Shaw's Landing (Haunted Hearts Series Book 4)

by Denise Moncrief

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  She was surprised. She thought it sounded really crazy.

  “Maybe you can try it. You know, writing your daydreams.”

  She shrugged again. Uncertainty clouded her future. If she went back into Haskins’s operation, she might not have time to do anything but stay alive. She almost choked up at the thought. The whole concept of diving back in made her want to crawl in a hole somewhere and not come out until the apocalypse. Like the end of the world freaks.

  “I met Timna yesterday.”

  She was glad to move away from territory that was likely to rupture her heart.

  “She’s a weird little old woman, isn’t she?”

  “She seems to know a lot of details about other people’s lives without ever coming down off the mountain.” Shaw was talking one thing, but his eyes seemed to be telling her something else.

  He’d moved another fraction of an inch toward her. Their elbows were bumping together where she leaned against the railing, just like he was. His arm slid behind her back. His gaze held hers, and she was concentrating on him and his lips and his eyes and the muscles rippling in his upper arms instead of what he was saying. He brushed his knuckles across her cheek, and a shimmer of longing zipped through her, surging through her nervous system and making her flesh heat.

  “This shouldn’t happen.” His husky voice sent a fresh wave of anticipation through her.

  “What?” She acted confused, but she knew exactly what he meant.

  She would be damned if she’d let him push her away because of some stupid rule about cops and suspects not being together. She wasn’t a suspect. She wasn’t a victim. She was just a woman who had the hots for a man, who wanted to live out her imagination.

  His lips hovered over hers, just like in her daydreams.

  “I shouldn’t kiss you. We shouldn’t…” But he never finished his sentence.

  She could tell that he wanted to kiss her. The sparkle in his eyes gave him away. She pressed her lips to his before he could change his mind. At first, the sudden contact seemed to shock him, but then his mouth took charge of hers. The kiss was deep and full and lasted oh so long.

  She began to return his kiss, and that seemed to fire him up even more. He pulled her into him, her curves meeting his hard planes and muscles beautifully, a perfect fit.

  When he finally unlocked their lips to catch a breath, he leaned his head back. “We shouldn’t.”

  She nipped at his lower lip. “Shut up.”

  This time he moved in for the kiss. A powerful emotion raged through her, sending her soaring. If his kiss could take her to heights she’d never been, what would it be like to be with him, body-to-body, skin-to-skin? She wanted to know. More than anything, she needed to know.

  Maybe, just maybe, fishing with him was her new favorite thing.

  Something went splat in the water behind them, and the kiss broke. He glanced over his shoulder toward the line and smiled. “I think we have a bite.”

  She turned his face back to hers, one hand on each cheek. “Forget about the stupid fish.”

  He grinned. “Okay.”

  ****

  “You know all about me. I want to know about you.”

  Courtney’s breath caressed his cheek where she leaned with her back against him, her head next to his. They’d just spent the last few hours in each other’s arms, forgetting about the fishing and the sunrise.

  “I’m not sure I know all about you, Courtney.”

  She laughed and the sound of her laughter seemed bright and hopeful to him. Maybe he’d managed to put a little sparkle in her eyes. Maybe.

  “Surely, you’ve done a background check on me.”

  “I did.”

  “Then, what else is there to know? I’ve told you everything else.”

  “Everything?” he asked.

  She groaned. “Tell me about your family.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck where his muscles suddenly tensed up.

  She must have sensed his distress. “You don’t have a good relationship with your family, do you?”

  He wrapped his arms tighter around her. “It’s not that it’s a bad relationship. It just isn’t.”

  “You don’t see them much?”

  He shook his head. “They travel a lot.” Maybe they were running away from the past. He waited a moment, debating how much to tell her, and then chose to tell her everything. “I think they’ve always blamed me for my sister’s death.”

  “Did you cause her death?”

  She had a way of cutting out all the extras and asking the most basic question.

