready to give. That wasn’t right.

  After a long while, the bed shifted again and she glanced his way. He had rolled onto his back, his eyes closed, a slight smile playing around the edges of his gorgeous mouth. One hand resting on his chest, the other behind his head. Then he released a sigh and a soft snore.

  Had the man really fallen asleep? Well, yeah. After all, he had gotten very little rest the last few days. Exhaustion had obviously overcome whatever desires the man might have had.

  In a little while, she’d wake him and they’d get into his car and leave, but for the moment, she let him have his nap, luxuriating in the privilege of observing him without him knowing it. She longed to curl up beside him and lean her head on his shoulder.

  Being this close to him was so delicious. She reached out to touch him, but he twitched, so she withdrew her hand. She had the sudden desire to kiss his sexy lips. Deep and full and lingering. Run her fingers through his hair. Press her body next to his. She sighed and turned her head away to study the ceiling.

  Odd. Why would someone wallpaper a ceiling? The torn paper clung to the plaster in some spots and hung from others in bits and tags. The pattern was unusual. She traced the fleur de lis with her eyes until her lids grew heavy.

  ****

  It wasn’t until the bed began to shake violently that Tori realized she’d fallen asleep beside Gray. Her eyes popped open just as a dark shadow moved over her. A hand reached out to stroke her cheek. The softest of whispers fluttered in her ear.

  “Victoria.” A man’s voice. Filled with regret, fear, hate, and love. Raw and unfiltered. Heavy with strong emotion ill defined by the shallow words men had created to describe the shadows of the heart.

  Then, the unmistakable searing burn of a knife sliced across her throat.

  An ear-piercing scream assaulted her ears. It wasn’t until she slapped her hand over her mouth in terror that she realized the scream was pouring from her.

  “Tori?” Gray’s voice barely permeated the ringing in her ears.

  Strong hands wrapped around her upper arms, dragged her from the bed, and then pulled out the door into the hallway, shaking her until her screams collapsed into gulps of fear-laden hiccups.

  “Tori, calm down. You’re all right.”

  Another barrage of hiccups. “Did you hear that? Did you see that?” She twisted to stare at the still open bedroom door.

  He pulled her into his arms, and his embrace seemed to shelter her from the terror that had just engulfed her. “Yeah. I saw it.” He sounded as frightened as she felt.

  She sniffed back a sob. No way she’d let this man see her cry. “It’s just like the last time.”

  He leaned back and peered into her eyes. “What do you mean?”

  The truth welled up inside her, ready to erupt, but before she could answer, the chair fell over and the door to Victoria’s bedroom slammed shut.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The relaxing effects of the wine had worn off and left Gray with a sort of hyperaware jitteriness. Tori’s breath escaped her in ragged bursts while his seemed to catch in his throat. He grabbed her hand and dragged her along the hallway, down the stairs, across the foyer, and out the front door. Once he made it outside onto the stone patio, he stopped, dropped her hand, and bent over with his hands on his thighs, finally inhaling huge gulps of oxygen. She grasped his shoulder and leaned on him, panting and gasping.

  His legs gave and his butt hit the top step. He planted his feet firmly on the ground to keep his knees from shaking. The last thing he wanted to do was appear like a wuss in front of Tori. She slid down until she was seated next to him, shoulder to shoulder.

  The race down the stairs and out the door shouldn’t have affected him so much. It wasn’t that much exertion, yet he felt completely drained of energy as if his life force had been tapped and emptied.

  After a long moment, his heart rate decelerated, and her raspy breathing adjusted to a normal rhythm. He glanced over his shoulder at the house looming large and ominous behind him. His whole body did one of those jerky shakes that happen when the adrenaline has finished its rush.

  “Are you all right, Tori?” He dared to slide his arm across her shoulder. Their faces were only inches apart, so close he could smell pinot on her breath. She didn’t flinch and she didn’t shove him off.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  She felt of her neck. “It happened again.” She pressed her fingers against a spot just below her lower jaw. “Is my neck red?”

  She titled her head, and he could see the spot she was rubbing.

  He smiled, hoping to relieve some of the tension that still vibrated around them. “No, you are most definitely not a redneck.”

  She snorted. Was she amused at his lame attempt at humor? He couldn’t be sure.

  “That’s not what I meant. Does my throat look like it’s been cut?”

  He stared at her face, unwilling to glance at her neck for fear of what he might discover. Finally, he shifted his gaze. Nothing. Her throat appeared to be a normal, healthy shade of rosy pink, probably colored by the last vestiges of a spike in blood pressure due to the sudden stress.

  “Did you feel it again? Did it feel like someone had cut you with a knife?”

