‘‘Yeah. We could.’’ Her lack of enthusiasm was clear from her tone.
‘‘What do you want to do, then?’’ He sounded faintly impatient.
‘‘Oh, I don’t know. I thought we might—go to bed.’’ Her eyes twinkled up at him.
Seth began to grin. ‘‘Here I am, trying to court you, trying to inject a little romance into what’s left of our evening, and all you can think about is rushing me into bed. If you’re not careful, you’re going to make me think you don’t respect me.’’
Olivia’s hands slid down over his shoulders, and she began to undo the top button on his shirt. ‘‘Oh, sure, I respect you. But what I really want to do is see you naked.’’
‘‘That’s it.’’ Seth’s hands closed over hers as she undid the second button, stilling them and holding them against his chest. She could feel his body heat radiating through the thin denim. His eyes gleamed down at her. ‘‘Let’s go upstairs.’’
They turned as one toward the door, and stopped dead, exchanging bemused glances.
‘‘They’ll see us going up the stairs,’’ Olivia said hollowly.
Seth ran a hand through his hair, and stared at the closed door in frustration. ‘‘Hell, I feel like a teenager.’’
‘‘Want to go make out in your car?’’ Olivia asked, and began to giggle.
‘‘Hush, they’ll hear you.’’ He gripped her hand, pulling her along the front of the house. ‘‘I’ve got a plan.’’
‘‘What?’’
‘‘We’ll sneak up the outside stairs, and go through the French windows.’’
‘‘Lover, I don’t know about you, but I keep my French windows locked.’’
Seth stopped on the first rung of the metal stairs along the side of the house that led up to the gallery, and looked down at her.
‘‘What did you call me?’’
Olivia was suddenly self-conscious as she remembered. ‘‘Oh—lover?’’
He came back down the stairs to slide a hand under her hair and tilt her face up to his. ‘‘I like the way you say that,’’ he said, and kissed her.
When he let her go, Olivia’s head was spinning.
‘‘Come on.’’ Seth pulled her ruthlessly up the stairs behind him, then along the gallery. ‘‘Your room or mine?’’ he asked over his shoulder.
‘‘Mine’s locked,’’ Olivia reminded him in a hushed tone. Her lips still throbbed from that kiss.
‘‘So’s mine.’’ He paused to fish something out of one of the hanging fern baskets. ‘‘Yours is closer,’’ he decided.
‘‘What is that?’’ Her gaze was riveted on the object he held in one hand.
‘‘A file. I guess it’s been in that basket for decades. I haven’t used it often, but when I do I always put it back. It’s pretty handy, actually. If you just slip it between the windows, you can jimmy up the latch, and—presto— you’re in.’’ He demonstrated on her window as he spoke. Olivia was appalled at how easily he gained access to her room.
‘‘You mean that thing’s been out there all this time?’’ she demanded accusingly even as he drew her inside and closed the window behind them. She’d left the bedside lamp on, and its warm glow made the room seem welcoming. ‘‘Anybody could have done that! I want that thing—and I want those latches replaced with something more modern that can’t be jimmied! Tomorrow!’’
As she considered the possibilities, Olivia’s blood ran cold.
‘‘If it bothers you, sure,’’ Seth said, putting the file down on her dresser and sounding faintly surprised. ‘‘I guess I never thought about it from a woman’s point of view. It always just seemed kind of convenient to me. In case I was out late, and forgot my key.’’
‘‘It would.’’ Olivia was already being distracted by his arms sliding around her waist. His arms were solid with muscle, and his body as he pulled her against it felt rock hard. She loved the way he felt. His blond head bent over her dark one, and she looked up at him. His face was bronzed and hard-planed, with tiny lines radiating out from the corners of his eyes. His mouth was long and firm and just faintly smiling. Her gaze traveled over his firm chin and down the strong column of his throat to the buttons she had unfastened on his shirt. Making a mental note to call a locksmith first thing in the morning, she turned her attention to unfastening the remaining buttons.
