Zach shrugged. “I haven’t gone into the light yet. But they’re together and that’s okay. I’m still having too much fun out here. And I’m determined to have the perfect Christmas. I’m not going until I’ve had it. But now I find out that damned real estate agent is sending me Scrooges like you on purpose.”
A wink took the edge off his words, but she still rolled her eyes. “I’ll get my UPS guy to rent the cabin for next year. He’s a total Christmas freak, and so is his family. You guys can work yourself into a holiday frenzy together. Hell, he’s probably even got a Santa clock just like yours.”
“I bet he’s not as sexy as you, though.”
“I guess it depends on how much brown shorts turn you on.”
He blinked out, reappearing right in front of her. That still freaked her out. She wasn’t sure it was something she’d get used to, but when he looked at her the way he was looking at her now, she didn’t really care.
“You turn me on,” he said, his voice thick. “We should talk about that North Pole snow globe over there. I’m willing to make it go away for a price.”
Heat seeped through her body, making her muscles feel loose. “What’s your price?”
The words he whispered in her ear made her face flame and her knees weak. He was definitely on the naughty list. “It’s a deal.”
eee
Two days later, Jessica pulled her coat on and grabbed the sticky note off the fridge and her car keys. “It’s a nice day. I’m going to run up the road and call my agent. He gets nervous when I don’t check in.”
“I’ll go with you.”
When he dematerialized, she paused. Not only because the ability to do that wasn’t normal in her world, but because a random thought blindsided her.
He could leave the cabin. Her destination was right up the road, of course, but it still made her wonder how far he could travel. He was the first ghost she’d ever been acquainted with, so she wasn’t sure how the whole earthbound energy thing worked. Maybe there was a certain radius or something he could exist in.
It only took a few minutes to find the spot detailed on the sticky note. She felt like an idiot crawling on top of her SUV—and the metal roof was damn cold—but she had enough bars to make the call.
Her agent answered the phone himself on the first ring, which surprised her since she rarely got to bypass his office manager. He’d no doubt been waiting for her call and was alerted by caller ID. “Jessica?”
“Hi, Harry.”
“I’ve been worried sick about you!”
She laughed and rolled her eyes, even though he couldn’t see her. He always started with the maternal clucking, then moved to business, then swung full circle back to clucking. Jessica adored him.
“I talked to you just a few days ago,” she reminded him.
“How do I know you didn’t get lost in the woods? Or bit by a rabid squirrel? Hell, you could be assaulted by a lovesick moose!”
Jessica only half-listened to her agent’s melodrama. Zach was standing at the edge of the road, taking all his clothes off. Hot, naked ghostflesh beat work-related hysterics any day.
“Are you writing okay up there?” Harry asked in her ear, the melodrama apparently spent for the moment.
“Yes, Harry. I don’t let diseased, horny wildlife interfere with my deadlines.”
He laughed, long and loudly, and she managed a chuckle of her own. But Zach was completely nude now and Jessica knew two things. One, ghosts were impervious to cold-induced shrinkage. And two, she didn’t want to be talking to Harry anymore.
“Everything’s pretty much shut down for the holidays,” her agent was saying, “so there won’t be any news on getting that advance clause revamped until after the new year.”
Zach spread his feet, put his arms out and fell forward with a splat. Then he poofed out and reappeared next to a perfect, anatomically-correct impression of himself. She laughed so hard she almost slipped off the roof.
“Jessica?”
“Sorry, Harry. I got distracted by a horny squirrel trying to abscond with my virtue.”
“Sure, mock my fears. But when you get mauled by a bear, don’t think I won’t tell you I told you so before getting you an extension.”
Now Zach was flat on his naked back, making snow angels. Jessica had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing again.
Harry cleared his throat. “Isn’t this where you launch into a tirade about the business world grinding to a halt for two weeks to worship a fat guy in a red suit?”
Yes, but she didn’t feel like it this year, for some reason. “I’m not worried about it. No clause revision, no J.C. Newton bestseller next year. It’ll work out.”
“Maybe the fresh air is doing you good,” Harry said.
Something was, but it wasn’t the fresh air. She wanted to make snow angels, too, although having a minimum body temperature to maintain, she’d be leaving her clothes on.
“I’ll call you in a few days, Harry.”
“Call me at home, since I’ll be doing Christmas with the kids and grandkids.”
“I will. Tell them I said…” Jessica let the sentence die. Had she really been about to wish somebody a Merry Christmas? Impossible. Those words had not left her mouth in many, many years. “Tell them I said hi and give them my best.”
After receiving a few more admonitions regarding wild animals, thin ice and looming deadlines, Jessica snapped her phone closed and climbed down off the SUV.
“That was a business call you were distracting me from,” she told Zach, going for stern but not even coming close.
How a man was able to look mouthwatering and impish at the same time was beyond her, but he managed. At least he’d slipped his clothes back on. She liked the naked view, but the temperature worried her despite his being impervious to it. It simply wasn’t normal for naked men to roll around in the snow. When sober, anyway.
“Make a snow angel next to mine,” was his only response. She’d expected him to at least pretend to be contrite. “A naked one, next to mine.”
