Shades of Gray

by Katie MacAlister

  “She’s not a ghost,” he answered, and was clearly about to go into one of his denial lectures, but Noelle decided that this was a time when bud-nipping was most definitely called for.

  “Gray, darling, I’m not stupid. Yes, I’m a Guardian, and yes, most of my experience is with demons, but I know a ghost when I see one, and your mother”—she paused to wave a hand at Lady Joan, who was gazing at her son with an expression of yearning that was painful to see—“your mother is most definitely one.”

  Gray froze, his eyes narrowed on her. “My mother is . . . here?”

  “Yes.” She looked more closely at him. “You don’t see her, do you?”

  He shook his head, pain and guilt gripping him with such strength that Noelle’s knees weakened. She grabbed his arm, gasping for breath. “My God, what is it? Why do you feel that way? Why can’t you see your mother’s spirit?”

  An inarticulate sob came from Lady Joan. Noelle, sharing Gray’s pain, turned her head at the sound, the anguish on the woman’s face so horrible to see that she fell to her knees.

  Instantly, Gray was there, pulling her into his arms, tamping down the horrible pain inside himself until she could breathe again, the scent and feel of him so warm and alive wrapped around her like a soft blanket.

  Are you all right, Beloved? I’m sorry that my emotions got away from me. I should have better shielded them from you.

  “No, you shouldn’t have,” Noelle said, pulling herself away from the safe haven of his body in order to search his eyes. “I don’t want to be protected from your emotions, Gray, not even the negative ones. What happened to you?” She took his face in her hands and gently kissed him. “What happened to your mother to leave her so devastated? Why can’t you see her?”

  Fresh pain lanced through him at her words, and Noelle swore to herself, damning her verbal clumsiness.

  He rose to his feet, pulling her up at the same time, his face shuttered, his emotions locked tightly away from her. “The past is in the past, where it should be. As for my mother . . .” He looked over her shoulder to the crumbling remains of the cottage. “If you can indeed see her and speak to her, tell her . . .” His voice cracked. It took him a few seconds to speak again. “Tell her that I am sorry.”

  Tears burned in Noelle’s eyes as she glanced behind her to see Lady Joan, now seated on a fallen tree, weeping silently into her hands. Obviously, whatever happened to you and your mother was a profound tragedy. But I don’t get a sense of censure from her, Gray. I don’t think she wants an apology from you.

  He stumbled away from her, pushing away her hands when she tried to grab his arm, his mind once again choked with so much guilt it almost strangled her.

  Gray?

  Leave me. Just . . . leave me. I bring nothing but sorrow to those close to me. You are better off without me, Noelle.

  “Poor, deluded man,” she said softly, watching his shadow flicker for a moment before it disappeared into the gathering darkness. “He honestly thinks that we’d be better off apart.”

  “He carries a great burden,” Lady Joan said in her soft, whisper-thin voice. “He seeks to protect you from the darkness within him.”

  “But I can relieve him of that darkness, at least some of it. I can give him back his soul. Surely he must want that?” She turned to the ghost, who now bore an expression of hopelessness. “I’m going to be blunt, Lady Joan. Blunt and nosy. What happened between you that Gray feels such guilt?”

  The ghost closed her eyes for a few moments. “He believes he is responsible for my death.”

  “Goddess! That would certainly account for his emotions. Was he responsible?”

  “No, Grayson was not responsible.” Lady Joan stood and brushed off her skirts before drifting toward the cottage, her visibility fading as she disappeared into the spirit realm. “It was his father who killed me.”

  Chapter Six

  How did she find out? How the hell did she find out that Mother was here?” I spun around and glared at the cat, who perched regally on the tall four-poster bed. “You told her, didn’t you?”

  Johannes cocked an eyebrow at me.

  “Oh, don’t give me that look. I know full well that if you put your mind to it, you could speak. You damned . . .” Words failed me. I swore under my breath and stomped over to the window, jerking back the curtain to stare furiously down to the veranda. “If it wasn’t you, it had to be that bastard Nostredame. I’ll murder the bloody fool. Dammit, he’s already dead. I’ll . . . I’ll . . . I’ll call in a Summoner and have him removed.”

