Emily Greenwood (10 page)

Several hours later, Felicity paused in the dark hallway near Tethering’s master bedroom, waiting to make sure that no one was awake. She was satisfied that she had made not a sound as she crept into the manor in her bare feet. It was after midnight and she was again disguised in her Lovely Annabelle costume, preparing to disturb the sleep of James Collington. The day spent in his company had only made her more certain she had to get him to leave as soon as possible, before she did something foolish, like throwing her arms around him and kissing him. Already Lovely Annabelle had gotten a reaction out of Mr. Collington. She’d been seen by the stable boy, too, and the gossip of servants would increase the tension in the household. With any luck, tonight would accomplish her goal of making him believe he couldn’t bear to live at Tethering.

Outside, a cloud passed over the moon, dimming her only source of light, and she approached the master bedroom blindly, slowly, with her arm thrust out. Before she could reach the doorknob, which she intended to rattle, her bare toes banged into something very hard, like a statue or an urn, which hadn’t been there before.

“Ow!” she said much too loudly before clapping a hand across her mouth in horror.

Searching with quiet fingers, she found the knob and gave it a brisk jiggle. Then, hoping she was not pushing her luck, she moaned once and, reaching into her pocket, extracted a generous handful of soot, which she dropped in his doorway. Then she quickly made for the hidden panel at the end of the corridor. As she crept along, the sound of heavy footsteps rushing on creaking floors sent her flying.

Someone was stirring in that bedroom!

She was through the panel and down the pole in a trice. Once in the cellar, she heard footsteps on the floor above her. Quickly, panic racing through her, she made her way to the hidden secret door. She slipped out and upward along the tunnel. Several heart-pounding minutes later, she was pushing aside the paving stone that led into the garden.

Having replaced the stone, she crouched in the bushes a moment, catching her breath, calming her racing heart, and listening. No one emerged from the house, so she trusted that her pursuer would be searching inside for her, at least for the few minutes it took for her to complete her mission outside.

Now for the second part of tonight’s plan: the stables. The outdoor servants were the ones who had seen her before, so she’d give them another scare tonight.

She made for the orchard tree line, which would provide cover and a means of escape if anyone should emerge. Creeping silently from tree to tree on her bare feet, she planned to get close to the stables and make her ghostly presence known before disappearing into the orchard and returning to Blossom Cottage.

Tonight was darker, with the clouds thick over the moon, and though she knew it was silly, she felt skittish. Maybe some of her jumpiness came from knowing James Collington was on the other side of Tethering’s walls. But he would be cowering and quivering. He had to be.

She was perhaps fifty feet away from the stable doors when she heard the sound of a twig snapping about twenty feet behind her.

She froze.

What had that been? Her heart knocked in her chest. She stood still, listening for several moments. Nothing but the sound of her own breathing.

She gave herself a stern shake. It had doubtless been a small animal, or maybe a branch had fallen from a tree. Nonetheless, when she started moving again, it was at a faster pace. Shortly she stumbled on a root and fell forward onto her hands and knees in a pile of crackling dried leaves and sticks.

“Who’s that?” called a voice from the stables. “Who’s out there?”

Someone was stirring in the stables! She stopped behind a tree, heart pounding, thinking that she’d done enough haunting for one night. The seeds of fear had been planted. Though she could dash past the stable to make Annabelle’s presence distinct, the stable boy was on the alert and she might be apprehended. Better to go back to the cottage.

A twig cracked again, much nearer this time, making her already pounding heart jump. And then she heard something far worse.

“Lovely Annabelle.” A whispering man’s voice.

Horrors! Someone was calling for Lovely Annabelle. The ghost of Annabelle’s lover?

Felicity was not going to stand around to find out. She took off like a shot, running full tilt back the way she had come, toward the corner of the house and the far-off safety of Blossom Cottage. Sticks and pebbles cut her bare feet and branches from the trees slapped and caught at her, but she flew on.

Until she ran into a tree.

“Oof,” she gasped into the night stillness.

