She studied his face, his very handsome face. Waited a moment to let it all sink in. “I think we already have. We might as well finish what we started.” She meant more than the project or anything connected with it.
“I don’t know…”
No, he hadn’t caught her double meaning.
She grinned at him and pushed a little harder, unwilling to quit the project or abandon her research. No, she wasn’t ready yet to give up. She could have sworn he’d been filling in the cracks in her fractured heart with quick-drying cement. Leaving Wakefield meant she might not see Dylan again.
“What? Are you chicken? I’m game. Are you?”
“I promised Moreau I would protect you.”
What did that have to do with anything?
“From what? Brandon Wakefield?” She snorted her derision and leaned toward him until her face was inches from his. “Right now, I think he’s more afraid of a ghost than he is of us.” She tapped the table with her chipped fingernail. “He’s run away twice, hasn’t he? Something keeps pulling him back here, and the ghost keeps tormenting him. It’s like she’s trying to use him as a surrogate to punish Les Wakefield.”
Dylan laughed, but discomfort bubbled from beneath his mirth. “That might be true if she were a ghost, but I’ll bet someone is pranking us. I’ll bet there is no ghost.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Do you really believe that?”
“I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.”
Ah, he thought he had her there. She smiled and allowed a good amount of sugar to drip from her expression. “A girl can change her mind.”
“Have you? Really, Sophia? Have you changed your mind?”
So he had caught her subtle hint.
Dylan sighed. His hand hovered so close to her face, hanging in the air as if he were afraid she’d bite it off if he touched her.
She didn’t flinch or try to move away. She held his gaze, daring to look into the depths of his soul. What she saw there scared her beyond any fear she’d ever had. Not that he was dangerous or that her heart was in danger. No, her fear was much more fundamental. She was afraid she’d forgive him for everything when he really didn’t want her forgiveness. Maybe all he wanted was… Her fear clamped down on the thought and squeezed the life out of it.
“Every day and every night I think about how I messed things up between us. I’m so, so sorry, Sophia. I’ve missed you. Sometimes I miss you so much it hurts; it physically hurts.”
She pulled her emotions up from the depths of her pain. No, she couldn’t let him get off so easily. She needed more before she believed his remorse was genuine. More than anything, she wanted his feelings to be real. “Did you miss me when you were with her?”
He closed his eyes. His fingers rested on her cheek. “The truth is going to hurt.”
“It already hurts. You might as well tell it to me straight.” Why did she have to sound so breathless?
His eyes popped open, a flash of fire flickered to life, and then burned as fierce as a hot blaze devouring everything it touched. “Yeah, it hurt, especially when I was with her.”
His touch scorched her cheek, but she couldn’t make herself pull away from his caress.
“How could that possibly be true?” A razor’s edge had entered her tone, replacing the breathlessness. No need for him to think he could get to her without a fight. She needed him to fight for her.
“What I did…no excuse. I should have never been alone with her. I should have never… There are so many things I shouldn’t have done. But once I’d done them, I was trapped.”
She jerked away from his touch. “Trapped? You could have walked way from her. No, you could have run away. I might have forgiven you if…if you’d been honest with me.”
He bounced back from her. “Really? That’s all it would have taken? Just to tell you the truth? Why did I get the feeling that nothing I could have said would have mattered? Come on, Sophia. You knew her. How do you think she trapped me?”
A fresh pain stabbed her in the heart. Was he going to play the victim to Audrey’s villain? Was he going to take no responsibility for his part in their affair?
“After you found out she lied to you about the baby, you didn’t have to stay with her.”
He stared at her, his jaw working. She expected anger, but instead, pain seemed to settle across his features, dragging at the corners of his mouth and shadowing his eyes.
Her stomach dropped to the bottom of her gut. The truth was coming at her. She couldn’t stop herself from gouging it out by picking the scabs off old wounds. “She had something else on you, didn’t she? What was it, Dylan? How did she trap you?”
