“He’s very handsome, they say,” Maryann said. “Very handsome indeed.”
“Huh? Who?” Roy was awfully cute, but even she wouldn’t exactly call him handsome.
“Our ghost. Captain Daniel Elliot.”
“Oh, of course. The ghost,” Emma said. “Have you ever seen him yourself?”
Maryann mounted the carpeted stairs and Emma followed. “Tragically, no,” she said with a laugh. “I guess I’m just not receptive to the spirit world. I’d love to see him, though.”
“So, why do you think he appears? And why just at Christmas?”
When they reached the second-floor landing, Maryann started down a long hallway. “According to the people who’ve seen him—and talked to him—he’s looking for his lost love. And something else apparently, but he can’t seem to remember what it is.”
“You mean people have not only seen him but spoken to him?” Emma’s skepticism wavered for a moment.
“Oh, yes.”
“That must scare the bejesus out of them.”
Maryann opened the door to the room at the end of the hall and paused on the threshold. “I’m sure it does at first. Evidently Captain Elliot is a true Southern gentleman, though. He puts them at their ease right away.”
Emma uttered a little squeal of delight when she saw the room. An antique four-poster bed, complete with white lace canopy, dominated the space. Another beautifully decorated tree stood between the bed and the fireplace. A homey wood fire crackled below a mantel topped with a lovely collection of nutcrackers and hand-carved Santas. In front of the ornaments lay pine boughs so freshly cut that the scent put Emma in mind of sleighing through a forest on a wintry night.
Emma sighed. “It’s perfect.”
“I’m so glad you like it. The ice machine is in that alcove we just passed in the hallway. Let me know if you need anything else.” Maryann turned to go but stopped in the doorway. “I almost forgot. The Christmas tour of antebellum homes starts at seven.”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Emma assured her. As much as she enjoyed history, she’d rather be engaging in more romantic activities as soon as Roy arrived, but she knew he would relish the tour, and it was one of the selling points that got him to agree to come down here.
As soon as Maryann had closed the door behind her, Emma flung her suitcase and garment bag onto the chest at the foot of the bed. She rushed to unpack in case Roy got there early. She wanted everything to be perfect the moment he arrived. She scurried down the hall to the ice maker and filled the silver ice bucket so she could chill the bottle of expensive champagne she’d bought. Next she opened the plastic baggie of red rose petals and scattered them on the bed.
Emma saved the best part for last. She’d slaved over a hot sewing machine for the past two weeks making an exact replica of Scarlett O’Hara’s red velvet robe from Gone with the Wind—the one she’d been wearing when Rhett Butler had carried her up the stairs to ravish her. She removed the robe from the garment bag and arranged the layers and layers of white lace trim. Stripping to her underwear, she put on the robe and smoothed it down against her body. Then she checked her reflection in the free-standing, full-length mirror in the corner. Pinching her cheeks for color as Scarlett would have done, she fluffed her long brown hair and struck a sexy pose. How could Roy possibly resist her?
As if on cue, her cell phone chimed Roy’s ring tone—“The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” “Hello, my love,” she answered. “Where are you?”
“Heading north on I-75,” Roy answered merrily.
“What? Why are you going in the opposite direction from where you’re supposed to be going?” Roy often had a bad sense of direction, but going northwest instead of southeast was ridiculous.
“Change of plan,” Roy said.
“No,” Emma insisted. “No change of plan. The plan is a romantic weekend in Savannah. That’s the plan.” She was beginning to feel lightheaded, and she hadn’t even had a glass of champagne yet. What the hell could he possibly mean?
“I just got a call from the reenactment society. They approved my application at the last minute!”
No! No! No! This was not happening! Emma crawled onto the bed and put her head between her knees. “What,” she intoned, “are you talking about?”
When Roy continued, his tone of voice wasn’t as cheery. “You remember. I applied for the part of General John Bell Hood in the reenactment of the Battle of Nashville, December 1862.”
“I thought they’d turned you down for that. You applied months ago, and you got all huffy when you didn’t hear from them. You told me that if you couldn’t play the part of General Hood you weren’t going to go at all. I remember reminding you that the soldiers at the Battle of Nashville nearly froze to death in the ice and snow. I distinctly remember telling you that you were better off not going anyway because if you did you’d be miserable and would probably freeze your balls off.” Emma flopped onto her back and stared upward at the canopy.
Roy laughed nervously. It was the same laugh he always used to calm her down when he was determined to do some damn fool thing she disapproved of. “Well, now that you mention it, I do remember that conversation. But here’s the thing—they called me two weeks ago and said that the decision on casting the General Hood part had been postponed until the last minute because of some problems with the casting committee. Then the paperwork got lost for a week, but they just now called me and told me to get up to Nashville pronto for the weekend reenactment. And thanks to you, my bags were already packed!”
Emma tried to control her breathing. “So, so, you’re going? After I bent over backwards to make this weekend perfect? What about our plans? What about me?”
