Dark Duets Part 26

I faced him and touched my finger to where a scar slashed through his eyebrow. It was the same as in the painting. Every detail exact.

He's a ghost.

The thought entered my mind like a whisper and then turned into a shout.

I shook my head.

Normal people don't think this way, I reminded myself. My life wasn't a gothic novel, no matter how many times I'd read Wuthering Heights and dreamed my way into Heathcliff's arms.

"What's happening?" I asked him, dreading the answer.

"How much do you remember?"

I shook my head, ready to say "nothing," but then I realized that wasn't true.

"Do you remember that each time you come to me with a different story? An art student wanting to catalog the castle's paintings. A hotelier hoping to find the perfect spot for a bed-and-breakfast . . . you've inherited from a long-lost cousin . . . you were given the key as a tip." He laughed, the sound harsh and unamused. "Once you came to me as a horticulture specialist looking into a new species of poplar."

My brow furrowed.

"She has a terrible sense of humor. They all do. Sometimes you remember who you really are late into the night and sometimes you never do." His voice deepened. "And sometimes you remember early in the evening, like now."

I glanced around the study, gasping when my eyes landed on his ma.s.sive desk. I walked over to it, spread my hands across the surface. "You've made love to me here." My cheeks burned red before the words left my mouth. "A dozen times."

"A hundred." He came up behind me, pulling my back against his chest. "I've made love to you everywhere in this castle, Emily," he whispered in my ear. If his arms hadn't been crossed around me, I'd have fallen. Not just from the words, but from the memories.

I nodded, the ache in my chest almost unbearable.

He spun me then, lifting me onto the desk and stepping between my legs. His lips took mine in a frustrated, furious kiss-one I gave in to without question.

After a long moment, he pulled me tight to him, as though he could hold me fast enough to keep the world at bay. The world-or whatever else was out there. "This castle is darkness," he spoke to the top of my head, with barely there sound. "You are light."

I clung to him, hating the words. The pain. The weariness. "This castle is a curse, Emily." His breath was hot against my neck, sweet in my ear. "And you are my savior."

My heart pounded, blood roared, and as he spoke, the memories tumbled through me.

He took my hand and placed it to his chest, at his heart. His gaze was hot, fierce. "We've been here before. Done all of this before." His fingertips curled into my hair, desperate. "Every evening you come to me, and every morning you leave."

No. Impossible.

He was everywhere: the smell of him, the feel of him, the taste of him, and I shook my head, desperate to clear my thoughts. To find reason. Logic.

None would be found, but I knew one thing. "I could never leave you. Not here." Not to this. Memories surged around me: Owen leading me up the staircase, Owen lowering me to his bed, Owen leaning over me, deliciously playful, then deliciously serious.

Night after night.

Again and again.

First pleasure beyond my wildest dreams, then anguish, so powerful that it took the breath from me. "Why?" The word was so simple, and yet I feared the answer wouldn't be easy. For a hush of a heartbeat, I thought I heard howling in the distance. I shuddered.

Owen pulled away from me, the answer on his face. He knelt in front of the fireplace, stoking the fire until it roared. "I'm not a good man, Emily," he said, "and every day . . . you realize it. And you leave."

His eyes were fixed on the flames. "You leave the way you did when I was alive."

I didn't want to believe it. But how else could I explain why I knew his name? How I knew the corridors of this place as though I'd lived here before? How else could I explain the way I felt in his arms? That I would give up everything to be near him?

"How?"

He wrapped his arms around me and buried his head in the crook of my neck. "All I know is that it is always dark and gray and cold. And when you arrive, you bring a taste of the sun with you."

All those years of loneliness . . . a lifetime of emptiness, and here, now, with him . . .

Home.

His eyes shone when he looked back up at me, his lips against mine in fevered, frenzied kisses, as though we were running out of time.

"Please, Emily . . ." His words broke and my tears spilled over, and I was filled with the fear and desperation pouring from him. "Don't leave me. Not again. Not this time."

Or maybe it was me talking. Maybe it was me, my lips against his, and the words, "I love you. Please, don't let me go."

Or maybe it was both of us.

I COULD HEAR his heartbeat as we lay together, and it occurred to me that ghosts shouldn't have heartbeats. Nor should their skin feel warm on st.u.r.dy bone and threaded muscle. Nor should they bring the kind of deep, undeniable comfort that he brought.

We were wrapped in a hunting plaid I remembered from other places-stunning green and black in his portrait, and on the bed in which I started the night, and draped across a chair in the library. It was warm enough beneath the tightly woven wool for us to spread out across the mammoth bed, but we remained tangled together, a ma.s.s of breath and limb, of stroking fingers and teasing hands.

He was reciting Sh.e.l.ley again, the words tumbling in rhythmic beats beneath my ear. I have drunken deep of joy, and I will taste no other wine tonight.

I laughed as he rolled me to my back with a nip at my jaw and another at my ear, "The man was mad; I fully intend to have another taste," and sighed at the pleasure that pooled deep in me at the words, as though the joy of which Sh.e.l.ley wrote and that Owen felt could not help but find egress through me, like a raven into the dark sky.

I froze, hating the thought. Not a raven. Not anything so ominous.

With a s.h.i.+ver I remembered the earlier storm, the monstrous hounds crawling across the fields for us. The woman in red leading them, her mouth a gleaming slash in her face.

Owen had promised me it was a nightmare. But for a moment I thought I could hear them again in the wind outside. The sound of them howling. Coming for us.

For me.

Owen sensed the change in me, lifting his head, worry furrowing his brow. "Emily?"

