She surprised herself by returning the favor as he unsnapped her bra and let it drop to the floor. He pulled her in close to him and kissed her again, and the feel of his skin on hers sent another rush of heat through her body. With total abandon, Ginny unbuttoned her jeans and stepped out of them. She wanted him, and no amount of common sense was about to interfere with what her body had already set in motion.
Paul removed his jeans, his eyes doing a slow scan of her body from head to toe. She was surprised to find that she didn’t feel the least bit self-conscious. The desire was so clear in his expression that it made her feel sexy and powerful. She reached into the nightstand and pulled out protection. There was rarely opportunity to use any, but Ginny believed in being prepared for anything, even a long shot like Paul Stanton.
He rolled on the protection then lay on the bed and pulled her down beside him. His hand ran down her shoulders and across her breasts, and she closed her eyes, savoring every touch.
“You are so beautiful. I want to explore every inch of you,” he whispered.
Ginny felt the fire flame inside her at his words and knew she wouldn’t last long enough for an exploration. “Not this time,” she said. “I want you now. You can explore on round two.”
His eyes widened and she felt him stiffen even more against her thigh. He kissed her again, then whispered, “Whatever the lady wants.”
He moved on top of her and she opened herself to him, her body aching for him to enter. When he pushed slowly into her, she gasped and clutched his back. He moaned and lowered his head to kiss her again as he started the rhythmic movement that soon sent both of them over the edge.
Her body exploded with sensation as they climaxed and she cried out, digging her nails into the tender skin on his back. He thrust into her one last time, and then was still. He remained motionless above her for a couple of seconds and she wrapped her arms around him, enjoying the heavy weight of him on top of her, then he slid to the side and gathered her in his arms.
He kissed her softly and, despite having just been sent over the edge in the most spectacular fashion ever, her body still tingled as he kissed her, touched her. Ginny smiled and ran her hands down his bare backside, glad it was fairly early in the night.
Clearly, they weren’t yet done.
She hid under the bed in the older girl’s room when the lady came to gather them. Even though the lady had always been nice, she scared Ginny, but not as much as the man. She’d been at the house only two days, and so far, she’d been treated well, but Ginny knew something wasn’t right. With the lady or the man.
The lady’s words were kind, but there was an edge to her voice that belied her feelings. The man only smiled. Always smiling. But the smile gave Ginny the chills.
As soon as the lady left, Ginny snuck out the bedroom window and climbed down the trellis. The man was there, too, gathering the girls and taking them downstairs. Ginny didn’t know what would happen downstairs, but she didn’t want to be there. Not with the man.
She stepped off the trellis behind a bush with pretty pink flowers and peered between the leaves to make sure the backyard was empty. Of all the places she’d seen at the house, Ginny liked the backyard the best so far. It had stone walkways and benches hidden by giant bushes with sweet-smelling flowers.
That afternoon in the backyard, Ginny pretended that she’d been whisked off to a land far away, where fairies sprinkled magic dust on the flowers to make them smell good. Ginny was a princess and everyone in the kingdom adored her. The fairy kingdom didn’t have a wicked witch or a bad man. Not like the house.
The night air seemed to still as she stepped out of her hiding place and scurried for the stone path that led to the other side of the yard where the fountain awaited. It was a hot night, and Ginny already anticipated how the cool water of the fountain would feel on her bare feet. She’d just reached the end of the path when something flashed in the corner of her eye.
She turned toward the house and saw flickering light in a tiny decorative window of one of the downstairs rooms. The light jumped and danced on the other side of the sheer curtain and seemed to call to Ginny to step closer. Entranced by the dancing firelight, Ginny crept up to the house and pulled a brick over from the landscaping in front of the window. Standing on her tiptoes on top of the brick, Ginny could just peer over the window ledge and into the room.
The candles that created the dancing light didn’t look magical in the room surrounding the girls. Ginny tensed as the bad man stepped into the room then gasped as he grabbed one of the girls from the circle of candlelight and held her down on the table. The bad man wore a black robe and a mask, but Ginny still knew it was him. When he raised his hand over his head, she saw the flash of metal from a knife.
