Lover In The Shadows

“You haven’t found anything except outdated birth-control pills. Are you satisfied now?”

“Such a leading question, Ms. Harris. I find it very difficult to resist the reply.”

He straightened and stepped toward her, but he didn’t touch her.

“In fact, I can’t resist. No, Ms. Harris, I’m not satisfied.” His voice was rough and grainy as he tugged the end of the robe’s tie and looped it around his hand. Letting the slippery fabric slide through his fingers onto her shoulder, he trailed the tie lingeringly across her neck, an unbearably prolonged caress of satin on her skin.

“Here, Ms. Harris,” he said as he unhooked the robe and handed it to her, “perhaps you should get dressed.” And let me remain unsatisfied, he added silently.

Lindsay Longford, like most writers, is a reader. She even reads toothpaste labels in desperation! A former high school English teacher with an M.A. in literature, she began writing romances because she wanted to create stories that touched readers’ emotions by transporting them to a world where good things happened to good people and happily ever after is possible with a little work.

Her first book, Jake’s Child, was nominated for Best New Series Author and Best Silhouette Romance, and received a Special Achievement Award for Best First Series Book, from Romantic Times. It was also a finalist in the Romance Writers of America RITA® Award contest for Best First Book.

Lover in the Shadows

Lindsay Longford

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Wes, whose courage and kindness during difficult days have taught our son what a real hero is—and, more important, what it takes to be a man.

Thank you.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

The third time Molly woke up on her kitchen floor with the knife in her hand, she was too frightened to utter a sound.

This time the knife was spotted with blood. Dried, matte dark, it flecked the handle and clotted in the space where shining metal, wiped clean, met a wooden handle.

For a long time she lay with her cheek on the cold tiles and stared at the thing clutched in her white-knuckled fingers. Shadowy in the predawn, the slick black-and-white tile floor had become the color of smoke. Peaceful, this gray, in the silence. The tile felt cool against her cheek. Without turning her head, she let her gaze drift.

It would be so easy to lie here, curled up and lost in that gray blur.

So easy if she didn’t have to look at the knife wavering in her clenched fist.

Silver from the handle to the sharp point that fixed her eyes. Sharp, that point, razor sharp. The sweep of metal would slice cleanly, easily, through anything, with only the slightest pressure of wrist and fingers. She knew its power.

The silver point trembled with her effort to think. Her knuckle slipped against the edge and a pinhead of bright red dotted the blade.

She couldn’t move. It was only a small cut, scarcely noticeable, but the sight of her blood on that spotless metal sent her into gibbering mindlessness. Primitive instincts held her paralyzed on the cold floor, stiff against the terror washing through her in unending waves.

If she moved, her kitchen would dissolve into mist, everything familiar vanishing in a swirling vortex of motion, everything known becoming alien with each beat of her heart. Staring at the knife, she understood nothing and retreated deeper into the cave of herself, away from the howl of tigers prowling ever closer.

Something bumped against the outside door.

Metal gleamed as the knife jerked in her fist.

Molly shivered, a constant trembling running through her. Even the roots of her hair tightened with the effort of listening. Straining to hear in the thick silence, she shut her eyes, registering with every nerve in her body the sounds outside her kitchen.

But inside the kitchen, the click of the clock on the microwave oven marked the minutes, punctuation in the sentence of silence. Her heart beat loudly in her ears, louder than that inexorable click. She waited.

One minute. Two.

She waited.

For deliverance.

For horror to explode into her house once more.

She waited.

Suddenly, a thump on the open gallery that ran around the house. A rasp against the screen door, a sound light as breath against the window.

Then, once more, silence. Blood thick, heavy against her chilled skin. Heavy and insistent against her tightly closed eyelids, silence pressed down, suffocating her.

A scrape against the sill of the kitchen window.

The sound of something large moving outside on her open gallery.

Her heart banged against her ribs.

Her eyes snapped open. Heat flooded her, and her breath hazed the shiny metal in front of her.

