A Haunted Romance (15 page)

“So beautiful. So tasty.” His tongue swept up her labia in long slow strokes. “So wet.” He slid a finger in, then out, spreading her moisture around her entrance. He slid two in the second time. “So fuckable.”

“Yes,” she cried, her voice shaking with desire. She wanted him inside, filling her.

His hand was on her wrists again as he moved back up her body, his cock positioned at her entrance. “I want you, Chelsea,” he murmured. “I’m going to take you.”

“Please.” It was all she could think of to say.

He smiled at her word, so much so that she wanted to say it again just to see that reaction on his face. “Please.”

“Please what, Chelsea?” His gaze was locked on hers, and she couldn’t look away this time.

“Please take me. However you like.”

He shook his head. “I want to drive into you right now without worrying about anything,” he said, “but I’ll get a condom from the drawer. Don’t move a muscle.”

She lay perfectly still, her bound arms extended over her head to the top of the bed, her body open for him. She watched him unroll the condom over his cock, knowing it would soon be inside her.

She wasn’t prepared for the electricity that ran through her when his large hand closed over her wrists again, holding her in place. She’d never realized how much that would turn her on, to be bound, helpless, at the mercy of a man she trusted.

He entered her with one slow steady push until he filled her completely. He kissed her, and she kissed back. He thrust inside her, and she arched her hips. Bound like this, it was all about him, and she loved that. She didn’t have to worry about her own responses, about performing. His cock moved in and out of her, each thrust building on the heat inside her core, jostling her enough to make her breasts shake and the chain between them swing, creating a pulling that was almost unbearable and entirely right.

She couldn’t stop thinking about how much control he had this way over her. Yes, men were usually stronger, but by letting him bind her wrists she’d let him take even more power. She was there for his pleasure.

The orgasm that exploded through her body surprised her. She screamed out her pleasure, thankful for the long distances of the country. She didn’t have to hold back. He held her while her body trembled, his cock still sliding in her channel as it squeezed against him.

He pulled out of her when she was done. Surely she would have noticed if he’d come, wouldn’t she, even with the condom? But he flipped her over onto her knees and slid his cock right back inside her pussy from the rear.

He kept his hand on her wrists, holding her up. Her breasts swayed beneath her with each stroke inside. The chain that seemed so light now pulled her nipples. His finger tickled her ass, finding her back hole, stroking the sensitive nerves there. She shuddered. She told him he could take her any way he wanted, but he wasn’t going to fuck her there, was he?

His finger was wet with spit and probing, pushing. A little of it managed to wiggle inside her, and she moaned. It felt good, but there was no way she was taking a whole cock in there. Especially not one as big as Trent’s. His balls banged against her clit with each thrust, bringing her tantalizingly close but not quite giving her release.

His finger slipped in farther, and her body shuddered again. Her whole body felt like it was on fire, the tips of her breasts and her pussy burning especially hot. And her ass. She gasped for breath.

She thought he was saving himself for her ass, and she cursed his iron control silently. She wanted him inside her there, filling her, splitting her, but the idea frightened the hell out of her.

“Shh, darling,” he murmured, although she wasn’t sure what if anything she’d said aloud. “You’re not ready for that.”

She breathed a sigh of relief, and tried not to notice when he added, “yet.” In just a few strokes, she was ready to come again, and all it took was his words. “Come now,” he said, and she felt the first little flutter of pleasure. Then he reached around and loosed one of the clamps, and a sharp stab of pain and desire pushed her all the way over, making her body shake and tighten around him. They hurt worse coming off than they had when he put them on, but she didn’t care.

He took the other one off, and then he joined her, his body shaking, his cock pulsing inside her. He buried himself deeply and groaned as her pussy tightened around him.

She sighed when he pulled out of her and discarded the condom. She wanted him to stay inside her forever. She snuggled against his warm body, her hands still held over her head, and closed her eyes.

