“Absolutely no idea.” He set down the candelabra on the lid of the costume trunk and crouched down to delve into the other one. “There’s a picture in this frame,” he observed, dragging it out. It was a seascape, dark and wild, and to Izzy’s untrained eye, looked rather good.
“I like that,” she said, impressed. “What else?”
He came up with another, smaller picture, in a much simpler frame. For no reason, Izzy’s heart began to beat faster. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with Glenn. It was the picture. Before she even saw it, it seemed to radiate…age.
Glenn turned it over, and she gazed at it in shock.
It was old. Unless it was a fake, which it could have been, because as portraits went, it was hardly the best she’d ever seen. The proportions weren’t quite right. The young woman wore a blue gown, visible from the waist up, her black hair semi-covered by a loose veil. She held her head at a slightly challenging angle, and her dark eyes seemed to sparkle with fun. The artist had managed to catch that much, almost as if her face, her expression was all that interested him.
“It must be the blue gown,” Izzy said slowly. “But it makes her look just a little bit like me.”
“Quite a lot like you,” Glenn said. He too was staring at the picture. He turned it over again, and Izzy could make out the writing on the back of the wooden frame. Mary, Lady of Ardknocken. “Mary Ross. This must be Mary Ross, our ghost.”
“Fiona Marr will wet her pants for this,” Izzy said unsteadily, then stopped and dragged one hand through her hair. “Shit, if they show this in the programme, it’ll connect my face to Ardknocken. It’s too like me. Why is it like me?”
Glenn shrugged. He seemed to be having difficulty dragging his gaze away from the portrait. “Ancestress, I suppose. You’ve got her name, after all.”
Izzy’s throat felt dry. She hadn’t thought about the ghostly apparition in the library for days, not since the night in Oban had wiped just about everything else from her consciousness. “Is that why I saw her? Hell, I don’t see my own dead parents or grandparents. Why would I see the ghost of an ancestor who’s so distant there’s no way I’d ever be able to find a definite connection? I don’t see ghosts!”
Glenn lifted his gaze at last but said nothing. He seemed to be taking in every detail of her face.
“My daughter,” Izzy said abruptly. “That’s what she called me. What troubles you so, my daughter?”
“As if she recognized you as family.”
“If I heard anything at all. I was upset.”
“Because I jumped you,” Glenn remembered. “And kept talking.”
She laid her head on his shoulder. “I like to hear you talk.”
Glenn set the portrait down carefully against the larger picture and put his arm around her shoulder.
She added with perfect truth, “Actually, I like when you jump me too.” She turned her face up to his.
“So do I,” he said and kissed her mouth.
After a moment, he closed the lid of the trunk with his free hand and drew her up until he was sitting on the trunk, and pulled her onto his knees. “Like this,” he whispered. “I want it like this. With you in my lap.”
By way of answering, she seized his sweater and tugged it up over his head. His T-shirt swiftly followed and she had all of his naked shoulders and broad chest to caress and kiss. He stood, letting her feet slide back to the floor, so that he could remove her clothes one by one until she stood naked before him.
With amazement, she realized this was the first time he’d seen her totally naked since Oban. Even yesterday, in his bed, they’d both been partially dressed. She certainly hadn’t minded that. There was a certain wicked charm in such urgency, even when the actual fucking was slow. But now, standing before him without a stitch to cover her, her sudden embarrassment and fear of not pleasing vanished under his awed, hot gaze, and she realized this was what she wanted. No barriers between them.
His hand trembled slightly as it lifted to her shoulder, drawing her against him, caressing up her neck to cup her face as he kissed her. His arm tightened around her; her breasts pushed against his chest. She loved the feel of his skin on hers, warm and smooth over hard muscle.
After a few moments, she pushed her hand between them to the fastening of his jeans, where she became distracted by the rigid bulge of his erection. She laid her hand over it, curling her fingers around its thickness.
“Take them off,” she whispered.
