CHAPTER 65
I was fast asleep when I felt the bed moving up and down.
“Becca!” I heard his voice and then I felt the warm hand on my shoulder. “Becca, wake up,” he said.
“What?” I mumbled, caught somewhere between awake and asleep—that strange no man’s land where your body feels suspended between what is real and what isn’t.
“Come, get up. I think I know where the letters are,” he said to me, a gentle tapping on my shoulder.
At that, I sat straight up. I blinked several times, until my eyes adjusted to the light a little better. The moon was full; it was casting a soft white light into my room and this white light made Mike look like some kind of a statue, sculpted out of a white slab of marble.
“Where?” I rubbed the sticky sleep from my eyes and shook my head awake.
“The stables.” Mike flicked the light on next to my bed and I blinked rapidly as the harsh light almost blinded me. I shielded my eyes with my hands.
“What do you mean, stables?” I asked.
“I was looking through the old photo albums again, and there’s a picture of her and her horse,” he said.
I nodded and yawned at the same time. “I read about that in her diary.”
“Well, its name was Darcy. The horse.”
At that, a little shot of adrenalin woke me up. “And you think, what? That she hid the letters in the stables? That it was a cryptic clue—she didn’t mean an actual book?”
“Wouldn’t you make it cryptic? Something that only the person who knows you would work out?”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s just a slight leap, isn’t it? My favorite book, to the horse stables?”
“And, think about it, the stables are all the way at the bottom of the property, they back on to the woods—he would have been able to get to them, unseen. And, also, if she was unable to get away to give them to him, because my great-grandfather was watching her, she could have easily put them in the stables when she went riding.”
“You’ve thought about this a lot,” I said. I was still skeptical, though.
“I’m going to check it out, whether you’re coming or not.”
I jumped up. “I didn’t say I wasn’t coming.”
“Okay,” he said, and waited for me as I skidded around the room, pulling on a pair of shoes and a jumper.
“It’s inside out.” He pointed, once I was done.
“Mmmm?” I looked down at myself. I had indeed put my jumper on the wrong way. “I’m not very functional in the morning,” I said, trying to pull the thing off, but getting tangled in the process.
“Here.” He moved over to me and pulled at my jumper. “Seems you need some help dressing yourself in the mornings.” He smiled.
I put my arms up in the air and watched him as he pulled the jumper up and off me. He was looking at it with such concentration as he held the hole open for me to stick my head through. I did, and popped out the other end with a smile.
“Haven’t had someone dress me in a while,” I joked.
“That’s surprising, since it seems you need some help in that department.”
“Ha ha,” I teased back, wiggling into the jumper as he pulled it down my body. But, as his hands grazed my rib cage, I stiffened and froze. Suddenly, everything around us felt different again.Very.
His hands stopped what they were doing. They weren’t pulling on my top anymore; instead, his fingertips had come to rest on my rib cage. I could feel his hands through the cotton T-shirt I was wearing; they felt warm and soft. They tightened around me slightly and I shivered. My skin pebbled and the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stood straight up. His hands slipped down my sides, tracing my body as they went, and then came to rest on my waist, making me feel dizzy.
“What are you doing?” I whispered, looking up at him. He was staring at his hands, as if deciding what to do with them.Should I tell him what to do with them?Should I let him know where I wanted them? That I wanted them all over my body, in my hair, gripping the back of my neck, on my cheeks, holding my face?
He didn’t answer me, but his eyes did. They went from green to a stormy black, and an excited shiver ran the length of my body. And then his gaze left my waist and drifted back up to my eyes, seeking me out with such intensity, such a determined focus, that I was sure the room around me just disappeared.
