Christmas Spirit Read online

  Whatever was going on here was too astonishing to even consider. Charlie couldn’t have set up a con on this scale, and there was no other explanation. Not one he was going to accept, anyway.

  And he wanted Charlie. Had wanted her since sometime during her little rant about not being a spoiled heiress this afternoon, with her not-gem-encrusted shoe just short of stamping the floor in frustration.

  His desire wasn’t smart and it wasn’t professional, but he didn’t care about that either, not right now. She tasted good, felt good, and she was willing and hungry under his hands.

  He pulled her roughly into his lap until she straddled his thighs, and then he ran his hands underneath the back of her sweater. She was so smooth, so soft, and he let his fingers trail over her back as he kissed her, tongue slowly exploring her mouth.

  “We were ... going to talk,” she murmured against his lips as she threaded her fingers into his hair.

  “Later,” he said, licking along her jaw and taking the edge of her earlobe between his teeth.

  “Later works,” she breathed, and pressed harder against him. Her breasts were firm and sweet, and he could feel the rigid pressure of her nipples even through her sweater, his shirt.

  He didn’t do this. Well, he did this, sure, but he was usually a little more prepared for it. There was usually at least a couch, if not a bed, a good meal and some decent wine—okay, so he’d handled that part. But he’d never done the deed with only a few hours’ acquaintance and some kind of freaky supernatural experience as a backdrop.

  And yet here he was with Charlie on his lap, the unforgiving wood of a kitchen chair behind his back, and they were kissing like a couple of teenagers with the house to themselves for only a few minutes more.

  They should stop, he thought, unhooking her bra and running his hands around the front of her to slide his hands under the cups, palm the warm, silky fullness of her breasts. They should stop now, before things went too far. Really. They barely knew each other, and he would bet folding money, a lot of it, that Charlie didn’t do this kind of thing. Ever. Even after a lot more wine. He happened to glance at one of the Christmas cards, not liking to be watched by the big-eyed, green-capped elves on it. Okay, they were two-dimensional but he wasn’t taking any chances, not after what had happened in the attic. Sam flipped the holiday card down on its face and returned his attention to her.

  Then she made another inarticulate noise deep in her throat when his thumbs coasted over the firm tips of her nipples, and suddenly he forgot about stopping. He tightened his arms around her and pushed to his feet, laying her out on the wide, worn table. A piece of the day’s newspaper slid away to one side; a straw basket holding a few ripe bananas skidded in the other direction with a muted whisper of wicker on wood.

  He pushed her sweater up, exposing a wide swath of pale skin flushed hot with need, and she shivered. When she arched beneath his hands, she tipped her head back, and he found himself licking and biting at her throat, messy, openmouthed kisses and sharp nips that made her tremble and hold onto him, her fingers digging into his shoulders.

  God, he wanted her. Wanted all of her, right now, right here, naked and shaking and clinging to him. Wanted to watch her break open, swallow those soft, needful noises with his mouth, and stroke her back down until she was pliant and boneless in his arms.

  The shrill ring of the phone cut through the silence, and Charlie stiffened beneath him. They both froze, panting, and Sam loosened the fingers he had tight against her hipbone, holding her in place. The moment was shattered, and for a second they simply stared at each other, trying to breathe.

  “I should ...” Charlie started, swallowing the rest of the sentence. Her eyes were huge, only a thin ring of brown visible around the blown pupils.

  “Yeah,” Sam said, straightening up, trying not to shudder. He was strung taut, aching and hard, and as Charlie pushed up to her elbows and wriggled off the table, he could suddenly see what the two of them must have looked like.

  Scrubbing a hand over his face, he took a step back and helped her to her feet. She was shaky, all right, and her hair was wild around her shoulders, her recently replaced glasses sitting crooked on her nose. So sexy.

  What the hell was he doing?

  He waited while she stumbled across the kitchen to get the phone, dropping into the chair he had abandoned just minutes earlier. He barely registered her soft, breathless “Hello?” into the receiver.

