A Time Apart: Book One of The Macauley Series Page 16

  “He did, did he? Interesting. I’m surprised, but then, everything about this is surprising, is it not?”

  The sarcasm in his voice was thick as molasses.

  “Why do I get the impression that you’re not exactly happy that I’m here?”

  “Please don’t take it personally,” he replied. “Like I said, I don’t like to see William vulnerable and right now he is. I wonder, did he tell you about his enemies?” He raised a sardonic eyebrow at her, knowing full well that she didn’t know about that facet of William’s life.

  “Alright then … how much do you really know, Olivia, about the situation you’ve willingly walked into?”

  She had to admit that there was a lot about William that she didn’t know. Probably too much.

  While they had talked late into the night about their life as it had been, and then her life as it was today, even during that conversation Olivia had gotten the impression that William had avoided talking about the man he had become. He was happy to answer questions about his time as a human; in fact, he seemed to cherish those memories, but he had been somewhat evasive when she’d asked about his vampire life.

  It pained her to admit it to Seamus, but she needed that information.

  “We didn’t get to that last night.”

  “No, I imagine you didn’t.” He smirked as he took in the pillows on the floor by the fire and she understood his meaning all too well.

  Olivia’s face turned scarlet and her ears started ringing, a physical manifestation of extreme embarrassment that she had had since she was in third grade.

  “What I meant to say was that we didn’t talk about him much last night. We talked about our life together before ... before he changed ... and then we talked about my life and my parents.”

  “I suggest you get him to tell you all about himself as soon as possible so that you can decide if you still want to be here. His real self, Olivia, not this human facade he puts on for the outside world.”

  “I had planned to talk to him tonight. But tell me, Seamus, knowing that I stayed even after I realized what was happening to me, do you really think I’m going to leave him now?”

  “No, I don’t suppose you would. Nor do I suppose that you actually could, even if you wanted to. He’s found you and he’s not going to give you up without a fight. I just hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  He set down his now empty cup and rose from the chair.

  “But enough of all this hinting around on my part. I’m sure William will share everything with you tonight when he wakes and then you can decide for yourself what you’re going to do. In the meantime, I should show you to your chambers.”

  Olivia followed him out of the room, down the hall, and up a magnificent staircase lined with portraits dating back hundreds of years. Sprinkled among them were various images of William, dressed to represent the era in which the painting had been created. As the years passed, the eyes in his portrait became more and more radiant. By the time they reached the top of the staircase, the final painting – done in 1969 from the dated plaque that had been attached to the bottom of the frame – had eyes that were a piercing, electric blue similar to the shade she’d seen staring back at her during certain moments the night before.

  “What’s with the eyes?” she asked.

  “That’s one of the things you should talk to William about. His secrets are not mine to share. But tell me, what do you think of this one?” He gestured to a huge painting, at least 6 feet tall, hung by itself at the top of the landing.

  Olivia gasped.

  “Remarkable, isn’t it?”

  “Oh my god.”

  “Yes, I thought so too when I saw you last night.”

  Olivia walked over to the portrait, stunned. With the exception of the clothing, the woman in the picture was the spitting image of her, right down to the freckles across the bridge of her nose, and that one lone freckle on her bottom lip. She looked down to see a signature inscribed on the bottom right hand corner – Macauley – dated 1690.

  “Did William paint this?”

  “Who else could have captured your likeness in such a way? Yours is a face that has haunted him since the moment he became immortal. I’m sure he knows every line, every freckle, and every expression of that face. It’s what he dreams of when he sleeps, Olivia.”

  She started to speak, but he stopped her.

  “I don’t tell you this to scare you, but to make sure you understand – fully – what is at stake here. This is not some dalliance that you can walk away from. You are the love of his entire existence.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t know if I was her. Ceara.” Olivia gestured at the portrait above them.

  “Given the world I live in, Olivia, and all that I’ve seen, I’ve quit taking things at face value. With this portrait, William’s beliefs, and your memories, I’d say there’s a pretty good chance it’s the truth. But I wanted to be sure that you believe it’s the truth too.”

  Before Olivia could think up a response, Seamus moved behind her to open a door to their right.

  “Here we are. Your suite.”

  Given the sophisticated beauty she’d been surrounded by since entering the castle, Olivia shouldn’t have been surprised at how utterly resplendent her room was. Despite that fact that she’d lived her entire life surrounded by wealth, she couldn’t help feeling like a princess in a fairy tale. The Donnelly fortune was relatively new money, and it bought shiny new things. The Macauley fortune was an old one, and so were its physical embodiments.

  Against the back wall was a four-poster bed of rich mahogany covered in sumptuous blue velvet and more pillows than any one person would need in their lifetime. A matching armoire stood across the room, flanked by a mirror that was taller than she was. In between the silk-draped windows on either side of the room was a small chest of drawers topped by a large cut crystal vase – Waterford, she assumed – of white roses and lilies. At her feet was an impeccably preserved Aubboson rug.

  “Your things are in the armoire,” Seamus said, interrupting her catalogue of the room’s contents.

