“Are you trying to seduce me?” Jillian asked him.

I’m trying to find a way to save you, he ached to tell her.

“Would it frighten you if I was?” he asked instead.

“Yes,” she said simply, then added, “and no.”

“You’re so vulnerable, Jillian,” he said, and meant it from the best part of himself.

“And you are so very alone,” she said softly, not having any idea how shockingly accurate she was.

“You don’t know how alone,” he told her.

“Should I be frightened?” she asked.

You should be terrified. You should run as far and as fast as you can.

After having lived in both Tel Aviv and Moscow in conjunction with the U.S. State Department, Marilyn Tracy enjoys writing about the cultures she’s explored and the people she’s grown to love. She likes to hear from the people who enjoy her books and always has a pot of coffee on or a glass of wine ready for anyone dropping by, especially if they don’t mind chaos and know how to wield a paintbrush.

Something Beautiful
Marilyn Tracy

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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To my beautiful nieces, Penny, Sunday and Vicky

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

Steven Sayers turned his gaze from the lovely woman standing inside her sprawling adobe home to the waning afternoon sun. He closed his eyes against the red glow and held his palms outstretched. He felt the faint, delicate caress of ultraviolet light, took it inside his skin, letting it warm him, restore him.

He tried to remember what it had felt like to live in nothing but light, to be as insubstantial as the wind, as intangible as a dream. But ten thousand years of this body had stolen all but the dimmest of recollections.

Oh, to be one with the universe again, to stretch into infinity, a blaze of light, a burning star, pure reason and mathematics, blending with and sharing that searing core of energy.

Or to be here, once and for all—really, truly here—a mortal possessing all of a mortal’s chaotic longings, lusts, that eagerness for laughter, for joy. To feel a mortal’s simple acceptance of love, friendship, even pain.

But Steven Sayers was neither one nor the other. He was trapped somewhere in between. In many ways—in the sensations, the briefly intense moments of feeling—he felt he was more than he used to be. And then, when that brief moment passed, he always found himself less, aching for something he couldn’t quite grasp, couldn’t hold in his all too seemingly mortal hands.

For ten thousand years, longer than recorded human history, he’d roamed this earthly plane, forever searching for those few like him, those few whom he fought so fiercely. Ten thousand years of battles stretched out behind him, a harshly cut swath of destruction in a cosmic war started so long ago that habit had overtaken zealousness and painful memories of human contact made him shrink from what few offers of companionship had been given.

Those moments of contact, their shockingly swift intensity and their equally lightning-quick demise, had, over the years, made him reluctant to reach out, made him almost resentful of the very mortals he championed—if such as he could be called a champion.

So it was far easier to remain distant, to hold himself aloof from all forms of society. He’d tried entering it fully, and found it only brought pain and longing. And in ten thousand years, it was far simpler to disappear for decades at a stretch, waiting for the next portal carrier’s birth, spending solitary years reading, contemplating the secrets of humanity, pondering the questions of what comprised the soul, what separated the soul from the man.

Then, when he felt the portals born again, he would come forward, tracking their growth, following their development. And the battle would rage anew. And thus far, while he’d often failed to win, he’d never lost. Until now.

Now Steven knew with utter certainty that his ten-thousand-year hell was soon to end. The longings would end, the aching would fade away forever, no matter if he was victor or vanquished.

The autumnal equinox was only two weeks in the future, and the final battle would be waged on that night. With only two of them remaining, and so much hanging in the proverbial balance, no stalemates would occur this time. This one battle would end the war once and for all. Forever and, hopefully, for good. And only one could be deemed a victor.

In reviewing those ten thousand years, Steven decided he felt only two regrets. One was that he could never experience the single perfect moment he granted those unfortunate mortals who gave their lives for his war. He would never be able to snatch one day, one hour, from his ten thousand years and say, “Here it is, this is my finest hour.” Because for him there were only endless days and nights, all stretching together, links in a hellish chain, moments spent waiting for battle, fighting, only to wait again.

His only other regret focused on the woman inside the house, the carrier of the portals. In two weeks’ time, she would have to die—and with her final gasp, he would give her back her finest hour, her perfect moment. It was his one magic, his one gift. A cosmic consolation prize.

But Steven didn’t want to grant that moment to Jillian Stewart. She didn’t deserve it.

CHAPTER ONE

Jillian Stewart leaned her forehead against the cool glass panes of the French doors leading to the side courtyard. She felt grateful for the support and irritated at the aching need for it.

She could hear the slightly rasped voice of her friend, but wasn’t really listening to what Elise was saying. She heard the soft clink of the china coffee cup more clearly than any words.

Would the hurt of losing Dave ever go away? she wondered. Would the pain ever become just another of life’s more uncomfortable memories? A full year had slipped by in a time-warped blur, and grief still crawled into bed with her at night. Pain still taunted her in the early morning when she stretched her hand to feel her husband’s warmth and found a cold, empty pillow instead.