  He shifted a bit to get more comfortable, and she moved with him, like they were two parts of a whole. He’d never felt so connected to another human being. Her kisses were like lightning, each one of them shooting through him and sending a sizzle of excitement throughout his body. Holding her was like holding fire in his arms.

  He forced his concentration back to her question. “If I did, I can’t remember it. For years, I didn’t remember she even existed. We were twins, and she drowned when we were three. I found out about her on my sixteenth birthday.”

  Courtney was quiet for a while, and Shaw had expected her to hit him with a ton more questions. Finally, she spoke, and her voice was full of empathy. “That’s why you hunt ghosts. Because you’ve seen her.”

  She always surprised him how perceptive she was, but maybe he shouldn’t be surprised any longer. She’d lived a hard life, but she wasn’t stupid. She was undereducated, but she wasn’t ignorant.

  “Once I found out about her, my parents seemed to back away from me. It’s strange how a person can feel abandoned and still be living with two other people.”

  “I know how that feels.”

  He bet that she did.

  “I enlisted to get away from them and everything they wanted me to be. I couldn’t follow their plan for my life when I didn’t feel they cared a damn about me or what happened to me. I wasn’t going to let them brag about their son following in their footsteps at Vanderbilt. But now…getting back at them doesn’t seem so important anymore. My choices have shaped my life, and I don’t regret them, but I wished I’d made them for different reasons.”

  “You regret the anger that went with your decision.” It wasn’t a question.

  She seemed to absorb his regret, and it was the first time he felt like he had truly shared his feelings about his parents with anyone. He’d told Clark a little about his past, but Clark hadn’t taken on his regret with him like Courtney had.

  “I’m really sorry. My reasons for leaving home must seem so shallow compared to yours.”

  “Why did you leave home?”

  She laughed, and the sound was self-deprecating. “I didn’t want Momma telling me what to do anymore. I thought I knew better than she did. She was wrong about Jared. She just didn’t understand our love.” She snorted, mocking herself. “What did I know about love?”

  “How long did it take you to find out he was a meth head?”

  She rubbed the rolled seam on the sofa cushion. “About two months. He hadn’t been using long. It hadn’t pulled him too far down yet. But I should have seen the signs. Even before I left home.”

  “That must be kind of hard to face.”

  She turned a little, her hip slipping between him and the sofa, and leaned her head against his shoulder. “So…you were in the military. What branch?”

  She obviously didn’t want to discuss her mother or Jared any longer. That was fine with Shaw. Mention of Jared Crenshaw always made him tense up. He wasn’t sure why. Couldn’t be jealousy. If the man weren’t already dead, Shaw would take him out somewhere and… “Army.”

  “What’d you do in the army?”

  He hesitated. Unpleasant memories attached to his time in Afghanistan. Three tours of duty. “I was a sniper.”

  She leaned her head back and peered into his eyes. “Oh. That’s…intense.”

&nbs
p; “Yeah, it was. Not something I like to talk about.”

  “Nighmares?”

  “I haven’t had one in awhile.” He brushed the hair back from where it fell across one side of her face. “You had one last night.”

  “I did?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  She shook her head. “Too much has happened. I’ve seen too much. And what happened with the necklace and the diary… I’m afraid to close my eyes.”

  “What happened with the diary?”

  She snuggled into him, trembling a little. “I was at my mother’s night before last.”

  So that’s where she’d been.

  “I might have gone to sleep reading the diary, but I think I put it down on the bed beside me before I closed my eyes. When I woke up, it felt like the book was burning my leg. Streaks of light came out of it, and I thought…” Her voice cracked a bit. “I thought it was going to suck me right into it.”

  He passed his hand over her hair, just because he liked touching her, and because he hoped the contact would calm her. Telling the story seemed to agitate her. When he stroked her neck right at the spot where her carotid pulsed, he could feel her pulse racing.

  “It’s okay. I’m here. You’re not alone now.”