Clutched in her hand, the knife had not changed.

She remembered going to bed earlier, with lights blazing around her. That much was clear. She recalled the quiet of the locked house around her, the dimly lit stairwell opposite her bedroom plunging straight into the belly of the house. She had lain facing that pitchy well, watching its shadows shift into shapes that hovered near her door as her eyes burned and twitched, and night deepened outside her window.

Oh, yes, she remembered staring into the darkness.

Sleep was a demon lover, furling his cape around her, tormenting and taunting, following close on her heels while, terrified, she ran for her life from his dark seduction.

Closing her eyes again, Molly rubbed her cheek against the floor. The tile against her face. Real. The knife in her hand.

That, too, real.

Like images curved and twisted in a fun-house mirror, everything familiar and ordinary was distorted now by the knife in her hand. From a far-off place, she felt the thing vibrating between her fingers like some terrifying dowsing rod that dragged her down to sunless caverns from which she’d never escape.

Wanting to disappear, to wake up in her bedroom with this moment only a disturbing nightmare half remembered in sunlight, Molly drew her knees to her chest, curling tighter into herself. As if they’d acquired a will of their own, though, her fingers gripped the knife even tighter.

Lying there, she grew gradually aware of other sounds—her raspy breathing, the drip of water from the sink faucet, the rain chattering against her shuttered windows.

And, close to her face, the knife rattling against the floor tiles.

That frenzied clatter finally broke her, sent her whimpering and scrabbling across the floor.

Eyes still shut against the monstrous vision in front of her, she edged back to the wall, the knife scraping the ceramic tiles with her movements.

When her hip bumped the corner of the room, she forced herself to open her eyes. With a courage she hadn’t known she had, she made herself observe the instrument of her terror.

Small flecks of drying blood spotted her thumb, but there in the burnished gleam of the knife blade, the reflection of an eye, large and wild, stared back at her. Shining in the dark, that eye watched her in silvery blankness.

An eye from a dark, mad place.

Hers, she realized with a gasp. Her face. Her eye.

Screams pushed at her clamped teeth and made her throat raw, but she held them inside. She clenched her jaw so tightly it hurt, knowing with a primal understanding that it was important not to scream.

Too close to a border she didn’t want to cross, she didn’t dare look back into that metallic eye. She sat up, her teeth clicking in a frantic, uncontrollable rhythm. She was shaking all over, the butcher knife still clutched in her fingers.

She couldn’t stop staring at the shining steel, the grain of the expensive wood in the handle, the splotches of blood on her hand and on the wood. As if staring at the minute details of the object would translate into understanding, she focused on the fine-grained wood.

There was no doubt about it. The knife was hers.

Just like the other times.

She’d used this knife more times than she wanted to recall. But no matter how hard she struggled, she couldn’t remember coming down to the kitchen and picking it up tonight. Like those other mornings, she had no memory of opening the drawer with its carefully arranged knives and sharpening blade, no memories now to explain this spider web of blood on her palms, the clots of blood between knife handle and metal.

Shuddering, Molly fought to take a deep breath, but the thunder of her heartbeat, roaring and all-consuming, was sucking the air from the room. Dizzy in that pounding vacuum, she couldn’t find air.

Tugging desperately, her fingers scrabbling at the neck of her pajamas, she dropped the knife. The clatter as it fell onto the tiles released her. Huddled in the corner of the kitchen, she inhaled, loud, ugly gulps harsh in the solitude. Tears ran down her cheeks and she scrubbed them, her fists abrasive against her cold, wet lips and eyelids.

She had to think.

She had to make sense of this latest incident.

Was she crazy, after all?

Bracing her palms against the wall, she lifted herself into a standing position. Her knees buckled, but she gritted her teeth and clung in desperation to the solid surface. Against all reason, she was relieved, relieved that her hands left no smear of blood on her pale gray walls.

There had already been enough blood.

