Excerpt 1 - Forgotten Silences:
The translucent stranger’s chin lowered and he became meditative. “Why would you feel sympathy for me?”
“Because, you are a lost spirit.” Nudging the petal with my finger, I glanced at his boots, noting for the first time the dried sludge on them. The mud cast an odd tint, reminiscent of blood—but thick and clumped. It looked familiar, though I couldn’t place it. “What is that on your boots? The color … do you know where the mud came from?”
He glanced at his boots, scraping his right heel with his left. “Color?” As if an afterthought, he glanced at the wavering fire. “Color. I know nothing of color. Everything is black and white.”
I shook my head. “No. I see color everywhere. Brilliant splashes of it. There must be some sort of … boundary … between your realm and mine.”
“My realm and—?” His jaw clenched. “Please, my lady. Why do you tease someone in my state with this Banbury story? The truth now. Do you know who I am … why I can't remember?”
“I know not who you are. But I know who I am. I'm as deaf as the night is dark. Yet here I am conversing with you.” I clamped my lips shut, sealing them tight to prove my point, “With or without using my mouth.”
He launched himself off the cushion and stumbled backward several steps, staring at me in repulsion. “Stop doing that!” He pointed. “It is you that is a ghost. You're haunting me!”
“No, Sir Hawk.” This time, I moved my lips. “Not me. I can hold onto things.” I rolled the flower pot between my breasts, so he would see the movement. “I can touch things.” I tagged Aria’s cage with my elbow, causing it to swing. She fluttered and snapped her beak in response, weary of the night’s strange events. “Now, you try.”
“You're daft.”
Biting my lip, I stood. My throw’s fringe tickled my toes and I shuffled my feet. “All right. What happened to your gloves?”
He shook his head with fervor. “I-I dropped them.”
“Ah. Then find them.”
His gaze jerked around the room, desperate. “But … they fell. Right there.” He gestured to Aria. “Somewhere beneath the cage.”
I stiffened my jaw. “They were only real while you wore them. Once you took them off, they vanished—ceased to exist.”
He glared at me. “Truly, aye?” Unbuttoning his jacket, he shrugged out of the sleeves and draped it over his elbow. Then, holding my gaze as his mouth perched on an arrogant slant, he pulled loose the cravat. His shirt lapels folded open to reveal a chest so chiseled it could have been made of stone, yet had the gleam of satin beneath a slight furring of dark hair.
My knees felt weak, but I stood my ground, forcing my eyes to meet his.
“How interesting.” He grinned. “It appears my clothes are still here. You're playing games with me.” The cravat dangled from his fingers like a white flag of surrender, a stark contrast to the challenge in his voice.
I squared my shoulders. “Drop them.”
“Drop them.”
“Yes.” I resituated my arm on the flower pot and my finger on the blossom. Unaccustomed to holding the awkward positions for so long, my hands started to fall asleep. “Let the jacket and cravat fall free of your touch.”
He bent at the waist in a mock bow. “At your bidding, my lady.” He released them, and we both watched the articles dissipate the moment they met the floor. Only his square pocket watch stayed intact when it hit the rug.
He started to tug his shirt from his pants, staring at the place on the floor where his jacket and cravat should have been. “'Tis a trick.” He studied my face. “I will watch you this time. Show me how you did it.” He began to work his wrists from his ruffled sleeves.
“You would do well, Sir, not relinquish the rest of your clothes so hastily.” I moved back to the window and sat with the flower pot propped on my lap to ease my arm. My fingertips tingled as blood resumed its natural course. “I suspect if you strip yourself naked, you shall remain that way.” My gaze shifted to the rug. “And daresay, your pocket watch has little hope of covering your most prized attribute.”
He considered my threat, easing his wrists back into place within the shirt. Bending forward, he picked up the watch and tucked its chain within his waistband so the geometric face hung on the outside of his trousers next to his hip. “You're one to talk of propriety. You who would summon a man to your bath and tease him with visions of milky skin and perfect breasts, then lead him on this nightmare journey into madness.”
