The Keepers: Christmas in Salem: Do You Fear What I Fear?The Fright Before ChristmasUnholy NightStalking in a Winter Wonderland (Harlequin Nocturne)

by Heather Graham

  A smile tipped the corners of his mouth. “Merry Christmas, Roe,” he said softly, his eyes bright, loving, searching her own.

  Then his expression grew serious, and he cupped the side of her face with a large hand, stroking her cheek with his thumb. “I swear, you have to believe me—not a day went by that I didn’t think about you and wish we were together.”

  Rebekah looked away. She wasn’t ready for him to see the truth in her eyes: that she had wished for the very same thing, if not more, over the past two and a half years. So much so that she’d unwittingly allowed him to become the standard by which she’d measured every man she dated.

  And all of them had fallen short. She had been left feeling empty, lonely and hopeless, destined to either settle for a man who was second best or be alone for the rest of her life.

  Vaughn gently lifted her chin, forcing her eyes to meet his again. “I don’t want to know the pain of missing you anymore. We’re together again, finally, and I don’t want to spend another moment without you ever again. I love you, Rebekah Savay. I’ve always loved you. Even when we were kids, you breathed life into me. You still do.”

  Rebekah stood speechless, heart hammering in her chest. The rest of her body felt paralyzed. She feared any movement might cause her to wake up from an unforgettable dream. How many nights had she tossed and turned in bed, unable to get Vaughn off her mind, wishing he lay beside her, longing to hear the very words he’d just spoken?

  “Say you’ll have me, Roe,” he said, his voice softer now, huskier. “Now and forever.” He leaned closer, his breath warming her face. “Say it and make me the happiest man on earth. Say it and I promise to live the rest of my life making sure you never regret the decision.”

  As if on cue, the plastic Santa started singing “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” Once, the irony would have warranted a chuckle.

  But not now.

  Not while in the midst of a kiss, a deep, sensual kiss that seemed to melt the snow beneath her feet and spark light into the depths of her soul. It illuminated a basic universal truth she’d somehow lost sight of through the years.

  Love expanded hope.

  Hope empowered dreams.

  And dreams blazed trails to a brighter, happier future.

  Love truly was the greatest gift of all.

  She pressed her body closer to Vaughn’s and deepened her kiss. His arms tightened around her, drawing her closer still. In that moment the pain she’d carried over the past two and a half years fell away. And possibly for the first time in her life, Rebekah suddenly understood the meaning of forever.

  She saw it in his eyes, felt it in his touch, heard it in the beating of his heart and tasted it on his lips.

  And she felt her heart open fully to it, taking in every measure of the gift he offered.

  Merry Christmas, Rebekah Savay.

  Merry Christmas, indeed....

  * * * * *

  UNHOLY NIGHT

  Kathleen Pickering

  Dear Reader,

  Season’s greetings during this most wonderful winter festival of love and light!

  Creating Unholy Night was such an adventure. Leave it to Heather Graham to combine a traditional human Christmas with multiple paranormal species, honoring each other’s differences while overcoming world darkness. Isn’t that what the Christmas season is all about? Creating light in the world?

  Unholy Night explores the gift of giving—setting aside our own desires to bring joy to others. Courage, faith and love fuel the actions of Selkie Keeper Katie Sue and her Selkie lover, Jett, in overcoming the conflicts that arise this Unholy Night in Salem. Through the spirit of Christmas, these mismatched soulmates learn that love requires balance, truth and, so many times, compromise. In today’s world of challenges and self-regard, what better time than now to consider ourselves in the bigger picture—the Christmas world tapestry of which we are all a part?

  Merry Christmas. God bless us one and all.

  Much love,

  Kathleen Pickering

  To everyone who sacrificed for love…and won.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 1

  Katie Sue Montgomery stood below the high-tide line in the dark, listening as the gently breaking surf offered the only sign that she was near the shore. Bathed in the unholy night that had become relentless for the past two weeks, she blessed her cousin Rebekah, aka Roe, Keeper of the Five Elementals, who had arrived earlier in the day and been miffed enough with the cold weather to coax the air elemental elder into calming the biting winds.