“I couldn’t run, and I couldn’t tell you.” The truth, whatever it was, appeared to be slicing him to shreds.
Her determination to make him pay for the way he had hurt her wavered. She no longer enjoyed watching him squirm. She had wanted him to fight for her, but she hadn’t wanted the battle to destroy him. “Why? Why couldn’t you tell me?”
“Because she would have ruined your life.”
“Me? What could she do to me?” What could be so devastating that Dylan would succumb to that kind of blackmail to protect her? Whatever it was, it had to be a lie.
“You should have told me when it happened, Sophia.” Doubt clouded his eyes.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Even as she uttered her denial, a sick feeling swelled in Sophia’s gut. “Is that why you said you couldn’t trust me?”
He swallowed hard. His eyes seemed to beg her to stop.
The truth was beginning to expand in her consciousness. She tossed her wobbly idea out, just to see how it would float. “You’re talking about the accident, aren’t you? What did she tell you?”
“You should have called the police. I would have stood by you.”
“Dylan, I don’t know what you think you know, what she told you, but whatever she said was obviously a lie. I told her we should call the police, but she begged me not to. She already had two DWIs. She was hysterical because she didn’t want to go to jail.”
His head snapped as if she’d punched him. “She was driving?”
“Yes, why do you think she wanted to keep the police out of it?” The nerves in her stomach jumped.
“She said you were driving the car.”
Her hand covered her mouth. Speechless. She had no words. Nothing she could say. The meaning of what he’d told her numbed her soul.
“It was your car. I remember the damage.” He shook his head. “She said she had proof, and she’d go to the police with it if I left her.”
Sophia heaved out of her chair. Tired. Every bone and muscle in her body ached. “You stayed with her because she threatened to tell the police I ran over that guy. Is that what you’re telling me?”
He nodded, but his confidence in the truth had obviously been shattered.
“She lied to you, Dylan.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about it when it happened?” His pleading voice rocked her on a wave of nausea.
“It wasn’t my story to tell, and I can’t believe that you’d believe her. After all the lies she told you, after all the lies you caught her in. You still believed she’d tell you the truth…about me?”
He shook his head, disbelief written on his pained features. “If I had told you all this, confessed to you what I’d done, told you about her threats, would you have forgiven me? Would we still be together?”
“We would have had a better chance of staying together then than we do now. Right now, I’m just…numb.” She stared at him, sadness oozing from every pore of her skin. Hope had died a painful death. “Trust is a fragile thing, Dylan. How can we ever get past this? I don’t know that I can.”
He coughed once and pressed his hand to his mouth. Shaking his head, he grabbed the doorknob. “I need some air.”
Maybe she had gone too far. Said too much. Was that how she really felt? Or was she in shock? How could she sort out her fee
lings so soon? It was all so fresh.
“Dylan, I just want to know…”
The door slammed behind him.
She had stopped crying over Dylan Hunter long ago, but stinging tears burned the backs of her eyes. The first sob ripped through her as she made her way to the bathroom just in time to toss the contents of her stomach into the toilet bowl.
****
As soon as Dylan ventured out into the night with nothing but a flashlight, he wished he’d stayed in the trailer. The overhanging limbs seemed to bend and reach for him, sometimes brushing his shoulders with low branches that snagged his clothing like grasping fingers. He searched overhead for any patch of sky not obscured by trees. Whatever sky was up there was hiding behind cloud cover. The night had never seemed so dark.
Or maybe that was just the empty feeling in the pit of his stomach.
You’re being ridiculous, Dylan. Just keep walking. You’ll burn your irritation off soon, and then you can go back to the trailer. You can get through tonight and then find a way back to New Orleans tomorrow. A little time away from Sophia might be good…
What was he saying? He’d had years away from her, and none of those years had been good. None at all.
He had headed out toward the highway, but before he’d traveled a third of the way down the drive, he noticed a path leading into the woods. He set out in that direction, traveling toward town and away from the swamp.
