Ramiro shook his head as he unfastened his seat belt. "That ghost bitch must have been smoking."
"I told you—I didn't see a ghost."
"You saw something that fried your brain, hermano" Ramiro told him pointedly before he slammed the passenger door shut.
Ryan was inclined to agree with Ramiro's parting shot when he turned on the light in the Prairie Avenue bedroom using his elbow. He set down the stuff he'd grabbed from his west-side loft before driving over to the mansion—a portable heater, two insulated sleeping bags that he'd zip together to accommodate his large frame, a pillow and a hastily packed duffle bag filled with camping equipment, clothing and toiletries.
He'd bring a carload of stuff over tomorrow, maybe ask Ramiro's cousin if he could borrow his truck to transport his mattress so he could set up the brass bed.
You've gone off the deep end at about 120 miles an hour, he told himself as he walked across the room, the wood floors creaking loudly beneath his boots. He felt like he'd penetrated the depths of a massive, sentient creature, as if the house itself was alive around him and regarding his intrusion with cold skepticism and a hint of amusement.
For the life of him he wouldn't have been able to say when he'd made the decision to move, at least temporarily, into the mansion.
He only knew for a fact that he wouldn't have been able to sleep in his familiar bed in his loft tonight. Thoughts of this house—of that woman in the peekaboo nightgown—would have hounded him . . . haunted him, until he'd finally risen from his mussed bed, dressed and driven over here at some ungodly hour of the morning.
Might as well do the inevitable right off the bat, Ryan thought grimly.
Once he'd turned the heater to a high setting, unrolled the sleeping bags, zipped them together and cleaned up in the antiquated but functional bathroom down the hall, Ryan stripped down to his boxer briefs. He retrieved the leather-bound book of sonnets from the drawer in the table where he'd left it earlier and started to head over to his sleeping bag.
Something caught his eye.
A portion of the mahogany mantel protruded forward an inch at chest level. It wasn't hugely obvious, but Ryan thought he would have noticed it when he and Ramiro were there earlier, considering how he'd touched and admired the workmanship of the carved wood. He pulled on the section of wood gently and then with more force, but it didn't budge. He stopped when he realized the only thing he was going to succeed in doing was ripping the beautiful mantel apart.
The piece of wood snapped forward another inch. The skin on the back of Ryan's neck prickled and roughened. It was as if someone had just pushed an invisible button and sprung the release.
He pulled, revealing a nine-by-nine-by-nine-inch compartment— like a drawer that had been installed into the woodwork. He reached inside and withdrew several aged black-and-white photographs. After a tense few seconds of staring at the first one, he went over to his sleeping bag and flipped on the battery-operated lamp he'd brought along for reading. He shuffled through the photos—seven in all—slowly. When he'd seen them all, he studied each one again.
And then again.
What he was looking at was a prime example of Victorian-era erotic photography—images of a bound, dark-haired beauty and a big, muscular man in various arousing stages of a session of mild BDSM sex.
Ryan lowered his head to better examine the woman's face in one photo. The man's hand was on the nape of her neck, appearing to hold her head down on the mattress of the bed while he knelt behind her. Her eyes were closed, but every nuance and angle of her face reflected a sense of profound, intense arousal.
He moaned harshly, his hand jerking up to his crotch to alleviate the painful stab of lust that shot through his cock like a sizzling bolt of lightning.
It wasn't just the nearly tangible ecstasy on the woman's face while the man thrust into her. No, it wasn't only that that made Ryan hard enough to pound nails with his erection.
Nor was it just the arousing photo of her mouth open in a silent scream of pleasure while the man's face was buried between her slender thighs or the image of her restrained to the bed while her lover used a crop on her full, shapely breasts.
The thing that had him jerking his cock out of his boxer briefs and pumping himself like a madman was the fact that the woman being sexually dominated and pleasured in those pictures was the same woman he'd seen in the mirror.
The same woman who—if he allowed himself to examine the issue for even a split second—was the sole reason he'd come here tonight to sleep in this cold, hulking, rattling skeleton of a house. Seeing her in that mirror had made the blood simmer in his veins.
But seeing unmasked desire on her beautiful face made him burn at the center of a raging, white-hot fire.
TWO
His portable alarm clock went off at seven a.m. Ryan stuck his head up and looked blurrily around the sunlight-filled Prairie Avenue mansion bedroom before he hit the snooze button on the alarm clock and buried his face back in the pillow.
He groggily recalled how he'd jacked off not once last night, but three times in a shockingly short period of time thanks to the volatile fuel of those erotic photos. Now that morning was here, it struck him as amusing that he'd gotten as horny as a teenage boy over photographs of a woman who'd likely been dead for the greater part of a century.
He scowled at the thought, turning his head on the pillow, willing the warm, enticing embrace of sleep to enfold him once again. He heard the heater blowing out its hot air and the sound of a car backfiring on a far-distant city street. Ramiro was going to be as pissed and mouthy as a shortchanged whore if Ryan wasn't ready when he arrived.
He was weighing the consequences of sleeping in and leaning toward getting up rather than endure Ramiro's complaints when a floorboard not
five feet behind his back creaked, as though someone had just placed a cautious foot on it and then paused at the subsequent sound. The hairs on his arms rose and prickled.
For some reason instead of springing up out his warm cocoon and lunging for his gun, like he logically should have, he remained still, his breath frozen in his lungs.