  “My things?”

  “Your luggage, your computer, everything from your room at The Shelbourne.”

  “But, I didn’t bring it with me,” she said, more than a trifle confused.

  “No, you didn’t. But William is a valued guest there and so here are your things. They arrived a couple of hours ago.”

  Olivia stood in stunned silence.

  She had planned on moving her belongings to the castle at some point in the near future, so it wasn’t as if this was something she hadn’t wanted, but the fact that it had been done without her being consulted left a bitter taste in her mouth. While William had told her that she would be free to come and go at her leisure, somehow the presence of all of her stuff packed away neatly in this room made Olivia question the sincerity of that claim.

  “I had intended to go shopping today,” she said defiantly, turning to face Seamus, daring him to tell her that she couldn’t. “If I wanted to buy some more sweaters and scarves, where would be the best place to get them? Would I need to go back to Dublin?”

  “You could go back into Dublin, but Kilkenny or Waterford is closer. Would you like me to have a car brought around for you?”

  “Really? All I have to do is ask and there it’ll be?”

  “It’s no problem at all. William has several vehicles he uses. He left word with his garage that you were to have free reign of the Saab, Volvo, or Land Rover. I can call for one of them if you’d like.”

  “Why those three?”

  “You don’t drive a manual, do you?”

  “No, but how do you know that?” she asked somewhat accusingly.

  “Olivia, it’s not what I know, but what William knows.”

  She must have looked confused because he continued then, only slightly exasperated, when she didn’t respond.

  “Apparently you gave an interview to a magazine about a trip that you
took with your mother, where arriving at the car rental agency you were given a vehicle with a manual transmission. You couldn’t drive it, and they were completely out of automatics. After not being able to leave the parking lot you hired a chauffeur for the remainder of your sojourn. And thus William instructed the garage to make sure that the vehicles with automatic transmissions are available for your use.”

  The day he recounted came back to her, and Olivia smiled at the memory of she and her mother sitting in the parking lot, looking at one another, two completely helpless females, which in any other circumstance they certainly were not. Olivia laughed out loud at the ridiculousness of that day. How silly they must have looked as they tried – probably a hundred times – to start the car before admitting defeat and calling for a driver.

  Olivia also recalled how later the reporter the magazine had dispatched for the interview told her that even though she could drive a stick-shift she always paid extra for an automatic car when visiting Europe because she never wanted to deal with maneuvering a tricky clutch when she was driving on the wrong side of the road in the wrong side of the car in a foreign country.

  How did William find that article? I hadn’t even thought about it in ages.

  Olivia wondered what he thought of the woman the press portrayed her as. How had he interpreted her relationship with her mother? How much of her life did he already know about?

  Once again relaxed after hearing that she would have access to a vehicle and that she could leave anytime that she wanted to – that there was nothing nefarious going on – Olivia thanked Seamus but told him that she wouldn’t need a vehicle after all.

  “I think since my things are here I’m just going to take a long, hot bath and do some work.”

  “I’ll leave you to it then. There are plenty of towels and a few different robes to choose from in the bathroom. Please, make yourself at home.”

  As Seamus closed her door, Olivia closed her eyes.

  What have I gotten myself into?

  CHAPTER 19

  As Olivia watched the sun set out her bedroom window she wondered how long it would be before William would rise. Would he come straight to her? What was the protocol of their arrangement? They hadn’t discussed specifics so she wasn’t entirely sure what was and wasn’t expected of her.

  Beyond Seamus, she hadn’t seen anyone else in the castle so she wasn’t expecting that her dinner would be prepared. While the refrigerator had been stocked with necessities, there hadn’t been a whole lot in the cupboards or pantry to make many meals beyond yogurt and granola, or the fixings for sandwiches. She didn’t intend to eat meat, cheese, and bread for three meals a day, every day. She must remember to ask Seamus to stock her favorite ingredients.

  Olivia shouldn’t have been nervous to see William – not after everything they’d shared the night before – but her heart was racing and her palms were beginning to sweat as she watched the sun slide below the horizon as full on dusk arrived. She checked herself in the mirror again, looking for anything to fix, more out of a need to fidget than a real attempt to look better.

  Olivia had decided to go without makeup as that’s how William had been used to seeing her during that other, far away lifetime. But with daily application of dark, smoky eye shadow and jet-black mascara, and rich, luscious berry-colored lipstick natural wasn’t exactly a look that she had perfected.

  Thankfully, she had been born with good genes that provided her with her mother’s flawless skin and her father’s bright green eyes. While it may not have been her favorite look, fresh-faced was at least something that Olivia could pull off without any great shame. Still, she was nervous to see his reaction to a freshly scrubbed, more wholesome version of her than he had seen the night before. She realized it was a funny thing to worry about considering he’d seen her as natural as anyone ever possibly could just hours before.

  A light knock at the door interrupted her thoughts and before Olivia could move away from the mirror, William popped his head in the room.

  “Am I interrupting you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  He stepped inside, almost timidly, and she turned around to face him, unsure how to properly greet one another.