* * *

When Chelsea woke up in the morning, he was no longer next to her, and her wrists were no longer tied. She grabbed one of his flannel shirts from his laundry pile, put on that and her panties, and went to look for him. He wasn’t in the kitchen either, so her fantasies of being cooked breakfast were not being fulfilled. That was okay; he was doing a good job of making her other fantasies come true.

She found a room that seemed to serve as his painting studio, with a broad view of the Blue Ridge, and admired the landscapes he’d painted, one of them only half-finished. He had a lot of talent and was still improving. The paintings in his studio were even better than the ones Aunt Pat had in her house.

Curiously, the canvas on the easel was blank, and turned upright, rather than lengthwise as was typical for the landscapes. There were a couple pencil lines there, but nothing more, and she couldn’t determine what was planned for the canvas from the clues around her. She looked around for a preliminary study or a drawing or maybe a photograph that would give her a clue, but there was nothing. She shrugged. It wasn’t really any of her business.

“Trent?” she called and got no response. She walked all around the house, calling his name, but there was still no answer.

She looked out the front window, and saw that the pickup was gone.

On the kitchen table, finally, she found a note.
Gone back to investigate the ghost. I’ll be back for breakfast. Wait for me. Trent.

She frowned, not liking the idea of him investigating without her, but there wasn’t anything she could do now. She could walk home, if she felt like it, but she really didn’t. He’d be back soon. He seemed to be an early riser, and if he was planning to make it for breakfast, she was actually surprised he wasn’t home already.

She couldn’t even write to pass the time. Her laptop was back at Aunt Pat’s, and while she could probably scare up pen and paper, she hated writing longhand.

There was a computer in the living room. He wouldn’t mind, surely, if she used it to work on her novel while she waited. She wiggled the mouse and made the darkened screen come alive. His browser was showing a page about séances. Curious, she sat down to read it. It wasn’t really about how to contact spirits—it was about the tricks nineteenth century mediums had used to make their clients think they were contacting a spirit.

Trent had been behind her, close to the door, when the door slammed—he could have easily reached that. And he’d been the only one with her when she saw the book slam. The Web site suggested that fishing poles and fishing wire were used to pull that sort of stunt. One of Trent’s hands had been with Caroline, and if the two of them were in it together, he could easily have had a hand free to make thumps in the darkness.

There had seemed to be two spirits, but what if there was a spirit and a fake, or two fakes? When they had asked if there were two spirits, one had answered yes, and the other no. So the two fakes, or the fake and the spirit, probably weren’t in league with each other. And the one who’d answered no either hadn’t expected a second spirit—and Chelsea thought ghosts would know something like that. So either it was a fake or a real spirit trying to unmask a fake.

The other one, though, had answered yes, so it couldn’t be a real spirit. This was Cat’s kind of puzzle, the kind that made Chelsea’s head hurt even when she was writing them. So the soft
thud
was a fake, probably made with a hand directly on or under the desk, since it didn’t sound quite like the book sounded later, and the hard
bang
made by the glass candleholder was the only one of the two that could possibly be Minerva.

So the question was, when everyone left the room but her and Trent, was the rising and falling of the book a trick? It could have been done with a fishing pole and fishing wire. The light had been dim enough she might not have been able to see the nearly invisible line. But then he would have had to prepare the book in advance, just in case his other trick failed. The fake could hardly have planned for Chelsea to stay behind.

And if it wasn’t him, then it was a real ghost.

If the book was from a real ghost, then the candlestick probably was too.

And that meant she’d been right after all—the ghost did want the manuscripts published, and the comment that there was a way she could make the ghost happy wasn’t a strange threat punctuated by the slamming of a door, as it had seemed to her at the time. It was a redundant answer to the question about the manuscripts.

Where was Trent, anyway? When Dalton had been roaming the house alone, Minerva had bonked him on the head. Would she be any kinder to Trent?

There was no way he should still be there. She put on her bra and pants and socks and shoes, borrowed a leather jacket that presumably belonged to Trent, and took off toward the haunted house at a run.

It took her nearly six minutes to run the half mile; she wasn’t a great runner, but she’d kept herself in shape with twice-weekly stints on a treadmill.

