Remembrance (The Mediator #7)(108)

“Nothing,” I said.

It was irritating how right Paul had been. And also how bloodthirsty. Imagine if he’d achieved his goal, and torn the place down. What would have happened to Jesse? What would have happened to me? To the girls? To everyone I knew and loved?

I shuddered, shoving the thought resolutely away. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that I’d won.

It was startling to see the walls looking so empty without the framed photos that had always hung there, of my mom and Andy on their wedding day, and my stepbrothers and me at various celebrations; the windows so naked without curtains or shades; the rooms so bare of furniture; the wooden floors so polished (they’d always been scuffed when we’d lived there, thanks to my stepbrothers’ skateboards and Max’s claws).

The realty company that had staged the home for my mom and Andy while they’d been trying to sell it had changed nothing structurally. It was a house that had been built in the mid-1800s, after all, back when they’d known how to make things that lasted. Life on the frontier had been fraught with very different perils than life in the twenty-first century.

“Look,” I said, touching the single defect in the molding in one wall of the front parlor. “They didn’t even fill in the bullet hole.”

Jesse gave me a tolerant smile. “I thought you hated that bullet hole.”

“Well,” I said with a shrug, swinging on the newel—it needed tightening, I noted—as I headed up the stairs. “It started to grow on me over the years.”

The midday light was shining through the stained-glass window at the top of the staircase, making a blue, red, and yellow pattern on the floor of the hallway outside my old bedroom. I stepped around it, noticing through the open doors to my stepbrothers’ old rooms that they’d been left relatively unchanged, except that this was the cleanest I’d ever seen them.

The door to my old room—the room that sat above the front parlor, the only bedroom in the house with an ocean view, the room in which I’d first met Jesse, and changed my life forever—was open, as well.

I stepped across the threshold.

Everything was different. Gone was the cream-colored wallpaper dotted with blue forget-me-nots, as were the frilly curtains, caught up with ruffled tiebacks. The walls were painted a deep, dark blue. The white paint on the wainscoting had been stripped, the wood returned to its original deep mahogany color to match the rest of the paneling throughout the house, then covered in a high gloss.

Even the window seat Andy had installed—though still there, and still covered in the cushion my mother had custom fitted—was now paneled in a dark cherry wood. The cushion was deep blue, to match the walls.

“Now this,” Jesse said as he came up behind me, “is a bedroom.”

I slammed my messenger bag onto the highly polished wood floor. “Shut up.”

“Susannah, you used to complain about how much you hated the way your mother decorated this room, though you loved her too much ever to tell her so.” He crossed the room to test the cushion on the window seat by sitting on it. “You said it in no way reflected your personality. Now it does.”

“Since when does navy blue match my personality? Have you ever seen me in navy blue? This room looks like an L.L. Bean catalog threw up in it.”

“I meant dark,” Jesse said. “You have a tendency sometimes to be a little dark.”

“Said the ghost to the mediator.”

“Former ghost. And I like it. Both you and the room.”

“Ugh, you would. You probably want to throw a few hunting prints on the walls.”

“That would look very nice, actually. Anyway, the window seat is still the same.” He bounced on the cushion once, then stretched a hand toward me. “Come here. There’s something I’ve been wanting to try since the day I first met you.”

There was no doubting his meaning by the decidedly sinful twist to his lips.

“What, now?” I slipped my fingers into his, and he pulled me down onto the window seat beside him. Our thighs were touching. This time, neither of us pulled away.

“The timing was never right until now,” he said. “And you had your rules, remember?”

“What rules?”

“From when we lived here together.” He slid a hand along my waist, his fingers curling beneath my tank top, even as his lips dipped to kiss the skin along my collarbone. “Rule number one, no touching.”

I felt myself flush, and not because the press of his lips had caused goose bumps of pleasure to rise all along the backs of my arms.

“Oh, right,” I said. “Those rules. Jesse, that was when you were undead, and I was in high school.”

“I’m not undead anymore.” He kissed me below my ear to prove it, the hand beneath my shirt rising. “At least, mostly not. And you haven’t been in high school in a long time.”

“You never followed my rules anyway. I always had to follow yours.” I seized his wrist before his fingers could dip beneath my bra. “But I’m not going to do it anymore.”

“Oh,” he said with a laugh. “I think you are.”

“Really? What about waiting until we’re married?” I hated to spoil the moment, lovely as it was, but I didn’t think I could take another stroke of his fingers, let alone another kiss, without leaping onto him and tearing his clothes off. “Do not promise me something you have no intention of delivering, Dr. de Silva.”