These Haunted Hearts: A Regency Ghost Story Read online

  “Trust me, Calista,” he said again and pressed into her body.

  However much she wanted this, the experience was odd, disagreeable. She tensed against the invasion. He felt impossibly big, as though he’d tear her in two if he continued.

  He kissed her deeply, hungrily. For a fleeting moment, she forgot that seeking pressure between her legs in the hot delight of his mouth exploring hers. She whimpered a protest when he raised his head to stare down at her through the shadows.

  “I want you, Calista. I want you as I’ve never wanted another woman.” His voice was raw with sincerity.

  In this precise moment, she had no doubt that he was hers completely, whatever challenges the world flung at them in the future. That flash of perception gave her the courage to tilt up toward him. “I want you, Miles. Don’t stop.”

  He made a low sound of satisfaction, but still he was gentle as he inched further inside her. Gradually she became accustomed to his size and weight. Then just as she wondered if perhaps there was hope of pleasure, he moved more purposefully.

  The sharp, sudden pain made her cry out. She muffled her distress against the damp skin of his shoulder. She dug her fingernails deep into his back as her body tensed for more discomfort.

  For a long lightless interval, he remained motionless, his body joined to hers. She felt him drag each breath into his lungs. She felt each ripple of muscle as he adjusted infinitesimally to fit himself to her.

  Slowly the searing pain subsided, leaving in its place a sense of unbreakable intimacy. Tonight she and Miles made vows with their bodies that they would repeat much less powerfully with words tomorrow before the vicar.

  As if sensing her body’s acceptance of his possession, he began to move with luxurious enjoyment. All her love for him focused on this overtly physical act, this union, this gift they both shared. The sweetness extended beyond anything she’d ever imagined.

  She closed her eyes and gave herself up to the rising tide of joy. The rhythm built until it pounded at the doors of heaven, carrying her toward paradise on a surge of unearthly sensation. At the height of her pleasure, she broke through into a place of dazzling brilliance. On a soft cry of rapture, she clenched around him, claiming him as hers, come what may.

  As she floated softly down from the golden realms, held safe in Miles’s arms, Calista basked in a peace unlike anything she’d ever known.

  Chapter Four

  HE’D MURDERED ISABELLA?

  Josiah staggered back to escape the preposterous accusation. Appalled denial kept him silent as he stared aghast at Isabella. But even while everything in him rejected what she’d said, the day’s confusing hints about his wicked reputation and his woeful fate slammed into him. Over and over. Until he wanted to scream “enough!”

  “No.” The word emerged as a croak.

  The unwavering certainty in Isabella’s eyes. The certainty combined with fear in a woman who would have faced down the devil without flinching. These, these almost convinced him.

  Almost…

  He could never have killed her. Never. Never. Never.

  Nothing she did would stir him to violence. There must be some mistake, some misunderstanding. He clung to that one waning hope while all other hope drained away.

  Like biting down on a cracked tooth, he tested the truth of her assertion against what he knew of himself. If he’d killed her, he’d feel it in his bones, in his blood.

  No, on his honor, no.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said, still in that artificial voice that didn’t sound like the man who had sworn to Isabella that he loved her and he’d devote the rest of his life to her happiness.

  “Don’t you remember?” She regarded him with horror, as if the repudiation of his crime was worse than the act itself.

  “I don’t remember because there’s nothing to remember.” In his desperation, he rushed toward her, but came up short when she cringed against the railing.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  The loathing in her voice made him feel ill. He spread his hands in a gesture of nonaggression and stepped back. “As you pointed out, I can’t hurt you now,” he said with a hint of snap. “You and I are beyond the reach of physical injury.”

  Her delicate features were drawn and her great dark eyes glittered with wariness. “I don’t…I don’t want to see you. Can’t you go back to where you came from?”

  “My love—”

  “Don’t call me that,” she demanded with a trace of her old imperiousness. He was mightily glad to see something remained of his Isabella, apart from this timorous girl.

