“The renovation started several weeks ago. I’ve been sleeping at the jail,” he said. “Not sure when they’re replacing the wiring, but it’s been flickering and faulty since I rented the place.”
Maddy stood at her door and stared at Constantine’s tie. The forget-me-nots, the diary and the chest of bones had been at his house. If he wasn’t guarding them…who was?
“He’s being compelled. They can do that. Especially if there’s room in someone for them to creep in,” Amelia had said.
She thought about Mark Smith and his cold, empty eyes. Amelia was wrong. Smith was the perfect host. Not Constantine. And he’d been there at the house. He hadn’t been out looking for her when she’d run into him fleeing Evelyn’s ghost.
He’d been coming home to Evelyn’s bones.
Maddy fumbled with her key while Constantine watched her nervous fingers. He would never believe her. He had scoffed at Gracie and Smith was one of his deputies.
She tried not to imagine her small stepsister fighting against Smith’s powerful grip.
When the door opened, the refuge of home felt like stepping into a cloister. One where ghosts, killers, death and loss held no sway. Constantine followed her in, but he stood in the threshold after she closed the door. They’d already been intimate. But he didn’t assume. He stood with his tailored shirt and the tie that was driving her crazy and waited for her to decide.
There was nothing she could do about Smith until she could talk with Amelia in the morning. She needed to tell the paranormal investigator that she and her organization had been barking up the wrong tree.
And what of Gracie? Had the pictures she took of Constantine really been about the house he lived in and not the sheriff at all?
It was late. She was tired and cold and a man she desired was waiting for her kiss rather than taking it from her. Maddy walked over to Constantine. She put her hand on his broad shoulder and used the steady prop of it to hover on one foot and then another as she took off her ruined shoes.
She thought maybe she understood the curfew for the first time since moving to Scarlet Falls. They were safe and alone in their own intimate bubble. Constantine watched her. One side of his oh-so-kissable lips had curved up slightly, only slightly. But on him it looked like a smile.
Maddy brushed across his mouth with one trembling finger already excited by what would be.
Then she reached to finally unknot his tie.
∗ ∗ ∗
The tuxedo’s bow tie was stiff and impossible against her fingers. Her gaze shifted up to his and back down again to concentrate when his hooded irises gave no indication to his thoughts.
Did he like it as she used her smooth lacquered nails to loosen and tug the perfect folds of black?
When the polished fabric finally freed, it was decadent. One side slid from the other with a small sigh, the tight weave only rough enough to make the slightest sound. The sigh was echoed from her own lips in the smallest rush of air when the vulnerable pulse point at his throat was bared and the beginning of his button placket was framed by the two ends of undone bow tie.
Still, he stood unmoving with his hands at his sides. He watched her as he always watched. But, maybe, there was a deeper interest, a vested interest in where her hands moved next?
She drew a breath and held it as she reached for his top button. It came free and then the next and the next in slow, savory succession. She exhaled with the loosening of his shirt only then realizing that Constantine exhaled softly, too. Relief, then, for both of them as skin was bared.
Maddy stepped closer, within the circle of his arms, but he didn’t embrace her. Rather, he left his arms akimbo so she could push the tailored matte cotton of his tuxedo shirt off his shoulders and down his arms.
The muscles beneath her fingers were firm and full. He had lost weight since her stepsister’s photographs, but it hadn’t been muscle mass.
She paused at the scar on his right arm then gently skimmed over the old bullet wound that had been intended for his head.
She brought her hands to his waist to work the shirt free from where it was tucked into his slim cut trousers.
The shirt fell with a whisper of starched fabric to the floor and Constantine finally moved.
He lifted his hands to her shoulders. He eased the chiffon down to bare her collarbone and then he dipped his head to taste her skin.
Maddy gasped.
She gripped his waist.
But she didn’t stop him.
