Shivers Box Set: Darkening Around Me\Legacy of Darkness\The Devil's Eye\Black Rose (9 page)

I woke to cool morning air and moisture on my face. I wasn’t surprised at the rain, but I was shocked to find myself in it without having any conscious recollection of rising and walking outside. I did remember pulling on my shorts and T-shirt sometime in the night, but my wet, cold feet on the grass and rain falling on my bare arms and face made no sense to my groggy, sleep-clouded mind.

I blinked against the pelting drops and shivered.

But I couldn’t turn back and go inside.

I. Couldn’t.

My feet wouldn’t move.

Only a dizzy, slight sway resulted from my desire for warmth and shelter. My whole body leaned this way and then that as if urged by a gentle breeze and not every muscle I possessed straining to break free. My feet remained where they were, as immovable…as stone.

“No,” I said, but there was no one to hear me. No living person anywhere. All around me, the Bride statues watched, forever locked in sympathy.

I was in the garden.

I shifted my gaze because my head wouldn’t move. Where was the real Bride? I tried to look from statue to statue to statue, but I couldn’t see them all clearly. My position and the rain made clarity impossible. White forms everywhere and no way of knowing if one of them wept and bled and perpetually drowned while she also waited to pounce. I could see nothing but marble overcome by grief and roses.

Then, triumph! My feet began to move. One shuffling step at a time. Not back the way I must have come toward the house and my new lover, but forward, through brambles and bushes.

“No,” I said again. My thrill at moving trailed away, leaving nothing but fear in its place. I willed my body to stop. I ordered my feet to quit. I strained every muscle again. For nothing. Long wicked thorns pierced and pulled at my cold, wet skin, but even the pain didn’t make me pause.

I became wetter still. The rain-heavy leaves trailed across and over my face and arms and legs until I shivered and shook. But I walked onward still. Ever onward.

I wanted to see the ocean. My lover’s garden was no longer the refuge it had once been for me. I knew I had to let him go and prepare to accept my husband’s return
.

The alien thoughts slithered across my brain on its surface rather than up from its depths. Not mine, but hers.

Married for two years with nothing to show for it but a gloomy house full of empty rooms and a husband constantly at work, building his wealth. Always gone. Always on to the next acquisition and the next
.

Now I could hear the ocean pounding two hundred feet below. The garden was thinning. A stiff breeze pushed my damp hair back from my face. I thought I heard my name called—shouted—from far behind me. But he called “Samantha” not “Maria” so I didn’t turn to answer.

Maria O’Keefe
.

I was eighteen when we married. He is twice my age. A worldly man who loves his portfolio, his investments, his possessions more than he could ever love a trophy bride. Then, after many long, lonely nights…another. A younger man who gave me all the attention I could crave and the one gift that might make my husband love me
.

My hands lifted to cup my flat stomach.

Maria had hoped the timing would be right. That her husband would accept the child she carried as his own. The man her husband had hired to build her an elaborate rose garden had moved on to the next wealthy man’s project without ever knowing that he had given Maria so much more than warmth and roses.

Now I stepped from the garden. One stride. Two. Three. I approached the cliff’s edge just as I’d seen the Thornleigh Bride approach it yesterday evening.

“Oh, my God,” I said when I came to the edge. The dizzy suck of gravity pulled on my body. “No.”

I looked out to sea with my hands on my stomach. I felt Maria’s hope. Her love for the tiny life that had fluttered beneath her fingers where I felt nothing but my own lean muscle.

Why had she jumped? None of what I was feeling was suicidal.

Fear, yes, but that was all mine. I seemed to be reenacting a fatal scene from nearly fifty years ago…and I knew what came next.

Suddenly, I wasn’t alone.

Several paces away, the bride appeared. She was as she’d been in the ballroom. Pale-eyed and ghoulish. Her white dress torn and sandy and wet. I smelled blood and roses.

“Not alone,” she said, wetly through foamy lips. “He followed.”

“Samantha!” Miles shouted from the edge of the garden.

I couldn’t turn. All I could do was stare at the gray sea as she had done and try to keep an eye on the ghost with my peripheral vision.

“You’re too close to the edge,” Miles warned.