Too often she’d found herself standing beside the empty hammock, a soft drink in her hand, staring vacantly at the leaves caught in the now-frayed webbing. She couldn’t count the times she’d passed the den sofa on a Saturday afternoon and reached out to pat feet that would never again scuff the hand-carved armrests. And the silence from his studio still seemed deafening, Dave’s unplayed Steinway a constant reminder that more than her husband had been buried with him that stormy autumn morning.

Even the world outside their rambling adobe home seemed to tease her, mocking her efforts to maintain a semblance of normality. Everything about Santa Fe seemed to whisper Dave’s name, conjure his image. He had loved the city so, delighting in the sharp seasonal changes, the deep snows—Jillian, Allie, find your skis, grab your mittens, there’s a slope with our names on it— the lazy summer afternoons—Let’s skip your gallery opening and open a bottle of champagne instead—the biting chill of a spring evening—Do you need a jacket, hon? Or are my arms enough?—and the long, golden Indian summers, brisk and beautiful autumn days…days like today.

How many times in the past, when Dave was still alive, had she chastised herself for feeling that his love was tempered somehow, that he couldn’t reach the inner part of her, touch that well of love she had to give? How many times had she felt empty, longing for some undefined magic that he’d never touched?

Until he was gone.

Until days like today, when the sun would have beckoned him, would have made him call her name.

But now, this afternoon, another man held her attention. The man raking leaves outside had green eyes, not honeyed brown, and his chiseled face carried none of Dave’s softness, nor a hint of Dave’s tenderness. Somehow that made her feel easier about him, as though the sheer magnitude of the contrast to Dave distanced him, made him safe.

“Jillian—”

She didn’t answer, didn’t turn to look at Elise Jacobson. She scarcely even heard the question inherent in the inflection of her name.

“Jillian? Hey, do you hear me?” Elise asked. Her voice seemed to come from a thousand miles away.

Several times during the past year, she had forced herself to meet Elise at one of the sidewalk cafés that Dave had frequented, and had been unable to meet her friend’s sympathetic gaze, and her hands had trembled too much to lift the cappuccino to her lips. And how much of that trembling had come from guilt, from knowing that, like him, she’d kept some vital part of herself blocked from him?

Elise said now, “I was thinking we might go to Hyde Park this weekend, let Allie get dirty in the woods…You know, all that sort of females-communing-with-nature stuff. We could even play out some kind of welcome-to-autumn ceremony, kind of an equinox ritual.”

Jillian still didn’t turn around. She continued to watch the green-eyed stranger working with such intimate knowledge of her property, her land. Not for the first time, she found herself lulled by his steady progress, even as she tensed at some scarcely recognized power that seemed to emanate from him.

“Just think about Hyde Park…the sound of Stellar’s jays in the pines, the mushrooms and toadstools hiding underneath the brown needles…” Elise said. “Don’t you want to go?”

She didn’t know how to answer Elise, because no matter how much time had passed, no matter how many times she might take her daughter to Hyde Park to stroll in the pines at the edge of the Santa Fe National Forest, once she found the narrow creek that meandered through the canyon, she would inevitably hear Dave’s exuberant laughter, his lilting call, as she heard it for the entire span of their marriage. And she would turn to look for him through the pine branches, only to discover he wasn’t there. Again. As usual. And she’d have to once more realize that now he would never be anywhere, anymore.

God, how she missed his laughter.

The muscled man carefully drawing the golden aspen leaves into a perfect circle never laughed. At least she had never seen him do so in the two weeks he’d been with her. She was glad of that, too. She didn’t want to hear a man’s deep, rumbling mirth, no matter how she had once craved Dave’s, no matter how much she ached for it still.

In fact, she thought, Steven’s very silence, his seemingly innate sadness, soothed her. It kept him distanced from her, separate. And let her feel easier about his presence, because she recognized in him that need for solitude, a need almost as deep as her own.

Or would she be wiser to acknowledge the simple, undeniable fact that he intrigued her, and had from the first moment he’d shown up on her doorstep two weeks ago, telling her—not asking—that he would do odd jobs around her property in exchange for a place to stay.

Two weeks later, she still recalled that feeling of holding her breath when he spoke, of her heart pounding too furiously in her chest, not in fear of him, exactly, but perhaps in acute, nearly painful awareness.

She hadn’t been able to place his unusual accent, an odd combination of old-world courtliness and a hint of foreign parts, and while showing him the various courtyards and niches on her grounds, she had asked him where he was from.

His short “All over” hadn’t allowed her any clues to go on. Nor did his looks. His hair was a rich golden blonde, almost Nordic in its wheaten, honeyed color, and was longish in the back, shorter around his chiseled and deeply tanned face, creating the effect of a mane and an overall impression of lion-like tawniness. His lips were full enough, but they so seldom curved in anything remotely resembling a smile that they gave the impression of being thin.

Only his eyes gave anything away, and she was wholly unable to interpret what she saw there. Mystery, perhaps, or a measure of having witnessed too much, of having seen too many terrible things. And she often caught the impression of a deep, abiding loneliness, a separateness more complete than any she’d ever witnessed before. And she had to question whether her curiosity about him stemmed from this last supposition, whether in both of them having encountered terrible things they had something in common. She, too, had been through too much in the past year.