A forbidden delight stirred in my chest. “You think my breasts are perfect?”
He grimaced—an expression which on any other man would be off-putting. But framed by his opacity, it made him more appealing, as if he were an avenging angel. “The loveliest I have ever seen. Of course, due to my limited memory, we can’t put much stock in my opinion, aye?”
I pouted.
In two strides, he loomed over me. “I owe you no apologies.” He snarled. “Were I any sort of rogue, I would've already laid you out and ravished you. You have it coming. Yanking my strings like a master puppeteer. Perchance I was right all along. You are a courtesan. And you've drugged me. Yes. You have drugged me, so you may unhinge my mind and steal my purse.”
My chin set and I steadied my gaze on his. “It would appear you have nothing worth stealing other than a most unusual busted watch.”
“Oh really?” His mouth tweaked, and a current of levity sparked the air between us. He arched a brow. “What in the name of rightness are you doing holding that blasted plant? Put it down.” A dare laced his words. “Put it down and I shall give you something worth stealing. First, we start with a kiss. Then I will show you how corporeal the rest of my body can be.”
My mouth drained of moisture. I had never known a threat could double as an enticement. Before I could offer any response, he reached for my wrists. His hands dispersed like a rush of dandelion seeds then reappeared as he drew back in shock. An odd sensation, as if the wind ruffled my skin. Startled, I jerked my legs and toppled the pot from my lap, losing my grip on the petals. The blossom dropped to the rug. Dirt hiccupped onto my bare feet.
When I looked up, he had vanished.
I cursed within my head—a word which would have curled my mama’s straight hair. Falling to my knees, I suffered a rash of chill bumps as my throw came unwound and sloughed to the floor. I didn’t care.
Naked, I scooped the soil back into the pot. Then, patting the loose sod in place around the flower, I nudged the stem to assure it hadn’t snapped in the fall. Satisfied, I wrapped my body in the wool again and touched a petal.
This time, he stood across the room in front of the dying fire. The smoldering flames flapped behind him, as if showing through a curtain of sheer fabric. His hands cupped his ears. “Stop sending me back … please. I cannot abide the voices any longer.”
“Voices?”
His hands inched down. “Why do you think I sing?” He narrowed his luminous gray eyes, his dark brows drawn low to contain some intense emotion. He looked ready to burst.
It struck me then, that indeed I did not know this man, or what burned within his soul to light his eyes in such a way.
Voices.
He might have been a madman in life. What if he had killed someone and been put to death for the crime? What if he was evil and cruel? For a moment, I thought to release the flower, to uproot it, throw it out into the night unprotected, so by morning it and everything attached to it would be destroyed by the winter winds.
I watched his face soften to thoughtfulness in the firelight—knowing he listened to my every doubt and weighed them against the ones he must be having himself. As I mused upon this, the luminance behind his eyes danced. And I realized what it was. His song’s light.
That is what burned within him. No man who sang with such passion and emotion could be evil. And as for cruel … for the most part, he had been good-natured considering the strange circumstances and confusion he faced.
I decided to help him make peace with this. Just as I hoped someone, somewhere, would do the same for my mother’s spirit, were she struggling.
My companion glanced at his pocket watch and up again. “So … I am dead.” The word shattered his baritone, as if he choked. Before I could even wonder if a ghost could feel pain, moisture gathered along his lashes. “Why do you not run from me in horror?”
I licked my lips. Interesting: the thought of fleeing had not even occurred to me. “I've always been a specter myself. Haunting a muted world as others experience life in full.”
His stare pierced me through as he considered my answer. He held up trembling palms to study each of his fingers. “How? How did this happen to me?”
I wanted to hold his hands in comfort. “I cannot say. But when I buried my mama today,” I struggled with the lump in my throat, “I came across your tombstone. And I saw your name. Hawk.”
Sooty lashes veiled his eyes, and I wished I could read his thoughts as he did mine.
“No, Miss. One so genteel as you has no business probing the nightfall of uncertainty that is my mind.” He clenched his jaw. “How long, according to my stone?”