  This was crazy. Almost as crazy as a ghost, he told himself, and choked back a desperate laugh.

  Charlie hung up the phone and turned around, smoothing her sweater into place and pressing her lips together. They were swollen, deep pink, evidence of his teeth and his mouth right there, and his dick twitched in recognition.

  And interest. Yeah, definite interest.

  “My friend Franny,” Charlie said. She was blushing again, and more than anything he wanted to grab her up and kiss her, stroke her hair until she was soft and needy in his arms again. “I’m sorry about that, but she—”

  “Hey.” He closed the distance between them and pulled her against him. “No need to apologize. I should be the one doing that.”

  “Sam ...”

  He held firm, despite the breathy sound of her voice, muffled against his chest. “I’m going to go now,” he said carefully, and put her away from him so he could look her in the eye. “But I’d like to come back tomorrow. So we can ... talk. If that’s all right.”

  She nodded, and he ducked down to kiss her, just once.

  “You sure you’re going to be okay here?” He jerked his head in the direction of the room upstairs. Christ, maybe he should take her with him.

  But she was nodding, completely calm now. “I’ll be fine,” she said, and she sounded more certain of herself than she had all night. “Really.”

  He wavered for a moment, liking the feel of her hips under his hands, the smell of her, sweet and light and somehow spicy, but she set her jaw and finally wriggled out of his grasp.

  “I’m a big girl,” she said firmly, and he realized her blush had faded. “I’ll be fine.”

  But as he kissed her good-bye, he wondered if she was talking about whatever had happened upstairs in that shrouded room—or what had almost happened right there on her kitchen table.

  An hour later, dressed in a pair of loose flannel pajamas with a candy cane print, Charlie stood in front of the mirror over her dresser and touched her lips with one shaking finger. They were still flushed, slightly pouty, almost bruised. Her hair looked as if she hadn’t combed it in a week, and her cheeks were still hot pink. Her throat, too. Or was that ... ? She squinted, ran a careful fingertip over the faint purple mark where her neck met her shoulder. Hey, she actually had a hickey.

  She’d never realized the evidence of kissing could be so, well, visible. Then again, she’d never kissed anyone quite the way she’d kissed Sam Landry.

  Her knees wobbled a little just thinking about it. The two of them, clinging to each other, fused with fever-heat and need, on her kitchen table, for heaven’s sake. If the phone hadn’t rung when it did ...

  She took a step backward and sank into the overstuffed easy chair she’d brought from her old apartment in Providence. Butch yowled in protest, and she whirled around to catch him streaking across the room, all offended dignity and flickering striped tail. He sniffed and curled up in the bay window, studiously ignoring her.

  “Sorry, buddy,” she said faintly. She didn’t sound quite like herself in the quiet room, but she didn’t feel quite like herself, either, so that made a certain kind of twisted sense.

  Charlotte Prescott didn’t kiss strange men in her kitchen. Charlotte Prescott didn’t kiss strange men anywhere. In fact, Charlotte Prescott had last kissed a man ... She slouched into the chair as she thought back, surprised at how long it took her to figure it out. She hadn’t kissed a man in almost two years. Her eyes widened as she realized how long it had been, and how little she had noticed.

 
Even so, she’d never done anything close to what she had done tonight with Sam. Nothing so frantic, so soon. She’d never even done anything like that in college, which was sort of the whole point of college, if you believed people like Franny, at least.

  There had to be a reason for it. Outside of Sam being mouthwatering, of course. She’d met a few good-looking men in her life and she’d never jumped one of them that way.

  Then again, she hadn’t done the initial jumping, had she? She stood and crossed back to the mirror, removing her glasses to lean closer to the glass and study her reflection.

  She wasn’t anything much, really. At least she didn’t think so. Plain light brown hair that hung straight down to her shoulders, myopic brown eyes, a mouth that had always seemed unremarkable aside from the fact that it was a pleasant enough shade of pink, and a straight, sort of boring nose.

