Christmas Spirit Page 7

  Chapter Seven

  Sam was just about to knock on Charlie’s front door when it was flung open. Charlie stared at him, gasped in surprise, pale as a sheet, and took a step backwards.

  She was shaking, Sam thought absently, and was inside with his hands tight around her upper arms before he even knew he was about to move.

  “What’s wrong? What happened?”

  She shook her head and wriggled out of his grasp, pushing past him to get outside, without a jacket or anything. At least she was wearing those slipper-sock things. He followed, ignoring the open door but setting down his leather laptop bag on the clean gray-painted floorboards of the front porch.

  “Charlie, talk to me.” He took her arm and steered her into one of the Adirondack chairs by the railing, going down on one knee to look up at her. It was chilly out despite the bright sky and the sunshine—the wind off the water carried winter’s chill. “What happened?”

  She was still shaking a little bit, although he decided at this point that it was due more to the temperature than whatever had spooked her. He ran his hands down her arms as she got calmer, taking a while to raise her gaze to his. She was sheepish, a little scared, confused, and he wanted to make all of it go away. “What happened?” he asked again, more softly this time.

  “I was in the kitchen, making a fresh pot of coffee, and I heard something,” she said. Her voice was surprisingly steady despite the fine trembling that wouldn’t quite stop, and the awful paleness of her cheeks.

  “Heard what?” His knee was protesting the unforgiving surface of the floor, but he wasn’t going to move until he knew what had happened.

  “I thought it was the wind at first,” she explained, and took a deep breath to steady herself. “I’ve heard things before, just once or twice, but it was always very vague, something I could almost pass off as the house settling or leaves rustling. But today ...” She pressed her lips together, frowning hard, trying to decide how to explain. “In the past, I could tell there was a voice there, but it was too far away to really hear. Today I heard it, and it was just one word inside this strange ... sort of crackling noise.”

  His pulse had kicked up, he realized, and he was gripping her arms so tightly he was going to leave bruises if he didn’t relax. “What was the word?”

  “Mine,” she said simply. Behind her glasses, her eyes were huge, the soft, dark brown of them gleaming with amazement and the last faint tinge of fear. “That was it, just ‘mine.’ But the voice ... it was so hard. I couldn’t tell if it was male or female, because it was still so distant. But whoever it was, it didn’t sound happy. Not pleased and proud, if you know what I mean. It was possessive. Determined.”

  She shuddered suddenly, and he let go of her arms to rise up and gather her against him. After one surprised, frozen moment, she slid her arms around his back and laid her head on his shoulder with a little sigh.

  “It’s silly,” she said, the words muffled by his shoulder. He could feel the warmth of her breath through his parka. “I mean, I’ve heard and seen things, and last night I wasn’t even this scared, really. I think it was just because I was alone, and it was so quiet in the house.” She moved, trying to disentangle herself, but he held her tight.

  “It’s not silly,” he said gruffly. “It’s weird and, yeah, a little scary. Ghosts aren’t supposed to be real, no matter how many believe in them. But I think the talking ones are more rare. After last night ...”

  She stiffened a little then, and he ran a hand down her back, soothing and steady. “Last night was an eye-opener. I’ll admit it. That ... growl was real enough, I can tell you that. And getting pushed around by something I can’t see is not my idea of a good time. I don’t blame you, babe. Not one bit.”

  He could feel her smile against his shoulder. Of course, he could also feel her breasts through the simple white button-down she was wearing over her jeans, and smell the good, clean, girl-scent of her shampoo in her hair. The back of her bra was a gentle ridge beneath his hand, and he itched to unhook it, unbutton her shirt, twist her around so he could get his mouth on her, taste that sweet darkness on her tongue.

  No.

  They were on her front porch in broad daylight, on a frigid December morning, and he was ready to strip her down and take her right here. She didn’t even seem to notice that she didn’t have a jacket on, but if she caught pneumonia, it would be all his fault and—What the hell was this? He liked her, yeah, and he wanted to get to know her better in more ways than one, but this? This was crazy. This wasn’t him. Not entirely, anyway. But he had to get her inside.

