The Architect of Song (Haunted Hearts Legacy Book 1) (16 page)

Hawk glared from over Uncle’s head, eyes ablaze with a threatening light. Some unnamed, intense emotion curdled his usual calm demeanor and he appeared to grow, the broadness of his frame more foreboding than ever before.

“My brother held you in his arms, and you precipitated it?” His phantom voice sliced through my heart—a frosted accusatory quality I had not heard since our first encounter when he thought me a thief.

I pled with him to be rational, to let me explain, but he was beyond reason.

“How could you let him
touch
you? Knowing I never can?” Hawk pounded his chest. “Knowing how I burn to!” With an earth-shattering growl and a well-aimed slap of his hand, he sent my hat soaring through the air, veil flapping behind it, until it landed atop the upturned heel of my uncle’s left shoe.

Uncle started to turn, as if feeling the hat’s weight upon his foot.

I moaned aloud, clutched his wrist, and feigned a dizzy spell. He scrambled up to support me, accidentally raking the hat several inches toward the toppled chair.

He started to look over his shoulder again, so I pretended to faint. Patting my cheek, he pressed my hand to his lips and I felt his anxious words: “Juliet? Juliet!”

Yelling inside my head, I demanded Hawk fix his mess. With one eye squinted, I watched as he swished his foot behind the hat and coaxed it beneath the bed.

I sat up with Uncle’s help while inwardly I scolded Hawk for his blatant disregard of the lies I had to weave daily to hide him. He frowned at me, the flame of betrayal still hot behind his eyes.

After I assured Uncle I’d fainted due to hunger, he agreed to go downstairs and return with tea and toast. He scanned the floor behind him as he left, a fruitless search for the elusive object he’d felt on his heel minutes earlier.

Once he pulled the door closed behind him, Hawk and I glared at each other in scalding silence.

I offered an olive branch. “I was so taken aback by your brother’s likeness to you. Everything felt out of sorts … surreal almost.”

“Of course. He held you in some sort of trance. Is that it?”

“It was the first I’d ever seen of his face. The resemblance was—”

“Resemblance be damned.” Hawk trampled my explanation. “There is one irrefutable difference between us, for future reference.” He drifted through the fallen chair from one side to the other, his form as insubstantial as the tracings of a cloud. The muscles in his neck twitched. “Ghost, remember?”

Teeth clenched, I cast a grimace up at him. “I made a wish. Stir-up Sunday, remember?”

Looming over me, Hawk chuckled. For the first time, the sound rattled in my head, discordant and venomous. “A childish game. Were you an empty-headed wren, I might believe such an excuse. But you’re bright and perceptive. And ripe for the plucking, it would seem.”

Heat spread from my chest to my neck and cheeks. “Perception loses clarity when diluted by emotions. As proven by how I’ve been blinded to your more loathsome aspects up to now by my loneliness and grief.”

His jaw muscle clenched. “Is that so?”

“Augh! No, it isn’t,” I retracted, at a loss for how to salvage this. “I only embraced Lord Thornton because I wanted him to be you with such fervor, I convinced myself it was possible. That somehow, heaven had heard my plea. It was not his arms holding me. In my mind, it was yours.”

“Ah.” He turned his back, shoulders rigid, as if to resist knocking more things off my desk. “That makes it all the better. At last you’ve found an earthly vessel of me, to pour all of your unmet desires into. And he’s wealthy to boot!”

My heart twisted in agony. I sat on the bed’s edge clenching my temples, as exasperated as him. “Please stop. You saved me when I was a child. Then you came again on my darkest eve when Mama died, an answered prayer. To hear the sound of a voice. To have music in my soul night after night. And your laughter like rain. Heaven sent you. Each time I awake in the morning to find you sitting by the window, I’m assured of it. Why would I want an ordinary viscount, when I have my guardian angel with me always?”

Hawk looked down, engrossed in a keen study of his eternally muddied boots.

I slapped at the moisture gathering on my lashes. “Do you truly think me a scarlet strumpet who constantly craves the touch of any man?” I waited an interminable few minutes for a response. His silence pierced me through.

I stood, suppressing my tears, and worked at the necklace that draped my collar bones, determined to draw the locket out from beneath my corset and cast it across the room.

“Enough, Juliet.” Hawk turned on me in a blink and nudged my shoulder, knocking me off balance. I plummeted to the mattress on my back. He leaned over me, one knee propped on the bed’s edge. “Enough …” His voice softened to silk.

I imagined his shirt raking my collar bones as he propped his elbows on either side of my head, his chest mere inches from mine.

His handsome face—a pearl against the thick, dark strands which framed him like a mane—held intense concentration as his hand opened across my décolleté. The pressure upon my bodice flattened the locket until the hard, warm metal indented the flesh above my sternum. My breath hung.

“You are no strumpet,” he whispered, so close I could breathe him in if I but tried. “You’re the purest, most compassionate and courageous lady ever to grace the earth. At my behest, you faced your mother’s grave the day after you buried her. You nigh fell to your death descending an icy tree. And you braved a gypsy camp to steal a book. You were even willing to go to another town and face a castle full of snodderies for me. Dare say, not another person in this world would go to such lengths for a lost spirit.” His glowing gaze encompassed me, from my hair tangled in a knotted, itchy mass beneath my nape, to my bodice where his hand still wrinkled the fabric. “God grant me pardon for needing you so. You deserve more than I can ever offer in return.”

