He stood on the veranda looking down on the garden. His shirt was open and the wind blew it back. As he turned, something cold floated between us. I felt her touch, her icy breath, and shivered. But I wasn’t afraid. Which was strange because here in her house she would be at her strongest. I had already seen what she could do and yet…I wasn’t afraid.
My gaze locked with Devlin’s and a current of heat surged through me. He felt it, too. His eyes flared and his body went very still.
The moment stretched on and on.
And then he closed the distance between us and I heard him mutter, “I knew you’d come,” but I didn’t know if he meant me.
I reached up and traced the silver medallion with my fingertip. A symbol of his mysterious past, a talisman of all his secrets. The metal was cold, but I could feel the heat of his skin drawing me to him as surely as his warmth enthralled his ghosts.
Rising on tiptoes, I offered him my mouth. He took it with a groan, crushing me to him in an embrace that seemed at once familiar and foreign, desperate and devastatingly controlled.
He tasted of whiskey and temptation and my darkest fantasies. I wanted to hear him say my name in that seductive, decadent drawl. I wanted to skim my tongue along his hot skin, press my mouth to the throbbing pulse in his neck, wrap myself around him until nothing could come between us.
Backing me up against the wall, he tore aside my clothes right there on the balcony while a voice inside my head warned:
But it was me. It was my hands that flung his shirt aside. My mouth that opened so readily beneath his.
My decision to discard the rules by which I’d lived my whole life.
He lifted my legs around him and, half drunk with desire, I let my head fall back against the wall, exposing my neck. He devoured me hungrily, his teeth nipping and tugging the tender skin at my throat, his tongue laving and soothing the pleasurable sting.
Through slitted eyes, I caught the barest hint of movement down in the garden. When I looked again, I saw only the flutter of leaves in the wind.
And then I saw nothing at all as Devlin whisked me into the bedroom. The charged air came with us, tingling over bare skin, feathering along aroused nerve-endings.
From where we stood, I had a view of Mariama’s dressing mirror, oval and ornate. In the candlelight, I could see the ridges of muscle in Devlin’s back as he bent over me. I had the strangest sensation of being outside my body, of watching something forbidden, something dangerously taboo.
I slipped from his embrace and when he turned, I pressed him against the wall, trailing my lips down his chest as I fumbled with his belt buckle and opened his zipper. Smiling up at him, I slid to my knees and then I did things to him I never knew I was capable of. He shuddered as I encircled him, and when I felt he was on the verge, I turned again to glance over my shoulder at the mirror. My smile now was sly, wanton. A temptress’s invitation.
Rising, I put my lips against his ear. “I will never leave you,” I whispered, and where those words came from, I had no idea.
Devlin’s eyes smoldered and before I could move away, his hand shot out to grip my chin. He tilted my head back, searching my face.
“Amelia.” It was almost a question.
The sound of it made me tremble. “Yes, yes, yes,” I breathed and wound my arms around his neck, pulling him down for my kiss.
The breeze through the open doorway whipped the candle flames as the silky curtains billowed and beckoned.
Devlin pulled away and stared into my eyes for the longest moment, and then with a muttered oath he swept me up and carried me to the bed. The fabric parted in the breeze, and before I could catch my breath, we were falling through that shimmering fabric into another world, dark and lush. Devlin’s world. Mariama’s world.
I heard nothing of the music now but the drumbeats. The primitive sound thundered in my ears as he rose over me.
Trapping my wrists, he lifted my arms over my head, kissing me again and again and again. Long, hot, out- of-control kisses that left me thrumming. That left me begging. I closed my eyes tightly as his lips slid over my stomach.
My arms were still over my head, but the fingers around my wrists had turned cold. I tried to move, but I couldn’t. Something held me in place as I felt Devlin’s tongue skim the inside of my thigh.
I squirmed and tried to free myself. Tried to say his name.
He lifted my hips to meet his mouth, and as a white-hot pleasure filled me, I heard her laugh.
Slowly, I opened my eyes.
A ghost hovered over the bed. Eyes burning into mine. Mouth twisted in a ghastly grin.
I tried not to react, but how could I not?
Tearing my hands free from whatever held me, I tried to push Devlin away. He looked up, eyes heavy with desire. “What’s the matter?”
They were all around us. Drawn by the heat and energy of our lovemaking. Drawn to the most elemental act of life…of what they could never experience again.
Hungry and covetous, they watched us. Leering from the darkest corners. Crouching like gargoyles atop bedposts. Touching diaphanous body parts in grotesque parody.
A scream rose in my throat as Devlin moved up beside me. “Amelia? What’s wrong? Did I hurt you? Scare you…?”
He didn’t have a clue they were there. How could he not feel the cold dankness that surrounded us? The evil that had blown in with the breeze?
Across the room, the entity I’d seen in the garden at Rapture sat slumped in a chair. He wore shackles, one clamped around his wrist, the other dangling free. Lifting the loose end to his face, he sneered knowingly at me through the hole.
Devlin touched my shoulder and I flinched away. “I…have to go.”
“What is it? What did I do?”
I slid out of bed and grabbed my clothes. “I’m…”
I ran blindly from that room, Devlin’s voice calling after me. “Amelia!”
Later when I looked back on that night, I never remembered dressing or leaving the house. Had I not been so traumatized, I might have noticed the shadow that lurked at the corner of the veranda. I might even have recognized the troubled visage that tracked me.
As it was, I barely had any recollection of how I got home. I knew that I must have driven like a bat out of hell, though, because I was already inside my house, locked in my own little sanctuary, by the time Devlin caught up with me.
He beat on my front door, called out my name, but I didn’t let him in. I slid to the floor, arms wrapped tightly around my legs, shaking uncontrollably as my father’s warning pounded through my head.
“Papa,” I whispered. “What have I done?”
Thirty-Eight
I woke up the next day to sunlight and a ringing telephone. I was in my bedroom, but I had no idea how I’d gotten there. The details of last evening were cloudy. Something told me I was better off that way.
Drawing the covers over my head, I waited for the caller to give up. I wasn’t up to dealing with real life. I wanted to drift a little while longer, but little by little, everything came back to me and I felt very alone and afraid. I had no one to talk to, no one to turn to. I couldn’t tell Papa. I couldn’t bear to see the look in his eyes. I couldn’t tell
