His morbid thoughts vanished as he watched the girl ascend the stairs in the distance. What was she doing? Where had she been? He’d specifically asked that the nursing staff remain on Cristina’s level, he thought irritably.
Her figure was so light, her feet were so quick, her tread so silent he might have been catching a glimpse of a fey creature making an escape. He watched her fly up the stairs, her red fairy pack flung over her shoulder. Curiosity and amusement replaced his brief flash of anger. Her back and shoulders were held very stiff and erect, as if to say that although she was fleeing, she was doing so proudly. Defiantly? Silently thumbing her nose at the mortal world?
His stiff mouth softened and flickered at his uncharacteristic fanciful thought.
She wasn’t entirely fairylike. No, he’d recognized her just now from the back—that erect carriage, that enticing, graceful curve that led from a narrow waist to round hips. He hadn’t noticed her today because he’d been overseeing some new equipment installation at his plant in Deerfield, but he’d seen her yesterday on Cristina’s monitor. Just in passing . . . brief glimpses before she’d cheekily opened those curtains.
Emma Shore.
He’d asked Mrs. Shaw for the offender’s name yesterday and recalled it now.
He’d thought her unconventionally pretty before she’d irritated him by yanking open those curtains. Interesting looking. Her golden-blond hair was fairly short and reminded him of the style flappers used to wear, boyish and highlighting the shape of her skull. It suggested a nonconformist spirit—or at least a female who wanted others to think she was different, anyway. It touched her collar in the back while the soft-looking waves in the front ideally framed a delicate, piquant face. He couldn’t tell the color of her eyes on the monitor, but he’d noticed they looked large and dark next to her pale skin and hair. She had a tilt to her chin and a bright smile that went well together. Most people couldn’t pull off brash sweetness, but she did. Somehow. Or at least that had been his quick impression.
He’d certainly thought that her face looked far too young and fresh to go with the lush, ripe firmness of her ass. Her figure was light and supple, the gracefulness of her movement capturing his attention.
Not that he’d been staring. She was just difficult not to notice on the screen, that’s all. Any straight man would have looked twice. Any straight man with good taste would have looked more than that.
He’d follow her now and demand an explanation for her intrusion into his home.
He remained unmoving, however. She’d annoyed him, but her appearance had lightened him somehow as well, freshened him like a lungful of sea air after a night of debauchery.
He stared out at the black lake, lost in thoughts that, for once lately, weren’t bitter and morose.
Chapter Four
At the end of her shift the next night, Emma entered the bedroom to say good-bye to Cristina. Her patient had fallen asleep while Emma gave her report to Debbie, the night nurse. Emma paused next to the bed. Cristina looked even more shrunken than usual, her skin like dry, gray parchment stretched too tight over bone. A hospice nurse’s main goal was to make the last days of her patient’s life as comfortable and fulfilling as possible. Finding out what that meant for Cristina was proving to be a challenge for Emma. She sensed Cristina’s soul was heavy. Shedding that weight—even a little—might help ease her passage from this world.
“Night, Cristina. Sleep easy,” Emma whispered before she turned to leave the hushed room.
“It’s your own fault. You knew what I was capable of and what I wasn’t. You were capable of even less.”
Emma blinked and spun around at the death-rattle voice.
“Cristina?” she whispered, confused to see that her patient hadn’t moved from her sleeping position. She turned to go again after a pause. Cristina was having increasingly disturbed sleep, nightmares, and occasional hallucinations.
“It was too much for me. Not only one, but two! You knew as well as me I wasn’t cut out for it. So you found yourself a martyr. Is it my fault she died? And then you had the nerve to think I’d transform into her overnight and replace her, you bastard!”
Emma started at the venomous shriek. She hurried toward Cristina, who was now jerking and tossing on the bed, her mouth bared in a snarl, arms flailing.
“I’ve got her,” Debbie said, appearing by Emma’s side as Emma gently restrained the swinging arms and spoke in firm, soothing tones, calling Cristina back to the waking world.
“I think she’s okay,” Emma said after a moment when Cristina began to quiet and settle. Still, the invisible threads of her patient’s nightmare seemed to brush against Emma . . . cling to her.
She waited until Cri
stina settled fully into sleep before she walked out of the bedroom and retrieved her purse. She noticed the stack of clean towels on a small table.
The vision triggered the memory of wandering around the house last night, of being trapped in that armoire. Lots of things triggered that memory. Almost everything, in fact, Emma reminded herself grimly as she searched for her keys in her purse. She’d finally escaped from that miserable experience and found her car, the laundry bag still slung over her shoulder like an inexplicable artifact she’d brought from another world.
She’d witnessed a lot of grief in her life, and understood the complexities and paradoxes of loss. Death transformed the living. It changed them, whether they wanted it to or not.
She’d been changed somehow last night, breathing the singular male scent that clung to the garments hung in the armoire, listening to the sounds of sexual excitement ringing in her ears. She’d been altered, but not by death, by something she found far more disturbing. The whole strange incident had upset her in a way she couldn’t name. Something had rocked her comfortable world, and she resented the man—irrationally, she knew—for that earthquake.
She hadn’t wanted Colin to touch her this morning when he’d stopped by before catching his train for work, a fact that bewildered her almost as much as it had Colin. She hadn’t seen him since Saturday night, after all. Sure, their physical relationship had mellowed lately—and it had never been firework explosive since they’d started sleeping together two years ago—but she’d normally be glad to see Colin and eager to express her affection.
As a means of punishing herself for her odd behavior and her inability to shut off her brain in regard to the man at the Breakers and his perversities, she’d sentenced herself to labor. She’d gone to the Laundromat this morning, one of her most hated errands, and finished what she hadn’t last night.
It’d been hard to return to the Breakers today following the “armoire incident,” as she’d taken to calling it in the privacy of her mind. Once she was there, however, burying herself in work helped, like it always did. She hadn’t slept well after she’d returned home last night. As good and exhausted as she was, all she could think about was dreamless, deep sleep, a rest blessedly devoid of the disturbing image of that man—Vanni—locking down his climax as though he thought he didn’t deserve the pleasure.