by Amy Lane
And he blushed himself.
“The glass bottle?” he asked, fastening his eyes on the acres of repeating chrysanthemums on the wallpaper.
“Yes. That. That wasn’t bad. That was… good.”
“Oh yes. Yes, it was.” The chrysanthemums were gold and orange and brown and white, with glimpses of green stem and lined in black. The black lines took on a life of their own, writhing sensuously, becoming a buxom woman with blazing red hair, a slender woman with shining gold. They rolled across the wall, laughing, making love, or became flowers with long skirts as their stalks, great hats as their flowers, walking the halls of Daisy Place primly, arm in arm.
Tucker stared at them, fascinated, a sexual flush heating his body in the preternatural cold of the mansion, and tried grimly not to think about the form-shifting ghost playing with a kitten on the bed.
Because he was starting to emanate sex vibes in the worst of ways.
“So do you want those separate?” Angel’s voice sounded constricted, and Tucker tore his gaze away from what seemed to be haunted wallpaper and met his eyes.
And gasped.
“Again?” he asked, none of his arousal dissipating.
Angel was a chrysanthemum—a woman—with glossy blond hair and limpid green eyes, wearing a slim green dress that showed generous cleavage at the V of the neck.
“Oh damn!” She sounded both plaintive and surprised. “I was not supposed to do that.”
Tucker held his hand to his mouth, trying hard not to laugh. “But you’ve been doing it since I got here. This is my second day, and you’ve been three people already.”
“I’m still the same person,” she muttered, white teeth sinking into a tender pink lip. “I just… I was the same form for your aunt for fifty-five years. A teenage boy, sandy hair, green eyes. I have no idea why I can’t hold it together around you!” Impatiently she pushed imaginary hair from her eyes and frowned.
“Whatsamatter, Angel? Do you need a cosmic scrunchy?”
Angel glowered at him, her green eyes sparking with irritation. Tucker stared into them, mesmerized. They were the same eyes she’d worn in her last form—bright bottle green that seemed perfect until he saw the little flecks of rust brown in the iris—and Tucker realized that even if they hadn’t been the same color, there was something in there, a clear green sort of light that had been in his eyes when he’d been not-Damien and when he’d been the hot young roughneck and here, now, the blowsy blond in the green dress.
“Your eyes,” he said softly. “Your eyes are the same.”
This Angel had a soft jaw and the beguiling round face of a woman in her early thirties. Her sweet little mouth made a delicate moue. “Yes?”
“Yes,” Tucker said, lost in those eyes. He suddenly wanted the hot young roughneck back so he could see if they were as beguiling in a man’s form. He remembered Angel’s delight at the kitten, his earnestness then, replacing the driven workaholic, and thought that maybe they would be.
“Ouch!” Angel’s sharp word broke the spell, and she grimaced at the kitten, who continued to chew on her red-tipped, manicured fingers. “So.” She shifted uncomfortably and shook that amazing hair back again. “Do you want a different pile?”
Tucker had to shake himself back into what they’d been talking about, and he squinted at the objects on the desk. Yes, she was right. It didn’t matter what shape or gender she wore—they had a job to do.
“Yeah,” he said after a moment of sorting objects. A diamond hairpin, a shell from a beach, a cameo brooch, a tortoiseshell comb. He’d hit the jackpot in the delicate dresser near the bed. The dresser itself stood on tall, thin, spiderlike legs, and it held almost entirely women’s toiletries. “I’d say these would all be good.” He picked up a glass paperweight with dreamlike strands of green winding through the glass and a single bright orange fish. It was large and heavy—bigger than a softball—and it would have been exquisitely beautiful, but a sizable chunk of glass was missing from the bottom. There was also some unpolished glass roughing up the bottom, as though something had been glued or affixed to that part of the weight to make it flat. It had a surprising heft to it—a ten-pound paperweight?—and Tucker couldn’t figure out if it was physical or psychic, but he had trouble looking at the weight for more than a moment. His gaze kept shifting off of it, glancing to other things.
“This is bad,” he murmured thoughtfully, holding it in two hands. The skin under the gloves got hotter, and the object seemed to get heavier, almost bowling ball heavy, as he stood.