I caressed a silky petal beneath my finger. “The flower averted my attention from the epitaph.”
Perception softened the vexed lines on his forehead. “The plant is from my gravesite then.”
I nodded, ashamed to tell him the rest.
“You dug it up.”
Wavering, I got to my feet with the pot cradled in front of me. “Yes. I'm a grave robber. Are you angry?”
“No.” He managed a tight, pensive smile. “Grateful. Somehow, I'm connected to it. And by taking it, you have found a way to release me from purgatory. I am no longer alone.”
I glanced at my feet, still gritty with residual dirt. “Nor am I.”
Our attention settled on one another—appraising and thoughtful. Behind him, through the transparency of his chest, the fire snuffed to embers. A tragic image, as if I watched his heart die. The room seemed to shrink with the arrival of new shadows, yet the silence stretched around me, no longer a merciless roar but a serene hush.
Hawk cleared his throat, breaking the lull. “Forgive me for accusing you of being a courtesan. You're obviously a compassionate lady of high moral substance.”
“Think nothing of it. You were flustered.”
“Might I be so bold as to ask your name, Miss…?”
It dawned on me then. We had not yet been properly introduced. With the ghostly aspect of his existence, all propriety had fallen by the wayside. “You may call me Juliet.”
His eyes tendered. “Juliet, I'm sorry for the loss of your mother.” The sentiment was almost as beautiful as hearing my name spoken.
“Thank you.”
“She must have been an exceptional woman, to have left such a hole in your life.”
I shut my eyes, framing her face in my mind. I would not forget her appearance as I had her voice. Not ever. I would make sure of that.
“But you are deaf.”
My eyes snapped open upon my guest’s redundant observation.
“How could you have known your mother’s voice to forget it?”
From beneath the throw’s fringe, I studied my feet, tilting my left one to the side to shake some dirt from between my toes. “A childhood illness took my hearing. But before that, my mama used to sing to me every day. I would dance with her beneath the rain during spring showers. And every evening, I would fall asleep to her lullabies. Yet I cannot find the sound in my mind any longer. It's been too many years.” I took a breath and the flower’s incense rushed through me, comforting. “Until tonight. Tonight I heard music again.” His gray eyes held mine and I smiled. “So sweet. So unexpected.”
His expression changed. Compassion and a hint of something else—humility?—carved his masculine chin. “I would like to have met you under different circumstances, Juliet.”
“But then I wouldn't have heard the beauty of your voice.”
He grinned. “You flatter me.”
“No. In truth. I would venture you have much in common with Aria.”
“Your bird? Her melodies were far from harmonious earlier. I fancy she doesn’t like me very much.” His lips formed a thoughtful line. “Odd. She seems to notice me even without touching the flower.”
I glanced in her direction. “I've read animals are endowed with an extra sense … a deep perception humans do not possess. Perchance the same holds true for plants, and somehow, by touching this flower, such insight is imposed upon me.” I returned my focus to Hawk. “Can you remember nothing? Nothing at all of your past? You apparently know a second language, according to your songs.”
“I remember nothing.” His jaw twitched. “If I but had some clue…” As if just remembering it, he rolled his pocket watch within his palm to regard the backside. “By Jove! It’s engraved.”
I gasped. “Well, what does it say?”
“Rat King.”
“Whatever does that mean?”
“Damned if I know.” He tucked the chain away again. A maelstrom of hopelessness darkened his countenance.
“I shall help you, Hawk. Tomorrow, I’ll return to the cemetery. There was a man visiting you today … though I couldn’t see his face. But I did see a path that led from the backside of the fence surrounding your stone. A well worn path. Someone keeps a vigil at your grave. We will learn who it is.” Though such an excursion so soon after Mama’s interim unnerved me, the expression of relief upon this poor soul’s face was all the incentive I needed.
“Is it the man, you think?”
“No. He seemed to have no way in … the padlock kept him at bay. Someone else has the key.” A shiver ran through me as I realized how chill the room had grown.