  She nodded, tears misting her eyes. She sniffed them back. “It’s almost as if the thing wants a piece of me.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  She laughed. “You were there. If you were paying attention, you couldn’t miss what happened.”

  Well, he had been asleep, but the violent shaking of the bed had jolted him out of a sexy dream that involved her and him and a blanket in the middle of nowhere up in the mountains, away from everything, just the two of them under the stars. He pulled his thoughts out of his frustrated imagination and refocused on their conversation—a conversation that needed to be vocalized for both their sakes.

  “I want to hear it in your words...see it through your perspective.”

  The way she stared at him, he dreaded what she would say.

  “Did you feel the bed start to shake?” So much doubt resonated in her question. Did she fear she had been the only one having the experience?

  He squeezed her shoulder to give her some added reassurance. “Yes, I did. Woke me up...” He bit the inside of his cheek to keep from blurting the entire truth. She didn’t need to know about his very erotic dream.

  She sighed as if relieved. “I must have fallen asl
eep. It was almost like the bed wanted me to wake up so I could see what was coming at me.”

  He held his breath. Not a great beginning to her story. Just as he had sensed, she had experienced much more of the disturbance than he had. For some reason, Tori was a conduit for the energy localizing in the house.

  He didn’t want her to feel as if she was alone with the fear left over from the experience. He never wanted her to feel alone in anything. That thought scared him as nothing else that night had. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the strange new feeling welling up in him. More than physical attraction. And there was plenty of that. No, there was something more. Something he’d never felt for Caroline. Had he come to care for Tori so much already?

  “Then I saw it...a black mass hovered next to the bed. It sort of took shape. His hand reached out to me and he whispered my name.

  “He?”

  Had she finally allowed the thing to have a human essence? If one believed in the afterlife...that sometimes souls lingered with unfinished business... He couldn’t finish the thought before she was talking again.

  “Yes, definitely masculine.”

  “How did it make you feel?” His husky voice boomed across the darkened night. Loud in his ears.

  Why did he ask that question? He’d never asked anyone that question...well, anyone he had interviewed about paranormal experiences.

  She sucked in a breath. “Scared out of my...”

  The pause before she used the word mind was significant. He’d heard that she’d once been accused of being mentally disturbed, and he could only imagine what an ordeal that had been for her.

  “Besides being scared nearly to death, I just felt angry.”

  “Angry?”

  She turned blazing eyes on him. “It’s happening to me all over again.”

  He rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and pointer finger, but kept his other arm around her. “Maybe you should tell me what happened in Little Rock.” He paused. “If it’s making you angry.”

  She didn’t blink. Stiffened while she sat beside him like a stone statue. “I processed the evidence from the Lipton murder.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Well, then, you understand, don’t you? You get why I left Little Rock and took a job with a county sheriff’s office.”

  She’d been accused of tampering with evidence in a major murder case—a difficult case where the prosecution was trying to convict a man of murder without ever having found the body of the victim. When she’d led the Little Rock police to the shallow grave where the body was buried, she couldn’t explain how she knew where to find it. The mess had become so tangled that the Little Rock PD had called in the Investigations Unit of the Arkansas State Police.

  “Who’s your friend in Little Rock? Didn’t he tell you which ugly scandal ended my career in the crime lab?”

  He scratched the back of his neck and slapped at a mosquito. “Shaw Bennett. He told me you left Little Rock in a hurry because of some missing evidence.”

  Actually, Shaw had told him more than that.

  “Shaw Bennett? Because of him... Because of what he did... Everybody thought I was crazy.” She whisper-shouted the word crazy and sounded just a little bit insane when she did.

  The expression on her face made him flinch.

  “What did he do?”

  “Is he one of your ghost hunting buddies, Gray? I want to know before I trash the man.”

  He cleared his throat. “He’s the guy I called when everything went crazy at Laurel Heights.”

  “Oh, I see. So you and that jackass are tight, huh?”

  Guilt by association.

  He could feel her inching away from him, so he pulled her in tighter to his side.

  “I know him. I wouldn’t say I like him. I got him out of a bind once. He returned the favor out at Laurel Heights. And just so you know, he refused to tell me the whole story about what happened to you in Little Rock. He said it was time for those rumors to stop. So why don’t you tell me what happened so I’ll know the truth, and I won’t have to ask around and get everyone’s distorted version of the truth?”

  Her head turned until they were staring into each other’s eyes, almost nose to nose. “You know how I knew where to find the body? I went back to the crime scene to see if I could find anything else left behind that might lead us to the killer. I felt horrible that the evidence that would have convicted him went missing on my watch. And guess what?” She sucked in a shaky breath.

