Of course. She’d envisioned a whole bizarre list of things a ghost might include in his conversation, melodramatic Dickensian statements that went hand in hand with popping in and out of thin air, perhaps accompanied by a good dose of chain rattling.
David wore no chains, but he hadn’t disappointed her.
“Damned,” she repeated. “But you didn’t tell me where you go when you’re not on Earth. Where you came from.”
The planes of his handsome face took on a bleakness, a despair that transformed him from a man of confident ease to one whose gaze revealed long intimacy with pain. Jesse had seen that look too many times not to recognize it.
“I told you that there were no words,” he said. “The place … is beyond your comprehension, Jesse. It is endless nothingless, eternal loneliness. I call it limbo, but it has no name. Or hope.”
Before, when they’d touched on the hillside, she’d sensed David’s very being. Now his portrayal came to life within her imagination, and she could see what he described. Feel what he felt in that place.
He had mentioned a battlefield, but this was far worse. Here there was no life or death, only unbearable isolation that went on forever.
So hopeless. So alone. No way out.
She could drown in those emotions as she drowned in his gaze. With a firm grasp on her will, she pulled herself out of his illusion.
“What did you do in your life,” she said, “so terrible as to earn that kind of punishment?”
His gaze dropped to his clenched fists. “That is … the difficulty. I remember very little of my previous existence on Earth. I know only that when you called my name, I was able to return. I was given another chance.”
“A chance … to do what?”
“My memory doesn’t tell me.” He looked at her again, as intently as before. “In … that other place, I lost myself. Now that I’m here, I am just beginning to regain what I was. And I am convinced that you have my answers, Jesse.”
It seemed both bizarre and appropriate that she should be haunted by a ghost who claimed to have lost his memory, when she was in the process of rebuilding her own.
But he actually thought she could provide answers for him. A man who called himself damned.
“I don’t have any answers,” she said. “Not yours or anyone’s. I don’t know why this is happening, but I can’t help you. I …”
Have enough troubles of my own, she finished silently. But he was staring at her, swallowing her up in that piercing blue.
“I don’t believe that,” he said. “There’s generosity in your soul. Too much to refuse help to one who needs you.” He held out his hand in a gesture of supplication, fingers cupped. “You won’t turn your back on suffering. Not even mine.”
“How do you know?” she asked with a touch of bitterness.
“I saw you on the hill with your troops,” he said. “They followed you as men follow a leader they trust with their lives. One who cares for them, protects them.”
She couldn’t meet his gaze. “You don’t remember your own life on Earth,” she said, “but you’re so sure of me.”
“One must be sure of something, even when all else is gone. Isn’t that true, Jesse?”
Oh, yes, he knew that need; he spoke as a man who had struggled against all hope to find something to put his faith in. As if suffering had been his lot far longer than human life could compass. For years, working with the Corps, Jesse had tried to relieve what misery she could, in countries where such misery was as common as hunger and injustice. She’d been careful to keep a little of herself apart, because to do otherwise meant losing the detachment that let her function. As she’d lost it with Bobby Moran.
Now, if she allowed it, she could slide right into the all too personal pain of a man who wasn’t even alive.
She closed her eyes. “Why me?”
“Because we have a connection, you and I.” She heard the skidding thump of the chair as he stood. “I don’t know what it is, but I feel it. As you do. You couldn’t have called me otherwise. And what happened on the hillside …”
Oh, God. “It’s crazy,” she said. “Crazy—”
“No.” He moved closer to her, boots clicking on the floor. She could feel the flesh-and-blood nearness of his presence, his face inches from hers. “No, Jesse. Don’t.”
Her heart pounded in her throat. Don’t, he told her, but she didn’t know what he commanded. With an effort she shut off her emotions and opened her eyes. He was very close: his eyes, his mouth, his formidable reality. She could hear his breathing, as rapid as her own.
“Don’t deny it, Jesse,” he said. “Don’t deny me.”
Before she could think to pull away, he seized her wrist. There was no sharing of space now, no arcane overlapping. His hand was warm and firm and strong. She felt the brush of scars and callused fingers.
Masculine. Intimate. His touch cut to the very quick of her, spiraled in a wild electric dance through every nerve of her body.
It had never happened to her before. Never. She’d long ago accepted that there was a part of herself no man could reach.
David reached it. He reached it and grasped it and claimed it for his own.
She snatched her hand free, but the tingles and pulses and sparks left her too dizzy to stand. She staggered, and David skirted the table to catch her. She dodged him and found refuge against the wall.
God help her. She closed her eyes again, but the visions were waiting. And David was always there.
Yet suddenly another name took shape in her mind, a name she’d heard David speak on the mountainside but hadn’t remembered until this moment. A name that meant something, that seemed to hold a hope of understanding.
“Who is Sophie?” she whispered.
CHAPTER FOUR
So she had heard him.
He hadn’t meant to speak that other name aloud. It had been carelessness to voice his thoughts when he’d realized, almost from the beginning, that she must not know the truth.
