Lindsay Longford - Lover In The Shadows

“Such a leading question, Ms. Harris. I find it very difficult to resist the reply.”

He straightened and stepped toward her, but he didn’t touch her.

“In fact, I can’t resist. No, Ms. Harris, I’m not satisfied.” His voice was rough and grainy as he tugged the end of the robe’s tie and looped it around his hand. Letting the slippery fabric slide through his fingers onto her shoulder, he trailed the tie lingeringly across her neck, an unbearably prolonged caress of satin on her skin.

“Here, Ms. Harris,” he said as he unhooked the robe and handed it to her, “perhaps you should get dressed.” And let me remain unsatisfied, he added silently.

Lindsay Longford, like most writers, is a reader. She even reads toothpaste labels in desperation! A former high school English teacher with an M.A. in literature, she began writing romances because she wanted to create stories that touched readers’ emotions by transporting them to a world where good things happened to good people and happily ever after is possible with a little work.

Her first book, Jake’s Child, was nominated for Best New Series Author and Best Silhouette Romance, and received a Special Achievement Award for Best First Series Book, from Romantic Times. It was also a finalist in the Romance Writers of America RITA® Award contest for Best First Book.

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To Wes, whose courage and kindness during difficult days have taught our son what a real hero is—and, more important, what it takes to be a man.

Thank you.

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The third time Molly woke up on her kitchen floor with the knife in her hand, she was too frightened to utter a sound.

This time the knife was spotted with blood. Dried, matte dark, it flecked the handle and clotted in the space where shining metal, wiped clean, met a wooden handle.

For a long time she lay with her cheek on the cold tiles and stared at the thing clutched in her white-knuckled fingers. Shadowy in the predawn, the slick black-and-white tile floor had become the color of smoke. Peaceful, this gray, in the silence. The tile felt cool against her cheek. Without turning her head, she let her gaze drift.

It would be so easy to lie here, curled up and lost in that gray blur.

So easy if she didn’t have to look at the knife wavering in her clenched fist.

Silver from the handle to the sharp point that fixed her eyes. Sharp, that point, razor sharp. The sweep of metal would slice cleanly, easily, through anything, with only the slightest pressure of wrist and fingers. She knew its power.

The silver point trembled with her effort to think. Her knuckle slipped against the edge and a pinhead of bright red dotted the blade.

She couldn’t move. It was only a small cut, scarcely noticeable, but the sight of her blood on that spotless metal sent her into gibbering mindlessness. Primitive instincts held her paralyzed on the cold floor, stiff against the terror washing through her in unending waves.

If she moved, her kitchen would dissolve into mist, everything familiar vanishing in a swirling vortex of motion, everything known becoming alien with each beat of her heart. Staring at the knife, she understood nothing and retreated deeper into the cave of herself, away from the howl of tigers prowling ever closer.

Something bumped against the outside door.

Metal gleamed as the knife jerked in her fist.

Molly shivered, a constant trembling running through her. Even the roots of her hair tightened with the effort of listening. Straining to hear in the thick silence, she shut her eyes, registering with every nerve in her body the sounds outside her kitchen.

But inside the kitchen, the click of the clock on the microwave oven marked the minutes, punctuation in the sentence of silence. Her heart beat loudly in her ears, louder than that inexorable click. She waited.

One minute. Two.

She waited.

For deliverance.

For horror to explode into her house once more.

She waited.

Suddenly, a thump on the open gallery that ran around the house. A rasp against the screen door, a sound light as breath against the window.

Then, once more, silence. Blood thick, heavy against her chilled skin. Heavy and insistent against her tightly closed eyelids, silence pressed down, suffocating her.

A scrape against the sill of the kitchen window.

The sound of something large moving outside on her open gallery.

Her heart banged against her ribs.

Her eyes snapped open. Heat flooded her, and her breath hazed the shiny metal in front of her.

Clutched in her hand, the knife had not changed.

She remembered going to bed earlier, with lights blazing around her. That much was clear. She recalled the quiet of the locked house around her, the dimly lit stairwell opposite her bedroom plunging straight into the belly of the house. She had lain facing that pitchy well, watching its shadows shift into shapes that hovered near her door as her eyes burned and twitched, and night deepened outside her window.

Oh, yes, she remembered staring into the darkness.

Sleep was a demon lover, furling his cape around her, tormenting and taunting, following close on her heels while, terrified, she ran for her life from his dark seduction.

Closing her eyes again, Molly rubbed her cheek against the floor. The tile against her face. Real. The knife in her hand.

That, too, real.

Like images curved and twisted in a fun-house mirror, everything familiar and ordinary was distorted now by the knife in her hand. From a far-off place, she felt the thing vibrating between her fingers like some terrifying dowsing rod that dragged her down to sunless caverns from which she’d never escape.

Wanting to disappear, to wake up in her bedroom with this moment only a disturbing nightmare half remembered in sunlight, Molly drew her knees to her chest, curling tighter into herself. As if they’d acquired a will of their own, though, her fingers gripped the knife even tighter.

Lying there, she grew gradually aware of other sounds—her raspy breathing, the drip of water from the sink faucet, the rain chattering against her shuttered windows.

And, close to her face, the knife rattling against the floor tiles.

That frenzied clatter finally broke her, sent her whimpering and scrabbling across the floor.

Eyes still shut against the monstrous vision in front of her, she edged back to the wall, the knife scraping the ceramic tiles with her movements.

When her hip bumped the corner of the room, she forced herself to open her eyes. With a courage she hadn’t known she had, she made herself observe the instrument of her terror.