  Johannes got to his feet, stretched, then jumped off the bed and strolled to the door, giving me an imperious look over his shoulder.

  “What, now I’m your personal servant?”

  He just looked at me with half-closed wicked green eyes.

  “One of these days, Johannes . . .” I flung open the door, yelling after him, “So help me God, if you say one more word to Noelle—don’t give me that look, you could talk if you weren’t so damned lazy. I swear to you by all that you hold dear, I’ll send you back to Amaymon if you even think of meddling with my Beloved!”

  The cat disappeared into the darkness of the hallway, leaving me alone with the horrible knowledge that I’d lost even the brief glimpse of paradise that had descended so unexpectedly upon me.

  I returned to the window, leaning my forehead against the chill of the glass, seriously considering drowning myself in the pond before I remembered that it had grown over decades ago. “You’ve made a bloody mess of everything,” I told my reflection in the window. “Not content to screw up your own life, you ruined your mother’s, destroyed any hope of a happy future, and now you’re tainting the best thing that ever happened to you. You make me sick.”

  The face in the window stared back at me. I sighed at it. “Christ, I can’t even be pathetically maudlin without sounding ridiculous.”

  A flicker from the veranda had me growling out oaths I hadn’t used in a very long time, and without further thought about the reason I wanted to pummel Nosty to a ghostly pulp when Noelle and I had no future, I found myself chasing after the blasted ghost. He didn’t stay on the veranda long, leaving it before I found him. It took another twenty minutes before I finally pinned him down in the housekeeper’s room in the basement of the east wing.

  “There you are, you traitorous bastard!”

  Nosty spun around at the sound of my voice, his gaze immediately flitting around the room, obviously in search of escape. “Er . . . Gray. Hello again. Long time no chitchat. I was just . . . uh . . . talking to Miles, here. Wasn’t I, Miles?”

  The mortal was sitting on a worn wooden chair in the middle of the room, lit only by a single candle that listed to one side, stuck into a broken saucer. “Who the devil are you?” He squinted at me for a moment. “Oh, you’re that horrible actress’s boyfriend. Well, you can leave, along with this chatterbox.”

  I ignored the ill-mannered man. Mortals, on the whole, were interesting. This one, however, I could quite happily never set eyes on again. I honed my glare on Nosty. “Don’t try to weasel your way out of this. You know full well that I’m here because you’ve been telling tales.”

  “Hello! Am I suddenly mute? I just told you two to leave!” Miles sputtered.

  Nosty edged away from me. “Tales? Me? I’d never do that, Gray, you know that. Especially not tales about you.”

  Miles breathed heavily through his nose. “The spirits sent me to this room so that I might commune with the deceased housekeeper. I feel that she has things she wishes to tell me, and she can’t bloody well do that with you two standing there bollixing away.”

  “You told Noelle about my mother.” I growled, stalking slowly toward the ghost.

  Nosty gulped and backed up, his hands out in a placating gesture. “I didn’t tell her anything about Lady Joan. Other than where she lived. But nothing else, Gray, I swear.”

  “I think I am being possessed.” Miles, now swaying in his chair, his eyes clo
sed, started humming to himself. “Yes, I believe the spirit of the housekeeper is merging with my consciousness. What is it you want, dear lady? You want these people out of your room? Yes, yes, I completely understand. You wish for your privacy to be honored.”

  “That was enough to send her running over to the cottage to speak with my mother, whose very presence you neglected to bother mentioning to me. Shall I tell you what I do to those who annoy me, Nosty?”

  “You were never here!” the ghost shrieked, now backed up against the wall. He looked as if he was trying very hard to disappear into nothing, but I hadn’t spent my entire existence coping with ghosts without learning a trick or two. I made sure he was grounded and couldn’t dissipate his being. “How could I tell you if you never showed up at the Abbey?”

  “You’re bloody ’ere now, both of you, and you can just leave so I can get on with me ’ousework,” Miles said in a strong Cockney accent as he glared at us. “I’ve got an entire ’ouse what to clean and feed.”

