To be honest, the sex was physically draining, but the emotional connection we had in that cave was on another level. I felt everything he was sharing with me, like he couldn’t hold the starved memories of his heart back any longer, and they tore out of that scar across his chest and fused with mine. It was like he was…sharing with me all he felt. A loneliness so cold, it burned down to the bone. A heat so hot, it burned down to the marrow. Then…warmth. It was the most intense moments of my life to date.
My poor coochee-cooch, though. If it wasn’t for that last round in the thermal springs, when I’d fallen asleep so hard, I wouldn’t have been able to sit without crying. I glanced down at my thighs. He’d ruined the bathing suit Scarlett had given me.Then a slow smile came to my face. She’d done that on purpose! Scarlett was a slick chickee.
“Coochee-cooch,” my husband repeated.
Oh. I must have said that out loud, or my husband had taken up residence inside of my mind while I was sleeping. I honestly wouldn’t doubt it. He was powerful in so many ways.
“Coochee-cooche. It’s, um. Well, it was an erotic dance done in the eighteen hundreds.”
He repeated the words, rolling them around in his mouth, and I grinned and squeezed his rock-hard bicep.
“I have a question for you.” I yawned.
He gave me a side-eye glance, like he was suddenly wary of those.
“Where was Rosaria going that night?”
He tensed, then relaxed. “Away from me.”
“I know.” I sat up taller, but it didn’t help the tiredness still flooding my system. But I was determined to get this out. “But do you know where—specifically? She was in an awful rush.”
“She drove fast,” he said, but I could tell the gears were turning in his head.
Where was she going that night?
If I was looking at this from a purely metaphorical view—if I was running to Rocco, who was she running to? Maybe she thought she could detour me by killing me, then keep going?
That would have finished him off.
She damaged his body.
She would have stolen his heart too.
This was never truly about me, but about him.
I love a good metaphor, symbolism too, but…this family took both to another level. If I didn’t have it in me to figure it all out, I would have been so effing lost—like those soldiers suffering from ghost afflictions in the hospital lost.
“Vincenzo,” I said. “He was there that night. I saw him.”
He glanced at me again.
I refused to tell him what Vincenzo had told me that night,about Rosaria being the witch I had killed, because…I didn’t want him to die, not for the comment, but for maybe talking to me out of turn—talking to me first. Before Rocco had. I didn’t think Rocco would punish him for it, since I wasn’t known to him at the time. On the other hand, I saw the look on his face when I was about to admit to him that the police hadn’t noticed me because of the case, but because most of them were flirting with me. It wasn’t the kind of attention I was looking for—what I had going on went much deeper than the physical, because my physical body was in jeopardy of being murdered. That tends to send anyone’s heart into panic mode and make them jump at every noise.
It had been so bad at one point that, even if I wanted a pet, I never would have gotten one. If, say, my cat would have jumped down from his carpet tower, I would have had a heart attack.
“Vincenzo would have been searching for Rosaria,” he said, but the words seemed automatic.
Something I sensed about Vincenzo the night we met—not much put him off. Something I’d confirmed about him since our first meeting. This family had dark themes, and that was where Vincenzo existed—in its darkest parts. Maybe he was going to…finish Rosaria off because of what she’d done to Rocco? That would have made sense, but his car was parked in the opposite direction—the direction behind the bus, not behind her. He hadn’t been chasing her, and she wasn’t running from him.
And, yeah, maybe she had been running from Rocco and the entire situation, but it seemed like she was determined to get somewhere. Like she was going to be late—just like I was, and we both couldn’t stand the thought.
Alarm bells were going off in my gut, arrows pointing in all different directions, but I was so sure of this—someonehadbeen waiting for her.
Maybe this “ghost” on the island?
That still didn’t explain the night I’d seen her underneath my balcony, though. The slicing motion she’d made across her throat. Maybe that was why I was so empathic to the men who claimedthey saw her too. It was unnerving to an umpteenth degree to see a woman who was supposed to be dead walking (floating, some of the men swore) around. Come to think of it, it almost seemed like she floated away from me too. Or maybe because she was such a shock, my mind hadn’t registered the entire picture.
Her face came back to me at times, like I was in the middle of a night storm, no light, but when shocks of lightning would brighten the world around me, she was coming at me—each shock a step closer.
