Amanda Stevens - The Restorer

Switching on the interior light, I checked Ethan’s note as I drove slowly down the street, searching for a lovely Queen Anne with a blue porch and a well-tended garden. When I spotted the address, the windows were all dark and I didn’t see Devlin’s car. He must have parked around back, I decided. Or else he’d spotted me in the mirror and driven on by.

I checked my own mirror just to make sure he hadn’t doubled back and come up behind me.

No one was there. Coast all clear.

Now what?

Pulling to the curb, I shut off the engine, cut the lights and just sat there, my thoughts in turmoil. Why had I come here? I wanted to blame the impulse on Essie’s tea or the few sips of champagne I’d had at Dr. Shaw’s party. I wasn’t behaving like a woman who had always lived her life by a strict set of rules. I could see my reflection in the car window and thought, that’s not me. She has my eyes, my nose, my mouth, but inside she’s morphed into some strange, reckless creature I don’t know anymore.

“Go home, Amelia.” I said it aloud because I thought the words might have more power. Home to my safe, pleasant, empty sanctuary where I was guarded from ghosts and governed by my father’s warnings.

But I didn’t start the engine, didn’t turn around, didn’t drive off into the night. Instead I sat there for a while longer and then finally I got out.

Crossing the street, I stood at the bottom of the veranda steps, my face upturned to the sky. Clouds drifted across the moon and I could feel something in the air. A storm was coming. The drop in pressure tickled my scalp and I felt almost giddy with excitement as I lifted my arms and let the wind sweep over me.

It was a very liberating moment, a casting off, but then I turned toward the house—her house—and something darker coursed through my veins. Someone stood in the front window. A shadow that darted away when I saw it.

Shivering, I knocked on the front door. It swung open and I took a cautious step inside. “Devlin?”

I took a moment to acclimate my eyes to the gloom. Directly in front of me, an elegant staircase curved up and around to a wide second-story gallery. Beyond the stairwell, a long hallway led back into the house and to my right was a murky parlor.

Moving to the arched doorway, I allowed my gaze to travel over the old-fashioned furniture, which surely had not been Devlin’s choice, and the imposing portrait of Mariama over the mantel, which surely was. The air smelled faintly of sage and lemon verbena—like Essie’s house—with a musty undercurrent of dust, abandonment and unspeakable despair.

Veiled moonlight shone through the large front window, and for a moment I saw Shani standing there staring out. Watching for Devlin. Waiting for him to come back and say goodbye.

She was tiny and luminescent, and as I stood there observing her, she faded into nothingness.

The fresh coat of blue paint on the porch had not kept out the ghosts. The chill of their presence surrounded me. Not just Shani and Mariama, but the ghosts of another life. The ghosts of a happy family. The ghost of the man Devlin had once been.

As I backed into the foyer, my gaze lifted to a flickering light beyond the gallery. I could hear music up there now, something exotic and tribal. A drumming that stirred primitive instincts.

Slowly, I climbed the stairs, calling out Devlin’s name. Some thing cold swept against me, the merest brush of a silk dress, and I knew it was her. A mirror hung on the wall, and as I passed by, I caught a glimpse of my reflection. Only this time…I didn’t see my eyes, my nose, my mouth. For a moment, I could have sworn I saw Mariama staring back at me, but the illusion was fleeting. Once again it was me in the mirror. Wide eyes, freckled skin, bedraggled ponytail. Hardly the vision of a temptress.

And yet as I neared the top of the stairs, I grew bolder, freer. When I reached the landing, I paused to remove the band from my ponytail and shake out my hair. My head fell back, swaying in abandon as the rhythm of the music seemed to crawl inside my skin.

The sound came from the room down the hallway. The door was open and the beat seemed to intensify as I approached.

Inside, everything was hazy and candlelit. It was like stepping into someone else’s dream. The breeze that blew in through the balcony doors stirred the flames and rippled like waves through the silky fabric that cocooned the bed. An eerie audience of African masks hung from the walls, and the hollow eyes seemed to watch me as I walked across the room to Devlin.

He stood on the veranda looking down on the garden. His shirt was open and the wind blew it back. As he turned, something cold floated between us. I felt her touch, her icy breath, and shivered. But I wasn’t afraid. Which was strange because here in her house she would be at her strongest. I had already seen what she could do and yet…I wasn’t afraid.

My gaze locked with Devlin’s and a current of heat surged through me. He felt it, too. His eyes flared and his body went very still.

The moment stretched on and on.

And then he closed the distance between us and I heard him mutter, “I knew you’d come,” but I didn’t know if he meant me.

I reached up and traced the silver medallion with my fingertip. A symbol of his mysterious past, a talisman of all his secrets. The metal was cold, but I could feel the heat of his skin drawing me to him as surely as his warmth enthralled his ghosts.

Rising on tiptoes, I offered him my mouth. He took it with a groan, crushing me to him in an embrace that seemed at once familiar and foreign, desperate and devastatingly controlled.

He tasted of whiskey and temptation and my darkest fantasies. I wanted to hear him say my name in that seductive, decadent drawl. I wanted to skim my tongue along his hot skin, press my mouth to the throbbing pulse in his neck, wrap myself around him until nothing could come between us. Not time, not distance, not even death.

Backing me up against the wall, he tore aside my clothes right there on the balcony while a voice inside my head warned: This is not you, Amelia. This is not you.

But it was me. It was my hands that flung his shirt aside. My mouth that opened so readily beneath his.

My decision to discard the rules by which I’d lived my whole life.

He lifted my legs around him and, half drunk with desire, I let my head fall back against the wall, exposing my neck. He devoured me hungrily, his teeth nipping and tugging the tender skin at my throat, his tongue laving and soothing the pleasurable sting.

Through slitted eyes, I caught the barest hint of movement down in the garden. When I looked again, I saw only the flutter of leaves in the wind.

And then I saw nothing at all as Devlin whisked me into the bedroom. The charged air came with us, tingling over bare skin, feathering along aroused nerve-endings.

From where we stood, I had a view of Mariama’s dressing mirror, oval and ornate. In the candlelight, I could see the ridges of muscle in Devlin’s back as he bent over me. I had the strangest sensation of being outside my body, of watching something forbidden, something dangerously taboo.

I slipped from his embrace and when he turned, I pressed him against the wall, trailing my lips down his chest as I fumbled with his belt buckle and opened his zipper. Smiling up at him, I slid to my knees and then I did things to him I never knew I was capable of. He shuddered as I encircled him, and when I felt he was on the verge, I turned again to glance over my shoulder at the mirror. My smile now was sly, wanton. A temptress’s invitation.

Rising, I put my lips against his ear. “I will never leave you,” I whispered, and where those words came from, I had no idea.