Buck Me... For Halloween: Paranormal BBW Holiday Second Chance Romance (Frost Brothers' Brides)

by Anya Nowlan

Probably both. But mostly for the blood!

  “No problem. If there’s any problem with the shipment, let me know. I’m in town until tomorrow morning,” Vix said with a smile, his body relaxing visibly as if it had gotten over some initial shock.

  “I will,” Samarra said, nodding as she stuffed her hands into her jacket pockets.

  It was the best thing she could do to hide the fact that they were shaking.

  “I’ll be seeing you around, Samarra,” Vix said.

  “I hope you will!”

  The words came out before she could stop herself. Slapping a hand over her mouth, Samarra turned away and rushed over to the control board again, mortified. She could hear Vix chuckling behind her as he walked towards his truck, putting more and more distance between the two of them.

  I can’t believe I just did that.

  Samarra kept the hand over her mouth as she stood there, studiously looking at the control board as if she had something interesting there that needed to be checked up on. Instead, it was simply a ruse to keep from drooling after the hot delivery guy while he left.

  “Bye!” Vix shouted a second before he turned the engine on, and Samarra’s matching cry got drowned out by the noise.

  She waved to him as Vix pulled out of the driveway, the wide and high beams bathing her with light for a moment. When the truck clattered down the street, Samarra could finally take another breath.

  Time to go get some sleep, she told herself.

  Maybe a nice, hot bath in the hotel bathroom would clear her mind a little and get her back on the path of work, instead of daydreaming about the mysterious airline pilot turned delivery guy she’d spent the last hour with.

  But when Samarra turned around to face her handiwork for the last time that night, all the accent lights in the house were suddenly back on. Frowning, she glanced back at the control board. All the switches were off, like they were supposed to. When she tried flicking them off and on again, nothing happened.

  What the hell…

  So it seemed this night was still far from over.

  Vix

  Vix had barely made it out of the driveway before he was kicking himself for leaving. Or, well, it wasn’t so much him as it was his buck.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know I’m a dumbass,” he told himself out loud, turning the radio up a bit in an effort to drown out his own thoughts.

  That spark he’d had with Samarra… that was real. He’d never felt anything quite like it. It had been like lightning and thunder and everything sweet and delicious going through him at once when they’d touched. It only went to confirm what he’d thought when he’d seen her the first time – that she was absolutely gorgeous – and what he’d learned since.

  A woman like that? She was worth billions in any valuation Vix could possibly imagine.

  And I walked away from her.

  A curious tense sensation bubbled in the pit of his stomach, making him restless. The more distance he put between himself and Samarra, the more wrong it felt. As if he wasn’t supposed to be leaving her at all. Or maybe that she needed him to not leave…

  “You’re making things up, Vix Frost. That woman is perfectly fine without you, handling her haunted house and kicking butt while doing so.”

  He nodded to himself, as if that would set his mind at ease.

  It didn’t.

  When he rounded the corner of the block, looking left and right in an effort to remember where the hell he’d booked his motel room in Salem for the night, it was like everything clicked into place in his brain. Instead of taking either the left or the right, Vix turned the whole damn truck around and barreled straight down the street again.

  If I don’t ask her out, there’s no way I won’t spend the rest of the damn year beating myself up for it.

  Though there wasn’t that much year left anymore, Vix sort of had a feeling that it wouldn’t really stop at the year… No, he’d be regretting that dumbass move for at least half a decade. Or if his buck was anything to go by, for a lifetime.

  For some reason, his animal was entirely and unquestionably convinced that if he flaked out on this woman right now, that would basically be the end of all things good and right. While Vix didn’t exactly agree with that kind of gloom and doom outlook on life, he couldn’t argue it either.

  His buck had never steered him wrong before, pun intended.

  With his mouth dry and his mind working overtime to try out a dozen different lines to get Samarra to say yes to a date with him, as well as preparing for all the arguments, Vix made his way back down to the right house. When he pulled up in front of it though, he didn’t have time to latch onto any of the lines his brain thought were more promising. Slamming down on the brakes, Vix brought the truck to an abrupt stop.

  What the fuck!

  The house looked like it had come to life, and not in the good sense. As soon as Vix opened the door and hopped out, he could hear noises coming from inside the house. Everything from creaking, to a fake wind howling, to screams, it was like someone had put on the sound machine at full force and was letting it rip.

  She was supposed to be done for the night… This isn’t right.

  “Samarra!” Vix roared out, crossing the lawn with long, purposeful strides. “Samarra!?”

  He dodged between the piles of gear littering the yard, making his way to the front door. As soon as his hand touched the knob, he sprung back. A jolt of what was this time actual electricity went through him, rattling him to the bone.

  “What the actual buck,” Vix muttered, brows furrowed as he looked around. “Samarra!” he tried again.

  Instead of an answer from her, he could hear another set of screams from inside the building. The windows flickered with different, dark colors. He had a bad feeling about this, and so did his buck. In the rare cases that the two of them agreed, Vix knew he had to take the situation seriously.

