Shadows (17 page)

He could be thoughtful, and at other times he could be so cool.  She’d not asked why he stormed off along the drive last night, and he’d volunteered nothing.  Nor had he said anything that suggested he was even close to being in love with her, which was one of the reasons she had insisted on sleeping alone.

Adrian hadn’t really loved her, in spite of their two years together and all his protestations of love in the early days.  Like an idiot she’d believed him, but declarations of love didn’t necessarily mean it was the real deal.

She pulled the sheet up around her ears.  How did a woman really know when she was loved?  Did the words matter?  Too scared to risk being hurt ever again, she risked being alone all her life.

~~~

Melissa woke to the sound of Rory moving about, and waited until all was quiet.  Then she quickly got up, showered, dressed and found him sitting on the bolly, legs stretched before him and bare feet balanced on a second chair.  A pale blue cotton shirt hung loose over the waistband of his old shorts.

“Good morning.  Have you eaten?”

He shook his head.

“I’ll make toast.”  Once in the kitchen she chided herself for volunteering to make breakfast.  Nothing had changed overnight.  He probably thought she’d offered as a way to worm her way back into his good graces.  Shame prickled at her own weakness, and she slammed the knife into the butter.  Serve him right if she made toast and coffee only for herself, but that would be childish.  Jigging from one foot to the other in frustration, she grabbed the pile of toast and took it outside.  “Here.  Eat while it’s hot.”

He squinted at her.  “Hot toast?  Now there’s a novelty.”

Melissa heard the sarcasm, didn't appreciate it, and scowled at him.  Then she noticed the smile he failed to suppress and found her irritation melting away.  She slapped butter across her toast.  “Was I bad tempered last night?  Over the bedroom thing?”

One eyebrow lifted before he spoke.  “You could say that.”

“Sorry.  I was still a bit shaken up.”

“Doesn’t matter.”  He bit into his toast, and caught a drip of butter in his palm.

He seemed relaxed.  Maybe this was the moment to test the water.  “I used to see ghosts when I was a child.”  Melissa kept her gaze on her knife as she spread fig jam over the buttered toast.  “But I seem to have lost the knack of dealing with them.”  Her heart started to pound.  Laying herself open to ridicule like this was horrible.

Rory swallowed and then sat unmoving with his toast half way to his mouth.  His eyes, that bright peacock blue, had opened wide.  He wasn’t laughing yet.

In for a penny, in for a pound.  “I hadn’t seen one since I was twelve, until I came here.  I thought I ought to tell you.”

He bit into the toast, still watching her, and chewed slowly.

She put her knife down and plunged her hands under the table, where her fingers clung to each other in anxiety until she couldn't withstand the silence any longer.  “Well?”

He didn't rush to answer.  “I don’t know.  What do most people say in these circumstances?  How interesting for you?  What a fascinating hobby?”  Frowning, he went on attacking his toast.

“I wish I hadn’t told you if you’re going to be nasty about it.”

“Why did you?”

“I don’t know.  It doesn’t help in any way.  I just thought I’d be honest about it.”  Her fingers twined together beneath the table.  She ought to have planned it better, chosen her moment more carefully instead of blurting it out over breakfast.  Some tactician she’d turned out to be.

“Are you saying that if you were not here, we wouldn’t be seeing them?”

“Have you ever seen—”

“Of course not.”  He flung the crust of his toast onto his plate as if he’d lost his appetite.

“I know it sounds strange, but there’s no need to make me feel like some sort of deluded idiot.  I’m really quite normal.”  His frown did not lift, and she waited for him to retaliate with something cutting.  Unable to sit still, she examined her toast, and bit into it so hard she made her teeth ache.  He was going to be like all the rest.

“I don’t believe it’s normal to see ghosts, Melissa.”

“Well, you’re seeing them now.”

“Only courtesy of you, I suspect.”

“I have nothing to do with it.”  She wasn't going to let him blame her.  That wasn't fair, not anywhere near an accurate assessment of what was happening around the mill.  “What do you think I do?  Wave a magic wand and chant incantations?”  Oh Lord, she could feel heat rushing into her face as her irritation mounted.

“How many other…do you know anyone else who sees these things?”

Which derogatory word had he hesitated over?  She’d heard them all, from the polite to the down right rude.  She shook her head and refused to look at him.  Tears pricked at the back of her eyes and she drank coffee, blinked hard and stared out over the fields.  Crying would be the last, ignominious straw.  She would not cry.

But it hurt to have him ridicule her.

The chink of knife against plate sounded loud in the oppressive silence.  Rory slumped in his chair, cradling his empty mug between his large hands as he stared out across the bolly.

He’d be offering to drive her to the airport in a moment.  The threat of tears receded, and her heart rate slowed marginally, but she could not sit here and do nothing.  She jerked to her feet and thumped a plate onto the tray when Rory’s hand stretched across the table and gripped her wrist.  “Leave those.  Come for a walk with me.  We need to talk.”

Her first impulse was to throw off his hand.  She tried, but he gripped too firmly.  “We can talk here.”

He shook his head, caught her glance and held it.  “Any moment now your tame Frenchman is going to come bounding up those steps.  We can’t discuss things in front of him.”

She looked up into his chilly blue eyes.  “He’s not my tame Frenchman.  But you have a point.  I don’t want him knowing about this either.”  She put the plate down on the tray.