  And control himself until she’d calmed down. He was pretty sure it wasn’t her, either. Granted, he only knew enough about Charlie to fit on the head of the proverbial pin, but he was willing to bet money that she wasn’t the type who would usually turn her head to find a man’s mouth, hungry and hot, as if she’d read his mind.

  As if she needed this just as badly as he did, right here and right now.

  He couldn’t argue the point, not right away. Not with her tongue slipping in against his, wet and sweet, and her fingers twisting in the fabric of his shirt, holding on as he angled them closer. His knee was screaming, and his hips were aching from the uncomfortable position he was in, but right now it didn’t matter. He kissed her harder, until it was all teeth and lips and tongue, messy and fast.

  She broke away so suddenly, his head followed, his mouth eager to claim hers again, but instead of breaking away completely she was standing up. And dragging him with her, it turned out, her fingers hooked into his belt loops.

  “Inside,” she said. And they were. Just like that.

  “Charlie,” he breathed, and she just nodded up at him, cheeks hot with color, her mouth bruised dark pink from his kisses.

  “Sam,” she said, voice full of wonder and need and heat, and then they were kissing again, her arms around his neck. She was up on her toes to reach him better, and he was cupping her ass, bringing her closer.

  God, he wanted her. Wanted all of her, naked and sweat-slick and needy beneath him, and he slid his hands up under her shirt, dragging his palms slowly over all that smooth, soft skin.

  She wriggled closer, licking into his mouth with her hands on his face, holding him there, and he groaned out loud, sinking his fingers into the rounded curves of her ass, not even noticing they were in front of a window.

  Just as someone called up from the sidewalk. “Hi, Charlie! Oh! Uh ...”

  They disentangled so quickly, Charlie stumbled, banging her knee on the wide wooden windowsill, and Sam swayed for a minute, trying to regain his balance without the warm anchor of her body against his.

  “Hi, Isabel,” Charlie called through the window, her hand at half mast in greeting. The woman who had spoken was about Charlie’s age and pushing a sleek navy blue stroller, but instead of stopping she just smiled and hurried on as she called over her shoulder, “I’ll, um, talk to you later!”

  “Oh brother,” Charlie groaned, sinking into an armchair and shivering all of a sudden. “We barely know each other, and now she probably thinks ... I don’t even know what she’ll think now.”

  “Who cares,” Sam said firmly. He took her hand and pulled her to her feet. She let him steer her away from the window. He dashed outside again and collected his laptop before it froze and the screen shattered, then shut the front door firmly behind them.

  For a moment, they simply stared at each other, and Sam could feel the magnetic pull between them that made going right back to what they’d been doing the best and most sensible idea in the world. The temptation was clear on Charlie’s face, too—she was breathing hard, her cheeks still hot with color, and her lips were still parted, still slick with their kisses.

  One step, he thought. If he took one step toward her, she’d be in his arms, and then they’d be ... well, not upstairs in her bed, that much was pretty clear. She’d be lucky if they made it to the couch instead of right here on the floor of the entry hall.


  Which was wrong. Wrong. Hot, yeah, definitely, but it couldn’t happen right now, not like this, not when he didn’t know what the hell was going on and why the two of them were like a couple of animals in heat around each other.

  It had to be the house. Or whatever was in the house. Whatever strange entity had taken up residence here. Had to be.

  He tightened his fingers around the strap of his bag and set his jaw. Charlie was waiting, eyes troubled behind her glasses, her chest still faintly heaving. “Get your coat,” he ground out with effort. “We have some research to do.”

  “This is a lot less fun than researching faery rings and the English moors,” Charlie said two hours later at a table in the back of the library, idly flipping the pages of a book on the whaling history of Martha’s Vineyard.

