I forgot about looking over my shoulder at what might have followed me from the beach and looked up instead into a pair of coffee-colored eyes so rich, so bottomless, that no mere supernatural encounter could possibly compete.
“O’Keefe…” I began.
But it wasn’t going to be about ghosts or him calling me a cab. It wasn’t going to be about the torment that was his constant companion or my fear that he would one day break. It was going to be about me wrapping my legs around his lean waist and taking him. Here, there, against the wall or on the floor, anywhere so long as it was soon. Very, very soon.
I didn’t get to proposition him, though, because he pulled me closer, hard, knocking the air from my lungs as I impacted his chest. Then he leaned down and took my chilled, open lips with his.
Hot, so hot.
I’d been outside in damp drizzle and ocean spray. I was cool to the bone, even cooler because of my fright.
O’Keefe had changed out of his wet clothes and he’d been in his studio with the space heaters turned up to supersonic. At least that’s what he felt like. I slowly thawed into him while his lips moved over mine and his amazing hands roamed. He molded and shaped my muscled rear with his strong fingers. He lifted my hips until even with our height difference I could cup the heat of his erection with the V between my legs. By the time our tongues twined, I was warmed all the way to my core.
I was out of practice, but I took on the intensity of his hungry kiss as if it was a challenging triathlon I needed to conquer. I licked into his sweet, spicy mouth and, I swear, I almost took control. He moaned around my tongue and his body formed into me. I fully expected to wind up on the floor and I braced for it, but then suddenly he shifted us until the wall was at my back.
And I wasn’t in control. Not at all.
The hot press of his cock found my heat. The full length of his body crushed me to the hard paneling. And all I could do was wrap my arms and my legs around him and hang on.
I’d never been pleasured so thoroughly fully clothed. I writhed against him, too far gone to care that there were clothes in our way. My body didn’t care. I was climbing to the happy place and we were barely acquaintances.
And that’s when fingers of frigid air prickled across my skin.
“No,” I gasped and O’Keefe wrenched back, separating our lips and bodies with a sudden jerk.
I would have fallen if he’d let me go. That was how utterly given over to his embrace my body had become.
“What is it?” I asked.
But I knew. Not a what. A who. A she. The Thornleigh Bride didn’t want O’Keefe and me to kiss. The air in the hall had gone to ice. When I spoke, white puffs accompanied my words.
“You shouldn’t have come. I shouldn’t have asked you here,” O’Keefe said.
He pulled farther back and away and let me slide to my feet. He plunged his hands into his hair to smooth the waves we’d mussed. And, also, I thought, to keep from reaching for me again.
“A week,” I reminded him.
All the stories I’d read about Thornleigh had referenced a one-week grace period of safety before…what? There hadn’t been any specific consequences. Strange disappearances. Crazy tales of narrow escapes. No one should ever stay beyond a week. Period.
“We have several more days,” I insisted, as much to the icy air as to O’Keefe himself.
“I’m not so sure….” O’Keefe replied. He reached out to touch my freezing cheek and his fingers felt even cooler against my skin. “But I won’t ask you to leave. I can’t.”
I wanted to tell him I wouldn’t go even if he did, but I was shivering and my chattering teeth might have made the sentiment sound less firm than it actually was.
“Go to your room and stay there until morning. Things are always…better….in the morning.”
I wanted to ask him to come with me. His fingers hadn’t smoothed the dark waves of his hair. If anything, he was more rumpled than ever. My fingers twitched and I longed to plunge them into those curls to grip and pull him close. I met his eyes and the darkness there stopped me. He might say yes. He would say yes. I could feel myself slipping into the black abyss of those eyes—the hunger. My God, his hunger ran deeper than mine.
And what might come after the icy air if we continued where we’d left off?
I thought about the rain-soaked pad from that morning. The one that had only been filled with me. Those drawings said so much about what was growing between us, but I remembered how the other pad had made me feel. The one where O’Keefe had struggled against the ghost’s influence. Could a dead woman feel jealousy? The very idea chilled me to the bone.