Hawk looked over his shoulder at the embers. “Would you like me to stir the fire for—” The statement broke and he bowed his head, cursing.
I could not blame him. I wondered how anyone could bear such frustration. “It is all right. I can revive the flames.”
“How? Your hands are preoccupied.” He slumped onto the hearth. “For saint’s sake, put it down. I certainly cannot expect you to carry the pot around for the rest of the night. And besides, you'll never be able to explore the graveyard holding onto it.”
He was right. And my arms were growing tired. Still, I wrestled with the decision. I dreaded to send him back to that place. He had not told me any details, but I didn’t need a sixth sense to relate to his fear. He had mentioned darkness, and I of all people could sympathize with the gruesome notions a lightless setting could inspire. And how much more terrifying would the darkness be, knowing what he now knew of his fate?
Then an idea came to me. So simple, I wondered why I hadn't thought of it before. On impulse, I plucked the petal free between my fingers.
When I looked up, Hawk still stood there. The flower didn't have to be intact to bind us, so long as I touched a petal. I set the pot on the floor to show him my prize.
“Of course!” Standing up, he clapped. The sound brought my feet to dance. “But,” he rubbed his chin, “it will prove a challenge to carry that around and never drop it. The chain on your neck. Did I see a locket affixed to it earlier?”
I tugged on the necklace to expose the heart-shaped charm.
“Is it pure silver?”
I nodded—all I could manage as he strode ever closer to me, intent in his study of the necklace. We soon stood face to face. A full head taller than me, had he been flesh, his respirations would have warmed my brow. His arms were so muscular, so stable. I wondered what it might feel like to be wrapped within them. What he smelled like … tasted like … how soft the upturned hair at his shoulders might feel beneath my fingers.
“Ah, Juliet.” His fingertip scattered upon attempting to touch my collar bone where the chain lay—a ripple of sensation—gone before my brain could even decipher it. “It appears I stepped from one purgatory into another. You must silence such curiosities.”
“I am sorry.” Remembering my nakedness beneath the throw, I tightened my free hand around the knot at my chest.
“As am I.” He smiled, though disappointment cluttered the curve. “Let us try something now. I want you to tuck the petal within your locket. Silver is the most conductive of all metals. Perchance it will allow the energy … life force … whatever I share with this flower … to find its way to you.”
His ingenuity impressed me. “I shall have to lose you for a moment, in the transfer.”
He nodded, but I didn’t miss his effort to hide his anxiety.
“Only for a moment.” I promised, then placed the petal in the pot. He vanished.
With a sense of urgency, I picked up the pot and carried it to the dining table. It pained me to remove Mama and Papa’s portraits from the locket. But if Hawk’s surmise was correct, there must be nothing to interfere with the silver.
I saw a flicker of him as I placed the petal within and latched the heart-shaped charm shut. Then, the chain clasped around my neck and the locket fell between my breasts beneath the throw. And my ghostly companion reappeared … this time to stay.
Excerpt 2 - Forgotten Silences:
I stalled at the gazebo’s entrance, steam billowing all around me, my eyes asquint at the symbol upon the archway’s frame: the same gypsy symbol as on the Manor’s gate … and the one upon the portrait in my room. The heat from the fountains on either side of me paled in comparison to the rush of excitement upon this finding.
I pointed to the symbol, glancing up at the viscount with a question etched into my forehead.
His gloved finger reached out to trace it. “It represents a mystical giger,” his lips inferred. “A door or portal. An entrance to a secret world.”
Trying to decipher how such a symbol would fit on a portrait, I lost myself in thought until the viscount’s fingers laced through mine again and lured me over the threshold.
“You owe me something, Miss Emerline. Shall we tally up here in the gazebo?”
He had turned me to face him so I could read his words upon our entering the archway, and the steam from the fountains warmed my right side. I gulped at his inference. Did he speak of the journal? Or perhaps he’d discovered what I’d taken in my excursion to his room the other day … how I dug through his things and, like a demented pack rat, hoarded my findings with everything else I had purloined from him and his kin.