With great deliberation, he put the weight on the far end of the desk, with the snuffbox. Then he put the women’s toiletries on the other end, pending Angel’s examination. He put the green, uhm, bottle on that end, figuring that would mark the good side, and then put the hole puncher and the pen and the “Oh my God fifty people going potty can you imagine the boredom!” polished wooden dowel from the toilet paper holder in the middle.
“Okay, so how’s this?” he said. Angel stood up after one final pass to make sure the kitten would stay and sashayed over to stand next to Tucker. Tucker closed his eyes and inhaled, smelling nothing but imagining flowered body spray in the place of lime and musk.
Either smell turned his key.
“So we’ve got good, bad, and boring,” Angel observed. “I like it. Did you get a glimpse of the man who used the snuff box?”
Tucker shuddered. “Yes. I’d recognize him again if he wandered into someone else’s vision.”
Angel hmmd. “Okay, yes.” He began to point so Tucker could sort. “These objects are neutral—I see so many people doing so many things with them that they’re useless. This one”—Angel pointed to a mother-of-pearl-handled brush—“is strong both ways. It has conflict, good moments, and bad moments. This one has a story.”
Tucker took hold of the brush and then sat on the bed, closing his eyes and getting ready. The kitten licked his thigh through his jeans briefly and then trotted toward the pillow to curl up on the cushion like she belonged there.
Angel came to sit by him, apprehension clear in those wide green eyes.
“Ready?”
“Sure.” Very carefully, Tucker pulled off one cotton glove and took the brush in his hand.
BRIDGET STOOD behind Sophie in a richly decorated room in Baltimore, this one with cream-colored wallpaper and mauve brocaded curtains. With clean, methodical strokes, she mastered the thick blond mass of Sophie’s hair, and Sophie gazed at her in the mirror with worship.
“You’re so good with it, Bridget,” she said breathlessly. “I’ve grown so tired of my head being jerked on, and you’re just so tender.”
And still the brush slid through the coarse and silken strands with a lulling precision.
Bridget’s hands were shaking. Her sex was swollen and aching with desire, but she must not, must not reveal these things to the innocent Sophie, who trusted Bridget as the only human being to talk to her in this strange and vast mansion that Sophie had recently arrived at.
“Ye must not’ve had much of a ladies’ maid if they tugged on yer hair so,” Bridget reprimanded. She’d seen how the people of this house treated Sophie—the master was cold to her, his wife worse. Their son, Sophie’s husband, paid attention in obsessive, uncomfortable flurries and then left for extravagant amounts of time, playing with his mates. Bridget would resent him for that neglect if she hadn’t seen the relief in Sophie’s eyes whenever the man left.
“Oh, Bridget, I’ve never had a maid. My father’s a pastor in Wilmington. He’s a good man, but poor. Pastors are. Thomas’s horseless lost a wheel as he was driving by my father’s place one day. He made a hideous row about it—terrorized my father something awful, saying that only a fool would keep his road so poorly it could do that much damage. I brought him some lemonade to take some of his anger from Father, and he thought I was pretty.”
She smiled then, tentatively, as though embarrassed, and Bridget readjusted her thinking.
“Ye are pretty,
Sophie girl,” she said, her voice gentle. Ah, a pastor’s child. Ripe for the taking by a rich bastard like Thomas Conklin. Wonderful. Well, Bridget had been her ally since she’d been dragged into the Conklin mansion, practically a child bride. She would continue to be her friend—
Sophie stopped Bridget’s ministrations with the brush by bringing her hand up to capture Bridget’s. “Do you really think so?” she asked, hope shining in her eyes like tears. “I’ve heard it from my father and brother, and Thomas and his father—” She shuddered. Master Conklin was a frigid, foreboding figure of a man. “—say it all the time. But….” She bit her lip and glanced shyly in the mirror. “I never really wanted to be pretty until you brushed my hair, looking at me like that.”
Bridget tried to shift her hand away. Sophie’s touch sent shock waves through her body, but Sophie turned around and clasped the hand—and the brush—to her lips.