  The quiet winter air would make the evening hours more hospitable when Jett, her selkie lover, returned from the sea this Christmas Eve. She was sure he would arrive at this appointed hour as he had promised to do seven years ago and seven years before that. Each time she spent another brief holiday season with him when he came ashore and transformed from a seal into a man, only to lose him again to the sea. As an ocean dweller in his seal form, Jett was truly himself. Yet only as a man could he be hers. His love for her had been powerful enough to bind her to him despite his absence during these irretrievably lost years, but she had been younger then. Today she struggled with different feelings.

  Had she thought these days of darkness would clear just for her and Jett because she loved him so much? The dark had done nothing but exaggerate her loneliness without him. Now she entertained the awful possibility that Jett wouldn’t show. Why would he, when he loved his selkie life so much more than his time on land with her?

  Even though she knew that wasn’t true, it was in line with the thoughts that had been torturing her since the darkness hit, and even more so while helping set up for the Christmas Eve party at her cousin Samantha’s earlier this evening. Meanwhile, everyone who was aware of her situation had been doing everything they could to get her out the door to greet Jett in time.

  She tucked the end of her sand-colored scarf deeper into the collar of her coat. Only yesterday she had crocheted the scarf, choosing a silk corded yarn to match her blond hair, which she had cropped short in a fit of doldrums two days ago. She hoped Jett liked it, though at this point it hardly seemed to matter. The bad feelings inside her remained. The dull misery afflicting everyone in town had to be an offshoot of this unholy curse—because the prolonged unexplained darkness could be nothing else but a curse—that had invaded Salem.

  And so far, no Jett in sight.

  This stygian pall not only had the town mystics, Wiccans and paranormal beings scrambling for an answer, but the absence of sunlight had eclipsed the townspeople’s well-being. The normally friendly and tolerant villagers of Salem were starting to become frazzled and impatient with each other. They’d strung holiday lights around town and decorated their homes for the Yuletide season, but the holiday songs piping from shops and restaurants could only go so far toward cheering people up.

  The longer Katie Sue waited for Jett’s arrival, the more she grew irritated by the unusual despondent mood haunting her thoughts. She, Samantha and the other Keepers knew the unusual darkness was fueling these moods. Katie clung to the thought of the upcoming precious moments with Jett as her lover to buoy her through this difficult holiday season. Tonight she’d taken the daring step of bringing a sleeping bag with her. The darkness and the cold could be damned. Maybe if she and Jett made love as soon as possible, she could forget—if only for this Christmas Eve—her angst over the crucial decision before her.

  The decision. There lay the crux of her problem. Today was Jett’s birthday. He returned to this place of his birth at this same time and date every seven years since reaching manhood. Before then, she’d had the luxury of spending every day with him while he lived at her family’s seaside mansion as a boy. They’d grown up together. Frolicked in the sea for
hours on end because of her surprising ability to swim underwater for a long time. But once his fourteenth birthday hit, he’d been driven by instinct to return to the sea to fulfill his birthright as a selkie or lose his ability to transform. Would she welcome him with birthday greetings when he arrived tonight, or would she be telling him goodbye?

  At twenty-eight, she had spent only six weeks with Jett in fourteen years. Those six weeks had been the most precious days of her life, because they had finally become lovers, but she and Jett were no longer children. She could not live with a mere three weeks basking in Jett’s love only to let him go and endure another seven years without him. She wanted a husband, home and hearth. Children of her own to share with the man she loved. Her heart could no longer bear Jett’s prolonged absences—not when the world carried on after he was gone and everyone forgot him except her.