Molly groped along the wall, flicking on the light switch when she came to it. Lightheaded and drunk with fear, she placed her palms on the wall, carefully, one after the other. She ended her journey at the stainless-steel double sink, where she gripped the lifeline of its curved, satiny edge.

The edge of the knife’s blade was curved, too.

Sweat popped out at her hairline, ran down her spine, and she found herself dry-heaving into the spotless basin. When the wracking convulsions ended, she yanked the faucet handle up as far as it would go.

Cold water gushed out and she cupped it again and again, faster and faster against her face, her hands, her throat. Water sprayed, dripped everywhere, yet she couldn’t stop rubbing her hands under the spray, rubbing and rubbing but still seeing blood on her fingers. Great rasping sobs tore through her.

But she hadn’t given in to screaming. Comfort of a sort in that knowledge. She hadn’t surrendered to the madness dimly seen in her reflected eye.

Her pajama top was plastered against her breasts when she finally gained control. Bent over the sink, she gripped its edge while water slithered down her neck. Damp and cold, the wet, silky fabric of her top brushed her nipples, chilling them into hard bumps.

After the first incident, she no longer slept naked, no longer left her windows open to the night lurking at their edge, to the darkness threatening now at the edge of her mind. The idea of being vulnerable was unbearable.

Whatever it was, that thump she’d heard on the gallery had been real.

Pulling the black, silky cotton away from her breasts with fingers that still trembled, Molly looked around her once-loved kitchen. Cool and serene, it bore no trace now of the violence that had splashed its walls with blood.

The tongues of both bolts on the door to the outside gallery were snug in their grooves. She’d always been careful about locking up before she went to bed. In the last year she’d become obsessed with the need to check and recheck locks and bolts, even braving the dark stairwell to come downstairs in the middle of the night and check again.

She remembered roaming the house last night, examining the locks in her gritty-eyed exhaustion, but she’d gone back to bed afterward.

She hadn’t slept. Not during the night. Never then.

During those lost, lonely months after the murder of her parents, sleep had eluded her.

Wrapping her arms around herself, Molly glanced slowly around the room. She wouldn’t think now about the other rooms off the shadowy hall.

Like the door, the kitchen shutters seemed undisturbed, but she couldn’t tell if the windows behind the shutters were still locked until she made herself move away from the sink.

Everything was where it should be—the red enameled teapot on the black mirrored stove, the black-and-white place mats on the table.

One thing only stood out of place…the long-handled knife on the floor.

She couldn’t pick it up.

Apparently she’d gone out, roaming in the night with that blood-speckled knife in her hand, returning to lock herself in behind her bolted doors and windows.

Or someone had come in.

And vanished, leaving her locked in?

Not possible.

Molly looked away from the knife. She understood she was going to have to do something. She wished she knew what.

Deep inside her, the fine edge of control was popping, shredding in audible snaps. She wouldn’t survive finding herself another time curled up on the floor. She knew that as well as she knew anything.

Turning back to the sink, she turned the water on more slowly this time and splashed her face and scrubbed her hands yet again while she sorted through her terror-blasted thoughts. Numb, scarcely aware of what she was doing, she lathered her hands over and over, soaping and scrubbing her nails, her palms, between her fingers, as she tried to reason through what had happened. Step by step, using logic to distance herself from the edge of the chasm, she considered the possibilities.

Thought was a barricade against the fears nibbling at the edge of her consciousness.

She could call the police. As much as she loathed the idea of seeing them in her house again, she probably should call them. But if she did, they’d think she was crazy.

Maybe she was. But she’d always heard if you thought you were crazy, you probably weren’t. Right now she wasn’t sure where that theory left her, aside from giving some perverse comfort. The police would do one of two things—either ignore her or laugh at her.

She couldn’t blame them. What, after all, was there for them to check out? Her knife? Her blood in its handle?

Her outstretched fingers shivered as she looked at them.

Of course it was her blood.

Unthinkable if it were not.

Frantically she searched her hands, looking for scratches on one hand, pressing the water-pruned skin, stretching it, looking between her fingers.

