Shivers Box Set: Darkening Around Me\Legacy of Darkness\The Devil's Eye\Black Rose (6 page)

Meager sunlight filtered into the halls of Thornleigh through smudged panes. In those weak but warm rays, dust motes hung suspended, little specks in time and space. I wandered, released from the nighttime refuge of my room, hesitant to seek out O’Keefe.

I needed to talk to him about Mary. I needed to tell him what I’d seen. But I could still feel his touch on my skin.

I’d always been decisive. Taking action—to recover, to train, to travel—had saved me following the attack.

Thornleigh changed that. I was like one of those dust specks held suspended by compulsions and conflicting desires. There was a wrongness here and I couldn’t run away from it. Somehow I felt I would carry it with me. There was also something so right about O’Keefe that I couldn’t imagine leaving him behind and never seeing him again.

This morning I went up instead of down, climbing a single narrow flight of stairs to the attic beneath the eaves. A sound had drawn me this way instead of that. There had been a fluttering murmur cut off by a slight cry that might have been nothing more than a poor mouse in a trap, but I thought it might have been a bird that had found its way inside and now couldn’t get back out. The idea of a trapped sparrow starving to death in the dark and dusty upper realms of the great old house bothered me until I came out and up. Checking out the attic seemed more practical than trying to solve Mary’s deep-seated issues and definitely easier to deal with.

Don’t explore the shadows,
O’Keefe had said.

The natural tendency to feel like an intruder in a new place was heightened by the strangeness I’d already encountered here. I stepped lightly, not exactly sneaking around but definitely not proclaiming my presence.

The sound came again more muffled than before. What if the bird had gotten tangled in some stored junk? What if it wasn’t only trapped, but hurt?

I hurried, taking the last few treads quickly. I tried the small door at the top half, expecting an unresponsive knob to make my efforts in vain. But the brass knob turned with a rattle beneath my fingers and the small door, about three quarters the size of a regular door, creaked open.

Dry, stale air crept out to greet me as if I’d unsealed a tomb. There was less sunlight here and I paused in spite of my concern for whatever creature might be caught in its final resting place, mouse or sparrow, because I couldn’t see.

I blinked. I strained my eyes. I looked hard into the shadows. I could make out the outline of eclectic clutter. The attic must have stretched across much of the house, but I could only feel the size of it. I couldn’t see the far reaches. Several small dormer windows did allow slight illumination, but they were dirty and covered with sagging old lace. The weak sunlight was caught and filtered harshly through yellowed lace webs.

Boxes, trunks and old forgotten furniture made my task impossible. How could I free a trapped animal when I could hardly see to place my feet? I moved forward anyway, drawn by the slight movement of one of the farthest curtains.

I thought of going back downstairs to find a flashlight, but I was afraid a trapped bird would beat itself to death on a dusty windowpane before I could make it all the way down and back.

As I came closer, the curtain moved again with a sudden rustle and sigh. I jumped and knocked against a stack of books, and several dusty sketch pads tumbled to the floor with faded flutters. I automatically reached to pick up the mess I’d made. I placed the sketch pads back on the stack, realizing as I did so that most of the stack was actually more of the same. Not books, but sketch pads and notebooks.

Once I had straightened the leaning stack of what must have been dozens upon dozens of sketch pads on top of an old trunk, I couldn’t resist lifting the top corner of the top pad. A glimpse of a familiar form caused me to open the pad completely. It was
Mourning Walk
—the sketch I now owned myself. With growing unease, I lifted the top page and then another and then another. Soon I had gone through the entire top sketch pad and several beneath and all of them were full of identical charcoal sketches along with closer studies of the woman’s hands and feet and lips and hair.
My God
. This wasn’t artistry. This was obsession.

Why the same woman again and again in the same pose as if he’d been driven to capture something about her again and again on the sketch pad’s pages?

Worst of all, the sketches reminded me of Mary’s dolls. Not in appearance, but in obsessive execution. The repetition was frightening. I backed away from the stack of pads much as I’d backed away from the moldering baby dolls with my heart pounding and my mind trying to understand what I’d seen.