His lips trailed down with the occasional brush of his hot tongue until he met fabric. The chiffon had caught above her nipple. Only the swell of her breast and a dark hint of areola were bared for him to tease, but he teased it well. He tasted her with a light brushing of his lips and tongue until her nipple was hardened to a peak—even untouched, even hidden behind the bunched chiffon and lace.
“It killed me to touch you and not taste you that day in the Carriage House. When we danced tonight I promised myself I would do this if you didn’t stop me,” Constantine confessed.
Then to illustrate, he tugged her dress down, taking her strapless lace bra with it, until her arms were pinned to her sides with lavender chiffon and her pale, pinkly flushed breasts were totally freed.
She didn’t stop him.
Not when his five o’clock shadow prickled pleasantly across her delicate skin. Not when his hot mouth closed over one breast to suckle. She only cried out as the sensation went to other tender parts of her.
He held her and she was glad because her legs had gone weak. Heat spread as he favored first one breast and then the other with teeth and tongue.
“Please,” she breathed into his rumpled hair. She was tied to the spot by her dress and her trembling legs…and her desire to stay exactly wherever his lips might be.
“Please what, Maddy? What would please you tonight?” Constantine asked.
“I want you in my bed,” Maddy answered. Desire coiled tighter and tighter in the pit of her stomach as she said the words. “I want to be bare with you.”
Constantine straightened. His hands moved to cup her face and tilt her chin so that their gazes met. Both of them breathed heavier than normal as if they’d had to run a great distance to reach each other’s arms.
“Do you? Do you want to be bare with me? No beautiful clothes. No perfectly applied makeup. Your hair tumbled like this all around?” he asked.
He easily pulled the pins from her hair with one hand while the other continued to cup her face and hold her in place.
Tears pricked behind Maddy’s lashes. Not because she minded being mussed, but because of the intense relief of letting it all go—her show, her effort, her past—all let go because with him none of it mattered.
Maddy nodded.
And Constantine leaned to press his lips to hers. With no coaxing, their mouths opened so their tongues could twine.
He’d let go, too.
He wasn’t closed off and detached with nothing but his observant eyes to give him away.
He was fully in her arms, fully hers and soon, as their legs carried them down the hall, he was in her bed.
Her dress fell easily in a lavender puddle of softness on the floor. But her underwear and sheer stockings took longer. Constantine saw to it. He lifted each leg and slid its stocking down, each in turn, until she ached with the slow, achingly slow, savoring of it.
But she didn’t rush him.
She stood, trembling and hungry, until she was finally nude. And then she pushed him back on the bed and did the same to him. She took her time. She savored the baring of his skin, inch by inch. Then, she savored his erection with her mouth, inch by inch, the hot length of it heaven against her tongue.
When he pulled her up to stretch across him it was more intimate than she imagined. Because he was so masculine and yet he begged her for her touch, and she was so naked and yet she’d never felt so strong.
She hadn’t spared a thought for the vanity. She hadn’t thought about forget-me
-not bouquets. She was on Constantine in the moment. Perspiration gathered on her upper lip, slick and salty. He was inside her. Deep. She rode him and he rocked up into her. As their bodies tensed together in release, petals began to fall. Maddy blinked and slowed and watched in disbelief as ghostly pale petals fell from the ceiling, materializing from nothing, in an impossible, eerie snowfall.
Constantine opened his eyes and froze, obviously seeing the forget-me-nots and feeling them, too, where they settled on his lashes, skin and hair.
“What the…?” he asked.
And then in the silence of falling petals a shattering explosion interrupted the creepy beauty of the flowers with bloody pricks of powdered glass all along their skin.
∗ ∗ ∗
Constantine gathered her against him even though settling glass and silence indicated the worst was over. When he rose and stood, he looked formidable. Even with rivulets of blood welling on dozens of tiny cuts in his skin.
Maddy dared to look behind her. The dressing table mirror had shattered. Glass had exploded out into the room. Though they weren’t hurt badly, blood and glass had joined the petals that even now curled into dried husks of what they had been.