“We can do Savannah anytime,” he said, sounding miffed now. “I thought you’d be happy for me.”
She suddenly thought of something that made her heart lurch in her chest. “You said you’ve known for two weeks that you were still in the running. Is that the thing you were hinting about? The thing that you said would make this Christmas the most special one ever? That something was going to happen that we’d never forget? Please, please in the name of all that’s holy, tell me that you were not talking about the reenactment.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “Well, yeah. What else would I have been talking about?”
Dancing spots formed in front of her eyes like the ones she saw when she played tennis too long in the 95-degree Atlanta heat. All the disappointments of the relationship’s long course came charging back to her. All the dashed expectations, all the embarrassments and the insensitivity.
“Emma, are you there?”
“Yes,” she heard herself say.
“Are you okay?”
“No.”
He sighed heavily. “Like I said, I thought you’d be happy for me, but I was clearly mistaken. If it’s going to make you so unhappy for me to have this honor, just say the word and I’ll turn around.”
Emma took a deep, calming breath. “You passive-aggressive asshole.” She heard Roy gasp. She had never spoken to him like that before. “You go on ahead and go to Nashville,” she said coldly.
“Emma!”
“And I hope you freeze your balls off.”
* * *
Emma stared up at the canopy for a long time while taking sips of champagne straight from the bottle. The fabric’s stark whiteness acted as a movie screen onto which her mind projected the highlights and lowlights of her long relationship with Roy. At the conclusion of the show, she’d known she was done with him. Forever. She’d invested ten years of her life in Roy, and she now realized he’d matured little from the self-absorbed nineteen-year-old she’d met in college. Romantically speaking, she was back to square one. She wasn’t going to get a ring for Christmas, and she wasn’t going to be married by her next birthday.
She sat up and became instantly dizzy from the alcohol. Tears threatened, but she’d be damned if she’d let that bastard make her feel bad about h
erself and her situation for a moment longer. The grandfather clock on the far side of the fireplace said it was nine-thirty. She heard a hubbub from the ground floor and realized that it was the Christmas tour of antebellum homes coming through on their last stop—this very mansion. She might as well hear the lecture about the house. It might get her mind off her troubles for a while.
Emma stood up carefully and pushed her feet into her slippers. She tottered woozily down the hall and stood on the landing, peeking around the wall so she could listen without being noticed. Her mind wandered as she listened to the docent’s spiel about the house—its architecture, when it was built, etc.
Off to one side she noticed a man in a Confederate Civil War uniform who appeared to be earnestly studying each face in the crowd. From his height—he must be six-foot-three at least—he would be able to see all of them. Despite his imposing size, nobody seemed to notice him. That was odd.
The uniform was completely accurate from what she could tell. Mentally, she saluted whoever had made it for the handsome blond man whose eyes were such a vivid blue she found them arresting even at this distance. He must be one of the tour guides counting the customers, making sure he hadn’t lost any of them between stops. Perhaps one had wandered away, because when he’d finished studying them all he began to look troubled, twisting his cavalry officer’s hat in his large hands.
He looked so sorrowful she couldn’t help but stare at him. He somehow felt the force of her gaze, because when his head slowly lifted, his eyes, the color of a blue gas flame, locked with hers. She felt blood rush to her face and other, lower, parts of her body, and she was momentarily struck by the absolute conviction that she’d seen those eyes somewhere before. Was she so desperate for male attention that her body responded so wantonly to a stranger an hour after she broke up with her boyfriend?
She started when the crowd broke into applause. The tour was over. When Emma looked to where the blond man had stood, he wasn’t there. With a sigh, she returned to her room, which by now was dim since the fire was nearly out. The sight of the beautiful room, which had so thrilled her earlier, made her want to run away as fast as she could. As she picked up the bottle of champagne and took a large gulp she thought momentarily of packing her bags and driving home. And she might’ve if she hadn’t been so drunk.
If there had ever been a lower point in her life, she couldn’t remember it.
“Merry Christmas to me!” she yelled and hurled the bottle into the fireplace. When the bottle shattered, the alcohol in what little champagne remained caused the dying fire to spark to life again.
“Yours might not be merry, but mine just got a whole lot merrier.”
She jumped and spun around to see the blond man in uniform standing in front of the Christmas tree. No, it couldn’t be. She’d had too much to drink. That was all. But no, the man downstairs couldn’t have gotten past her into the room without her seeing him. She blinked once. Twice. She reached out to touch the rough wool of his uniform sleeve, and the truth became big, solid, and really tall.
This was him. She was face to face with the Christmas ghost of Savannah.
* * *
“Aren’t you…”
The ghost, who looked as substantial as any man she’d ever seen, gazed into her eyes with a look of unbridled joy. “My Belle, it’s me, Daniel. You’ve finally found your way to me after lo these many years. Now we can be together for another lifetime, just like we planned.”
It took her a moment to find her voice. When she did, she said apologetically, “But, I—I’m not Belle. My name is Emma.”