A movement startled me and I jumped again. I’d forgotten why I’d climbed the stairs in the first place. But I hadn’t found the bird—only a cracked window allowing pacific air inside. One of the yellow curtains moved every time a breeze blew. I pulled the curtain aside and looked down at the tangled garden, then down farther to the waves crashing far, far below. I half expected to see O’Keefe wandering the garden with his statues, but I saw and heard nothing at all, too far removed to even hear the surf.

When I turned back to the attic, I had to blink again. The daylight outside with its sudden sun—no matter how faint—had blinded me to the shadowy room around me. In that moment of sensory deprivation, I heard the murmur again and identified it as a shuffling, muffled…step?

I strained to see, no longer thinking about mouse or bird. Even though my muscles bunched and my heart responded with quickened beats, I wasn’t going to cry out or see ghosts where there was nothing but shadows. Still, my eyes took ages to adjust and in those interminable seconds I almost believed that one of the garden statues had found me and followed me to show me its tears again. Or worse, a tiny stumbling doll reaching for me with moldering arms.

“I heard footsteps on the stairs,” a familiar voice began, and with its masculine vibration the shadows parted to reveal O’Keefe’s pale, handsome face as he stepped into the dusty sunlight.

Only when I relaxed into a different sort of tension altogether did I realize my fists had been clenched and my back pressed against the warm window. I quickly opened my fingers, hoping he hadn’t seen my fear. But this was Miles with his artist’s eyes and keen perception. His dark gaze, so startling against his porcelain cheeks, swept over me, taking in every detail.

“I heard something, too… I thought maybe a bird….” I trailed off because he didn’t look around at my words. He still looked only at me. And he stepped closer. I should have been frightened. His repetitive drawings, his belief that Thornleigh was haunted, should have frightened me. And it did. But more for him than of him. When he was near me, I was afraid, but more of my own visceral reactions than that any harm would come to me. He had been so upset when he’d seen my scars and angry with the man who had hurt me.

“More likely other things,” he said. “I warned you about exploring shadows. It’s best to ignore unusual noises at Thornleigh.”

I wanted to scoff at the idea that poltergeist activity existed or that it would scare me, but I was too distracted by his nearness. He leaned so close to me that I could breathe in his scent—charcoal and soap and a fresh hint of garden dew in morning sun. I drew in a startled gasp when he suddenly leaned even closer, but he was only reaching behind me to open the latch on the cracked window. He pushed it open, slightly brushing my arm as he did so. My responsive gooseflesh had nothing to do with the breeze that drifted inside or the hint of roses.

“There. Just in case. Better?” he murmured. He didn’t think there was a bird. He didn’t dispute the noise or try to explain it away. He simply didn’t accept a logical reason for it.

“Okay,” I said, shakily, affected by his proximity and his belief in ghosts. On one hand, he seemed so tuned into me, so warm and connected. He wasn’t at all put off by the defenses I’d erected since I’d been attacked. On the other hand, was he as unbalanced as his cook? Who was the woman he obsessively drew again and again?

“I’d like to sketch you in the sun,” he continued, as if he didn’t care if we were being haunted, as if a whole graveyard of ghosts wouldn’t distract him from capturing my likeness on paper and later in clay. I looked up at his face. He hadn’t straightened when he’d finished with the window. He still leaned into the sun near me and the faint beams softly caressed the hard edges and planes of his angular face.

I’d been curious about him before we met. I’d thought him handsome and intriguing from the first. But, here, with a yellowed lace curtain billowing around him, I had to blink against the urge to step into an intimacy with him that he hadn’t offered. In spite of the concerns the numerous sketch pads caused in me, I wanted to know him. I wanted to…

He cut his eyes toward me and they had gone brown like whiskey lit by the pale yellow sunlight, and I drew back. This was the danger here. Not ghosts or eccentric artists with strange obsessions, but this. My reaction to Miles. This desire to be close to him when I’d spent many months holding myself apart.

“How do you feel about a sitting in the garden?” he asked.

I didn’t like the garden. I didn’t think I could sit for him again without asking for his touch in ways that had nothing to do with art. I didn’t want to admit either.

“Yes. That will be fine,” I lied.

