Darkening Around Me

“We’ll ask Mary if she has some you can borrow,” Miles said. He smiled. Just the slightest return of a tilt to his lips and I looked away. The softening, the curve to his mouth, was too potent. It had been a very long time since I’d allowed myself this kind of attraction. Better to focus on the woman who entered the room carrying a tray full of covered dishes.

“Poached salmon and salad,” the woman offered. She sat the tray down and looked at it as if she might have forgotten what it was for in the first place.

She was thin and gray from head to foot. Her hair, her skin, her serviceable dress and shoes—all gray. But her face was smooth and her hands were young. I noticed the quick movements of her fingers when she gripped them together to still them in front of her skirt.

“Mary, this is Samantha Knox. Samantha, this is Mary. She’s my housekeeper’s niece and she cooks for me from time to time,” Miles said. He moved forward to hold a chair for me as he spoke, as naturally as if he’d been born a century earlier.

“That smells delicious,” I said, claiming the seat and looking up at Mary with a smile.

She didn’t return the smile. Not in an unfriendly way, but in a distracted way as if her mind was on other things.

“If that’s all, I’ll just…” she began, but she didn’t even finish her sentence before she turned away.

“Are you staying with your aunt tonight? Or would you like to stay here? The storm seems to be getting worse,” Miles said to her back.

“No. Not here. No. I’ll be fine,” Mary assured him over her shoulder as she left the room with hurried steps.

While O’Keefe spoke to his cook, I had taken the clandestine opportunity to notice that he’d changed for dinner. The cut of his suit was sharp as a razor, modern and nicely formed to his long, lean legs and tapered waist. His broad shoulders filled the jacket and, sans tie, the tailored white shirt showed not an ounce of spare flesh. I thought of the marble in the garden and how physically demanding it would be to work in that medium. Then I thought of clay and the working of it and I looked to his hands. He had sat down and was lifting the covers from the food, each digit curled and extended in the regular way, but I was struck by those hands and what I knew they could do.

I tried to focus on the arugula. Really. I did. Mostly because, once Mary left the room, O’Keefe’s dark eyes never left me. My face. My hands. The movements of my eyelashes against my cheeks. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. If he intrigued me, if I found him an interesting pleasure to behold, then I, or his art at least, consumed him. And that’s what I was, surely. A subject. A study. I’m reasonably attractive, but I’ve never stopped traffic. O’Keefe seemed stopped as if nothing existed in the world beyond my face and form.

He had been telling me about Mary leaving food for him that he occasionally remembered to heat up and eat. Very occasionally, judging from his physique. But then he seemed to give up all pretense of normal conversation.

“I wanted to give you time to recover from your trip, but in this light…your face…” He was already up. He strode over to a table by the fire to retrieve a large sketch pad and pencil.

He didn’t ask for permission. My presence at Thornleigh was by permission. I’d come here for this, after all. If I hadn’t realized how intense it would be to have his every sensibility trained like crosshairs on me, that was my problem, not his.

I watched him, salad forgotten. His concentration. His tension. Every muscle in his body flexed to capture the perfect angle of my chin on paper. Seductive? Yes. I had to remind myself to chew and swallow the last bite I was to take of my fish. Because he came to me then and took my hand to pull me up and over to the fire. He urged me into a chair and then knelt at my side so very close, so very focused on his paper and not really on me at all. Oh, certainly on my appearance. The curve of my cheek or the shape of my brow, but I don’t think he saw what his nearness was doing to me. Not at first. Not the flush. Not the shallow breathing to limit the impact of his fresh-scented hair. Earlier he’d reeked of ozone from the rain. Now he smelled spicy, tempting.

His art consumed him and the flash in his eye looked very like the intensity I’d seen in the eyes of Dominick in the portrait upstairs. The resemblance made my heart kick faster. How easily intensity could go from being positive to negative. Should I be attracted to Miles O’Keefe or maybe, just maybe, should I fear him?

All this time, the storm had raged outside. The fire and the food and O’Keefe’s interest had distracted me from it, but suddenly the old wiring in the house lost its battle against the frequent lightning. One of the flickers I’d grown accustomed to became an outage.

We were left in darkness.

Only the small fire illuminated and that was barely a foot or two semicircle of warmth in front of the hearth. We were in shadow, O’Keefe and I. Alone in the dark with a man who made me…what? Uncertain. Nervous. Flustered.

It was in those first moments of darkness that I couldn’t deny being attracted to O’Keefe. I was fascinated by his artistry and struck by a physical attraction to him that seemed beyond a pretty face and sexy eyes to a marrow-deep pull of his male magnetism.

But I also feared him.

Deep down I knew there was no possibility of shallow interaction with his intense personality. He would shatter and shake and possibly consume, but never bore. Never that. He would never be a casual acquaintance or a cool business arrangement.

And what of those piteous crying statues in the garden? He had created them, but, in life, had he inspired those tears?

I might have set myself on a mission to reclaim my strength and courage, but fascination with a tortured artist was surely out of the question.

I was going to stand and distance myself from the man who knelt too close in front of me. In the dark, I couldn’t see his expression or anticipate his movements, but I could still feel his powerful presence.