Head tilted so his hat’s brim shaded his eyes, my host awaited an answer. His handsome face poised between amusement and insistence, his body a glorious turn of muscle and bone that could break anyone he so desired. It seemed every moment I spent with him fed my hunger to know him more, inasmuch as he baffled and mystified me. He was a conundrum: a master of the Manor, a friend to butterflies and horses, a study of thoughtful and quiet patience, despite all I’d heard of his past and his dangerous temper.
Removing his glove, he lifted a roughened finger to my chin, raising it so I could not look away. “Well, what say you?”
His naked touch sent a flame through my neck and cheeks. I had always prided myself on reading other’s thoughts through their expressions. But now I felt emotionally deaf … so much more unsettling than the physical equivalent. “I-I am unsure to what you refer, my lord.”
Dropping his arm to replace his glove, he paused as if rethinking his strategy. “The dance you owe me, of course. Is this not why you wished to be alone? So I might teach you privily before Monday’s ball?”
Relief coaxed my lips to a smile. “Yes. I am nervous for the ball.”
His answering half-smile reflected an unspoken intuition, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he had just given me a reprieve. Perhaps he knew all of my secrets … perhaps I was the one being read. I wasn’t sure I liked being sprawled upon the slide of a microscope, after spending so many years bent over the lens.
The iron vines overhead drew shadows upon the snow beneath my feet and I traced one with my toe. After laying his cane on a bench, the viscount gave my wrist a slight tug and led me toward the center of the platform. He positioned me to stand in front of him.
Upon two paces back, he scored a square in the white powder between us with his boot heel. “We shall not dance the quadrilles. We will only partake in the waltzes. Do you know the box step?”
In an effort to appear nonchalant, I shrugged. I once knew it … but eleven years had blurred the memory. “I have no scope for rhythm.” I pointed to my ears for emphasis.
The viscount took off his hat, his dark hair tied at his nape. He cast the topper behind him so it skidded on the bench, sending snow flying in particles until it stopped next to his cane. “Bah. Rhythm. They try to write it on paper for the maestro. But any instrumentalist knows. Rhythm cannot be captured in ink anymore than silence can. And it has nothing to do with your ears. It is something you feel and see all around you.”
I frowned. “Easy for you to philosophize…”
He laughed. “Oh, believe me, you make nothing easy.” His head cocked to one side, teasing. “When you are outside and it begins to rain, how does one—in your condition—know it’s raining? You cannot hear the patter on the leaves overhead.”
My jaw clenched. “Are you poking fun at me?”
Any trace of amusement faded from his expression. “Never. But you can feel the droplets, yes? They have a rhythm. You can see the spread of them on the ground, darkening the dirt to mud. Rhythm. Have you ever been to a pond in summer, and watched the frogs sing?”
In my mind, I envisioned bulbous chins swelling with air then deflating, keeping time with one another. “Hmm. Let me guess … rhythm?” I smirked.
He grinned back. “Ah, clever girl. So, when we dance, if you never take your eyes off me, I’ll not let you falter. I shall provide the rhythm.” Palm on my waist, he lined me up at one corner of the square and pointed to his sensuous lips. “Watch here.” My hands in his, he guided our footsteps with his counting. “One … two … three … one … two … three…” Together, we traced the square’s lines until our footprints erased them, until we broke loose and twirled around the gazebo from one end to the other—his coat and my cloak spinning fans around our feet. Soon, we were laughing with the thrill of it.
I fell into his flow—easier than I had imagined. Similar to riding the horse earlier, a grace so natural it became my own, transforming me from the inside out until I was no longer a separate entity but joined with another. Two becoming one in the matrimony of movement.
My partner amazed me, his ability to waltz even with a damaged foot—as if he lost his limp when he danced. So intent on the freedom of our fusion, I didn’t notice the change in his mood until his counting slowed and he stopped dancing altogether.
Finishing out the step I’d started, I tripped over his boot and slipped in the snow. The viscount reached out to steady me but my momentum unbalanced him as well. He toppled beside me, both of our posteriors swallowed by a cushion of white powder.
