She stepped back, her hand at the neck of her gown. “Who are you and what are you doing in my house?”
“Your house?” the man asked. “I think the landlord would disagree with that.” Turning, he lifted his arm and the light illuminated some stairs. Amy glanced over the railing and below she saw what looked like a tavern resembling the ones they’d seen in Williamsburg.
Amy took a step back from the man. He was as tall as Stephen but he looked bigger, broader, and he didn’t have Stephen’s sweetness of expression. “I don’t know who you are or what your game is, but if you don’t get out of my house this minute, I’m going to scream for my husband to call the police.”
The man stepped farther away from her. “Please do call your, uh, what is it? Your husband, wench. I will see to him.” He flipped back his heavy black cloak to show the long, silver sword in a scabbard at his waist.
Every newspaper account of every horror Amy had ever read about came to her mind. “Please don’t hurt my children,” she whispered while thinking that he’d already harmed them.
Her eyes wide with terror and her heart pounding, she put her hand behind her to open the door to her son’s room. In one swift movement, she opened the door, ran into the bedroom, then shut the door and leaned against it. She didn’t know what she was going to do if the man pushed against the door; she’d never be able to hold it against him. But when the door stayed still, her only concern was to find her son and get him out of the house. They’d practiced fire drills and Amy kept rope ladders rolled up in the cabinet under the window seat.
She ran to the bed. “Davy?” she whispered urgently. “Get up. Get up now. You have to get out of the house. There’s an emergency.” When the boy didn’t move, she threw back the covers and put out her hands to wake him.
“Oh, this is a nice surprise. Come here, honey,” said a man’s voice, and the next second Amy was being pulled into the bed by a pair of strong arms. The man smelled as if he hadn’t had a bath in a year, and in addition to being frightened, Amy felt nauseous.
“Let me go!” she said, kicking out at him, which, unfortunately, made her nightgown go up above her knees.
“Just like I like ’em,” the man said, his hand on her knee and moving upward. His mouth was near her face and he had breath like a cesspool.
“Stop it!” she said as loudly as she could, but her voice was muffled by his hand, his face, and his body that was moving on top of her.
In the next second, someone lifted the man from her and she heard him hit the wall.
“Stephen!” Amy said, her arms going up to him. “It was horrible! He tried to—The boys! Our sons! We have to get them.”
“I do not know who Stephen is,” the man said, “and I do not know of your sons. I was not aware that you had a husband.”
It was the dark man. She could see his face outlined by the moonlight coming in through the window. “You!” she said. “What have you done with my husband and children?”
The man stood up straight as the other man groaned in the corner. “Unless you want him to be your companion for the night, I would suggest that you go back to your own bed. Perhaps on the morrow you will be less insane.”
Amy just sat on the bed and looked up at him in confusion. The bed was so soft that the mattress nearly surrounded her. “I don’t know who you are or what you’re talking about. This is my home and I live here with my husband and two sons. What have you done with them?”
Even in the darkness of the room, she could see the man shake his head, then roll his eyes. In the next second, he bent and lifted her into his arms.
Amy struggled to get away from him.
“If you do not be still I will drop you and I can attest that this floor is very hard.” When she quit struggling, he carried her down the hall and through the doorway of the room she’d awakened in, and dropped her onto the bed.
When Amy landed, there was a high-pitched scream and a woman stuck her head out from under the covers.
“What by God’s teeth is this?” the woman said, sputtering and fighting her way out from under the covers. She looked at the man. “Oh, it’s you, my lord. Do you need something?” As she said this, she was kicking at Amy and trying to get her off her legs.
The man used flint and a striker to light a candle by the bedside. “Aye, I do,” he said. “Keep your sister in bed unless it is your plan to hire her out to the men in your keeping.”
“Why not?” the woman said. “She’s of little other use to us. She is weak and slow-witted. My father despairs of her.”