But beyond his looks, his accent, even his silence, Jillian had felt a strange recognition of Steven. A connection of some kind. From the first moment, she’d had the feeling she’d seen him often, almost as though from a distance, like a barely glimpsed face in a crowd, a character half remembered from a movie. As a child? In a dream?

“I don’t trust him,” her friend Elise said now.”

Who?” Jillian asked absently, watching Steven as he paused and again turned his face to the waning sun, as seemingly unaware of her attention today as he’d been yesterday or the day before. And yet now, as she had all the other times she watched him working, she had the distinct feeling that he remained totally alert to her presence, to her gaze upon him.

As he’d done several times in the past two weeks, he closed his eyes against the sun, facing it almost as if it were much more than a mere source of energy, as if it were his source, his private supply. His already deeply tanned face seemed to draw in the light, to hold it somehow on those granitelike golden cheeks. His muscled body was as still as a statue and as finely crafted. His entire stance seemed ritualistic, somehow, and this, too, stirred a faint eddying of memory. She’d seen this somewhere, sometime. But when…where?

“Him, your handyman…gardener, whatever you want to call him,” Elise said.

The man outside seemed far more than that. Somehow, when Elise gave a name to Steven’s profession, something in her tone made him sound like a person seeking a handout. From the first moment, he had struck Jillian far differently, almost as though he echoed some primordial chord deep within her, a musical note she scarcely understood.

Watching him absorb the sun now, Jillian realized that in very many real ways she’d been the needy one, not him. In an odd sense, by cleaning out a year’s accumulation of leaves, trash and old branches, he seemed to be cleaning out some dark corner of her soul.

She’d apologized for the state of the haciendalike grounds when she showed him around. He hadn’t smiled or tried to make her feel at ease.

He’d said, “Work is a fact of life. No task is ever quite finished.”

The words were simplistic, almost banal, and yet Jillian had been struck by the comment, and by the sorrow inherent in his voice as he’d spoken. And the almost supreme ennui—a stark boredom, or perhaps indifference. How could she not trust a man who had so effortlessly lifted the burden of guilt from her shoulders?

She said to Elise now, “His name’s Steven Sayers.”

Her words etched the cold glass with clouded breath, and she realized Steven’s absorption of the sun’s warmth had to be illusion only; the dimming afternoon was frigid. She thought of her daughter walking home from the bus stop. Should she go get Allie, cart her those last few blocks in the warmed Volvo?

“It might as well be Jack the Ripper, for all you’ve found out about him,” Elise said.

Jillian smiled, and looked at Steven even more closely, trying to see what triggered Elise’s doubts. He remained perfectly still, eyes closed, one hand holding the rake out to his left, the other open-palmed, stretched wide, conical fingers splayed. He appeared to be doing far more than simply drawing the warmth of the late-afternoon sun; he looked as though he were truly pulling it into him, collecting it for later use, storing it deep within him. What would it be like to touch him now, to feel that heat against him?

Jillian shivered.

Elise didn’t seem to notice and continued speaking. “No references, no background check. Get real, Jillian. You’re a rich woman. He could be anybody.”

He was anybody. And there was no way she could explain to Elise that she did know things about him, little things, bits and pieces of information that allowed her to form a tentative bridge of trust.

She’d taken over some linens for him that first night, and she’d seen the books he had neatly arranged in the small guesthouse bookcase. They were all hardbound, making her wonder what manner of man carted a trunkload of heavy books with him in his apparent vagabondlike lifestyle.

All the books appeared to be old and well read, and the authors ranged from Ovid to Malory to Anne Rice. Some of the texts were in what appeared to be Greek or Russian, while others were in German and Latin.

But she hadn’t told any of this to Elise, and didn’t now. The fact that the man could apparently speak several languages and yet sought a job as a handyman-gardener would hardly jibe for her friend.

“He’s a good worker,” Jillian said, trying not to sound defensive.

Aware of how long she’d been staring at him, and unwilling to give Elise even more food for thought, she dragged her eyes from the unusual man communing with the sun, turned finally and sat down at the table again. She deliberately sat with her back to the courtyard and the man.

Steven.

She smiled at Elise, and her friend smiled back, but said, “Admit it, honey, he’s as different as they come.”

Jillian couldn’t argue that, and didn’t even try. Steven Sayers epitomized “different.” His direct gaze gave nothing away, no hint of desperation for a job, no subservience, either. His broad shoulders remained squared and set and yet, oddly, presented no confrontational attitude, either. He projected a profoundly stark take-me-or-leave-me acceptance of the odd vagaries of life.

He responded to any of her questions—and, contrary to what Elise thought, she had asked a few—with simple one-or two-word answers. And he tackled the various projects around her house with a quiet and steady determination that was reflected in his progress, not his demeanor. But these “differences” were what made her welcome his presence.

“You slay me, Jillian,” Elise said now, shaking her head and, inadvertently, her coffee.

