Darkening Around Me. Barbara Hancock J.

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СКАЧАТЬ me as I stood there staring into long-dead eyes.

      The painting, the carpeting, the paneling, the lighting—all of it was “Victorian” by way of 1963. The effect was creepily off-kilter. Thornleigh had a dollhouse quality to it, as if everything was a not-quite-right copy of what it should have been.

      As I stood there in the on-again, off-again flash of lightning and electric wiring that had seen better days, I had the fierce desire to fix and to freshen. To repair. Hadn’t I been doing the same for myself for months? I wasn’t the only soul in the world that needed healing. But the same desire to heal rising here made my heartbeat quicken and my breath catch.

      Because I didn’t think it was Thornleigh that I was compelled to save.

      With that thought came the sudden slam of a door down a hallway that intersected the one where I stood. The loud impact of heavy wood against wood made me jump. I turned to the black opening of the other corridor and waited. Long seconds stretched by, but no one revealed themselves. Who else was in the house? I assumed my host waited for me downstairs. It probably shouldn’t have bothered me that I wasn’t alone, but it did. Especially when the door slamming was only followed by the distant rumble of thunder from outside. Part of me hated to turn away from the direction of the slam to continue toward the stairs, but, of course, I did it anyway. I couldn’t stand there nervous for no good reason all night. Still, as I did turn and continue on my way, my neck prickled and my pace quickened.

      * * *

      O’Keefe had told me how to find the small morning room where we would eat dinner. It was off the grand dining room, which stood empty and cold save for dozens of ghostly draped chairs and a massive cherry table that could have accommodated fifty. I couldn’t walk quickly and quietly enough past chair after empty chair as their sheets gleamed in the dark.

      The smaller and brighter morning room beckoned, but even so I paused again as Miles O’Keefe came into view. He stood by a fireplace, looking down at the flickering flames, his skin alight with its glow but also shadowed where the glow failed to touch. He startled me again with his height and the lean quality of his form. How anyone so tall and obviously strong could also give off an air of vulnerability I don’t know, but it was there in his dark, dark eyes and the flash of his hair against his pale forehead.

      “I wondered if I should send out a search party,” Miles said as I entered, but when he turned the slight tilt of his lips fell and he was serious again.

      My cheeks warmed when those almost-black eyes swept me from head to toe. I suddenly wished for jeans and sneakers and possibly a ponytail holder because it seemed to be the unbound waves of my hair that held his attention the longest. My natural desire to feel attractive warred with my need to feel safe and unnoticed by this man with flashing eyes.

      “A bread-crumb trail wouldn’t be a bad idea,” I said. Pretending we were still being light and funny.

      “We’ll ask Mary if she has some you can borrow,” Miles said. He smiled. Just the slightest return of a tilt to his lips and I looked away. The softening, the curve to his mouth, was too potent. It had been a very long time since I’d allowed myself this kind of attraction. Better to focus on the woman who entered the room carrying a tray full of covered dishes.

      “Poached salmon and salad,” the woman offered. She sat the tray down and looked at it as if she might have forgotten what it was for in the first place.

      She was thin and gray from head to foot. Her hair, her skin, her serviceable dress and shoes—all gray. But her face was smooth and her hands were young. I noticed the quick movements of her fingers when she gripped them together to still them in front of her skirt.

      “Mary, this is Samantha Knox. Samantha, this is Mary. She’s my housekeeper’s niece and she cooks for me from time to time,” Miles said. He moved forward to hold a chair for me as he spoke, as naturally as if he’d been born a century earlier.

      “That smells delicious,” I said, claiming the seat and looking up at Mary with a smile.

      She didn’t return the smile. Not in an unfriendly way, but in a distracted way as if her mind was on other things.

      “If that’s all, I’ll just…” she began, but she didn’t even finish her sentence before she turned away.

      “Are you staying with your aunt tonight? Or would you like to stay here? The storm seems to be getting worse,” Miles said to her back.

      “No. Not here. No. I’ll be fine,” Mary assured him over her shoulder as she left the room with hurried steps.

      While O’Keefe spoke to his cook, I had taken the clandestine opportunity to notice that he’d changed for dinner. The cut of his suit was sharp as a razor, modern and nicely formed to his long, lean legs and tapered waist. His broad shoulders filled the jacket and, sans tie, the tailored white shirt showed not an ounce of spare flesh. I thought of the marble in the garden and how physically demanding it would be to work in that medium. Then I thought of clay and the working of it and I looked to his hands. He had sat down and was lifting the covers from the food, each digit curled and extended in the regular way, but I was struck by those hands and what I knew they could do.

      I tried to focus on the arugula. Really. I did. Mostly because, once Mary left the room, O’Keefe’s dark eyes never left me. My face. My hands. The movements of my eyelashes against my cheeks. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. If he intrigued me, if I found him an interesting pleasure to behold, then I, or his art at least, consumed him. And that’s what I was, surely. A subject. A study. I’m reasonably attractive, but I’ve never stopped traffic. O’Keefe seemed stopped as if nothing existed in the world beyond my face and form.

      He had been telling me about Mary leaving food for him that he occasionally remembered to heat up and eat. Very occasionally, judging from his physique. But then he seemed to give up all pretense of normal conversation.

      “I wanted to give you time to recover from your trip, but in this light…your face…” He was already up. He strode over to a table by the fire to retrieve a large sketch pad and pencil.

      He didn’t ask for permission. My presence at Thornleigh was by permission. I’d come here for this, after all. If I hadn’t realized how intense it would be to have his every sensibility trained like crosshairs on me, that was my problem, not his.

      I watched him, salad forgotten. His concentration. His tension. Every muscle in his body flexed to capture the perfect angle of my chin on paper. Seductive? Yes. I had to remind myself to chew and swallow the last bite I was to take of my fish. Because he came to me then and took my hand to pull me up and over to the fire. He urged me into a chair and then knelt at my side so very close, so very focused on his paper and not really on me at all. Oh, certainly on my appearance. The curve of my cheek or the shape of my brow, but I don’t think he saw what his nearness was doing to me. Not at first. Not the flush. Not the shallow breathing to limit the impact of his fresh-scented hair. Earlier he’d reeked of ozone from the rain. Now he smelled spicy, tempting.

      His art consumed him and the flash in his eye looked very like the intensity I’d seen in the eyes of Dominick in the portrait upstairs. The resemblance made my heart kick faster. How easily intensity could go from being positive to negative. Should I be attracted to Miles O’Keefe or maybe, just maybe, should I fear him?

      All this time, the storm had raged outside. The fire and the food and O’Keefe’s interest had distracted me from it, but suddenly the old wiring in the house lost its battle against the frequent lightning. One of the flickers I’d grown accustomed to became an outage.

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