Reborn (11 page)

“This room is freaking me out. There’s quite a history locked up here, you know? Yesterday at the library, while I was researching for you, I read stuff that gave me nightmares last night.”

When she shuddered, I loosened the fingers of my left hand from the fist they were in and flattened them out on her arm, tightening my hold on her.

“Don’t worry, Desiree, I won’t let anything happen to you. It’s just a room.”

But as I reassured her, I wasn’t assured myself. Feelings of déjà vu toyed with my sanity, and I suppressed my own shudder.

“Just a room.” I barely recognized my own voice, softer, lower, but the urge to protect Desiree was too strong to ignore, whether from a trinket that had fallen off a table somewhere across the room, or ghosts from the past. She needed me, and I would not desert her in her moment of need.

Voices, carried down the hall, grew closer. The doorknob jiggled, once, twice, then silence. As I held my breath, I felt Desiree hold hers. She lowered her hand from its grip on my T-shirt, but stayed next to me, a silent gesture of contentment.

Strands of silken hair covered my hand on her arm. I lifted my fingers; the curls fell around them. A compulsion beyond my control made me turn my head to the left, until my chin grazed her forehead, but barely. Except for my chest rising and falling from breathing, I held perfectly still, wondering how long we would stay like that. Who would make the next move? And what would that move be?

Then Desiree spoke. “Your heartbeat just slowed.”

She’s listening to my heart.

“It was pumping pretty fast before, but it’s calm now,” she said.

She lifted her head and looked up. I couldn’t resist the urge to touch her cheek, then her chin. It seemed the natural thing to do. She turned farther, facing me, until she was in my arms completely, and I didn’t know what to do next.

“Are you all right now?” I asked, smoothing her hair over her back.

“Yeah. As long as you don’t leave my side.” Her gaze roamed the room. “I never liked this place.”

“Have you been here before?”

“Lots of times, but not in this room. Auntie Mel would never let me wander off alone. So much crazy talk about ghosts and evil spirits.” Desiree shuddered. “She always kept me by her side. Sometimes, when I was younger, she would let me play outside as long as I was near Wally.”

The loose grip I had on her tightened. “Will my side do, in this case?”

A smile lifted her cheeks. She nodded, scanning both my eyes, then my nose, mouth, then back to my eyes.

“You know, you really don’t look like
him
at all. You’re a complete gentleman, and your eyes are way kinder.” She ran a hand over the muscles in my arm; they twitched beneath her touch. “And you’re not menacing at all.”

None of the differences she mentioned meant anything. They weren’t actual features—those were nearly identical. The things Desiree mentioned were things
she
saw, or wanted to see. I
did
look like Solomon Brandt, the plantation owner, ruthless slave driver. And although I longed to feel like someone else, anyone else, I had felt him inside me, on two accounts now. Was he my past? My future?

The movement of Desiree’s arms circling my waist brought me back to the moment at hand. The intensity of her gaze and the feel of her body against mine drove my urge. I slid a hand under her hair, over the thin fabric of the shirt she wore, and worked my way upward. When I reached her hairline, I closed my fingers around the back of her neck, squeezing gently, possibly pushing her closer.

Like two magnets, our faces inched toward each other. Did she want to be kissed as much as I wanted to kiss her? I was seconds away from finding out when another unexpected noise spoiled the moment. This time, the noise sounded distinctly like a chair leg scraping across a wooden floor, followed by a woman’s cry.

A muffled gasp expelled from Desiree, before she buried her face in my chest. This girl I barely knew, yet felt such passion for, already had my heart racing; now it beat on overload. The new disturbance shocked my emotions, and I struggled to put them in check. Changing focus to the far wall where the noise had come from, I patted Desiree on the back in a soothing manner, and then took a step back, holding her at arm’s length.

She lifted her head, her eyes wide.

“Can you turn on your cell phone? I need the light.”

“Wh-what for?” Her words were quick and fear-filled.

“I want to see what the noise was. Stop it from bothering us again.”

As if I knew exactly what to do, I reached for the switch on the oil lamp’s handle and turned up the flame, swelling our circle of light, almost reaching the edges of the room.

Desiree turned on her phone, gripped my hand tightly, and let me lead the way. We walked toward the gaping black hole of a stone fireplace. My gaze followed the light as Desiree passed the beam over the stones. A china bowl sat at one corner of the dark wood mantel.

“Over here,” I said.

She shone the light on the bowl filled with chandelier crystals. Then she screamed and dropped the phone, startling me. She jumped around behind me, gripping the sides of my T-shirt, pulling the neckline across my throat.

“There it is. Over there.”

She pointed to the far end of the mantel. A mouse jumped off the wood and onto the heavy draperies that hung at a window beside the fireplace. I picked up the phone and added light to the mouse as it scurried down the drape, disappearing along the floor molding.

“It’s just a mouse,” I said, grinning. “It probably ran through the bowl with the crystals in it, causing the tinkling noise.”

