Oh no.
She’d been so preoccupied with what she’d learned yesterday, she hadn’t put together the pieces in her mind. Matt’s tale had been a bastardized version of Addie Durand’s story, some lingering ghost of the event that must have rocked Morgantown and the surrounding area twenty years ago. Crystal must have known. That’s why the night supervisor had been so adamant about denying the truth of the story. And in fact, Crystal hadn’t lied. It hadn’t been a camper who had been kidnapped. Crystal just hadn’t wanted to frighten the kids, and so had quashed the story. Alice wondered if Camp Durand employees hadn’t been doing something similar for years, even if they couldn’t entirely erase the Durand kidnapping from the public’s consciousness.
“Matt,” Alice said tensely as the boy started to stand. “Not the story about the kid being snatched at Camp Durand.”
“I’ve got it all figured out,” Matt told her excitedly in a hushed tone, wiping the sand off his cargo shorts. “Crystal was mad the other night because I said it happened here. She thought that’s what scared the little kids the most. I’m going to make it generic, and say it happened near some woods around here, not at Camp Durand,” he hissed before he lunged through the crowd.
He was gone like a shot arrow, beyond the reach of Alice’s voice unless she wanted to yell at him and make a scene. She listened uneasily as Matt began his story, adding more details and drama here at the bonfire than he had in the Red Team common room a few nights ago.
“… this man and woman—the parents,” Matt was saying, “loved their little girl so much. She was their whole world, and everything was so great for them and they were all so happy. But that all changed one dark, stormy summer night … a night a lot like this one,” Matt said, his eyes moving theatrically over his audience, pulling them into the story. “On that night, the mom had taken a walk and visited some friends. She stayed later than she’d intended. A storm had moved in fast, and it made the night darker earlier than it normally would have been. She had her little girl with her, and the little girl had fallen asleep during the visit. So the mom had to carry the girl into a path in the dark woods in order to get to their house. She was really nervous, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being watched.
“And she was being watched from the cover of the trees. There were these kidnappers in the woods, waiting, and they snatched the little girl right from her mother’s arms. One second, her daughter was there, and the next, the mother was alone and screaming for her baby … screams you can still hear echoing in those woods today.”
Shivers rippled across Alice’s skin. She rubbed her arms, trying to diminish the goose bumps that had popped up on her flesh. She glanced behind her to the woods uneasily. Had the bonfire started to dim, because the shadows seemed closer now …
“Well, these men killed the little girl; murdered her in cold blood,” Matt said solemnly, and he had the campers’ full attention now. Even Alice, who was highly unsettled by the story, was listening while her lungs burned as she held her breath. “And when the mother heard about her little girl being murdered, she went crazy. She didn’t want to live, with her daughter being taken right out of her arms like that and murdered. She was out of her head with grief. So one night, the mother—”
“Excuse me, I’m sorry to interrupt,” a man said loudly.
Alice gasped and jumped when someone touched her arm. She stared up at Dylan’s face, shocked. His fingertips brushed lightly across the back of her shoulder, as if in a furtive gesture of reassurance, before he straightened.
“Excuse me,” he said again, his gaze meeting hers ever so briefly. “Can I get through? I have an announcement to make to everyone.”
Alice moved, as did the other kids in front of her, parting the way so Dylan could walk through the crowd. His commanding, dark figure seemed to blaze along the outline with the light from the bonfire. Sebastian Kehoe stood to meet him when he reached the center of the ring of people. Alice watched anxiously as the two men conferred in subdued voices. Everyone started chattering in the interim, curious and interested as to the reason for the interruption.
Dylan turned and held up a hand. Everyone’s chattering silenced.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask everyone to return to their cabins,” he called out loudly. “There’s a bad storm on the way. If the night staff can quickly organize their teams, please? Everyone should get inside as fast as possible.”
Alice stood with everyone else, bemused and unsettled by the interruption.
EVEN though her assigned meeting with Dylan wasn’t for another fifteen minutes, Alice left her cabin and entered the woods. The storm had come closer, and she somehow knew he’d be waiting for her now, before the storm broke. The air seemed to crackle with electricity and thunder rumbled ominously overhead.
Suddenly, she felt his hand brush her forearm and she turned to him in the darkness. She opened her mouth to say something—she wasn’t sure what, because she was too anxious to ask him if he’d interrupted Matt’s “story” at that particular point on purpose—but then his mouth was covering hers, hot and possessive, and her thoughts scattered beneath his heat.
Thunder rolled through the sky, louder this time.
“Come on,” Dylan said urgently next to her lips. “The storm is about to break.”
She followed him in the pitch black, no longer as hesitant as she had been on the first night, trusting him to guide her unerringly. When they reached the edge of the woods past the stables, she moved behind him, her arms around his waist. He led her into the woods, and she shivered despite the warm, humid air. The trees thrashed and groaned around them. A shocking flash of lightning made the woods go iridescent for a moment, leaving the impression of Dylan’s head and broad shoulders burned behind her eyelids. The hair on her forearms stood on end, and it felt like every inch of her skin tingled with electricity.
Rain started to spatter her skin as they reached the castle grounds.
“Come on. It’s going to unload on us,” Dylan said, urging her to run up the grass slope. Wind and rain buffeted her as they made their way to the back terrace. Thunder boomed, and Dylan was herding her up the back steps for cover beneath the eave. He unlocked the door, prodding her with his touch to go before him into the unlit media room. She waited, panting, while he locked the door and keyed in the code to the alarm system. By the time he turned to her, the air conditioning had caused her wet skin to roughen.
Outside in the yard, the wind bent the trees and whipped the branches like they were made of rubber instead of bark.
“It really is a bad storm,” she said quietly when he faced her.
“Did you think I made the whole thing up?” he asked, stalking toward her. Without breaking her stare, he dropped his keys onto a nearby table, causing a loud jangle of metal against wood. Despite the reference he’d made last night to going into the office in Morgantown, she wondered if he hadn’t worked at home today instead. He wore jeans and a blue and white plaid button down. He hadn’t shaved yet again. With that thickening scruff shadowing his lower face and upper lip, he really had his pirate-look going on. He looked a little dangerous.
Sexy as hell.
“No, it’s not that. It’s just when you chose to interrupt the campfire. Dylan, that story Matt was telling, was that a”—she swallowed thickly, rubbing her chilled arms—“a sort of urban legend about Addie? It was, wasn’t it?” she whispered when he didn’t immediately reply, and his expression remained masklike. He took her into his arms, his hands opening at the back of her hips.
“I told you how it really happened. I was there. Who knows better? That was just a campfire story that’s been embroidered over the years.”
“About a ghost of a woman who haunts these woods?” Alice said, studying his hovering, handsome face intently while her heart beat a tattoo in her ears. “The mother of the little girl—”