A Haunted Romance (9 page)

He let his disappointment show for only a moment. “You’ll be safer yet there,” he said agreeably.

“Maybe when I get back sometime?” Her heart beat a little faster.

Trent smiled. “I’ll take a rain check, sure.”

Had the ghost been watching them make love? The idea brought a blush to her face.
There’s no such thing as ghosts
. She couldn’t imagine watching people have sex without even having a body to respond to it with. That would make her want to slam the door too. But it was probably just weighted funny, and they’d jostled it when they entered, starting a process where it slowly gathered steam until eventually it closed quite hard. It didn’t quite fit, but it was more sensible than believing a ghost had done it.

Chapter Five

Chelsea grabbed the last few things she need for the trip. Trent had just pulled out of the driveway. She took the can of cola from the fridge—the lure of sugar was too much—and put it on the floor next to her desk. She wanted a coaster before putting it on the old desk. It still didn’t feel enough like it was hers to be putting stains on it.

She packed up her laptop in its case and slung it over her shoulder, reaching down to pick up the can again. She noticed the envelope that had come in the morning’s mail a few inches away and picked that up instead. In her condo, the area around her desk had become cluttered with papers, and she hoped to avoid that in the new place, although she suspected it was a futile fight. She could at least put off succumbing as long as possible. She slit open the envelope with a fingernail and pulled out its contents.

To her surprise, it wasn’t a form letter; it was addressed to her specifically. She read through it and then put it down on top of the desk. Five hundred thousand dollars. She could sell this property, take the money, pay off the rest of her condo, and still have plenty left over. She had no idea the place was worth so much. Apparently some developers wanted to build something or other, and the money was contingent on one of the neighbors selling too. Trent or Dalton; either one would do.

She could be free of the moaning and the door creaking, the strange screechings and mysterious keys. But she’d wonder about the house forever and whether it was really haunted or not. She set the letter on the table. Maybe she’d look at it again in a few days.

* * *

It was six o’clock the next evening when Chelsea got back to the house. Rush hour started earlier than she’d expected it to; it had been years since she’d had to commute to work, and in the meantime, Washington traffic had gotten worse. Even though she left shortly after two, traffic on 66 had been a mess for miles.

Thank goodness the weather had held. It was nippy but not icy, and she didn’t have to get the chains out in the dark. She carted her boxes into the house and left them in the living room, which looked entirely too empty without something in it. While boxes were not a great look, it was better than nothing.

She’d been nervous the whole ride over, but she calmed down as soon as she took her boots off. The house was quiet, and just as she’d left it—a perfectly normal old rural house. The idea that the place was haunted seemed fanciful again. She’d missed it.

She’d missed Trent too. She’d had a fantasy of him sitting on the stoop, waiting for her, but she knew it was silly. Still, he had been around an awful lot, and she liked that.
The place seems less warm when he isn’t around. And it gets pretty hot when he is
. She hadn’t felt that way about a man for a long time.

She knew she really ought to write, so she set up her laptop and stared at it for a while. She read the last few pages of her manuscript in an attempt to get jump-started, but it was no use. Since talking to the archivist that morning and buying a scanner, she’d been eager to get to the contents of the chest. She closed her laptop and brought it to the bedroom.

She washed and thoroughly dried her hands before touching anything; the oils that built up on skin could be fatal to old documents. The books and magazines she lifted out first, even though she was more interested in the papers. Each issue of the
Pearl
went in its own acid-free bag. The books she put on the bookcase in her office, after recording the titles, authors, and dates of each. There were a couple more in French, but the other three were English.
Altar of Venus
, 1890.
The Way of a Man with a Maid
, 1896.
A Night in a Moorish Harem
, 1905. Only the last had an author’s name on it, a Lord George Herbert. If nothing else, the owner of the chest had been consistent in their reading material, or possibly they had left their more respectable books on the shelves in the house while the salacious ones were locked away in a chest.

