She realized she was staring into dark empty space, not a wall. The hallway branched off here to another portion of the house. Unlike the main hallway, though, it wasn’t lit. She peered, trying to penetrate the thick shadows with her vision, the skin of her arms tight and prickling with goose bumps. Her feet moved, even though she hadn’t told them to. She found herself continuing, gripped by a bizarre mixture of fear and …
Longing?
A figure rushed across the hallway ten feet ahead of her. A woman. Alice cried out, startled more than frightened. She had the brief impression of shoulder-length brown hair and a pretty, striking face. The woman’s clothing was less distinct—a pale, luminous dress, she thought—but one thing flashed clear in Alice’s eyes as the woman reached for a doorknob: a stunning gold filigreed bracelet that looked like delicate interlaced vines and leaves.
No sooner was the vision there than it was gone.
Alice stood there, shocked, not believing her own senses. There wasn’t a patch of her skin that wasn’t tight and tingling. There had been no sound of a door opening and closing, the woman had just been there one moment, and gone the next.
Bullshit, her rational brain inserted itself.
She rushed into the darkness, pausing when she thought she’d reached the location where she’d seen the woman in the hall.
“Hello?” she called loudly, hating the high-pitched, panicked quality of her voice. Hands outstretched, she sought blindly in the darkness. She patted desperately against the surface of the wall, feeling only the texture of wallpaper and the top of the wainscoting, but then—
Her hands traced the outline of the wood frame of a door. Yes. There had been a door. That’s where the woman had vanished to.
How is it that you saw her so clearly, though? It’s pitch dark in here.
She continued to feel frantically for the knob, her hands searching, ignoring the warning, logical voice in her head. She needed to get in that room and see that woman. Now.
Light flooded the hallway. She gasped in shock.
“Alice?”
She stared in the direction of the voice, one of her hands in a clawing position on the wood paneling of the door, the other gripping a brass knob. Dylan stood just past the chest of drawers at the intersection of the hallway, wearing his jeans, the top buttons still unfastened. His fingers touched a light switch.
Oh God. He’s looking at me like I’m crazy.
“I heard something,” she said hollowly. She lowered her hands from the door. “A … woman calling out something. And then just now, I saw—” She halted, realizing how odd she sounded. Dylan was her mirror. He looked increasingly tense and alarmed.
Maybe even a little horror-struck?
She gripped her hands together tightly to stop them from shaking. Unable to continue meeting Dylan’s stare, she looked at the door. Her fingers itched to touch the cool knob again.
“Alice, come here.”
She swallowed thickly at the sound of his voice and looked around. He was walking toward her. He looked beautiful and solid, his lustrous hair sexily sleep-mussed, the shadow of whiskers on his jaw. Had she really been pressed against that hard, ripped torso just minutes ago? Why had she ever left?
“She’s in there,” she mumbled, reaching for the door again, perversely drawn to it.
Dylan caught her wrist abruptly. She gasped and looked up at his inscrutable face.
“Who’s in there?”
“A woman. I saw her. She disappeared into there,” she insisted, nodding toward the door.
“There’s no w
oman in there,” he said, dark brows slanting ominously.
She felt a sweat break out on her skin. “But I saw her.”
“Alice, there’s no one else in this house but us.”
She jerked on her wrist, but he held it fast. “Just let me look in the room then, damn it! I saw a woman. Maybe it was your cook or your housekeeper or something,” she reasoned, even though she’d seen both Louise and Marie, and neither woman remotely resembled the fair, elegant woman wearing the pale dress. She lunged toward the door, determined to see for herself, but Dylan pulled her into his arms, halting her. She stared up at him, stunned.
“Alice, there is no woman in this house but you,” he said succinctly. “That’s an empty bedroom that hasn’t been used in ages. I don’t want you going in it. There’s a caved-in floorboard in there. It’s dangerous. I’m having someone coming next week to fix it.”