I swallowed around a heavy weight in my throat. "How did we get here?"

He smiled, the expression lopsided, making him look younger. More dear. "Well, first, I removed that robe . . ."

I laughed, but not for long before the tears came, quick and painful. "Stop. How did this happen?" I paused, one tear welling over, falling back into my hair before he could stop it, and then I whispered, "What did we do to deserve this?"

He kissed me then, as the answer came. As though he could make the truth disappear along with fear and disappointment and devastation . . . and betrayal.

I gasped against his lips. Betrayal.

"You lied to me."

He looked away.

I kept talking. "Every night. We do this."

"We love."

Love. Love and distance. Love and fear. Love and sadness. Love and betrayal. "And every day, I leave."

I could see the pain in his beautiful eyes-those eyes the color of the sea I cross every day. "Every day."

"Every day I remember." And I did remember. I remembered all of it, suddenly, and he knew it. He saw the memories come and he rushed to stop them. To explain them. Like he had a thousand times before.

"I neglected you." His voice cracked. "I ignored your pain, your sadness, in part because I did not know how to chase it away and in part because I was terrified of what it would do to me."

The words hurt. They hurt as much as the memories that came with him. The nights alone, aching for him. The days of wanting him. The way I had to stand by and watch him become less and less of the man I'd loved . . . more and more of the man I married.

The way he'd changed.

The way I had.

And then, the night I'd left, tired and angry and filled with sorrow and unwilling to go another moment here, in this house with this shadow of a man who resisted love and pa.s.sion. Unwilling to live without it.

Unwilling to ask him for it.

I'd left. And he'd died.

And I had vowed to forget him.

Since then . . . years . . . centuries . . . we've danced this dance. Given what we thought we wanted. Every night: me, alone in a changing world without memory; him, alone in an unchanging one, remembering everything. Filled with regret.

How we were both filled with regret.

And then, after we've finally found each other and seen the mistakes we made- "I leave. And I forget you. I forget the truth."

That I hate him. That I love him.

"But I never forget you," he said, and pain seeped through me like dye cast in the ocean, infecting every drop. "I never forget what I've done. I never stop regretting that I did not cherish you. I never forget what I feel."

"What do you feel?"

He leaned back against the ma.s.sive pillows on the bed, the tartan baring him to the waist, revealing a wicked scar crossing his chest from shoulder to hip. The wound that killed him. The wound that took him from me.

The wound that brought him back.

I reached out to touch it, and he caught my fingers, bringing them to his lips. Kissing their tips. "I feel the moments we have missed. The eternity we have been apart. I feel the way I long for you when you aren't here."

He punctuated the sentences with soft, lush kisses. And, finally, he said, "I feel the way you ache for me when you leave."

The words were the worst possible blow. We had lost everything but the memory of what might have been and lived in a place where everything was gray and we were so alone.

Each lost in the mist without the other.

And yet . . . "I would live this night again and again-forever-if it was all I had of you," I told him.

"No," he said. "No more," he whispered at my temple, holding me in strong, steel arms that seemed able to keep everything at bay. "Not again."

"Of course again," I said, refusing this words. "This is how we have each other."

"But, Emily, you can have so much more . . . the other side . . . away from this dark place and its hounds and its wickedness . . . you can have it."

He lifted my lips to his, kissing me again, as though the caress could force me to understand. To choose. To leave him.

As if it didn't make me want to stay forever.

I pulled away. "I don't want it. Whatever it is. I want you."

He cursed, soft and sweet in the waning candlelight. "This is my h.e.l.l, not yours. They were my sins, never yours. You deserve paradise."

I shook my head. "You always thought I was the perfect one."

He pulled me to him, holding me as tightly as he ever had, strong arms, harsh breath, fierce love. "You are perfect."

But I wasn't. I was as imperfect as he was. Blessedly so.

And because of that I did not have paradise.

I had him.

"I WON'T LEAVE you," I said, eager to start again. To throw open the sash and toss ourselves through. "Not again."

Outside the sky was turning a dishwater gray as the sun struggled to rise. Inside, Owen and I lay tangled in the sheets of his ma.s.sive bed. He traced a finger down my neck, along my collarbone, over my ribs. His lips followed in the wake of his caress, stilling at the hollow above my hip, his words like a prayer there. "Please, Emily, I beg you. Please leave."

The words stung. Lacerated. Demolished. "You want me to leave?"

"Don't you understand? This is agony. Every minute with you is unmatched pleasure and unbearable pain because I know that you shall leave, and I shall be alone again, weeping for your loss, aching for you. Desperate for more than a handful of hours. For a lifetime. For an eternity where we don't have to worry about time or torture or h.e.l.l."

He looked to me, eyes full of anger. "And every day I know it will happen again. You will come and I will love you and I will lose you. And perhaps I could face it, if it weren't for you. If I did not know that you, too, ache. If every bright memory were not clouded over with the memory of your tears day after day. Tears I have caused." His voice wavered, more breath than sound. "It's been this way for centuries, Emily. And I am so tired."

A tear trailed down my cheek, and he pressed his lips to it.

"I don't want you to suffer."

At my words he left the bed, paced across the room before coming to kneel by me, my legs now dangling over the edge. He gripped my knees with his hands, dropping a kiss onto each of my thighs before saying, "That's the torture of it. Not my own pain-but the pain I cause you. Every morning I break your heart and I can't . . ."

His voice cracked and he squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his lips together. His entire body was quivering. When he finally looked up at me, his eyes were bright, anguished. "I can't keep hurting you like that. Please. Please, you have to end it."

I slid from the bed until I, too, was on my knees.