Jillian was truly and openly grateful for this friendship, thankful that at least one person around her remembered Dave, had known him before his death, and yet still included her, as well. All her other friends had slowly, almost deliberately, faded out of her life. Perhaps they had been as tormented as she by Dave’s death, as guilty as she, maybe, but instead of little things reminding them, she was the reminder, the constant harbinger of doom, the widow who underscored their vulnerability, who told them death waited like a hungry lion, just out of sight, eager to take, desperate to consume.

Those friends, those who had retreated from her, were the same ones who had urged her to move, start a new life, get out of Santa Fe, find an ocean somewhere, a deserted island, perhaps, and paint again, to go anywhere, do anything but be too near them. And when she hadn’t gone, they had deserted her instead, almost too easily and readily finding their own Santa Fe islands, safe harbors against the pain of knowing that all does not always end well.

This was true for everyone but Elise, who mothered her, hectored her and chided her for not checking Steven-the-handyman’s references, clucked at her over forgetting Allie’s therapy appointments, and loved her at least as much for her faults as despite them.

So she had let all but Elise disappear, but she hadn’t moved. She couldn’t have done so a year ago, and she still couldn’t. It would be like closing the door on her marriage, on her and Dave’s life together, their happiness, the richness of that joy. Even their grief therapist, still working once a month with both her and Allie, frequently suggested putting the rambling adobe up for rent and trying a different locale for a time, letting the traumas of the past heal before returning.

But Jillian knew those traumas would only be waiting for them when and if they came back. Besides, this creamy-walled, sprawling hacienda represented home, even if the great warm heart had gone out of it.

Elise glanced outside and back at Jillian before lowering her voice to ask, “What if this Steven guy is a murderer? What if he’s a child molester? I tell you, Allie acts oddly around him. Now, doesn’t that mean something?”

“These days Allie acts oddly around practically everyone,” Jillian said, but with no bitterness or shame.

What had happened to her daughter, to them, had changed their lives at the fundamental core; any altered behavior was only to be expected, tolerated, then slowly, slowly modified.

“Kids know things. You can always trust a child’s instincts when it comes to…well, bad people,” Elise said in an even more hushed tone, as if Steven were capable of hearing her through the double-paned French doors and three-foot-thick walls and despite the reality of his standing a good fifty feet away.

Jillian didn’t bother to answer. The truth was, kids didn’t know things; they learned them. In Allie’s case, it had been the hard way. And thanks to that year-ago horrible morning on the way to school, this particular eight-year-old didn’t have a clue about what was good or bad and her mother certainly couldn’t tell her anymore. When it came right down to it, Jillian suspected that no human being, unless psychic, had an instant recognition of either good or bad.

“Have you checked to see if he has a gun?” Elise whispered.

Jillian couldn’t help it, she chuckled aloud. It felt good. “By doing what, Elise? Sneaking into his house and searching his things?”

Elise looked thoughtful. “It’s your house. Guesthouse, anyway,” she said, but she shrugged, as though acknowledging Jillian’s question and her own amended answer. “Well, you could ask him, couldn’t you?”

“I can just picture that. ‘Excuse me, Steven, but do you have a weapon you plan on using on my daughter or me?”’

Even Elise had to choke back a laugh. That choked sound was one of the things Jillian most dearly liked about Elise.

“Well, anyway, you have to learn to be more careful.”

Jillian’s smile felt frozen now. Being careful had nothing to do with survival. She’d been cautious and careful all her life. Dave had been careful. Even on his last awful morning, his seat belt had been fastened, the insurance current, Allie strapped in, the door locked on the passenger side and Allie’s school lunch neatly folded into her hand-painted lunch pail. But none of Dave’s anxiety, concern or even occasionally scattered solicitude had stopped the random bullet from that drive-by shooting. And not a single element of the loving regard that Jillian had poured into their marriage had prevented that .38 caliber thief from stealing Dave, or his music, his passion, his fathering, his soul, and so very much more.

Something in her rigid smile, or perhaps something lurking in her eyes, let Elise catch a glimpse of her thoughts, for her friend said quickly, “Oh, honey, I’m sorry. I know there are things you can’t foresee.”

Her voice dropped nearly an octave, and she nearly spit out an epithet before continuing, “Forget I said anything. I’m just a worrywart.” She patted the table, as if touching Jillian’s hand.

Jillian shook her head, trying to shake away the memory of that agonizing day, the worse-than-despairing year of days since.

“I’m fine,” she said.

Elise, ever the cheerleader, leaned forward slightly, her ruddy face free of any smile now, her mouth drawn into a serious line, her eyes urgent. “At least you’re painting again,” she said.

Jillian nodded. It was a true statement, but it made her feel guilty nonetheless. She was painting again, not the light, airy abstracts that had so delighted Dave. Instead, she was creating dark, angry, real and surreal accounts of the fury and confusion that reigned in her. And most of all, these new and frightening paintings all too often depicted the helplessness she felt upon hearing her daughter’s screams in the middle of the night. Surreal doorways, openings to terrible, evil places, horrific eyes darkly beckoning. Were these desperate paintings wholly representative of her life now?