His fingers tangled with hers, removing his jeans and underwear. She wanted a moment to look, to admire, as he’d done with her, but he sat back down on the trunk immediately, drawing her between his legs while he caressed her hips and thighs and bottom. One hand slid inward between her thighs and found her wetness. She shuddered with pleasure at his touch, and he slid one finger inside her. With his other hand, he took hold of his cock, and as soon as he slid his finger out, he pushed his cock in.
Izzy closed her eyes. For several moments she just stood like that, between his legs with his cock just inside her, savouring everything. When she felt his lips on her breast, she threaded her fingers into his hair and freed it from the rubber band. She moved a little, experimenting with the position, rubbing against him.
His hand stroked down one thigh to her knee and then lifted her bent leg over his, and she climbed onto his lap, holding his face to her breasts before she slowly, achingly pushed herself down on his cock until he was fully sheathed in her.
He began to rock, and she moved with him. His teeth grazed her nipple, his hands caressed her bottom, pulling her into him, pushing her up. She gyrated, lifting herself at the same time and descending on him with sweet, searing bliss.
“Oh yes,” he whispered into her breasts. “Can we do this all day?”
“You’d be paying me for fucking you,” she pointed out unsteadily. “What would that make me?”
“A damn good buy.”
Laughter caught in her throat as he found a particularly wonderful angle to thrust in. “Bastard.”
“Name-calling. A whole, new fetish… Fuck, Izzy, do that again.”
“Bastard,” she said deliberately, and this time it was he who hissed out a surprised laugh.
“Not the insult, the twist,” he said, turning her hips in his hand and pushing up into her to show her what he meant. She moaned in bliss and did it again, and again and somehow, her next witty response got lost in sheer physical pleasure, in the need to move and give and reach completion with him.
As they drew closer, still rising and falling and rocking together, his hands tangled in her hair, holding her head as he gazed at her. She loved to see him like this, his face clouded with passion, the faint lines of tension and need and lust taking control of his expression. It was as if, like this, he couldn’t and wouldn’t hide. This was Glenn, her Glenn.
Although she didn’t mean to, she heard herself say the words aloud, in a soft, intense whisper. “My Glenn…” And then she was falling deeper and deeper into joy. He growled and groaned, and shuddered into his own climax. His fingers closed convulsively in her hair, but he didn’t release her, didn’t even fully blink, although his eyelids fluttered and flickered in the attempt. She clung to him, accepting it all, giving everything until their bodies gradually calmed. And still he held her face and gazed at her, his chest rising and falling with the still-rapid working of his lungs.
He said, “You don’t cry when you come.”
“Sometimes, with you, I think I will,” she said shakily. “I feel so much, I think I’ll have to cry, but in the end, it’s pure…happiness. And I don’t.” She blinked, trying to get her fuzzy, sated head around his odd statement. “Why? Do you want me to cry?”
“Never,” he said and kissed the corners of her eyes, her eyelids, and then her lips. “I never want you to cry.”
Glenn carried down the two trunks
they’d gone through and plonked them in one corner of Chrissy’s office. Chrissy thought the trunks themselves might be worth something, as well as what was inside, and Glenn left her contentedly searching out antique dealers. Then he went back up to his room, opened the middle drawer of his chest and removed the portrait they thought was Mary Ross.
He took it up to his roof garden, still wrapped in his shirt, and sat down at the table to look at it in the daylight. Since it was a typically dull grey day in the west of Scotland, there wasn’t much sunlight to damage it, although if it really was fifteenth century, he probably shouldn’t be doing this too often.
The portrait lady really was like Izzy. She seemed a little younger, somehow, a girl in her very early twenties rather than one nearer or perhaps even over thirty. This closeness with Izzy had sprung up so fast, it came as something of a shock to realize he didn’t even know how old she was. Of course, conversations tended to be limited to alone time, and the urgency of sex inevitably took up much of that only too short period in each day. He wanted all day and all night with Izzy—even just once.
Or more than once…
Stop it, Brody.