  “Why not?” He drew himself to his full height and matched her hauteur. “That’s what you are. Seventy years haven’t changed how I love you. An eternity won’t change that.”

  “You don’t love me,” she said sulkily, wrapping her arms around herself in a protective gesture that made him want to smash something. “If you loved me, you wouldn’t have killed me.”

  He stifled the urge to rage, to tell her that she knew him better than this. Temper wouldn’t bring them through this mess. Isabella still looked like she might flee at the slightest sign of danger from him.

  From him? The thought beggared belief.

  Josiah struggled to keep his voice steady. “Tell me what you remember.”

  She straightened and cast him a disdainful look familiar from life. She’d always been haughty and headstrong. “Surely you know.”

  He’d always liked that his beloved was no pliable reed, but a woman ready to battle him head-on for what she wanted. Right now, damn it, her stubbornness operated against him and he wasn’t nearly so pleased with her strength.

  Josiah slumped against the wall, folding his arms to stop himself reaching for her. It was torture to be so close without touching. “Humor me.”

  She cast him an unimpressed glance under her thick sweep of black lashes. It was a look that had never failed to make him want her. The effect remained as powerful on the other side of the mortal divide.

  “You act as if I owe you answers. I owe you nothing.”

  He stared into her beautiful face and knew in every cell of his body that he couldn’t have killed her. There had to be some mistake. He sighed and chanced honesty. “All of this just seems so absurd. That you could credit I’d do you harm, when you know I’d give up the hope of heaven for your sake.”

  The brief flicker of amusement, black as it was, was the first sign of softening in her manner. “I’d suggest that our presence here indicates we’ve both given up our hope of heaven.”

  “The last thing I remember is stealing you away from the wedding breakfast,” he said evenly, not fool enough to find too much encouragement in the faint thaw. At least with every second that passed, she looked less likely to take to her heels.

  “And then you murdered me.”

  “Just like that?” He arched his eyebrows in unconcealed skepticism. “I went straight from kissing you in the hall to pricking you with my pocket knife? Or did I come into possession of a loaded pistol somewhere between vowing a lifetime’s devotion and getting you into bed?”

  “You have no right to mock me.” Anger sparked in her black eyes. The push and pull between them was familiar, no matter how much time had passed. Although the ridiculous truth was that he felt like he’d only seen Isabella yesterday, when they were both alive and blissfully in love.

  He shook his head in bewilderment. “It seems so unreal, sweeting. That we’re dead and at Marston Hall and it’s seventy years since I held you in my arms. And that you imagine I killed you.”

  “You did kill me,” she said sullenly, stepping back into the room from the landing with a graceful sway of her wide skirts. His heart lurched with dizzying relief that at least she stayed. “Now you think it’s funny.”

  “Anything but.” His tone was cool, and he didn’t make the mistake of interpreting her approach as an invitation to touch her.

  What would it be like to touch her? Could he even touch her? He could touch inanimate objects, but what about someone formed from the same indefinable material that he now was?

  “You pushed me down the stairs in a fit of jealous rage.” She spoke as though her impossible statement ended all argument between them.

  Shock held him motionless. Could he have done that? Could he have done that and forgotten?

  Their courtship hadn’t been undiluted harmony. He’d loved her to distraction and she, knowing that, hadn’t been above teasing him. From the first, he’d been unsure of her chastity. Talk had been rife about what liberties she’d permitted her previous suitors. Even so, he couldn’t imagine killing her. Isabella could lie under every man in the Royal Navy and Josiah would still want her.

  With difficulty, he kept his voice even. “Why? Had you betrayed me?”

  She didn’t meet his eyes. “Of course not. I loved you.”

  “And I love you.” Foreboding filled him. Her unease was visible. Nor did he miss the significance of the past tense in her statement. “Whatever you did, my beloved, I wouldn’t hurt you.”