  Not bad, really. Just not ... the type of woman who drove a man crazy. She certainly never had before, anyway. David would probably swear to that under oath, in fact.

  She stuck her tongue out at herself, and leaned her elbows on the dresser’s cluttered surface. The thing was, she wasn’t the only thing that had happened to Sam tonight.

  Slipping her glasses back on, she padded down the hall barefoot, biting her lip. No, something else had taken place here tonight, and it had been a hell of a lot more than she’d bargained for. Coming to a stop beside the closed door to the spare room, she touched the knob with careful fingers, swallowing hard, her heart beginning to speed up, and then frowned.

  There was nothing to be afraid of. She’d been living here for almost two months, and the most she’d ever felt was that strange, sensual heat, after all.

  Okay, that wasn’t entirely true. Once, down in the kitchen, she’d heard whispers, faint and papery, like leaves scratching at the wind, so distant there was no way to make out actual words. Twice she’d smelled lilacs in the hall upstairs, just outside the spare room, and the aroma had been both so strong and so far away, she’d been rocked backwards, trying to figure out where it was coming from.

  And once, just once, when she was still half asleep and stumbling from the bathroom back to her bedroom, she had seen a gauzy flash of white just inside the spare bedroom, insubstantial, but somehow carrying the unmistakable curves and bell shape of a woman’s dress.

  She shuddered then, a faint thrill of unease, and let her fingers slide away from the doorknob. Whatever had happened before, she had never once experienced that blast of cold air, or heard that rough, furious growl before tonight.

  And she still wasn’t sure she believed what she knew she had seen—something incredibly strong shoving Sam backwards into the side of the bed, so forcefully his head had rocked on his neck for a moment as the breath whooshed out of his lungs.

  Something had happened in that room, and for the first time she wondered if it was possibly something too strange. It was a ridiculous thing to consider now, she realized, backing away from the door. Cute little cartoon Casper was the only happy ghost she had ever heard of, and he wasn’t a very good example of the spirit world, now was he?

  She hurried back along the dim, chilly hall to her bedroom, doing her best not to slam the door behind her.

  Butch lifted his head and regarded her with sleepy indifference when she crawled into bed, flicking his tail when the comforter shifted beneath him. “You didn’t like it the one time you felt the ghost,” she told him with a frown, and rolled her eyes when he sniffed and leapt off the bed.

  She snuggled down and reached for the book she’d left on the night table, but she couldn’t concentrate. When she wasn’t feeling that bitter, icy rush of air against her skin, she was back in the kitchen with Sam, the table biting into her spine and his mouth hot and demanding against hers, the muscles in his back rippling like water as he moved, his hair sliding thick and silky under her hands, and then she was flushed all over again and so restless she had to start the page of her book all over again.

  She gave up when she’d read the same paragraph three times without registering a word of it, and turned off the light. There in the dark, there was nothing but the fitful wind outside and the house settling around her, faint creaks and groans as the old structure eased farther into its foundation.

  She couldn’t think about the spare room, not without the urge to pull the covers over her head like a frightened little girl. It wasn’t any safer to think about Sam as she lay there in the dark, but it was certainly much more enjoyable.

  Chapter Six

  “You can’t bring that in here,” a woman with shockingly blond hair and a Reading is Fun button pinned to her blouse told Sam the next morning. He was only two feet inside the Edgartown Public Library, a tall takeout coffee in hand and his laptop bag over his shoulder, and it took a moment to realize she was talking to him.

  And what she was talking about. His fingers tightened around the cup when she pursed her lips and lifted her eyebrows in disapproval.

  “Right,” he said, backing out and trying not to scowl.

  “Shush,” she answered reflexively, then turned to whatever it was she had been looking at on her computer monitor.

  She looked as if she’d been ready to confiscate the cup, and if anyone tried to get between him and his caffeine this morning, they were going to get an earful.

  He was almost certain there wasn’t enough coffee in the world this morning anyway. On his back in the too small, sickeningly antiqued room he’d booked at the Edgartown Inn, just two blocks away, he’d stared at the ceiling for hours last night.