I passed her the phone and turned around to face her. Frantically, she searched the floor around us. That was my cue. I slipped my arms around her, pulling her close.

“It’s gone, ran over there somewhere.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

She let out a big sigh and gave me a flustered grin. “I’m not usually such a damsel, you know.”

The discovery didn’t explain the scraping noise, but I didn’t bring it up. As long as Desiree felt safe.

Gazing into the glossy green pools of her eyes, my emotions found the path they were on before, until Desiree lifted her gaze above my head, and the desire in her eyes change to distress.

When I turned and saw the cause of her concern, the over-heated blood in my veins cooled considerably. A portrait of the man I was growing to hate hung, perhaps too proudly, over the fireplace. Desiree lowered the light and turned to me. But I took the phone from her hand, stepped closer, and examined the portrait more closely. The picture Desiree brought with her had been taken from this image.

Solomon’s chiseled features must have been touched up over the years, to look as life-like as they did. His slicked-back hair, hanging past his shoulders, gleamed black, contrasting against the black suit jacket and bow tie he wore, with a white shirt. There was more color in his blue eyes than anything else in the painting; even my own eyes weren’t as deeply shaded.

“Creepy,” Desiree said. “Those soulless eyes kinda follow you wherever you go.”

She was right. Whichever way I moved, he stared back at me.

Her phone rang, distracting us. She had a quick conversation, then hung up. “Auntie Mel says the tourists are upstairs, and we can sneak out now. She’ll meet us in the parking lot.”

As much as I wanted to bolt from this room, I was disappointed that our time together was over.

“Let’s put the room back in order,” I said.

As I started to walk toward the windows, Desiree stopped me with a hand on my wrist.

“Um, despite the creepiness, I’m glad we got locked in here together.” A smile turned up the corners of her mouth.

To say I was glad to be in here for any reason would be a lie. But I smiled and said, “Maybe sometime we can continue this in more pleasant surroundings.” The river came to mind.

“We should definitely do something together sometime,” she said. “I’d love to get to know the man behind the mystery.”

In a rush, we put the room back as it was, all but the scent of oil smoke hanging in the air. I unlocked the door, then put the key back in its place, wondering if Melba even knew it was there. Then we raced through the mansion and out into the parking lot where Melba stood by her car, waiting for us. After casting a suspicious glare over each of us, she said, “Des, have a safe drive back to school. Let’s go, Solomon.”

“So I’m not invited for supper?” Desiree said in a teasing tone. When Melba didn’t answer, she said, “Thanks, but maybe another time.”

A warm breeze blew strands of red curls across her face; she tossed them behind her shoulder and smiled cordially at me, but I detected something in her eyes that wasn’t there when she’d first arrived. Something she hid from her aunt. “I have evening classes tonight. I’ll come by soon.”

“Thanks for coming by with the information.” Trying to look and sound unsmitten wasn’t easy. My heart reached out to her as she got into her little black car and drove off to some other part of the world.

“Can we go now?”

When I heard Melba’s sarcastic tone, I turned away from Desiree’s dust cloud and got into the car. In a way, I was glad the tour bus had come and kept us from the window-cleaning task.

The drive back was a quiet one. Melba didn’t even turn on the radio. In fact, she seemed to be in deep concentration, but not on the road in front of her. I even thought, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her lips move once or twice.

houghts of Desiree floated in my head the rest of the day, so much so that I couldn’t concentrate on other things. The world around me seemed brighter, colors clearer. In fact, everything seemed clearer, except my past. That was more of a mystery than ever.

Melba seemed distracted, too. She didn’t have much to say during supper, and complained that she was tired immediately after. I’d even caught her mumbling to herself again, or maybe she was conversing with the spirit world, or maybe she was just crazy. She had refused to talk to me about what had happened at the estate before Desiree arrived.

After supper, I abandoned the yard work and took Excalibur for a walk to the river. I told him everything that had happened that day—the accounts of Harold the slave, and the closeness of me and Desiree in Solomon’s den. I couldn’t tell if he cared or not, but he seemed to listen, pricking his ears toward me now and then.

When I got into bed that night, the girl I’d almost kissed seemed permanently etched into my mind. Our lips had been so close to touching. I wondered what it felt like to kiss, and to be kissed. I wondered how she tasted; I could only imagine every bit as sweet as she looked. I longed for that moment again, to feel her against me; the rise and fall of her chest against mine as she breathed, her warm breath on the front of my neck when she laughed, or squealed from fright. But the moment was lost. Desire to be near her again burned deep inside me, in places I didn’t know existed, until today.

My eyes grew heavy as my body warmed on the inside. Then Desiree’s image faded into green, the same shade as her eyes. The heat intensified, sparking its way through my bones, veins, and organs. The green area behind my eyelids turned to persimmon, like her hair, and then red. The fever inside me burned though to my skin, becoming uncomfortable. Flames erupted behind my eyelids, blazing, and through the flames burst the evil Solomon Brandt.