Only yesterday she’d discovered that the pairs of haunted eyes in the roiling clouds beyond the jambs of the last three nowhere doors were the same exact color as Steven’s. What did that foretell? What did it mean? His eyes were the doorways of her own soul? That was too heavy and too complex even for Jillian’s present dark mood.

“So, that damned bullet didn’t get everything, did it?” Elise asked almost harshly.

Jillian looked up in surprise. Was this the secret to their friendship, that Elise was able to tap into some underlying empathetic emanation, or was it that she was nearly telepathic?

Elise nodded, as if Jillian had voiced these questions aloud. “I know, Jillian. Don’t you think I’ve been angry about it, too? It was bad enough to lose Dave, his gorgeous music. And to see what you and Allie were going through? But, my God, you stopped painting, too. It was like that murderer stole you also.”

Jillian nodded slowly, fighting tears that threatened to spill, to blur her vision. She blinked rapidly, willing them away. Elise was right, and too terribly on target. She had felt that way, still felt that way to a large degree. That bullet had stolen her joy in living.

“It’s okay, you know,” Elise said. “It’s just me here now. Not some shrink with nasty questions about your mother and your second cousin’s older brother. I know what hell it was to live with Dave sometimes. I knew him before you did, remember?”

Jillian smiled weakly, and then, almost to her relief, found herself saying, “Sometimes at night, when I wake up and remember that he’s not here, I’ve gone to sit at the drafting table, or maybe in front of the easel. And nothing would come. Not even a glimmer of an idea. All I could think about was, who would I show it to now that Dave was…gone. At least he kept me honest.”

“You could always call me, you know. I want to see your work.”

Jillian looked away from Elise, unable to continue while directly meeting her friend’s blatant sympathy. She half turned in her chair, profiling both Elise and the outside doors. She thought of the way Steven had stood so still in the courtyard, and drew on that image for some semblance of strength.

How could she explain to Elise that the paintings weren’t ‘work’? They were agony, despair, rage. They were the darkest, angriest part of her. The guilt over the marriage, which had been broken long before Dave’s death? The guilt over knowing that both of them, no matter how much they might have loved, had held some special ingredient back? Whatever they represented, whatever they displayed, Jillian knew they were the doorways to the ultimate torment in her soul.

“Anytime, Jill,” Elise said.

Jillian didn’t tell Elise that it wasn’t—couldn’t be—the same as showing Dave. She didn’t have to; Elise knew. But just yesterday, hadn’t she considered showing a recent piece to Steven? Somehow she’d thought he would understand it, perhaps even be able to explain it to her. Was it because he’d told her, only last week—when she’d said he didn’t have to call her Mrs. Stewart, but could call her Jillian—that someone had once told him that even “the prince of darkness is a gentleman.”

She couldn’t remember the context, why he’d said it. She only remembered being teased by the odd phrase, feeling it fit him somehow. A browse through Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations had revealed the quote as coming from Shakespeare’s King Lear. A man who quoted Shakespeare while cleaning out gutters was a man who might understand the dark side of life, she’d thought then, and remembered now, smiling a little.

She’d thought it a remarkably apt remark from him. “Child Rowland to the dark tower came…” That was what Steven reminded her of, a haunted man in search of himself, in search of some dark and terrible truth.

Elise, perhaps encouraged by Jillian’s smile but misunderstanding it, said, “Jill, you’re actually drawing something. And, honey, they’re good.”

Jillian tried letting this sink in, attempted to feel the truth in Elise’s words. The paintings were well drawn, well executed, but good? That was a judgment, not an absolute, an abstract instead of a truth. What was good about doorways that led nowhere, openings that only revealed glimmers of dark, terrible universes beyond?

For some inexplicable reason, the doorways reminded her of Steven. The dark tower? Was that why she’d thought he could explain them to her?

Elise said something else, something about the new “jeweled” effect in her recent work.

Jillian asked her, hearing the angry note in her voice come through, despite her attempts to quell it, “Do you know why my new paintings all have that jeweled effect, that brighter-than-bright sheen to them?”

Her friend murmured an uneasy negative.

Jillian felt her lips curve, but she knew it wasn’t in a smile, unless this time it really was born of bitterness. “They’re that way because the whole time I’m painting, I’m crying. And I paint what I see.”

She heard Elise murmur a placating something, but her heart was pounding so loudly, the words didn’t penetrate. She couldn’t sit there any longer. The restlessness that had so thoroughly claimed her during the past year triggered, and forced her into action. She moved back to the window and stared out at the courtyard.

Steven was no longer absorbing the dying rays of the setting sun. He was standing facing the doors, just in front of the pile of leaves, looking as though he’d risen from them, a golden phoenix from unburned ashes. His hands hung loose at his sides, the rake abandoned against the trunk of the apricot tree at the far south end of the courtyard.

His eyes were open now, and filled with light, as if he truly had taken in the sun’s rays and transformed them into a startling green. The color was oddly out of place in the late-afternoon desert Southwest, and was as luminous as the jeweled colors in her paintings. Blazing emeralds.

It was at least three seconds before she realized she was gazing directly into his eyes, staring at him, frozen, and when she did, she felt strangely linked with him, her heart pounding in a strange combination of fear and poignant recognition.