“Wait,” he demanded. He must have felt my leg tense where it brushed his arm. Or maybe he sensed my desire to run away from the darkness.

Then his sensitive fingers cupped my face.

I breathed in quickly, startled by his touch, but I didn’t jerk away. The pull was in effect and his warm fingers felt right against my skin.

“I almost had you…the shape of your face… Let me…” O’Keefe murmured.

My God, his voice was meant for the darkness. It was deep and masculine with a husky edge of urgency. I had the crazy idea that only the crackling fire could understand the whole of it, that I was somehow missing the burn of deeper inflections and hidden meanings.

Softly, gently, his fingers traced my face and I didn’t pull away. I didn’t stand. I held myself perfectly still. I didn’t dare to even breathe. All this time, I’d been challenging myself with the wrong sort of tests. Obviously. Climb a mountain. Run. Whatever. Sitting in the dark with this all-too-observant stranger caused my adrenaline to spike like no climb I’d ever taken on. And that was before his hands dipped from my face to my neck and we both paused. Me, because an arch of desire sizzled through me with a sudden thrill. Only my neck, but the pad of his thumb was directly over the rapid pulse beat that revealed too much of my fear and my wants.

“You’re frightened?” he asked, his murmur huskier than before.

“I’m not afraid of the dark if that’s what you’re asking,” I replied.

How to tell him that I was afraid of him and my reaction to him? That his hands on my skin scared me because my skin was off-limits and the last thing I sensed in him was control or discipline.

“The dark of Thornleigh is something to fear. Don’t be too brave for your own good. Not here and not with me,” Miles warned.

He must have felt my pulse leap beneath his thumb, but I didn’t care. I had been much more vulnerable than this before and I’d survived.

“It isn’t dark. Not really. I can see the shape of things. I can see the gleam of your eyes,” I said.

It was true. The firelight hadn’t left us in inky nothingness. Everything was indistinct but recognizable. I saw when he closed his eyes and moistened his lips and when he leaned slightly toward me as if he would…before he spoke again.

“Don’t explore the shadows. Don’t leave your room at night and don’t…don’t… One week. We have only one week,” he said and this time his words were rushed, as if he was afraid to be interrupted. I couldn’t see his expression, but his fingers had tightened on my skin, urgent and tense.

I would never know what the third warning would have been. The lights hummed back to life and O’Keefe let his hands trail down and away from me as he stood up and moved back. I looked up at his face, but even with the added light I couldn’t read the expression that claimed it. His dark eyes were shuttered and his mouth was tight.

* * *

There was no internet connection at Thornleigh. No way to check email or use a search engine. Even my phone was glitchy. I couldn’t get online and I hadn’t received any replies to my texts since I arrived.

I finally had to accept that they weren’t getting through.

It should have been annoying or even humorous. There were Robinson Crusoe jokes to be made. But then I recognized the slight flutter in my chest for what it really was.

Panic.

There was a phone on the table in the hall directly down from my room. I remembered passing it and marveling at its archaeological quality. Big, black with a rotary dial, it was at least a chance for contact with the outside world.

I had already called my aunt and my parents from the airport, but I wanted to hear light, familiar voices. The door to my room opened with hardly a creak and I stepped into the hallway. It was several degrees cooler and infinitely darker in the passage, but I could make out the table and the phone. I padded toward it feeling as if I was reaching for a crutch in the need to hear my aunt’s voice, but hurrying the last steps nevertheless.

I was startled by the size and weight of the telephone receiver in my hand when I picked it up. I held the cool earpiece to my cheek and reached for the dial. Then, disappointment hit. Nothing. No dial tone. No sound whatsoever. Just dead emptiness. I jiggled the receiver rest. I tried several numbers on the rotary dial, surprised at how hard it was to actually get it to turn.

Still nothing.

The lines might have been down because of the storm. Or the old phone might have outlived its usefulness sometime before I was born.

I was alone with O’Keefe in a haunted house. I didn’t for one minute believe that it was haunted by a ghost, but I had definitely seen some expectation of darkness in my host’s eyes. I might not believe in poltergeists, but I definitely believed in being haunted. I had personal experience with it myself. I climbed and ran to get away from it. I avoided my workshop because I was afraid of what my craft might reveal about how deep my cuts actually bled.

With all those thoughts haunting me, I needed a hint of normalcy. I needed distraction. A few cat memes would not be remiss.

There was one room in the house that might help me. I’d seen it on my way to my bedroom. The library. It had been huge and dark and gloomy, but huge meant shelves upon shelves of something that might make up for the fact that I couldn’t connect to the web to download a book to occupy me until the rain had passed.

I put the receiver back on the phone with a solid thump.

The need to run burned in my knees, but I wasn’t familiar enough with my surroundings. Right now, the only place I knew of to stretch my legs was the garden pathways. The thought of going back into the garden at night was not a cheerful one. My mind jeered at me with images of me running all right. But in those imaginings I was running from something or someone, my feet pounding and my heart pumping and always the idea that I would never be able to run fast enough.

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