She was tired of being careful. Tired of being alone. “I’m sure.”
He let out a possessive growl and kissed her harder. Then he cursed and pulled away. “Damn.”
She felt cold after being in his arms. He wasn’t getting undressed.
He sighed, a sound of disgust.
“You don’t want me?”
“Damn straight I want you, but you’ve had a hell of a shock.”
“You’re afraid I’m just caught up in my emotions.”
“Are you?” He sounded uncertain.
“I don’t think so.” But her voice sounded as uncertain as his had.
He put a hand on either side of her face and whispered, “You are going to come to my bed, but I want you to know exactly what you’re doing when it happens.” He pulled her into his arms and held her for a moment. She could feel the indecision and frustration running through him. In that moment, whatever it was that she felt for him grew, and she knew she could easily fall in love with him.
He leaned back and brushed the hair off her face. His fingers weren’t soft, but they were surprisingly gentle. “You need rest.”
“I know.”
“Are you going back to your room now?” He still looked like he half regretted his chivalrous actions.
“I think I’ll sleep here and see if I get any more answers.”
“Want company?” He said it without a leer, without a smile, and she knew that he would have lain next to her, even held her, and not asked for anything more. Jake Stone was a man of many sides.
“Thank you, but I’ll be fine.” And Jake was probably right about her being emotional, because suddenly she felt too tired to move, much less make love.
One of the guards appeared at the door with a message from Nathan to call him. They had apparently linked with a satellite that enabled cell phone reception at the castle.
“I’ll call him,” Jake said. “You rest.”
The guard gave Kendall and Jake a strange look before he left. Jake followed him. Kendall slipped off her shoes and lay down on the bed where she had been born. Sleep was impossible. The vision replayed over and over in her head, and when it stopped, she tossed and turned, trying to put together the pieces of her past. Her father had told her that her mother died when she was young. She knew it had been when she was very young. She hadn’t realized it had been in childbirth. Why hadn’t he told her?
For God’s sake, Kendall. She died giving birth to you. He was probably worried that you’d think it was your fault she died. Wasn’t it?
Now she was burning to know more… who her mother was, where she lived, how she’d met her father, if there was a family out there she didn’t know. Why someone had tried to kill her.
When Kendall finally fell asleep, her dreams were just as confusing as her thoughts. Images of the bloody childbirth and her father. Then she dreamed about the plane crash that had killed her father, Adam, and Uncle John. She hadn’t been there, but she’d imagined it in her dreams a million times. Or seen it. She didn’t know. But it seemed so real, she felt the heat of the flames. When she woke, she felt as if she were on fire.
She sat up, heart thudding so hard the bed seemed to shake. Then she saw that she wasn’t alone. Someone stood at the foot of the bed. “Jake?” Had he come to check on her? When her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw the robe. The ghost was back. This time he stood looking at the desk where she’d found the hidden letter. His hands were folded in front of him. He looked up and she saw his profile, and she knew why he’d seemed familiar. Why he was attached to this room. Why she had needed to be there in the chapel to protect Jake and Nathan from being killed when Edward died.
The ghost was her father.
“Daddy.”
He turned and looked at her. She saw a faint hint of her father’s eyes, his strong nose and angled cheekbones, his mouth set tight in concentration as it had been when he studied his latest find. There was an intensity about him when he was focused on his work, but that intensity could just as easily turn to a smile whenever she was near.
He moved closer to the bed, staring at Kendall. But she knew he wasn’t looking at her. He was seeing the bloody bed where his lover had died. Her hands reached out for him, but he turned and walked into the same wall he had vanished through the last time.
Kendall threw back the covers and slipped on her Nikes. She grabbed her flashlight and pressed the catch in the wall that opened to the secret passageway. “Wait,” she called. She glimpsed his robes and scrambled to keep up. He followed the same path as before, and she wondered if he even knew she was there or was just repeating the same pattern over and over. She stepped out of the tree that connected the secret passageway and the graveyard.
It took her a few seconds to find him. He stood outside the fence near the two square stones where she’d seen him on her first visit to the castle. He stayed longer this time, staring down at the stones. It wasn’t until she had stepped within reach of the gravestones that he faded away. Was he trying to tell her something? Was it possible that the Fountain of Youth was hidden here? Hiding treasure in graves and tombs was common in many civilizations. Was her father’s spirit still trying to help her find relics, just like the two of them had done when she was a kid? Or was this just a memory she had glimpsed?
Kendall looked at the two lonely graves. She assumed they were graves. There weren’t any markings on the stones, but she had sensed a funeral procession when she touched one of the stones the last time she was here. It would make sense if his body had been buried here, but it couldn’t be her father’s grave. There hadn’t been a body to bury. None of the bodies from the crash had been found. Her father, Adam, Uncle John.
The authorities had told Aunt Edna that the flames would have destroyed everything but the bones, which wild animals must have carried off. The crash had occurred on a private airstrip in a wooded, isolated area in Italy, and the wreckage hadn’t been discovered for three days. Kendall had searched for the records as an adult, needing to see the place herself, but she couldn’t find any mention of a specific location of the crash. Aunt Edna claimed she’d forgotten, but Kendall suspected she was trying to protect her. Her aunt had seen how devastated Kendall had been as a child. The grief she’d suffered. Aunt Edna had put up a memorial in a cemetery within walking distance to her house so that Kendall could visit whenever she missed her father. She had gone there often, leaning against the headstone, knowing he wasn’t there, wondering why she had lived when everyone she loved had died.
A few times, Aunt Edna had driven her to the graveyard in Great Falls, where Adam and his father were memorialized. Kendall had sat by Adam’s empty grave and talked to him, pretending he could hear her.
Graves, sometimes she hated them. Kendall looked down at the headstones at her feet. They could have been here a thousand years, or a dozen. She slowly put one hand on each of them and waited to see if anything came. She felt a suffocating sense of sadness and loss, and glimpsed a cloudy image of a woman’s face ravaged by pain and grief. The same woman in the tower bed. Kendall knew then it wasn’t just the woman’s sadness and loss she felt. It was her own. This was her mother’s grave. Had her father buried her there? He must have. And the other grave, who was buried in it? A thought struck her, so alarming she gasped, but something moved closer to the castle, and she hurried to see if it was her father’s ghost or just one of the guards.
She followed the movement and saw the garden with the maze where Jake had first gone with Raphael, scouting out a way to get inside the castle. She’d never had a chance to explore here. The place looked haunted in the moonlight. A perfect place for a ghost. Topiaries stood at the entrance of the garden. A vine-covered wall surrounded it, isolating it from the rest of the castle grounds. There were a variety of trees and bushes, and a fountain stood near the maze, like the one in the entrance of the castle. Fountain? It couldn’t be that simple. Moonlight reflected off the water spouting from the fountain and falling into the pond at the base. It was stone, old, like everything here. Kendall dipped her finger in the water and touched the stone.