by Julie Kenner
“Hey, Kiley?”
She froze, her hand going still.
“You awake?”
That was it, that was it. Just pretend to be asleep. Perfect. She tried to breathe the way a sleeper breathed, but gradually, so he wouldn’t notice the sudden change.
“Kiley?”
She didn’t respond, just kept breathing, kept still.
He drew his arm from around her, eased her from her side onto her back so slowly she knew he was trying not to wake her. She guessed he didn’t want her to realize he’d been holding her so…intimately.
But no, that wasn’t it. A second later, she knew that wasn’t it, because he was sitting up, just a little, and she felt his hand pushing her hair away from her face, slowly, softly. The warmth of his touch trailed over her jaw to her neck, to her shoulder, and slowly, slowly, lower, drifted over her satin-covered breast, making her want to slap him and arch closer all at the same time. But he kept going, sliding his hand to her belly, sideways to trace the curve of her waist, and back again to her abdomen.
Enough. Hell, it was enough. He was making her hot without even trying, and if he kept it up she was going to have an orgasm right in front of him.
She made a little noise in her throat and slowly rolled onto her side, facing away from him, just so he’d get the idea that, even asleep, she was rejecting him.
He went still for a moment. And then he was touching her again. His hands, both of them now, on the small of her back and sliding lower, boldly, right to her buttocks, cupping her cheeks and squeezing.
Furious and more turned on than she could believe, she jerked onto her other side, facing him, and said, “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
He smiled slowly. “Same thing you were doing to me a few minutes ago, Kiley. Fair is fair.”
“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. I wasn’t doing anything but sleeping a few minutes ago.”
“Liar.” His hand closed on her wrist, and he put her hand on his abdomen again, held it there with his hand over it. “Go on, touch to your heart’s content. It’s not like I mind.”
“You damn well should mind. You don’t even like me.”
He shrugged. “I’m a guy. Liking you doesn’t have to enter into it. Go on, satisfy your curiosity. Feel me up.”
She slid her hand upward over those rock-hard abs even as she pulled it away. “You are so full of yourself.”
“I’d far prefer you to be full of me.”
She blinked hard and fast. “What?”
He shrugged. “We’re both adults. Unmarried, uncommitted.”
“One of us ought to be committed, though.”
He smiled slowly, pushing her hair away from her face. “If we’re not gonna be enemies anymore—are, in fact, becoming allies in the war against your spooks—then there’s really no reason we shouldn’t.”
“There are a million reasons we shouldn’t.”
“You want to. I want to. It’s surprising, I admit that, but—”
“I do not want to.”
“No?” He ran the back of his hand over her breast again, and then again as her nipple grew hard and tight. “Gee, Kiley, your body says otherwise.”
She narrowed her eyes on him. “I hate you.”
“You want me, though. I want you, too.”
“You son of a—”
His hand slid down over her belly, and she felt herself wanting it to keep going, wanting him to touch her.
“Tell me to stop,” he whispered.
She didn’t. And he was right, liking didn’t even enter into it.
His fingers touched the top of her panties. He slid them inside. “You can tell me to stop anytime, you know,” he whispered again. He was leaning over her now, his face very, very close to hers. “But I hope you don’t.”
She told herself to tell him to stop, and then tell him to go away. But instead, she felt her thighs ease a little farther apart, her hips push against his hand, just a little.
He moved his hand farther, sliding his fingers between her moist lips, parting them, and rubbing against the softness they hid. “Damn, woman. I haven’t been this hot for anyone in ten years. Why the hell did it have to be you?”
She tried to answer, but all that came out was a soft moan, and that just made him rub her harder, exploring new places, probing to new depths. Shameless, she opened up to him and moved against his hand, and her breaths came faster. She reached for him, desperate to know this was hitting him as hard as it was hitting her, and her hand closed around him, thick and hard and pulsing with need. So she rubbed, teased him the way he was teasing her.
He drew his hand away, got up onto his hands and knees, above her. She felt cold, empty, ached to be in his arms again. But he was kneeling over her, stripping away her panties, peeling off her nightgown, staring down at her naked body. “God, Brigham. You never told me you were a goddamn goddess.” He closed his hands on her breasts, squeezing, kneading them.
She wanted him as naked and vulnerable as she was, so she tugged at his briefs until they came down and she had complete access to his erection.
He slid off the foot of the bed, grabbed her ankles and dragged her lower on the mattress until her butt was at the very edge. He slid his hands up her legs to her knees and bent them up, back, wide. She was aching for him by now. Squirming and pleading in soft whimpers for him to do it, already. Holding her like that, he pushed himself slowly, deeply inside her, farther, and still farther.
“Oh, yes,” she moaned, her eyes falling closed.
He buried himself inside her, filled her to her very depths. And then, for some reason, he went still and swore softly under his breath.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE LIGHTS WERE OUT. He was kneeling between her warm, firm thighs, buried inside her, every nerve ending in his body electrified. And every single light in the place had just gone out, making Jack wonder if someone had come in. Or maybe the storm going on inside him was actually happening outside, and the power had gone out.
