Seducing Abby Rhodes

by J. D. Mason

  “Do you remember dreaming?”

  Abby shrugged. “I remember bits and pieces of a dream, I suppose,” she said, feeling frustrated. “You know how dreams are. When you first wake up, you remember just about all of it, but over time, it fades. I remember a feeling, though.”

  “What?”

  “Rushed? Like I had to hurry up and do something. But I can’t remember what it was.”

  Marlowe stared at her for a long time.

  “How many times do I have to tell you not to do that? You creep me out when you do that.”

  “I know,” she said indifferently. “Where’s Jordan?”

  Abby was caught off guard by the question. She hadn’t mentioned him to Marlowe at all. “In Dallas.”

  “What’s wrong, Abby?”

  “I just told you what’s wrong,” she said, agitated. “I walked in my sleep, Marlowe. That’s what’s wrong, and I need to know if it had something to do with the ghosts in that house.”

  “I’m sure it did. But what else is wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Abby said, shaking her head.

  Marlowe turned her head slightly to one side and squinted, convicting Abby with a look. She might as well have put a gun to Abby’s head.

  “We broke up,” she reluctantly admitted. “H-he was seeing someone else.”

  Marlowe would not stop staring at Abby.

  “Maybe coming here was a bad idea,” Abby eventually said.

  “It was the woman,” Marlowe said. “She’s the one who had you up walking in your sleep.”

  “Why?”

  “I told you when you first bought the house, Abby, that something’s not finished there. My guess is she wants you to hurry and finish it.”

  “How? What? I don’t even know what it is, Marlowe.”

  “Me either. But it’s selfish of you to leave that house.”

  Abby was stunned to hear her say that. “She scared the hell out of me. How do you expect me to stay there with her taking over my body like that?”

  “I don’t think she plans on hurting you.”

  “Oh, you don’t think,” Abby shot back angrily. “I don’t think you know for sure what she plans on doing to me.”

  “It could have something to do with Jordan being gone.”

  “I can’t help it that he’s gone,” Abby said, fighting back tears. “But he’s not coming back. So, I don’t know … those ghosts are just going to have to do whatever ghosts do under the circumstances.”

  Marlowe had the nerve to look disappointed.

  “So, since you’re basically saying that there’s nothing that can be done?” Abby asked. “I need to sell the house, Marlowe.”

  “Sell it?” Marlowe asked, stunned. “I thought you loved it.”

  “I’m over it. I need to move on. I’m looking at other properties. Non-haunted properties that are much better investments than that house. They can’t follow me. Right? I mean, these ghosts are tethered to this house. Isn’t that true?”

  “So, you’re just going to leave them hanging?”

  They were ghosts for crying out loud and certainly weren’t her responsibility. “They were hanging before I moved in.”

  “So, you’re just going to let them scare the shit out of somebody else?”

  “What do you expect me to do?”

  “Same thing they expect you to do. Finish this.”

  “I’m scared to death. Can’t you and Shou Shou go in there and do some kind of exorcism or something?”

  “We don’t do things like that,” she said, looking and sounding absolutely insulted.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” Abby said defensively. “I didn’t know.”

  “You need to get Jordan back to the house,” Marlowe blurted out.

  “Would you stop saying his name?”

  “This isn’t over.”

  “It is for me. I’m selling this house, and I’m moving on.” Abby stood up to leave.

  “You’re putting too much faith into a broken heart, Abby,” Marlowe said as Abby started to open the door to leave.

  Abby stopped. “No, Marlowe. I put too much faith in him.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, Abby pulled her car into the driveway at the house and made it all the way to the front door before she realized that she’d meant to drive back to the hotel. She hadn’t meant to come here. But still, she put her key into the lock, opened the door, and stepped inside. A rush of warm air enveloped her like a hug, and sorrow filled her chest. She was so lonely, so empty inside without him. Tears flooded her eyes and began to stream down her cheeks. She hadn’t cried in over a week. Abby had worked so hard to ignore the ache he’d left behind, but all of a sudden, she couldn’t ignore it anymore.