Jessica backed away, shaking her head. “Oh no. First, if they’re both naked, they’re probably not angels. And second, unlike you, I feel the cold, and it’s not exactly balmy out here right now.”
“I’ll warm you up later.”
Acting purely on impulse, she bent over and scooped snow in her bare hands, packing it into a nice tight snowball. He narrowed his eyes as she drew back her arm, then let it fly.
A solid chest shot. Or it would have been, but at the last second Zach went blurry around the edges and the snowball passed right through him.
“That’s cheating!” she yelled.
Seconds later, she was thumped in the shoulder and snow exploded all over her neck and chest. Zach dematerialized almost instantly, but she could still hear his laughter.
What the hell? Jessica found a fluffy, thick patch of pristine snow and let herself freefall backwards. She sank in, then began swishing her arms and legs.
Zach popped back into being and watched her, grinning. “That’s a good one, even with clothes on.”
She stopped swishing. Short of floundering around and wrecking it, she couldn’t get up. “Last time I made one I wasn’t getting old. I think I’m stuck.”
“That’s why it takes two to make a snow angel, babe.”
He stood near her feet and held out his hands, pulling her up and into his arms. With his arm draped naturally around her waist, holding her comfortably, they gazed down at the Jessica-shaped impression.
Zach was right. Her snow angel was a good one. It was beautiful, actually, and Jessica sighed. She couldn’t remember when she’d stopped throwing herself down in the snow like that.
“Which one’s your favorite?” he asked, pondering the line of snow angels. They were like snowflakes—no two exactly the same.
“That one,” she said, pointing to his full-frontal impression.
He kissed her temple and steered her toward the SUV. “Time t
o head back and get you warmed up.”
After downing a mug of hot cocoa with an orgasm chaser, Jessica wrote for a few hours before closing the file and rubbing her eyes. It wasn’t easy keeping a classic horror story fresh and original—especially with eleven of her own books to avoid retreading—and Zach was playing hell with her concentration.
He’d poofed himself away somewhere, and she wondered where he was and what he was doing. It had only been a few hours and she missed his company. She was totally hooked on the guy already.
Zach came to rest in the corner of the bedroom. An invisible ball of energy. He was bored and restless, but he was doing his best to leave Jessica alone while she wrote.
While it wasn’t a difficult feat, it did take a small amount of concentration to maintain his physical form, and he’d been doing it pretty much non-stop since her arrival. Resting while she did her minimum pages for the day seemed best for both of them, even if it left him bouncing around alone.
Damn, but that woman made him ache. Not in a blue balls kind of ache, but a deep ache in his chest—or an overall sense of it while in this state.
Jessica rocked his world, and spending time with her served to remind him of what he couldn’t ever have. Hell, he even mourned things he hadn’t even had—a wife, kids.
Before the roof incident, he’d been starting to get the urge to settle down. Now he’d found a woman he’d like to settle down with, and he was dead.
He had nothing to offer her. She wasn’t going to give up her life in the city to move in with a ghost. Even if she was…what then? Jessica was alive. Her happily ever after had a shelf life, and his didn’t.
Zach would have punched a wall if he had matter. He’d finally found a woman he could imagine spending the rest of his life with, and there was no rest of his life. It had already ended.
As if he’d summoned her, Jessica stuck her head into the bedroom, obviously looking for him.
He popped back into physical form and laughed when she damn near jumped out of her skin. Those not-so-subtle reminders he was a ghost still took her by surprise every time.
“Geez, Zach,” Jessica said, one hand pressed to her chest. “Can’t you just materialize slowly and give some warning?”
“I’m a ghost, babe, not a landing party from the USS Enterprise.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m done for now and it’s a nice day. Let’s sit in the rockers on the front porch.”
Zach beamed himself out there so he could get the squeaky one first. It was his favorite, and it never failed to freak out his guests.
Jessica appeared a few minutes later wearing a bulky sweater and carrying a steaming mug of hot cocoa he wished he could drink. She sighed as she sank into the rocker, and Zach cursed the owners for not having a double-wide swing instead.
“So,” she said after a few minutes of companionable silence, “did you have a girlfriend or a wife when you…fell off the roof?”
“No. I was single at the time. But I was starting to think about giving up my wild existence and finding an old ball and chain.”
Jessica laughed so hard she almost spilled her drink. She set it on the rustic table next to her and wiped her eyes with the ends of her sleeves. “I’m sorry. I had a Jacob Marley visual—old ball and chain? It’s probably not that funny.”
Zach chuckled. “I never liked Jacob Marley. The Ghost of Christmas Present was always my favorite. How about you? I’m guessing the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, since you’re a horror writer.”
“While I haven’t watched it in many years,” she said pointedly, “the Ghost of Christmas Past was my favorite—he gave the warm and fuzzy back-story. Although you’d be my favorite ghost now—the Ghost of Christmas Overkill.”
This time it was Zach who laughed. “I wish you could stay here forever.”
Oh shit. He really hadn’t meant to say that out loud. He shouldn’t have, even if he kind of already meant it. A guy hinting at commitment after only a couple of days was even freakier than a ghost.