She opened her mouth to scream but no sound came out. A trickle of warm liquid ran down her leg and onto her bare foot. The other girls screamed and began to run, knocking the candles over in their panic. The bad man pushed the girl off the table and ran through the door with the woman. The door closed behind the girls and they pounded on it, but it didn’t budge.
The rug went up in flames and the red wallpaper began to peel from the walls, making it look as if the walls were bleeding. The door was locked. There was no other window save the tiny one that Ginny looked through. The girls were trapped.
There was a shout to her left and as she spun around, she lost her balance and fell off the brick, slamming into the cold, hard dirt. She sprang up from the ground and ran through the garden to the swamp. She heard shouting behind her, but she didn’t stop to listen. She just ran, the thorns and branches tearing at her bare skin.
The screams of the girls reverberated in her mind, driving her forward in a frenzy. It was as if she believed that she could outrun their cries.
G
INNY WAKENED SCREAMING, her arms flailing against the man who was attacking her. Her heart pounded and her mind yelled that it was all over for her—that the end had come.
“Ginny!” Paul’s voice sounded beyond the screams and she focused on it, allowing the screams to fade away. Finally, she saw him in front of her, both hands on her shoulders, shaking them, his fear evident.
“Paul. Oh, my God!” Ginny threw her arms around him, and he hugged her close until her fear subsided enough for her to talk.
“Must have been one heck of a nightmare,” Paul said.
Ginny released him and leaned back so that she could see his face. “It was horrible.” She recounted what she’d dreamed to Paul, but no matter how vivid or concise the words she chose, they seemed trite in comparison to the horror she’d seen.
“Do you think it was my memory? Or was it all a bad dream?”
Paul shook his head. “I wish I knew. Did you recognize the man from the dream?”
Ginny’s mind flashed back to the dream, as if rolling a film in reverse. “No.” She frowned. “In my dream, I know he’s bad, but I don’t see his face. My mind can’t focus in on the features. Why is that?”
“Maybe because it was so horrific you blocked out the details. Maybe because it didn’t really happen so you couldn’t imagine some details with clarity.”
“The girls did die in that room. That one with the little window.”
“Yes, but you already knew that. That fact could have filtered into your dream, along with a bad man with a butcher knife.”
“My attacker last night,” Ginny said. “You think my mind could have taken all those details and created a nightmare combining them all. So it wasn’t real.”
“We don’t know that for sure, but I promise you, we’re going to find out.”
Ginny nodded and lay back down in bed. Paul lay next to her, his arm wrapped protectively around her. Her body relaxed as the heat from his body warmed hers, but her mind whirled with unanswered questions, unanswered horrors.
P
AUL SAT ON HIS REGULAR STOOL in the corner of the café, eating a truly fabulous cinnamon roll and watching Ginny as she tallied receipts from the day before. It was early, but this morning the café was empty, awaiting the arrival of Saul Pritchard to get started with the painting. Madelaine had initially wanted to put off her remodeling plans, but Paul pressed her to go ahead with them. It would give him an opportunity to observe Pritchard without drawing attention to the fact.
Ginny’s brow scrunched in concentration as she tapped the keys on the adding machine. She’d lain awake for hours last night after her dream, finally drifting off just an hour before the alarm sounded, startling them out of sleep. He’d waited until her breathing was rhythmic and deep before finally allowing himself to slip into slumber with her. The skin around her eyes was darker than the rest, the result of two nights of troubled and lost sleep, but this morning, she’d popped right out of bed when the alarm sounded and gone through her morning routine as if nothing had happened.
Including nothing between them.
Before the nightmare, their night together had been nothing short of incredible for Paul, and he’d thought she felt the same way. But once the morning light crept into her tiny apartment, it was as if a gate slowly closed on the passionate woman from the night before. She was pleasant, as always, but any sign of intimacy was gone. Paul hoped she didn’t regret what had happened between them, and at first opportunity, he was going to talk to her about it. The last thing he wanted to do was add to Ginny’s worries.
