Page 1 of Lover
PROLOGUE
THE WEATHER AT Willowfield had remained a bleak, stubborn gray, punctuated by the blistering winds of an early spring that fought helplessly against winter, which never went easily to its rest in New England. I’d never hated the dormant season, scorned its quiet, or regretted its stillness. Even the endless nights had offered me a unique, almost holy peace. But it had been years since I’d experienced any tranquility in my soul, any joy in the solitude winter granted to this mammoth house, once bustling with people and chaotic life.
I was nursing a brandy, wondering how long I could refrain from leaving Willowfield, dreaming grim, dismal dreams, when the door to the library swung forcefully open. I damn near jumped out of my skin. Living my lifetime in this house had given me some immunity to the shivers it often inspired in the spines of others, particularly at night, but I’d been so deep inside my mind I hadn’t heard footsteps in the hall, and my thoughts had been so dark of late that I first expected to find a ghoul at my door instead of my housekeeper.
Her demeanor, normally comforting in its rigid sensibility, was collapsed into a series of worry lines, her brows drawn down, eyes wide.
I sat up, unsettled by her harried appearance.
“Professor…”
“What’s happened?”
“Dr. Hannigan is on the phone. He’s in a state. I could barely understand half of what he’s saying. He’s demanding to speak with you right away.”
A wave of catastrophic thoughts cascaded through my mind in a bare second. Hannigan was a level-headed man, never distraught. Someone must be dead or horrifically injured. As I rose hastily to my feet and rushed with Ms. Dillard through the dark hallways to the phone in the parlor, I hurried through a list in my head of the people whose injury would work the doctor into incoherence.
Burt or Lottie.
Jack.
Florence.
M…
No. Like a fist striking my abdomen, my breath left me. Not her. She was already gone.
I stood over the table where the phone receiver rested off the cradle, ready to be picked up—to deliver its horrible news. I lifted it to my ear.
“Hannigan,” I said.
“Callum. Callum, I’ve found her.” The doctor’s voice was thick, his nose clogged with the tears he must have been crying. The strangled noise he made in his throat revealed that he still was. “In a bookshop in Boston. Just…pretty as a picture and no clue who I was.”
He was rejoicing, not grieving. Though my uneasiness abated, I remained confounded.
“Hannigan, you’ve scared the devil himself out of Ms. Dillard and me. We thought something terrible had happened.”
“No, my boy. Something wonderful!”
Frustrated by the unnecessary fear I’d been subjected to, I snapped, “You’re talking nonsense, man.”
“I tell you, Ifoundher!” he yelled, and I pulled the earpiece away.
“Christ, Hannigan,” I demanded, “who?”
“She’s alive, Callum.”
The room shifted, turning in a feverish circle around me, utter silence filling my ears until they rang with a phantom noise that might have been the singing of angels or the screams of a woman falling to her death in a rain-swollen ravine.
I looked to Ms. Dillard, searching for an anchor back to the present. The look on my face frightened her, and she brought her hands to her mouth, eyes already full, anticipating yet another woe to have befallen the house.
“Callum!” Dr. Hannigan barked, and the world sharpened.
“Did you hear me?” he said. “Millicent is alive.”
CHAPTER 1
MY PACING WAS beginning to annoy even myself, the constant back and forth from my desk to the fireplace, to the desk again, anxiety crashing against my rib cage in bullying blows.
