Darkening Around Me

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.