“Oh, yes,” she moaned, her eyes falling closed.
He buried himself inside her, filled her to her very depths. And then, for some reason, he went still and swore softly under his breath.
T
HE LIGHTS WERE OUT
. He was kneeling between her warm, firm thighs, buried inside her, every nerve ending in his body electrified. And every single light in the place had just gone out, making Jack wonder if someone had come in. Or maybe the storm going on inside him was actually happening outside, and the power had gone out.
He stopped moving, and she whimpered in protest. Then he wondered what the hell demon lived in this house, that it would possess him to do something as stupid as to sleep with his worst enemy. And yet, when he looked at her, lying beneath him, squirming against him, head moving side to side, eyes closed, he wanted to ignore the sudden blackout and keep up what he was doing. It would be a mistake, but damn, what a pleasant mistake to make.
He hovered there, deep inside her, debating, mind against body. He drove himself just a little deeper, loving the sounds she made as she took him. And then the light in the stairway flashed on, flickered, went off again. “Hell,” he muttered.
“What?”
Her eyes blinked open, just as the TV set flashed on, its volume full throttle, blasting a hard rock video. The surprise of that blast of noise sent her eyes flying wider. He withdrew from her fast, as startled as she was.
She blinked at the TV screen, then at the flickering stairway light. “Jack?”
“I’ll shut it off.” He went to turn off the television. The volume was deafening.
“Wait.” She said it loud, then reached out and grabbed the remote from the end table beside the sofa bed. She hit the power button on the TV, and it went dark, silent. The stair light flicked again, then stayed on. One by one the other lights came back on as well.
She pursed her lips, drawing the sheet up to her chest as if suddenly embarrassed to be naked in front of him. “Maybe my ghost is the jealous type.”
He smiled, not because she was funny, but because she was making jokes when she must be frightened half out of her mind. Kiley was a tough one, but then again, he’d always known that. “Maybe it’s just as well,” he said, and couldn’t believe he was saying it.
“I was thinking the same thing. Sex probably isn’t the best idea we ever had. We don’t even like each other.”
“Oh, I don’t know. You’re growing on me, Brigham.”
“Yeah, and us being naked in the same bed has nothing to do with that whatsoever?”
“I didn’t say that.”
She shook her head. “Whatever just happened here—”
“Almost happened,” he corrected her.
“Almost?” She pursed her lips. “We didn’t finish, Jack, but we definitely got started.”
“It was a goddamn good start, too.”
She averted her eyes. “It wasn’t based on affection. Or caring. Or any tender feelings whatsoever.”
“Oh, come on. Don’t pretend you can speak for me on that.”
“Jack, we didn’t even kiss first.”
He mulled that over, realized she was right. So no kissing, to a female, equaled no caring, no tenderness. Good to know. “Okay, so there was no kissing. So if this thing that almost happened—that started to happen—wasn’t based on affection, then what was it based on?”
She shrugged. “Libido? Fear? Chemistry?”
“And those are the wrong reasons to have sex?” he asked.
“All the wrong reasons. But it’s okay. The ghost caught us in time.”
“Gives me even more motivation to help you get rid of it,” he said, sending her an evil grin.
She smiled back, and a lump formed in his throat as he watched the movement of her lips, and he realized he wanted to kiss her. He regretted not taking his time, before. Just as well, though. Hell, what would she have read into it then? Still, the thought persisted.
“Think you can sleep?” she asked. She was getting out of the bed, tugging the covers with her. He glimpsed as much of her as possible, figuring it would be his last chance for a while.
He surprised himself by answering honestly. “Not next to you, no.”
She picked up her nightie, pulled it on over her head, letting the covers go only when she was concealed. Didn’t matter. He’d seen her and the image was burned into his mind. He almost groaned aloud when she stepped into the panties and pulled them up.
Then she tossed him his briefs, because he was sitting there on the bed with a pillow over his privates. “Good,” she said.
“Good what? That I’m not going to be able to sleep?”
“Exactly. I won’t sleep, either. Between almost
jumping your bones and the damn ghost, I’ll be lucky if I can sleep again for a week.”
“You sound like you have a plan—something we can do instead.”
She nodded, padding across the room and taking the book she’d had in her car earlier from the fireplace mantel. He used the opportunity to pull on his underwear and prop the pillow behind his head. She said, “We can read. I already got started, but nothing that really explains any of this has shown up so far.”
She handed him the book. He looked at it and nodded.
“There’s an entire chapter on this house, in fact.” She climbed back into the bed beside him. “I think I might have a case against the real estate agency. Do you?”
“Failure to disclose ghosts. Yeah, it’s probably in the law books, right in the same section where they have to disclose termites and leaky roofs.”
She smiled again. “Go on, open to the chapter. We may as well read it together, though I’m not altogether sure I want to know any more than I already do.”
He nodded, flipped to the chapter that opened with a photo of her house and started reading.
B
Y THE TIME THEY FINISHED
the chapter it was nearly dawn. The “ghost” or whatever was raising hell in Kiley’s new home had been quiet for the rest of the night, and she was starved.
She closed the cover. “Well, that was helpful.”
“Not.”
She stretched and got to her feet. “Hungry?”
“Don’t tell me you’re offering to cook me breakfast?”
“What are you, insane? You’re taking me to IHOP.”
He glanced at his watch. “They won’t be open for an hour and a half.”
She pouted. “Oh, hell. Well, I can scramble an egg, but the whites might be runny. I never seem to get them quite—”
“How about if I make breakfast?”
She raised her eyebrows.
“Yeah, I can cook. Just don’t let it get around.” He got up, pulled on his jeans.