Amy stopped struggling against the legs kicking at her and looked at the woman. She was pretty, but in a slovenly way. Her dark hair looked as though it hadn’t been washed in a while and there was dirt on her neck. The worst thing was the way she was looking at the man looming over them. Pure, undiluted lust.
“Might there be something I can do for you,” the woman said, her tone suggestive.
“Nay, not tonight. Just keep your sister in the room. Tie her to the bed if need be.”
“Ah,” the woman said, her voice low and purring. “I might like to be tied to the bed.”
Amy grimaced at the forward manner of the woman and looked up at the man, but his dark face gave no hint of what he was thinking. She’d thought he was Stephen but he wasn’t. He looked a bit like him, but—
“You look like Zoë’s drawing,” Amy said. “You’re Stephen, but distorted.”
“I am not your husband,” the man said, but his tone was more amused than angry.
“Of a certain you are not,” the dark woman said as she swung out with her fist and hit Amy on the arm.
Amy fell back into the heavy covers and grabbed her arm. “That hurt!”
“It was meant to,” the woman said, never taking her eyes off the man. When she started to get out of bed, the man stepped back, obviously wanting to get out of the room.
“I will leave you to it, then,” the man said as he opened the door, then he was gone.
Amy sat where she was, still too stunned by the last few minutes to understand what had happened. She turned to the woman in the bed beside her. “My name is Amy Hanford and I seem to have…Actually, I don’t know what’s happened to me, but I need to find my husband and children. If you could—”
She didn’t say another word because the woman hit her in the face with her fist. Amy went sailing back into the bedcovers, and when she put her hand up, her nose was bleeding.
“You’re my stupid sister!” the woman yelled into her face. “You have no husband and no children. You have no men! You understand me? The men belong to me. And especially Lord Hawthorne. He’s mine and not yours, so don’t go followin’ after him to try to get him in bed with you. You understand me?”
“Perfectly,” Amy said. She was looking for a box of tissues, but saw none. As blood ran down her arm, she grabbed a gray piece of cloth and held it to her nose.
“You’re washin’ that, not me,” the woman said.
Amy realized she was holding a corner of the sheet. “I’m sure I’ll be the first,” she said, but was glad that her stuffed nose kept her from being understood. She didn’t want to be hit again.
The woman blew out the candle. “Now let me get some sleep.”
“Happily,” Amy muttered, then lay down in the bed beside the woman. By now she’d decided that she was at home and dreaming and the faster she went back to sleep, the sooner she’d wake up and laugh with Stephen over her ridiculous dream.
Or would she wake up in Maine and share the dream with…? She smiled. With her new friends. It was a nice thought in the midst of a truly awful dream, and Amy believed in nice thoughts.
She closed her eyes and gave herself over to the memory of the day she and Stephen and the boys had gone to the zoo. That had been a lovely day. After a while, her nose stopped bleeding and she went to sleep.
Eight
“What happened to you?” Zoë asked when Amy walked into the kitchen the next morning.
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Zoë was sitting at the kitchen table, an empty plate in front of her, her sketch pad on her lap. Faith was at the sink, washing dishes.
Amy opened the freezer door and got out a tray of ice. “I think I rolled over and hit my nose on the bedside table. At least that’s all I can think of that would do this. Does it look really bad?” She wrapped the ice in a dish towel and held it to her sore face.
“Awful,” Zoë said. “One side of your face—”
Faith put her hand on Zoë’s shoulder. “She’s been up all night, so don’t listen to her. You look fine. A little makeup and some—”
“Plastic surgery,” Zoë cut in.
“Don’t make me laugh,” Amy said. “My whole face hurts. I got blood all over Jeanne’s sheets and they’re in the washer now, but I don’t think the stains will come out.” She looked at Faith. “Maybe we could buy her some new ones today.”
“Sure,” Faith said as she accepted the invitation.
Amy looked at the woman. “Is there something different about you today?”
“She looks five years younger, doesn’t she?” Zoë said. “I noticed it right away. Now you, you look like you spent a couple of rounds with a boxer.”