Chapter Eight
When I returned to my room, I found the sketch torn in two. I didn’t touch it. Those two halves of ripped paper took me back to another place and time when my ordinary world had been torn asunder.
As far as I knew, O’Keefe was the only other person in residence. Mrs. Scott came only occasionally to clean. Mary couldn’t take enough time away from her dolls to plot sketch destruction. Try as I might I couldn’t imagine O’Keefe barging into my room to rend a sketch of his own creation in two. A more sinister vision crept across my imagination. I had seen the impossible bride with my own eyes. I had felt the hall grow icy. If she could materialize on the cliff, if she could make the air around us become unnaturally cold, then what would stop her from slipping into my room for malevolent purposes? I remembered the sound of the door in the distance on my first night here.
Suddenly, I didn’t feel alone. My time at Thornleigh had left me jumpy. I’d felt vaguely like someone or something was watching me from the start. Now that uneasy feeling magnified. The room seemed colder, and age and dampness permeated the walls. Worst of all, I could almost detect a hint of roses. The same heavy, wet scent that had clung to me in the garden.
It was late. My car was on the other side of the garden. O’Keefe was probably back at work. Out the window, I could see the leaded glass of the conservatory glowing with the yellow lamplight below.
I could go to him with the ruined sketch and we could talk about the ghost or I could climb into bed and accept three things: The ghost was real. I had several days before she posed a threat to me. And I couldn’t face O’Keefe again, vulnerable and hungry, without having him in every possible way, ghost be damned.
I wasn’t a wimp. I also wasn’t ready to attack O’Keefe. Oh, I wanted him. My body ached with the need to be with him. But there was so much standing in our way. He was mad. Raving mad. Not because he believed in ghosts that weren’t real as I’d originally imagined, but because he’d been driven there by a ghost who had been plaguing him for years. The Thornleigh Bride had influenced us all, but O’Keefe more than anyone. My heart pounded with dark possibilities. What if she fully possessed him and influenced his actions. How could I not be afraid of him now?
A huge part of me protested the very idea of Miles hurting me in any way. He resisted the ghost at every turn. He had never been anything but gentle with me. Fierce, passionate, but gentle.
But there was no denying that he was in a battle with some kind of entity—one neither he nor I could possibly understand.
I thought about the phone in the hall. I hadn’t spoken to my aunt or my parents since I’d landed at the airport. They would be worried, and hearing their voices might steady my nerves. I couldn’t talk to them about what was happening here. It was too unusual and frightening to put into words, but if I could reach out and hear my aunt’s voice…
Cool air wafted against my face when I opened my door. The hallway was always cooler, I told myself. There was no reason for my pulse to quicken. No need for my breath to catch. My hope faltered when I noticed the lamp was out. Had the electricity failed again? Was there any reason to try the phone at all?
I stepped out of my room anyway, unsure of what else to do. Maybe after I called my aunt, I would hang up and call a cab. I couldn’t make it through the rose garden to my own car, but a cab could pick me
up on the opposite side of the house. Never mind that I would have to make it all the way through the house to the rear driveway. Never mind that I didn’t think I could abandon O’Keefe to face this madness alone.
The house was silent around me. No doors slammed. No thunder boomed. The utter quiet made the walk to the table seem interminable. As if the distance from my door to the phone had oddly been stretched out of its usual proportion. Finally I reached it. Finally I reached to pick the receiver up and hold it to my ear.
At first, I was encouraged—there was static on the line. I jiggled the receiver’s rest, hoping to improve the connection. I dialed the digits of my aunt’s number. The clicking whir of the rotary dial seemed to echo in my ear, then the static crackled into dead silence. I stood with the earpiece pressed hard against the side of my head. My heart began to pound. I held my breath. Because I could hear wind rushing in the distance from over the phone. I could hear the crashing of waves.
