Haunting Rachel (28 page)

Fiona paused for just a moment and looked at Rachel. “I don’t know that it matters much whether or not that’s the reason, Miss Rachel. You’re alive again after ten years of just … walking through life. As much as he loved life, Mr. Tom would surely say that was a wonderful thing.”

“And Adam?”

“If he loves you, he’ll agree.”

Rachel didn’t respond to that, but as the housekeeper retreated to the kitchen and left her alone again, she couldn’t help but think about a couple of things that made that statement sound hollow. Adam hadn’t mentioned love. And he had more than once made it clear that he did not consider his resemblance to Tom a good thing.

Except, of course, that it had gotten him more easily and quickly into her house, her life. Her trust. Adam might not like the resemblance, but he had been ruthless enough to use it for his own ends.

Rachel couldn’t help wondering if he was still doing that.

And what did she really feel? In a way, Tom’s death had encased both her heart and her sexuality in ice, and that ice had remained through all the years of study and work. She had been so young when she lost him and all her dreams of them together; her very youth had encouraged her to cling to those dreams, to prefer them to the reality of going on without Tom.

For a long time, she had felt disloyal to Tom even in dating casually, and by the time those feelings had naturally and inevitably faded somewhat, work had been her focus and her outlet.

By that point, she had thought it easier just to maintain the status quo, especially while she’d been living and working in New York. Work had demanded all her time and energy, she hadn’t had to face and deal with the ghosts in her life, and so she had been able to keep herself in an emotional limbo. Until she had come home.

But now she was home. And whether Adam was responsible or not, the ice had cracked, even shattered. The barrier between her and her own feelings had been removed.
Everything she felt was stronger, sharper, and seemed to originate from someplace deeper inside her, a place untapped and even untouched for most of her life.

Her anger at Adam had come from there. So did her doubts and her passion.

So did her love.

For so much of her life she had believed that what she had felt for Tom had been the deepest, most powerful feeling she would ever know. Her commitment to him had been absolute, without hesitation or question, and the agony of his death had nearly destroyed her.

But recovery from a devastating loss was not all that had happened to her in ten years. There was also the transition from child to woman. And the development of her creative urges and abilities. And her independence.

The girl who had loved Thomas Sheridan for so long and so absolutely no longer existed.

What she felt now, for Adam, was so much more than she had ever expected to feel for anyone in her life. Far from simple adoration, it was a complex jumble of excitement and fear, growing love and paralyzing doubts, dreams and anxieties, passion and uncertainty, trust—and distrust.

And her physical response to him was so strong that it seemed to push everything else aside. Her body felt different, curiously alive and sensitized. An unfamiliar hunger lurked just below the surface and ambushed her unexpectedly whenever she looked at him or touched him. The mere sound of his voice made everything inside her go still in listening, and his slow smile made her want to smile in return.

But that was her. Her feelings.

Except for his undeniable desire for her, she really had
no idea what Adam thought or felt. He was still too good at hiding from her anything he did not want her to know.

She knew he had secrets left to tell, that there were still details in his past and quite possibly his present that he wasn’t ready to share with her. That he might never be willing to really talk to her about what he had endured in that brutal prison.

She also knew that if she had seen the scars on his back without the warning of her dream, she probably would have pressed him to talk to her about it, which would have been a mistake. As it was, her dream had shown her a barbarity so clear and detailed that she had not been able to bear even the idea of learning more. Not now, at least. Probably not for a long time.

You have to know where he’s been, Rachel. You have to understand.

For the first time, the full import of her dream hit Rachel.

His scars. How could she have known about his scars, dreamed about them?

Oh, she might have guessed that Adam had been mistreated in that prison, but the bloodied welts she had seen crisscrossing his back in the dream—and still saw, too vividly, when she let herself—closely matched the pale but visible scars he bore in reality.

Maybe even perfectly matched.

You have to know where he’s been, Rachel. You have to understand.

It had been Tom’s voice she had heard, subtly different from Adam’s.

“I’m just tired, that’s all,” she said, her own voice startling her in the silence of the house. “Imagining things.”

Tom’s voice in her dreams. A note from him. A yellow
rose on her nightstand. A gift delayed by a decade and a death.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Rachel heard herself say, firmly this time. But even as she did, a faint chill made gooseflesh rise on her arms as she recalled that terrible awakening ten years ago, and Tom’s anguished appearance at the foot of her bed.

She had not dreamed that.

“Miss Rachel?”

Fiona’s voice startled her, and Rachel was thankful to be pulled from her unsettling thoughts. “Yes?”

The housekeeper didn’t seem particularly surprised to find Rachel still standing in the foyer, then Rachel realized that only a few moments had passed since their earlier conversation.

“I forgot to tell you before. Miss Lloyd left a note for you on the table by the basement door. A list of pieces your uncle has asked for.”

Rachel nodded. “Thanks, Fiona. I’ll take a look at it.” She hesitated, then added, “Has Darby finished going through the stored furniture?”

“Not quite. There’s still a part of the basement left. She’s moved out what you wanted sold and what’s been taken to be repaired, and tagged what’s been gone over and added to the inventory. The rest she said she’d get to next week.”

“I think I’ll go down to the basement for a little while. I haven’t been down there in years.” Anything to get her mind off other things.

“Be careful on the stairs,” Fiona warned automatically, as she always did.

“Yes, I will.” Left alone again, Rachel headed for the basement, her thoughts taking a welcome new turn.