  Remembering the gut punch of that icy air, and the threatening growl rumbling through the room right behind it. The slow pressure of that sexual heat under his skin. The way Charlie had tasted when he kissed her, the soft give of her skin under his palms, the breathless way her mouth had opened when he’d nipped at her collarbone and soothed the sting of the bite with his tongue ...

  Yeah, if he kept thinking about it now, he’d be up forever. In more ways than one, he thought with a silent groan. He hitched his bag up over his shoulder and set out down the street, the cup’s warmth comforting in his hand. He just needed ... more coffee. And research. Research would ground him, anchor him in the real world, not whatever freaky dimension he had wound up in last night in Charlie’s house.

  That hadn’t been Frosty the Snowman who’d tried to knock him on his ass when he’d gotten too close to Charlie. But who—or what—had it been?

  Her house was right around the corner he realized with a grunt of frustration. Not that he had meant to head in that direction. Not at all.

  Of course, his feet weren’t exactly turning around. What the hell?

  A retiree with a golden retriever so white around the muzzle it looked to be roughly as old as his owner walked by, smiling up at Sam from beneath the brim of a Red Sox cap. “Morning,” he called cheerfully, the day’s newspaper folded beneath one arm.

  Sam grunted and kept walking. Everything about Edgartown was straight out of a postcard, glossy and neat. Even the bleak winter weather didn’t take away from the neat Victorians lined up like dollhouses, sporting tidy Christmas wreaths and tasteful garlands. This wasn’t the kind of town that went for big inflatable displays or tons of outdoor lights and nodding white-wire reindeer. Of course, one gust of the wind off the Atlantic would probably blow an inflatable Santa all the way up to the North Pole.

  Even the locals were straight out of central casting, from the strict, shush-a-matic librarian to the old-timer walking his dog, for God’s sake.

  And that was before you got to the cliché of the haunted sea captain’s house.

  He turned up Morse Street before he reached Cottage, determined to finish his coffee even though it was freezing out and get his head on straight before he headed over to Charlie’s. Calling her first would be safer anyway. If he knocked, he knew what would happen. She would answer, glasses sliding down her nose and her hair tucked behind her ears, blushing and shy, and he would... well, he would
tackle her right there in the front hall and kiss her breathless, and that was probably still a bad idea.

  Every part of his body aside from his brain disagreed about it being a bad idea—in fact, a couple of parts seemed to consider getting his mouth on Charlie’s was a damn good plan—but he was determined to ignore their protests for now.

  It was only ten o’clock in the morning. He had some self-control. Not much, but some.

  He was downing the last of his coffee when he heard, “Well, if it isn’t Sam Landry. Good morning to you.”

  When he looked up, Lillian Bing was leaning in the doorway of a shop just a dozen feet away, arms crossed over her chest and Gloria the dachshund was circling her feet, tail wagging frantically. Above the woman’s clipped silver hair, a hanging shingle swung in the wind off the water. The word Pages was painted there across a simple graphic of an open book.

  “Lillian. Morning.”

  “You don’t sound completely caffeinated yet,” she said with a knowing smile. She was squinting in the weak sunshine, one hand up now to shield her dark gray eyes. “Come on in and I’ll fix you up.”

  He followed her into the store, nose twitching at the combination of new books, vintage volumes, coffee, leather, and what he was pretty sure was patchouli. He could picture Lillian as a hippie, he realized, imagining her hair before it had turned pewter, maybe long and braided down her back. She was about the right age, and she had the turquoise and silver jewelry to lend at least a little credence to the theory. And she’d named her dog after Gloria Steinem, who wasn’t a hippie but from back in the day, for sure.

  “So, a bookstore,” he said, wandering through the stacks up front, making sure his voice carried to Lillian, who’d disappeared behind a counter at the far wall, but not before catching her tunic top on a bristly garland of spiky red and green. There were Christmas-themed doodads all over the place, including a retro Rudolf with a blinking bulb for a nose.