The Girl in Blue by Barbara J. Hancock Read Free Book Online

again. With his grim fascinations and the lingering death and darkness in his eyes, Creed might prove to be more dangerous than anything she’d ever run from in Scarlet Falls.
    She’d spent her life learning a way to defeat the darkness and he seemed far too willing to embrace it. She had practically run to get away from the photographs, musty files and gloomy stories she’d found at the Historical Society, and Samuel Creed was their benefactor.
    “No,” she said. She didn’t want him digging into her secrets, but she couldn’t pretend that her curiosity was all in fun. “This isn’t a lark,” she continued. She felt sympathy for the poor little girl buried under their feet, dead too soon even though some part of her might still roam intent to bother and burn.
    His dark eyes surveyed her face. Her skin felt fragile in the breeze like glass, as if one more jarring incident would shatter her.
    It didn’t.
    As she looked up at Creed, something appeared at the periphery of her vision.
    The Girl in Blue stood under a blazing maple at the edge of the cemetery. She posed exactly as she’d been posed in the photograph except she clutched empty hands to her chest where the ragdoll should be.
    Trinity blinked.
    She forced herself to breathe.
    She didn’t shatter.
    She absorbed one more oddity in silence. One more. Each and every one weighed on her, but she didn’t buckle.
    “What happens when your whole body stills like the universe is going on without you?” Creed asked. He whispered the words in his whiskey-drenched tones and the query couldn’t have been more intimate even if their heads had been lying on pillows.
    “Nothing,” she lied. The untruth came from numb lips.
    “Your eyes go wide and your breathing stops and then you catch yourself. You make yourself breathe. You make yourself blink,” he continued a play by play of this moment, but also a commentary on so many such moments he’d witnessed before.
    And still she could see Clara Chadwick out of the corner of her eye as if the photograph in her pocket had come to life…if life could describe the hollow-eyed shade of the dead girl who was actually dust beneath her boots.
    Creed reached up. He touched her cheek and the chilled brittle flesh there suddenly became supple and warm.
    She wasn’t fragile.
    That was an illusion.
    She was so strong and resilient that she could stand among the restless dead in a cemetery and desire the touch of a man she should fear while resisting the need to confide in him.
    He stepped closer when she didn’t flinch from his fingers on her cheek. He stepped closer and leaned down and tasted her again. As if this wasn’t their third kiss in seven years, as if he often leaned to taste her, but also much slower, obviously savoring and prolonging a move others would take for granted because they didn’t have to wait or resist.
    “Oh,” she breathed out when his tongue eased in.
    He tasted her, slight and teasing, but she hadn’t expected the sensual deepening of a kiss that should have been brief because it was public. The cemetery was sheltered, but it was outside in the open air where anyone might pass. Creed must not care if the whole town saw him lick into her softly open lips and she met his tongue with hers because, while she cared, her body had a mind of its own.
    She didn’t reach for him. She responded only with her lips and tongue, kissing him back, but not burying her hands in his hair or twining them around his neck. She kept her hands in her pockets, but both of his came up to hold her face so gently she could barely feel the heat from his fingers. And still his tongue dipped and twirled and dueled with hers, showing her the passion that belied the stillness of his body and hers.
    They weren’t alone.
    There were shadows around them that didn’t belong. Along the ground they were cast by nothing discernible against the stones. They shifted and swirled though there wasn’t a sunbeam strong enough to create