by Rebecca York
That led him back to his theory that she was somehow involved in the murder. And perhaps the ghost business was a smoke screen…
He’d like to talk to her about it some more. But he’d found out in the past few hours that she wouldn’t welcome the topic.
Well, maybe he could start with something else and work his way back to the ghosts. That might be the right approach.
Or maybe he should give up the idea of including her in his book.
He blinked, wondering where that wayward thought had come from. He’d come all the way down here to corner her, and he wasn’t going to let her put him off. He wanted to find out what made her tick. For professional and personal reasons.
He brought himself up short. Personal reasons had no place in his plans. At least not where Chelsea Caldwell was concerned.
***
CHELSEA COULD NOT STOP thinking of Michael Bryant. Not as a guest. As a man. A very handsome man, if you liked the dark brooding type.
Carrying the tray of glasses to the kitchen, she stopped short, nearly spilling the crystal, as a realization hit her with a jolt.
She was attracted to him. Strongly attracted.
And that was too bad, because she couldn’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t being entirely honest with her and Aunt Sophie.
Maybe the mistrust had started right at the beginning—when she’d seen him prowling around the outside of the house before stopping in the office to tell them he had arrived.
She filled the sink with soap and water, then began to wash the wineglasses, since she didn’t trust stemware in the dishwasher.
As she worked, the light by the kitchen door gave a pop and went out.
“Damn,” she muttered.
At this time in the evening, she needed all the light she could get if she was going to wash Mrs. Alexander’s lipstick off the wineglass. She got another bulb from the pantry, then carried over the kitchen stool that she kept under the edge of the island.
The stool seemed a little more shaky than usual, but she was in a hurry, so she climbed up and started to unscrew the shade.
***
MICHAEL TUCKED THE restaurant brochures into his back pocket and walked back toward the public areas of the house. He had a legitimate reason to talk to Chelsea now—if he could find her.
A couple of lamps burned in the living room, but the trays of cheese and wine had been cleared away.
“Chelsea?”
When she didn’t answer, he listened for a moment and thought he heard a noise down the hall.
Hurrying through the dining room, he pushed open the swinging door into the kitchen and heard a scrabbling sound—and a gasp.
Chapter Five
Michael’s heart leaped into his throat as he sprang through the door. He was in time to see a kitchen stool toppling over, and hear a crash as Chelsea hurtled toward the floor.
He caught her before she landed, pulling her body tightly against his. His heart was pounding like a tom-tom in his chest as he tightened his hold on her, struggling to keep them both from falling over.
Her hands flew over his back, then settled on his shoulders. As the two of them regained their balance, he waited for her to push him away, but she still clung to him.
He muttered a curse under his breath, then added, “I’m so sorry.”
He’d come charging into the kitchen like a bull chasing a red flag, and apparently he’d knocked Chelsea off the stool when she was changing a lightbulb.
Now he was holding her in his arms. She felt warm and feminine in his embrace. And more fragile than he would have imagined.
“Are you all right?” he asked, the question coming out low and gritty.
“Yes.”
Now was the time to turn her loose. His brain registered that fact, but his arms simply wouldn’t drop away from her body.
He felt her move, but it was only to raise her face to his. There he saw her questioning look and a very appealing flush spread across her cheeks.
He focused on her lips, then raised his gaze to her eyes. Time stretched, long enough for an eternity of silent messages to pass between them. Somewhere in his mind, he knew none of this should be happening. He shouldn’t be holding her—for so many reasons.
He had come here because…
At this moment, the reason didn’t matter. The only thing his brain had room for was that she was standing in his embrace.
That was reality. Their reality.
His gaze switched to her mouth again. Her lips were parted now, her breath shallow. Slowly, giving her a chance to pull away, he lowered his head, and his mouth touched down on hers.
Had he meant to be gentle? Had he meant to comfort her?
Those were his intentions. And that was the way the kiss started. She was passive for a moment. Maybe she was even shocked. But then he felt her respond to him. The returned pressure of her lips against his fueled a hot, frantic jolt inside him—a jolt that reverberated between them and at the same time wrapped itself around them like a protective shield.
A cannon could have gone off beside the house, and the explosion wouldn’t have made them move away from each other.
He heard a sound well up in her throat. Or perhaps it was from his throat. He couldn’t be sure.
He felt her hands roving restlessly over his back, his shoulders, and he found he was doing the same thing to her.
They clung together, rocking slightly in the middle of the room as the kiss turned more urgent, hungrier.
The taste and feel of Chelsea Caldwell were the only reality in his universe. Well, that and the pounding arousal of his own body that swept away all thoughts but one.
He wanted her with an urgency that he had never felt before.
His mouth moved over hers, feasting on her. She kissed him with the same hunger. When she opened her lips, he accepted the invitation, his tongue sliding along the rigid line of her teeth, then beyond.
