Chapter 3
Chapter Three
As gracefully as a gazelle, the woman surged to her feet, snatched the towel, and leapt from the bath to retreat as far away from him as possible.
John was almost too shocked to much lament the fact that she wrapped her torso in the towel and clutched it to her clavicles, protecting most of her lovely figure from view.
He looked down at his hand, pleased to note that it had become visible, or at least the transparent shadow of it, a flesh-colored outline through which he could see the floor beneath, interrupted only by the cuff of his crimson regimental jacket.
“Holy Moses,” she gasped, breathing as if she’d run apace. Enough of her skin was still visible to notice that she rippled with tiny goosebumps. “You’re a—shade. A man. A…”
“A ghost?” he politely finished for her.
She blanched unbelievably whiter, pressing a hand to her forehead as if to check for a fever. Apparently not finding one, she lowered her palm, unveiling a wrinkle of bemusement.
“You’re not Carrie,” she accused, her diction slow and uncertain.
“An astute observation,” he answered wryly.
“Did you know her?”
“Know her?” He found the question odd and out of place.
“You’re in her bedroom. Did you haunt her?” Brows lifting impossibly higher, her gaze shifted to the cobalt coverlet on the bed, and the spider-web thin lace of the curtains, no doubt making certain scandalized assumptions.
He opened his mouth to dispel them, but what came out was, “What year is it?”
She blinked back at him in mute confusion. Her eyes all but crossed and uncrossed as she looked at him, and then through him, and then at him again. “You’re English,” she said rather distantly. “But here…haunting the Highlands. Why?”
John drifted around the basin toward her. “Pay attention, woman, what bloody year is it?”
She swallowed, retreating from the bed and inching around the basin to keep it between them. “It’s eighteen ninety-one.”
He froze as his calculations astonished him. “I’ve been asleep for thirty-five years this time.”
“My,” she breathed, bending down to retrieve her undergarments from the edge of the tub as she backed toward the fire. “You must have been awfully knackered.”
He scowled at her, not understanding the word. “You’re quite calm for a woman being haunted. Why are you not running out of here, screaming for help at the top of your lungs?”
She seemed to consider his question carefully, letting go of one side of the towel as she tapped her chin in a contemplative posture. The towel slipped down her chest a little, and John felt his composure slip right along with it.
“For one, I’m not dressed. And for another, Bess warned me I’d spend the night with a ghost. I suppose it was my erroneous assumption that apparition would be female.”
He allowed her to keep the basin between them, even though he could have passed right through it and not even disturbed the water.
Not yet.
“I do apologize if I frightened you, miss,” he felt compelled to say. “Let me assure you I am a mostly harmless ghost.”
“That’s a relief to hear. Though I’ll admit I was more startled than frightened…almost.”
His scowl suddenly felt more like a pout, which irked him in the extreme.
“I’ll have you know, the mention of my very name has struck terror in the hearts of entire regiments.
And you expect me to believe you are so bold as to be fearless?
I am a bloody apparition after all. You’re not even having a mild crisis of nerves? ”
“I’m sure you were very terrifying, sir,” she obligingly rushed to soothe his ego, which helped not at all. “But I’ll admit I’m rather too elated to be scared.”
“Elated?” He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Was the woman mad?
She nodded, her lips breaking into a broad smile, her slim shoulder lifting in an attractive and apologetic shrug.
“I’ve always believed in ghosts, and I’ve never been lucky enough to meet one.
I have so many questions. I could cheerfully murder myself for leaving my notebook back at the carriage.
” She said this as a muttered afterthought before looking up at him with a winsome smile.
“Do you mind, awfully, turning around so I can dress?”
“I don’t see the point,” he challenged, crossing his arms over his chest and lifting a suggestive brow. “You act as though I haven’t been here the entire time…watching you.”
“How dare you?” she gasped in outrage, her notice flying to the bathtub as if it’d just dawned on her that he could have been present without her knowledge. Her color heightened as a comely blush crept up her chest and neck from below the towel.
He was coming to hate that bloody towel.
John bristled, but only because guilt pricked at him. “I dare because I’m dead and have been imprisoned in this godforsaken structure since before your grandparents were born, no doubt. What have I to do but observe the goings-on here? Most people are none the wiser.”