  She walked over to the sofa and stretched out facedown on it and sobbed into one of the throw pillows like a child. He had awakened something dormant and buried so deep inside her that she didn’t even know it was there. Abby had dared to open herself up to him, dared herself to step outside the box she’d lived in her whole life, and loved him. Now she had to get back to who she had been before she’d met him, only Abby didn’t seem to remember the way. She’d been happy before Jordan had come into her life, but she couldn’t seem to find that place again despite the fact that she knew what it looked and felt like.

  I cried.

  She looked up from the pillow, peering into every space of that room. “Ida?” she asked cautiously.

  Abby sat up and wiped away her tears. Daylight filtered through the house, so it wasn’t as scary as it was at night. Abby sat there for a moment, still weighed down in sorrow, but then she started to wonder if it was just her sorrow she felt, or Ida’s, too.

  Marlowe expected for Abby to reconcile whatever it was that was keeping these ghosts stuck here. Some things made sense. Julian Gatewood and Ida Green loved each other, passionately. Marlowe kept telling Abby that something wasn’t finished, but Abby had no idea what that something could be or how to finish it. Even if she did, though, so what? Two ghosts go skipping off into the afterlife together, happily ever after. And she’d still be stuck here trying to mend a wound that might never heal.

  She’d had no idea that she was so fragile. Abby had always been tough and resilient. Nothing ever got and kept her down for long, but this, this was new, and she was left raw from it.

  Find it.

  “Find what, Ida?” Abby began to sob again. “I don’t know what you want.” Abby bolted to her feet. “I don’t know what the fuck you want.”

  She needed to get out of this place and out of her own head and out of her own misery. Abby spun around to face the door and nearly jumped out of her skin at the sight of the image standing between her and that door. It was Jordan.

  “I want you,” he said, stepping closer to her. “I have never stopped wanting you, Abby.”

  Jordan wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her against his chest. Was she dreaming again? Abby inhaled Jordan’s scent and closed her eyes, and he lowered his lips to hers and swept his delicious tongue through her mouth.

  Wake up, Abby! You need to wake up.

  Jordan lifted her off the ground and sat her on his lap as he sat on the couch. “I tried to stay away,” he said, breathless between kisses.

  Yes. He should’ve stayed away, but Abby held him tightly. She kissed him passionately.

  “I couldn’t,” he whispered.

  She cried because he felt good in her arms. She cried because she’d missed him so very much, and because she needed him more than … more than …

  Die Without You

  “I’M SICK OF THIS SHIT,” Jordan grunted, angrily mashing the gas pedal, taking his silver Maserati to ridiculous speeds.

  He slammed on the brakes and turned the wheel until the car came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the road, facing the car behind him.

  Jordan climbed out of his car and started marching toward the other driver while that car was still rolling. By the time the driver managed to stop,
Jordan was next to the window on the driver’s side. Another car, a black sedan, pulled up behind the two of them and stopped. Jordan angrily pulled the door open.

  “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” the driver exclaimed, raising his hands in surrender. “What the fuck’s wrong with you, man?”

  “You’re what the fuck’s wrong with me, motha fucka!”

  The other man apprehensively stepped out of his car. “What?” he asked nervously. “Did I cut you off or something? Was I following too close? What?”

  Jordan loomed over the dude who couldn’t have been more than five eight, a buck fifty on a good day. “Yes,” he said emphatically. “You were too damn close, and you have been for too damn long.”

  This was Robin’s little bluebird that had been perched on her shoulder, watching Jordan’s every move for the last month, at least.

  “I’m sorry. There’s no reason to get all bent outta shape over my bad driving. I probably wasn’t paying attention.”

  “But I was. You turn your ass back around. You stay the fuck away from me, and you find another way to earn your money.”

  “I was just—”

  “I am well aware of what you were just—” He pushed the dude back against the car. “You tell her that I’m none of your gotdamn business anymore,” he warned.