“Come on,” Constantine said. He reached for her and lifted her into his arms. He was taking all the risk of stepping on glass to protect her.
He carried her from the room. He shut the door and turned the key in the lock. He walked down the hall to the guest bedroom and shut the door behind them. She didn’t ask him if ghosts could be kept at bay with doors and locks. She knew they couldn’t. But she also knew that the vanity was in the other room and that somehow did matter.
They climbed onto the fresh bed and curled into each other’s bodies. Maddy was glad to be bare against him, still, happy to be against his warmth instead of alone.
Chapter Ten
Constantine was gone the next morning when Maddy woke. She stepped softly from the guest bedroom toward her bedroom, feeling the house completely empty around her. Not a soul or a sigh. The shards of mirror still littered the bedroom floor. She cleaned them up with an ordinary dustbin and broom, but she took them out to the garbage can by the curb rather than keep them in a wastebasket in the house.
There were no dried forget-me-not petals mixed in the broken glass.
There was no evidence of fresh petals on the bed or on the floor.
But for the broken mirror, she could have pretended it had been a bad dream. All of it. Even the pin pricks of cuts all over Constantine’s hands and face.
Now she wasn’t only expected to believe in ghosts. She had to believe in spirits who could manifest physically and cause harm—possibly even death. Maddy held one particularly wicked shard up to the morning light streaming into the bedroom window. The razor’s edge of the glass winked with a seemingly evil intent in the sunlight.
She had never thought of Gracie’s job as dangerous. Crazy, reckless of her potential—meaningless sometimes—but never dangerous. She must now reevaluate it all. She did so as she showered, soaping and cleansing all the little places where glass had stung her skin.
Maddy left three voice mails for Amelia. She wanted to warn her about Mark Smith. The other woman didn’t return her calls. She didn’t try to tell her about the vanity, its mirror or the forget-me-nots. She couldn’t separate the supernatural elements of the tale from the decidedly natural elements.
Her body was still flushed and tender.
Even as she showered and pulled on jeans and a sweater—a hand knit lavender sweater—she remembered Constantine’s taste and touch. She didn’t know where he had gone or what he intended to do, but she did know now that he was definitely not under Evelyn Wilde’s thrall.
What that meant to any possible relationship between them, only time would tell.
They were both still very much haunted by what had come before in their lives even if no actual ghosts trailed them at all.
∗ ∗ ∗
It was Sunday—a day of rest for most of the town, but not for Maddy. She liked occasional moments of leisure as much as the next person, but she could usually only achieve them after a long day’s work.
With her cell phone in her pocket on vibrate and a pick in her gloved hands, Maddy began to break up a semicircle of lawn behind her house where she’d received permission from the landlord to install a water feature. She would build the fountain and surrounding garden beds during winter’s slow months so it would be ready for use come the spring.
She hadn’t been busting up grass and clods of dirt long before she was interrupted.
“Hi, Maddy,” Tom McCall said. She dropped the pick’s head to the ground and leaned on its long handle. Though she had much on her mind, she made the effort to smile at the sad-eyed deputy. She was rewarded by an answering smile that just missed reaching his mournful eyes. “Sheriff sent me to fetch you. He’s found something he thinks you need to see,” Tom said.
Maddy’s heartbeat quickened. Had Constantine thought of something concerning her sister’s murder and gone to pursue it before she woke this morning?
“Of course,” she said. She pulled off her gloves. “Let me stow these things.”
Quickly, she took the pick to her cart and left it and the gloves with her other tools. She kicked the dirt from the lug soles of her work boots and took them off inside her back door. Then she pulled off the coveralls she’d donned to protect her clothes. She switched to a pair of more stylish boots in fawn-colored leather.
While she hurriedly prepared to go with him, Tom waited patiently. He stood in the sun with his hands in his pockets, the soft smile still on his face, his eyes still ringed with circles and droopy.