There was a mirror by the dining table and Amy looked in it. Since she’d been up, she’d done little but stare at her reflection, but each time it still looked like she’d lost a fight.
“I think we should take you to a doctor,” Faith said. “Your nose could be broken. Why didn’t you call out when you hit the cabinet? I’m a light sleeper and I would have heard you.”
Amy sat down at the kitchen table and gingerly touched her nose. “Actually, I did call out, but only the man heard me.”
“Man?” Both Faith and Zoë stopped and looked at her.
Amy took Zoë’s drawing pad and flipped the pages to the sketch of Stephen—Stephen the Dark, she thought. “Him. He heard me in my dream.”
“You had a dream about my man?” Zoë asked. “I’m not sure that’s legal. I think that if I conjured him, he’s mine. You already have one hunk, so you can’t have mine.”
“What was your dream?” Faith asked, her face serious as she sat down opposite Amy. “And was he the one who hit you?”
Amy glanced at the two women and saw that they both had lost their look of amusement. “No, no, and double no,” she said. “The man didn’t hit me. No man, not in life or in a dream, has ever hit me, so you two can stop looking at me like that. It was my sister—the sister in the dream, that is—who hit me and I was in bed with her.”
Zoë and Faith were silent for a moment, then Faith said, “I’ll get the eggs out while you start talking.”
Amy groaned. “No, really, it was just a stupid dream. I’m sure it’s not part of Jeanne’s therapy that we have to tell our dumb dreams.”
“Are you kidding? She loves dreams,” Zoë said. “I got to the point where I made them up just to entertain her. I liked to see how fast she could write to get them down.”
Faith gave Zoë a look of disgust. “And you wonder why the court ordered you into therapy.” She looked back at Amy. “Even if Jeanne hated dreams, I think I can speak for both of us by saying that we’d like to hear your dream about being in bed with your sister and that man.”
“He wasn’t in the bed.”
“Oh,” Zoë and Faith said in unison, and they sounded so disappointed that Amy laughed—but that hurt her swollen, bruised face, so she stopped.
“Okay,” Amy said, “I’ll tell, but it was nothing, really.” She smiled. “Stupid. That’s what my sister kept calling me. I think she really hated me.”
“All sisters do,” Faith said as she broke eggs into a bowl.
“That’s the second time you’ve said something rotten about sisters,” Amy said. “What makes you so down on them?”
“When my mother died, I found out that my father had been married before and had two daughters older than me. Let’s just say that when they found out I’d married a rich man, they were all over me.”
“Were they in your bed and did they hit you?” Zoë asked.
“No.”
“Then I’d rather hear Amy’s story,” Zoë said.
Actually, Amy didn’t mind telling her dream because she hoped that the telling would take it out of her head. Even though she was now awake and in the sunlight and it was the twenty-first century, it still felt real.
“Interesting,” Zoë said when Amy had finished talking. “My guess is that you had the dream after you hit your nose. It was a story to explain the accident.”
“I guess so,” Amy said, looking down at her bowl of cereal. “But I’ve never had a dream that had odors in it. I can still smell that horrible man’s bad breath. Yuck!”
“What about the hero’s breath?” Faith asked.
“Hero? Oh, you mean the—”
“The tall, dark, and handsome demigod,” Zoë said.
“Hardly that,” Amy said as she carried her empty bowl to the sink and washed it. “What shall we do today besides buy sheets?” Turning, she looked at both of them, but neither Zoë nor Faith spoke.
“Did I miss something?” Amy asked.
“Actually, Faith wants to spend the day with a hairdresser and get her hair cut and dyed flaming red.”
“Really?” Amy asked, eyes wide.
“I thought I might,” she said shyly. “I mean about the cut part, not the flaming red.”
“I think that’s wonderful. And what about you, Zoë?”
“Sketching,” she said, holding up her pad. “I have a few things in my head and I’d like to walk along the coast and get some ideas.”