She looked around for Trent’s pickup, but it wasn’t there.

The door wasn’t locked. She wasn’t sure she’d locked it last night. She’d been pretty eager to get away from it, in fact, and when she’d left, Andrea and Dalton had still been there. Was the medium in on it too? Dalton? Caroline? She didn’t trust anyone.

She hesitated before opening the door. There was plenty of light out, and she’d never heard the moaning or anything during the day, but the incident with the attic stairs had happened in the daytime.

She opened it slowly and called out, “Minerva?”

The only answer was a low moan. That seemed to be the limit of Minerva’s speaking, anyway, but this time it seemed to be on the same floor as her. She walked toward the dining room, heart hammering.

In the dining room Trent lay on the floor. His eyes were open, but just barely. There was blood in his hair. All around him on the floor were scattered pieces of glass; the chandelier had fallen, and its framework lay in the center.

“Shit, Trent, what happened?”

“Chandelier fell.” His voice was unusually quiet, and there was a roughness to it. “I was unconscious for a spell. Have been checking myself before I try to move.”

Chelsea crouched next to him, careful not to kneel on any glass. He had a heck of bump on his head, but the bleeding had stopped. “Look at me.”

It wasn’t especially bright, so she really couldn’t tell if his pupils were dilated more than usual; certainly they were pretty open. She looked around. He hadn’t moved from the spot since the chandelier had fallen either, so he was telling the truth. None of the glass looked like it had been ground beneath human feet. She longed to trust him again, the way she had before she’d seen the Web site.

“Why are you here, Trent?”

“I decided that the séance was a fake, so I thought I’d try to figure it out. But I also wanted to retrieve my sketchbook.” He nodded over to the shelves, where the sketchbook he’d brought over the day before still stood.

“And why did you decide that the séance was a fake?”

“The two answers to the question of whether or not there were two spirits.”

Chelsea smiled. “I figured that out too.”

“But Minerva didn’t mean to kill me with the chandelier, or if she did, she didn’t finish the job. There are pieces of glass there she could pick up, if she could move a key. Even if she has problems with fine control, she could still stab me with a piece of glass, and she hasn’t.”

Chelsea nodded. “Don’t move.”

She went for the stairs. All her chairs were in the one room, but she needed a chair to see what she wanted to see. “Minerva?” she asked, but didn’t get an answer. She entered her office.

Chairs were on the floor, and there were shards of glass from the candlestick. A Cat Connors mystery was sitting in the middle of the table. “I’ll help you, Minerva. I’ll help you.” Chelsea got the folding chair and retreated from the room.

Trent had only sort of obeyed orders. When Chelsea got back he was standing, leaning against the wall.

“Sit down,” she told him.

“I’m good enough to stand,” he told her.

She wasn’t going to waste her time arguing with him, because she was pretty sure it wouldn’t do any good. He was the type who gave orders, and he wasn’t going to be any good at following them. Most of the time that suited her fine. She unfolded the chair on the floor, and climbed up on it.

She’d once had Cat Connors solve a case where a wife was murdered by her husband filing her brake cable halfway through so it would break when she tried to use it. In order to get the description right of what it would look like afterward, she’d had an auto mechanic show her how to do it. The chandelier had been filed halfway through. It would have taken excellent motor control to stop at just the right point and to do it without filing the rest of the wire that had held it up. The only other marks on the wire were a dark spot around where the wire had been broken.

And even though Trent was taller than her, she was pretty sure he couldn’t do it that well from the floor. He could reach the spot with a file, sure, but that was it; actually filing it neatly would require being higher than that. So someone had used a chair or a ladder.

“What is it?” Trent asked.

“The chandelier was primed to fall by someone. Someone not Minerva, if our guesses are right about her limited dexterity, and I think they are. They had to climb up here and…” She came back down.

“And …?”

“And hope it fell eventually? And it just happened to fall on the first person who came through the room? No one is that good that they could file it so it would be sure to break right away.”