  Since the yelling was getting him nowhere, Vix skipped trying it again. He hauled himself over the low porch railing and hit the ground running. There had to be a back entrance of some sort and he was determined to find it.

  Soon enough, he found another door, hidden in the shadows. He approached this one more carefully, tapping his finger to the metal handle before grabbing hold of it in earnest. At least this one wasn’t loaded with an electrical charge.

  Vix ripped the door open and dove into the darkness that awaited for him.

  “Samarra!” he yelled now, moving forward as he called her name.

  She had to be there somewhere. Even if this was another one of her little tests, Vix didn’t care. He’d rather make a fool of himself for the second time that night than leave without knowing if she was okay.

  Purposefully ignoring the moving shadows, the animatronics and the visual effects that seemed to be everywhere, Vix made his way through the lower floor. He was running out of patience by the time he finally heard a noise that seemed to be out of place. It wasn’t rhythmical or perfectly choreographed like the rest of his admittedly spooky surroundings, but seemed to be fumbling and louder.

  Like someone walking ahead of him.

  “Samarra!”

  “Who the hell is that?”

  Vix breathed out a sigh of relief when he heard her voice. Pushing through the next door, he almost walked straight into an open pit in the middle of the kitchen floor. Samarra was standing across from it, shining a flashlight in his face.

  “You mind lowering that?” Vix asked, shading his face with one of his wide palms.

  “Shit, Vix? I’m so sorry,” Samarra gasped, pointing the beam to the hole.

  Frowning, Vix edged past the pit and moved to Samarra’s side. She seemed to be taking turns between peering into the darkness and looking at him.

  The kitchen around them was as creepy as ever. All the appliances seemed to be from two centuries ago, and in the middle of the kitchen stood a proper wooden butcher’s block. Countless blades that looked damn sharp to Vix hung above it, including meat cleavers and spec
ialty saws.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, his arm instinctively going around her waist and pulling her to him.

  A pleasant rumble went through him, his buck entirely approving of what he was doing. It was only when Samarra froze in his arms that Vix realized he might have just skipped a couple dozen steps on their path of getting to know each other better.

  Oh, buck me. Congratulations, dumbass. Scare the girl in the haunted house. Good going.

  He let go of her sharply and put a tiny bit of space between them, reluctant to wander too far from her but wishing to make her feel a bit more comfortable.

  “I’m okay. What are you doing here?”

  This time, there was no humor in her voice. She looked as spooked as he did, if not more. All around them, the entirety of the soundtracks for the various rooms seemed to be playing at the same time, including the one for the kitchen.

  “I… I don’t know. I wanted to make sure you were okay. And maybe ask you for a date,” Vix said, stumbling over his words as he went from staring at Samarra, to looking at the dark hole before them, to glancing at her again.

  He was beet red. Good thing it was too dark to tell.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked, before she could say anything about his admissions.

  “Honestly, I don’t know,” Samarra admitted, shining the flashlight down into the darkness again. “I was supposed to be heading to the hotel and then the whole house suddenly switched on.”

  “Something wrong with the control panel?”

  “I don’t think so. It was acting like it wasn’t even connected. I’ve gone through half the rooms and all the controls are working as intended if they’re being controlled by a main switch.”

  “But the main switch is not the main switch anymore, is that what you’re saying?” Vix queried with an ever-deepening frown.

  “Exactly. And then there’s this,” Samarra said, pointing vaguely at the hole in the kitchen floor.

  “Yeah, what the hell is that? You could kill someone with this,” Vix grumbled, remembering all too clearly how he almost walked into the damn thing.

  “First of all, I know. And second of all, it’s not supposed to be here. This thing leads down to the cellars and we had it shut tight because we didn’t want anyone getting hurt. There’s another entrance further in the house that has proper stairs. This one only has a rickety ladder.

  These old houses sometimes had a cellar right below the kitchen to make it more convenient to store food.”

  Vix nodded through Samarra’s explanation. They sort of had something similar in the old chateau at Shifter Grove, now that he thought about it. But the Frost family wasn’t in the habit of turning their family home into a deathtrap, so that thing rarely got used.

  “So why is it open?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know why any of this is happening,” Samarra said, her voice dropping slightly.

  Without thinking about it, Vix snaked his arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer once again. She didn’t freeze like last time. Good sign.

  “So I guess we better find out, right?” he asked, his voice soft.

  Breathing in her scent and standing so close to her was pure heaven. She smelled fantastic, even though she’d obviously been crawling through vents and setting up cobwebs and wires for the past few days. In the back of his mind, Vix momentarily wondered if there would be a way that she could ever smell or seem unappealing to him.

  He doubted it.

  That was a weird sensation on its own, and there was no shortage of those that evening.

  “I guess we should,” Samarra agreed.

  For a moment there, Vix thought she cuddled closer to him. In any case, it filled his insides with an immediate warmth, a blazing fire that made him feel like he was ten feet tall.

  Looking around for any light source to grab other than Samarra’s flashlight, Vix stilled.

  “Um, Samarra?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You haven’t brought the blood in yet, have you?”

  “No, why?”

