The night before she’d been helpless, held captive by the ghost of a dead girl. That afternoon she saw people holding back the darkness with action, with knowledge, with determination and heart.
“I engaged the brake. I did. Of course, I did,” her father had protested.
Trinity stood silently while her mother lamented her father’s “mistake.”
There were people determined not to see in Scarlet Falls, people who gladly grew up to turn a blind eye on restless spirits and “accidents” and whispering shadows.
That day, Trinity watched the people helping her father and she vowed she would never close her eyes.
The helpless pause only lasted a few seconds. She sank down, down, but then shefought the invisible ropes. She couldn’t see them, but she knew they were there. She clawed against their scratchy tight hold as her lungs threatened to give in to the instinctive pressure to breath water instead of air. Finally, she broke free and kicked out with her legs. She reached up and desperately pushed the water out of her way. She strained every muscle to swim for her life. Then, her face broke the surface and she gasped for breath.
Kicking, gasping, scrabbling for purchase on the slippery rocks of the bank, Trinity pulled herself up with handfuls of rocks and mud before she collapsed in a wet heap on thousands of pebbles shaped like tears.
“Trinity!” Creed shouted.
Through the fog he stepped, materializing from nowhere to stride right over the still smoldering match stick near the trees. He ignored it completely.
“Where have you been?” she asked as he pulled her to her feet.
“I was walking,” Creed said.
Walking. Around the blood-scented lake where he’d almost died.
Chapter Eight
A long hot shower and several shampoos with suds that left her hair perfumed with sandalwoodfinally dispelled the scent of blood. The town’s water supply was piped out to the few houses around the lake because even filtration systems and purifiers wouldn’t make the lake’s water potable.
Trinity tried to ignore the faint smell of smoke that clung to the clothes she’d brought from Hillhaven in her backpack. She shrugged into a thick cable knit sweater and leggings before leaving the bathroom with damp hair and freshly scrubbed skin to face Creed.
He stood at the bank of windows and looked out at fog that had grown thinner with the rising sun.
“There’s a girl. I’ve seen her most of my life,” Trinity began. She didn’t mention other things she’d seen. “I thought she was harmless. Horrible, but harmless. Until I saw her the night of the fire in Boston.”
She walked into the room with her arms wrapped around her still-chilled body.
“A girl?” Creed asked. He turned only slightly from the window, looking at her sideways as if he was afraid his full attention would cause her to go silent.
“A dead girl. Clara Chadwick. The Girl in Blue. The same one in the photograph from your collection,” Trinity said.
“She was there at the grave in the cemetery. You saw her,” Creed guessed. He was still, almost motionless though outside the ethereal fog swirled as it rose and vaporized into the sky.
“I see her everywhere. I followed her to the lake just now. She disappeared as I fell in,” Trinity said.
Now, Creed faced her. He turned his back on the windows.
“You fell?” he asked.
Trinity remembered what it was like to pull against a force intent on pulling the boy she was trying to save into the depths. Had she felt pulled? Is that what Creed was asking?
No.
She hadn’t been pulled, but she had felt bound. She could still imagine the press of ropes around her arms and chest.
“The rocks shifted under my feet. They were stable and then they weren’t,” Trinity said. “Accidents happen,” she finished in a low voice, but one he was close enough to hear.
“Yes. They do,” Creed said. He stepped closer. “Though I think you probably have more firsthand experience with that phenomenon than most.”
“I try to help,” Trinity said.
Creed moved closer until she had to tilt her chin to meet his dark eyes.
“I know,” he replied.
He reached up to touch her cool cheek. Trinity didn’t flinch away. He’d always seen more than he should. He noticed her every blink, her every sigh or every time her body tensed because something was about to happen or when she was no longer alone.
She saw The Girl in Blue.
She saw the malevolent intent of invisible forces that seemed to want to hurt and harm.
And Creed saw her.