She met the invasion eagerly, fueling his need for more. With deliberate purpose, he eased far enough away to slide one hand between them so that he could gently cup her breast and stroke his fingers over the tip.
It had turned hard, abrading his fingers through her blouse. Thank the Lord she had taken off the sweater so that the bulky garment didn’t get in his way.
The small sounds she made in her throat sent sparks along his nerve endings. Like the electric shock of the first time he’d touched her. That must have been a promise of things to come.
“Chelsea.”
She answered with his name.
He took a step back, taking her with him, thinking that he would brace his hips against the kitchen counter so that he could equalize their heights and bring her center against his erection.
But as he moved his foot, something crunched under his heel.
It sounded like broken glass.
She went rigid in his arms.
His eyes blinked open and he saw a look of panic bloom on her face.
“What are you doing?” she gasped.
“You mean what are we doing?” he heard himself correct her, maybe because he was feeling defensive about his own impulsive behavior.
He wanted to look away, but he kept his gaze steady. “Whatever it was, there were two people involved.”
She had the grace not to challenge him on that. “Yes,” she whispered, and flushed again, only this time he knew it was from embarrassment, not passion.
His head was spinning as he scrambled to rearrange his thinking.
He’d come to Jenkins Cove to investigate the ghost stories Chelsea Caldwell was spreading around town to make herself important. Or to obscure something more sinister.
Since he’d arrived, she’d acted as if she wished all the fuss would die down. Then he’d burst through the kitchen door and knocked her down—and caught her in his arms. And she’d stayed there.
It had been an accident, for all the good that did him.
She was staring at him with a look of distress in her eyes�
��a look far different from her earlier expression.
“I’m sorry,” he said. The words sounded lame, even to his own ears.
“This is crazy.”
“I know.”
“We can’t do this.”
“I know,” he said again.
She backed away and crunched on glass again.
He looked down to make sure that she wasn’t wearing sandals or something else dangerous. “Let me help you clean that up.”
“I can do it.”
When he began to protest, she cut him off. “Please leave.”
He started to comply. Then he saw the stool lying on its side. One of the legs was bent at a strange angle. He walked over and picked it up. “This is broken.”
“What?”
“The stool broke when it fell.”
“But it only fell on its side.” She inspected the leg, looking perplexed.
“You’d better get rid of it.”
“I don’t need your advice.”
“Right. Sorry.” He backed away. He could have argued that they needed to talk about what had happened. But he couldn’t exactly imagine the conversation, and he had the good sense to step back through the door.
He walked to his room and grabbed his jacket, then left the B & B, heading for Main Street. He didn’t care what restaurant he went to now; he just needed to get out of the house.
The sun had set, the air had turned nippy, and the cold helped clear his head. But he still didn’t know what had happened to him.
Chelsea Caldwell was a woman he didn’t want to like. A woman he was investigating because he thought she was into some kind of scam. But doubts about his judgment kept stealing into his mind. And as soon as he’d folded her into his arms, everything had changed.
He’d felt something simmering between them from the first moment they’d met. It had flashed into a rolling boil with alarming speed.
He considered going back to the B & B, grabbing his suitcase and leaving. For a whole lot of reasons. Did he really want to prove she was a fraud?
He swore under his breath. A few hours ago he’d been absolutely sure of his purpose. Now he realized this research trip to Jenkins Cove wasn’t exactly turning out the way he’d expected.
That was the way his profession worked, he reminded himself. You came in with certain assumptions, and you had to be prepared to change them if the facts warranted.
As he walked down Center Street, past an old warehouse that stood dark and hulking in the night, something strange happened. He came to a place where the atmosphere was suddenly colder than it had been just moments before. He raised his head and looked around, expecting to see that the wind had picked up and was blowing the branches of the trees around. But the air was still as a pond that was covered with a sheet of ice.
A sudden prickling sensation at the back of his neck made him whirl around to find out who was watching him.
Every instinct told him that someone was observing him. When his eyes probed the shadows, he saw nothing. Yet the feeling of being watched only grew stronger. And the air seemed to darken or flicker.
“Who’s there?” he called out, taking a step toward the spot where it seemed he might have seen some movement in the darkness.
“Come out and show yourself.”
No one answered, and he stood on someone’s lawn for several moments, frustration bubbling inside him.
He prided himself on being a rational man. But at this moment, he felt that something was happening totally outside his control. He didn’t feel the wind blowing, but he heard something. A high-pitched whispering that grated on his ears and his nerve endings.
When he tried to take a step forward, he felt as if he’d hit an invisible barrier that held him in place.
He clenched his teeth, thinking this was the strangest experience he had ever had. It was getting weirder by the heartbeat.
Along with the strange sound, he thought he heard words, and strained to hear them. But he couldn’t bring the syllables into focus so that they made any sense.
It was as though someone was speaking to him over a radio frequency, but he wasn’t equipped to bring in the signal.