  “Stop it, stop it, stop it!” She raised her hands to her ears and turned away in a fury. “I told you what happened. Now go away and never come near me again.”

  Her distress lashed at his heart, convincing him further that he could never injure her. “Isabella, tell me what you remember, not what you’ve heard a string of confounded gossiping fools say in this house.”

  Her shoulders trembled. Damn it, he’d made her cry. His voice softened and he fought the urge to take her in his arms and reassure her. She was no longer the terrified cypher who had discovered him in the east tower, but he knew she’d scarper if he pushed her too far. “Sweetest love, tell me.”

  She turned. “I—”

  She r
aised a shaking hand to her lips as though afraid to say the words. But when she spoke, her voice was surprisingly steady, for all that her cheeks glistened with tears. “I was on the landing at the top of the grand staircase above the great hall. All the wedding guests were shouting and crowding around something on the floor. I bent over the banister to see and realized that it was my body. Lying on the tiles. I…I tried to say something, to tell them that I wasn’t dead at all, I was here alive. But even though I cried and screamed and pleaded, nobody paid a moment’s attention. Then my father gathered the men and they rushed upstairs and grabbed you. The family story is that you were hauled out of the Chinese bed, but that’s not true. You were standing next to me looking down into the hall. I tried to call out to you, but you didn’t hear me either.”

  Josiah frowned. “Do you remember me pushing you?”

  Reluctantly she shook her head. “No. But everyone says you did and that was the law’s verdict. My father had you carried off to London in shackles. You were tried in the House of Lords. Then they hanged you. You never said a word in your defense.”

  Her matter-of-fact tone confirmed her unshakable faith in what she said. He felt like all the blood drained from his body. Which was lunatic. He had neither blood nor body.

  Dear God, what an awful fate. For anyone. Perhaps it was a mercy he remembered nothing. His silence at his trial was a damning detail.

  She was still speaking. “After that, they closed up Marston Hall and dismantled the bed, saying it brought bad luck. I’ve been here alone for seventy years, barring the few servants who acted as caretakers.” In spite of the misery in her face, her lips twisted in a wry smile. “You’d think, given I was the innocent party, I’d waft up to heaven and you’d linger to expiate your sins down here. Where have you been?”

  There was so much he wanted to say, so much he wanted to disagree with in her dramatic story. But his resistance to what she’d told him was purely emotional. He had no facts to go on. Nothing she said had stirred a shred of memory in him. His history remained a blank from the moment when as the happiest man in the world, he’d swept Isabella into his arms.

  He forced himself to answer, although where he’d been was one of the least important issues between them. “I don’t know. I woke up in the Chinese bed last night. I remember marrying you, then kissing you behind the vase, then carrying you up the stairs. That was almost seventy years ago with nothing in between.”

  “There’s a wedding in this house in the morning. Perhaps that conjured you from hell.”

  He wished she sounded like she was joking. “I don’t think I’ve been in hell. Or if I have, I don’t recall it. It’s like no time has passed since we wed. When I woke up, I thought I was still alive. That you were still my wife.”

  Her lips twisted in another bleak smile. “I suppose I still am. Although we vowed to stay together till death us do part, and death did indeed part us. It’s quite a conundrum. One for the ecclesiastical courts, I’m sure.”

  It was his turn to find her mockery grating. How could she accept so unquestioningly that he’d murdered her? When she’d known how steadfastly he’d loved her.

  But then she’d had nearly seven decades to come to terms with what had happened. He’d only been extant for one bewildering day.

  “Don’t,” he couldn’t help saying.

  She shot him a hostile glance. “Perhaps your spirit is attached in some way to the bed. The thing’s been in pieces in the cellar since they shut the house. They only finished reassembling it yesterday.”

  The theory made as much sense as anything else in this topsy-turvy world. So many mysteries. So many puzzles. But just one was important. Had he killed this vivid woman he adored?