In another fifteen minutes, his tired body suggested he’d gone far enough and he was ready to turn around when the path emerged into a clearing surrounding a mobile home. A man slouched in a lawn chair on the wood deck with his face covered by a baseball cap and his boots propped on an old milk crate.
Turn around or not? If he backed up slowly, maybe the man would never know he’d invaded his privacy. He stepped on a dry twig.
The man startled and grabbed for a nearby shotgun. “Who’s there?”
Dylan lifted his hands. “Hey. Whoa! Lower the shotgun. I’m not dangerous.”
“Who are you?”
Dylan could almost hear the unspoken you ain’t from around here on the end of the sentence. He pointed to the manor house. “I’m doing the renovation work over at the Wakefield place.” He moved forward and held out his hand. “Dylan Hunter.”
“Hunter, huh? I heard of you. You’re that guy from New Orleans whose girlfriend disappeared, aren’t you?”
Dylan groaned. Did everyone on earth know about his past? “Yeah, I’m that guy, but I didn’t do anything to her.” He added the last because eventually he’d have to say it. People always wanted to hear it whether they believed him when he said it or not.
“Whatcha doing out here this time of night? Are you lost?” The man snorted at his own sarcasm.
Dylan hesitated. Did he have a reason for wandering around in the dark? Was sulking a good enough excuse? The truth would have to do. He had no other excuse for invading the man’s solitude by crawling out of the dark woods on a dark, cloudy night than that he’d run away from Sophia’s anger.
His hand still dangled unshaken. The moment was becoming awkward.
“I’m staying in a trailer on the Wakefield property with my ex-girlfriend…” He held up his unshaken hand. “Long story. Anyway…we had an awful fight. Not like we haven’t fought before, but this time… You know, I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
The man leaned the shotgun against the mobile home and finally offered his hand. “Woman trouble, huh? My name’s Bobby.”
Dylan hesitated before shaking his hand.
The man reached into a cooler and handed Dylan a beer. “Sit down for a while.” Bobby deposited his rear in his lawn chair again. “So, Dylan Hunter, tell me all about your woman trouble.”
The man sounded friendly enough, but Dylan got the impression there was something just a little off about him.
He took a long swig of the cold beer before responding. The liquid slid down the back of his throat and cooled the fire burning in him. “Aw, I don’t know. That should probably stay between me and her.”
“Yeah, sure. She’s that kind, huh?”
Dylan nodded. “Yeah, she’s that kind.” He wasn’t quite sure what Bobby meant by that, and he didn’t want to talk about Sophia, so he let the man’s assumptions ride.
He took another gulp of the beer and settled onto the steps in front of the door. “How long have you lived next door to the Wakefield place?”
The man narrowed his eyes. Now why would that question make the man wary of him?
“Since… It’s been a few years.”
Everything seemed to slow to a snail’s pace. Dylan’s head felt heavy. But of course, he’d been a bit sleep deprived the last few nights. His slumber had been restless with Sophia in the house.
He nodded in the direction of the manor house. “Ever notice anything weird going on over there?”
Bobby threw back an ounce or two of his beer. He seemed to consider Dylan’s question a long time. Before the man answered, Dylan closed his eyes, thinking he’d rest them for only a moment.
When Dylan awoke sprawled out on Bobby’s deck the next morning, he felt like he had two heads. The man was nowhere around, so he stood and dusted off his clothes. His head pounded. The grit in his eyes felt like someone had thrown sawdust at him.
He turned his gaze toward the way he had come. No, he still wasn’t ready to go back yet. Not in the shape he was in. Funny. He didn’t think he’d drunk enough to feel this bad. He didn’t even remember finishing the first beer.
As he sauntered off the opposite direction from the house, he realized Bobby had never answered his question about the weird stuff going on at Wakefield Manor. The man had thrown off a strange vibe, giving Dylan something to think about while he walked off his hangover.
