Still Lake - Anne Stuart [54]
And then she remembered what she was doing here. And who was upstairs asleep. “Ma?” she whispered loudly.
She didn’t dare climb the narrow stairs to the second level. She was already playing with fire—besides, Grace wasn’t the stealthy sort. If she was here, Sophie would have heard her. She tried one last time. “Grace?” she called in a stage whisper.
“She’s not here.”
Sophie shrieked. Smith had appeared out of nowhere, looming up in the darkness. Blocking the doorway. “What are you doing here?” she demanded in a panicked voice.
“I live here, remember?” he said with thinly disguised impatience. “And your mother hasn’t wandered over here tonight. What made you think she had?”
“She’s missing.” It was bad enough that she was standing in his house in the middle of the night in her nightgown. Somehow the darkness made it worse. Not that she wanted bright lights to expose what she was wearing. Though in fact the nightgown had more fabric in it than some of her dresses. She was being stupid. “Why are you prowling around here in the dark?” she demanded.
“It’s my house, I can prowl around all I want. In fact, the power’s out. I was just calling the electric company.”
“You told me your phone didn’t work.”
“It didn’t work yesterday. They hooked it up today. Why don’t you call your house and see if your mother’s there?”
“She won’t answer the phone.”
“Your sister will. That way you’ll know whether you really need to panic or not.”
“All right,” she said grudgingly. He sounded too damned practical for her, and she wanted to get away from him as fast as she could, but if Grace was missing she needed to get help quickly. “Where’s the phone?”
“Over by the sofa. You’ll have to feel your way there—I don’t have a flashlight or candles.”
“I do,” she said, remembering it belatedly, and she switched it on, shining it on Smith.
Big mistake. He was wearing a pair of ragged cutoff jeans and nothing else. There seemed to be acres and acres of naked, tanned, warm male skin right in front of her, and she dropped the flashlight, which immediately went out, plunging them back into darkness again.
“Smart move,” he drawled. “Did you see a ghost?”
There it was again. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” she said.
“Given the history of this place that’s probably just as well,” he muttered. “Give me your hand.”
“Why?”
“I said your hand, not any other part,” he said, annoyed. “I’m going to lead you over to the telephone, preferably without you breaking your neck in the process.”
“I think I should just go back…”
He’d already grabbed her hand. He could see better than she could in the darkness, and she had no chance to pull away. His hand was big, strong, warm. Flesh. He moved past her into the pitch-black room. The doorway was empty. She could yank her hand free and run for it if she could just take him by surprise.
“Don’t think you can run away,” he said, tugging at her. “I won’t be responsible for you getting lost in the woods any more than I would for your mother. I have at least a faint sense of decency. Come on.”
She didn’t bother struggling—it would have been undignified, and her tattered dignity was her only defense by that point. She let him lead her through the darkness, and she only banged her hip once against a wooden object before he placed her hand on the telephone. “There,” he said, sounding impatient.
The impatience was both reassuring and annoying. He didn’t want her there any more than she wanted to be there—he’d made that entirely clear. He just had a sense of responsibility beneath his remote exterior.
It was an old-fashioned dial phone, probably black and ancient. Touch-tone would have been hard enough in the dark. By the fifth attempt she could hear the phone ringing on