Peace and quiet seeped into me. The sun had sunk below the horizon, and the cemetery was now dark. I wasn’t creeped out or anything. I wrote about the things that went bump in the night. And love. And amazing sex. But mostly about horror.
Nothing in the graveyard was scary enough to compare to the strangeness that I had in my head.
Ollie
The convention had ended at six in the evening, and I’d made it to the airport in Newark by eight. With booking my flight, checking my luggage, and making it through security, I’d barely made it to the gate by nine thirty. I was in for a nine-hour flight to Frankfurt, Germany, and a three-hour stopover until my connection to Amsterdam.
My anger was absolute. Within my chest was an unfathomable boiling fury. It’d fueled me to just get up and get the fuck out, leave all of it behind. Completely justified that I had done the right thing in leaving the woman who had manipulated me into feeling something for her, I was righteous with it.
Until the plane took off. The second we were airborne, my boiling rage went icy.
What the fuck did I do?
As the g-force pressed me into the back of my seat, every memory Xanthe and I had created together blasted my aching heart.
On the flight from Amsterdam, Xanthe had been guarding herself against someone she thought was a prick. She’d known who I was when I knocked her over. She had known she’d have to meet me and work with me.
If I had been in her shoes, what would I have done?
I would have introduced myself as Elaine, if for nothing else than to make said prick extremely uncomfortable. But Xanthe wasn’t a prick. She’d decided to give me the benefit of the doubt, see what I’d have to say. She’d given me a second chance.
Oh, God…
I had told her to fuck herself and left her shaking and crying.
“If you had known Elaine was me, would you have even sat next to me and spoken to a person you considered mentally unhinged?”
Xanthe put her thoughts, her hopes, and her desires out there for anyone, everyone, to simply pick up and dig around in. She’d spent nearly her whole life having her mental health be in doubt. Elaine H. Ford was just a shield between herself and the rest of the world.
When she’d been with me, she had simply been Xanthe—not a writer, not an author on the verge of exploding all over the mainstream. She was just a woman who had smelled steak and wanted some, who laughed at herself for thinking that watching Ancient Aliens was the best form of entertainment on a Thursday night. She was a woman who had shown me what she was afraid of when I’d asked.
I scared the shit out of her, and still, she had taken a chance on a man who had a reputation for fucking ’em and leaving ’em hanging.
She’d tried to tell me about Elaine before our last date; I realized this now.
Xanthe was cautious. She thought shit through before she did anything. It had taken me four times of touching her hand before she had even considered touching mine back. From that moment on though, she had opened up to me.
Even when I was being a jerk, sick with jealousy over her spending the night out with some other guy—and, incidentally, his wife and child—she’d taken pity on me and rescued me from the situation I had gotten myself into while trying to make her jealous.
Holy shit, I’m a complete and utter fuckwad!
A prisoner of my own making on this flight, I was unable to change my course. I couldn’t go to her. Worse, I had abandoned her! And it wasn’t just at the convention—and I was going to be in a shit-ton of trouble for that—but she was now driving to Boston.
She was going to a cemetery—alone.
Oh God.
Xanthe Malcolm, an only child, was visiting her dead mother and grandmother by herself. Their deaths had set her upon a course that had her constantly questioning her sanity.
She was so wonderfully, amazingly, incredibly normal.
She hardly ever let anyone into her life. Circumstances had made her build a fortress around her heart, shutting people out. The friends she spoke of and the ones I had met were friends she’d had for a long time. She kept them close and loved them with her whole being.
When I had told her there was nothing between us, that it had all been a lie…the look on her face…she had let me in, and what had I done? I’d shown her I didn’t deserve to be anywhere near her heart.
For nine hours, I sat in my seat, torturing myself with thoughts of Xanthe—all that I knew of her and everything I had yet to learn. She had earned my heart; she hadn’t stolen it. I’d given it to her for being the perfect woman for me.
The minute the plane landed in Frankfurt, I turned on my phone, seeing a ton of missed calls and messages. Grabbing my carry-on from the overhead compartment, I hurried off the plane and ran through the terminal, phone glued to my ear.
“Oliver, it’s me…” said a tearful Xanthe as her message came through.
The sound of her voice, sad and in pain, constricted around my chest. Tears burned in my eyes as I listened to her tell me how she understood that I wanted nothing to do with her ever again.
Dropping weakly onto a bench, I whispered, “Xanthe Love.”
“I just wanted you to know…” Her voice broke as she choked around her words.
Miserably, I sat with my forehead in my hand.
“I felt it, too.”
“Oh God…” I gasped, sobbing like one destroyed, in the middle of the airport. Wiping my face, I sat up and pressed the button to call her back. I was going to set this straight right the fuck now.
An automated voice answered, “The number you’re trying to reach cannot be completed as dialed.”
I tried again. And again. And again. I resorted to sending a text, and even that was rejected.
Unable to send.
What the fuck?
Depression settled heavily over me now. It was fucking imperative that I reach her! She had to know that I was sorry—again—and that by no means was it over.
I hadn’t slept on the flight, and I was sorely lagging. I needed coffee and probably some food, but I had no appetite. I wasn’t able to think straight for shit. Standing up, I threw my bag over my shoulder, hunted down the closest coffee stand, and ordered a triple-shot mocha latte. It was fucking delicious. No wonder Xanthe had been so heartbroken over that lost cup.
Finding a seat in the little café, I opened up my bag, looking for my camera. I spotted a first-edition paperback and went for that instead. I was nearly finished with Haunted Bonds. Unable to bear the thought of that, I opened it and started at the beginning.
Once again, I became lost in the story. This time, knowing that it came from Xanthe…it was like seeing her all over again. New. Transformed. There was darkness within her, and it was quite profound. She described horrors as though she had seen them in the flesh.
What happened to her to make her think this way? Was it merely the death of her mother and grandmother?
The evil that Lindsey Sparks fought against…were they Xanthe’s nightmares? Her demons?
And Donovan was now something else for me, too. He was the only one strong enough to bring Lindsey out of herself. He showed her that there was more to live for than her obsession with her work, than destroying evil.
The more I read, the more I saw into the woman I had been helplessly falling for. I didn’t want to be helped. I wanted to be the one to discover all the things that made Xanthe who she was. I ended up spending two hours glued to her pages.