  She glanced up at him and blinked. “I’m not sure it was about being alone.”

  “I think it’s always about being alone.” When she didn’t respond to what he thought was an insightful comment, he pushed forward expressing his thoughts. “Tori had a similar experience with Celeste Standridge’s diary the other night. The same burning. The same streaks of light. She freaked out.”

  “So that’s what she meant yesterday. No wonder she looked at Victoria’s diary as if it were a snake.”

  He flinched. “I hate snakes.”

  She laughed. “Really? Big tough guy like you has such a strong reaction to snakes?”

  “The only good snake is a dead one.”

  It was time to get on with his day, but he didn’t want to stop their time together. Shaw would have to go into town soon and begin another day investigating the few leads he had. The previous afternoon, Courtney had given him a whole new path to follow. He’d dig a little deeper into the Standridge family’s history, certain there was a connection to the Hamiltons. And then there was the Richards clan. How deep were they tied to Haskins? Also, he wanted to know if the dead woman on the Ridge was Cherish Duncan or not.

  But his most important chore for the day was talking to the press about the cover up of Jeremy Haskins’s death, the news that would start the avalanche of events that he hoped would end Fred Haskins’s control of Hill County.

  “You’re about to leave, aren’t you?”

  He pressed his lips together and nodded.

  “Can I have just one more—”

  He moved in for the kiss, sweeter than all the others that had come before it.

  She broke the kiss. “Shaw?”

  He waited for her question, sensing it would be a difficult one to answer.

  “What’s going on here? Are we.. Is this…”

  Her traced the line of her jaw with his fingertip. “Let’s take it one step at a time. I like being with you. I want to get to know you better, but we need to take our time. What happened last night… That can’t happen again for a while. You’ve been through too much to rush into something new. I don’t want to be that guy.”

  Her brow creased across the bridge of her nose. “What guy?”

  She hadn’t caught his meaning as he had hoped she would.

  “Never mind.”

  “No, you meant something.” Anger flushed her cheeks.

  He sighed. “I don’t want to be the guy that comes after the guy that hurt you. The one that thinks he’s going to make things all better and can’t.”

  “What are you saying? You want me to find someone else, ditch him, and then we can pick up where we left off?”

  “No. That’s… No. I just don’t want to hurt you too.”

  She ran her fingers down his cheek. “If you do, I’ll just have to forgive you.”

  Could fixing a relationship really be that simple?

  Chapter Eighteen

  Bored again. Gray had not come back to Shaw’s Landing as he said he would. Instead, he had gone back home. Tori had moved back into the motel where she’d been staying for the last few months. Shaw was out doing the cop thing Shaw did, and Courtney was alone…again.

  Another long, long day lay ahead of her if she didn’t find something to do. She twisted the tail of Jared’s blue chambray button down shirt. Going in to town was out of the question, but she needed a fresh change of clothes. Yeah, she could go into town if she wanted. Why was that out of the question? Shaw couldn’t keep her at the Landing against her will. She could do whatever she wanted to do.

  Her rebellious mind put forth some strong arguments, but her vulnerable heart was stronger. It was her decision. She would stay. Because he wanted her to, and because she probably was safer hidden away at Shaw’s Landing.

  Her eyes strayed once again to Victoria Hamilton’s diary. If she took it outside in the daylight…

  She grabbed the book off the bar and rushed out the door with it. The rays of the mid-morning sun shone down upon it as if it were golden. The worn leather felt smooth in her hand. She descended the stairs and found a wooden rocker on the front deck of the restaurant in full view of the path that led to the dock. If Shaw came back, she’d see him before he saw her.

  The pages of the diary flipped open to the spot where she’d left off reading two nights before.

  25 January 1924

  That woman was here again today. Thomas wouldn’t let her in the front door on Alfred’s orders. He’s been told that Esther is not allowed inside Victoria House again. I stood at the top of the stairs and watched Thomas attempt to shove her out the door. That must have been hard for him because she was once the mistress of Alfred’s house.

