“Why was that?” she asked.
Their eyes locked. His hand fell from her face but rested against her uninjured side. His palm was warm and the penetration of heat through her skin made her shiver in a way that had nothing to do with the cold this time.
He was touching her. Intimately. Only this time there was no ghostly connection. There was, however, a physical one, which was possibly even more threatening. Cass shifted to her side, but his hand moved with her. His eyes were pinned on her and she wondered if his heart was racing nearly as fast as hers.
This was crazy. It wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted answers. She shifted again and this time, he pulled his hand away. “You just said you saw Dougie with me. You were watching us. Why?”
He moved and took a seat on the end of the futon. There was a weird sort of intimacy even now that they weren’t touching. Him sitting on the edge of the place where she typically rested her head. It seemed more natural than it should have.
Deciding that she needed space more than she needed answers, Cass rolled off the other side of the futon away from him. “Forget it.”
Her knees shook, but she managed to tug her clothes out of his hands and make it down the small hallway to her bedroom. She dumped the sweater in the corner of the room and reached inside her closet lined with shelves to find a T-shirt that she could pull on. She’d never considered herself modest, but the idea of Malcolm seeing her, touching her, in nothing more than her underwear was a bit too much to handle.
Her cats sat side by side on the bed, their bodies tucked against each other in a way that always made her smile. Popping their heads up, they watched her move about the room. She opened her mouth to coo at them, but saw them turn with synchronicity toward the door.
“The fact that you’re telling me I don’t have to answer,” he said from the doorway of her bedroom, “leads me to believe you think you already know the answer. Did my sister tell you that, too?”
The cats got up from their nest and slowly walked to the edge of the bed as if standing guard against the new intruder. Nice of them this time, since last time he’d visited they had stuck to the bedroom. Not that it mattered. Cass didn’t imagine they could be all that effective against a full-grown man anyway, but she appreciated their effort. Right up until Malcolm stepped closer and held out his hand so that they could shamelessly rub their heads up against him.
“You’re a cat person.”
“Hardly,” he replied with a hint of a smirk, even while his other hand reached out to stroke the long feline bodies. “Haven’t you heard? Men aren’t supposed to like cats.”
Rolling her eyes, she made a noise that indicated what she thought about the concept of manliness in general.
“You didn’t answer my question. Was it my sister that…Did you communicate, or whatever it is you do with her, again?”
“No. You can relax.” No doubt her earlier encounter with the beast had temporarily drained her of the ability to connect with anyone. Maybe that’s why his touch hadn’t conjured up any kind of connection. Thank God. For a while she could live just among the living.
“You’re not curious?”
“I was. Now I’m too sore to be curious.”
She moved around him and out of the bedroom. Having him there was worse than sitting with him on the futon. But when she got back to the living room, she realized there weren’t a whole lot of other choices. She stood in the middle of her space with her arms crossed over her chest and waited for him to appear.
“Look, it wasn’t because I suspected you or anything,” he clarified. “I knew this morning that you weren’t involved.”
“Well, thanks. I think.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t think you’re…connected.”
“I don’t know,” he answered tightly. “I don’t know, other than you seem to be the only link to two women who I believe were killed by the same person. You’re also the only thing I can do.”
His choice of words had her raising her eyebrows. “Excuse me?”
“I didn’t mean it…I meant that you’re my only way of staying involved. I followed you because, yes, I wanted to see if something else happened. If you stumbled on another dead body. But that didn’t happen.”
“Nope.”
“No,” he said carefully. “No dead body. But you did stumble into the middle of the street for no apparent reason. I told you why I followed you. Now you tell me what the hell pushed you into the middle of the street.”
This time he was the one folding his arms over his chest. They made quite a picture, the two of them standing across from each other, both of them in a you-can’t-touch-me pose. She tilted her head slightly, already predicting how he would handle the truth.
“What if I told you it was a monster? A monster from the other side hit me and pushed me into the street.”
“Given everything that’s happened today…I would tell you it’s not the strangest damn thing I’ve heard.”
Chapter 9
It certainly wasn’t the reaction Cass was expecting. Not that he would laugh outright in her face. He was too polite.
“A big, beefy, overmuscled monster,” she elaborated, purposefully trying to shake his stoicism. “With huge fangs that hang from its mouth and a nose that’s pushed up against its face like a pig’s. Its eyes are set deep and black and when it opens its mouth…”
A shudder overtook her body just thinking about the darkness that had permeated her being at the sound of its strange call. So much rage.
And she had just stood there, figuratively, and taken it. Earlier, Malcolm had suggested that she had let Dougie beat her, and she’d thought the idea ridiculous. But wasn’t that what she had done with that thing?
She hadn’t even considered fighting back. She didn’t know if she knew how. It wasn’t like she’d been forced to face off bullies at school. She’d been a loner from the start and most had obligingly left her alone. In the asylum, she’d been segmented from the violent population, so no one had been a threat physically to her, although she had gotten into a few pushing matches with a patient over a chair in the rec room. Certainly nothing that had prepared her for what she’d faced in her room.
She imagined she could deliver a good slap across the face-a gift most women were born with. But no man had ever prompted such an action. Hell, she hadn’t even slapped Dougie.
“Let me do something,” he said, breaking the silence that had ensued after she could no longer continue with her description. “I’ll make you some tea.”
Unable to help herself she smiled. “Tea?”
“I’m told it helps calm people down.”
“Oh, I get it. You think I’m hysterical.”
“I think you’re upset, yes. I know you’re in pain. Do you have tea?”
“In the kitchen,” she said, pointing beyond his shoulder.
Her cats followed him.
Traitors.
Oddly enough, watching him move about her small kitchen, filling her ceramic cow teapot with water, searching for mugs and the tea bags that she kept in the cabinet over the refrigerator, did have a calming effect. Something about the mundane act made her feel normal again.
“Tell me some more about this monster,” he urged. With two filled mugs in his hands, he stopped in the center of the room. “Why don’t you have any furniture?”
“I told you before I like to keep things simple.”
He handed her a mug and then pulled over the lone bar stool adjacent to the counter and sat. “Okay.