There were other subtle and not so subtle differences. Izzy had a rather charming little mole above her left breast, which the portrait lacked. The portrait’s mouth was just a little smaller, her hair wavy rather than straight like Izzy’s.
Obviously they weren’t the same woman. Which had got him thinking about his dreams. When he’d made love to Izzy in his dreams, sometimes she’d wept. He didn’t know why. With the kind of emotion Izzy had described, maybe. He liked to think about that, about inspiring such intense feeling in her. It was probably crass male ego, delighted to be able to achieve so much by his clearly spectacularly good fucking. Which made him a bit of a dick. And yet if it wasn’t that, it made him just a little bit scared.
Whatever, Izzy had never cried when they made love in reality. Maybe she would, one day.
Or maybe, in his dreams, he’d been fucking Mary.
Everything in him rebelled against that. He wanted them to have been of Izzy. Besides, all the dreams he’d ever made any kind of sense out of had been of the future. Why should he suddenly dream of the past? Of course, many of those incomprehensible dreams could have been past too, and if the ghost of Mary Ross really did haunt this place, perhaps it wasn’t so surprising she should trouble his dreams too. It just felt wrong.
Bizarrely, considering he’d been discounting the dreams for most of his life, he found he wanted this justification for being Izzy’s lover. As if it had been foretold, and meant. As if that would keep her with him. And it was true that his first dream of her had been in prison, before he’d ever set foot in this house.
Two women, two sets of dreams? There was the woman who wept, whom some other man tied up and took too casually, allowing Glenn to experience some of his sexual pleasure. And then there was Izzy, who felt so right in his arms, and surely it was he, Glenn, who made love to her.
The woman being assaulted in his bedroom, the woman calling her attacker a bastard in his dream, had been wearing blue jeans. That had been Izzy too. And more than likely, her attacker was the total fucker she’d once been married to.
He wasn’t blind to the importance of Izzy’s invitation to eat with her and Jack on Thursday afternoon. It would be round the village in no time that he’d gone into her home. But if she didn’t care, neither did he. He kind of liked the kid and liked watching the interplay of care and banter and scolding between him and his mother. It was, of course, more than slightly scary when he was beguiled into feeling part of that, but his feet were still firmly enough on the ground to understand that was temporary illusion.
So, armed with a bottle of wine and a child’s fishing rod he’d found in the attic, he walked up the path to the B&B, ignoring the twitching curtains, and climbed the stairs to Izzy’s flat.
He heard Jack’s voice and half expected him to fling open the door, but instead there was a slight pause and then the sliding of a chain and the turning of a key before Izzy opened the door herself, smiling her pleasure to see him. She stepped back, waving him inside. Perhaps for the benefit of the neighbours who could never now say he’d forced his way in.
This could, of course, be the solution to his desire to spend all night with her. She couldn’t stay up at the house away from Jack, but he could stay here. If invited. The thought had crossed his mind already, and he suspected it might have crossed Izzy’s. It wasn’t why he was here, but still… If not tonight, then another night. There was hope.
Until he stepped into her tiny flat, and she closed and locked the door. A defence she’d always employed, second nature now, against unexpected discovery by her ex. The same reason that accounted for Jack not being allowed to open the door. Glenn could and did expect that. What he hadn’t expected was for the key to sound like the echo of his cell door, for the walls to close in him so suddenly that he broke into a sweat of utter panic.
Chapter Fourteen
Glenn’s presence shrank her little flat. His large person filled the tiny entrance hall so that she had to squeeze past him. Flustered for some reason, she took the bottle from his cool fingers and waved him into the living room, told him to take off his coat, and Jack to hang it up.
She’d tried to make the meal a bit special, made some French onion soup and bought fillet steak to have with salad, and Jack had chosen a large, creamy gateau for pudding. Since making Jack wait for food by having a civilized drink first was counterproductive, she brought the soup through from the kitchen immediately and set it on the previously laid table.
