Swim Deep - Page 44

“I don’t understand how you can do it, Evan,” I said bluntly.

“Do what?”

“Live in this house. Exist in a place where your wife… the woman you loved disappeared.”

His hands tightened on my upper arms. I looked up at his shadowed face as he loomed over me, the ache in my chest amplifying.

“Do you know, when I looked at you the first time, I was shocked to the core? And you’re talking to a man who doesn’t surprise easily. Not anymore. I was stunned to see something so wholly new. So fresh. Honest. Rare.”

His deep voice vibrated with emotion. Rarely had I heard him speak this way. I stared up at him, speechless.

“I loved Elizabeth once, that’s true. I used to think she was the most perfect thing in existence. But the years matter, Anna. Maybe you’re too young to understand that yet. My point is, she’s gone. And I’ve fallen in love with you. God, can’t you feel that?”

Light flickered around us. His question roared in my brain alongside crashing thunder. Distantly, I realized that the kitchen had grown dark. The storm had crept up on us silently, but arrived with a fury. Its power was nothing compared to the man who held me.

“Yes,” I admitted honestly. “I can feel how much you love me.”

He swooped down and captured my mouth with his. Thunder crashed around us. I clutched at his shoulders, surrendering to the heat. To the truth.

I realized in some distant part of my brain that this was the reason he didn’t feel the need to tell me the miniscule details of his thoughts: This inescapable attraction between us, this magnetic draw. It was so big, so overwhelming, so obvious, it trumped everything else.

He put his forearm under my thighs. My feet left the floor. Our kiss continued, voracious and desperate, even as he threaded me through the obstacles in the kitchen and carried me up the stairs.

That night was the one where I think I started to believe in ghosts. Truly believe. Maybe ghosts were supernatural.

Maybe they were just the haunts of our minds.

That night, the dream returned. It was the same as before… terrifyingly the same. There was the similar dread and anticipation as I stared at the closed door in our room as it disappeared, transforming into a black void. There was the familiar horror at seeing her figure emerge from the absolute darkness, the smell of rotting flesh, the paralysis and mind-melting fear as she stood over me and slowly opened the hole of her mouth to speak. Water dripped on my cheek, the essence of her, the sensation horrifyingly real.

All of it was the same.

Except for the ending.

Someone gripped my shoulder and shook me.

“Anna. Anna, wake up.”

My eyelids flew open at his command. I winced at the bright light, gasping. I reached out blindly, my flattened hand slapping against Evan’s chest. He felt warm and solid. I dug my fingertips slightly into his bare flesh, trying to ground myself. I realized he sat up partially in bed, the sheet draped across his lap, leaving his upper body exposed. He stared down at me, his dark eyebrows slanted in concern. A shudder went through me.

“What happened?” I asked, still disoriented and agitated by the light and the residue of the nightmare.

“You were screaming,” he said, his hand transferring to my upper arm. He squeezed slightly, as if, like me, he needed to feel my flesh. “No, not screaming exactly. More like you were trying to, but someone was choking you. Are you all right?”

I glanced around the room. When my eyelids had first opened, it’d felt like a searchlight had been directed at my face. Now, I realized that Evan had only turned on a bedside lamp. It gave off a warm glow, casting our bedroom in a soft light. I had just been in this exact same place, in the nightmare. But this was an entirely different world.

Still… that other world, that nightmare world existed. I knew that somehow, deep in my bones. It lay just beneath this one, a menacing shadow-world to the one where I lay here with my husband.

I saw Evan’s concern, felt the tension of his body. But the vestiges of the dream still gripped at me. I rubbed my hand across my face, trying to clear away my weird thoughts like I would a clinging cobweb.

“Anna? What were you dreaming about?”

I opened my mouth to tell him about the nightmare woman who had taken to haunting me.

His first wife.

Instead, something else came out of my mouth.

“Evan, why are we here? Just tell me.”

Tags: Beth Kery Romance
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