Ready & Willing (34 page)

She said nothing at first, only continued to gaze at the river as if she hadn’t heard him. So Silas returned his attention to the river, too. Maybe if she thought his curiosity was only idle, she would be more inclined to answer. And perhaps, if he was very lucky, some part of her reply might even include the truth.

For a long time, she only sat silently, pensively, and Silas didn’t pester her to say anything more. The passage of time was something with which he was supremely comfortable, since time had become his truest companion in the afterlife. And even before he died, he had been a patient man when it came to waiting for what he truly wanted. Patience was a trait of anyone who was accustomed to river life. Travel on such waterways was leisurely, even indolent. There was no point in hurrying on a river, because the river would carry you at whatever speed it happened to be churning in that day. Even with a paddle wheeler, the captain’s needs and requirements could only go so far. It was the river who made most of the decisions, and she generally took her time in making them.

Like the river, Cecilia could take all the time she needed, as far as Silas was concerned. He had no desire to rush the passage of time with her. But just as he was becoming accustomed to the silence—she relented.

“Yes,” she said softly. “I often needed time to myself in San Francisco.”

Not wanting to press his luck, but needing to know, Silas echoed, again, very cautiously, “To get away, you said.”

She hesitated, then nodded. “Yes,” she repeated. “To get away.”

He started to ask her from what she needed to get away, then, because he knew it was the more correct question, he amended, “From whom?”

She had continued to watch the river as she talked to him, but now she turned to meet his gaze. Instead of answering, however, she asked, “If I say something to a ghost, is that like talking to myself? I mean, you couldn’t go around blabbing to everyone, could you?” Her expression grew troubled. “Although, since Audrey can hear you, I guess you could tell her . . .”

Silas began to guide his hand toward her face to touch her, then remembered that he could not, so lowered it to his lap again. “Cecilia, even if I were alive, I would never violate any trust you placed in me.”

She nodded slowly. But she confided nothing, something that told him she wasn’t quite convinced.

He lifted his hand to rest it on the back of her seat—strange that he was able to affect that pose, and many others, when he couldn’t feel what he was doing—then pushed his fingers as close to her shoulder as he dared without actually making contact. But even without touching her, he could feel . . . something . . . surrounding her that reminded him of the fear and pain she kept inside. Some aura of distress that was humming just beneath her surface and was gradually leaking out. Whatever she was holding on to, she wouldn’t be able to do it forever. Eventually, whatever it was was going to break free and spill out of her.

“That first day we met,” he ventured carefully, “when you and I . . . collided,” he said, thinking that word was as good as any for what happened, “in that scant second when the two of us were one, I could sense your thoughts and feelings. Or, at least, some aspect of them.” He smiled what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “You’re quite good at guarding your emotions, Cecilia, but they’re very, very strong. I wonder, though,” he added, “if you understand how strong you are yourself. You’re stronger, I think, than your emotions. Stronger than even you realize.”

She inhaled a deep breath and released it slowly, as if she were trying to do the very thing he was talking about, keeping her feelings tightly braced and staying stronger than they were. But her dark eyes grew damp as she completed the gesture, suddenly looking even larger and more expressive than they had before. She blinked, once, and a fat tear tumbled from each eye. Immediately, she swiped at one of them, but the other kept traveling down her cheek, pausing at the bow of her jawline where it was poised to drop. In that moment, Silas knew a keen torment, because he wanted so desperately to lift a finger to that tear and brush it away.

Unable to stop himself—or perhaps he simply didn’t want to stop himself—that was precisely what he did. Except that, of course, he wasn’t able to move the tear. And when the pad of his thumb raked softly over her skin, instead of feeling the warmth and smoothness of her flesh, he only succeeded in sparking another jolt of discovery that shook him to his very core.

It wasn’t quite like before, however. There was no overwhelming rush of sorrow or dread the way there had been when she’d plunged her hand through his chest. Since the contact was lighter this time, so was Silas’s awareness of her feelings. But, too, since Cecilia had let some of her guard down, Silas was able to understand more of what generated her response this time than he had been before.

It was indeed a who, not a what, she had needed to escape in San Francisco. A man. A man she had once trusted, and who had betrayed that trust most heinously.