The silence stretched into the awkward range before Jessica smiled. “If you try to send me up on the roof with an inflatable Santa, I’m definitely refusing.”
“Why aren’t you married?” he asked, figuring he should get all his too personal or downright stupid comments and questions out of the way at one time.
She stopped smiling and looked off into the trees. “I was once. He was boring, uptight, belittled my writing, then gambled away my very first advance check on a horse named—get this—Joyeux Noёl.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. Joyeux Noёl my ass.” She looked directly at him, then, her pretty blue eyes serious despite the smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “You’re nothing like him.”
“Absolutely not,” he agreed, wanting to be done with the depressing stuff even though he’d brought it up. “I’ve never bet on a horse race in my life. I did lose my dad’s truck in a game of strip poker once, though.”
“Aren’t you supposed to bet your clothes in strip poker?”
“Yeah, but I was naked at that point, and one hand away from Julie Daigneault taking her bra off, so I talked them into letting me throw the truck in the pot. She had ti…breasts that could have won her Employee of the Month at Hooters, but nobody had ever seen her nipples.”
“And you lost.”
“No nipples for me. And do you know how hard it is to get a cab when you’re bare-assed and broke?”
She laughed, and Zach was relieved the earlier seriousness had evaporated. He needed to remember his time with her was limited, and they could be nothing to each other but fun, sex-hungry holiday diversions.
“What did your dad do?” she asked.
“When he was done laughing his ass off at me, he called Julie’s parents and we went and picked up the truck.”
“Did you ever get to see Julie whatshername take her bra off?”
“Yes,” he answered mournfully. “Her nipples were pretty enough, but I found out she was a bra stuffer. It was really traumatic for me.”
“Oh you poor baby,” she said, almost keeping a straight face.
“I’m better now. Your breasts have been very therapeutic for me.”
Jessica almost choked on the sip of hot cocoa she’d taken. “I can’t believe I quit working early to listen to this.”
“I think I feel a need for more couch time coming up, too.” That wasn’t all that was coming up.
Jessica narrowed her eyes. “For the mini Christmas train set you have circling around the coffeemaker.”
Zach pretended to consider the offer, but just talking about her breasts had him so worked up he could barely remember what decoration she was even talking about. “I don’t know, babe. You know guys love trains.”
She set her empty mug on the table and crossed her arms over her chest, which was so unfair. Between the sweater and her arms, he could barely see her breasts at all. “I guess somebody’s engine won’t be heading into the tunnel, then.”
He lost the train set, a gaudy wreath, a set of wooden nutcracker soldiers and a tree-scented candle even he had to agree smelled more like Pine-Sol before the day was done.
Chapter Four
They passed the rest of the week in a haze of sex, talking, and the repackaging of forfeited ornaments.
With the woodstove wrapping the living room in a warm embrace, and her head in Zach's lap on the couch, Jessica felt a contentment she hadn't felt in years. That was especially surprising considering tomorrow would be Christmas Eve. It wasn't usually one of her better days.
There was only one thing threatening to ruin her perfect evening—the ever-strengthening realization her time with Zach was limited. Soon she'd be leaving this cozy cabin to return to her condo in the city. A condo she'd always loved, but now she dreaded the loneliness she'd convinced herself not to feel in the past.
In only a week she’d grown accustomed to his company to the point she couldn’t imagine being without it. He puttered around the h
ouse while she wrote. He made love to her during her breaks—after a lengthy speech on how it would be good for her body to really stretch those muscles. He made her laugh by making naked snow angels just because he could. They bartered ornaments constantly, though Jessica was clearly ahead. She’d found all his sweet spots—a stroke here, a fingertip pressed just there—and now the only evidence of Christmas remaining was the fully decked-out tree in the corner.
She didn’t want to leave him. Her heart ached just at the thought of never seeing Zach again. And yet she couldn't quite bring herself to ask the question bouncing around in her head. Was Zach tied to this cabin, or could he move to Boston and haunt her condo? Maybe there was some emotional bond holding him here, but maybe there wasn’t. Maybe he could live with her.
She didn't ask because, even if he could blink himself into the city, she wasn't sure it would be enough. Could they go out? Could other people see him? And how could she possibly grow old next to a man trapped forever in his “sexual prime”?
Jessica sighed, and the sound drew Zach's attention away from the book he was reading—hers of course. “What are you thinking about?”
“I'm wondering what perverted sex act will get rid of that tree,” she said. She wasn't about to tell him what had really been on her mind. So she lied, even though right here and now—curled up with Zach on the couch—the twinkling lights reflecting off the shimmering garland didn't seem all that annoying.
His laughter seemed to vibrate through his body and into her own. “Oh no you don't. That tree's not going anywhere.”
“It's all you have left to barter for sex. How long can you hold out?”
Zach disappeared and her head hit the couch cushion with a thump. She hated when he did that.
Four minutes later he reappeared—coming through the door this time—dangling from his finger what looked like plastic handcuffs covered in glittery red garland.
“You found Christmas handcuffs in the storage shed? What the hell kind of people owned this place?” And just what did Zachary Roberts think he was going to do with them?
In the Spirit Page 3