She led the way to the kitchen, showed him where things were, put on a pot of coffee, then sat at the table and watched him work. He knew his way around a kitchen, whisking eggs in a large bowl, adding milk, cinnamon, nutmeg, soaking slices of bread in the concoction, and dropping them onto a sizzling griddle.
“Wow,” she said.
“I’m a man of many talents.” He glanced at her. “As you would have found out last night, had we not been so rudely interrupted.”
She let herself grin back. This was something new, this flirting going on between them. She wasn’t sure how to react to it. Was this going to be the new nature of their relationship, now that she’d vowed to stop trying to discredit him and put him out of business? How odd it would be not to be his worst nightmare. She wasn’t sure how to deal with it, or whether she even liked it. She’d enjoyed tormenting him, hounding him.
So she decided to change the subject. “Let’s nutshell this, shall we?”
“Sure.” He expertly flipped the French toast.
“What do we know about this house that we didn’t know before?” she asked.
“Well, the last couple who lived here moved out
within six months, but refused to cite a reason or be interviewed by the book’s author,” Jack said.
“The couple before that claimed that the place was haunted. Talked about lights and things going on and off, items being moved around, footsteps in the middle of the night.”
“Nothing as drastic as what’s been happening to you, though.”
She nodded. “Same as the family who lived here before them. They actually liked the ghost, said it watched out for them. I wonder why. I mean, the ghost has never seemed hostile to anyone else—”
“That we know of,” he said.
She nodded. “But prior to that, there was nothing—not until the suicide.”
“Yeah. You know, I had no idea Phil Miller had ever lived in this house, much less that his first wife had committed suicide.”
“You mean you know him?”
He nodded. “He’s a music teacher in a neighboring school district. Must be close to retirement age by now. But I’ve seen him around.”
“He comes into your shop? Seems interested in the spiritual?”
“Nah. We eat in the same diner a lot.”
“Oh.” She was disappointed. For a moment there, she thought she might be onto something. Then she brightened again. “Still, it was right after her death that the haunting began. Do you think it’s Sharon Miller, Jack? Do you think she’s the ghost?”
He shrugged. “Need a plate, here.”
She hopped up, got two plates from the cupboard and handed him one. He stacked three slices of the toast onto
it, handed it back to her and threw in three more. “Go ahead and start without me.”
She set her plate on the table, went to the fridge for margarine, maple syrup and got out a bottle of orange juice while she was at it. Then she got silverware and glasses for them, and when that was done, poured two mugs full of coffee and set the creamer and sugar on the table.
“There.”
By then he was flipping his three slices onto his plate and joining her. He sat down. She said, “So where should we begin?”
“Well, you can tell me what your life was like before you came to Burnt Hills,” he said.
She looked up quickly. “I meant with the ghost. Can you just exorcise this thing, or do you need to know more about it, first?”
He seemed to be taking his time, thinking it over while adding syrup to his toast, cream to his coffee. “Well,” he said at length. “The more information we have, the more effective the exorcism will be.”
“That’s what I figured. So what’s the plan?”
“Right now, eating breakfast. And talking. Where are you from, Kiley?”
She sighed. “You really wanna know?”
“Yeah. I know, it seems odd to me, too.”
She shrugged, took a bite and moaned in ecstasy. When she’d swallowed, she said, “This is incredible.”
“I know.”
She licked her lips. “I was a spoiled little rich girl from Richmond, Virginia. Inherited my parents’ entire fortune. Fell for a con man who married me, took me for every red cent, and then left me high and dry.”
She felt his eyes on her, realized he’d stopped eating. Slowly she looked up at him.
“That’s why you’re so down on people you perceive to be hucksters?”
She nodded. “It’s why I stopped believing anything I couldn’t find proof of.” She shrugged. “Maybe I’ve been wrong. Maybe my own bitterness has warped my vision.”
“Maybe.” He wasn’t quite meeting her eyes anymore, and he dug back into his breakfast as if it were the most important thing he would do all day.
When she finished and was sipping her coffee, she leaned back in her chair. “God, I feel like patting my belly. That was delicious.”
“Glad I managed to satisfy at least one of your physical cravings.”
She smirked at him. “Oh, I don’t think you’d have had any trouble with the other.”
“No?”
She didn’t answer. Since when did she stroke this man’s ego? Not that that’s what she was doing. He’d been good. God, it would have been mind-blowing. But it didn’t pay to think about that now. It hadn’t happened. It wasn’t going to.
“Okay, so here’s what I’m thinking,” she said.
“About what?”
“About the ghost. I think we should contact the last couple who lived here.”
“The ones who wouldn’t talk to the author?”
She nodded. “They might be more willing to talk to me. I mean, I’m living here, after all.”
“You’re also a journalist who enjoys exposing people as frauds. They might be suspicious of you.”
“Hmm, you have a point. Okay, so you’ll have to help
me talk to them. Meanwhile, we’ll do a little investigative digging into Mr. Miller. See if we can find out anything more about his wife’s death.”
“Like what?”
“Like how she killed herself, and why. And what she might want from me.” She licked her lips. “Maybe you could consult the Ouija board or whatever the hell you use, see if you can get any answers from her directly.”
“Naturally. That was going to be my first move.”
She nodded, swallowed more coffee. Outside the sun was coming up, its orange-yellow rays beaming in through the kitchen windows. “I suppose I should take a shower.”
He nodded. “Yeah. I should wash up and shave, myself. You want me to stand in the bathroom while you shower?”
She licked her lips. That would be a bad idea. Very bad. She would be all too tempted to reach out and yank him into the water with her. “I think I’ll be okay, now that it’s light outside. So long as I use the downstairs bathroom.”