Dangerous Temptation (Dark Dream 1)

“Thank you, Mr. Belcante,” he said solemnly. “Now, let me show you to your rooms.”

He led us up the right side of the curving stairs, pointing out some of the notable paintings clustered on nearly every available wall.

“Eamon and Zelda McTiernan, Tiernan’s maternal grandparents, were rather fond of art,” he said drily as he indicated the long hall we entered filled with ornate frames. “There are rooms stuffed full of it.”

“What?” I asked, my chest tightening with excitement. “Has it been catalogued? Some of these are very rare.”

My fingers hovered over the gold frame of a Picasso painting wedged between a Franz Marc and an Andy Warhol print. I could feel my heart knock brutally against my ribs as we descended the dark hall of wonders.

The house itself might have been nightmarish, but this? This was a dream for a girl who loved art as much as I did.

“My sister loves paintings,” Brando was telling Walcott, looking up, up, up at the tall man, so he almost walked into a marble bust. The manservant adjusted his path with a hand on his shoulder, but Brando didn’t pause to stop talking. “She’s a big geek for it.”

“You’re a geek for Marvel comics and movies,” I reminded him, darting forward to squeeze his sides until he laughed and squealed.

“Superheroes are way better than stuffy dead guys who painted pictures of stuffy old things like flowers and things,” he protested, looking up at Walcott for affirmation.

It made my stomach hurt to see how much he yearned for male validation and influence.

“I am fond of the Hulk,” Walcott admitted with a wink.

“Really? But he’s big and ugly and mean!”

“Is he? I suppose I like the idea of being two different people. One on the inside and one for everyone else.”

“All superheroes are like that!”

“But the Hulk is the only one that seems mean and dumb yet still makes a positive impact on the world,” Walcott pointed out and I had a surreal moment of wondering how my life had come to this, philosophical discussions of superheroes in gothic mansions with an actual manservant.

“That’s fair,” Brando decided. “Anca, can we watch Hulk tonight before bed?”

“Sure, Brandy Boy.”

“You wanna join us?” he asked Walcott next.

The older man blinked, caught off guard as we stopped at a black door with a little plaque on it that read, “Mr. Brandon Belcante.”

It caught me off-guard to see such a permanent proclamation of our residency here. It made me realize some silly part of me had been clinging to the idea that this was only temporary. But this wasn’t a fairytale, it was real life, and there would be no prince charming to save us from the villain who had decided to take us into his haunted home. A shivered slithered down my spine.

“If you’d like,” Walcott finally decided, “I could make time to watch a movie.”

“Cool!” That settled, Brando bounced on his toes and indicated the door. “This is my room? It even has my name on it. That’s so cool.”

Without another word, Walcott opened the door to reveal the room within. It was large, too big for a little boy, and filled with old, heavy furniture that gleamed with care and wealth. Brando immediately ran to the four-poster bed and jumped on the thick, soft covers, rolling over the grey sheets and moaning at their softness.

“This room is bigger than our whole house,” he declared, going into a crunch to look at me from where he lay. “We just have to set up my comic book collection and get some superhero sheets and then it’ll be like…the best room ever.”

I grinned at him, moving over to ruffle his soft head of hair. “We can do that. Why don’t you read some comics in here while I go check out my room, okay? I’ll be back.”

He nodded, rolling over to pull off the little backpack he wore. When he pulled out the latest edition of Spiderman, Walcott and I were immediately forgotten.

I pressed a kiss to his head, my fingers feathering over the pulse point in his neck compulsively. It was a habit I was developing that I didn’t know how to break.

Done, I followed Walcott out of the room and back down the hall.

“I think you’ll like your rooms,” Walcott said with a little smile as he led me through the old, creaking house. “They were once Tiernan’s mother’s.”

I shivered a little at the idea of what Tiernan’s mother might have been like. If her son was anything to go off of, she was probably incredibly intimidating.

But when Walcott opened the door with a small gold plaque labeled with my name, the interior wasn’t cold or bleak at all. The darkness of the rest of the house was absent from the feminine room. Tiny blue flowers peppered the cream wallpaper, the color repeated in the lush silk bedding and the massive Persian carpet over the dark parquet flooring. The rest was all in shades of white and gold, from the quilted headboard to the tufted chair at the gorgeous vanity set in front of the curved turret window.