The Earl of Christmas Past (Goode Girls Romance #5) - Kerrigan Byrne Page 0,20
be the worst.
Still, he could tell he’d not defeated her as the wheels and cogs of what he was coming to understand was a sharp and restless brain didn’t cease their machinations. “Can you take me to this Chamber of Sorrows?”
“Certainly, though it’s not far.” He motioned to the wardrobe, a piece of furniture almost as tall as he was. “The Pitagowans have merely covered the door with this.”
She circled the thing, tapping on her chin as she was wont to do. Testing its heft with a little push. “I don’t know if I can move it.”
John didn’t know if she could either, which meant he’d have to. “I’ll do what I can to help you.”
Clearly heartened, she gifted him with a brilliant smile that sparked a little flicker of joy in his guts before she flattened her back against one side, bracing her feet on the ground to pit her entire weight against the thing. It scraped and budged, but only an inch or so.
John joined her, levering over her and bracketing her head with his arms. If someone walked in at this moment, that person would do well to assume they were about to kiss.
Or had just finished doing so.
As if she’d read his thoughts, her eyes dropped to his mouth. Her tongue snaking out to moisten her own lips.
John’s lids slammed closed as lust roared through him. “Goddammit, Vanessa. Push.”
The wardrobe gave way beneath their combined efforts, and he all but leapt away from her and retreated to the opposite end of the room.
It’d been a long time since he’d asserted himself onto the world of the living so often in one night. It tired him. Weakened him in so many ways.
The chief among them his self-control. In one respect a heavenly thing, and in others, pure hell.
He willed his inflamed libido to cool and ordered the heart that’d begun beating again to stop. He commanded his soul to stop yearning. To cease aching for what should not—what could never—be.
“That took a lot from you, didn’t it?” she observed.
He looked down at his own outline and noted it was thinner, more translucent, the features blurred.
“I’ll be fine,” he sighed. “Though I’ll hope you forgive me for not opening the door.”
Vanessa took one of the oil lamps from the sideboard and pushed open the doorway that was really no bigger than a cupboard. Even someone as petite as she had to duck to get inside.
John merely went through the wall.
He found himself watching her more than noting any of the treasures in the dusty old place. Pure, unadulterated awe slackened her jaw, parting her lips as she twirled in the center of the tiny antechamber as if trying to take in the entire glory of the Sistine Chapel.
She all but floated to the haphazard shelves and rickety cases lining the long chamber.
As one could never do in a museum, she reached out trembling, elegant fingers and tested the sharpness of a saber mounted on the wall or threaded them through the plume on a hat. It was as if she could see with her eyes, but never truly had a vision of anything until she’d experienced it through touch.
John found himself wanting to trade places with inanimate objects as she caressed them with the reverence of a lover. Buckles. Buttons. A rifle, a medal of valor, irons for captives, chains and whips and other implements of violence and war.
She didn’t belong in this place, this so-called Chamber of Sorrows. She was a creature of light and joy. One to whom melancholy and sorrow did not attach itself for long.
What must it be like to move in the world in such a way?
Vanessa Latimer had transfixed him like nothing or no one had done before.
Everything she did, every gesture she made was attractive to him. From the way she blinked the fans of her eyelashes, to the swift, almost sparrow-like movements of her graceful neck as she tried to look at everything all at once. The sway of her skirts soothed him, drew him toward her as she ventured deeper into the long chamber, which was actually more a corridor that ran the length of the inn.
She paused at a small table upon which letters and miniature portraits of women or children were stacked neatly. As if understanding they might disintegrate if she touched them, her hands hovered like butterfly wings above the loops of writing often stained with blood.
He’d known her for such a short time, and yet