But it wasn’t a tree she had collided with. Though it was hard, it was not scratchy with bark. No, it was the broad, firm, familiar chest of a man. James Collington. His arms flew up and imprisoned her against him.

She looked up at him from under her lashes, breathless, her heart thudding wildly in her chest. In the weak moonlight, his eyes flashed at her and he looked dangerous. His black hair was tousled from sleep, but he didn’t look silly. Instead, with his tan skin and the dark shadow of a beard forming on his strong jaw, he looked like nothing so much as a sleeping bear awoken too early. She swallowed hard.

“Lovely Annabelle,” he said quietly, and now it did not sound soft and spectral. It sounded deep and ominous and very much as if it were coming from a live man. “So, you like to play with fire?”

She stood frozen, unable to say a thing.

The voice sounded from the stable area again. “Who’s there? Who’s out there?” it demanded. A shuffling sound indicated someone moving toward them from the stables.

James looked down at her. “Should I say I’ve caught our ghost?” Devilish lights crackled in his eyes. “Or perhaps I should say nothing and see if whoever that is can find you. Or us.”

Oh, dear heaven! Would he expose her?

“Please, not?” she croaked hopefully.

He leaned away from her. “It’s Collington. Out for a walk,” he called. His voice rumbled in his chest and vibrated into her body where she pressed against him.

“Oh, sir. Sorry, sir,” came the voice. “Good night.”

“Good night,” James called back. And then he returned his full attention to her.

“Well, Annabelle. You owe me a forfeit,” he said. He shook his head, a lazy, menacing motion. “You are nothing if not persistent, woman. I thought I told you there was to be no more haunting.”

“But why are you here? You’re afraid of ghosts!” she blurted out.

“What on earth gave you that idea?”

“You did ask me to contact Lovely Annabelle for you…”

“Because I knew I was speaking to her then. And I told her in no uncertain terms that the haunting must stop.”

“But I overheard your servants talking about your fears, when you thought one night that the moaning of the wind was a ghost!”

His eyelids lowered. “And you assumed they were talking about me.”

“I—” she began, then realized anything she said would only make things worse.

“Foolish of you.”

His thumb came up and rubbed across her bottom lip. Shivers tingled along her neck and shoulders. She waited, in fear mixed with anticipation, for what he was going to do next. He turned his thumb and examined it in the weak moonlight.

“Good. I don’t think black lips would look as good on me.”

He leaned forward and brushed his lips against hers gently, and she caught a whiff of wine and that manly, intoxicating scent that was James. Then he crushed his warm mouth against hers, and, sanity forgotten, she opened to him. She kissed him back and he pulled her more tightly against him.

It felt like heaven, just as she’d dreamed. The heat and hardness of his body came to her through the thin fabric of Lovely Annabelle’s gown. She wrapped her arms around him and squeezed him to her.

He groaned and moved his hands to her sides, where they clasped her hips and drew her roughly against him. This time when she felt the evidence of his desire she was not shocked, but thrilled.

His hands moved upward to mold against her breasts, and she knew herself to be melting inside, her defenses, her reason, turning to mush, slipping away. His tongue stroked inside her mouth sensuously, the pleasure making her quiver. He moved his lips below her ear, his dark hair and whiskery cheek tickling her skin, and murmured some foreign words.

“
Qu
é
bella
espectra.
” His voice was husky.

Espectra
. Spirit? Ghost? Her thoughts swirled dizzily.
Bella…
beautiful?

He kissed her again, and she moved her hands to tangle in his hair. The heat of his hands traveled through the fabric of her gown as he ran them up her waist and over her breasts, where they stopped to make slow, beguiling circles.

“You really, really shouldn’t have come out tonight,” he said, his lips right under her ear. It sounded less like an admonition and more like someone stating an unfortunate fact.

“Yes,” she whispered. “I… see that clearly now.”

She should pull away, but no part of her wanted to separate from him. Instead, she explored upward, skimming her hands over those shoulders that had so often drawn her attention. She buried her face in his chest and breathed in his scent that she loved.