  Damn the selkie rule of shed your skin forever and stay human or return to the sea for seven years’ time. Then again, when she’d learned from her mother that she’d inherited the role of Keeper of the Selkies, she’d known that falling in love with one of her charges was breaking the rules. The birthmark of a cresting wave inside her left arm matched the one her mother carried on her hip, identifying the women of their descent as selkie Keepers. Her mother had been grooming her since she turned fourteen—the year Jett left for the first time—because Christina Montgomery was preparing to retire. She’d been invited to join the International Council with the other elders and felt she would be of most assistance there. Katie learned that as a Keeper, the women of her line carried the latent selkie gene, giving rise to the possibility of having a selkie child. There was even a legend that a selkie Keeper might have the ability to transform into a selkie. The gift hadn’t shown up for hundreds of years, so no one knew if it was really true. Yet for over a hundred years, her family had used their state-certified home for troubled boys as cover for their true role as Keepers of the selkies, who also sometimes sheltered there when they were young and not yet fully bound to the sea, as well as other paranormal water creatures.

  She and Jett seemed damned on all counts. If only a sliver of sun would pierce the sky, perhaps her heart wouldn’t feel as frigid as the sand beneath her boots.

  The tumbling waves would have disguised his arrival to less-trained ears. But as a Keeper, she had heightened senses and heard the splash of direct motion. She felt his presence in the dark before he said a word.

  “Jett!” His name tumbled from her lips. She turned on her electric lantern but it cast a paltry ring of light in front of her. “I can’t see you.”

  “I’m here, Katie.”

  His words vibrated straight through her, plucking her heartstrings with the smooth, velvet timbre of his voice. Immediately her frozen heart began to melt. She watched in the thin artificial light as Jett shed his selkie skin and stood naked in the freezing wind.

  She held out a bag of clothes and the down sleeping bag for him to drape around himself for extra warmth. As he stepped closer, her breath caught in her throat.

  Jett was exquisite.

  When you grew up with someone, their changes day by day didn’t have as profound an effect as they did after prolonged absence. At twenty-one, Jett had been mercilessly handsome with his lithe body, chiseled face and crooked smile. His bright, coal-black eyes always seemed to be laughing. That long, inky-black hair that fell in a cowlick across his forehead always begged, as it did now, for her fingers to brush it away and perhaps rest beneath those curls at the nape of his neck.

  Jett was pure male. Naked, with the winter wind scrubbing his muscled skin, he was breathtaking from his broad shoulders to the flat plane of his belly highlighted in the dim circle of light. His smile did things to the pit of her being that no one in her lifetime could match. His beautiful seal coat of silver-gray lay draped over his shoulders like a nobleman’s cape.

  “Jett...”

  He took the sleeping bag from her and grinned when he realized it was large enough for two. “Is this my birthday gift?”

  “No, I am. Merry Christmas, Jett.”

  Ignoring the offered clothes, he pulled her within the circle of his arms, wrapping them together in the cocoon of warm down, and captured her lips in a profound and urgent kiss.

  She wrapped her arms around his neck, and the dampness of the seal fur and the heat of his kiss sent a frisson of heat and cold shimmering through her.

  He broke the kiss long enough to whisper, “Katie, my love.”

  Uncaring of the cold, they tumbled to the sand.

  She had missed the strength of his arms, the salty taste of his kiss and the way his mouth plundered hers as if he were starved for her. How had she survived without the musky smell of his skin, the magic he created with his lips and the heat of his body?

  She could never let Jett go.

  Oh, God, she couldn’t think of that. Not now. His heat compounded the intention of his hands on her body. Every nerve ending responded to his touch.

  “Katie Sue... I... So long without you...”

  He could hardly speak between kissing her, rolling her in a tangle of limbs and laughter within the sleeping bag that they’d managed to zip themselves into. She’d wriggled out of her coat, and they used it now as a pillow for their heads.

  Suddenly, when they’d finally settled into a welcome, passionate embrace where they could fully explore and fulfill their needs, Jett stopped and turned off the lantern.

  “I want you naked, Katie Sue. I want your skin burning against mine.”

  This was her Jett. Playful. Serious. Urgent.

  This was where she had to draw the line.

  “Jett. Wait.”

  He stilled his roaming hands. “What is it?”

  The profound darkness made it easy to speak. She didn’t want to see the look in his eyes if she was going to hurt him. Not knowing exactly how to begin, she whispered, “I’ve missed you so much.”