I knew it. But there was nothing I could do. I swayed as I had in the garden, back and forth, as the ocean air whipped my hair wildly around my face.

“He followed,” the ghost bubbled.

It wasn’t Miles she referred to. Alien thoughts were still in my head. When the push came, I jerked and stumbled and I knew what she had known as she fell: Dominick had killed his unfaithful bride and her unborn child. She’d been a tainted possession no longer fully his.

The fall had happened over and over and over again. Maria O’Keefe had plunged to her death again and again.

But not today.

Because Miles had followed me, too, and his lunge to save me trumped nearly fifty years of murderous jealousy.

I fell, but back into his embrace and we both tumbled to the ground several feet shy of the ledge.

“She was pushed. She didn’t jump,” I gasped into his chest.

“I’ve got you,” he replied.

“She didn’t jump,” I repeated.

I pulled back to look at the ghost. As I watched, it changed. It became more solid, a corpse standing beside us on the cliff. Like a sudden gruesome time-lapse, waves of foamy water rushed out of its eyes and nose and mouth. I cried out, but the process was inexorable. Its torpid flesh rotted away. Blackened muscle was revealed, then bleached bone. The dry gray bones collapsed and turned to nothing but a pile of dust. Then the dust began to blow away.

“It wanted someone to know what happened,” I said. Maria’s thoughts were gone. The alien touch on my brain had evaporated as if it had never been. But I was left with that last certainty. It had wanted someone to know. Whatever had been left of Maria, it had wanted someone to know.

The obsessions it had caused in Mary and in Miles, the compulsions it had caused in Mrs. Scott and me—the dusting, choosing the book with the poem, possibly even my desire to be sculpted—everything it had done had been in an effort to communicate the truth about the unborn child’s murder. I would never know how much of my unwillingness to leave had been because of my growing feelings for Miles and how much of it had been because of the Thornleigh Bride’s influence. I only knew I was glad that I had stayed.

“You almost died,” Miles replied. He pulled me closer to his chest and farther from the edge.

“I almost died before, but that didn’t stop me. Maybe she knew I could take it,” I said.

“Maybe she knew I wouldn’t let you fall,” Miles added.

* * *

Dominick O’Keefe had never remarried. Rumors say he was never the same after his young wife’s “suicide.” Rumors aren’t always wrong. I couldn’t imagine what the haunting put Maria’s murderous husband through, but he died alone in 1983, refusing to see anyone and widely known as insane.

Maria had believed that her husband didn’t love her. But what about the rose garden? Had it been a grand romantic gesture that had ended in tragedy? Or just another symbol of his growing wealth? She’d been so young and inexperienced. And he’d been a very dangerous man to try to fool.

It took Miles months to complete the bronze sculpture that now stands on the cliff facing the sea. It’s a memorial. He created Maria as she might have been if she’d lived and a little boy a few years old. She holds his hand, tightly and safely, on the edge of forever.

I still get jumpy when it rains.

Tonight is stormy and Miles is in his studio. Which means I’m left to think about the night I followed the Thornleigh Bride to the ballroom.

Thank goodness we have guests. Some of his friends and some of mine. My aunt has visited several times with homemade apple pie from Abingdon. I was able to give her several silver pieces for La Roux. I’d crafted them in a new workshop just off the massive kitchen in a room that had once been a pantry. Thornleigh is rarely as empty as it was…although all the marble statues are gone. Overactive imagination or not, I’d always thought them sentient. I’m glad to know they’ve been delivered to eager museums, galleries and private collections across the globe.

Beautiful, but not here is good
.

Mary moved off Thornleigh property and now lives with Mrs. Scott. I don’t think we’ll ever see either of them again. When the ghost let Mary go, she “woke up” surrounded by thousands of moldy dolls. I try not to think about that much.

I hear a step in the hall. It isn’t midnight yet, but the thunder has grown louder and closer, which means my husband will come to me. Neither of us are big fans of bad weather.

“Not asleep yet?” Miles asks.

He comes into the master bedroom and closes the door. The room has been completely redone in a modern style with contemporary furniture, which almost helps you forget you are in a once-haunted house.

Forgetting is fully accomplished when I step into his arms.