“You loved him,” Silas said when he realized that, too. But he felt no stab of disappointment in recognizing that, no twinge of envy. He felt what Cecilia did—shades of melancholy, traces of lingering fear.

She nodded slowly. Then, with clear reluctance, she shifted her body so that his fingers were no longer in contact with her flesh. She still wasn’t willing to share her feelings with him. Not that intimately. Not yet, at any rate.

She did, however, tell him what he had hungered to know. “His name was Vincent Strayer.
Is
Vincent Strayer,” she corrected herself. “I mean, it’s not like he’s dead.”

“Unlike some people,” Silas pointed out unnecessarily.

She braved a smile at that. “You’re more alive than Vincent could ever hope to be. Certainly you’re more human.”

He dipped his head in both acknowledgment and gratitude.

Her smile fell when she returned to the subject of this Vincent. “I met him six years ago. He owned the restaurant where I worked. He was very handsome. Very charming. And quite a bit older than me.”

“I’m quite a bit older than you, too,” Silas reminded her.

He was treated to another quick smile, but there was still a fleeting sadness in the gesture. “But you and I aren’t . . . We’re not . . .” She shook her head, as if giving up on trying to put voice to whatever she was thinking, then settled on, “You’re not like him.”

“And what was he like?”

She inhaled another one of those deep, thoughtful breaths, but this time, when she exhaled, there was a raggedness to her respiration that hadn’t been there before. “At first, he was wonderful,” she said. “I thought he was attentive and loving and fascinated by me. But looking back, I can see now that he was a classic emotional abuser.” She met Silas’s gaze again. “I guess they didn’t call them that in your time, did they? That’s a twentieth-century thing.”

“No, that wasn’t what we called men who mistreated women in my time,” Silas concurred. “Those of us who were decent had other, infinitely less polite, designations for them. But that is by no means a ‘twentieth-century thing,’ as you called it. And I am saddened to find it still occurs. Though I suppose, the nature of men being what it is, I am not entirely surprised, unfortunately.”

She nodded, but said nothing.

When it looked as if her silence would remain a chronic condition, Silas asked pointedly, “Tell me about this Vincent who was wonderful at first.”

She looked back at the river and sighed again, but this time there was an impatient quality to the sound. “I was with him for five years,” she said. “The first couple were, I thought at the time, great. I thought Vincent was so in love with me. He wanted to be with me all the time. He lavished me with gifts and praise. Took me on romantic weekends. Every time I turned around, he was there. At work, at home, socializing . . . We did everything together.”

Silas said nothing, for he feared he knew where this was going. He had known more than one man like Vincent when he was alive. They didn’t collect women because they loved them. They collected women because they wanted to own them.

“And on those rare occasions when he and I were apart,” Cecilia continued, still watching the slowly rippling waters of the muddy Ohio, “he called constantly, wanting to know how my day was. What I’d done, who I’d seen, where I’d gone. I thought it was because he cared about my experiences. I thought it was because he loved me. Maybe even more than I loved him.”

Ah
, Silas thought,
there was a telling statement
. The fact that Cecilia knew, even early on, that whatever behavior Vincent was displaying, it veered from the sort of feelings she had for him. She loved him. But what he felt for her was something else.

“I’m not sure I can pinpoint when I realized something was wrong,” she said. “It just gradually started occurring to me that my friends weren’t calling me anymore, and I wasn’t calling them. Not that I had a lot of friends,” she conceded, “or family, for that matter. But I had a few friends. Until Vincent subtly separated me from them.”

She looked at Silas again. “I can see now how it happened. Whenever I was invited out somewhere, to anything, Vincent always pouted and said he’d made special plans he wanted to surprise me with and now I was ruining the surprise. Or, even worse, he’d say I didn’t love him as much as he loved me, because I wanted to spend time with other people instead of him. He always turned it around on me and made me feel guilty, and then I’d have to work doubly hard to prove my love to him. Prove my love,” she repeated derisively. “As if love is something you have to prove to someone. That just shows how far gone I was.”

“Or how lonely you were,” Silas said softly.

