Page 47 of Love At First Fright
She nodded, even as she was slick with need.
“Good.” Ellis smiled, before slanting his lips against hers once more.
18
Rosemary had existed in astate of frustration for twenty-four hours, and she wasn’t sure how much longer she could bear it. Apparently, Ellis was very serious about taking his time with her, as last night in the turret room he’d only kissed her.
Since their wake-up call and the start of night shoots, they’d had barely a second together. Only once, about an hour ago, when there’d been a momentary break in filming for Vincent to take an important call, had Ellis found Rosemary in a shadowed copse of trees away from the main set.
“Hi, love.”
“Hi.”
“Have you been good?” he whispered, low and honeyed.
“I have.”
He skimmed a hand across the top of her thigh, squeezing it possessively, high enough that if anyone in the crew had seen them, they would know precisely what was going on between them.
“Good,” he huffed, and for a second Rosemary had feltEllis’s control slip. She’d almost thrown care to the wind and kissed him right then and there. But then the call for Ellis to come back to set had come in, and he’d had to go.
Rosemary wasn’t a brat. She knew that there was a whole host of submissives in the kink community who were, but she never felt called to try it out. What she craved was praise. She tried not to psychoanalyse herself too much, but if Rosemary had to, she reckoned it might all strike back to her gifted and talented days in school.
Still, brattiness aside, she was desperate for release. If it weren’t for his soft commands, she’d have made herself orgasm already. Likely multiple times.
But she wanted to be good, knowing that the payoff would be worth it. All of this was so new, and she’d wanted to experience this dynamic for so long, she wasn’t about to let one little orgasm get in the way of that.
Still, watching Ellis in that hauntingly attractive billowing cotton shirt wasn’t making it any easier for Rosemary. She decided to go and see what the second unit was filming. Lyn had told her they worked on shots that didn’t require the principal cast.
She made her way through the forest, flashlight in hand.
Now, as she stepped over a log, Rosemary heard a soft giggle to her right. She stopped in her tracks. What was that? Then it came again, a breathy little laugh, followed by an echo of a dog barking. Rosemary, unlike every clever heroine she’d ever written in her horror novels, followed the sounds deeper into the forest.
There, in a patch of moonlight, she found Cecilia, playing with Ellis’s ghost dog. The little dog was lying with his belly splayed up on the grass, and Cecilia was crouched down, giving him pats and telling him what a sweet boy he was.
“Hello,” Rosemary said, speaking quietly so as not to spook the ghost.
“Oh, hello.”
“I’m Rosemary.”
“Cecilia.”
“Yes, I know. He’s quite taken with you,” Rosemary said, gesturing at the ghost dog. The other times she’d seen Cecilia were mostly when she’d been arguing with Juliet, but now seeing her on her own there was something about her that reminded Rosemary of a delicate flower, dainty enough that it might blow over in a strong wind.
Cecilia looked up at Rosemary and smiled softly. If such a thing were possible for a ghost, Rosemary thought her cheeks appeared tearstained.
“He’s glad to be seen again, I expect. It is hard for the animals, when their owners cannot see them. They don’t understand why.”
Rosemary crouched down and saw that the leather collar had a name, Hank, inscribed on it. She let the little ghost dog sniff her hand. All she felt, as he nuzzled into her palm, was a faint brush of cold.
“You’ve seen animal spirits before?” Rosemary asked Cecilia.
Cecilia nodded, and sat down on the chilled ground, wrapping a shawl, stitched with blue roses, around herself as if she could feel the cold.
“When we died, my horse stayed with me for a time. He died, too, in the carriage accident.” She let Hank climb onto her lap and scratched between his ears.
“Ghost animals aren’t like us,” Cecilia said. “They need permission to go. They need to know that their owner will be alright. They stay around to protect them, and comfort them.”