“Come then, let us talk.”  He shoved his feet into trainers and turned into the grassy walk she had always intended to explore.  Good thing she’d chosen jeans this morning.  The earthen track, partly overgrown, wound between tall old trees, and looked inviting with the sunshine slanting down between the leaves, but brambles overhung the trail and snaked out to trap an unwary ankle.  Nettles grew waist high, and a fallen tree partially blocked the trail ahead.

Rory picked up a stout stick and beat down the nettles.  “I’ve never met anyone who sees ghosts.  You’ll have to make allowances for me.  It was a bit of a shock.  Tell me about it.”

She eyed his back suspiciously.  “You don’t have to be nice.  You can say what you think.  I’ve probably heard it all before.”

He flicked a swift glance over his shoulder.  “Don’t be so defensive.  Tell me what happens.”

So he really wanted to know.  He wasn't going to ridicule her like so many others had in the past.  He went up a notch in her estimation.  “Nothing happens.  They look like ordinary folk.  I’m not Harry Potter, I don’t see headless knights.”

He laughed, but he wasn’t laughing at her.  A warm glow started up somewhere inside her.  “Then how do you know they’re ghosts?”

She smiled at his question.  “Usually they disappear.  Fade away into nothing.”  She walked behind him, careful where she put her feet, dodging branches that whipped by her face.  “I know I get edgy about it, but everyone is so…so silly about it.  A lot of children say they see things, but most of them stop when they understand that adults don’t see the things they do.  It doesn’t earn them parental approval, either.”

“Did you talk about what you saw?”

“Not after a class of seven-year-old kids chanted rude names at me.”  She shook her head sadly as horrid memories caught at her.  “My mother knows.  You and she are the only two adults I’ve told.”

“The kids wouldn’t understand.  I’m honored you told me.”

She eyed his back, and allowed him to move up another notch.  “I haven’t even told my brother.”

“It must have been difficult keeping it from him.”

Melissa clapped one hand to her mouth in horror.  She shouldn’t have spoken of her brother.  Now he would want to know about Gareth and that would lead to all sorts of other explanations she hadn’t thought out properly.  She blurted the first thing that might deflect his interest.  “He isn’t…he’s my half-brother.  He doesn’t live with us, so it wasn’t hard.”  Gareth’s father, the charismatic Lt. Col. John Hazlerigg, had married Gareth’s mother and formed a wonderful family of his own.

Gareth was legitimate.

Should she blurt it all out now, and get it over with in one fell swoop?  Her heart pounded at the thought and the words wouldn’t come.  Better let him get used to the ghosts first.

Rory strode on, slashing at nettles.  “Did it…they, not frighten you?”

Thank goodness he was more interested in ghosts than half-brothers.  “Not really.  I thought it was normal.  That’s why I talked about it at school.  I assumed other people saw the same things.”

He turned to look at her, and his eyes showed his concern.  “How old were you when it first happened?”

“I can’t remember a first time.  It wasn’t special, it was normal.  That’s the only way I can describe it.”

“What do you see?  People?  Places?  Like the couple we’ve been seeing here?  It must have been puzzling for your parents to have you babbling on about things they could not see.  I suppose your father was around some of the time.”

“They probably thought I was an idiot.”  She could not meet his glance and deliberately conceal information from him.  He assumed her parents had lived together and the divorce had come later, and it might be best to let him go on thinking it.  But that was tantamount to lying, and she squirmed at the idea, hating deliberate deception.

“We all have our quirks.  I have to say yours are more fascinating than most.”

She let out a small puff of air, half amusement, half relief.  “Huh.  Now you’re just being kind.  What do you really think?”

“Seriously?  I think it is fascinating that you can see things others can only guess at.  I’ve several books at home describing scientific experiments that have no explanation.  You may have heard of Dr. Lyall Watson.  He’s one of the authors I’ve read several times.”

He might be humoring her, or he might be serious.  Perhaps he wasn’t going to drive her to the airport after all.  “You don’t think I’m strange and scary?”

He turned and held out his hand.

Melissa hesitated, hardly daring to believe what he was offering.  But he smiled at her, and, with her teeth clamped in her lower lip to stop it wobbling, she took the two steps that brought her into the shelter of his arm and buried her face against his chest.  The relief was immediate, like coming home after a long spell abroad.  She stayed there, breathing in the aroma of newly showered male.  Slowly her muscles relaxed and she leaned closer.  This was what she had needed last night, but didn't have the courage to admit.  Turning her cheek, she listened to the solid thud of his heartbeat.

“But you seemed so shocked when you saw the ghost.”  Though it took some effort, she made herself take a step back.  He did not try and hold her.

“I was surprised.  It’s one thing to read and speculate about something, but quite another to find yourself standing two yards from it.”

The damp green woodland around them vibrated with birdsong.  Melissa ventured to look him in the eye.  “You didn’t think they were ghosts at first, did you?”

He shook his head.  “No, though I don’t know what I thought was happening, given their strange clothes and the fact that we couldn’t hear them yelling at each other.  But it didn’t cross my mind that they were ghosts.”

“Until they disappeared into thin air.”

His nose wrinkled in distaste and uncertainty.  She loosed a tiny spurt of laughter.  Not many people would ever see Rory looking so unsure of himself.  “What do you want to do now?”

He gestured with both arms.  “You probably have a better idea than me.  Let’s walk for a little while.”

Melissa followed him.  More comfortable with herself now that she had told him, she took a deep breath and looked around cheerfully.  Would she be even happier if she confided in Rory?  Told him her family secret, kept nothing back?  Maybe.  But not if he reacted by leaving her.