He stopped moving, and she whimpered in protest. Then he wondered what the hell demon lived in this house, that it would possess him to do something as stupid as to sleep with his worst enemy. And yet, when he looked at her, lying beneath him, squirming against him, head moving side to side, eyes closed, he wanted to ignore the sudden blackout and keep up what he was doing. It would be a mistake, but damn, what a pleasant mistake to make.
He hovered there, deep inside her, debating, mind against body. He drove himself just a little deeper, loving the sounds she made as she took him. And then the light in the stairway flashed on, flickered, went off again. “Hell,” he muttered.
“What?”
Her eyes blinked open, just as the TV set flashed on, its volume full throttle, blasting a hard rock video. The surprise of that blast of noise sent her eyes flying wider. He withdrew from her fast, as startled as she was.
She blinked at the TV screen, then at the flickering stairway light. “Jack?”
“I’ll shut it off.” He went to turn off the television. The volume was deafening.
“Wait.” She said it loud, then reached out and grabbed the remote from the end table beside the sofa bed. She hit the power button on the TV, and it went dark, silent. The stair light flicked again, then stayed on. One by one the other lights came back on as well.
She pursed her lips, drawing the sheet up to her chest as if suddenly embarrassed to be naked in front of him. “Maybe my ghost is the jealous type.”
He smiled, not because she was funny, but because she was making jokes when she must be frightened half out of her mind. Kiley was a tough one, but then again, he’d always known that. “Maybe it’s just as well,” he said, and couldn’t believe he was saying it.
“I was thinking the same thing. Sex probably isn’t the best idea we ever had. We don’t even like each other.”
“Oh, I don’t know. You’re growing on me, Brigham.”
“Yeah, and us being nak
ed in the same bed has nothing to do with that whatsoever?”
“I didn’t say that.”
She shook her head. “Whatever just happened here—”
“Almost happened,” he corrected her.
“Almost?” She pursed her lips. “We didn’t finish, Jack, but we definitely got started.”
“It was a goddamn good start, too.”
She averted her eyes. “It wasn’t based on affection. Or caring. Or any tender feelings whatsoever.”
“Oh, come on. Don’t pretend you can speak for me on that.”
“Jack, we didn’t even kiss first.”
He mulled that over, realized she was right. So no kissing, to a female, equaled no caring, no tenderness. Good to know. “Okay, so there was no kissing. So if this thing that almost happened—that started to happen—wasn’t based on affection, then what was it based on?”
She shrugged. “Libido? Fear? Chemistry?”
“And those are the wrong reasons to have sex?” he asked.
“All the wrong reasons. But it’s okay. The ghost caught us in time.”
“Gives me even more motivation to help you get rid of it,” he said, sending her an evil grin.
She smiled back, and a lump formed in his throat as he watched the movement of her lips, and he realized he wanted to kiss her. He regretted not taking his time, before. Just as well, though. Hell, what would she have read into it then? Still, the thought persisted.
“Think you can sleep?” she asked. She was getting out of the bed, tugging the covers with her. He glimpsed as much of her as possible, figuring it would be his last chance for a while.
He surprised himself by answering honestly. “Not next to you, no.”
She picked up her nightie, pulled it on over her head, letting the covers go only when she was concealed. Didn’t matter. He’d seen her and the image was burned into his mind. He almost groaned aloud when she stepped into the panties and pulled them up.
Then she tossed him his briefs, because he was sitting there on the bed with a pillow over his privates. “Good,” she said.
“Good what? That I’m not going to be able to sleep?”
“Exactly. I won’t sleep, either. Between almost jumping your bones and the damn ghost, I’ll be lucky if I can sleep again for a week.”
“You sound like you have a plan—something we can do instead.”
She nodded, padding across the room and taking the book she’d had in her car earlier from the fireplace mantel. He used the opportunity to pull on his underwear and prop the pillow behind his head. She said, “We can read. I already got started, but nothing that really explains any of this has shown up so far.”
She handed him the book. He looked at it and nodded.
“There’s an entire chapter on this house, in fact.” She climbed back into the bed beside him. “I think I might have a case against the real estate agency. Do you?”
“Failure to disclose ghosts. Yeah, it’s probably in the law books, right in the same section where they have to disclose termites and leaky roofs.”
She smiled again. “Go on, open to the chapter. We may as well read it together, though I’m not altogether sure I want to know any more than I already do.”
He nodded, flipped to the chapter that opened with a photo of her house and started reading.
BY THE TIME THEY FINISHED the chapter it was nearly dawn. The “ghost” or whatever was raising hell in Kiley’s new home had been quiet for the rest of the night, and she was starved.
She closed the cover. “Well, that was helpful.”
“Not.”
She stretched and got to her feet. “Hungry?”
“Don’t tell me you’re offering to cook me breakfast?”
“What are you, insane? You’re taking me to IHOP.”
He glanced at his watch. “They won’t be open for an hour and a half.”
She pouted. “Oh, hell. Well, I can scramble an egg, but the whites might be runny. I never seem to get them quite—”
“How about if I make breakfast?”
She raised her eyebrows.