My cheeks warmed and his gaze dropped there, of course, attuned to the slightest variation of color.

“You’re sure?” he pressed.

I lifted my chin. I’d come here to be sculpted. The sketching sessions were part of his process. Just as sketching out rudimentary outlines of silver pieces had been a part of mine back when I still crafted. My workshop had been cold for a long, long time. I’d been too busy crafting myself into someone better and stronger. Or so I’d thought. Thornleigh had ways of making you see the hidden weaknesses in a piece. The fissures and imperfect alloys that would shatter when tempered.

“I’ll meet you in the garden,” I replied.

* * *

I refused to be afraid of statues, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t relieved when the chair I was to sit on turned out to be in a clearing devoid of brambles and weeping women. The midmorning sun was warm on my face. I tried to focus on that one simple thing as I braced myself for when O’Keefe would start. He had placed the chair and then the easel several paces away from each other.

That wasn’t far enough.

I was back in the silken ivory robe with nothing but another of the thin panties beneath and I was supremely conscious of my nakedness with a sexy artist I was painfully attracted to only a few feet away. Every muscle I possessed tightened when he turned and walked to me. The pacific breeze barely made it to us through the maze of vine and roses. What did was sweetened and heavy. It flowed over me—over us—like a caress. It lifted a rumpled lock of his mahogany hair and from there it wafted against my neck, playing with the silk to brush it aside.

I shivered, but not because of the breeze.

Miles reached to arrange my robe, and like the breeze his effort was to brush it aside.

I licked my lips to stave off nervous tension and I tasted sea salt and green growing things and suddenly the bitter hint of charcoal because Miles measured my lips with the slightest slide of one digit from side to side over the full swell of my lower lip.

I didn’t believe in lust at first sight. It had never happened to me. Not before the attack and definitely not since. But this wasn’t professional detachment between us. There was passion barely contained in his fingers. There was desire in the depths of his dark, dark eyes. I had no doubt the same heat was reflected in mine.

Even knowing I would have to bare myself again to him, I had followed him to his garden. Though its pathways had unaccountably frightened me, though the statues throughout its briary depths disconcerted me, I was here on this chair willingly, oh, so willingly, as silk slipped to puddle around my waist.

O’Keefe stepped back to his easel. It seemed a retreat. As if he quickly put distance between us when my bare breasts were revealed. My nipples peaked in the soft, heavy breeze and I waited and hoped for him to leave his pad and come to me again.

He began to sketch as if he were putting out a fire or kindling one—I don’t know which—but his movements were hurried as if each second he wanted to capture tried to evade his grasp.

He didn’t speak.

But he did place.

My limbs. My face. My hair.

From easel to me he stepped and back again.

And, always, each time, I anticipated his touch, then held my breath while the pleasurable pain of it assailed me and then sighed with loss when he stepped away once more. The careful, impersonal touches that came and went sensitized my skin. Each time his touch left me, the breeze continued his inadvertent seduction.

Finally, after what seemed the longest pause as I held my breath waiting, he pulled the silk from me. The move wasn’t quick. He looked into my eyes as inch by inch of the material parted from my body. Like his touch and the breeze, the silken slide of material against my skin was a seduction, only this time he watched my reaction as I licked my lips and trembled and sighed.

He dropped the robe to the side on the ground, but he didn’t look where it fell. He continued to watch me and because he held my attention I saw the rise and fall of his chest and the flush of want on his skin.

Yes. I was outside under the midday sky and, yes, I was nude save for a triangle of ivory silk that hardly covered my pubic curls, but we were all alone except for the lurking statues and I was too taken by his artistic storm to care.

There was decadence to my willingness to let go. Pure and wanton, the desire to forget my nervousness about statues and dolls and sketches came over me. When it fully claimed me, tingles of awareness flared to life and I knew if my hardened nipples didn’t betray me dampened silk would.

He stepped back to his sketch pad. I couldn’t see his work—it was hidden from me. I could see only his focus and I saw when the sketch pad wouldn’t hold it, when it shifted fully back to me. Not as a subject of artistic fascination. The flowing movement of his pencil slowed to a stop as if forgotten in his hand. His attention left the pages in front of him.