It took her half an hour to get the scanner working to her satisfaction. She sat on the floor of her bedroom, a stack of acid-free plastic sleeves beside her, her laptop and scanner all hooked up. Gingerly, she lifted the first page and slid it into a sleeve and then placed in the scanner. It whirred satisfyingly as she pushed the button, and she looked at the image on her laptop. It took her several tries before she had the correct settings to make legible images of the page.

She turned the page over to scan the other side. She resisted the temptation to read each page as she lifted it out; she’d read the digital copies later. From the glimpses she caught while the scanner did its thing, the first few were like the first, although not all from the same person. Each was written by an Englishman who had never met Minerva, or Minnie as she was called by one man. Minerva might have been virginal, but in letters, she had no shortage of lovers.

After twenty or so pages, Chelsea was ready to quit for the night. She had to be so careful with each page, and the scanner took too long. The few salacious passages she’d come across had left her a little horny, which didn’t make it easy to go slow. But each image needed to be examined to make sure that the words were readable before the next was placed in the scanner.

She scanned one more page and glanced at the next, intending to leave it in the chest for tomorrow. But the page caught her eye because it didn’t look like it was a letter. The writing was different too; despite the flowery nature of the script of the letters, there was a sameness to them, even those from different authors. This writing had just as many flourishes, but they were different, more feminine.
Chapter One
, the author had spelled out, and then written below,
In which Amelia is first introduced to the pleasures of the flesh but retains her maidenhead.

Her lethargy gone, Chelsea read on. Amelia was an American schoolgirl who found herself in London, and it was clear that the author imagined London to be a city of the utmost debauchery. By the tenth page, poor Amelia had been propositioned twice, pinched once, and narrowly rescued from rape by a “gentleman,” who in turn taught her how to suck cock by the end of the chapter on page sixteen. For all the flowery language typical of the era, it wasn’t badly written, especially for a handwritten draft.

Reluctantly, Chelsea closed the chest, but she didn’t lock it. She stacked the pages in their sleeves on a shelf, putting the letters on one pile and the first chapter of the novel on the other. She uploaded the rest of the pictures to the laptop, glancing at each one to make sure they didn’t need rescanning. By the time she had her nightshirt on, she was so tired, she fell very quickly off to sleep.

She dreamed she was in London. Trent was in the dream too, dressed up as an English lord. She was lying naked on a bed, her hand moving between her legs, her fingers curled and half inside her pussy. He was watching her. A woman was moaning in another room, probably being pleasured or teased or tortured, she wasn’t sure which. She was in some kind of bordello.

Her hand bumped up against a hard piece of cylindrical plastic, or maybe it was glass. In any case, it was the right size and shape. She pushed it inside her.

She pumped the dildo in and out of her sex, brushing her clit with her thumb, and the men faded in and out of existence. A face would pop up briefly, and she would think she was being fucked, and then she’d realize she was just fucking herself, and the image would leave her.

She woke up sweaty and right on the edge. She knew she’d been dreaming, but at least she had something nice and hard to finish herself off with. She felt the rush travel through her body as she peaked, and then her hand slowed down as she lay back against the pillow, sated and drenched but awake.

The moaning in the other room kept going, and she realized that it hadn’t been part of the dream. And she really did have a dildo in her hand. She was sure she hadn’t taken it to bed with her.

Shit.

In the dream, the moaning had sounded more pleasured than pained, but now it was clearly a woman in distress, not in the throes of sex. She got up and ran to the other room, turning the light on. As before, the moaning stopped instantly.

She left the light on. She walked back to her bedroom and turned that light on as well. The dildo was there, transparent and rose-tinted on the middle of her dark green sheets. It had been one of the toys that had spilled out a few nights before, the ones she had presumed belonged to Pat. For a moment she thought she might simply never have picked it up, but then she remembered that the toys had been on the sleeping bag, not the bed. The bed hadn’t even had a mattress on it then. So how had it ended up in the bed?