Perhaps he’d gone too far, and too swiftly. She’d broken away, rejecting his frontal attack, yet the vibrant force of her life itself still coursed through him from the simple touch they’d just shared. It pulsed in his heart and lungs and nerves and groin, as heady as an overabundance of whiskey or a dangerous escapade taken a step beyond recklessness. He felt the pull of it long after he turned to the window and hid his face from her searching gaze.
He’d nearly forgotten himself in that touch. Her pointed question was a warning that it was time for a strategic retreat.
“Sophie,” he repeated, crafting the illusion of puzzled reflection. “It sounds … somewhat familiar to me.”
Jesse’s footsteps moved across the polished wooden floor behind him. “You called me that on the hillside, as if you thought I were someone else.”
He had no intention of answering honestly. “Someone else,” he said, staring out at the twilit darkness. “It’s possible … the name is one piece of that memory I must find.”
“Someone in your previous life,” she said. “A woman. And I reminded you of her. The way you said it … She was important to you.”
She spoke with a still, grave certainty. Was it her soul’s memory, unacknowledged? Could she sense so much?
“You already guess far more than I do,” he said, “but I believe you may be right.” He turned halfway, offering a crooked smile. “You see? You can help me, Jesse.”
“Help you to remember your life?” She laughed humorlessly. “Maybe you’ll understand my skepticism when I tell you that there are parts of my own life I can barely remember. And I’m no ghost.”
By God, no, she was not. Jesse was life. She was the symbol of what he’d lost and what he must regain. She was the plan and the battle and the victory all in one stubborn body and soul.
Life.
“I do understand,” he said. He lowered his voice to a seductive murmur. “Another reason we’ve been drawn together. We have a great deal in common, and there
’s so much more to discover.” He moved back to the table, noting the way she kept it between them to forestall any further risk of a touch.
Afraid, but not of him. And she hated being afraid as he hated the fetters that tied him to limbo.
“You have power you don’t even know you possess,” he said with perfect candor. “And it’s not in you to run. Is it, Jesse?”
She jerked her head in denial, mouth set. “Whatever I … imagined, whatever you may believe, I’m not in the business of saving souls.”
“Not even your own?”
Her flinch spoke volumes. It had been a shot in the dark, a blind guess, but now he knew he was right. Jesse was more than merely afraid. He’d been thrown on the mercy of a woman deeply troubled—forced to win not only her acceptance, but her goodwill and trust. And there was no trust in her eyes.
Surely they were laughing at him, those grim guardians of his prison. His punishment was far from over.
“Perhaps,” he said, “we’re meant to help each other.”
For a moment, just a moment, he thought he saw a softening in her gaze—as he’d seen on the hillside just before he’d left her, or when he’d held her hand. The fragile, trembling hope of a child offered unexpected comfort, or a soldier given a second chance at survival after a deadly skirmish.
But she shrugged, throwing off the fleeting vulnerability like an overladen pack. “What makes you think I need help? I’m not the one who’s damned.” She strode across the room, vanishing into the small, oddly equipped kitchen. David heard the sound of running water and the click of a glass. When she returned, she was firmly entrenched behind a shield of false nonchalance.
“Oh,” she said, “I might find you useful if I could send you out to haunt someone on command. That’s the only practical function I can think of for a ghost.”
“Indeed,” he said, watching her with narrowed eyes. “And who would you send me to haunt? Have you enemies, Jesse?”
He saw her answer in the stiffening of her shoulders and the rise of her chin. But she wasn’t going to admit anything so personal to him. Not yet.
“An army of ghosts would have been useful in the Peninsula,” he said, easing around the table. “Boney’s soldiers were as superstitious as the next man. We’d have won the war in half the time.”
Jesse had fortified herself against a recessed shelf of books that David had perused earlier. Her collection included volumes on carpentry and wilderness survival—odd choices for a woman.
But David already knew she was no ordinary woman.
What battle are you fighting, Jesse? How do I make you put it aside long enough to set me free?
“Did you die in the war?” she asked. “Or don’t you remember that?”
The suddenness of her question made him pause, just long enough for her to slip through the door into the next room. He followed, smelling the faint tang of sawdust and some spicier scent mingled with the ubiquitous evergreen and grass and fresh air. The main room of her cottage was as compact and unadorned as the rest, furnished with a small sofa, a rather plain armchair, more shelves and a few unfamiliar objects he had yet to name.
Jesse didn’t pause in the room but walked through yet another door. This was the source of the sawdust scent: a workshop filled with furniture in various stages of completion, assorted pieces of wood and tools for cutting and shaping. Wide windows looked out over a cluster of trees, barely visible as silhouettes on a background of indigo sky and the first glimmer of stars.
“That is one event I can hardly forget,” David said, stopping just inside the door. “You have heard of Waterloo?”
“I’ve heard of it.” She was sorting and stacking small sheets of rough paper in rows along a worktable, compulsively precise in every movement. “Wasn’t it the last engagement of your war?”
My war, he thought with dark irony. If only it had ended there. “I didn’t know it then,” he said. “It was a terrible battle. I learned only after my death that Wellington was victorious. A French musket ball made sure of that.”