CHAPTER 47
‘‘YOU’RE BEAUTIFUL,’’ SETH SAID, AS HER FINGERS worked at the buttons. Glancing up at him, Olivia discovered that he wasn’t smiling any longer. His eyes were intent on her face, and something about the way he was looking at her gave her the shivers. She finished with the buttons and his shirt fell open, exposing a long rectangle of hard-muscled flesh liberally covered with hair.
‘‘So are you,’’ she replied cordially, and he responded, she thought, involuntarily, with the ghost of a smile.
Her hands slid up over his chest, savoring the warmth and feel of his bare skin. He caught her hands, flattening them against him. When she looked up at him inquiringly, he shook his head at her. Heat flared at her from the depths of his eyes.
‘‘Stop right there,’’ he said, his voice husky. ‘‘Or this is going to go way too fast.’’
‘‘I want to see you naked. I told you.’’ Olivia was teasing him, flirting with him, but at the look in his eyes she caught her breath, and suddenly she wasn’t teasing anymore. He let go of her hands to pull her into his arms, and she slid her hands up under his shirt, over his broad shoulders, and clung. Beneath her fingers she could feel his shoulders tighten. One hand slid down her back, found the curve of her bottom in the ancient jeans, and splayed over it, pulling her hard against him.
Then he kissed her.
Olivia clung to his shoulders and pressed her body against his and rose up on her tiptoes as she kissed him back. Then she reached between them for the button securing his pants. As she freed it he made a sound like a groan under his breath and lifted her off her feet, carrying her the few steps to the bed.
‘‘You’re strong,’’ she said admiringly, batting her eyelashes at him playfully.
The merest shadow of a smile touched his mouth. ‘‘You’re light.’’
He laid her down, and shrugged out of his shirt. Olivia had just a second to admire the sheer masculine beauty of his chest before he came down beside her, his broad shoulders blocking the light of the bedside lamp. Not bothering with the buttons, which Olivia thought commendably efficient of him, he lifted her loose white camp shirt over her head and threw it aside. For a moment he looked down at her, his eyes admiring the silky pink bra that she had taken pains to wear for him.
‘‘Pretty,’’ he said, and bent his head to press his lips to her nipple through the thin layer of rayon.
Olivia shuddered as the moist heat of his mouth burned through to her flesh, and buried both hands in the short spikes of his hair. After a moment he lifted his head, then reached around behind her back to unhook her bra. Removing it, he simply looked down at her for a moment, his gaze devouring the full, strawberry-tipped globes of her breasts.
While she watched him, he bent his head again. Warm, moist, and just faintly rough, his tongue ran over her already distended nipple. Desire shot through her like a lightning bolt. She gasped, pulling his head down harder against her breast. Obediently he drew her nipple into his mouth, nibbling and tugging. Even as his mouth moved to her other breast, his hand found and freed the snap of her jeans. As she heard the sound of her zipper being lowered, he lifted his head away from her breast. His gaze fixed on her face. Their eyes met for a moment, and then Olivia’s attention shifted. She watched, fascinated, as his hand, long-fingered and bronzed, disappeared inside her open zipper. His palm was warm and faintly rough as it slid over her stomach and delved inside her pink bikini panties.
Then he made her wait.
Olivia squirmed, silently pleading with him to continue as his fingers found and caressed the sable triangle of curls, while refusing to go lower. He was teasing her deli
berately, she knew. He knew what she wanted. She glanced up at him, half annoyed, half on fire, to find that he was watching her still.
‘‘Seth.’’ Desperate, she gasped out his name. Her hands dropped from his shoulders, slid down his arms and back up again, her nails faintly scoring the hard muscles there in supplication.
At that he relented, pushing her jeans and panties down almost to her knees and sliding his fingers between her thighs. He touched her where she most wished to be touched, watching her face as he pressed and stroked and finally slid inside. Olivia closed her eyes against his heated blue gaze and dug her nails into the mattress and gave herself up to the mind-blowing pleasure of it, writhing desperately under the ministrations of that knowing hand until finally, without warning, it withdrew. She made a faint sound of protest, and her eyes opened. Her gaze met his for one electrifying instant as he stood up to shuck his pants, and then he jerked her jeans and panties the rest of the way off and replaced his fingers with his mouth.