He always had. Ever since she’d forced air into his water-logged lungs all those years ago. Ever since his lips had come to life and clung to hers with delicious decadence—with that kiss that had flung the fear of death back at whatever had threatened them with it. Following it, they were in tune, in sync, engaged in a smooth dance of cause and effect that the rest of the world failed to see.
Trinity—because she had a fierce natural instinct to heal and help.
Creed—because he had another kind of ferocity directed entirely at her.
She wished she could trust it. She’d saved him. They had chemistry that crackled, but his intense focus couldn’t be explained away by gratitude and lust, could it? What if his interest was weighted by darker things as she had feared? His fascination with the occult and his near death experience might extend to an unhealthy interest in the danger of Scarlet Falls and the woman who could see it. After all, being interested in the history of this town meant being interested in death.
Trinity shivered and Creed brushed his warm thumb along her cheek and down to her jaw as if fascinated by the gooseflesh rising on her skin.
Then he looked from her skin to her eyes to gauge her reaction as he leaned closer.
“But who helps you? Who saves you when you need saving, Trinity Chadwick?” Creed asked.
Not him. He wasn’t a knight in shining armor. Yet she tasted salvation when he pressed his warm lips to her cool ones. When his mouth opened and his tongue flicked, taking advantage of her sudden intake of breath to seek and claim, she found warmth. His warmth. The heat they generated together banished the darkness even if it was only for a little while. It spread from where their tongues lazily twined outward until her whole body was warmed by what seemed like more than a kiss.
This was an offer to have him to hold against whatever evil tried to harm her.
Trinity reached and slid her hands up his hard chest to find his broad shoulders. His body’s heat seemed to blaze compared to hers. She was still chilled by the icy lake waters.
She stepped into his heat as he deepened the kiss. She pressed against him while he pressed his lips more insistently to hers. He moaned, not put off by her chill or her need. His hands spread and stroked down her back, molding her body to his, gifting more than heat through the friction of his kneading fingers.
He pulled her against the heat of his erection. Its hard ridge met her stomach and this time she moaned, deep in her throat, because he felt so good against her, but she knew it could be better. It would be better.
She’d had a hot shower. There was a fire in the hearth—gas logs with a safe blue-green flame. But she wouldn’t be warm again until she could get closer to Creed.
Skin to skin.
His lips broke from hers and she drew breath to protest, but he silenced her with a squeeze of his hands on her hips. He wasn’t letting her go. He wasn’t stepping away.
“My office is in the loft. It’s the warmest place in the house. The sun flows from all these windows into that space,” Creed said, gravely and low.
Trinity’s body responded as if he’d used more graphic words. She could already see his naked body in the sunlight. She could already feel its warmth on her bared flesh.
She nodded, unable to speak. The casual response to a casual offer that was in fact not casual at all.
Creed stepped back then. He took her hand
and led her to the small spiral stairs all but hidden by a bookcase in the corner. He led the way urging her up one tread after another until they were in his hidden creative space.
He had a smaller desk here and a closed laptop computer. She noted the ever present bottle of Scotch beside it, but he ignored the whiskey. His attention was on her.
The loft was warmer. Much warmer than down below.
Trinity reached for the hem of her sweater and pulled it over her head.
Creed moved close, meeting her eyes for a moment. His gaze warmer and more golden in the sunlight than she’d seen it before. Then he buried his face into her neck and cupped her lace-covered breasts. His lips ran softly across her skin down to the swell of her above the pale pink bra.
“I’m cold,” she said. And she suddenly was, trembling with the memory of High Lake’s black touch.
“I know,” Creed said. “It stays with you for…a while.”
He gathered her close, but as he pulled she lifted his shirt up and off so their skin would meet. Immediately her chill was dispelled. But not her tremble. She shivered for another reason entirely. Her body reacting to the sensual slide of their flushed bare skin.