  She glanced up, looking around. Whales were popular in these parts, maybe a little too popular. There were Christmas cutouts taped to the ends of the tall shelves, and one of them was a whale in a Santa hat, pulling a sea-sleigh piled high with gifts for the good little boys and girls of Edgartown. Awww.

  Sam shot her an annoyed look. “Do you want to figure out what’s going on in that house or not?” He was sprawled in a curving, solid oak chair on the other side of the table, catty-corner from her—as far away as he could get and still be at the same table, she thought, and sighed.

  Which was for the best, obviously. Especially here. She was fairly certain that the staff of the Edgartown Public Library would not approve of public displays of affection in the reference section, or anywhere else.

  And keeping her hands off Sam was proving more and more difficult to do, no matter where they were, it seemed.

  Shoulders bumping as they’d set out from her house to the library, she’d taken Sam’s hand without thinking twice. In the just-above-freezing morning air his hand had been so warm, so strong, and when he had let his thumb trace lazy circles on the back of her hand, the rush of heat in her belly was a shock. They were holding hands, for heaven’s sake, not kissing, not ... well, practically climbing all over each other the way they had been on her porch, in front of her entire neighborhood.

  She blushed again just thinking about it, and Sam scowled. “Keep reading,” he muttered and, judging by the way he slid further down in his chair, adjusting his position, she knew he was still feeling it, too. Arousal. Need.

  She turned back to the book lying open on the table in front of her. It dated back at least a century and a half, and it was yellow with age and stiff with disuse. Which had as much to do with the author’s dry-as-dust style as the topic of whaling which had bored her to tears the minute she’d gotten three chapters into Moby Dick back in college, come to think of it. If she read one more laundry list of a ship captain’s household inventory from 1856, she was going to scream. Or possibly fall asleep right here in the library.

  “Look, the idea is to find out anything we can about the Prescotts,” Sam said without preamble. He’d explained the point of this unexpected research trip four times already, and she was beginning to believe he was talking just to keep himself from leaping across the table and kissing her, judging by the look on his face.

  Which was hot and bothered in the extreme, she thought, answering heat flooding up from her chest and into her cheeks. He’d pushed his hands into his hair so many times, it was spiked up every which way, and those blue eyes were still dark, a thin ring of warm blue ocean around the black of his pupils.

  She turned back to the book in determination, flipping to the next page. The point of this excursion was to find out whatever they could about her family’s history, about the house itself, if and when anything strange had happened there in the years since it had been built, or possibly if some other house or building with tragic echoes had stood there before Cyrus Prescott laid the foundation for his family home. All of which was the only way either of them could imagine to figure out where the ghost had come from, and why.

  And despite the morning’s scare, Charlie couldn’t picture anything she’d rather be doing less than this.

  But she could picture a lot of things she would rather be doing. In great detail, in fact. Greater detail than she’d ever imagined before meeting Sam. Hot, sweaty, naked, intimate things ...

  “Charlie!”

  Her head snapped up when Sam barked at her, and she shot him a glare that was half guilt and half embarrassment. “What?”

  “Pay attention,” he warned her, gesturing at the forgotten book. He’d closed the lid of his laptop and leaned forward, elbows on the table. He had such gorgeous hands, she thought as he steepled his fingers together, thoughtful for a moment. Long fingers, warm skin stretched taut over the knuckles, nicely shaped nails. She knew what those hands felt like against her skin, tangled in her hair, stroking the curve of her cheek. “At least tell me if you’ve found anything,” he added, and she tore her gaze away from his hands.

  She raised an eyebrow and pushed her glasses up on her nose. “I can tell you a dozen different uses for whale oil, the first warning signs of scurvy, ten different slang terms for the crow’s nest, and general springtime wind patterns along the eastern seaboard. In other words, no.”

  “Perfect.” He grunted and sat back. “I’ve got nothing, too.”