By the time he slid up her body, heatedly kissing her belly button and breasts on the way and then burying his mouth against her throat, Olivia was on fire, trembling with need as she wrapped her legs around his hips. She felt the fine tremors that shook his arms as they crushed her to him, and realized that he was trembling, too. Then he was inside her, plunging deep, and she cried out.
All thoughts of playing were forgotten now. He took her fiercely, driving into her with an urgency that made her strain and buck and writhe in frenzied response. Her hips arched up off the bed to receive him. She shook, and clung, and at the end, when the firestorm took her, cried out his name.
‘‘Livvy,’’ he groaned in response, huge and hard and hot as he thrust into her trembling body. ‘‘Ah, Livvy.’’
Then he shuddered, and was still, holding himself throbbing inside her. After a moment he went limp. His big body sprawled atop her, damp with sweat.
Olivia wrapped her arms around his back, kissed his shoulder, and closed her eyes. Within seconds she was fathoms-deep asleep.
‘‘Livvy! Livvy, wake up! Olivia!’’ His voice pulled her out of it, dragging her from the darkness, from the shore of the moonlit lake where her mother struggled in the water. Olivia moaned and flailed, hitting something warm and resilient and then gasping as a brilliant burst of light shone full on her fluttering lids.
‘‘Livvy!’’
Seth’s voice. She would know Seth’s voice anywhere. Gasping as though she had run a marathon, she opened her eyes a slit. Seth was leaning over her, his blond hair wildly disordered, five o’clock shadow darkening his cheeks and chin, his blue eyes narrowed with concern for her. His broad bare shoulders and the tapered width of his chest loomed in front of her, and Olivia saw with a glance that he was propped on one elbow, his chest and arms naked above the quilt that cut him off at the waist. A second, sweeping glance showed her that they were in her big four-poster bed, in the bedroom she had inherited from Belinda.
They had made love. She had fallen asleep. Seth must have tucked them both in—and he had stayed with her. As the knowledge that she was sleeping with Seth percolated through her terror-dulled brain, Olivia took a deep breath, and some of the tension that held her in thrall seeped away.
‘‘Seth,’’ she murmured. Taking further stock of the situation, she realized that they were both naked—and then she smelled it: the elusive hint of White Shoulders perfume. Glancing quickly at the clock, she saw that the time was 3:29 A.M.
Seth had dragged her from sleep before the dream ended.
‘‘Do you smell it?’’ she asked him, not very coherently, looking wildly around. The light was on. Except for the part Seth’s body blocked from view, she could see the entire room perfectly. No one was present except the two of them. No ghost, and no living human being.
Only that trace of perfume.
‘‘Smell what, baby?’’ The frown that had been lifting from his face settled back down again. Furrows marred the skin between his brows. His eyes moved over her face.
‘‘Anything. Sniff!’’ Fully awake now, Olivia hitched herself up on the pillows, taking the sheet with her and securing it with an arm above her breasts. She glanced around the room again as she followed her own instruction. Looking at her like he thought she’d lost her mind, Seth nevertheless sniffed the air.
‘‘Well?’’ she demanded.
‘‘All I smell is your own sweet skin,’’ he said with a humorous glint, lowering his nose to her arm and ostentatiously sniffing. ‘‘Very nice.’’
‘‘I’m serious.’’ She smacked his thickly muscled shoulder with her palm, and he straightened. Another glance around the room convinced her: She and Seth were alone. The smell of the perfume was fading, too.
‘‘What am I supposed to smell?’’ he asked cautiously, glancing around, too. ‘‘Gas or something?’’
Olivia sighed. ‘‘My mother’s perfume,’’ she admitted, knowing that it sounded outlandish even as she said it. ‘‘She wore White Shoulders a lot. I remember how it smelled. Every time I wake up from having the nightmare, the smell is in the room.’’
For a moment Seth said nothing. He simply regarded her narrowly from under frowning brows. Then he flopped back down on his pillow, slid an arm behind his head, and looked at her again.
‘‘And you believe your mother is haunting you.’’ It was a shrewd guess. Seth knew her well.
‘‘Yes. No. I don’t know. What am I supposed to think? I keep having this nightmare, and every time I wake up I smell her perfume.’’