Carefully, I took the receiver away from my ear. But the sounds grew louder. They seemed to fill the hallway, hollow and from far away but, oh, so real. Sweat broke out on my brow and breath I could no longer hold rushed in and out of my lungs in hurried gasps.
Because the wind over the phone had seemed to coalesce into a woman’s terrified scream.
I dropped the receiver back on its rest and backed away from the table.
Suddenly, the lamp came on. It didn’t flicker or falter. It suddenly just shone as if someone had flipped the switch. Then the phone rang. It sounded with a loud, jarring clang I’d only heard in old movies. The bbbring made me jump and cry out, but I rushed forward to pick it up. Maybe the call to my aunt had gone through. Maybe I would tell her everything in a wild rush before we were cut off.
Hurriedly, with clumsy fingers, I lifted the receiver to my ear.
“Aunt Caroline?” I asked in a wavering voice so unlike my own. “Is that you?”
Of course, it wasn’t.
“No one knows,” a wet voice gurgled in my ear.
And then an unmistakable scream.
I dropped the receiver back into its cradle to break the connection, as if the voice and the scream could somehow manifest through the line. I jerked back and away and stumbled to my room. Icy fear made my limbs numb and graceless.
Long after I slammed my door and locked it, I stood guarding it with clenched fists and horror curdling my blood.
I was trapped. Caught in the same web that had trapped Miles O’Keefe years ago.
Sometime later, after hours of utter silence had passed, I collapsed into bed.
* * *
I’m not sure what woke me—a rustle, a sigh, a stone tear falling on my face? By the time I opened my eyes, all was silent and the room was empty. And, yet, there was movement. I looked toward it, holding my sheet with two fierce fists.
A shadow passed outside my door.
From one side of the wide oak to the other, in the pale light shining from the hall and under the door, someone or something passed.
It could have been O’Keefe, but wandering the halls at midnight was a little too Edgar Allan Poe even for an eccentric artist haunted by the dead.
I waited, breath held, to see if the shadow would return. And, yes, I called it “she” in my thoughts. Where is she going? What does she want?
I could have stayed in bed. I could have stayed shaky and weak following the knife attack, too. I hadn’t. I didn’t. I rose and went for the door.
Two years of intense physical therapy and personal training made me no more capable of ghost hunting than the next person, but it did make it impossible for me to cower and quake and hide any longer. No one knows…what? What did no one know? Maria O’Keefe had jumped off a cliff. Did her ghost want me to know why?
The hall light no longer glowed. Someone had turned it off. O’Keefe? All about energy conservation and saving the penguins? Maybe. But my hands clenched into tense fists. The cliff. The cold air. The sketch. The phone and the light. How physical could this haunting get?
There was once a sunny day when a young woman went off to her aunt’s gallery expecting ten to five and maybe a drink with friends after. She ended up enduring the darkest day of her life. I left my room and walked down the hall, chasing shadows and wondering if my world was darkening around me again.
The house wasn’t silent. Large houses seldom are. Cavernous ones echo at the slightest sound. How could O’Keefe stand all the empty rooms? They bothered me. Door after door. If they’d been open, I couldn’t have done it. One yawning dark hole after another. As it was, I passed closed doors. Too many closed doors. I wondered if there was only one ghost at Thornleigh or if they were legion.
Where was she?
I kept moving, but I didn’t like it when I came to double pocket doors that obviously led to something important. Dead end. Even as I thought it, the phrase freaked me out.
I reached and twisted and pushed. The heavy white doors didn’t screech like I expected. They slid silently back into the wall and cool air flowed out onto my face. Too cool. I shivered, but I also stepped forward. You had to face fear to conquer it.
God, I changed my mind. I almost fell back. The room was full of white figures. I didn’t count. I couldn’t. It seemed like fifty. It was probably fifteen and they were all facing me with anguished eyes.
Only statues.