She picked it up and took it to the bathroom to clean. It made no sense. Even when she imagined a ghost, it made no sense. If the ghost had given it to her to play with, presumably she—or he, she supposed, but Minerva was the only former resident of the house she knew about besides her aunts—would have watched? So why moan in the study if the action was going on elsewhere?

She glanced at her watch. Three twenty, far too early to get up, but she wasn’t sure she could get back to sleep. Although, if the light being on shut up the moaning, she could try to keep the lights on in both places. Maybe the ghost needed the darkness.

She put the dildo back in the bag in the closet and sprawled out on her bed. She closed her eyes, trying to convince herself that she’d get back to sleep but gave it up after ten minutes. The bed felt lonely, and the house felt downright creepy.

Finally she got up, grabbed a stack of plastic sleeves, and sat back down next to the chest.

“Chapter two. In which Amelia pleases a man and a woman at the same time and slides further into depravity.”

It sounded promising. Chelsea scanned the first page and read on.

The phone rang at some ungodly hour. Sunlight was streaming through the windows, and Chelsea’s watch claimed it was nine o’clock, but that didn’t change her opinion of the hour. At some point during the night, she’d snoozed off, leaning against the bed, still on the floor with plastic sleeves all around her.

She got the phone on the fourth ring. It was Dalton, wanting to make sure she was okay and that she didn’t need anything.

“Just a little sleep deprived,” she told him. “Hey, did you get a letter like the one you handed me the other day?”

“From Compton Real Estate? Yeah, they’ve been sending letters for a while.”

“What do you think?”

There was a pause, and then he said, “Your aunt never wanted to sell. It’s a good deal, though, well above market price, so I’d take it if you did. They’re not interested unless they can get two pieces of property together. Yours and mine, or yours and Trent’s, or better yet all three.”

“Do you know who wants the land so badly?”

“Nope, no idea.” Another pause. “Are you planning to sell?”

She thought about it. She couldn’t sleep with the light on every night, and wasn’t sure she’d feel entirely safe even if she did. Still, the ghost hadn’t done anything really dangerous, unless it was responsible for the attic stairs falling on Dalton. The rest was annoying but even a bit playful. If it had left the key, it was on her side in helping her discover the secrets of the chest. She could take the chest, and the one upstairs for that matter, back to Falls Church with her. Would the ghost follow the chest or stay in the house? She didn’t know. And she wasn’t entirely happy with herself for taking the whole idea of a ghost seriously anyway. “I don’t know.”

“Ah.”

“There is one thing I could use help on, but it’s not essential, although you might find it interesting. There’s a couple of old chests here, and at least one of them is full of papers and books from around the turn of the century. I’m trying to catalog them and take pictures of them, if you’d like to help.”

“Old papers, huh? Yeah, sure, I love old stuff. Sometimes I think I was born a century too late. Or maybe it’s a millennium.” Dalton chuckled. “I’d miss electricity, though.”

“And modern plumbing, I’d bet. Come over after lunch, maybe? Say one o’clock?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, see you then.”

Chelsea put down the receiver. She could get a little more of a snooze, this time on the bed. If she slept during the day, she could write at night, and the house wouldn’t spook her out so much.

The phone rang again an hour later.

“Hello!”

“Hey, Chelsea, it’s Trent. Mind if I come on over?” His voice was rough and sexy, and it caused an immediate pleasant reaction down low.

Come right over and come to bed with me
. “Um, sure.”

“Great! I have some stuff from Mrs. Gray to show you about the history of the house.”

Chelsea straightened. That sounded interesting too. “Good.”

“Have you had any more trouble with…” Trent paused, as if choosing his words, “…the house?”

“I…well, that moaning sound again.” Despite the intimacy they shared, she wasn’t going to tell him about masturbating during the middle of the night. But maybe she could find a way around the issue. “You didn’t put anything on my bed the other day, did you?”

“No. What an odd question. You found something in your bed?”

“One of Pat and Joann’s toys.”

He chuckled. “No, I’d remember if I’d planted
that
. Besides, I’d have wanted to watch to see what you did with it.”