  In the sedan stopped behind the two of them, a man climbed out of the passenger side and came over to the two of them. “I’ll drive,” he said to the man who had been following Jordan. He grinned. “You can ride shotgun.”

  Nothing else needed to be said. The threat was implied by Jordan, and it was thick and undeniable. The man following him made his way around to the passenger side of the car, while Jordan started back toward his.

  * * *

  Jordan had been away from her for far too long. And the notion that he could ever possibly stay away from Abby was absolutely ridiculous. Jordan lost himself inside this woman, and as he blanketed her with himself, stroked slowly in and out of her, inhaled and savored the flavor of her, he understood that this connection to Abby was spiritual, ethereal, and eternal. She was always his.

  “I need for you to tell me what’s happened, Jordan,” Abby said softly, her head resting on his chest. “You have to tell me the truth.”

  The truth? The truth was a tangle of barbed wire that would only push her farther away from him, and that’s the last thing he wanted.

  “I’m working through some things, Abby.”

  Abby raised up and looked into his eyes. “That’s not good enough. What things?”

  Of course she deserved answers, but Abby had no idea of the depth of her question. This was about more than Jordan and this other woman. His answer would reveal the darkest parts of himself, those parts he’d hoped had been buried, that he’d somehow been redeemed from, but two women were dead because of him. There would never be redemption from that, and he was selfish and a fool to ever think that there could be.

  “Jordan, please. What are we doing here? Where is this relationship going? I can’t … I won’t be your Ida Green. I won’t sit here in this house waiting on you to show up when it suits you. I’m not going to make myself convenient like that for you.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to.”

  “Then what is going on with you and Robin Sinclair? Are you still seeing her? Did you ever stop?”

  “I’m in love with you, Abby. Not her.”

  “I’m old enough to know that sometimes love isn’t enough, Jordan,” she said sadly.

  Jordan raised his hand and swept hair back from the side of her face. Abby rolled over to the side of the bed and pulled the blanket up to cover her chest.

  “I don’t want Robin, Abby. I made that clear to her and to you,” he reluctantly began to explain.

  “Then why are you with her?”

  “Because of what she thinks she knows about me. And because she’s willing to use this theory of hers to ruin absolutely everything I’ve worked practically my whole life to achieve.”

  Abby turned to face him. “I’m listening.”

  Jordan took a deep breath and internally weighed just how much of his past he could share with her. “My wife killed herself because I was having an affair, one of many.”

  It was subtle, but Abby’s expression started to change as she stared into his eyes.

  “One particular woman, the last one, was Lonnie Adebayo. She was an established photojournalist who had covered stories all around the world.”

  There were so many details, so many extraneous circumstances to this story that Jordan absolutely did not want her to know about. His relationship with Lonnie had been passionate and tumultuous, dark and dangerous. Jordan had sunk to his deepest, most demented levels of his personality to the point that he’d even scared himself. He absolutely would not share those details with Abby.

  “Claire wanted me to end the relationship.”

  “Did you?” she asked wearily.

  “It ended for a time, but not completely.”

  “Claire found out?”

  He nodded. “Lonnie Adebayo was murdered.” He swallowed the bile building in his throat from the memory of that night. “I was at a hotel with her. Claire found out, showed up, and … she shot her.”

  Abby rolled over onto her back and stared up at the ceiling.

  “I pulled some strings and made sure that Claire and I were never implicated.”

  Abby looked at him as if she were seeing him for the first time. And Jordan immediately knew in this moment that he’d said more than he should’ve.

  “A man named Frank Ross stood trial for Lonnie’s murder.”

  “Why would they think he did it?”

  “He knew Lonnie. The two of them were working on a scheme to—”

  “To what, Jordan?”

  “Frank Ross is my half brother. At the time, no one knew that I wasn’t a Gatewood by blood. At the time, it seemed important to keep that fact a secret.”

  “Did you make the police believe that Frank had killed Lonnie?”

  “The police put together their own case against Frank, but”—he paused—“I never came forward with the truth, Abby.”