Creed noted her pleasure. He dropped to his knees before her, in one smooth motion taking her leggings down with him. She burrowed her hands into his dark thick hair, feeling the warmth of the sunlight trapped in its waves.
He kissed her quivering stomach and she thought she’d never be cold again. His tongue teased around the edges of her bikini briefs, and then he nipped the soft swell of skin over each of her hipbones while his hands on her bottom held her firmly in place.
She was captured for long moments. Trapped in his grip for his teeth and tongue, but then he allowed her to sink down and straddle his hips. Maximum heat. Maximum connection. In the bright space of the loft, Creed’s body was a revelation. Lean, fit, spare—perhaps the demons that rode him didn’t allow for ease or any measure of softness.
Trinity gave him hers.
She reached around to undo the hooks of her bra. Then she pressed her freed breasts to the hard plane of his chest. He wasn’t tanned. He wasn’t a person who spent time in the sun, but his coloring was naturally darker than hers. The contrast of her flushed porcelain to his rich cream was delicious. A sprinkling of dark hair on his chest tickled against her and led intriguingly to a line that disappeared behind the waist band of his tailored pants.
Decadence. She’d found it.
Gripping him between her legs while she wore nothing but a scant lace brief.
He met her eyes again. He watched her face as he dipped to take the tip of one breast between his lips.
“Oh,” she gasped. His rough tongue stroked and his mouth suckled. The pleasure he had in her reaction gleamed in his eyes, an onyx flash like the one in his ear.
“Warmer now?” he asked, arching one brow.
“Yes,” she replied. Then added “please” as he moved to close his hot mouth over her other breast. He hummed his approval against her nipple when she reached for his zipper.
Trinity undid his button and rasped the zipper down. He tilted his face back, his cheeks flushed and his breathing quickened. She stood and slowly slid the last barrier she wore down. She let the lace fall, watching him as he’d watched her. Very aware of his erection as he shed the pants she’d loosened. Anticipating the heat they were going to share.
She settled back down against him where he waited on the plush rug that covered the loft’s floor. She straddled his thighs.
“I don’t think I’ve truly been warm until now. Not since that day,” Creed confessed. Then his words faded into a long groan as she opened to him, as he pressed up and inside.
She controlled the rhythm and the thrust. She took him as he’d taken her the night before, but this time they looked into each other’s eyes. This time when she cried out in release, she wasn’t looking out at the night. She was bathed by the sun and looking at a light in Creed’s expression she’d never seen.
He held her so tight, his fingers almost hurt where they pressed into her skin. But she didn’t protest. She held him, too. When he tensed, when he came, she thought maybe in those moments the chill of the lake and the darkness of the town didn’t have a chance of coming between them.
* * *
“I need the doll,” she said. They still lay on the loft’s rug in the sun, but they couldn’t ignore the darkness forever. Night would come and, with it, darker things. His fingers brushed her lips to so that the breath of her words must tickle over them. His gaze rose from her mouth to meet her eyes. She’d taken him by surprise.
“The doll…” he began.
“The ragdoll from the picture of Clara in your collection. I think I know what I need to do,” Trinity said.
* * *
The day was long.
Trinity spent it in an uneasy sleep plagued by dreams that skirted the edge of nightmares. Creed spent part of it with Mrs. Jesham and the Historical Society records.
It was probably an indication of her dismay in what she was determined to do that a particularly gruesome vision of The Girl in Blue haunted her sleep, her dress gone to moldy rags and bones showing beneath mummified skin.
Creed woke her at dusk or she woke herself, clawing her way up from the blood-scented depths of High Lake where the bodies of children floated, floated, floated all around her.
“It’s all right,” Creed said. He grabbed her flailing hands as he sat beside her on the bed they had yet to share.
As she fully awoke, the scent of blood was replaced by sandalwood and a hint of Scotch.
It wasn’t all right, but she wasn’t going to argue with him. Not when he held her hands so firmly even as dark shadows under his eyes showed his own need for respite.