Seth sighed. Reaching over, he slid an arm beneath her and pulled her against him. Nothing loath, Olivia snuggled close, ending up with her head on his shoulder and one hand splayed across the warm breadth of his chest. Before they were settled, her leg was draped over his thighs.
‘‘So talk to me,’’ he said. ‘‘I take it you’ve been having nightmares ever since I told you about your mother’s suicide. You should have told me.’’
‘‘Actually,’’ Olivia said, her fingers idly tracing the outlines of the hard muscles beneath the gold-tipped hair on his chest, ‘‘I started having this nightmare—this same nightmare—before I knew anything about that. I’ve been having it ever since I came home again. And—and that’s not all. In my dream, my mother—it doesn’t seem like she’s committing suicide. It’s more as if something is pulling her under the water against her will. Every time I dream about it, the details get more vivid, but it’s the same thing. Her drowning is not a suicide.’’
‘‘Hmm,’’ he said, and thus encouraged, Olivia ended up telling him about everything: the voices that seemed to call to her from the lake, her odd, almost physically ill reaction to her mother’s picture, even the face that was so like her own but wasn’t quite hers in the mirror in the bedroom where Sara now slept. She didn’t leave anything out, and by the time she got through she felt several degrees better.
Seth said nothing for a moment, just lay there with a meditative expression on his face.
‘‘So I’m a total nutcase, right?’’ she asked, feeling almost cheerful. The improvement in her mood had something to do with getting the whole thing off her chest, she knew. But it had more to do with the fact that she was naked in bed with Seth, had been sleeping with Seth, and now considered him irretrievably hers. She was ready, willing, and able to take on all challengers.
‘‘I’d say you were more traumatized than nuts,’’ Seth said slowly. ‘‘Livvy—I think you ought to talk to someone about it.’’
‘‘I just told you the whole thing.’’ There was the faintest touch of indignation in her voice.
He slanted a look down at her. ‘‘I mean a professional. A psychiatrist. Like I said, I think your mother’s death traumatized you. Moving back home after all that time away must have jolted loose all kinds of emotions that you’ve been suppressing for years.’’
Olivia thought about that for a moment. ‘‘Is that what you think is happening?’’
‘‘I don’t
see any other explanation.’’
Olivia peeped up at him. ‘‘You don’t think—my mother’s haunting me, trying to tell me that her death wasn’t a suicide?’’
One corner of Seth’s mouth quirked up in a wry smile. ‘‘Livvy, seriously, do you?’’
‘‘But what about the perfume? I keep smelling it every time I have the dream. And the face in the mirror, too. I’m—I’m almost sure it was my mother’s face I saw, not mine.’’
‘‘I didn’t smell anything, Livvy.’’ His voice was gentle.
Olivia grimaced. ‘‘You’re saying it’s my imagination.’’
‘‘I’m saying you ought to talk to somebody. Get Charlie to give you the name of somebody good.’’
‘‘Seth.’’
‘‘Hmmm?’’
‘‘I’m glad you were with me tonight when it happened. It’s been horrible, having that dream night after night and waking up terrified and all alone.’’
A spark of humor lit his eyes. ‘‘You should have come and crawled in bed with me. I wouldn’t have kicked you out, guaranteed.’’
Olivia smiled. ‘‘I wish now I had, just to get your reaction.’’
‘‘Baby, believe me, there’s no doubt about my reaction. I’ve been wanting to take you to bed since you were seventeen years old.’’
Olivia’s hand stilled palm-down on his chest. She propped her chin on her flat hand and stared at him. ‘‘You have not.’’
‘‘I can still remember the dress you wore the night you eloped. It was bright red, had little skinny straps and ruffles around your knees, and made your tits and ass look good enough to eat.’’
‘‘How vulgar.’’ Olivia chided him for his choice of words with a grin.
‘‘Yeah, well, when I caught you making out with that lowlife Morrison—right before we had our fight and you ended up slapping my face—’’
‘‘Sorry,’’ Olivia mouthed with a little moue of apology.
‘‘What I really wanted to do was kiss you myself. Actually, take you to bed myself. I knew you were sleeping with him.’’ Seth’s voice deepened into a growl at the end.
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