  Listening to himself tell her these things, Jordan felt as if he were reading from some cheap pulp fiction novel. It all seemed too fucking surreal and far-fetched to have actually happened, but it was real, and it was his life. And he was an asshole.

  “Immediately after Lonnie was killed, I sent Claire to Europe. That’s not what she needed. She needed me. But because of me, two women are dead.”

  “Robin found all this out?” she asked softly.

  “Robin thinks that I killed Lonnie. And I guess I did,” he admitted. “Not directly, but shit, Abby. I might as well have pulled that trigger. She’s threatened to take this theory of hers to the police, to the press, to anybody who’ll listen.”

  “But Claire is the one who shot Lonnie.”

  “And I destroyed Claire. I owe her, Abby. I owe her the legacy of her name, of her gentle nature. If it came to it, and I had to own up to Lonnie’s murder to save Claire’s reputation, then I’d have to do that. Because ultimately, I am to blame.”

  Abby was quiet for the next half hour. She’d even turned her back to him as he dressed to leave. Jordan had come here on impulse. His need for her had outweighed reason, and maybe in the back of his mind, he believed that by seeing Abby again, by touching her and loving her, that somehow this would all magically resolve itself. Nothing could change the past, and nothing would ever relieve Jordan of the burden of Claire’s and Lonnie’s deaths.

  If things went Robin’s way, his penance was set. Robin would get her big, fancy wedding, her life as a Gatewood. And Jordan would always love a woman he could never have. Sitting on the side of the bed, thinking about it, it seemed to be a fair and equitable resolution. But one that he’d regret for the rest of his life.

  “The idea of not having you in my life doesn’t bode well for me, Abby,” he said, dismally. “What we have comes along once
in a lifetime, if you’re lucky. And maybe I haven’t earned the right to have you, to spend my life with you, but dammit, if I still don’t want it.”

  Abby slowly rolled over on her back and pushed up in bed, leaning back against the headboard.

  “But you don’t want to lose everything you’ve worked for either,” she softly reminded him. “If the police think that you killed that woman, then you could go to prison.”

  Jordan rocked his head slowly in a nod. Losing a contract was one thing. Life in prison was something else entirely. “I’ve got more skeletons in my closet than I can count,” he said, hanging his head. “It was only a matter of time before somebody came along and yanked on one of them.”

  “We’ve all got skeletons. What happened back then, it just—”

  We’ve all got skeletons. Jordan latched on to that statement like a fish on a hook. He turned and looked at her. “We all do have skeletons,” he said in a revelation.

  Jordan had been playing this thing all wrong. He’d been waiting for Robin to make a mistake, to mess up, giving him an out from this arrangement. He’d been looking through her past, trying to find one mistake that he could use as leverage. Jordan had come up empty, time and time again, but what if he hadn’t been looking far enough or deep enough?

  Before leaving, he kissed her softly on the shoulder, and whispered, “I love you. Never question that. Never doubt it.”

  Jordan had to leave, but he’d come back. Would she be here when he did?

  Soul on Ice

  ABBY LAY IN BED LONG after Jordan had left. How in the world had she ever gotten herself tangled up with a man like him? These last few months, Abby didn’t even recognize herself, giving into whims and fancy that normally she’d have shirked off as being ridiculous and left them right where they were, without giving them another thought. Haunted houses and seductive strangers had made her lose sight of the very practical nature that she’d always been so proud of, that she’d always nurtured and clung to as if her life depended on it, because in reality, it had.

  She climbed out of bed, walked over to the bedroom window, and stood looking out at the massive tree in her backyard. Being in this house had robbed her of her spirit. Being with Jordan had cost her her pragmatic stronghold over her life. Abby had prided herself on being able to read people, on her ability to tell within a five-minute conversation if that person was someone she should get to know or avoid. She’d missed the signs with Jordan. Probably because she was more caught up in how he looked and the things he’d said. Abby let her loneliness get the best of her, and when someone like him, tall, handsome, and charismatic, paid attention to her, she lost her damn mind and ultimately, her heart.