  “I’m not really sure what the protocol is here. Do I kiss you hello? Wave? Say ‘hi, how was your nap’?”

  “You could do all three if you wanted.”

  “I don’t know which one feels the most natural,” she admitted. “There’s this weirdness and I know there shouldn’t be after last night, but in the grand scheme of things we’re still relative strangers and now I’ve essentially been moved into your castle, so it’s all a bit rushed and awkward for me. We’ve basically condensed what could be years of a relationship into one 18-hour period and I just don’t know how I’m supposed to behave.”

  Olivia stopped talking as she realized that she was babbling and that her voice had risen a few octaves. She didn’t want him to think she was near hysterics again, but she was certainly out of her comfort zone and feeling very awkward about the whole situation.

  William approached her gingerly and she wondered if he was taking pains to move more slowly than he normally would in order to keep up his human charade. If so, he was greatly deceiving himself if he thought walking slowly would make her forget his true nature after their previous night together.

  “You don’t need to walk on egg shells around me, you know,” she told him. “You can move exactly as you would if I wasn’t here.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh come off it. I see you practically tiptoeing when you could just as easily be here before I could blink.”

  William let out a huge laugh that caught Olivia by surprise, and immediately made her feel defensive.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You are.”

  He reached over and grabbed her hands so that they were facing one another, hands intertwined. A very normal, very loving pose for a very not normal couple.

  “Has anyone ever told you that you worry too much?”

  “Yes, all the time. But why were you laughing at me?”

  “I was laughing because you’re a delightful surprise to me. You put on this tough, devil-may-care attitude but inside you’re so worried about what everyone is doing, why they’re doing it, and what it has to do with you. You’re a walking contradiction. In one way it’s very cynical and narcissistic and in other ways it’s very naïve.”

  “I’m not naïve, and you’re not human, so you’re wrong on both accounts.”

  Olivia didn’t like where the conversation was going. They’d already spent too much time the night before dissecting her life. What she really wanted was to know more about him. She leaned into him and maneuvered her face to his neck to nuzzle the spot where it met his collarbone. She licked playfully, hoping to distract him from his current focus of conversation. William shuddered as she bit him playfully.

  Mission accomplished.

  “You have to know that not every action has a motivation behind it,” he said, indicating that she hadn’t completely distracted him despite her best efforts. “Sometimes things just are. Humans – and I count myself among them for the purpose of this discussion – are very instinctual. A lot of what we do is because we feel like doing it, not because we’ve plotted, planned, and assessed our action from every angle.”

  Mission not accomplished.

  “No one has time to think so much about what reactions their actions will or won’t get out of someone else. There doesn’t have to be a sinister motive behind everything.” He gently pulled Olivia away from the hollow of his neck, meeting her eyes to make sure that she was hearing what he was saying. “I was walking slowly because I was enjoying looking at you and I wanted to prolong the moment.”

  He pulled her back against his body so that the top of her head rested just under his chin, then he kissed her hair so tenderly that she almost forgot how out of control everything was around her. Again
everything else melted away and she felt as if she was exactly where she was supposed to be. Everything was right with the world.

  “Just relax for a minute and enjoy what is.”

  “You do realize that’s a lot easier said than done, right?”

  William brought Olivia’s hand up to his lips and spent the next several seconds kissing each knuckle before opening her palm and planting a soft, sensuous kiss directly in its center.

  “Relax,” he whispered.

  Exactly how he thinks any woman is supposed to relax while he is seducing them is beyond me.

  While in theory relaxing sounded like a fantastic idea, so much of what Seamus had said earlier in the day still rang in Olivia’s ears. Paired with her own uneasiness about the rapidity of the situation making her tenser than usual, she needed something to hold onto before the tide that was William truly swept her away. She used his inability to see her face and thus know from one glance what she was thinking to broach the fact that there was a lot more information she would need before she could well and truly relax about anything. It was information that could only come from him.

  “I spoke with Seamus a bit today.”

  “Yes, he told me.”

  William’s voice was clipped and she realized that he had stopped to speak with Seamus before coming to her room. While she knew that was practical and probably part of their long-established routine, it hurt a bit to hear that after everything they’d shared that she was not first and foremost on William’s mind.

  “I imagine I have some explaining to do after that conversation.”

  Yes. Yes he did.

  * * * *

  “I don’t mean to sound suspicious or to immediately begin questioning you, but the conversation I had with Seamus while you were ... sleeping ... was a rather strange one, and it’s just left me feeling a bit out of sorts.”

  “He can do that to people.”

  William seemed resigned to the fact that Seamus had rattled her, almost as if he had expected it.

  Olivia waited for him to elaborate on his previous statement; instead he walked over to the tall, lead paned window, pulled the curtain aside, and looked out to the night sky. She wasn’t sure what he was looking at, or what he was looking for, but she was beginning to understand that when searching for his next words in a conversation, he’d adopt this pensive position. Whether it was gazing into the fire or out the window, it seemed to help him settle on where he’d take the discussion next.