  He chuckled. “That’s good, because here I am. Now kiss me.”

  She inhaled the salty scent of him as he pressed his lips to hers, questioning whether she should be so insane as to continue.

  She pushed him away. “No, Jett. We have to talk. I don’t think we’ll get a chance once we join the others.”

  He nuzzled her ear, his breath whisper warm on her neck. “Can’t we talk later? You smell so good.”

  Her body began yielding to his in automatic response. She forced her mind to wait. “Jett, please. As much as I brought the sleeping bag for this exact reason, I’ve been wrestling with my feelings. I don’t know if making love is such a good idea for us.”

  He grew rigid. “What are you saying?”

  Her words tumbled out in a rush. “Jett, I love you, you know that, but the years when you’re gone... Your voice fades in my mind, your face, your touch, fade from my reality. I’m strong for a while, but then I see lovers holding hands, mothers with their children. All the things I can’t have. Your absence becomes so painful that I can hardly breathe. I can’t bear the loneliness. If you leave me this time, I may have to give you up, if only to keep my sanity.”

  He pressed his forehead to hers. “I knew this moment would come, and I don’t know how to change it.”

  Hope sank. She’d wished he would say he was willing to do anything to keep her love. Her heart felt ready to shatter any second. “I know it’s unfair of me to ask you to remain human, but I want you to stay with me so badly.”

  Jett pulled her closer, if that were possible. “If I could make my life different, I would, Katie. Every minute, day and year away from you drives me back to you with an ache that won’t quit until I hold you again. I live to return to you.”

  “What can we do?”

  The irritation that had begun haunting her since the darkness fell simmered too close to the surface. With every ounce of strength, she wanted to do what was right for them both, but damn it all, if he truly loved her then why couldn’t he change for her?

  He buried his face in he
r hair. “If I asked you to become a selkie, would you forsake your human side?”

  She’d struggled with the same question over and over these past few years. If she were to discover she could transform, would she leave land for Jett’s love, only see her family for Christmas once every seven years? There were moments when she believed she could, and others...

  In response to her silence, desperation filled his voice. “Can’t you just love me as I am, Katie? I’ll take my chances on losing you, just please don’t leave me now. You are my birthday gift. How could I possibly celebrate Christmas without you?”

  Tears spilled down her face. “I don’t have the choice. You do. Your mother stayed human for love, Jett. Aren’t I worth it?”

  He grew silent.

  Something dark began uncoiling in her chest, unleashing the suspicion that perhaps he didn’t truly love her but was only using her. She swallowed hard to tamp down the rising ugly feeling. “I’m sorry. I can’t explain what’s happening to me.”

  He cupped her face. He could see her. He had the eyes for night. “It’s okay. We’ve been apart so long. And we both know my mother’s choice to stay human killed her in the end. She begged me to protect my heritage. You know I can’t deny her wish—or my own destiny.”

  The message in his answer was unavoidable, but the tenderness in his voice tugged at her emotions. His hands sliding down her body, gently exploring while a sigh of need escaped his lips, set her blood on fire, even though that angry sensation still pulsed in her chest.

  “Please, Katie Sue. Love me. Now.”

  She squeezed her eyes closed, wanting to wipe away the heartache that she knew would follow, and wrestled with the anger that she understood was magnified by the cursed darkness. Responding to her sigh, Jett slid his hands to her hips, drawing her against him. The feel of him undid her wavering determination.

  She’d loved him from the day they had first met on Christmas Eve twenty-one years ago, when her father had brought him to their home. That wasn’t unusual, as their oceanside Victorian mansion had served as a shelter for troubled boys for over a century. What was unusual, however, was the way she and Jett had bonded immediately. Both of them had been only seven years old. Jett, with his glittering black eyes, eager smile and a focus that would have made another girl her age uncomfortable, had imprinted himself on her—and she on him. She hadn’t known it at the time, but understood now that he had claimed her for his own way back then. They’d spent every waking moment together as children. Could she resist him now, even when she knew her desire for stability, home and, someday, a family with the man she loved might never come to be?