  He forced himself to ask the question. “If you don’t remember, how can you be sure?”

  Her eyes remained guarded. It hurt him to think how openly she’d once trusted him. “I’ve had plenty of time to listen to the people at the hall talk about what happened. We quarreled in the Chinese bedroom. The servants heard us.”

  Their wooing had been a tempestuous affair, marked by passionate clashes and even more passionate reconciliations. “We were always quarreling. That was nothing new.”

  She shrugged, although he didn’t find her nonchalance convincing. “This time, your rage attained such a pitch that you shoved me down the stairs.”

  It could make sense, he supposed, with another man and another woman. But still the story seemed wrong. Yet what did he have to place in opposition to what had been accepted for nearly seventy years? Isabella believed he’d killed her. Family history confirmed he’d killed her. What did the revulsion in his soul matter compared to all these hard facts?

  “I cannot believe it. I will not believe it,” he said in a flat voice, even as cruel reality beat at him, insisted he accept the completely unacceptable.

  She regarded him sadly and for once he saw past her anger to her desolation. “No, you don’t want to believe it. Neither did I.” She paused. “But you will, over time. Anything is possible over time.”

  When she slipped out of the room and left him alone, he didn’t have the heart to stop her.

  Chapter Five

  CALISTA OPENED HER eyes. She lay naked atop the lavishly embroidered counterpane of the Chinese bed. The room was still dark. If she’d slept after discovering such astonishing pleasure in Miles’s arms, it hadn’t been for long.

  Wincing, she shifted carefully. Her body ached with unfamiliar twinges. But what did fleeting discomfort matter now that Miles had opened a blissful new world to her?

  Miles slept at her side, curled around her as if he couldn’t bear to let her go, even in sleep. Inside this closed room, she was overwhelmingly conscious of the pervasive scents of sex and sated male.

  As she stared up into the darkness, she wondered if she could endure such happiness. If she could endure the possibility of losing such happiness.

  Better to die now…

  Puzzled, she frowned. What had prompted that bleak thought?

  Reaching her peak in Miles’s embrace, she’d finally accepted that she’d been wrong to give her fears such a hold over her. She and Miles were meant to be together. When his body had thundered into hers, she’d believed that she’d never doubt his love again.

  Except that those words that dragged her back toward the quicksand of doubt weren’t just in her mind. Someone had spoken to her. In a low, insinuating tone that made her skin prickle. She wasn’t sure whether it was man or woman. The unidentified voice was low and infinitely noxious.

  No. No, this couldn’t be happening. It was impossible. Calista Aston was a devotee of scientific process. She didn’t believe in disembodied voices or curses or spirits.

  Except that she’d heard that horrible voice most distinctly.

  When she stared up at the tester, she saw two tiny pinpoints of bright red above her. Two tiny pinpoints of red that focused on her in a way that both frightened and fascinated her.

  With a shiver, Calista realized that the lights emanated from that same malevolent face she’d noticed this afternoon. The wrinkled, gleeful face that had mocked her fragile hopes of finding happiness in marriage.

  The red eyes glared back at her, filled with fiendish intelligence.

  Perhaps she was dreaming. Dreams could seem so real, couldn’t they? And even after such rapture, the pressures of the last days might add a grim tenor to her fantasies.

  Everything in the room remained black and silent. She told herself this must be a dream. But she was too aware of Miles beside her, the possessive weight of his arm across her breasts, the soft sigh of his breathing, the heat of his body pressed to her side.

  Fear tightened her belly and tasted sour on her lips. She was undoubtedly awake.

  And unable to break the hold those two burning red eyes exerted. Transfixed, she stared upward. The eyes pierced her to the soul. Her weak, frightened, imperfect soul. The eyes saw all her faults and inadequacies. All her unrequited longing for Miles to love her forever.

  Just as they had earlier, the eyes derided her futile yearning. They knew her wishes would never come true.