  I shot him a look. “The only housekeeper who ever used this room was Czech, not British, and she spoke no English.”

  Miles blinked for a second, then collapsed back onto the chair, slumped down, moaning. “The spirits, so many spirits here, they are fighting to speak through me . . .”

  “If you so much as open your mouth to Noelle again—” I grabbed the ghost by the front of his robe and lifted him off the ground, shaking him as I did so.

  “I won’t!” Nosty babbled, his expression suitably frightened by my unspoken threat. “I swear by the saints, I won’t say another thing to her! I won’t tell her about Johannes, or Amaymon, or that night when your mother died . . . I won’t tell her about any of that.”

  “See that you don’t.” I slammed him against the wall before I released my grip on his robe. He slid down the wall to the floor, where he crumpled into a ball before disappearing into nothing.

  Behind me, Miles was humming softly to himself, occasionally tossing out a word of what was obviously tourist Czech. I turned to tell him he’d have to do better than that if he wanted to convince anyone that he was possessed, but the sight of the woman standing in the doorway, her arms crossed and one lovely sable eyebrow cocked in question, drove all lesser concerns from my mind.

  “Johannes?” Noelle said, watching me avidly. Amaymon? Is that the demon lord who vitiated you? Why did your father kill your mother, and more important, why do you feel so guilty about it?

  For a moment, for the time it takes for one synapse to fire at another, I thought of running. I’d run my entire life—why not now? But even as I stood tense and poised to escape, the warm lilac scent that seemed to be permanently imbued in her skin wrapped me in silken tendrils, pulling me toward her.

  “I am now possessed,” Miles announced loudly in a quasi-Czech accent as I walked past him to the door.

  “Bully for you.” I stopped in front of Noelle and looked down at her, trying to read in her eyes that which I so desperately wanted to see.

  Her expression was inscrutable, although as I watched, the corners of her mouth began to curl up. I was distracted by the sight of her mouth, and the hunger within me came to life, swamping me with the pounding, insistent need to claim her in all the ways known to man and woman.

  Instantly, I was ravenous with hunger and rock hard with baser needs.

  “Oooh,” she said as I scooped her up and lurched painfully down the narrow hall toward the back stairs. “I like what you’re thinking. Feathers have been underused in sexual play, I’ve always felt.”

  I slid a glance down at her as I started up a flight of stairs toward my bedroom. “Just how much sexual play have you indulged in that you would feel so strongly about the subject?”

  “Are you by any chance asking me how many men I’ve slept with?”

  “Yes.”

  “I really don’t think that’s any of your business. I’m certainly not going to ask you how many women you’ve been with, so I don’t think it’s at all fair or even politically correct to inquire as to the number of my previous lovers. You do see, don’t you, that it’s what happens from here on out that’s important, not what happened in our past?”

  “Yes, I understand that.”

  She looked at me as I kicked open the door to the room that had been mine whenever I was at the Abbey, a little smile flirting with her lips. My erection went from rock hard to damn near impervious to a point-blank atomic blast.

  “How many?” I asked, setting her on her feet and immediately stripping her of her clothing.

  She giggled, damn her delicious hide. I had no resistance to such a feminine sound and only just managed to keep from pouncing on her. “Three. You?”

  “Does that matter?”

  “Oh, yes.” She leaned forward to nip my bottom lip. “What’s good for the goose and all that. How many, Gray?”

  I sighed, checked the bathroom to make sure Johannes wasn’t lurking about, then returned to find Noelle lying seductively on the bed. “Twenty-two, if you insist on knowing.”

  “Twenty-two . . . goodness!” She sat up, her breasts bobbing enticingly in front of me as I struggled to remove my trousers without simply shredding them off my body. “That’s a lot of women, Gray. I don’t think I like that number. When you compare three with twenty-two, well . . . that’s quite a difference.”

  “I was born in 1664,” I pointed out, finally wrestling my trousers off, eyeing her with indecision. Should I start with those delectable breasts and work my way down or begin at the shy, pink-tipped little toes and work upward?

  “Were you? That’s really neither here nor there, is it?” She did a little mental arithmetic. “Oh, I see what you mean. You’ve had relationships with an average of seven women every century.”