Bridget gave up and rubbed her rough, hard-worked thumb along the angel softness of Sophie’s cheek.
“Aye,” she whispered, her voice rough and low. “I think yer beautiful.”
She lowered her head then, thinking to lay a quick kiss on Sophie’s brow, but Sophie tipped her head back, her lips soft, ripe, rich red with promise, and Bridget dipped her head just a bit lower….
TUCKER MADE a soft noise, hoping he could see their lips touch, their mouths open, the kiss land, but as he reacted to the vision, it changed.
SOPHIE’S HAND shook, but she continued to brush her hair as she regarded the sinister dark-suited figure in the mirror.
“No,” she said, proud of how strong her voice was. “I don’t know where Thomas has gone.”
“Well, aren’t you his wife? Shouldn’t you keep better track of him?”
Her heart—fueled by anger—began to beat more steadily and stopped its fearful stuttering. “I am a stranger in a strange house,” she said shortly. “I have no resources to find him, and if I wandered around calling his name, I wouldn’t be a grown woman, I’d be a terrified child.”
She was a terrified child. The elder Mr. Conklin produced that fear in everybody. Sophie had seen him strike out at servants carrying full trays of food, shattering china and splashing tea all over the ceramic-tiled floors—and the person in question. Mrs. Conklin came down the stairs at least once a week with her face heavily powdered—a mark, a bruise, a split lip buried deep beneath. She rarely went out into the world, and when her face was that heavily powdered, her friends were not allowed to call.
Bridget told her that the lady had fewer and fewer friends each year.
“Don’t be impertinent,” Conklin sneered. “You’re a country whore, and why my son didn’t tup you and leave you is one of the great mysteries of life.”
It was a mystery to Sophie too, given that Thomas’s first sexual attention to her had been in their marriage bed. He’d done his duty—she was no longer officially a virgin—and had then rolled off her and gone to the study for a glass of port.
Sophie rather suspected Thomas didn’t like tupping.
At least not tupping her, at any rate.
“I was a virgin when I married,” she said quietly, her jaw locked and grim. It wasn’t that her virginity had defined her, but she respected her father, respected his kindness, and would not want him shamed by this man’s low-spirited insults.
“The hell you were.” A cruel smile flirted with his thin lips, and he pulled a filigreed silver box from his waistcoat and took a pinch of whatever he kept inside with a superior sniff.
And then whatever bond of propriety had held Thomas Conklin Senior in the doorway broke, and he stormed into Sophie’s bedroom, the grimness of his black suit dominating the pleasant white room. Sophie turned partway, holding her hands out in defense and fear, but Conklin was a big man, brutally strong, and he thrust his fingers up through her long silky hair and jerked her head back.
“You’re a whore,” he whispered into Sophie’s ear, his breath foul. From this close, Sophie could see the furry tunnels of his nose and the hole burned in the membrane between nostrils.
“No,” she denied, not sure what he wanted from her.
His hand cracked across her face, hard, and she yelped in pain.
“A whore!” he cried, but she wouldn’t let herself agree.
“No.”
With a roar he dragged her by the hair and threw her across the room onto the bed, and she lay there, helpless, as he lifted her dressing gown and dropped his trousers.
“No,” she whispered. “No. No. No.”
TUCKER GASPED, sobbing, and tried to let go of the hairbrush, but the image shifted again, and he was stuck there, stuck in time, while….
SOPHIE COULDN’T look at her swollen face in the mirror as Bridget pinned her hair that night.
“I’ll kill ’im,” Bridget muttered.
Sophie shook her head, unable to stop the tears. “He’ll kill us both,” she said, voice leaden. “And his son will help him bury our bodies.”
She’d never fooled herself into believing that her husband loved her. But when he’d started to show her attention, there in her father’s yard, she’d seen her parents’ poverty and how hard they had to work to feed the children they had, and she had hoped. Hoped that this handsome, rich man could take the burden of her care off her parents’ hands.
Bridget crouched at her knees then, leaving her hair in tumbles down her back. “Sophie girl,” she begged, taking her hands. “Do ye have family? Someone you could hide with? Someone the old man wouldn’t think of facing down?”
