Chapter 8
I gasped, my hands coming up instinctively to brace against whatever I had collided with.
My palms pressed against warm fabric—and beneath it, the steady rise and fall of breathing.
His pulse beat beneath my fingers, smooth and insistent.
Proof of life. Proof of all the terrible things a body could be made to surrender.
Dr. Ambrose’s hands gripped my arms, steadying me as I struggled to break free, still half-convinced the thing in the room was reaching for me.
"Miss Reed!" His voice cut through my panic, stripped of everything except the need to anchor me.
I looked up into his face, my breath coming in short pants, and saw shock and concern pulling at his features.
I had no words for the rawness in his eyes.
He looked like a man encountering a creature he had long since stopped believing he might see again, barely resisting the urge to capture that endangered species and never let it go.
"There is—" I said, trying to gesture behind me, to warn him about the woman, the blood, the reaching hands. "She is... there is someone—"
But when I turned to look over my shoulder, the space where the woman had stood was empty. The fire blazed cheerfully, illuminating the room in soft golden light, revealing a perfectly ordinary, albeit beautiful, bedchamber.
There was no woman. No blood. No glowing vines. No reaching hands or that terrible whispered plea for help.
There was nothing.
I stood there, staring at the empty space, my logical mind struggling to reconcile what I had seen with what now remained.
Had I imagined it?
When I looked back at him, his brows furrowed as he searched my face. "What is it?" He paused, tilting his head to one side. "What are you doing in here?"
His hands were still on my arms—warm and real in a way nothing else in that room felt.
We stood frozen like that for a long moment, and I became far too aware of how our bodies remained pressed close to one another.
I noticed now that his dark hair was soaked through, the dampness of it catching the firelight, suggesting he had only just arrived home.
And in the terrible silence between us, I realized I had absolutely no explanation that would justify my reason for being in that room.
I opened my mouth, standing there gaping like some witless fool, desperate for words that refused to come. The brilliance I had always assumed my mind possessed abandoned me in that moment, leaving me with nothing but my thundering heartbeat and rising mortification.
"I thought I saw—" I started, but the words would not form properly. How could I tell him what I had seen when it made no sense even to me, when the evidence of my own eyes suggested I had imagined the entire thing?
I shook my head, trying to recall why I had been searching through the rooms of the manor to start with.
"I was looking for Hawthorne,” I said quickly.
"Hawthorne?" he repeated, his frown deepening with obvious confusion.
His hands fell from my arms, the warmth of his grip taking a moment to fade. He took a step back, putting distance between us, and I felt the absence of him with startling awareness. My limbs trembled without that anchor, my balance suddenly uncertain.
He leaned back against the doorframe, crossing his arms over his chest. His fingers curled inward, knuckles whitening as he held something still by sheer discipline alone.
"I am sorry," I stammered, wringing my hands in the folds of my dress. "The door was unlocked and Agnes said Hawthorne was not feeling well, so I wanted to check on him."
I snapped my mouth closed, breathing deeply through my nose as I tried to step past him. "I will just go."
His hand shot out, gripping my arm to stay me. "Perhaps you should stay and explain to me more thoroughly why you thought Hawthorne would be in my bedchamber."
I stared up at him, eyes wide.
His bedchamber?
He released my arm, and I took an unsteady step back.
"I did not—I mean, I thought—"
"You thought what, Miss Reed?" One dark brow rose as he watched me flounder, the corner of his mouth threatening a shape that never quite arrived.
He stepped closer, leaning toward my ear, his composure slipping beyond his restraint.
His breath cascaded down my neck as he spoke in a low voice that reached through the fabric of my ribbon and reverberated across my skin.
"If you wished to see inside my bedchamber, I assure you, you had only to ask. "
Heat flooded my face. My heart pounded violently against my ribs, every beat following the deep, sensual cadence of his voice.
He pulled back just enough to look at me, the gold flecks in his amber eyes catching the firelight.
His expression shifted at once, there and gone before I could examine it.
The muscle in his jaw jumped, his chest rising and falling with each unsteady breath.
"That is not—" I started, but what could I possibly say that would not make this situation worse than it already was?
"No?" His voice remained low, intimate and dangerous. "Then what were you doing in here, Miss Reed? Truly?"
"I told you." My mouth went dry, making speech difficult. "I thought Hawthorne might be resting here. I did not realize this was your bedchamber. I thought this was your late wife's room."