  “What?” He prompted her to continue when it seemed she’d stalled.

  “The house told me where to find the body. The house, Gray. How weird is that? If you weren’t a ghost hunter, would you believe me? How was I supposed to write that one up, huh? Yet I couldn’t ignore what I knew in my gut was true. I had to tell them where I thought the body was hidden. If you were investigating that murder and you didn’t believe in paranormal activity, wouldn’t you accuse me of being delusional...a paranoid schizophrenic...just like my mother? Or worse yet, an accessory to murder or maybe even the murderer.”

  Just like her mother? There was an even deeper layer to her story. His heart broke for her.

  She blinked back a few more tears. Her neck reddened. She was mad but that obviously didn’t make the story any easier to tell just because it was spilling from her in waves, like a dam had burst.

  “You know what that did for my credibility? Any evidence I’d ever processed came into question.” She sucked down a sob and swiped at her eyes. “Shaw didn’t help things. He was going to prove that I’d heard things from the house. Catch them on a recording and then play them for that idiot Little Rock detective, but Shaw just made it worse. He talked them into going out to the house to do an investigation, which yielded nothing but a lot of news stories about how we were nuts. Little Rock police detectives do not like being embarrassed by a crazy person’s theatrics.” She paused long enough to sniff hard. “Yeah, you see why missing evidence doesn’t look good for me?”

  “I told Halsey that I lost the envelope.”

  “You did what?”

  “I told Halsey I was the one who lost the evidence.”

  She pushed his arm off and jumped to her feet. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Why not? I knew you’d gone through something awful because of missing evidence. I didn’t want you to go through that again.” He didn’t want her taking the blame for something he asked her to do.

  “Take me home.”

  “What?”

  “I need to go home...back to my motel room.” She glared at him for a long minute before she hurried toward his car.

  He stood and watched her stiff back while she waited for him to unlock the door. Why was she so angry? Why was protecting her from further scandal so wrong?

  ****

  Gray shoved the gear into park and left the motor idling. The drive back from Victoria House had been heavy with Tori’s quiet anger. He’d tried to talk about why she was angry, but she wouldn’t even glance his way, kept her head turned toward the passenger window. He finally gave up trying.

  The woman was stubborn. Maybe it was just as well nothing romantic had happened between them. He didn’t need her kind of aggravation.

  As soon as the car rolled to a stop, she was popping the lock.

  “Tori?”

  She jerked her head around and faced him. Her anger hadn’t diminished a bit. If looks could have killed, he’d be as dead as Jared Crenshaw. Maybe even deader.

  He tried again to start the conversation. “Look, I don’t get why—”

  “If you don’t get it, Gray, then... I don’t want to talk you. Not right now. Maybe later when I’m not so mad.” She slammed the door on any reply he might have had.

  He’d give her time to cool off. Maybe he’d try to talk to her about it again. Maybe not. Depended on whether he ever felt it was worth it.

  He reversed the car and backed out of the parking spot. Then he decided he wouldn’t let h
er get by with her attitude. He’d done nothing wrong by keeping her part in the missing evidence debacle quiet. Why couldn’t she appreciate his attempt to keep her out of it? Shouldn’t she be grateful for it?

  He twisted the steering wheel to move back into the spot he’d just vacated, but before he could kill the engine, his cell phone vibrated against his hip. He shoved the gear into park before glancing at the display and was surprised to see Ashley’s number. It had been so long since he’d spoken with her that she could have changed her number and Gray wouldn’t have known it.

  Why was she calling him? Late at night?

  “Ashley? What’s wrong?”

  “Someone’s beat Josh up. He doesn’t want me to take him to the hospital, but I’m positive he has a broken rib and I’m afraid of internal bleeding. He’s passed out again.” Her voice barely croaked above a whisper. Fear resonated in every word she spoke.

  He closed his eyes. Had Tori noticed he hadn’t left yet? He had to leave soon or she might call the Fairview cops on him. Wouldn’t that be funny?

  “Where are you at?”

  “An abandoned house down county road 17, about a mile south of Ashley Ridge.” She paused and the brief moment was ripe with tension. “What should I do?”

  What kind of question was that? She was a medical professional. She should know what to do.

  “Hang up and call 9-1-1.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not? If he’s hurt that bad, he needs a hospital.”

  The distinct sound of Ashley sucking in a ragged breath rattled across the airwaves. “Courtney was here, but she’s gone now. She used Josh’s phone to tell me where to find him, but when I got here there was no sign of her. You know that if I call this in dispatch will send a Sheriff’s unit out here.”

  Courtney had left. When was he ever going to catch up with the woman, and how did Josh know where to find her? Why did Josh go out there alone to meet her?