“My brother,” she said, thinking. “James.” James had fought all his life, fighting through high school, boxing through his violent youth. He was a railroad worker now, a foreman, with broad shoulders and arms like steel cannon-shot. “He’d defend me. But he’s working in the railyards of Sacramento, Bridget. I don’t know how we’re supposed to—”
“Write him a letter,” Bridget said, her green eyes dancing deviously. “Write him a letter, and I’ll have the valet write a reply like ’e’s yer brother.”
“But won’t they—”
“They don’t think none of us can read. The valet has good writing, though—writes ’is daughter twice a week. If we make that bastard think ye’ve been summoned, we can get money to travel across the country, and maybe your brother’ll take you in—”
“Not directly to him, though,” Sophie said, worried for James. “He’s a good man, Bridget, but we don’t need to drag trouble to his door.”
“Someplace nearby. We can ask the telegraph office where’s a good place. We can stay there a while—”
“Money!” Sophie said, the exhilaration of escaping this vast tomb of whispers and lies suddenly so close to her heart that she could feel it beat faster. “Bridget, we need money to get away from—”
“Aye. It’s why we’ll have the fake letter from yer brother—they won’t listen to yerself, we both know that. But if a man bids you come, ye can ask yer husband, the useless sot. Tell him ye want to visit family, that ye need cash to travel. He throws money about like sand, Sophie. Make him throw some yer way.”
“We can write James for real when we arrive,” Sophie said, seeing the plan. “Tell him why we ran.” Oh, they could do it. Sophie may have been a virgin when Thomas had come to her father’s door, but she knew what her husband wanted in bed now. He would come and use her and go—but if she made a game of it, laughed like a wanton, he’d give her money so he mightn’t feel guilty about how long he stayed away.
Bridget looked up at her, face shining with tears. “Ye do that. But let us flee this place. What he did to ye today….”
She burst into tears, and Sophie stroked her curly hair back from her face. She took the brush Bridget had placed on the dresser, and while Bridget lay sobbing on her lap, Sophie pulled the pins from her hair, one by one.
The last one had a jewel on the end of it, a sparkly fake diamond, and Sophie touched it briefly. Bridget’s sobs had stilled, and Sophie set the pin down
and began to coax that riotous mane from her face. “It’s the only frivolous thing about you,” she commented. She didn’t want to talk about that afternoon, or how Bridget had found her, half-naked, bruised, and bleeding, on the floor next to the bed. Her whole body ached, and would for days, but Sophie longed for her soul to fly free of pain.
“All ladies’ maids dream of being grand ladies sometime,” Bridget said, taking the pin from Sophie.
“That’s not what they should dream of,” Sophie said, continuing with the brushing. It soothed her as much doing it as it had when Bridget had done it to her.
“What, then? More tea trays? More laundry?”
“No,” Sophie murmured, remembering her parents, poor but happy. “A small house of their own. Dishes they chose themselves. Nobody’s laundry but theirs. Those are dreams fit for queens.”
“Or peasants,” Bridget said dryly.
“I’m not afraid of laundry,” Sophie told her, turning her so that Sophie could continue with her hair. “I’m afraid of the king in the castle, the one who terrorizes the maids and the princesses and destroys his prince.”
“His prince isn’t much of a man.” Bridget sniffed disdainfully.
But Sophie wasn’t sure. There had been moments of kindness there, of joy—at least of interest. But the gallant suitor who had brought home a blushing bride had shriveled under his father’s scorn.
Maybe he wasn’t strong—but then, he’d been grown in rocky soil, soaked in acid, and watered in wrath.
“Some place with good earth,” she murmured. “So I can grow a garden, like my mother. Chickens, maybe.”
“Aye,” Bridget murmured, lulled by the gentle strokes. “Some place like that.”
FINALLY TUCKER was able to put down the brush. It fell from his limp grasp, and he flopped back on the bed, the sweat soaking clean through his T-shirt and into the quilt beneath him.
“Oh, Angel,” he panted. “This is awful. It’s exhausting. Please tell me that somewhere in all these rooms are the ghosts of miners who just came up broke and wanted to get laid!”