  The two of them turned around and Vix pointed at the butcher’s block. He hadn’t noticed it before, but now it was clear as day. It was drenched in blood and it had dribbled down to the floor. When Samarra shined her flashlight on it, a thick trail of blood became visible that led into the dark pit right between them.

  In the middle of that trail of blood was a wide footprint.

  “What the…” Samarra gasped.

  This night is getting weirder and weirder….

  Samarra

  Everything going wrong on the day it shouldn’t – check. Hot guy to watch you fail – check. Stumbling around in the dark like a fool – double check!

  Samarra bit down on a sigh that threatened to overwhelm her as she stared at the bloody mess of a butcher’s block. Her notes did say that it was supposed to be somewhat bloody… eventually. But definitely not before the fake blood had even been unpacked!

  Something was definitely not right and Samarra was quickly losing her enthusiasm in regards to finding out what exactly was causing it.

  Thomas would have a field day with this, was the last thing Samarra thought about, before forcing herself back into the moment.

  She clicked her tongue and nodded to herself, before looking up at Vix. His expression seemed worried and as perplexed as hers, though he lit up noticeably when their eyes met. There was something just so honest and easygoing about him that Samarra couldn’t help but trust him.

  Not that trusting people had ever done her much good.

  Pressing the bitterness down, she shined the light into the darkness of the pit. There were more dribbled bloodstains on the rickety ladder rungs that led down into the tight, cramped cellar. She knew it snaked through two different rooms, mostly stocked with ancient and questionable canned goods that no one dared touch.

  “The steps definitely lead down there,” she said.

  Vix crouched down, squinting his eyes to see anything in the dark. He nodded slowly, before dipping his fingertip into the spilled blood. It looked real enough.

  “It’s fresh,” he noted.

  “It shouldn’t be. Even if someone did a test run… No, but that couldn’t be. I checked the kitchen when I did the walkthrough before!”

  Samarra bit her lip, confusion welling in her. Her ex-boyfriend and former business partner, Thomas Crane, was the guy who used to be in charge of physical props, while Samarra had overseen the effects, the color work, the lights, etc. This was the very first event she was doing completely alone and she couldn’t fight off the flashback of her and Thomas prepping the blood on a previous event.

  He’d always been so smug about it, too. Like he knew so much better what he was doing than she ever could. It was in part his arrogance that had broken them up and forced Samarra to kick him out of her company eventually.

  Though it was mostly the fact that he’d been screwing the audio engineer behind her back for years.

  “So that means someone’s in here and playing some sort of a practical joke on you, right? Could it be anyone from your crew?”

  Samarra pursed her lips, thinking for a moment. It was hard to concentrate when the whole building around her sounded like it was about to come to life and swallow her like something out of a D-list horror movie.

  Even though that was sort of the aesthetic they were going for.

  “No, I don’t think anyone would have the energy to be a complete twat like that.”

  Vix smirked.

  “Alright. If this was happening to me alone, I’d assume one of my brothers to be behind it.”

  “How many do you have?” Samarra asked absently, her gaze trailing over the wide plains of his back, as if they had any time for small-talk.

  “Eight,” Vix said earnestly.

  That shut Samarra up well and good.

  Who had eight brothers!?

  “Okay, so here’s the plan,” Vix started, straightening up and gently taking the flashl
ight from her hands.

  She loved the little tingle that went through her body when their hands touched again.

  “I’m going to go down there, and check out where those footsteps go. You’re going to stay up here, and you’re going to scream like hell if something, anything happens that shouldn’t happen, you hear me?”

  “But I’m the one who knows the rooms down there,” Samarra protested. “I should be the one going down there. At best, it’s some kid sneaking around making an ass of himself.”

  “Some kid with access to a lot of fake blood and who has somehow turned on all the lights and sounds in your very technically complex haunted house?” Vix asked.

  Staring him down was getting her nowhere. They were face-to-face and all Samarra could really think about was how his lips would taste, even though alarm bells were going off in the back of her mind. It was becoming awfully clear that something weird was going on in the Haunted House of Salem and she didn’t like it one bit.

  My hormones are not allowed to get between me and seeing that this event goes off without a hitch! Even if I do want to jump the hot pilot while there could be a murderer lurking around here somewhere.

  “Okay, how about we both go then?” Samarra countered.

  Vix seemed to consider this for a moment, before nodding carefully.

  “Fine. Probably better not to leave you alone here. Good thinking. But I go first.”

  “Of course you will,” Samarra sighed with a smile and a roll of her eyes.

  Vix thrust the flashlight back in her hand and she lit the way as he climbed down, taking the rungs slowly. Every step he took, the ladder creaked and groaned, as if it was about to collapse under his weight at any moment.

  “Okay, I’m down!” Vix called, his voice echoing a little in the deep cellar.

  “Here goes nothing,” Samarra muttered to herself, clamping down on the flashlight with her teeth as she started climbing as well.

  Holding onto the flashlight that way, she made it down into the darkness. There, she took the flashlight out of her mouth and wiped it off, handing it to Vix. He was already busy looking around himself, but it was only when he got the light that he could probably make any sense of the darkness.