  “Whereas you’ve had three in less than approximately fifteen years,” I said, crawling onto the bottom of the bed, taking one ankle in hand, the sensation of her smooth, warm flesh driving the hunger and passion inside me even higher, until I thought I might fall into the deep, red well of need.

  “Twelve, actually. I’m thirty-one. Three makes me sound so very promiscuous,” she said thoughtfully, watching with interest as I struggled with the hunger, keeping my bites to gentle little nips as I kissed my way up first one calf, then the other. “Wanton, almost. Are we going to have oral sex?”

  I stopped licking behind her knee to look up as she lolled back on the pillows, her dark red curls tangled on the bed linens, desire mingling with expectation in her beautiful eyes. “We’re going to do whatever you like. You may command me.”

  “Really?” She smiled. “Then you’ll answer my questions about Amaymon and your parents and those other things that Nosty mentioned that had you looking like you wanted to kill him on the spot but knew you couldn’t because, well, he’s already dead, for one.”

  “You may command me in sexual acts,” I said, biting a little harder on her thigh.

  She moaned. “Oral sex, then.”

  “As you wish.” I leaned forward to kiss a path down toward where shorter, darker curls shielded her intimate secrets, but she sat up, pushing me onto my back.

  “You’re going to be the recipient, though.”

  I thought, at least for an infinitesimal fraction of a second, of protesting that I wanted to be the one to give her pleasure, but there was no way on this good earth I was going to stop Noelle from doing what she so obviously wanted to do.

  She laughed in my mind. I don’t think there’s a man alive who would say no.

  I frowned as she moved my legs aside and sat on her heels between my calves. It’s not that. I simply do not wish to deprive you of the pleasure that you are so obviously anticipating.

  She looked pointedly at my erection, which, at that moment, had properties in tensile strength that were similar to titanium.

  “All right. Perhaps I am anticipating them as well,” I admitted.

  “Tensile strength?” She giggled and stroked her hands up my legs, her touch like
molten fire going straight to my blood and driving the hunger into a fevered pitch. “I like the way your mind works, Gray. Most men, most normal men, couldn’t come up with phrases like ‘tensile strength’ at a time like this. Most men would be lying back, moaning, clutching the sheets with both hands, begging me to explore your titanium-like penis with my tongue and mouth and perhaps, if I’m very, very gentle, even a little scrape of teeth.”

  “I am not most—”

  She bent over me, taking the very tip of me into her mouth.

  The sensation of her tongue swirling against flesh that was suddenly sensitized beyond human bearing left me moaning, clutching the sheets with both hands, and begging her to never stop doing what she was doing.

  I never thought I’d like this, she told me as she continued to torment me with her mouth, almost making me come off the bed when her hands joined in. But with you, it’s different. I think it’s because I can feel what every little touch is doing to you. Now, how do you feel about this?

  It’s too much. My back arched off the bed as my hips thrust upward into the sweet torment of her mouth. You’re going to kill me.

  You’re immortal, my darling.

  If it’s possible to die of pleasure, I’ll do it, I managed to get out before the hunger slipped control, and I was pulling her over me, thrusting up into her, capturing her cry of ecstasy in my mouth. Her fingers dug hard into my shoulders, her breasts, those delightful little strumpets bent on my utter captivation, tempting me with their silken warmth as she moved to a rhythm that was shared between us, her pleasure feeding mine, which in turn drove hers even higher. It was as if we were in a perpetual cycle of rapture, and it was only when her release claimed her that I let myself drink deeply, the skin of her shoulder a silken haven that I couldn’t resist any longer. She was mine, and I knew at that moment that I would move the moon and the stars to make sure she remained that way.

  It took a long time to recover, both physically and emotionally. I knew what committing myself to Noelle would mean, knew that it would require sacrifices from both of us, and was attempting to organize a number of arguments in favor of my point of view when she lifted her head and frowned at me. She was lying on top of me, our legs and arms tangled in a boneless, utterly sated manner. The fact that she had the strength not only to raise her head but also actually to frown annoyed me.