With a quick movement, he slid his hands below her bottom and scooped her up. Their breath sounded loud in the night stillness.

“Oh!” was all she had time to whisper before he set her on a tree stump. He knelt in front of her and kissed her with gentle insistence, and she knew such a surge of being treasured, of being cherished by this man. An irresistibly good feeling.

Tentatively, she moved her hands along his sides, over the width of his ribs and inward along his waist. He shivered, as if she were tickling him, only not in a funny way.

He pushed one shoulder of her gown down her arm and her freed breast fell loose. She should have been shocked, but she wasn’t, because she knew he wanted her. He pressed his lips to the base of her neck and slowly, draggingly, kissed downward along the tender skin. Both of them were breathing hard, and she heard him growl low. As his moist lips moved closer to the tip of her breast, she shuddered. And all the while, her heart was beating out a thrill:
he
wanted
her, he needed her, he must care about her
.

Her mind was nothing but rich, incredible sensation, urgent desires that she’d never known before and that she never wanted to come to an end. But then she became aware, with crashing disappointment, that they
were
coming to an end. He had taken his mouth away from her bosom and now, disorientingly, only cool night air lingered over the moist trail his lips had left. And then he was tugging her sleeve back onto her shoulder.

He sat back on his haunches, away from her, and looked into the darkness beyond her.

“What?” was all she could manage. How could he just stop?

“This isn’t going to work,” he said.

“Work? What are you talking about?” And why was he talking? Why had he stopped? She jerked at the shoulder of her gown, which was threatening to slide back down, and knew she had let herself go too far. Was he playing some kind of game with her?

“Once we had a proper kiss,” he said in a gloomy tone, “I thought it would solve the problem of this attraction between us.”

So. It had been a trick of sorts. It hadn’t been something genuine that had arisen between them, something of the moment, but calculated for his own purposes. She should have known. He always had a plan.

He rubbed his eyes with a hand. The moonlight fell in shadows on the hollows of his cheeks, giving him a haggard look. “It’s this—this thing between us. The attraction.”

She crossed her arms, squeezing them tightly to her. She couldn’t let him know how deeply connected she’d felt to him just now. How she’d thought for a minute, and deeply welcomed the thought, that he cared about her.

“Attraction, pooh! I’d have to be crazy to be attracted to the man who’s stolen my family estate.”

“Obviously neither of us would have chosen this. It’s inconvenient—”

“It’s impossible!”

“Admit it or not, it doesn’t change what’s true.”

“All right. So there is some physical… force between us,” she said, grateful for the cool tone she’d been able to summon when her heart felt wrung. “But what happened tonight is the end of it. Period.”

James lifted an eyebrow at Felicity. She was furious at him, and probably equally with herself for succumbing, but she’d never admit any of it, and he had to admire the strength of her spirit. “Agreed. But will it be as easy as that?”

The feeble moonlight fell like silver mist on her ridiculous disguise as she sat there on the stump. Her normally pretty features looked silly with their soot smudges, and she’d be scrubbing forever to get the stuff out of her hair. Funny though she looked, he’d take her back to his room right then if he could.

“We’ll just make sure that it is,” she said in that cool tone so different from how they’d been addressing each other only a minute before. Felicity Wilcox was
fun
. She’d brought him something he hadn’t known in ages: delight. Along, of course, with passion. By God, the passion.

“It’s as simple as this,” she said. “We don’t touch each other.”

Simple. Right. “Very well, I won’t start anything if you don’t.”

“Hah! You can count on that. Me starting things was never the problem.”

“No?” This from the woman who’d been wandering his home and grounds at night. Whether she wanted to admit it or not, she liked to play.

“No.” She turned to go then, but he caught her arm.

“You and your father will come to my house party,” he said.

She didn’t turn around. “I’ve already said no.”

“Oh, but you will come,” he repeated.

She turned around, her eyes sparkling angrily at him. “We certainly will not.”

He let his eyes run over her disguise. “I don’t think you’re in a position to argue about this.”

Her pretty mouth pursed in frustration. He smiled thinly.