Page 51 of A Secret In The Garden

I let out a slow, uneven grin and watched her enter her room, forcing myself to turn away and not do something really, really stupid—like pushing her against the wall and wrapping her thighs around my head. The hallway stretched before me, the dark corridor lined with memories and secrets it seemed like I’d never fully know.

I was halfway to my own room when her blood-curdling scream shattered the heavy silence.

In an instant, I was running back, my heart thundering. I burst through her door, scanning the room for a threat. She had told me something was messing with her door and couch, and I had brushed it off. And security had been having issues with the cameras lately. It wouldn’t be the first time paparazzi had broken in.

My chest spiked with a thrill. I’d let them get a few seconds’ head start, so that I could maximize the chase. If they were smart, they’d throw themselves over the cliff before I got to them. I would hurt them a lot more than the fall if I caught them. As if I’d willed it into existence, a high-pitched tone sounded from my phone. Security.

Eliza was pressed against the wall, all color drained from her face, eyes wide with terror. A chair lay overturned several feet from where she stood as if thrown. “She—she— Something pushed me.” She struggled to speak. “The chair—it just…it flew across the room.”

The room was empty. I approached her carefully, my protectiveness overwhelming any skepticism. “Are you hurt?” My hands hovered near her, wanting to touch her but afraid of causing more distress.

She was trembling. “I don’t understand. One moment, I was standing by the dresser, and then…” Her voice trailed off, eyes darting around the room before grabbing at the locket around her neck.

“You said she. Who’s she? Katya? Leah?” I asked, ready to hurl someone off the balcony for scaring her. My staff knew better than to play games, but they were the only shes I could think of.

The room was freezing, electric. Something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t tell exactly what it was.

I couldn’t look at her trembling for another second without trying to help. I pulled her close, feeling how rigid her body was before she slowly relaxed into my embrace. Her warmth, her scent—like soil and lavender, maybe pine, but all in a way that smelled like she’d just stepped in from a forest—her sudden proximity was intoxicating and dangerous, and even though I saw no threat in her room, I couldn’t bring myself to step away from her. Feeling her press herself deeper into my chest felt like a key unlocking something inside of me. I had no room to think about not hurting her because I was filled with determination to keep her safe.

The feeling of something weird in the room lingered, making me uneasy. It was like a hundred sets of eyes were on me and on her, waiting…lurking. I ignored the creepy feeling, not wanting to frighten her any more than she already was.

“You’re safe,” I murmured into her hair, though I wasn’t entirely convinced of that myself. Goose bumps lit up across the back of my neck. No matter what, I wouldn’t let anything happen to her. I meant what I said: she was safe with me—if not from me.

Our eyes met, a tension between us coiling like a spring ready to be released. I could see every freckle on her face, an eyelash that bent the wrong way, the slight tremble of her swollen lower lip, the fear still lingering in her eyes, the way her breath caught when my thumb grazed her soft cheek. She looked up at me with so much emotion that it caused me to panic. What was I doing? She was leaving in a few weeks. She’d be leaving me, just like everyone left.

I pulled away.

“I can’t do this,” I muttered, more to myself than to her. The ghosts of my past—my abandoned childhood, my fractured relationships, my own emotional barriers—all stood between us like insurmountable walls, and no matter how much I wanted to, they were barriers I couldn’t get over.

I couldn’t do a fling with Eliza; I was already too attached. I wouldn’t be okay with having her for another month just for her to leave me. Then what? The manor was a two-hour drive from civilization, and I didn’t want to always stay here. What if I had stronger feelings than she did? If I sank my hooks into her, I could never let her go. She’d know too much, be too branded into my flesh. What if I didn’t want her anymore and this was just sexual? I shook my head, trying to quiet the thoughts. She was frightened, and all I could think about was trying to claim her. This was not the night to figure any of this out.

“Why don’t you sleep in another room tonight? Would you feel better?” I asked her.

“No, I think this is okay,” she said, looking a little embarrassed. “I think I let my, um, imagination get the best of me.”

I walked through the room, checking the balcony and bathroom one last time before I left her standing there, confusion and hurt evident in her expression. I swear the manor sighed around me as I retreated into the hallway.

Outside her room, the hall felt alive with whispers. For a moment, I could have sworn I smelled Chanel No. 5 again. There was a flash of dark red, but when I turned, there was nothing. Just shadows and paintings.

Chapter 17

Eliza

With Jasper’s father returning, everything was in chaos. Jasper insisted that I continue in the garden even though Darius had demanded that nothing else be touched. There was an uncomfortable eeriness to the conservatory now as the layers and the puzzle pieces continued to show but not click into place. The fact that Jasper’s father had returned after all this time made me prickle with unease. The fact that he had not brought Hester with him obviously hadn’t been a surprise to me, though it was obvious that Jasper had expected her to be standing next to his father when, in fact, she stood dead at the foot of my bed. And the more and more time I spent working in the conservatory getting to know the woman Hester had been, the more I knew how wrong this all was.

All of them—Jasper, Sowerby, and Darius—each continued to act as though Hester would walk through the door at any given moment. But I knew the truth.

And I believed at least one if not all of them did too.

Hester Blackwood was dead, and she was clearly not happy about it, not that I blamed her in the slightest.

Which raised the question: Which of them knew she was dead? Each of them continued to act weird in their own way, though Darius, I knew the least, and he seemed the most suspicious in how he talked about her. I had said I was putting roses in the garden, trying to pull more information from him, giving him ample opportunity to say how much she hated them. Knowing she hated roses from her journal but that they were used as a wax stamp on her letters was one of the only clues I had—even if I had no idea what it meant or how, if at all, that information could help.

Sowerby refused to speak ill of Hester if he spoke of her at all. I knew at one point he had been incredibly close to her, working side by side with her in the garden. Had there been something romantic with Hester and Sowerby? Could there have been a scuffle between Sowerby and Hester out near the cliff? Maybe she told him she couldn’t see him anymore and he’d pushed her off the cliff. With a tall stone barrier to prevent a fall and the fact that she still haunted the manor, it was an obvious guess. Had both Darius and Hester left like Jasper believed, but something happened to Hester and that’s why she chose to haunt the manor? For Jasper? As a sad and shattered mother hoping to right her wrongs? The hair on the back of my neck rose. Perhaps it was my own wild, all-encompassing fears of the cliff, but it seemed like that was the most explainable place that Hester’s body would have gone, lost and never to be discovered.

That left another set of questions that I found myself pushing to the back of my head, not wanting to press into them any further.

The moment Darius had stepped foot in the manor, I expected the worry I had about Jasper killing her to dissolve. Right in front of my eyes was evidence that Jasper had not killed his parents, confirmation that he had been telling me the truth about everything. However, that feeling never left, and instead, more questions filled my mind. I knew that his mother was dead, so what had happened to her? If Darius had been playing dead this whole time, that also raised a lot of questions, though at the time he left, I suppose I understood why he would let the allegations against Jasper remain and pretend to be dead; everyone hated him. If Darius had murdered Hester, killed her the night that her and Jasper had fought, then why would he have bothered to leave Jasper? Why not take him? What had caused them to snap and suddenly become such horrible parents who left their son if they had, in fact, both left? And why hadn’t they taken Jasper with them? The questions continued to come with no answers. I was failing her.