She put out one hand to balance herself, but there was nothing to grasp. She took a halting step. The other hand let go of her skirt, too, as if her fingers were numb. A rain of flowers fell, forgotten, into the dancing stream around her feet.
“No,” she said again, but she obviously wasn’t distressed about the flowers. She was frightened. She was blanched and frozen, as if she’d seen a ghost.
And the ghost was Patrick.
CHAPTER THREE
LIFE WAS BEAUTIFUL, especially in a ghost town.
Celia had a skirt full of flowers, and the brook was cool and clear as it slipped around her toes. She decided she might never go home. She might just go into the roofless old boardinghouse, make herself a pallet of wildflowers and sleep under the starry sky.
Actually, she was one of the few people who truly wouldn’t be afraid to do such a thing. She had grown up on ghost stories of Teague Ellis. In Enchantment, no giggling sleepover was complete without a spooky tale of how, if you were daring enough to go to Silverton at night, you would hear the rumble of Teague Ellis’s motorcycle as it invisibly prowled the deserted streets.
Some said he walked the corridors of the high school, listening for the sound of a baby crying. Through the years, half a dozen hysterical girls had sworn they’d seen him at the Homecoming dance, a dark, angry, handsome face in the crowd, searching for Angelina.
Celia had always laughed at the stories. Useful for boys who wanted their dates to shiver and cling to their strong, protective arms, but pure fantasy, of course. She never felt the slightest bit skittish in Silverton, though Teague’s poor body had been found there only two years after his disappearance. She’d never heard the ghostly motorcycle, or the moans that were said to waft up through the planks of the boarded-over mine shafts.
Celia was very levelheaded. She did not believe in ghosts.
But this…this was different.
As she stared at the stranger who had materialized there, just ten feet away, a primal fear rippled along her nerves, as if an unseen hand played them like the strings of a harp.
He…he looked exactly like Teague Ellis. How could it be? And yet…
She’d seen pictures of Teague often enough. The sexy, bad-tempered mouth, the wavy black hair that fell into deep-set, deep-blue eyes. She’d never forget the scruffy animal glamour—like James Dean, she’d thought. James Dean drawn in a palette of devil-black and bedroom-blue.
And oh, those eyes…those eyes said the boy had known pain and would know, in turn, how to inflict it.
But, in the space of a couple of seconds, she came to her senses. The man in front of her smiled, and the hypnotic vision shifted to something more prosaic. An eerie, but coincidental, resemblance. Similar height, similar coloring…and the rest was the product of overactive nerves and the haunting power of this place.
“I’m sorry,” the man said. His voice was cultured and deep. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
He moved toward the pebbled edge of the stream. As he bent over to help retrieve the wildflowers she’d dropped, he looked up at her and smiled, the sun beaming straight into his amazing blue eyes. “I walked in just now. My car broke down a little way down the road, and I was looking for a telephone.”
She smiled back, feeling finally returning to her fingertips. Not Teague, of course not. How could she have been so idiotic?
For one thing, Teague had been nineteen the night he disappeared. This man must be nearly thirty, though that sexy mouth and brooding eyes certainly gave his looks the gut-kick virility of a hot-blooded teenager.
“You didn’t startle me,” she lied, hurrying to pick up the rest of her flowers before the stream carried them away. “Or rather, it’s just that I thought I was alone.”
“Yes.” He turned and scanned the dusty, broken buildings. “This place could make you feel you were all alone in the whole world, couldn’t it? I could tell right away I wasn’t going to find a phone, but I couldn’t resist the urge to explore. It’s fascinating.”
She nodded, pleased that he seemed sensitive to the atmosphere—and that he didn’t find it depressing or ugly. She’d always thought the intense solitude was one of Silverton’s charms. It was a good place to think things over.
“I’m afraid there’s never been a single telephone in the town of Silverton,” she said. “The mine closed up at least ten years before it was invented.”
He handed her the flowers. “I was afraid of that,” he said. “Well, I guess I’d better start hiking back, then.”
He smiled again, and the smile was so open and friendly that his resemblance to Teague Ellis faded even further. You could tell from Teague’s picture that he had rarely smiled, and when he had it probably had possessed a sinister, wolfish quality.
“Maybe,” the man who wasn’t Teague said, “you’d be willing to point me in the direction of the nearest town that isn’t a ghost town.”
She hesitated just a second. She could almost hear Trish now, ordering her not to be naive. You couldn’t go giving a man a lift in your car just because he was handsome, wore an expensive suit and had a nice smile. Bad guys didn’t come equipped with neon signs that said Danger. Murderers and thieves sometimes looked exactly like bankers and lawyers.
Still, if this man had wanted to harm her, couldn’t he have done it already? If he wanted to bash her over the head and steal her earrings, or toss her down in the chilly stream and ravish her, there certainly wasn’t anyone in Silverton to stop him.
After sharing a deserted ghost town with him, would letting him into her car really be so much more dangerous?
“The nearest gas station is in Enchantment,” she said. “That’s only about ten miles from here. I’d be glad to give you a ride.”
He tilted his head with a well-bred diffidence. “Are you sure? I wouldn’t want to take you out of your way.”
“It’s not out of my way at all. I live in Enchantment.” She transferred the flowers to her left arm and held out her hand. “By the way, I’m Celia Brice—” she looked down at the flowers “—wildflower enthusiast.”
His handshake was strong and warm, but entirely civilized and respectful. There was really no reason for Celia to start shivering.
The spring wind must have decided to turn cool, as it sometimes did up here in the mountains. Of course it didn’t help that she was standing ankle deep in a running brook.
Or that this was the sexiest man she’d ever seen.
“Patrick Torrance,” he said, letting go of her hand at the perfect moment. Obviously he wasn’t harboring a single, solitary, ravish-related thought. “And I would be very grateful for a ride into Enchantment. I was actually on my way there when the car broke down.”
“You were? Why?”
She hadn’t meant to sound so astonished. But Enchantment was a small town, and while it attracted its fair share of tourists, this man didn’t look like a tourist somehow. Enchantment’s