Her heart broke for him as she watched his joy gradually turn to uncertainty. “Of course you’re Belle, my dear. You just don’t remember me yet is all. I forget things myself. I’ve been coming here for more than a hundred and fifty years now, and I find myself disoriented sometimes.” He smiled again and brushed a lock of wavy hair off his forehead. “I know there’s something I’m meant to do. Some final thing that must happen before we can be together in this time. First we must find each other, which we’ve done. And then….” His sandy brows knit in concentration.
“Er, maybe you’re supposed to go toward the light?” Emma suggested.
Daniel blinked. “What is this light everyone speaks of? Whenever I manifest here, good people tell me to go toward a light. What light? It’s downright confounding.”
“Never mind,” Emma said. “It’s not important right now. It sounds like you know you’re a ghost, right?”
“That is correct,” he said. “I am not of your world.”
“Don’t you think you’re stuck in some sort of loop or something?”
“Loop?”
“What I mean is, uh, as I understand it ghosts can sometimes get stuck in a time warp, doing something over and over that they used to do when they were alive.” Not that she’d ever believed in ghosts before this moment, but she’d read that theory somewhere by someone who did.
“I think not,” Daniel said. “We had a plan, Belle. Think hard and try to remember. It all began when we met that gentleman from the East, a trader from one of the oriental lands. He did business with my father’s shipping company down by the docks. We hosted him for dinner one night, and at one point he began to talk of spiritual matters.”
Emma tried to summon the memories he spoke of, but though it was fascinating, this tale was utterly unfamiliar. In truth, she wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t dreaming or having a champagne hallucination. She considered asking the captain to pinch her as a reality check, but she couldn’t take the chance that she might not hear the rest of his story.
“We had heard of reincarnation, of course,” he continued in a faraway voice, “but as that phenomenon is not part of our native culture or religion, neither of us had ever thought much about it. But while listening to Mr. Chin the concept came alive in our imaginations. After discussing later what we had learned, we became convinced that we had been lovers in previous lives.”
His eyes became more animated as he warmed to his story. “When we first met we each had been positive that we’d known each other before even though we could discover no previous connection. Reincarnation now seemed the explanation. As we pondered the matter, a thought struck each of us at the same moment. If we had been together in the past, and we were together at present, then we could be together again in the future. There and then we vowed to find each other in our next lives.”
“Wow,” Emma said, wishing that she were Belle. This man loved his wife desperately. This was exactly what she’d always been looking for, man who would go to the ends of the earth for her, as Daniel had gone to the ends of time and space for Belle.
“What if I were Belle?” she asked. “You’re in one dimension and I’m in another. How would we get into the same one?”
Daniel looked confused and tired. “That, I expect, is what I can’t remember.” Suddenly his eyes went wide with alarm. “Something just came back to me.”
“What?” Emma leaned forward anxiously.
“What day is it?” Daniel’s gaze darted about the room.
“It’s December twenty-first. What do you remember? Tell me.”
Daniel stared down into her eyes. “I remember that we went to Mr. Chin the night after we first talked to him and told him of our wish. He said ensuring we reincarnate in roughly the same place and time would be very difficult, and the hardest part would be finding each other once we did. He consulted some very old astrological charts in his possession and came up with a plan that he said could work, but only if the timing was perfect.”
“And?”
“I still don’t remember exactly what we have to do,” Daniel said. “But I remember it has to take place by Christmas Eve.”
As he spoke the last words, he began to fade away. “Oh, my,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave. I can’t seem to manifest here in this time for long.” He reached out to her and she touched her palm to his. A jolt of familiarity shot through he
r.
He began to become translucent, then transparent, then only a wispy outline before disappearing altogether. The last words he spoke hung in the air as he left. “I’ll come to you again tomorrow night.”
Chapter 2
After a fitful night’s sleep, Emma woke with the hangover from hell. Fighting the urge to go back to bed, she bathed, pulled on jeans, boots, and a pullover cable sweater and went downstairs to the dining room. Over a cup of black coffee and a croissant, she thought about what had happened the night before.
Surely the appearance of Captain Daniel Elliot was an alcohol- and heartbreak-fueled dream. She had seen a real man—a real good-looking man—downstairs, gone to bed, fallen into a deep sleep, and dreamed of him. That had to have been what happened, surely. People often dreamed of some of the last things they saw, heard, or thought about before they went to sleep.
Still, the touch of his hand had been so real and so electric. When Roy touched her it was safe and familiar and, now that she was starting to be honest with herself, somewhat boring. Could it be that a man who was only a dream could touch her in a way that sent shivers through her soul?
She’d just swallowed the last of her coffee when her cell phone rang. It was Roy. “Do you still have your balls?” she asked just as Maryann appeared at her elbow with the coffee pot. Maryann’s eye grew wide as she backed away without a word.
Spirits of the Season: Eight Haunting Holiday Romances Page 36