Had her swift rise from the table called his attention, or had he been watching her all along, as she all too often watched him?

She could read nothing in his closed expression, no understanding, no pity, yet she felt a powerful emotion emanating from him all the same. That emotion wasn’t tenderness or concern, nor did it seem to carry any nuances of sexuality or even sensuality, though he certainly exuded all of those things on a physical plane. But whatever he was thinking or feeling seemed to radiate out from him like an aura taking flight, dark and filled with purpose, but its meaning obscured, hidden from her. She could have sworn she felt it race across the distance, and gasped at the raw intensity of it.

Shock rippled through her. He’s like my paintings, she thought, and instinctively raised her hand between them, laying her palm against the cold glass. Was she reaching for him, or warding him off?

She could feel his power, and didn’t understand it. He was dark and light at the same time. Extremes. Sharp contrasts and angles, hidden messages and sparkling truths.

Staring at him, linked with him, she felt words form in her mind. Were they coming from him? No, from within herself. Again, like her paintings.

“Jillian?”

“Dark with excessive bright.”

She had murmured the words aloud, almost like a talisman. Or were they a plea?

Why hadn’t she looked away from him? Why was she continuing to stand there…locked in his gaze? And what was it about the words dark with excessive bright that had so captured her thoughts, snagged her memory?

Then she remembered. Steven had said the words the other morning while clearing the overthick woodbine from the side of the house. What had he meant then, and why had the words seemed to hold so much more than mere statement in them?

“What’s that from?” Elise asked.

“What?” she asked faintly, as though from far away. She couldn’t break his gaze, felt she was drowning in it, dizzy, aching. What was happening to her? She felt as if one of her dark doorways were opening slightly, and if she stared at him much longer she would see the roiling clouds with the haunted, hungry eyes seeking her.

“Earth to Jillian. I said, ‘What’s that from?”’

Steven Sayers—the gardener, she reminded herself, half hysterically—looked away first, turning his head as though purposefully ending this unusual connection. He walked slowly back to the apricot tree and took the rake in his left hand. Without looking back toward the house, he resumed his careful tending of the pile of leaves.

Jillian fought nausea, found herself shaking and raised trembling hands to hug her suddenly cold shoulders. Her grandmother, had she still been alive, would have said a wolf had just passed over Jillian’s grave. She knew it was far more serious than that, far more real. If she’d stayed linked with him a moment longer, she knew, she would have lost herself somehow.

“Sounds like something I’ve read,” Elise said.

“What?”

“That ‘dark with excessive bright’ thing.”

Jillian drew a deep breath before turning around. “I don’t know. It sounded familiar to me, too, but I…don’t remember where I…read…it.”

“Shakespeare? Donne? Maybe Spenser? It doesn’t sound like a standard biblical verse, but I could be wrong.”

Jillian’s chill fell away as swiftly as it had come upon her. She moved back to the table, but didn’t sit down. Was she subconsciously signaling her need to be alone?

She leaned against one of the high-backed oak chairs and said, “I always forget you’re a scholar.”

Right now she wished Elise were really the white witch she professed to be, could really see into one of her myriad crystal balls and explain what Jillian had just experienced. Because it had been something. Or as Allie was fond of saying lately, something beautiful. Beautiful in the sense of “awesome,” a concept with a dual-edged sheen, at one and the same time both exceedingly lovely and woefully dangerous.

Elise winced and waved her hand. “You’re the scholar, sweetie, remember? You’re the one who reads everything known to man. Before you started painting, anyway. Maybe that’s the secret to your art, you bring it a little old-worldliness.

“Anyway, nowadays, scholars do research and get to read all the time. They’re eligible for Nobel Prizes and a billion grants. I’m one of the publish-or-perish crew, remember?”

Elise stood up and shook her pleated wool skirt as though such an effort would remove the long-creased wrinkles in it. “Speaking of which, I have an abstract I have to finish by Thursday, and this being Monday and I haven’t even begun reading the material, let alone writing the damned thing, I’d better set my sights on the computer—”

Allie burst through the front door at that moment, bringing a blast of chill air with her as she sprang into the dining room. She spun her bookbag onto the small desk reserved for just that purpose and skidded to a semihalt.

“Have you seen Lyle?” she called, then, apparently remembering some semblance of manners, muttered a breathless greeting to Elise and her mother.

“How was school?” Jillian asked.

“Fine. Have you seen Lyle?”

Jillian felt rather than saw Elise’s ironic gaze and heard Elise murmur, “None of us ever have, hon.”

Allie didn’t seem to notice. She ran on through the kitchen and down the hallway to her bedroom.

Jillian heard the door slam open, and heard her daughter’s cheerful voice recounting snippets of her day. To Lyle. She felt a momentary stab of unreasonable jealousy; Lyle received all of Allie’s confidences, those little details once shared with her mother.

Jillian waited a moment before turning to meet Elise’s eyes. As she had expected, Elise was studying her with a cross between amusement and commiseration.

Elise gestured toward Allie’s unseen bedroom and said, “Now that really does give me the creeps.”

