“You filthy woman! I’ll say it again — if I catch you sneaking into my father’s bed one more time, I’ll strip you naked and throw you outside for the dogs!”
The voice, heavy with threat, floated down from above Sophia Reed’s head. Moonlight pooled across the floorboard and fell on the sequined, scandalously short dress she was wearing.
Her chest went cold. When she glanced down she saw the valley of cleavage on display, and a pale hand gripping the thin strap of her dress like it might snap. Following the trembling hand up — the hand trembling from anger — Sophia met a face that still looked annoyingly young.
The boy standing before her couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen. He was handsome, by the kind of striking, unfair standard that made a mouth tighten. Anger had twisted his features; after staring for a long moment, Sophia felt a peculiar tug of recognition. He looked so familiar.
But… wasn’t she dead?
She’d been dead a long time. How could she suddenly open her eyes and have someone yank at her dress?
Through the framed painting on the wall, in the shifting light and shadow, she realized the face she was looking out from was not the face she used to own at all.
Sophia reached out and touched the boy’s hand, incredulous; it was warm.
Not a dream. Ghosts don’t dream. She was… alive again?
“Get your hand off me, gross!” the boy barked and jerked his hand away, rubbing the place that had been touched until the skin reddened.
Sophia hadn’t yet recovered from the impossible thrill of being alive when the boy’s expression of contempt landed on her like a slap.
She clicked her tongue. “Gross? Wow, you talk like a real sweetheart. A child shouldn’t be so rude, you know?”
“Am I not right?” he sneered, arms folded tight across his chest, every word dripping with disdain. “You’re an adult, wandering around at midnight in that scrap of a dress, sneaking into my father’s room. What do you think you’re doing? If you’re not disgusting, who is?”
He took a breath and eyed Sophia from head to toe. “Everyone knows you’re supposed to be the tutor here. Someone who doesn’t know’d think you were some club girl who slipped out the back door.”
“Club girl…” The corner of Sophia’s mouth twitched. She opened her mouth to answer, then the boy took a quick step back and blurted, “And pull your skirt down. It’s almost showing your underwear. You think wearing trash like that will make you Mrs. Kane? Dream on. That seat won’t be yours no matter how long it sits empty. Serves you right you fell down the stairs! Why didn’t you just die when you fell? Get out!”
Sophia stood up in her heels, crossed her arms and swung slowly around him like a ridiculous vaudeville act. She leaned in, letting his disgust wash over her, and deliberately softened her voice.
“But I like your father,” she said, absurdly earnest. “I really like him. I want to be Mrs. Kane so badly… it’s driving me crazy.”
“You have no shame!” he yelled.
“I don’t want it,” she said brazenly — and with an actual grin that probably should have been mortifying. “I told you, I want to be Mrs. Kane. What’s a little shame to that? Once I become your stepmother—”
She deliberately dragged out the line, just to rile him.
“I’ll help your real mother teach you how to stop being such a brat.”
The boy’s eyes went red. He glared at her with teeth clenched. Sophia pretended to inspect her nails, ready to press the advantage — until a new voice, low and strange in its calm, drifted down from upstairs.
“And who do you think you are, to lecture my child?” the man said.
The voice was controlled anger, cold and measured. A hand rested on the banister as a man in silk sleepwear descended, looking down on them both with an expression that gave nothing away. His gaze skimmed over Sophia’s face without warmth, then settled on the boy.
The boy — already watery-eyed — looked more aggrieved when he saw his father, whispering, “Dad.”
“What’s this noise?” Alexander Kane reprimanded his son. “And who is she? What do you think you’re doing?”
The chastened boy wilted, muttering reluctantly, “That woman was trying to seduce you—”
Alexander came down the stairs slowly. As he stepped into the light his features became clearer: deep-set eyes, a high, aristocratic nose, and a face that had shed its boyishness for a cold, practiced masculinity. His look had no warmth, no leftover softness. And yet Sophia’s breath caught.
She knew this face. She knew it intimately.
On so many weekends in the past he had stood at the door of her small apartment, indifferent to weather or propriety, and forced his way into her bed with the authority of a man who owned every room he walked into. He was like any husband going home — except she had never been his wife. She had been his expensive kept woman, a thing purchased to satisfy desire in private, hated in daylight, because she happened to resemble his First Love far too closely.
Fake, she told herself. It had always been a fake: a facsimile bought to replace a memory. She remembered lying on a hospital slab, dying, while Alexander’s voice on the phone remained cold, unmoved by the idea of coming to see her.
Of course. A stand-in for someone else didn’t merit his descent. A kept woman’s worth was measured in the bedroom and nowhere else.
Despite the years she’d been gone, his life had carried on perfectly — he’d even had a son. She, on the other hand, had been shoved from a stairwell while pregnant with his child and left for dead on a sterile operating table at St. Luke’s Medical Center. One body, two deaths. Now, after being given a second chance at life, she swore she would stay as far away from him as she could.
Alexander’s movements were deliberate. He glanced at her coldly as he passed; the look cut to the bone, but it lacked the venom his son had used. He simply saw a woman in a revealing dress and the invitation implied, and his mockery landed hard.
Alexander sat on the living room sofa, a cigarette pinched between his fingers. Through the haze of smoke he watched Sophia and his son. He waved a hand, signaling for her to step closer.
Sophia, whose mind was reeling from the impossible fact of her resurrection, shrank back like a startled quail and didn’t dare move.
Alexander snorted and looked at the ring on his hand. “Bold enough to leave lingerie on my bed, but now you’re all meek and coy? Spare me the act.”
The mockery between father and son was identical — a family trait. Alexander’s sarcasm landed even more forcefully than the boy’s. Even though she suspected he might not recognize her, past moments with him made Sophia nervous enough to clamp her fingers together.
He paused when he noticed her nervous hands. There was something in the way she twisted her fingers that made an old, inexplicable sensation claw up in him. He thought of a woman named Sophia he’d once kept — a pretty possession who used to bite her nails when scolded. For a heartbeat, a memory he had buried pressed against his mind.
He tightened his jaw and tried to shove it away. He wasn’t a man given to nostalgia; he forced himself not to think. Still, he looked her over — at the outrageously short dress — and understood precisely what she had come for.
Sophia’s heart thudded, but she kept her back straight. Even if he didn’t know who she really was, she recognized him too — not as a father or a husband but as the man who had ruined her. This time, she vowed, she would not let him near her.
