Alarmed by the thought, he reached blindly, finding his cell phone on the bedside table. He squinted at the time. No, he’d been right. It was only a few minutes past two in the morning, way too early for Alice to be up and preparing to return to the camp.
He rose from the bed with just as much haste and alarm as that first time, but on this occasion with more certainty that he knew where to find her. The knowledge didn’t quiet his worry any. He switched on a bedside lamp and hauled on some jeans.
He found Alice standing square in the middle of the empty large bedroom suite in the west hall, her fists clamped tight at her sides. Her long toned legs were naked. They looked strangely vulnerable in the bright glow of the overhead chandelier.
Tension coiled tight in his muscles. On that other night when he’d found a disoriented Alice standing in the hallway, she’d claimed to have seen a woman; a woman Dylan knew to have been dead for nearly twenty years. It was as if her long-buried, resurging memories were too foreign for her to process, so they’d leapt into the solid surroundings of her waking world, like a weird unconscious hologram effect. Or at least that’s how Sidney Gates had tried to explain it to Dylan.
It was so hard, not knowing what to expect from her from one moment to the next. He felt like he could only be certain of her when he was making love to her, when she was entirely present in the moment with him, abandoning herself to pleasure.
To him.
“Do you remember who this room belonged to now?” he asked from behind her, his voice echoing off the bare walls of the large, mostly empty suite. She’d accused him of manipulation and lying when she’d realized he’d purposefully kept her from entering this room. That was before he’d told her the truth about her identity.
He was glad when she started slightly and turned her head, meeting his stare. She looked fully alert. Since Alice had come to Castle Durand, there were a few times when she’d go still in his presence, and it’d been like the ghosts of her past flickered in her eyes.
Is that what he was to her? A ghost?
“Was it Addie Durand’s room?” she asked slowly, her low hoarse voice causing his skin to roughen.
His heart knocked against his sternum, even though he knew his appearance remained calm. No matter how hard he was trying—no matter how much he understood—he couldn’t entirely adjust to Alice’s distant, disconnected attitude about Adelaide Durand. It was . . .
Eerie.
He nodded and stepped toward her. “It was originally the nursery, and it had just been remodeled as a bedroom before Addie was taken. Addie’s ‘big girl’ bedroom,” he added with a small smile. “Are you remembering?” he asked her again cautiously.
She shook her head adamantly. Her short dark hair was growing. Her spiky bangs fell into her eyes. She stuck out her bottom lip and blew up on her bangs to clear her vision. The uncontrived, sexy gesture distracted him.
Just like most things about Alice did.
“I don’t remember.”
Despite her quick, firm denial, he wasn’t entirely sure he believed her. “Then why did you come here?”
“I was curious,” she replied, eyebrows arching in response to his quiet challenge.
“And how did you guess this was Addie’s room?”
She shrugged. “You tried to keep me from it. And it’s the best situated in the house, so large and airy . . .” She faded off, glancing around at the ornate crown molding, the bluish-silver-colored silk wallpaper, and the enormous bay window with a built-in curving cushioned bench that looked down on the gardens and the sharp drop-off of the craggy limestone bluff to Lake Michigan. Because it was night, their reflections glowed brightly in the opaque black glass. The room was nearly empty, only a few of his personal items remained from his recent occupancy. “You and Sidney had suggested how the Durands prized Addie so much, always giving her the best,” she continued. “So I guessed the best bedroom suite had belonged to her. And it belonged to you. Alan Durand prized you, as well,” she added, once again meeting his stare squarely.
Slowly, she spun to face him. She wore only the fitted T-shirt she’d worn at the bonfire and a semitransparent pair of white cotton panties. Instinctively, his gaze dropped over her, trailing over her elegantly sloping shoulders, the full thrusting breasts that stood in such erotic contrast to her slender limbs, narrow waist and hips. His gaze lingered between her thighs. Alice dyed the hair on her head to an obscuring near-black color, but her true shade was a dark red-gold, a combination of her father’s blond and her mother’s rich auburn. Despite the tension of the moment, he felt his body flicker with arousal at the vision of the auburn triangle of hair beneath the see-through fabric. There was something about the contrast of Alice’s tough-girl strength and her potent vulnerability that lit a fire in him, something elemental and strong.