All My Darkest Impulses (House of Crows), Lisa Unger [top 10 novels .txt] 📗

most hilarious thing in the world. Never had any human being ever looked at him with so much adoration and wonder. Maybe that little person was still in there, trapped inside the teenager who looked at him lately as though he were something she wanted to scrape off her shoe.

“Hi, bunny,” he whispered.

But she was as sound a sleeper as her mother. She pulled the covers around her until she disappeared into their fluff.

There it was again, the scraping. Downstairs. Or was it up?

The hallways, the three stories, the endless rooms, most of which had stood untouched for years—decades—not to mention the back passageways behind walls, the hidden stairways to half stories with abbreviated, low-ceilinged spaces, the dumbwaiters long rusted and long unused, except by mice and rats. Sounds traveled in strange ways, bounced around.

“Some eccentric person might consider this a living art project,” enthused Avery March, as they’d made their way through the maze of Merle House.

“Some mental patient,” said Jewel, who had come along for the tour, apparently to add commentary. She had been largely ignored, though March had seemed to find her amusing.

“No, you’re right,” gushed Samantha. “Merle House is a special place. It just needs some attention. Some love.”

Samantha was already in love.

He could see that; he knew how this house, this land, had a way of glamouring a certain type of person, weaving its way into their psyche. He’d seen it first with Claire, his childhood friend and, truth be told, first love—though of the innocent-never-went-anywhere-crush-type love. They stayed in touch; she was a psychiatrist now, some big job, a researcher into criminal psychology. He’d followed her career, read her work. She often asked about Merle House, his grandfather. But they never talked about what had happened here, or about Havenwood. Apparently, she’d filed it away too. Things they couldn’t explain and would rather forget.

He wound down the long staircase to the foyer and stood beneath the gigantic chandelier, listening. The dusty crystal pieces tinkled in the draft he felt on the back of his neck. A sigh. The house was so drafty it seemed to breathe sometimes.

There it was again. This time sounding more like a moan of pleasure.

He followed it to the old man’s study and pushed inside.

Matthew had commandeered this room, which smelled of must, stale tobacco, and woodsmoke, as his own. With its tall windows and walls of bookshelves, the big old desk, the plush couch before a grand fireplace, and all the files and years of journals on the house, Merle family history, it felt like the control center of the place. His laptop on the surface of the desk was the only nod to the modern world.

He paused a moment in the doorway, heart thudding.

On the couch lay Sylvia, nude, her body glowing in the moonlight. She was propped up on one elbow, watching him with eyes that looked black but that he knew to be blue.

“Matthew,” she whispered. “I think about you all the time.”

He approached her, his body coming alive, eyes drinking in the dip of her waist, the fullness of her thighs, the luscious teardrops of her breasts.

“Sylvia.”

“Did you miss me?”

When she’d turned up at his office that night months ago, she’d primly taken a seat in the chair beside his desk. It was a tiny room, barely larger than a walk-in closet.

“What can I do for you, Miss Rowan?”

He’d slid his chair as far away from her as possible, hitting the windowsill. What had she talked about? He didn’t even remember, distracted as he was by the way the light glinted in the fire of her hair, by the delicate turn of her neck, the scent—was it lily?—that seemed to waft off her.

“I see the way you look at me,” she said suddenly.

“I’m sorry?” he said, pretending he didn’t understand.

“I see it,” she said, a slight smile on her pink lips. “Matthew, I think about you all the time.”

A flush rose to her cheeks. He cleared his throat.

“I’m married, Miss Rowan. Happily married.”

He pointed to a picture of Samantha and Jewel, both of them looking sun-kissed and gorgeous, laughing on the beach. She glanced at it, then back to him with that stunning blue gaze.

“You’re sweating.”

He was sweating. He wiped at his forehead with the sleeve of his denim shirt.

“Miss Rowan,” he said, summoning his professor voice. “If you didn’t come here to talk about your work, then I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

God, he wanted her. He wanted to close the door to his office and bend her over his desk. He wanted her flesh under his hands. He wanted to bury his face in her hair. And he wanted other things, things he wouldn’t dare acknowledge. They locked eyes; she saw his desire and smiled.

She fished something out of her bag and slid it across his desk. A card. Just her name, Sylvia, and her number printed simply in black sans serif on cream card stock. Very old school in this digital age. He liked that about her. That she wore a watch. That, in class, she took notes in a notebook, not on a laptop.

“If you change your mind, just call me. Anytime.”

He didn’t reach to touch it, and she glided from the room, leaving her delicious scent behind. He sat there, vibrating, a deep discomfort in his groin, guilt gnawing at his heart. Wasn’t it still cheating to want someone with such intensity, even if you never touched her? With Samantha at home, diagnosed a few months ago with very early-stage breast cancer.

There’d been surgery, no chemo (thank God). But she was in her third week of radiation treatments, keeping it from most of their friends and Jewel because she didn’t want people to worry. She’d be okay, most likely, but the treatment and recovery was a hard road. She cried at night, so tired, so traumatized, and he held her tight.

And here he was getting a hard-on during office hours for his too-young and brazen