Amy wanted to protest that their plans left her alone, but truthfully, she didn’t mind being by herself. She wanted to go to the bookstore she’d seen yesterday. She looked at Zoë. “Did you really stay up all night?”
“Sure, I do it often.”
“She was still on the computer when I got up,” Faith said. “Maybe you should take a nap today.”
Amy looked at Zoë in question, and she gave a quick nod to let Amy know that she’d been on the Internet looking for something about Ty. Her eyes said that she’d found something, and from her look, what she’d found wasn’t good.
“Well,” Amy said, “I think I’ll go look for replacement sheets for Jeanne, and I’ll sightsee around town.”
“We saw all of it twice yesterday,” Faith said.
“Maybe I’ll spend the morning in that little used bookstore we saw. Remember? It’s down that alley by the pizza place.”
Faith had her head turned and Amy was looking at Zoë, who nodded. She’d understood Amy’s message that Zoë was to meet her there and tell her what she’d found out about Faith’s former boyfriend.
“All right,” Amy said, “I think I’ll finish getting dressed. Shall we meet back here for dinner? Maybe we should cook something.”
“I make a mean zabaglione,” Faith said. “Think I can find vin santo here?”
“You could use Marsala,” Amy said.
“Deliver me,” Zoë groaned. “I’m trapped with two housewives.”
“When you’re home, what do you eat?” Amy asked. “Don’t you cook?”
“I not only don’t cook, I don’t have a home.”
“What?” Faith asked.
“Since the accident, I’ve made my living by painting portraits of rich people and their kids. I stay in some mansion for three to six months and do watercolors and pastels of the whole family. I have become a ‘must have’ of the wealthiest people in the country.”
The way she said it, with a tone that said it was all ridiculous, made Faith and Amy smile.
“If you’re never in one place, how do you see Jeanne?” Faith asked.
“Computer setup. Video, audio, the works.”
“You have a therapy session by long distance?”
“Yeah, sure,” Zoë said. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” Amy said. “It’s just that sometimes
I feel very old.” She left the kitchen to go to her room. Before she left the house, she took the sheets out of the washer and she could see that they were still stained. That much blood would never come out.
As she put them in the dryer, she again thought about her dream. She’d made light of it to the others, but the truth was that it had deeply upset her. Usually, dreams faded during the day. A person could wake up still half in the dream, but by breakfast the images had dulled.
But not this dream. Right now it was almost as though she could remember the dream more clearly than she could remember her own family. She’d called Stephen this morning, catching him just as they were leaving on their camping trip. She spent about three minutes with each of her sons, but they were so excited about the trip they couldn’t focus. When Stephen got on the phone, the first thing she asked him was if he knew whether the name Hawthorne was in his family tree.
“I have no idea,” Stephen said. “What makes you ask a question like that?”
“I had an odd dream and you were in it and you were named Hawthorne.” She crossed her fingers at the lie.
“Yeah?” Stephen said. “That sounds interesting. You’ll have to tell me about it when you get back.”
There was a pause from Stephen. “Is something wrong?”
“Not at all. In fact, I think I may have made a couple of friends.”
“Friends? The last time I talked to you, you were complaining that one was a goth and the other an old maid. You wanted to get on the first plane out.”
“I know, but things have changed. Faith has had a hard life and she’s going to get her hair cut today.”
“That’s my Amy,” Stephen said, chuckling. “You’ve persuaded her to have a beauty makeover.”
“I didn’t do it,” Amy said, not liking what he’d said. It made her sound as though she thought of nothing but makeup and clothes. “Zoë did it.”
Again Stephen paused. “Honey, are you all right?”
“Fine,” Amy said. “I’m just fine. What about you and the boys?”
“We’re great. Dad came over last night and we watched sports on TV.”
When he didn’t say anything else, Amy knew it was her cue to ask him if Lewis had smoked in the house, if they’d put wet beer cans on the wooden furniture, and if they’d cleaned up the pizza she knew they’d eaten. But Amy didn’t say anything. All that seemed truly clear in her mind was her dream.