Her uncle Cameron had always been the artistic brother,
uninterested in business; he hadn’t wanted to be bothered by practical things, so he had a business manager who took care of his various investments. As far as Rachel could remember, her father and uncle had never even talked about business of any kind, and as for Cameron recommending that his brother lend someone five million dollars—the idea was absurd.

And that aside, he couldn’t possibly be the “old friend” to whom Duncan had referred in his journal; the brothers had gotten along well enough, but neither would have called the other an old friend.

An old bastard, maybe, but not an old friend.

Cam’s list was on a table beside the basement door, and Rachel scanned it quickly. A few items, none of which interested her particularly except to wonder idly where on earth Cam intended to put everything.

Leaving the list on the table, she opened the basement door and flipped on the lights as she started down the steps. The musty smell of basements everywhere wafted up to meet her, and for a moment she stopped on the steps, horribly reminded of the dream and Adam’s prison.

She had to stand there, holding tightly to the railing, and tell herself several times that it had only been a dream, that this was not a prison she was descending into, not a place where people were trapped and tortured. It was just a basement, a space dug out of the earth to provide storage for a family.

Slowly, she continued down the stairs, and by the time she reached the bottom, her panic had faded. Bright fluorescent lights illuminated even the corners of the huge space, and underneath their cool glare there was nothing that resembled a prison, just the refuse of generations, furniture and boxes full of things ultimately cast off as broken, out of fashion, or simply no longer wanted.

From the steps she could see a more methodical, spaced arrangement of the things nearest her, and knew it was Darby’s work. Farther away, toward the north side, it looked much more chaotic to her, with chairs piled atop tables, wardrobes pushed up against chests, and little room in which to move among the pieces.

Rachel walked away from the stairs, along an aisle with tagged furniture on either side, toward the north end of the basement. She looked at a few things in passing, noting that each had been beautifully polished and/or cleaned, and marveled at how much Darby had accomplished.

By the time she reached the north end, she had become absorbed in looking at what there was to see. She’d known there was a lot down there, but she was surprised at how many beautiful pieces a careful inventory had unearthed.

No wonder Darby was so thrilled.

Rachel couldn’t move very far into the section that had not yet been inventoried. She could see boxes and trunks, yet couldn’t get to them because of all the heavy pieces of furniture in the way. And the furniture was turned this way and that, some facing outward, some inward, and some even lying on their sides or backs.

The only way to get to most of the pieces was to do as Darby had done: Move one thing at a time.

“I wouldn’t even know what I was looking for,” Rachel muttered.

“Rachel? What the hell are you doing down here?”

Cameron was standing near the bottom of the stairs, staring across the room at her.

his, Mercy told herself, was a mistake. A big mistake.

She stared at the door for a full minute, gathering her nerve, drew a deep breath, and knocked. Mistake or not, she refused to spend yet another evening pacing in her apartment and asking herself whether she should force the issue or wait.

She really hated waiting.

Nicholas opened the door, holding a glass in one hand, and for a moment just looked at her.

“I need to talk to you, Nick.”

He nodded slowly and opened the door wider, gesturing for her to come in. “I’ve been expecting you,” he said.

That surprised Mercy somewhat, especially given the tense scene at the bank only a few hours before. She came into his apartment, eyeing him uncertainly as he closed the door. He looked, she thought, as if he had had a very, very
bad day. Coat and tie discarded, white shirt untucked and half unbuttoned, the sleeves rolled up loosely. His hair looked as if he’d run his fingers through it more than once, and there was something almost … numbed about his face.

“Maybe this isn’t such a good time,” she said slowly.

Nicholas crossed his sparse living room to the corner wet bar and splashed more whiskey into his glass. “For some discussions, there’s no such thing as a good time,” he said coolly. “Drink, Mercy?”

“No thanks.” She hesitated. “How many does that make for you?”

“I have no idea. It’s a new bottle.” Which was now half empty. He turned back to her and lifted the glass in a mocking toast. “Don’t worry. I’m not driving anywhere tonight.”

In all the years Mercy had known him, she had never seen him even finish a drink of whiskey, much less consume several. It was scaring her to see him like this; for all his coolness and seeming detachment, he was curiously out of control. “Nick, this isn’t like you.”

“Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do.”

She shook her head. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Just say what you came here to say, all right? Not that you have to.”

“What do you mean by that?” Mercy didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

He shrugged, swallowed half his drink, and went to sprawl in a big armchair by the cold fireplace. “I mean, it isn’t like I’m going to be surprised. I’ve been expecting it.”

“Expecting what?”

He lifted his glass in another mocking toast and said matter-of-factly, “Expecting you to tell me it’s over.”

It was definitely not what she had expected.

After the first moment of surprise, Mercy dropped her shoulder bag on the sofa, shrugged out of her jacket, and moved across the room to sit down on the big hassock in front of his chair. In the same matter-of-fact tone she said, “How long have you been expecting it?”

“Oh … from the beginning.” He was staring at his drink rather than at her. “Since the day after our first night together, I suppose.”

“Why?”

“You want a list? Because I’m an ugly bastard and you’re a beautiful woman who can have any man she wants. Because I’m prickly as hell, with a foul temper and worse moods, and I’m no picnic even on my best days. Because there’s eleven years between us in age and a few lifetimes in experience. Because even the best lover in the world can’t make a woman’s heart respond to him the way her body will.”