The confession tumbled, escaping in a breathless rush. I bit my bottom lip, sensing the change in him, the word cresting over him painfully. His eyes narrowed a fraction, and he took a step forward. Instinctively, I took a step back.
"My wife?" he repeated.
My pulse quickened with both fear and anticipation, a bird beating itself against the bars of a cage. I managed a nod, swallowing against the tightness in my throat as he continued forward. I matched it again, step for step, but he maneuvered around me, blocking my escape.
"Yes," I said, unable to keep the words from spilling out of my ridiculous mouth. "I checked all the other rooms first, and Agnes had said you lost your wife... and I just assumed this was her room. That you would not—that you did not—"
"You just assumed that I did not share this room with her?" he replied, cutting me off as he continued to advance with that same measured pace until my back hit the wall.
There was nowhere left to retreat.
My lungs constricted as he stopped directly before me.
He was close enough for me to witness the exact moment his gaze dropped to my lips, then returned to my eyes with great effort.
His hand came up slowly, fingers catching a loose curl that had escaped my pins during my frantic search of the house.
He twisted it around his finger, the intimacy of it making me ache to lean into his touch.
"I suppose I had not thought that through," I replied, my words coming out ridiculous, even to my own ears.
"Indeed," he said, releasing the curl as his fingers glided across my cheek with devastating tenderness. His breath shook from his chest at the contact, and he paused there, as though he had measured something important, decided upon it, and chose to allow himself the moment.
His thumb brushed across my bottom lip, and I fought the sudden, shocking urge to part them and taste salt and flesh—to lean in and press my mouth against the warm hollow of his throat and feel his pulse flutter against my lips.
I could picture it too easily. My teeth breaking the surface, the taste of copper and earth on my tongue as something green and growing wound its way between us.
The sensation sent heat flooding through me, pooling low, and the shameful truth of it was that I did not want to stop thinking about it.
His gaze searched mine for a long moment, eyes dark in the firelight, before dropping to the green velvet ribbon around my throat.
He went very still.
The change was so complete that it banished every other thought. His hand moved away, suspended helplessly near my face. His breath held as his eyes fixed on the ribbon with such raw grief it made my heart twist and burn.
He moved away unexpectedly, putting distance between us that felt far greater than its measure. Without looking at me again or acknowledging what had just passed between us, he turned and stalked to the door.
"Go to bed.”
I moved toward the doorway before he could change his mind, before whatever had held us in that charged moment reasserted itself.
"Miss Reed," he called out.
I turned back, glancing at him over my shoulder.
His back was still partly toward me, his head bowed.
He did not immediately speak, his hands clenching at his sides.
When he finally looked up at me, all traces of the grief and longing I had seen in his face only moments before were shuttered away behind the composed and careful mask I was beginning to understand was the labor of his entire waking life.
"Hawthorne sleeps in the servants' quarters. They are located below the kitchen." The corner of his mouth curved. "In case you still wished to check on him."
I pressed my lips together, feeling foolish, and said nothing as I turned and stepped into the corridor. The door closed behind me with a solid thud that seemed to echo down the entire hallway.
I slumped against the wall opposite his door, breathing deeply, pressing my palms flat against the cool wallpaper.
My skin still burned where he had touched me.
My bottom lip tingled where his thumb had rested, and I found myself pressing my own fingers there, trying to recapture the sensation even as my rational mind insisted I should be horrified by my own response.
What was I doing?
This was my employer. A man still grieving his dead wife—a wife whose ghost I had possibly just seen, whose room I had invaded.
I could not afford these feelings. I did not want these feelings.
I pushed away from the wall and made my way back to my room.
What had I actually seen? Had the woman been real? Had any of it been real? Or was I losing my grip on reality entirely, seeing ghosts where none existed?
When I finally reached my room, I collapsed onto the bed still fully dressed, but sleep refused to come for hours. My mind kept replaying the image of her reaching for me.
What had happened to her?
What did he do to her? My companion offered more quietly.
The thought consumed my mind, the rational part of me refusing to answer as I considered the possibilities.
I rolled over and stared through the window.
Outside, rain continued to fall in rhythmic curtains.
And just down the corridor, Dr. Ambrose was presumably lying in his bed—the same bed he had once shared with his wife.
I wondered if he was finding sleep any easier than I was.
Somehow, I doubted it.
I closed my eyes and drifted into a restless sleep as visions of a woman with a blood-soaked mouth full of vines invaded my dreams.