Jack was examining a small fishing rod with great glee. “Look what Glenn gave me!” he crowed. “It’s a fishing rod! Glenn says he’ll show me how to fish in the river, if you’re okay with it, and you are, Mum, aren’t you?”
“Well, yes, but Glenn has to deal with—” She glanced toward Glenn and broke off, because he was still standing at the window. Jack must have hung his coat up as she’d asked, but he’d dropped his sweater on the sofa. Even so, she could see beads of perspiration standing out on his forehead and his finger tugged at the loose neck of his shirt, as if it was too tight. “Are you okay?”
His hand dropped to his side. He smiled. “Of course. I found the rod in the corner of the other big attic room. It’s a child’s size, so I though Jack might like it. It still seemed to work fine when we cleaned it up.” He walked to the table as he spoke and grasped the back of a dining chair.
“Thanks,” Izzy said warmly, waving him and Jack to sit as she did. Glenn sat beside her, his movement oddly stiff. His shoulders looked tense, slightly too high. He wasn’t used to being invited out. They’d met before only in his territory or in the neutral surroundings of the hotel. She’d made a mistake asking him here with Jack, making a formal meal. She should have begun with a casual ham sandwich in passing one weekend on their way for a walk. Or something.
But he seemed to listen to Jack, answered odd words at appropriate moments, so she had hopes he’d relax.
“Soup’s beautiful,” he said to her at last, laying down his spoon. “If you’ve any left, you could take some up to Jim and watch him eat his heart out.”
She smiled. “If he likes it, I’ll give him the recipe,” she said dryly. Standing, she collected the bowls and went to fry the steak.
By the time she brought in the main course, Glenn’s faint smile bore a curious hint of desperation. She wondered if Jack was being a bit over-the-top, but Glenn had always taken the boy’s mega-enthusiasm in his stride before, and really, Jack was quite calm by his own standards. Then another possibility hit her, and she wondered if he’d had the same idea she had, that he could stay the night.
Going to bed with Glenn. Sleeping with Glenn. Waking up with Glenn. Simple desires when put beside the more clamouring urges of her body for what would come in between those things. And yet they were
just as necessary.
He wanted her and didn’t want to ask to stay, probably because of Jack. And in truth, it probably was too soon. But one day. One day, it would be right.
She did her best to make things work that evening, to talk about stuff that might interest him, and he just about held his own. But he never lost that strange stiffness, and his forehead was still shiny with sweat.
She took the opportunity, when Jack went off to the bathroom halfway through his gateau, to say, “Glenn, is something wrong?”
“Of course not. Lovely meal. Izzy—thanks.” Abruptly, he got to his feet. His wine glass was drained for the third time, but the alcohol didn’t seem to have relaxed him any. “I’d better get back.”
Her lips parted. “You’re going now? Wouldn’t you like some coffee?”
“No—no, thanks. Got stuff I need to do.” He was actually out the living room door. Stunned and not a little hurt by his abruptness, she pushed back her chair and followed him. He’d unlocked the door and was pulling it open. In a rush, he said, “Say bye to Jack for me. See you tomorrow, Izzy—thanks.”
And then he was leaping down the steps, striding down the path and out the gate. For several moments, she watched him walking fast along the street and up the hill, his arms swinging in what looked like massive relief.
Izzy stepped back, closed the door and locked it before leaning her forehead against the wood. Numbness seeped from her brain through the rest of her body.
Is that it? Is it over? Finished? Just like that?
Oh God, what have I done? What have I allowed?
He’d done it all wrong.
Standing at last on his roof garden in the cold, enveloping darkness, after walking for miles to relax and exhaust himself, he finally acknowledged what he should have done. He should have explained to her.
Although how could he when she looked like that? So eager and beguilingly pleased to have him in her home. He was only too aware of the trouble she’d gone to, setting the table, cooking a lovely meal, making him feel special. And all he’d wanted to do was run. Hell, he should have explained. They could have lugged it all down to the beach and eaten there. In the cold. And the dark.
In His Wildest Dreams Page 16