Her brows arrowed downward. “Maybe. I suppose I was emotionally vulnerable when I met him. And alone. And lonely. I was such an easy mark. Which is exactly what guys like Vincent look for in a woman.”

The observation didn’t invite comment, so Silas said nothing.

“I still can’t believe I let it go on as long as I did,” she continued. “Every day, he got a little more possessive, a little more demanding, a little more domineering. Every time he came into a room, I felt this panic sort of creeping in. And then, one day, the panic wasn’t creeping anymore, it was exploding. I could never do anything right, nothing was ever to his liking. He’d find fault in every little thing. The way I wore my hair, the color shirt I had on, the music I had playing on the radio. At work, even when the restaurant was getting rave reviews and the critics were praising my desserts as the best part of their dining experience, Vincent would tell me it wasn’t good enough. For years, he just kept chipping away at my confidence until I felt like a failure. Until I felt like I was nothing without him. He made me feel like I should be grateful he would deign to be with me, since no one else would ever want a loser like me.”

“Which was precisely the way he wanted you to feel.”

She nodded again.

“And yet,” Silas said, “some part of you must have realized that wasn’t true, otherwise you would still be with him.”

Again she turned to stare at the river, evidently finding it easier to talk to him when she wasn’t looking at him. “About a year and a half ago,” she said, her voice so soft, Silas had to strain to hear it, “we were supposed to go to a party given by another restaurateur, a man who was supposedly Vincent’s friend, but who Vincent viewed as more of a rival. And I was just . . .” Another sigh, this one weary-sounding. “Exhausted,” she finished. “Physically, emotionally, in every way a person can be exhausted. We’d had a wedding reception at the restaurant the night before, and it had gone on well into the morning. I’d gotten maybe two hours of sleep before I had to get up and to go back to work. When I came home that evening—Vincent stayed home and slept in, by the way—I knew there was no way I’d be able to make it through a night of partying. I was that close to collapse. I told Vincent to make my apologies and go without me, to tell them I was sick, which, quite frankly, was exactly what I was.”

When she hesitated before continuing, Silas asked, “And what did Vincent say to that?”

“Nothing,” Cecilia told him. “He didn’t say a word. He just grabbed me by the arm and dragged me into the bedroom, then shoved me to the floor and went to the closet. He jerked something out for me to wear, threw it at me, and then, for good measure, he . . .” She closed her eyes. “He kicked me. In the stomach. Hard.”

Something red hot and menacing boiled up inside Silas at hearing that, but he let her finish.

“He probably would have done more, but he didn’t want me to look like someone had just beaten me up when we went out. And we did go out,” she said. “I was terrified of what he would do if I refused. But I knew that was the end of it. Instead of putting me in my place, which was what Vincent intended for that kick to do, it was my wake-up call that I needed to get away from him. But it was months before I could do that. He watched me like a hawk.”

“And I don’t imagine he made it pleasant.”

She closed her eyes. “No.”

Telling himself not to ask, but needing to know, Silas ventured, “Cecilia, did he—”

But she hurried on before he could finish. “Finally, there was a night when Vincent had to stay late at the restaurant, and I left and came home and started packing. And only the barest essentials. I left behind every article of clothing and every piece of jewelry he ever gave me, only took the things I’d bought for myself. And I almost made it out with an hour-long lead on him. What I didn’t realize was that Vincent’s assistant, Dolan, who was really more like a bodyguard, was home, and that he’d received instructions from Vincent a long time ago to keep an eye on me when Vincent wasn’t around.”

She lifted a hand to cover her eyes and started to shiver. Again, Silas wished he could reach out to touch her. But he only sat helplessly and let her finish.

“I was almost to the front door when Dolan caught me,” she said. “He saw the suitcase, saw how frantic I was, and knew right off what I was doing. I bolted for the front door, but he got there first. He picked me up and carried me back to the bedroom, locked me in, and called Vincent.” Her eyes still closed, her hand trembling now as much as her body, Cecilia said, “He beat the hell out of me that night, Silas. And he . . . he . . .” Now her breathing was shaky, too. “And he . . . did other things . . . things I’d just as soon not talk about. Or think about.” She dropped her hand, opened her eyes, and continued to look at the river. “Not that I can help that last. But I’m doing better.”