She wondered about his sudden exit last night and the evidence of a sleepless night in the darkness under his eyes, but she didn’t ask.
She tried not to make him wait longer than necessary. She was ready to follow him to the squad car he’d left near the trash can at the curb in minutes. As she passed the large black receptacle, thinking of the shattered mirror and its shadows shut inside chilled her.
∗ ∗ ∗
They drove out of town and up the road leading to High Lake. Maddy recalled vividly her walk the day Gracie’s body was found and was glad for the blast of heat coming from the vents of the cold-natured deputy’s car. Especially when they passed the leaning fence post where the strange crow had perched that day with talons sunk into decayed wood. Impossibly, as they passed, a large crow sat there still.
It had to be a different bird. Or the same bird, possibly, returned to a favorite roost. But it looked for all the world like it had been waiting there all along for her to pass this way again. It seemed as if Tom let off the accelerator when they approached and the car slowed long enough for her to see the crow’s sharp beak open in a cry made soundless by engine noise and the rushing air from the vents.
She couldn’t be sure if he’d slowed on purpose to get a look at the large bird himself or if it had been only macabre imagination on her part. The car seemed to speed up again and they left the crow behind.
Relief filled her when they didn’t take the dirt and gravel road that led to her stepsister’s first grave. She hadn’t realized how much her tension had built until they passed the road and her whole body went limp. But then the relief drained away when Tom put on his signal and slowed to turn onto the road that led to Scarlet Falls.
Chapter Eleven
Before they reached the dead end that widened into a parking cul-de-sac overgrown with weeds and scrub, Maddy’s phone buzzed in her pocket. The sudden vibration made her jump and laugh.
“I muted the ring on my phone while I was working,” she explained.
Tom brought the car to a stop and cut the engine. He stared straight ahead instead of laughing with her. His smile was gone.
She dug her phone from her pocket and saw Amelia’s name on the screen. She raised the phone to her ear.
“Where are you?” Amelia asked. Her voice was slightly breathless.
“I’m with Tom at Scarlet Falls. The sheriff found something he wanted me to see,” Maddy explained.
There was a pause. For a second, she wondered if the connection had been lost.
“Maddy…the sheriff is here with me and Marcus…Mark…here in town. We’re at the Historical Society,” Amelia said.
Maddy’s blood ran cold as a wave of dread coursed through her veins. When she turned her head, Tom was looking at her with his familiar sad eyes, but the barrel of his revolver was pointed at her, which wasn’t familiar at all.
“Say goodbye, Maddy,” Tom advised.
From a world away in a town full of her gardens and a place where she’d never imagined a gun pointed at her face, Amelia continued.
“It was Tom all along. He’s been hoarding Evelyn’s bones. His wife died just before Gracie came to town, just before Hillhaven burned and the chest was found. He…he killed Gracie. You’re in terrible danger,” Amelia said. Her voice wavered but Tom’s hand didn’t.
Maddy heard a thump and voices in the background before the line went dead.
She hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye.
∗ ∗ ∗
They walked the path to Scarlet Falls she’d walked before. This time the whispers were louder. They sidled past her ears and slid along her skin, seeming to compel her forward and onward with an almost physical touch.
“The sheriff is meant for her. He won’t come home to her, but he’s meant for her all the same,” Tom said. He jammed the muzzle of his gun into the small of her back, cruelly, giving her no doubt he would pull the trigger if Evelyn so desired.
Maddy stumbled but stepped onward, determined to give him no reason to put a bullet into her spine. She could recover from bruises, both to her skin and to her pride, but she might not be able to recover from being shot.
This kind, quiet deputy had strangled her sister. His face had been the last sight Gracie had seen.
It had been the eyes that had fooled her. His sad brown eyes. She’d pitied him and felt for him because she’d lived with sadness, too. Had Gracie been fooled? Had she trusted Tom until his hands had closed around her vulnerable throat?
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