“Gloria says—”

Elise held up her hand. “Spare me Gloria’s immortal words. I know she’s got a degree in realigning your head, but let’s get real, Jillian. Allie is down the hall this very minute, talking to an invisible rainbow creature. And from what I can see—and hear—he talks back.”

“You can hear him, can you?” Jillian asked, smiling faintly, but feeling a frisson of reaction nonetheless.

“Not him, I can’t, but I can tell from the things Allie’s been saying that she sure thinks she does.”

“That’s the whole point of having an imaginary friend,” Jillian argued.

She hoped her light tone masked the doubts she held about the wisdom of maintaining the fiction that Lyle was something real. But the grief therapist thought Lyle’s appearance was a breakthrough of sorts, that his presence signaled an attempt on Allie’s part to rise above the trauma of her father’s death.

Gloria claimed that Lyle would allow Allie to communicate many of the difficult aspects of dealing with the pain of having actually been in the car and having had to watch her father die in her presence. And Jillian had to admit that since Lyle had come on the scene, Allie had finally started acting out her anger, her completely understandable rage.

So Lyle had to be a good thing, no matter how little Jillian might appreciate the acting out, the breakage of an old vase, the temper tantrums resulting in books knocked from the shelves, the scattering of papers, art supplies, anything of value to Jillian, then the lies about it afterward. Perfectly normal, if wholly disliked.

Elise said now, “You know, I’ve resisted the idea of you guys taking off for the wild blue, but I’ve gotta tell you, between your Steven and Allie’s Lyle, I’m changing my mind.”

“He’s not my Steven,” Jillian protested, but even to her, the words lacked conviction.

Luckily, Allie came running back into the dining room; her appearance blocked Elise’s quick rejoinder.

“Can we watch TV?” her little girl asked, making it clear by her actions that Lyle was with them in the room.

If she was entirely honest about Lyle, Jillian thought, she would simply tell her daughter that she hated the invisible creature, that he frightened her a little. A lot.

But she said instead, “There’s still a few minutes of daylight left. Why don’t you—and Lyle—run off some energy? I’ll bet if you ask, Steven will let you jump into that pile of leaves he’s just raked.”

Allie looked willing enough, and transferred her gaze to an empty spot some three feet away from her, and apparently at eye level. The question was obvious on her face. She nodded once, and then, her face stiffening, turned back to Jillian. The honey-brown eyes so like Dave’s met Jillian’s pleadingly, as if asking for understanding. As they did the times she lied to her mother.

“Lyle says he doesn’t want to go outside.”

Jillian could have sworn that Allie did want to go. She withheld a shudder. How could Allie have created an imaginary friend with such a fierce hold over her? Was Gloria right in believing order was the whole point of Lyle, a search for some kind of control in a world gone to chaos? Or was there something else going on here?

“Why doesn’t he want to go outside?” Elise asked, with a degree of probing Jillian didn’t care for—not because Elise was too curious, but because, as Jillian had come to realize lately, she wasn’t any too sure she wanted to hear the answers.

Allie cocked her head again, as if listening, her eyes taking on that intent focus on absolutely nothing. Jillian knew some actors would have paid a fortune for the secret of that particular trick.

As was usual while watching Allie listen to “Lyle,” Jillian fought the feeling that Allie really was seeing something, something that wasn’t her imagination, something all too real.

Allie turned her gaze to Elise, and said, “Lyle says Steven’s out there. He says he doesn’t want to run into Steven yet.”

Elise shot Jillian a sharp look, her round face filled with What-did-I-tell-you?

“What do you mean, yet?” Jillian asked.

Allie shrugged. “I dunno. That’s just what Lyle says. Can we watch TV now? I don’t have any homework.”

Jillian absently consented and carefully avoided Elise’s gaze as Allie left the room. Allie elaborately stepped aside, allowing her invisible friend to precede her through the archway leading to the den. Her slender young body arched against the doorjamb, precisely the way a person would do to allow someone—or something—with considerable girth to pass through.

Elise cleared her throat, then slowly said, “I’d say an extra little chat with Gloria Sanchez is in order here.”

“Based on Allie’s comments about Steven?”

“Based on everything, Jill. I’m not kidding when I say there’s something scary about this whole picture—”

“Mommy?”

Jillian felt a jolt of adrenaline course through her, and couldn’t hold back the slight start her daughter’s sudden reappearance had caused.

Elise also seemed startled. She muttered a curse beneath her breath and dramatically held one hand over her full breasts. “Sweetie, if you don’t want Aunt Elise to become invisible, too, don’t, for the love of heaven, sneak up on us like that again!”

Allie smiled, but Jillian could see the abstraction on her daughter’s face. “Lyle says not to ask Steven to come in the house, okay?”

Jillian felt a chill work down her arms. She couldn’t help it, she looked over Allie’s shoulder, as if expecting to see the invisible friend standing there, gauging her reaction. Allie had often referred to him as something beautiful. What was beautiful about this sort of control, these implications of danger?

She forced herself to speak. “Why would Lyle say something like that?” she asked. She hoped her voice didn’t sound either accusatory or as nervous as she felt.