For the first time in many minutes she looked at him. “Did you … die a hero?”
He couldn’t miss her tone of oddly innocent yearning. Was it a hero she was after? He was bound to disappoint her. But she didn’t have to know how little heroism there’d been in throwing himself in the path of certain death.
To make it stop. To end the guilt and the meaninglessness of life, only to realize too late what he’d traded for in exchange.
“I served my country,” he said. “I fought for many years. That I know.”
She stared at him for several more heartbeats and then down at the worktable. He noticed that the nails on her small fingers were short, practical, more suited for labor than for the social rounds Sophie had once enjoyed. But Jesse wouldn’t worry for hours about the drape of her gown or the arrangement of her hair or the perfect bon mot.
Sophie had wanted to please everyone with authority: the witches at Almacks, the leading bucks of the ton, the peers with more rank and power and money. She’d fawned on anyone who could give her approval.
Jesse didn’t want his approval. He had to make her want it. Want to keep him with her as long as it took.
“I was good at leading men,” he said, crouching to examine the legs of a sturdy, unpainted chair. “They trusted me. They knew I wouldn’t take them anywhere I wouldn’t go alone.”
“So you remember your years as a soldier, but nothing before?”
Under the level tone of her question was the sharp thrust of a bayonet. He rose, dusting his trousers. He felt sawdust on his hands; he rubbed the texture of it between his fingers, savoring the very fact that he could.
“Not yet,” he said. “But it will come.” He met her gaze. “I can see from your window that the night is beautiful, Jesse. Come walk with me. I find I have a dislike for walls.” With deliberate steps he approached her, passed her by as she stood very still, opened the workshop door and walked out.
She followed, as he’d known she would. Her footsteps skimmed the long grass with the hesitance of a doe’s. He didn’t look back but continued up the gentle slope of the hillside behind her cottage, toward the cluster of pines.
The evening breeze was cool, and there was enough moonlight to mark his path. David remembered nights like these with Sophie, when they’d both been foolish enough to believe in romance. On such a hillside he’d lain with her, had planted a seed in her body.
Elizabeth. Elizabeth who’d lived but one short year.
“What will happen when you recover your memory?”
Jesse had come up behind him, and he sat down beside a thorny flowered shrub, stretching his legs. He could see the lights of the village, scattered like embers and burning with the perpetual glow of some new science.
He plucked a serrated leaf from the shrub. “My answers will be there,” he said. “Just as yours are in the memories you’ve lost.”
She stood over him, unmoving. “You can’t read my mind,” she said at last. “You’d better understand right now that I didn’t ask you to come here. You’re the one who needs me.”
The leaf tore under the pressure of his fingers. “And there’s a price for your help.”
“There are rules,” she said. “And I want to get them very clear. You said you didn’t intend to leave me so abruptly before. Does that mean you don’t have control over your coming and going?”
“I only know that after a time I … lose my strength on this plane and must return to the place I came from,” he said, plucking a second leaf. “There are rules, and I’m just beginning to learn them myself.”
“Then how do you come here?”
He looked up. “You always bring me back.”
Her profile was frosted in moonlight, and he felt rather than saw her tension. “And am I the only one who can see you? My hikers didn’t notice you. Yet you’re … almost solid.”
“If I exert enough will, I can alter my form and give myself substance. I can
do this”—he tore the leaf in half—“if I concentrate. But I suspect that it is my proximity to you that makes so much possible.”
Her gaze dropped to his fingers on the leaf. “I don’t want you showing yourself to anyone else. That has to be part of the deal.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “I’m your ghost, Jesse. I’d hazard a guess that no one else could see me, even if I willed it so.”
Slowly she sank into a crouch, poised on that knife edge between acceptance and rejection, relaxation and flight. “Even if you can walk through walls, there is such a thing as common courtesy. And privacy.” She stared at him, and he imagined a blush heating her tanned skin. “I want some warning before you barge in out of nowhere. And if you can make yourself invisible … if you have any sense of honor, you won’t—”
She broke off, flustered, and he grinned to himself. Ah, but I’ve seen much of you already, he thought, remembering the way she’d looked in that nightshirt the first time, all curves and softness.
And he wanted to see more. His smile faded. She was wise to warn him, and a fool to call upon his honor.
“Shall I scratch on your door and beg admittance?” he asked.
“Knocking will be just fine. Or rattling your chains, or whatever it is ghosts do.”
A joke? David searched her face, but the light was too dim to be sure. If she could unbend enough to make jests …
“The chains are invisible, Jesse,” he said. “But you can break them.”
She plunged her hands into the grass at her feet, curling her fingers against the earth. “Don’t expect too much, Captain.”
“David. You did call me that.”
“A ghost by any other name,” she murmured, and gave a short laugh. But her voice dropped very low when she spoke again. “David.”
“It’s been long since I’ve heard a woman speak my name,” he said, equally hushed. “You do it well.”
Her breath caught. “Don’t push me. Don’t … repeat what you did in the cabin.”
Their touching, she meant. That moment of intimacy that couldn’t be denied. It must have affected her strongly indeed to compel such a tacit admission.
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