“Yeah, I can cook. Just don’t let it get around.” He got up, pulled on his jeans.
She led the way to the kitchen, showed him where things were, put on a pot of coffee, then sat at the table and watched him work. He knew his way around a kitchen, whisking eggs in a large bowl, adding milk, cinnamon, nutmeg, soaking slices of bread in the concoction, and dropping them onto a sizzling griddle.
“Wow,” she said.
“I’m a man of many talents.” He glanced at her. “As you would have found out last night, had we not been so rudely interrupted.”
She let herself grin back. This was something new, this flirting going on between them. She wasn’t sure how to react to it. Was this going to be the new nature of their relationship, now that she’d vowed to stop trying to discredit him and put him out of business? How odd it would be not to be his worst nightmare. She wasn’t sure how to deal with it, or whether she even liked it. She’d enjoyed tormenting him, hounding him.
So she decided to change the subject. “Let’s nutshell this, shall we?”
“Sure.” He expertly flipped the French toast.
“What do we know about this house that we didn’t know before?” she asked.
“Well, the last couple who lived here moved out within six months, but refused to cite a reason or be interviewed by the book’s author,” Jack said.
“The couple before that claimed that the place was haunted. Talked about lights and things going on and off, items being moved around, footsteps in the middle of the night.”
“Nothing as drastic as what’s been happening to you, though.”
She nodded. “Same as the family who lived here before them. They actually liked the ghost, said it watched out for them. I wonder why. I mean, the ghost has never seemed hostile to anyone else—”
“That we know of,” he said.
She nodded. “But prior to that, there was nothing—not until the suicide.”
“Yeah. You know, I had no idea Phil Miller had ever lived in this house, much less that his first wife had committed suicide.”
“You mean you know him?”
He nodded. “He’s a music teacher in a neighboring school district. Must be close to retirement age by now. But I’ve seen him around.”
“He comes into your shop? Seems interested in the spiritual?”
“Nah. We eat in the same diner a lot.”
“Oh.” She was disappointed. For a moment there, she thought she might be onto something. Then she brightened again. “Still, it was right after her death that the haunting began. Do you think it’s Sharon Miller, Jack? Do you think she’s the ghost?”
He shrugged. “Need a plate, here.”
She hopped up, got two plates from the cupboard and handed him one. He stacked three slices of the toast onto it, handed it back to her and threw in three more. “Go ahead and start without me.”
She set her plate on the table, went to the fridge for margarine, maple syrup and got out a bottle of orange juice while she was at it. Then she got silverware and glasses for them, and when that was done, poured two mugs full of coffee and set the creamer and sugar on the table.
“There.”
By then he was flipping his three slices onto his plate and joining her. He sat down. She said, “So where should we begin?”
“Well, you can tell me what your life was like before you came to Burnt Hills,” he said.
She looked up quickly. “I meant with the ghost. Can you just exorcise this thing, or do you need to know more about it, first?”
He seemed to be taking his time, thinking it over while adding syrup to his toast, cream to his coffee. “Well,” he said at length. “The more information we have, the more effective the exorcism will be.”
“That’s what I figured. So what’s the plan?”
“Right now, eating breakfast. And talking. Where are you from, Kiley?”
> She sighed. “You really wanna know?”
“Yeah. I know, it seems odd to me, too.”
She shrugged, took a bite and moaned in ecstasy. When she’d swallowed, she said, “This is incredible.”
“I know.”
She licked her lips. “I was a spoiled little rich girl from Richmond, Virginia. Inherited my parents’ entire fortune. Fell for a con man who married me, took me for every red cent, and then left me high and dry.”
She felt his eyes on her, realized he’d stopped eating. Slowly she looked up at him.
“That’s why you’re so down on people you perceive to be hucksters?”
She nodded. “It’s why I stopped believing anything I couldn’t find proof of.” She shrugged. “Maybe I’ve been wrong. Maybe my own bitterness has warped my vision.”
“Maybe.” He wasn’t quite meeting her eyes anymore, and he dug back into his breakfast as if it were the most important thing he would do all day.
When she finished and was sipping her coffee, she leaned back in her chair. “God, I feel like patting my belly. That was delicious.”
“Glad I managed to satisfy at least one of your physical cravings.”
She smirked at him. “Oh, I don’t think you’d have had any trouble with the other.”
“No?”
She didn’t answer. Since when did she stroke this man’s ego? Not that that’s what she was doing. He’d been good. God, it would have been mind-blowing. But it didn’t pay to think about that now. It hadn’t happened. It wasn’t going to.
“Okay, so here’s what I’m thinking,” she said.
“About what?”
“About the ghost. I think we should contact the last couple who lived here.”
“The ones who wouldn’t talk to the author?”
She nodded. “They might be more willing to talk to me. I mean, I’m living here, after all.”
“You’re also a journalist who enjoys exposing people as frauds. They might be suspicious of you.”
“Hmm, you have a point. Okay, so you’ll have to help me talk to them. Meanwhile, we’ll do a little investigative digging into Mr. Miller. See if we can find out anything more about his wife’s death.”