Only.
I’m pretty sure I’ll never think that again. It didn’t matter that they were stone, immovable and posing no possible threat. In the gloom of the midnight ballroom, they were terrifying. Their ghostly faces beseeched me for something, anything, to ease their pain. They were also the best possible place for a pale specter in a white gown to wait and watch my approach.
“What do you want?” I asked.
My voice echoed off hard marble bodies that were unable to absorb the sound waves or the meaning of my words. I braced myself, certain my noise would prod the real Bride forward.
“You woke me. You brought me here. What did you want to show me?”
I stepped further into the room, alert to any sound or change in atmosphere.
And then I saw movement.
Among the statues, one white figure was turned away from me, her long black hair in a tangled mass of wet waves down her back. A puddle of water was steadily spreading out and away from her and she swayed slightly back and forth, back and forth as the water flowed.
I edged closer.
Her gown plastered to her as I watched, growing wetter and wetter still. It was impossible and yet I saw it with my own eyes. I smelled seawater…and blood.
The only weapon I’d brought with me was reality. Cold, hard reality. I carried it with me in the scars on my chest and muscles in my legs. I’d earned each day I’d been given following my brush with death and those hard-won hours were in my voice when I spoke again.
“Why do these statues of you matter, Mrs. O’Keefe? Why do you want me to see them?”
At that, she whirled around and I scrambled back. If not for the distance to the door, I might have backpedaled all the way to my room.
Because her face was twisted into a snarl and her eyes were corpse-pale rimmed with torpid gray.
“I couldn’t save him.” She gurgled, and foamy water bubbled past her blue lips. “I couldn’t save him.”
She came toward me, one squelching step after another, while I continued to back away. Our audience of statues was no longer threatening. There was a new game in town.
“No one knows,” she hissed wetly.
She was a ghost, but she was nothing like I’d imagined a ghost would be. She shambled awkwardly like an animated corpse. Her sliding, shuffling feet left watery streaks of blood on the floor in her wake. I saw the wounds on her body where her skin had been broken and torn against the rocks when she’d fallen. Bone and muscle and tendon showed through in places and their forced movement as she walked caused viscous fluids to flow, mingling with the foamy water she must have tasted as she’d died.
Instead, I froze in horror as she came closer and closer, my perceptions eerily heightened to notice every gruesome detail.
How long had the waves plummeted her body before she’d been found? She was so gray, her skin saturated and sagging.
In a sudden rush of movement, she came at me, and I finally cried out when her cold, damp hand grabbed my wrist. Before I could punch or kick to free myself, she was gone. I was left staring at a still-widening puddle of seawater on the floor.
Chapter Nine
I ran.
Later, I might be ashamed. I might wonder why I hadn’t forced myself to walk calmly down those halls the same way I’d come. But in those moments pure instinct drove me and it drove me straight to him.
Safety in numbers or looking for a big strapping hero to rescue me? Who knew, but I flew. The honest truth was probably somewhere in between. O’Keefe was warm and alive. And, thank God, right where I’d left him.
I came around the corner of the conservatory doors as if the hounds of hell were nipping at my heels. I ran from a room full of statues and an impossible puddle and the absolute certainty that a week would be too long with the Bride but never long enough with Miles O’Keefe.
I stumbled to a stop when I saw that O’Keefe was sleeping. He lay stretched out on the same settee I’d posed on. Even with a freakish dead woman out stalking the night, the sight of him stunned me.
I wasn’t a portrait artist, but I wished I was. Though I knew stick figures would be the only result, I suddenly longed for charcoal, paper and enough talent to capture this moment forever.
He looked younger…and ageless. His shirt was open down the front and his head was thrown back. He might have been a turn-of-the-century lover in a swoon following coitus. Or he might have fallen asleep waiting and wishing…
I took a step toward him and then another. My heart still pounded from fright and exertion—I had sprinted the whole way—but now my pulse also reacted to him.
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