Her eyes widened as she, no doubt, imagined what he’d borne witness to in so long a time.
“That isn’t excuse for your ghastly behavior!
You are—were—a Lieutenant Colonel?” She raked her eyes over his form, a few more colors of his crimson regimentals lit by the fire at her back.
“This is conduct unbecoming an officer, I say.”
“Take it up with my superiors, then,” he snorted, leaning in her direction with eyes narrowed until he willed himself to disappear.
“Wait!” Her panicked quicksilver gaze scanned the emptiness, hopping right over him. “Come back,” she pleaded. “I’m sorry. I won’t scold you. I promise. I was just—”
He reappeared paces closer to her, standing on her side of the basin now.
She made a little squeak as he did, hopping back as close to the fire as she could get.
An inconvenient conscience needled him again. He was behaving badly, but a century of isolation tended to strip a man of his manners. “Tell me. Would you have behaved differently were our places reversed? Would you have looked away? Maintained my modesty, my privacy?”
Her gaze traveled down the length of him, and a very masculine sense of victory burned through his veins when he spied the glimmer of appreciation as it dashed across her features. An acute awareness of their proximity. Of his proportions in contrast to hers.
She was a woman.
He was a man.
They were alone in a room together with very little clothing between them.
And if he were naked, the warmth in her gaze told him she would drink in the sight of his body.
Just as he had.
“I cannot say what I would do in your case,” she admitted, her voice lower, huskier. “But if you asked nicely, I would turn around.”
He could refuse. What would she do then? But even as the thought flickered through him, so did another indisputable fact. One hundred and fifty years later, he was still a nobleman, one tasked to uphold honor.
And she was a lady deserving of his respect and deference.
Goddammit.
He bloody turned around.
The rustles of her unseen actions intrigued and tempted him, but he clenched his fists and forced himself to stay right where he was.
“I’m Miss Vanessa Latimer.”
He heard the towel hit the ground and this time was able to bite into his fist. Death, it seemed, did not diminish desire.
“Johnathan de Lohr,” he finally gritted out. “Earl of Worchester and Hereford.”
“I don’t think so,” she laughed over the sound of her belt buckling.
“Do you presume to tell me I don’t know my own name?” he asked crossly.
“Not at all, but I’ve been introduced to Johnathan de Lohr, Earl of Worchester at the Countess of Bainbridge’s ball a few years past, and have it on good authority that he’s very much alive. Also, the de Lohrs lost the Hereford title sometime in the eighteenth century.”
He frowned, bloody irked by the entire business. “And how would you know that?”
Her rueful sound vibrated through the dimness. “My mother always wanted me to marry a peer, so I’ve studied Burke’s more than the Bible, the encyclopedia, and most literature combined. More’s the pity. I find it tedious in the extreme.”
Hope leapt into his chest. News of his kinsmen never traveled to this place, and he always wondered about the fate of his family. “Tell me about him? About the Earl.”
“Well…” She drew the word out as if it helped her retrieve a memory.
“He’s attractive but not in that charming, handsome way of most gentlemen.
More like brutally well-built. Tall and wide, golden haired like a lion.
His hand was warm and strong when we were introduced.
And his eyes…his eyes were…” She drifted off, though the little sounds of friction and fabric told him she still dressed herself.
“Blue?” he prompted after the silence had become untenable. De Lohr eyes were almost invariably blue.
“Yes. But I was going to say empty.”
“Empty?” he echoed.
She made a melancholy little sound. “He stared at me for a long time, and I could sense no light behind the eyes. They were cold and hollow as a hellmouth, I’m afraid.
” She seemed to shake herself, her voice losing the dreamy huskiness and regaining some of the crisp starch his countrywomen were famous for.
“But worry not, he’s possessed of an impeccable reputation and an obscene fortune, so you should be proud of your legacy, all things considered… When were you the Earl, my lord?”
“Please, call me John,” he requested. “I’ve technically no title now; I died during the Jacobite rebellion of seventeen forty-five. My brother, James, became the Earl after I perished at the battle of Culloden.”
“You had no heir?”
A bleak and familiar ache opened in his chest. A void that existed whenever he thought of the life he didn’t have the chance to live. “I had no wife.”