Allie shifted, as though allowing something to pass back through the archway, again politely offering room.

Jillian deliberately focused her gaze on Allie, refusing to let her eyes slide to the nothing beside her daughter.

Thinking of Elise standing there watching, warning undoubtedly lining her face, she asked, “Doesn’t Lyle like Steven?”

Allie turned to stare into space again, and she nodded a second time.

“I’ll tell her,” she said before turning back to her mother. “Lyle just doesn’t want Steven in the house. He says it’s too soon.”

There’s no such thing as Lyle, Jillian told herself firmly.

But, much as she might want to do so, she couldn’t say this to Allie. Because for Allie, Lyle was very, very real. Too real, maybe.

When Gloria had suggested that the imaginary Lyle might be a means of breaking through Allie’s grief, Allie’s way of attempting contact with the outside world, Jillian had agreed to go along with the myth that Lyle was a real being, that his presence in their home was a welcome one. But, if she was to be honest, she had to agree with Elise. The whole concept was vaguely disturbing, and made her feel deliberately distanced by her little girl.

Through Lyle, Allie had, in the past month, said the most unusual things, comments that seemed remarkably adult, phrases that sounded strange upon the lips of an eight-year-old child. The grief therapist claimed this was consistent with trauma survival.

Jillian wondered.

And now Lyle didn’t want her asking Steven into the house. It wasn’t as if she had, or had really even considered doing so. So why had Allie brought it up? Was this an important key to Allie’s thoughts? She hadn’t said she didn’t like him, she’d said it was “too soon.” What exactly did that mean to Allie?

Jillian wondered how Dave would have handled something like an invisible creature living within their safe walls, and knew with a sharp pang that the situation would never have arisen. It was due to Dave’s death that the imaginary creature was there. And it was due to his loss that Allie clung to Lyle’s company.

Jillian fought the rise of anger against Dave, that overwhelming sense that by dying, he’d abandoned her, left her to grapple with things he should have been there to share with her. Forever, he’d said, but he’d lied. Right from the start.

For Allie’s sake, she now strove to find a light note. “Why would Lyle be worried about Steven coming into the house? Is he afraid he’ll have to give up some space, that we’ll ask him to move back to the lilac hedge?”

Apparently she’d hit the right tone, because for a split second Allie’s face lightened, and she actually seemed on the verge of a giggle. But then she sobered and her eyes turned to that empty—but all-too-real—spot where she could perceive that which no one else could.

It was more than simply disconcerting to see her daughter’s eyes unerringly return to the same exact height every time she turned to look at the ever-present Lyle. And it was even more unsettling at times to watch Allie’s gaze follow an imaginary being’s apparent progress around the room.

Jillian found herself tensing, waiting for Lyle’s next pronouncement, not even able to correct herself, to remember that it was Allie doing the thinking, the translating, the speaking. Because it didn’t seem like Allie at all.

Allie’s eyes turned back to Jillian’s, looking up, and she frowned a little, as if puzzling out Lyle’s unheard comment. “Lyle says Steven isn’t real.”

“What?” Elise and Jillian said in unison.

Jillian couldn’t begin to understand this latest twist of her daughter’s mind.

“Whoa…” Elise murmured. “This, I don’t like.”

Allie cocked her head, listening, not to Elise, but to that invisible, inaudible voice, then said, inexplicably, “Lyle says, just whatever happens, don’t let Steven inside.”

Allie turned to leave the room. For some reason, this chilled her mother more than her words had done; Allie was unconcerned by her comments. She didn’t appear to even know what she was talking about. This was wholly and utterly consistent with someone truly listening to another voice.

But that was patently impossible.

“Honey…” Jillian called after her, only to let her words trail off. Could Elise be right, and Allie did know or sense something about Steven that she herself refused to see? Or was there something else going on here, something related to Dave’s death, perhaps a general distrust of everyone?

Jillian wanted to call her daughter back, but didn’t. She didn’t because she knew that merely summoning Allie back to the entry hall wasn’t what she truly needed from her little girl. What she wanted in her heart of hearts was Allie back…period. The way she used to be, filled with giggles and sunshine, light, airy steps dancing through life, the way she’d been for a moment when coming into the house, the way she’d been a year ago.

She turned and met Elise’s concerned gaze. She was certain her own was equally troubled.

Elise raised her hands as if in surrender and said, “I’m out of here. But I don’t feel good about it. There’s more going on around here than doesn’t meet the eye. And I gotta tell you, I don’t like it. Any of it.” She looked over Jillian’s shoulder, out to the darkening courtyard.

Jillian turned to follow her friend’s scrutiny. Steven had apparently paused in the act of loading the piled leaves into a large black plastic bag. His profile was to the house, but something about his stilled hands, his tensed body, conveyed the impression he’d heard every word spoken by those inside. His face seemed even grimmer than usual, and his jaw like chiseled granite, his lips pulled into a tight grimace that could have been either pain or anger.

Jillian couldn’t help it; she turned her eyes to that spot in the archway, a place some four feet above the ground, an empty pocket of air, a space where no one stood, but where something had spoken.

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