Forever and Always Read online

  I leaned my head against his shoulder and Linc put his arm around me as though I were his sister. Part of me was glad that his rampant sexual desire had been temporarily sated, but part of me missed the way he’d looked at me with red-hot lust.

  We stayed like that for a few moments, then Linc moved to fish a piece of paper out of his pocket. It was his list of things Devlin had said we needed to do.

  “We gave the slaves what they want,” Linc said, “but now they’re gone so how do we ask them anything?”

  I didn’t want to move, didn’t want to think. I wanted to stay with my head against Linc’s shoulder and feel the warmth of a human male next to me. If I closed my eyes and concentrated, maybe, for one second, I could believe that Linc was Adam.

  “You don’t have to have dark skin to be enslaved,” I said, thinking about Adam and Bo—and myself. We didn’t have a racial history of slavery but we were enslaved.

  In the next moment, my eyes flew open and I saw that Linc was staring at me—and his thoughts were clear. Maybe all the dark slaves were gone but there’d been another slave in that house.

  “Amelia,” Linc whispered.

  “Amelia,” I answered.

  Linc

  Chapter Fourteen

  WE WERE GOING TO TALK TO A GHOST!

  I like to think I’m a courageous person, but I followed Darci with such reluctance that I couldn’t keep up with her short legs.

  I had to work hard not to think Darci was the strangest person on earth, and for the thousandth time I wondered how her husband had dealt with her.

  Last night had to be the strangest yet. Darci had gone crazy over some crystal ball so, like the gentleman I am, I said I’d help her get it. I risked my life to climb along a roof edge, then sneaked into the bedroom of a sleeping woman. I’d just unlocked the door for Darci when I looked back and there she was, awake. Ingrid was staring at me across a half-dark room, a question in her eyes.

  So what was I supposed to do? Tell her the truth, that I was in the room to steal her crystal ball? That would get the cops called and get me splashed all over the newspapers in a way that wouldn’t do my career any good. However, if I’d sneaked in the room to steal her, so to speak, that was okay. Did that make possessions more valuable than people?

  Anyway, there wasn’t anything else I could do but pretend I was after her. The truth was, though, that I figured she’d say no to me. In my lifetime I’d had only two women say no to me and they were Darci and her mother. But since they’d been the last two, I guess I thought my luck had changed.

  It hadn’t. By the time I got within a foot of the bed, I knew the woman wanted me in the worst way. I climbed into bed with her, let her undress me, and we began to make love.

  I wanted to make love slowly, to take all night at it because who knew when I’d get laid again? Between Alanna’s never being around, and Darci’s medieval attachment to a guy who was probably dead, I wanted to make the evening last.

  I didn’t know the woman I was in bed with, but I knew she had some part in the whole strange thing I’d become involved in. I was sure Darci knew more than she was telling me, but I was reluctant to try to find out more.

  As for the woman, the one time I tried to speak, she put her fingertips to my lips. We didn’t exchange a word the entire evening. We just touched and licked and sucked. By the time the sun rose there wasn’t an inch of her supple body that I didn’t know.

  At dawn she turned her back to me and went to sleep. No words spoken, just turned to her side and went to sleep. It was a dismissal. Her back was not an invitation to do that most intimate of gestures: cuddling. As though I were a stallion hired for the evening, she was through with me.

  I got up, pulled on some of my clothes, left through the door, and went to my own room downstairs. I wanted to sleep for a couple of hours before the women started demanding I rub them down. There were only six of them but they each wanted an appointment every day. And each one wanted more than the hour allotted. “I have a pain right here,” they’d whine, wanting me to spend an extra fifteen minutes on that area. I did it but I didn’t like it.

  However, the minute I put my head on my own pillow I was wide awake. Somewhere during the night I’d looked up to see Darci and that ghost playing “whose is biggest” with the wall to the room. Devlin, dressed up like some ancient Highlander, was leaning against the wall that was sometimes not there—which I can tell you looked pretty weird. He’d make the wall disappear, then Darci, concentrating so hard her eyes were down to slits, would make it reappear. Devlin looked like he was having fun, but Darci seemed to be working hard. No wonder she can’t find my son, I thought, she doesn’t have enough power.

  When Darci saw me watching her, she was embarrassed, the ghost laughed, and the wall reappeared. Beneath me, the blonde woman didn’t seem to be aware of anything that was going on, but I couldn’t take that as a compliment. She was like a robot that had been programmed to give pleasure. If I hadn’t been without female companionship for so long I wouldn’t have gone to bed with her. To me, sex is better if there’s a personal connection. Love makes it the best. Take Alanna, for instance. Or, maybe take Darci. She’d probably be fun in bed. Her little body could probably bend into some seriously interesting shapes, and what about that power of hers? She could read things that were in my mind. Could she put her visions and feeling into mine? If Darci and I had sex, could she make us feel both sides at once? I’d feel what she was feeling and she would feel what I did.

  I lay in bed and thought about this for so long that someone knocked on my door and told me breakfast was being served in the dining room. Yawning, I got up, dressed, and thought about how I could ask Darci about her power as it related to sex. Subtly, of course.

  After breakfast I was up to my elbows in too-soft white flesh. Maybe because I was feeling better I began to hint to each woman that I might be interested in her if she’d lose some weight and get a little muscle. At lunch Narcissa told me that they’d had to open the weight room because the women were demanding to use the equipment. “Maybe you could give some lessons,” she said.

  Deliver me, I thought. Two-pound dumbbells and showing women how to do shoulder presses was not something I wanted to do. However, it was great news to be told there was a weight room somewhere. I smiled at Narcissa. “I’ll just let them watch me work out and hope that inspires them.”

  I canceled all my massage appointments so I could work out after lunch, but Darci wanted me to break that glass ball I’d helped her steal. I figured that would take all of two minutes, then I’d be free. The truth was that after I worked out I planned to pay another visit to Ingrid.

  But breaking the ball proved to be impossible. Darci told me a bizarre story about alien substances, especially one that had been around a key, but I tried not to think about what she was saying. All I wanted to do was work out, then go to bed with a pretty woman.

  I should have known that Darci would have other ideas. Talking to a ghost was on the very bottom of my list of fun things to do.

  We paused outside the door to the room she said was Amelia’s and according to Darci, Amelia was still in there. Still imprisoned, still waiting.

  I was so nervous about what was behind the door that to lighten the mood I turned and started to walk away. Darci caught my shirt and pulled me back. I wanted her to laugh but she knew I was serious.

  “Look,” she said, “the truth is that I doubt if you’ll be able to see anything. I’ve been around ghosts for years and only I could see them—and even then I couldn’t see them.”

  “That makes sense,” I said.

  “I could see them inside my head. It’s like in a dream. You can see the people in a dream clearly but no one else can. That’s how I’ve always seen ghosts.”

  “Until this shape-guy, this Devlin.”

  “Right. Devlin is different. The point I’m trying to make is that you probably won’t see any ghost. You’ll just see a bare room while I’ll see the ghost