A Haunted Romance by Sindra van Yssel Page B

the author imagined London to be a city of the utmost debauchery. By the tenth page, poor Amelia had been propositioned twice, pinched once, and narrowly rescued from rape by a “gentleman,” who in turn taught her how to suck cock by the end of the chapter on page sixteen. For all the flowery language typical of the era, it wasn’t badly written, especially for a handwritten draft.
    Reluctantly, Chelsea closed the chest, but she didn’t lock it. She stacked the pages in their sleeves on a shelf, putting the letters on one pile and the first chapter of the novel on the other. She uploaded the rest of the pictures to the laptop, glancing at each one to make sure they didn’t need rescanning. By the time she had her nightshirt on, she was so tired, she fell very quickly off to sleep.
    She dreamed she was in London. Trent was in the dream too, dressed up as an English lord. She was lying naked on a bed, her hand moving between her legs, her fingers curled and half inside her pussy. He was watching her. A woman was moaning in another room, probably being pleasured or teased or tortured, she wasn’t sure which. She was in some kind of bordello.
    Her hand bumped up against a hard piece of cylindrical plastic, or maybe it was glass. In any case, it was the right size and shape. She pushed it inside her.
    She pumped the dildo in and out of her sex, brushing her clit with her thumb, and the men faded in and out of existence. A face would pop up briefly, and she would think she was being fucked, and then she’d realize she was just fucking herself, and the image would leave her.
    She woke up sweaty and right on the edge. She knew she’d been dreaming, but at least she had something nice and hard to finish herself off with. She felt the rush travel through her body as she peaked, and then her hand slowed down as she lay back against the pillow, sated and drenched but awake.
    The moaning in the other room kept going, and she realized that it hadn’t been part of the dream. And she really did have a dildo in her hand. She was sure she hadn’t taken it to bed with her.
    Shit.
    In the dream, the moaning had sounded more pleasured than pained, but now it was clearly a woman in distress, not in the throes of sex. She got up and ran to the other room, turning the light on. As before, the moaning stopped instantly.
    She left the light on. She walked back to her bedroom and turned that light on as well. The dildo was there, transparent and rose-tinted on the middle of her dark green sheets. It had been one of the toys that had spilled out a few nights before, the ones she had presumed belonged to Pat. For a moment she thought she might simply never have picked it up, but then she remembered that the toys had been on the sleeping bag, not the bed. The bed hadn’t even had a mattress on it then. So how had it ended up in the bed?
    She picked it up and took it to the bathroom to clean. It made no sense. Even when she imagined a ghost, it made no sense. If the ghost had given it to her to play with, presumably she—or he, she supposed, but Minerva was the only former resident of the house she knew about besides her aunts—would have watched? So why moan in the study if the action was going on elsewhere?
    She glanced at her watch. Three twenty, far too early to get up, but she wasn’t sure she could get back to sleep. Although, if the light being on shut up the moaning, she could try to keep the lights on in both places. Maybe the ghost needed the darkness.
    She put the dildo back in the bag in the closet and sprawled out on her bed. She closed her eyes, trying to convince herself that she’d get back to sleep but gave it up after ten minutes. The bed felt lonely, and the house felt downright creepy.
    Finally she got up, grabbed a stack of plastic sleeves, and sat back down next to the chest.
    “Chapter two. In which Amelia pleases a man and a woman at the same time and slides further into depravity.”
    It sounded promising. Chelsea