****
Sophia’s head still pounded from the vibrations of hammer rings. Collin McVey and his crew had finished their work a little over an hour before, but Sophia’s headache remained. And there was no sign of Dylan. She glanced out the second floor window that overlooked the drive. His truck hadn’t left the spot where he’d parked it the day before, so he had to be on the plantation somewhere.
At first, she told herself he was off licking his wounds. Yeah, she had no doubt he was hurting just as badly as she was. It couldn’t be an easy thing to know he’d believed Audrey’s lies. But as the day progressed and he still hadn’t made an appearance, she began to chew her nails.
She’d chosen the bedroom closest to the stairs to begin her search in case she’d needed to make a quick exit. Staying in the trailer alone had no appeal, so she’d dared to find a place inside the house within shouting distance of the work crew. The resulting headache testified to her mistake. The trailer would have been a better choice.
Collin stuck his head through the open door. “Sophia, we’re about to leave. My men need to work, but we don’t want to sit around with nothing to do.”
“Sure. I’ll get him to call you.”
He seemed to study her for a moment. “Maybe you shouldn’t stay up here by yourself, you know. This place is surely cursed.”
How many times had someone suggested that?
“I’ll be okay. I’m going to stay in the trailer until Dylan gets back.” She stuffed the papers she’d been reading back into the drawer where she’d found them and stood, stretching the kinks out of her shoulders. She glanced once more through the open window toward Dylan’s truck. Unease caused her insides to jerk.
Collin had turned to go when she stopped him. “Wait, Collin… Shouldn’t he have shown up by now?”
He rubbed a work-roughened hand up and down his cheek. “It does seem strange he never showed today. You want me to look around the place. Maybe he’s gotten himself into a bit of trouble.”
The whine of vehicle engines followed by the crunch of gravel filtered through the open window. Collin’s men had wasted no time leaving. She cocked her thumb toward the last taillight as it hurried down the drive toward
the parish road before she closed the window. “They don’t like being here, do they?”
He nodded. “A superstitious lot, they are.”
She gathered her things and stuffed them into her workbag. “I’ll go with you to look for Dylan. Just let me put my things in the trailer.”
Fifteen minutes later, they had searched the inside and circled the house. Still there was no sign of Dylan. By the time they stopped in front of the path that led into the woods behind the house, Sophia’s nails had all been nibbled down to the quick.
Collin gently pushed her hand away from her mouth. “Stop your worrying. He’s around here somewhere.” He rubbed his hands together and peered into the moss-covered cypress in front of them. “So…you want to go down the path a ways. If you do, I’ll need my flashlight.”
She chuckled without any amusement. “There are a lot of stories about malicious spirits running around in those woods. I’m not sure I want to, but what if Dylan is hurt.” Or something worse. The pounding ache increased where it centered right between her eyes.
“Ghosts? Sure there are, so my men say.”
“You’re not scared?”
He smiled. “Sure, I am, but I can’t leave here without knowing Dylan is well and right. So let’s go down there and have a look.”
She waited for him while he retrieved a flashlight, and then they set off down the path. The further they traveled, the darker and thicker the woods around them became. They’d gone no more than a hundred feet when they came upon a wrought iron gate set into a stone fence. Beyond the gate, overgrown brush and moss-draped cypress shrouded several moldy-looking crypts.
She stepped back, certain she didn’t want to enter the Wakefield family cemetery. “I’m not going in there.”
He sprayed the beam of his flashlight across the ground on the other side of the gate. “Well, I can see in there right enough. No sense in disturbing the dead for no reason.”
From where she stood, she could just make out the inscription on the nearest crypt. Wakefield. Only one name was carved on the front stone. Leslie Earnest Wakefield. So if the sheriff succeeded in her attempt to pull old man Wakefield’s bones out of his eternal sleep, then that was the crypt the coroner’s office would disturb. From what she remembered about opening up old tombs like his, there was a proper procedure. It wasn’t the opening that was difficult, but the resealing of the tomb that proved too expensive for most families. After it was opened, it might never be closed again.
The Unmistakable Scent of Gardenias (Haunted Hearts Series Book 6) Page 16