The Haunted (Sleeping with Monsters Book 1) Read Online Free Page B

piano in one room
– a conservatory? She plinked out a few tentative notes and listened to them
echo before moving on. Many of the rooms had massive beds, but little other
furniture – and halfway through she realized she’d started thinking of the
people who’d come through after the Master had died as locusts, stealing away
the home’s rightful furnishings, like the curtains and the portraits from the
dining room’s walls. No wonder the statues seemed so upset – they’d had to
watch everything else around them get taken away.
    She
tried all the faucets in the bathrooms – they were done in garish shades of
lime green and pink, and they’d all need remodeling too, if she could get
contractors out this far – and flushed all the toilets, making sure they
worked. As she walked from room to room, inspecting doors and closets, looking
out each window’s view, she began to feel a sense of ownership. She may have
been abandoned here, but this place was hers, already so much more than it was
Richard’s, even if the only reason they could afford it was because of his deep
pocketbook.
    She
trotted down the stairs again, across the cold tile of the entryway, and up to
the other wing’s second floor.
    This
side was all bedrooms, one after another, politely divided by more garish
bathrooms. They were all empty, except for a few more statues, and one enormous
room holding a massive four poster bed.
    Its
mattresses were as high as her hips. It had enormous clawed feet and the
posters were only inches below the ceiling in height. She walked across the
room to it slowly because it looked like a living thing, like it might come
alive and attack her. There were no sheets on it, nothing to hide the elaborate
carving that held the mattresses in on all four sides, roughly hewn symbols of
a bygone time, roaring lions, sleeping dragons, and a brace of running wolves
taking down a bucking unicorn. Someone must have commissioned it, because she
was familiar with antiques in a general sense, and she had never seen its like.
    Daphne
slowed as she reached its end. A feeling of warmth overcame her – a flush of
embarrassment, she thought, because it was impossible to stand at the bottom of
this kind of bed without imagining being bent over it, ass in the air, being
taken from behind. The longer she thought on the image the more turned on she
was, and her pussy began a low familiar ache. Richard was gone so often – and
still gone, now. She swallowed, and remnants of last night’s half-forgotten
dream returned, how close she’d been to coming then, before her fear denied
her.
    Heat
gathered inside her hips. She shouldn’t stay here, she should run back to her
own bedroom and finish herself off, be able to stroke her own clit and push
welcome fingers inside – when she felt the distinct outline of a hot hand press
against her leg and move up.
    Daphne
yelped as if caught, and whirled around. No one was there. But she’d felt it,
it’d burned her almost, it felt as hot as her pussy was – and maybe just as
hungry.
    But
she was alone. She stood there panting, half in fear, half in need,
trying to convince herself that what she’d felt had been real and not sure at
all that that was a good idea.
    If
it hadn’t been daylight, if birds hadn’t been singing outside, and if Arthur
and Mrs. Dudley hadn’t been puttering in the library and kitchen downstairs
respectively, she might not have continued – but because it was, and they did,
she took a crazy chance.
    “I
know you’re there. You can come out, if you want.”
    A
hot hand squeezed her own. She gasped and stepped aside.
    “I’m
– not insane, am I? Are you…real?”
    Whatever
or whoever it was decided not to honor that.
    “Who
are you?”
    The
hand squeezed her own again, and she had the sensation of someone taller than
she was standing very close. She could feel the heat radiating off of their
unseen body all along her own.
    “Did
you used to live here?”
    The
sensation