She sagged against the sink when she found the deep cut at the base of her right thumb. A gouge into the flesh. She touched it, felt the flap of skin. Obscene.

In her shock at finding herself once more on the kitchen floor, she hadn’t felt the dull throb of the gash in her hand. Hadn’t felt anything. Until now. As if she’d turned on a switch, her whole body ached.

Maybe she had been sleepwalking.

Drying her hands against her pajama bottoms and rubbing so hard against her leg she had to bite her lips against the pain, Molly tested that idea. The pain, real in its viciousness at the bottom of her thumb, was so alarming that she panicked to think she’d been sleepwalking, wandering upstairs, downstairs, all around the town…

“Stop it.” Her voice was startling in the quiet of the orderly kitchen, the single sound in all that humming silence.

She wouldn’t let herself lose control.

Molly took ten deep breaths. “Okay,” she said when she’d finished. Needing the reality of a human voice, even her own, she continued, “Okay. No one came in. Fact. Nobody could have.” Thinking, she shook her head slowly, and wet strands of hair slid across her chin. “Not past all those locks. And out? Leaving everything locked behind? Only a ghost, maybe. And there’s no such thing as ghosts. No such thing as the Bermuda Triangle.”

In spite of her weak attempt at humor, she shuddered again in the dim morning. She would have found greater comfort if she could forget all the people who did believe in the Triangle and ghosts. In the uncertain light of these moments between night and dawn, the idea of ghosts fluttering through her home wasn’t something she could cope with. Not after everything else. Ghosts who slipped through locked doors and windows. No, much better a real, tangible explanation for what was happening to her, no matter how terrifying.

That left sleepwalking.

But she didn’t have a history of sleepwalking.

She no longer dreamed.

Her breath came in wheezes. On TV she’d seen a report about the behavior people were capable of while in the grip of unconscious sleep.

The reporter had interviewed a woman who “woke up” over and over in her kitchen, eating, making sandwiches. Other people discovered themselves eating cigarette butts as if they were food. Nocturnal bingeing. People did strange things in the nighttime hours.

Murder, even.

A man had, supposedly, walked out of his house, driven to a relative’s home, strolled in and murdered the family.

While he was asleep.

Sleepwalking.

Madness.

Molly touched the wound on her hand.

Her blood.

She rubbed the spot over and over, trying not to think about alternatives.

Her blood.

He’d been watching her for a long time. Prowling around her house, moving silently along the gallery, watching her during the long nights. Now, he moved closer. It was time.

The small smack against the kitchen door shot Molly upright, her hands over her mouth.

A second smack. Purposeful.

She edged to the door. Worse to stay listening to that muffled sound and not know what it was.

If she wanted to keep her sanity, she had no choice.

Holding the shutter carefully so that she could look out onto the gallery, Molly saw only darkness.

Again the sound came, lower, from the floor.

Staring through the window, Molly saw a shimmer of motion, a flick of dark against dark. Something was out there.

Eyes were gleaming up at her.

Real eyes, not metallic reflections of her own fear-glazed self. A stray cat. Real. Nothing to make her hide behind locked doors jiggling with imagined fears.

Drawn to the reality of the cat, she carefully released the bolts. Damp air rushed in as she held on to the screen door and looked down at the cat staring back at her with unblinking gold eyes.

Large, with powerful muscles along his flanks and shoulders and a broad head with a bumpy, hooked nose, he was the most beautiful animal she’d ever seen. Rain-wet, his black coat was shiny and sleek.

“Hey, puss,” she whispered, looking down the length of the gallery. Off to her left she thought she saw movement, but it was only a mourning dove winging off into the rain, disturbed by the rattle of the opening door.

Imperiously unmoving, the cat sat with his long tail curled around his front paws and watched her with unwinking golden eyes.