I laughed again as I rubbed my hips, the netted bustle doing little to ease the resulting twinge of pain. The wind caught several tendrils of hair, tugged loose from my braid by our dancing, and lifted them across my forehead so they clung to my lashes—a gold obtrusion to my sight.
Lord Thornton removed my hat and pitched it to the bench diagonal from me, opposite the one holding his cane and cap. I watched him from behind the golden screen over my eyes, afraid to move. Afraid to even breathe.
The moment had taken a serious turn. I knew by the expression on his face—the same one he exhibited at the garden—troubled enchantment, head tilted to the side like a tamed wolf trying to make sense of its master’s desires. And here we sat alone and unsupervised in the wilds of a forest.
I clenched my hands within my cloak. What was wrong with me? To feel anticipation more than fear…
Clamping a long, gloved finger in his teeth, Lord Thornton unsheathed one hand and let the leather fall to his snow-crusted lap.
With studious languor, his fingertips gathered the fallen tendrils and pulled them out straight to open my view. He regarded the glistening spread before tucking it behind my ear. The warmth of his touch and the itch of my hair along my earlobe prompted a quiver of pleasure. Startled by the sensation, I sucked in a breath too sharply, swallowed the air’s icy flavor.
My reaction brought his focus to my mouth. He coaxed a forefinger down my jaw, watched the descent along my skin with those irises of shade and ice … of liquid and smoke … a paradox, so much like the man who owned them.
His lips moved then, such a slight flux I had to strain to read. “Little fallen angel.”
My conscience pricked me to think of Hawk. But the viscount allowed me no such quarter. With his gloved hand, he smoothed the braid at my nape and drew me close, his bared palm cupping my chin. Before I could protest, his mouth stopped mere inches from mine—an excruciating restraint—and I tasted his scent.
In that moment of suspended dissolution, our breaths formed a cloud, enclosing us in our own world … a world of mist, and wonder, and unexplored expectations.
I started to pull away but he shook his head in a pleading gesture, halting me. Then he surprised me by tilting my chin down so his lips would brush my brow instead—a pressure so delicate it could have been the rasp of a butterfly’s wing if not for his whiskers scraping me in the wake.
I leaned into him, enthralled and weakened by his touch. His fingertips drifted from my chin in a sensuous glide down my neck to my collarbone. There he splayed his hand, his pinky grazing the lace just above the top curve of my right breast. I whimpered inwardly, begging he further his exploration, yet at the same time, wrestling guilt for my weakness.
His lips palpitated, saying something against my forehead, then he kissed my eyelids, leaving each one tattooed with heat. Even when I opened my lashes to meet his gaze, I could still feel his mouth there—firm, yet so, so soft.
But it was an illusion, as his mouth was elsewhere now. Before it even registered to my consciousness, his lips covered mine. I made a startled sound, felt it rise in my throat and take wing. He must have swallowed the cry with my breath, for I suddenly felt winded, a prickly warmth replacing the air in my lungs as both of his hands tangled in my braid and slanted my head to deepen the kiss. My own hands opened haplessly beneath my cloak, unable to reach for him for the cloth binding them.
He savored me, devoured me, gently sucking my lower lip into his sweet, hot mouth. The suction seemed to span to my breasts where a stickery sensation awoke beneath my corset, pearling my nipples as if a rush of cold air washed over my naked flesh.
And somewhere, in the furthest throes of my mind, I imagined that I
was naked, twisting beneath him like wildfire, losing myself to his touch.
The thought slapped me awake.
I jerked back and his lips opened to release me. A string of spittle, sylphlike and fine as spider’s thread, joined us for an instant before I stretched to arm’s length, breaking it.
Motionless, he stared at me, mouth wet and swollen. His panting breath rose between us, shrouding the awkwardness of the moment in white vapor.
“Forgive me.” His dilated pupils showcased an intense state of arousal that mirrored my own. “It is … this place. ‘Tis magic.”
Magic. No question. I was nothing if not spellbound.