He briefly wondered if she thought he’d spent the night with her only because he was riding on the high of finding his sister, and he hoped that wasn’t the case. He was drawn to Ginny in a way he’d never been with any other woman. All his adult life he felt he’d been searching for something besides his sister. With Ginny, he felt as if he’d found that missing piece of himself.
Madelaine hurried into the café from the kitchen with two big cardboard boxes and placed them on a table. “Do you mind helping me?” she asked Paul. “I need to get all the stuff off the tables so Saul can cover them for the painting. I should have done it last night.”
“Of course.” Paul hopped off his stool and grabbed a box. “Things have been a little crazy around here, but they’re going to get better.”
Madelaine gave him a quick hug. “You don’t know how happy I was when Ginny told me you’d found your sister. And that she remembers you, even a little. It’s a miracle.”
Paul smiled and started removing napkin holders and salt and pepper shakers from the table and placing them in the box. “I agree. It’s all been a little overwhelming. I’ve looked for so long, and then it’s like it hit me all at once.”
Madelaine nodded. “I have to believe good things are coming for us all. We just need the dust to settle a bit.” There was a knock at the café door and Madelaine glanced at the clock and frowned. Saul wasn’t due for another ten minutes, but with the shades drawn, they couldn’t see who was standing outside.
Madelaine unlocked the door and opened it to find Mayor Daigle standing outside. She waved him inside, and he gave everyone a big smile before his gaze came to rest on Ginny.
“I just heard about what happened to you night before last,” he said. “I am so sorry to hear it and came by first thing to see if there was anything I could do.”
“Thank you,” Ginny said, “but I’m fine. I was just shaken up a bit.”
“Of course you were! I called Sheriff Blackwell as soon as I heard this morning. Got him right out of bed, I did. I cannot believe something like this happened in Johnson’s Bayou and he didn’t tell me. I have a duty to this community and its people, I told him.” The mayor looked righteously indignant.
Madelaine coughed and Paul could tell she was holding in a smile. “No use getting in a dander over it,” Ginny said. “Likely Sheriff Blackwell was thinking it was his duty to keep his trap shut about an ongoing investigation.”
Mayor Daigle appeared a bit mollified. “Perhaps so. Man’s rigid, that’s for sure.” The mayor stood there silent for several seconds, his gaze shifting among them. Paul could tell the man was just itching for them to provide him some more fodder for gossip, but it was as if they’d all made an unspoken pact to remain silent.
Finally the silence grew unbearable and Mayor Daigle gave them all his big, phony smile again. “Well, I’ve already taken up too much of you folks’ time and I know you got painting going on today. You let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
“We will,” Ginny said. “Thanks for stopping by.”
The mayor gave Paul a final glance, then allowed Madelaine to usher him out of the café. She’d hardly closed the door behind him before they all started laughing.
“The look on his face,” Madelaine howled, “when none of us would give him any details.”
“Priceless,” Paul agreed.
Ginny shook her head. “That silence was incredibly uncomfortable, but the man seems to specialize in creating it. Why doesn’t he get that he’s being intrusive?”
“He gets it,” Paul said. “He just doesn’t care.”
“Yep,” Madelaine agreed. “Man’s always been nosy. Always in everyone’s business.”
Another knock sounded at the door, and this time Madelaine glanced at the clock then flew into overdrive, plopping table items into the box. “Darn, he’s here and we’re not done.”
“I’ll get it,” Paul said as Madelaine hurried to open the door and let Saul in. Ginny joined him in clearing the rest of the tables, and Paul tried to make an unobtrusive assessment of the contractor.
Saul stepped around Madelaine and scanned the café, scowling. “Stuff’s gotta be off all the tables and the walls. Don’t know why you called me to work when you weren’t ready.”
“We’re almost done,” Madelaine assured him. “It will just take a few minutes.”
“I’ll just step out and have a cigarette while you do. Still charging you for the time, though.”
Madelaine looked back at Ginny and Paul and rolled her eyes as Saul made his way out of the café. “The man doesn’t know subtlety. Do you really think he could be involved in all this?”