Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 83912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
Except death, I think, my throat thickening. One minute you’re alive, and the next you’re dead. Death is as simple as it gets. At least for the person it claims. For those of us left behind, it’s complicated, haunting. Mysterious and maybe even dangerous. And death, I have learned, is never done with you until you are gone, too. My mind returns to Nick Rogers and the way he’d known that I was in the window. The way he’d stared up at me and then given me that wave, and every instinct I own tells me that Nick Rogers is a lot like death. He’s not done with me, either.
Chapter Three
Faith
Gasping for air, I sit up in bed, my hand on my throat, my breath heaving from my chest, seconds passing eternally as I will my heart to calm. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe. Just breathe. Finally, I begin to calm, and I scan the room, the heavy drapes that run throughout the family mansion that I grew up in casting it in shadows, while my mind casts the horror that woke me in its own form of darkness. Every image I think I can identify dodges and weaves, then fades just out of reach, like too many other things in my life right now.
Suddenly aware of the perpetual chill of the centuries-old property, a chill impossible to escape seeming to seep deep into my bones, I yank the blanket to my chin, the floral scent of the gardens that my mother loved clinging inescapably to it and to me. I glance toward the heavy antique white nightstand to my right to find the clock: eight a.m., a new dawn long ago rising over the rolling mountaintops hugging this region to illuminate the miles and miles of vineyards surrounding us. It’s also the dawn of my thirtieth birthday, and really, why wouldn’t it start with a nightmare? I’m sleeping in my dead mother’s bed.
It’s an uncomfortable thought, but not an emotional one, a reality that makes me even more uncomfortable. When my father died just two years ago now, I’d cried until I could cry no more, and then did it again. And again. And again. But I’m not crying now. What is wrong with me? I didn’t even cry at the funeral, but I’d been certain that when alone, I would. Now, eight weeks later, there are still no tears. I had my problems with my mother, but it’s not like I don’t grieve for her. I do, but I grieved for her in life as well, and maybe I grieved too much then to grieve now. I just don’t know.
Rolling over, I flip on the light, then hit a remote that turns on the fireplace directly in front of my bed. Sitting up, I stare at the flames as it spurts and sputters to life, but I don’t find the answers I seek there, or anywhere in this room, as I’d hoped when I’d moved from the identical room down the hall to this one. I’d been certain that being here, in the middle of my mother’s personal space, the scent of the gardens she loved clinging to virtually everything, including me, would finally make the tears fall. But no. Days later, and I’m still not crying; I’m having nightmares. And whatever those nightmares are, they always make me wake up angry. So there it is. I do have a feeling I can name. Anger is one of them. I’m not quite sure what that anger is all about, but right now, all I can hear is my mother shouting at me: You’re just like your father. An insult in her book, but there was no truth in it. I was never like my father. I always saw who and what she was, where he only saw the woman he’d loved for thirty years—the same amount of time I’ve been alive.
Throwing off the covers, I rotate, my feet settling on the stepstool that is a necessity to climb down from the bedframe. My gaze lands on Nick Rogers’s business card where I’d left it on the nightstand last night, after spending the minutes before sleep replaying every word, look, and touch with that man. This morning I’m admitting to myself what I had not last night. He woke me up, and because of him, there is at least one other emotion I can feel: lust. If lust is really even considered an emotion, but whatever the case, there is no other word for what charged the air between myself and that man, for what I felt and saw in his eyes when he touched me, but lust. And the more I think about that meeting, the more I know that there wasn’t anything romantic or sweet about our connection. It was dark and jagged. The kind of attraction that’s unforgiving in its demands. The kind of attraction that’s all consuming, proven by the fact that, even now, hours after our encounter, I can still feel his hand on my arm and the sizzle that had burned a path through my body. I can still feel the hum of my body that he, and he alone, created.