“As if,” I say and lightning flashes to illustrate my point.

“Nights like this weren’t made for sleeping,” Miles agrees.

I look up into his dark eyes and a thrill goes through me. He is slightly tanned now because I occasionally drag him from his studio for fresh air and sunshine. But he still looks as if he’s been touched by a taste of “nevermore,” and he will always be possessed by his art and emotion, if not by a ghost.

I reach up and bring his face down to mine with handfuls of his mahogany hair. It’s damp—he’s been in the garden. I don’t question what drives him to still pace those pathways; I simply take his full lips with mine to help him forget.

I’ve been possessed, too. Driven and ridden by dark deeds best absorbed and forgotten.

I still run, but I’m also designing jewelry again. Our wedding rings were my first creations since the attack, but they weren’t the last.

“I’ve been recreating your curves for hours,” he says into my neck as he pulls his lips free to nibble his way to the hollow there. “I needed to refresh my memory.”

“Oh? This morning wasn’t memorable enough for you?” I tease.

I’d woken him with my mouth, taking on the challenge of his morning erection with the same determination I’d use for a climb…but with considerably more pleasure.

“I’ve been thinking about your hot lips all day,” he moans, but when I move to trail my mouth down the chest I am currently baring one button at a time, he stops me with his hands in my hair. “I was thinking about the first time I saw your bare skin and what I’d wanted to do,” he continues.

He holds my head, but my hands are free. I use them to slip the sheer sleep shirt I wear from my shoulders and let it fall to my feet. I wear nothing else. There are no cowards here.

He looks at me as only he can, intense, seeing everything from my scars to my heart beneath. Then, he lets his fingers trail from my hair.

“Let me see you,” he says.

Suddenly, a thrill of shyness washes over me. He has seen me in every way we could think of for a whole year, but I know he means as I was the first time he saw me.

I pad over to the bed on bare feet and sit down on it, remembering the settee. Also remembering, I position myself as he’d drawn me and as he’d sculpted me. Slightly curved to the side, but breasts full and uncovered and the tracery of scars not hidden or shamed away.

“Yes,” Miles murmurs, and when he comes to me he touches me as he did a year ago with gentle, hesitant fingers.

But a year ago he hadn’t been naked, too.

A hot flush flows from my face to my chest. His erection tempts me, but I force myself to remain still. I can’t help that my nipples pebble. I can’t stop my breath from quickening or keep my gaze from his lips.

He leans over me, bringing them temptingly closer.

“I wanted to taste you, remember?” he whispers against the full swell of my left breast.

I gasp when the hot, wet tip of his tongue flicks out for a wicked taste. Only he knows that my former injuries have left me sensitized right…where…he…slides…his…tongue.

I shiver, but still I pose.

“I imagined you’d be firm and sweet and soft in all the right places,” he continues. His lips tickle my skin as he speaks.

I don’t move, but I do draw in a gasp of air when his hot mouth closes over my nipple. I may have called him “O’Keefe” for old times’ sake.

“You were nervous, but not afraid. Your eyes watched me as thoroughly as I watched you. I thought you’d kiss me given the chance, and I damn well wanted to test the theory,” Miles continues, talking between each sucking kiss to my tingling breast.

I can no longer stay completely still. Moisture wells between my thighs and I shift. But the slight shift is a triumph because what I want to do is beg him to suckle there, everywhere. His full succulent lips were made to make a woman beg, and I have before, but not tonight.

Tonight, I pose while he plays.

“You didn’t protest. Not any position I suggested. You let me explore all of you with my eyes. Tonight, I want to follow with my tongue.”

And he does.

He places me in every position, but instead of drawing, he tastes, until finally, finally, my thighs are nudged apart with his nimble fingers and his dark tousled curls are between them. He tongues me, deep, and I cry out, unable to remain passive.

I come as he licks, illuminated by lightning and shaken by pleasure spasms as thunder rolls.

I tremble, but he covers me too soon for me to feel vulnerable or alone. His strong, lean body warms mine and joins mine and we rock together. The storm darkens the world around us, but together we hold the darkness back as we hold each other.

“I’m not afraid anymore,” I say into his shoulder against the teeth marks I’ve made that will fade by morning.