  “You know, I do have some information at the house,” she said, frowning. “There’s a family Bible and some scrapbooks, at least. I’m sure there’s more, although I’d probably have to dig it out of the attic.”

  “No.” He stood up, shaking his head. “We’re not going back there.”

  She made an inarticulate noise, pure disbelief. “Sam, I live there. I have to go back eventually, you know.”

  He scowled at her and ran a hand over his head again. “I know that. But we’re not going back there, not right now. Not ... yet.”

  “Sam.” She closed The History of Whaling on Martha’s Vineyard—the title was as uninspired as the text, which was hardly a surprise—and folded her arms on it. “What happened this morning spooked me, I admit it. Especially after last night. That cold air and that sound ...” She trailed off, trying to disguise her shudder with a roll of her shoulders. “But nothing’s ever hurt me. And, well, I live there. I don’t exactly have a choice about going back. Besides, there’s Butch. He doesn’t like changes.”

  He huffed out a breath and stood up, face set in hard, unforgiving lines. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking beyond the obvious grim determination in his expression—he believed in the ghost now, she knew that, but she was pretty sure he wasn’t happy about it. Was he scared? Unlikely, given his size and strength. Was he scared for her? Maybe. Was he scared of what happened whenever they were alone in that house together? Hell, she hoped not.

  She didn’t know him well enough to guess, and that was sobering. Because two hours ago she’d been ready to tear his clothes off and know him in a whole other sense. Somehow, she supposed, she should feel a little funny about that, but instead she felt funny that she didn’t.

  “Yeah, well,” he said, oblivious to the confusion she was sure was clear on his face, and stuffed his laptop into the leather bag he carried it in. “You don’t have to go back right now. Right now I think we should get some lunch. What do you say? You hungry?”

  She stood up gratefully, and realized the English muffin she’d eaten at seven-thirty this morning was a distant memory. “I’m starved. And I know the best place on the island for French dip sandwiches.”

  “You should go back to the hotel and work on your article,” Charlie told Sam after they’d eaten. They were standing on the front steps of the house, and Sam had taken hold of her hand as tightly as if she was about to jump off a cliff. “I’ll be fine,” she added gently, smiling at him. “I’m fed, I’m not spooked anymore, and I’m sure the fire department would be happy to battle ghosts if I called them.”

  “With what? High pressure hoses? Axes?” Sam asked. He stroked the back of her hand with his thumb again. God, what was it about that simple contact that we
nt straight to her blood? “And I have plenty of time to work on the article, believe me.”

  “Well, I don’t need a babysitter,” Charlie insisted, and managed to extricate her hand from his, groaning at the way Sam growled in protest.

  This was absurd. She didn’t even know this man, and after one day she was melting with lust for him. She hadn’t written anything worth a damn since yesterday morning, and suddenly she was more interested in the vaguely threatening ghost in her house and the definitely tempting man by her side than the novel she had been trying to write for seven years.

  She had to get it together. Had to concentrate, focus, forget about Sam, if not the spirit upstairs, because at some point Sam would be gone, even if the ghost wouldn’t be. She didn’t need this distraction.

  And part of her, a small, extremely shameful part of her, was confused about the fact that Sam wanted her at all.

  She wasn’t his type. She knew that much in her bones, even if she didn’t know Sam very well. Sam was everything she wasn’t—confident and traveled and even a little world-weary. He did everything fast, in that “get it done and get gone” way some men had. He wasn’t right for her, a former English teacher who had had precisely four serious relationships in her life, and had never traveled farther west than New York City.

  And given all of that, she couldn’t understand why on earth he was interested.

  But he was. He wrapped his arm around her waist as she looked at him, and she could feel the attraction in the way his body curved into hers, the heat in his eyes, and the gritty husk of his tone when he said, “I can work on the article inside, with you. Any objections?”

  She had a million of them—sensible ones, even. Number one: letting herself fall for Sam was a risk of enormous proportions. But before she had a chance to think too hard, she heard herself saying, “Not at all. Come on in.”