Eleanor’s heart still raced even as her ragged breathing settled. She looked at Daniel who still lay embedded in her. His eyes were closed and his brow was furrowed in concentration as if he were trying to imprint in his memory this one moment inside her. Eleanor stared at his face. Long blond eyelashes lay on pale cheeks like sunlight on snow, and she felt an unexpected stab of tenderness toward him.

Daniel opened his eyes slowly. Eleanor tried to smile at him but the look he gave her was one of shock. He seemed to be seeing a stranger, and Eleanor realized with a sick churning in her stomach that he was.

“It was her you were fucking, wasn’t it?” she asked, her voice soft and without accusation. “Your wife, right? Lucky lady.”

Daniel’s only answer was to slip out of her. He left the bed and threw on his clothes.

“Keep the bed,” he said without looking at her. “Tonight this is the warmest room in the house.”

“But where will you—” Eleanor started to ask, but he was already gone.

She groaned in frustration and collapsed back on the bed. She blew out the candles and yanked the covers to her chin. After a few minutes in the dark, she felt the presence of ghosts in the room—the ghost of Daniel’s late wife and the more fearsome ghost of the man Daniel had been before her death. Eleanor knew she lay with them in the ghost of their marriage bed. She tossed the covers aside, found her nightgown, and returned to her own bedroom. She crawled back into her freezing bed where at least she knew that the only cold body between the sheets would be her own.

* * *

Eleanor awoke the next morning and heard the faint but reassuring hum that indicated the power had been restored to the house. She showered and dressed and scrounged for breakfast in the grand but near-empty kitchen. Still...although the kitchen felt abandoned, something told her she wasn’t alone in the house. Last night’s snow had been far too thick and heavy for the roads to be safely passable yet. Once her stomach was comfortably full, she began a cursory exploration. Ears attuned to the slightest sound, she paused outside a closed door near the backside of the house and heard the unmistakable sound of books sliding across a shelf.

She let loose a wolf whistle as she entered. The library was far larger inside than the unobtrusive door had presaged and was stocked with row after row, case after case of books. Enough books to start her own bookstore.

“I knew I heard books,” she said to no one in particular.

“You hear books?” Daniel’s lightly sarcastic voice came from the far left corner of the library. “Interesting. Most people actually have to read them.”

“It’s a gift,” she said, shrugging. “What are you doing?”

Daniel stood behind a desk stacked shoulder high with books.

“I am draining all the alphabet soup out of my library.” She raised an eyebrow at him as she walked to the desk. “I thought you were a bibliophile,” Daniel taunted in response to her puzzled look.