Or, to put it another way, he might have said that a phantom from the invisible world had invaded this stretch of Center Street. A phantom that was here to give Michael Bryant a warning, or an urgent message that he wasn’t able to capture.
A warning or a message from a phantom?
He shook his head, dismissing the outlandish notion, yet at the same time feeling the pounding of his own heart.
Apparently, he was so off balance from his encounter with Chelsea that he was seeing ghosts in the bushes and hearing their voices in the air.
“No.”
As he spoke, reality twisted again. The air grew a few degrees warmer, and from one moment to the next, he found that nothing was holding him in place. He could walk forward.
No, nothing had been holding him in the first place. Nothing besides the inability to make his own muscles move.
Still, when he found out that he was free, he began walking rapidly toward the Christmas lights and the holiday crowds on Main Street. When he realized he was practically running, he made an effort to slow down, cursing under his breath.
Was he losing it? First that kiss in the kitchen, and now this.
Whatever this was.
***
CHELSEA SWEPT THE BROKEN lightbulb into a dustpan. Then she wet some paper towels and picked up the tiny pieces of glass that she couldn’t see, working slowly and methodically.
She’d once gotten a piece of glass in her bare foot, and it had been painful—worse than a wooden splinter. She didn’t want to repeat that experience.
The remembered pain wasn’t the only reason she was concentrating so fiercely. She wanted to focus on the job at hand—not what had happened between herself and Michael Bryant.
He’d knocked her off the stool when he’d come into the kitchen. Then he’d caught her before she’d hit the floor.
So far, so good.
The rest of it was what she couldn’t wrap her head around. She’d ended up in his arms, and she’d stayed there. The embrace had turned into a kiss.
He’d brought his hand up between them and cupped her breast, rubbed his fingers across her nipple. She should have stopped him. Truth to tell, she hadn’t wanted him to stop.
It was only when his foot had crunched on the glass that she’d come to her senses.
What in the name of God was wrong with her? After the first ghost incident, she’d been careful not to let people know the real Chelsea Caldwell until she was sure it was safe. Her caution had cut down on her social life because she came across as guarded in personal relationships. After that she’d withdrawn even further into her work.
That was one reason the B & B was good for her. It forced her to interact with people. She enjoyed it, maybe because she knew the guests would be leaving in a few days and she didn’t have to keep up a relationship with them.
Was that what she’d done with Michael Bryant? Subconsciously decided he was “safe”?
Surely not because she trusted him.
Or had she responded on a baser, primal level? He was a handsome, sexy man, and she was a healthy young woman. Well, she’d have to be careful not to let it happen again. And not to be alone with him.
Really, she’d like to tell him to find another B & B in Jenkins Cove. She was even willing to help him do it. But she couldn’t let her personal feelings get in the way of Aunt Sophie’s business.
After finishing with the glass, she walked over to the stool and looked at the leg. Michael was right. She’d better get rid of it.
The stool had been fine the last time she’d used it, she recalled. What had happened? Had a ghost come into the B & B and broken it?
She tried to laugh, but the sound only grated in her ears.
***
MICHAEL THOUGHT ABOUT GOING into the first restaurant he came to, but he refused to
acknowledge that he was uncomfortable out in the open. He kept walking down the main street of the town. The shops were closed, but all of them were decked out in their holiday best, many with waterman themes. He even saw some ornaments made out of oyster shells or fishermen’s nets.
He walked for several blocks until the commercial establishments began to thin out. There was only one more place up ahead of him.
It was called the Duck Blind, and when he walked inside, he found it was an informal bar and restaurant with wood-paneled walls, a plank floor and tables lit by fake stained-glass chandeliers.
It seemed so familiar, so normal after his strange experience on Center Street. He’d started to question his own sanity there for a while. Somehow, though, this eatery helped restore his equilibrium.
He slid onto a stool at the bar and picked up the menu.
After a few moments, another guy came in and took the next stool.
The man was wearing scruffy jeans, work boots and a heavy beige sweater that had several pulls in the knit. His brown hair was a little straggly around the edges. He looked to be in his early thirties, but his hands were rough and weathered. His whole appearance gave the impression that he did some kind of manual labor.
He gave Michael an assessing look. “You’re not from around here.”
“Right,” Michael acknowledged.
“The crab cakes are good. And they do a good job with the fries.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
A sad-faced man with thinning salt-and-pepper hair and a short, scraggly matching beard came walking along behind the bar toward them. He was wearing a plaid shirt and a rumpled apron. “What’ll you have?”
Michael ordered a cup of coffee, and then the crab cakes, coleslaw and fries.
The man on the next stool got the same thing, with beer instead of coffee. Apparently he wanted company because after the bartender poured a mug of coffee, he said, “Name’s Phil Cardon. You here for long?”
“Michael Bryant. I’m taking a few days to visit the area.”
“Vacation?”
Michael took a sip of his coffee before he answered. “I’m thinking about setting a novel here.”