  She screamed at me from the front door and called me the vilest of names. Sometimes I wonder if I deserve the names she calls me. She said she wished I were dead. The hate in her eyes… I will never forget it as long as I live. I’ve done the woman wrong taking her husband away from her and leaving her daughter fatherless.

  Alfred has nothing to do with little Pearl. I feel so sorry for the child. Every time I see her in town, she appears gaunt and near starvation. I fear that Alfred has left them nothing to live on. I offered her a gold coin, but she spit on me.

  When Alfred saw Esther in the door, he told her to go home to her mother, and she cried most piteously. I had already begun to dislike him, but lately I’ve come to hate him. He has no heart and no soul. Cold and empty. His eyes never show any emotion any longer. I’ve become afraid of him.

  I wish John would come for me. I have no way to get back home without his help. Alfred never lets me out of the house unless I am with him or one of his bodyguards. Like I’m his prisoner. I am bored and restless. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to live my life anymore.

  I feel so alone.

  Strange things happen in this house at night. Bumps and bangs that wake me from a restless sleep. I think the noise is much more than Alfred’s guests having a good time in the basement.

  Courtney kept reading, fascinated by the life of a woman who had died years ago. The pages flipped by and Victoria’s story began to unfold. John never came for her. Alfred grew even more hostile toward her, yet he still wanted her to accommodate his sexual desires. More and more she began to feel violated when he was through with her. Courtney knew exactly how that felt.

  She came to the last entry in the diary.

  14 April 1924

  I overheard Thomas talking to one of the kitchen maids. Poor Esther. She’s gone quite insane and little Pearl has been living on the street. Alfred wanted to have Esther committed to the asylum in Memphis, but she has gone missing. I fear the woman has killed

  A large blob of black ink cut the entry short.

 
The sun had crossed the sky until it had hit the apex at noon. Its rays warmed Courtney’s back as she read the last of the diary entries, incomplete as if Victoria had been interrupted in her thoughts. Courtney wiped a single tear away. Poor Esther. Poor Victoria. Both women caught in a selfish man’s whims. Poor Pearl.

  The two ghosts that appeared at Victoria House were no doubt Victoria Hamilton and John Standridge. So he had come for Victoria after all. There had never been any mention of John in the legend of the Hamiltons’s murders. What had happened to him if he had once been in the Hamilton house? He had to have been. He haunted there.

  Courtney closed her eyes to better remember the paranormal event she had witnessed from behind the wall of Victoria’s bedroom.

  What had the ghosts said to each other? The dark apparition had said, “You belong to me.” The lighter one had said, “I never belonged to you, John.” If the dark apparition was John and the light one was Victoria, then the ghost of Victoria Hamilton had lied to the ghost of John Standridge. Or else she lied to her diary. No, Victoria’s heart had always belonged to John.

  Courtney snapped the diary shut and sighed. What a tragic story. Victoria and John had never been able to tell each other the truth. Courtney didn’t want to be trapped in that kind of relationship, never again. When she fell in love, she wanted to be able to tell the man exactly how she felt.

  Her mind involuntarily wandered to Shaw Bennett. Would she one day be able to tell a man like Shaw that she loved him? Would she ever know what it truly meant to love someone with all her heart?

  Suddenly uncomfortable with holding the book in her hands, she carried it back inside and set it back on the bar. With a heavy sigh, she turned her attention to making some lunch. Eating alone was never fun. How long would it be before Shaw returned? He’d told her before he left that he wouldn’t leave her alone there at night any longer.

  ****

  Shaw wondered why everyone called Celeste Standridge a crazy old lady. She’d given up her daughter, Laurel, for adoption to her brother, but did that make her insane? She had disowned her son, James, the twin Celeste had chosen to keep. Although that was an indicator of instability in the family, it wasn’t necessarily an indicator of psychological problems. Disowning a child wasn’t normal, but it wasn’t uncommon.