His outstretched fingers twitched—a shift in position that furrowed the fabric so it bunched around my breasts and ribcage like a passionate embrace. I gasped at the sensation.

I could
feel
him … or at least feel my clothes responding to his touch.

Mesmerized by my response, his gaze grew potent—determined. He moved the bodice again, maneuvering the wrinkles so they clustered around the curve of my right breast, pinching and binding with delicious friction.

I arched into the forbidden sensation. Wonder and fascination lit his face with every response he evoked.

“Can you feel me?” I asked, though it felt more like a plea.

His lashes lowered. “No. I feel only the fabric’s resistance—and even that is illusory.”

My eyes stung. How unfair, that he could give me such pleasure, yet glean none for himself.

“But Juliet, I delight in pleasing you.” His other hand tugged a trail of pleats across my ribs. “You, brimming with life, and me, the residue of a life gone by. I suppose, to never experience how you would feel beneath me is my penance for loving a lady beyond my station.”

My heart leapt. After all these years of silence, I had resigned I would never hear those words spoken by a man. “You …
love
me?”

“I would pledge it body and soul, but …” His forefinger glided through the back of my hand. “I suppose one has to take a phantom at his word.”

At a loss for any words of my own, I sorted through my myriad feelings. Did my heart belong to a ghost?

We shared all the characteristics of secret lovers.

Our worlds revolved around one another, yet we lived on separate planes. We planned for stolen interludes—relished any intimacy, however fleeting. Each morn, his was the first face I longed to see; and each night we were together in my dreams. His words both guided and cut me to bleed, yet his songs healed my soul.

And his kisses … purest magic.

He was kind, witty, and brave. More than anyone I’d ever met. A miracle, considering all he’d endured as a child.

Yes
. I loved him—as a ghost, as a friend, and as a man. So much that it lit a fire in my heart.

Hawk eased to the mattress beside me and I turned toward him. His face held an arrested expression, as if stunned by my confession.

I would’ve thought you would know before me.

“How?” he answered my unspoken observance. “When you didn’t know yourself until this moment?” His brilliant smile could’ve blinded the sun.

I reached out, fingers passing through his face. He blurred like a reflection in a puddle. When he resolved to perfect, youthful clarity, I dropped my arm back to the bed.

Unlike his brother, Hawk would never age. If he somehow remained with me and I lived to become an old maid in the eyes of the world, he would be forever beautiful and young while I became wrinkled and frail. I shook my head, overwhelmed by the differences between us, differences I didn’t wish to confront.

In that moment, I missed the complacency of make-believe.

Hawk clucked his tongue. “Sweet Juliet, have you not heard of the China rose’s most fascinating characteristic? Surely your mother told you.” He coaxed me to lie on my back again. His face hovered over mine, hands denting the quilt on either side of my head. “Your kind is the only rose that grows more vivid and fair with each passing year. Ask any botanist.”

Caught between a smile and a sob, I yearned to welcome him into my blood.

His attention shifted to the locket beneath my neckline.

“Spurn the petal, Hawk. Kiss me …
inhabit me
.”

He moaned, a raw and hungry sound. Then our lips melted together, and our spirits fused once more.

December dawned—glistening with snow and ice—and our move to Worthington was well underway.

I had lied again to Uncle, allowing him to contact Lord Thornton of my interest in his marriage proposition. After the trial period, if the viscount or I decided we weren’t suited for marriage, he would give me a full six months to move out of the house that he would then own.

I wasn’t going to make any effort toward the relationship, and had already made peace with losing my parent’s estate—though it broke my heart, and deepened my disdain for the viscount. But my priorities had shifted. My ghost was more important than any material possession would ever be.

This trip was a means to an end. To allow Hawk a chance to meet his brother and to find out more about the gypsies who worked for Lord Larson, so he might face the monster who had tortured him in his past. Most importantly, to give him closure per his body’s final resting place.

“You don’t have to be a martyr for me.” Hawk said one afternoon as our departure crept ever closer. “I’ve decided I don’t wish to know. Any of it.”

He was lying. For although he was a spirit, he was first and foremost a man—plagued with the inability to come forward physically as a rival for my hand.

“Hawk, my heart is devoted to you. This arrangement is fiction tantamount to any play. And it’s only for a month. Remember that.”

“Only one month,” Hawk grumbled. “It will be the longest four weeks of my death.”

During the final days, preparations consumed every waking hour. We spent mornings washing, folding, and packing, while afternoons entailed moving Enya’s family into my estate. This had been my idea, as it seemed absurd for them to remain in their drafty shack during winter when my house would be standing empty and unused.

It was also my way of thanking Enya for agreeing to come to the manor as my lady’s maid.

In the evenings, Uncle and I refined the merchandise which would soon line the shelves of our lavish boutique. As we worked side by side, he would glance over with a look of contentment and pride I hadn’t seen since Mama’s death. Guilt consumed me—knowing how temporal and false its foundation was.

After such frenetic days, everyone fell into their beds to let sleep swallow them. Everyone but me. For nights belonged to my ghost.

No longer satisfied to sit by the window while I slept, Hawk snuggled next to me atop my quilt. We conversed for hours—crafting intricate fairytales in lieu of the marriage and future we could never attain.