“Looking for any port in a storm, fella?” Molly stooped and touched her nose to the screen door close to the cat, comforted by the presence of another creature. This big cat with his unwavering gaze was solid and tangible in the quicksand of her thoughts. “You’re a beauty, you are.” Molly looked at his neck. “No collar? That’s a shame. I’ll bet there’s someone out there looking for you, cat.”

The cat tilted his head and lifted his paw to the door. He tapped it, an arrogant demand for service. Molly pressed her finger to the door and the pad of the cat’s big paw flexed. His claws pierced the screen around her finger, encircling the tip. Trapping it in the cage of his claws.

“Careful, buster. What do you want, anyway?”

The cat’s eyes never blinked.

“Oh? As if I should read your mind, huh? Food and a cozy spot next to the fire?”

Unmoving, utterly still, he watched her.

“Listen, buster, this is Florida. You’re not going to freeze.” Molly surveyed his body. Long, muscle-padded haunches. “You’re obviously not hungry. Couldn’t be. Vamoose, fella.” She tried to pull her finger away, but the cat tightened his grip, his eyes never leaving hers.

“Hey, this isn’t funny. Shoo, go away. I can’t help you. Sorry, but the last thing I need is a cat around here right now.” She wiggled her finger, but the cat held it firm. “If you were a dog, maybe I’d let you stay. I could use a real big, real mean dog. A brute. With a nasty disposition. A dog I’d keep for sure.” She pulled harder, futilely.

Uneasy, Molly raised her voice and looked around, sensing something ruffling her nerve endings. “Hey, listen, puss, let go. I want to shut the door, okay?” Molly thunked the screen with the fingers of her free hand.

So fast she never saw his movement, like dark lightning streaking, the cat fastened a paw around her hand, capturing a second finger and holding it with his claws through the screen.

“Well, buster, now we’re in a fine mess. Let go,” she ordered, glaring at the animal.

His gold gaze held hers. There was something in his somber stare that kept her looking, looking past the darker gold flecks, as if she were moving down a golden corridor faster and faster and faster, wind and air rushing past her, golden eyes locked on hers, drawing her deeper into that spinning gold….

Molly shook her head. Light lifted the edges of gray from the gallery and she could see out into her yard, down to the bayou veiled in rain. She sighed, exhausted and wrung out.

Looking back at the sleek animal in front of her, she frowned. “So, I’m a sucker for helpless critters, cat, but you’re the most unhelpless beast I’ve ever seen. And, like I said, you’re not a dog. Besides, cats are always looking down hallways as if they see something, and, puss, I don’t need you seeing things that go bump in the night, you know? I’m having enough problems figuring out which bumps are real and which ones aren’t. I don’t need you spooking the heck out of me.” Her voice dropped to a shaky whisper.

Not breaking her skin, the cat curled his claws tighter. That arrogance she’d noted earlier gleamed back at her from his gold eyes.

“You have some nerve, cat. Anybody ever tell you that? Yes, I know I like cats. Ordinarily.”

The cat arched his back, his claws still hooked in the screen around her fingers. Damp heat from his large body came to her in the chilly, rain-dark dawn.

Molly hesitated. “Listen, if I let you in, you can’t stay, hear? I mean, this isn’t your home away from home. You can come in for a while. Just until…” She stopped. She knew what she was doing. She knew she didn’t want to deal with the knife still in her kitchen. Twisting her fingers caught in his grasp, Molly continued, “Just until, okay?”

The cat blinked and sat back on his haunches, releasing her.

“Stinker. Bully.” She unlocked the screen door. “I guess you wouldn’t turn down a meal, huh?”

Padding in, his tail lifted, the cat moved across her gray floor like a dark cloud over shadowy water. Passing her refrigerator, he circled the kitchen until he came to the spot on the floor where she’d woken up.

For a long moment he stayed there.

He stopped next to the knife and looked back at her. His ears angled to the hall off the kitchen, listening. Listening to something beyond her hearing.

Molly watched the ripples move across his skin and felt an answering shiver move across her own. “Hey, c’mon, cat. Don’t do this to me. Really.” She rubbed her arms.