“The sun has gone down and the town is settling for the night,” Creed said.
Trinity pulled her hands from his and pushed wild curls back from her face. The gesture didn’t smooth them anymore than it slowed her racing heart.
“Settled for the night or hunkered down to wait for morning?” she asked.
Creed leaned down and kissed her. It wasn’t a gentle peck. His lips opened over hers and she gasped her surprised. His tongue delved between her lips and for those hot moments, need for him chased away all the dark remnants of nightmares clouding her hopes.
He brought his hands up to hold her in place, both palms warmly cupping her jaws and Trinity reached to place her hands on his wrists. Hanging on and holding back at the same time.
She wouldn’t forget his stroll beside the lake or the matches she’d found in his box. She couldn’t ignore his fascination with Scarlet Falls’ death-filled history. Even as she kissed him back, licking his whiskey sweetness, she didn’t move into his arms or soften.
She had something horrible to do. And it meant she would have to go out into the night of Scarlet Falls.
Creed noticed her reticence. He ended the kiss, pulling his mouth from hers and resting his forehead against hers as if it took everything he had not to beg her or force her to admit she wanted more.
“I found out some things you might want to know,” he said. The kiss had caused his voice to go low and deep. “We can talk in the other room.” He stood and turned away from her and the bed before walking to the door. Once there, he paused in the threshold.
Trinity thought he would speak again. She waited, still wrapped in his rumpled chocolate brown sheets.
He didn’t.
He glanced at her and then away before he left the room.
She rose. Her teeth worried the edge of the lip Creed had just suckled to soft, swollen sensitivity. She might worry about his macabre fascination with death and with the things he ascertained that she saw, but that didn’t mean she could easily resist the burn between them without an echoing remnant of it settling aglow in the pit of her stomach.
* * *
She brushed her hair and clipped it back. Cool water did little to soothe the heat from her fac
e. At least his lips had dispelled the haze of her nightmares. She stepped from the bathroom to the den with determined strides.
Creed sat in an oversize leather chair. He had the ragdoll in his hands. Her eyes went to the box on the counter, but he’d replaced the lid. She supposed the matches were still inside.
“You are Clara Chadwick’s closest living relative. In tracing the family tree, I found several deaths by fire,” Creed said. “Given more time to research fires in Scarlet Falls I might discover more.”
Trinity avoided the sofa. She propped her hip against the bar stool instead.
“Mrs. Jesham mentioned a Courthouse fire in 1972. That was before I was born, so maybe I’m not the first person she’s haunted,” Trinity said.
Creed turned the doll this way and that in his hands, testing its weight and smoothing its dress.
“When I was a boy, I had a flashlight collection. Every kind imaginable. Metal. Plastic. Penlights. I bet I had a hundred of them, and I kept them all in working order. Fresh batteries. Good bulbs. I wanted to see. I needed to see. But even with a hundred lights gleaming at midnight I could never see a thing. Just my room and empty shadows,” Creed said. “My need to see in the dark was a sort of fear, I suppose.”
He’d noticed something about the doll in his hands. He held up one of her threadbare feet to have a closer look.
“That evening by the lake, I saw something. I wasn’t looking for rocks or trouble like most people supposed. I had finally seen something. And it almost got me killed,” Creed said.
His fingers worked at some loose threads on the ragdoll’s foot.
Trinity found herself standing and several steps closer to the man and the doll without realizing she’d moved. Her gaze was riveted to his fingers on the ragdoll’s foot, but her memory took her back to that chilled evening by High Lake.
She’d seen him drive toward the lake from town and she’d followed on foot. Instinct was something she’d learned to obey even by the age of fifteen. She’d followed because she was afraid the tall, handsome boy who occasionally glanced her way might be hurt. So with the sun sinking on the horizon, she’d walked up to the lake above town instead of going home and shutting the night safely outside Hillhaven.
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