Once A Gambler. Carrie Hudson

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      She flipped the pages absently until she came across a loose tintype photo tucked into the book of a couple standing in front of an arbor, gazing into each other’s eyes. He was tall and good-looking—for the 1800s. Now, if that wasn’t love, she thought…

      But the pose seemed so unusual for a photo in a time when people had to freeze for minutes to get a good shot. And there was something about it…something about the woman in the picture…It was grainy and faded, but she could swear it sort of resembled…In fact, it looked almost exactly like—

      Oh, my God! Like Reese!

      Ellie blinked hard, rubbed her eyes, but the woman still looked like Reese. Clutching the photo tighter, she wondered if it was some great-great-relative who had merely looked just like her. But no. There was Reese’s dimple, the little mole on her neck. Even her hands…If it wasn’t Reese, it was her exact double. But how could someone so long ago look exactly like someone from now?

      And then without so much as a warning, the woman in the photo swiveled her head—

      —and looked directly at Ellie!

      Ellie shrieked and accidentally kicked the camera sitting beside her in her scramble to get up.

      As she did, there flashed a brilliant white light. It consumed the air in her grandmother’s attic and she felt herself tumbling, falling, as the ground disappeared beneath her.

      Until there was nothing at all around her but the white, white light that finally faded into blackness.

      

      ELLIE OPENED HER EYES slowly, feeling muzzy and a little nauseous, as if she’d downed several too many Long Island Iced Teas…and mixed them with a few glasses of Bordeaux. But she hadn’t been drinking. Had she? She was having trouble remembering.

      A pitchy dark surrounded her, broken only by a hint of moonlight spilling through some kind of slatted wood louvers inches beyond her nose. Even worse, she was flat on her back with her feet in the air, scrunched in some small, cramped place. Something was jammed painfully into her back and she shifted against it.

      It felt like…footwear?

      None of that made any sense. She backed up mentally, trying again. Okay, a second ago, she’d been in her grandmother’s attic, then…then what? Think, Ellie. Think.

      A flash of light echoed in her memory and a feeling that she was falling. Had she been knocked out? Electrocuted?

      Died? Had she gone toward the light?

      She lifted her hand to her face and felt around. Okay…okay. That feels right. Solid. So…good. Alive.

      She felt around the confines of her space. Some kind of a box? Her senses returned to her one at a time: the smell of old wood and musty leather and another smell—like that sharp tang of ozone in the air following a storm; the low rumbling sound of her neighbor’s Harley engine idling in the driveway below her grandmother’s attic.

      She frowned. Wait, not a motorcycle. It was too rhythmic. Too…human.

      She clapped a hand over her mouth. Someone on the other side of those slats was snoring.

      From that deep, dark part of her—that part that had always, since her sister’s disappearance, been waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for that same brush of darkness to sweep over her, as well—came the awful rush of terror she had known would find her. Whoever had taken Reese had come back for her! And stuffed her in this…this box!

      Oh, God, why the hell hadn’t she listened to Dane and stayed safely in L.A.? But why couldn’t she remember being taken? She had absolutely no memory after going through that trunk looking at old photographs of—

      That photo of Reese. In her mind, she watched the woman in the picture swivel a look at her. Maybe she was crazy! Maybe she’d finally lost it. Because that made absolutely no sense. None. Photos do not animate.

      Now, an odd calmness filtered through her, spreading a tingling rush of knowledge to the tips of her fingers. Of course. Of course!

      She was dreaming. This was all a dream. A lame dream. And now, she was dreaming she was in this box. Dreaming there was a man on the other side of this door, snoring.

      Of course! All she had to do was wake up.

      In the room beyond the louvers, a shadow moved. She shifted her head sideways to get a better look. A woman standing in front of a small, round window lifted a piece of clothing off a chair and rifled through its pockets. Something shiny glinted in her hand for a moment before she pocketed it.

      What Ellie did next was totally uncalled-for and—truth be told—unintentional.

      Bracing herself, she pressed her hand against the wood slats and pushed. In the next instant, she tumbled ungracefully out onto floor to the sound of the pickpocket’s gasp of surprise.

      “Hey!” Ellie shouted, but the woman dropped the piece of clothing and, silent as a bat, flitted out the door.

      As she quickly struggled to untangle her legs from the stuff in the box, she heard what sounded like a cocking gun.

      “Get up,” ordered a deep male voice from close by. “Slowly. Don’t make me shoot you.”

      “Whoa, whoa! There’s no shooting in dreams,” she told him, throwing her hands up in surrender.

      “Get up,” he repeated darkly, motioning with the tip of that cannon in his hand toward the tall piece of furniture out of which she’d tumbled.

      It was prudent to oblige, she decided, and she got to her feet slowly with her hands spread wide. “Okay, fine. But don’t point that thing at me.”

      With his gun still on her, he removed a glass hurricane cover from an old-fashioned kerosene lamp beside the bed, struck a match and lit it. A thin, watery light spilled from the lamp, washing the walls in soft gold.

      Ellie’s eyes widened. Except for the gun in his hand, and the sheet he was clutching in front of him, he was naked as the day he was born. Against her will and good sense, she stared at him. All of him. He returned the favor, his unfriendly gaze sweeping down the length of her slowly and back up.

      He was tall and strongly built. The lean musculature of his chest and arms born of a life lived hard. He seemed tightly strung as if, given provocation, he could just go off like that gun he was holding.

      The gaslight carved his arrogance with shadows and fatigue. He wasn’t pretty the way so many Hollywood men were. His face had a ruggedness to it, accentuated by the scar that ran along his jawline. His mouth was wide and turned up a little at the corners without trying, but even that perpetual half smile of friendliness couldn’t mitigate the bruised look in his eyes.

      “What the hell are you doing in my cabin?”

      That voice. It sent a shiver down her. “Fair question. But on the subject of who’s supposed to be where,” she pointed out, “what are you doing in my dream?”

      “Your what?”

      She pointed to his clothing strewn across the floor. “Oh, and you’d better check СКАЧАТЬ