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Soldier of Love
ISBN # 978-1-78184-143-3
©Copyright Gabrielle Holly 2012
Cover Art by Posh Gosh ©Copyright November 2012
Edited by Sue Meadows
Total-E-Bound Publishing
This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Total-E-Bound Publishing.
Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Total-E-Bound Publishing. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.
The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.
Published in 2012 by Total-E-Bound Publishing, Think Tank, Ruston Way, Lincoln, LN6 7FL, United Kingdom.
Warning:
This book contains sexually explicit content which is only suitable for mature readers. This story has a heat rating of Total-e-burning and a sexometer of 2.
This story contains 57 pages, additionally there is also a free excerpt at the end of the book containing 8 pages.
Ghost Encounters
SOLDIER OF LOVE
Gabrielle Holly
A reluctant spiritual medium, an insatiable Civil War ghost, and a sexy TV ghost hunter create an otherworldly love triangle.
When Toni Bianchi decides to chuck her high-stress career and mooching noncommittal boyfriend to become an innkeeper in a tiny tourist town, she doesn’t realise that she’s trading in one set of problems for another. The inn is a crumbling money pit haunted by the handsome ghost of its former owner—Civil War soldier John Buckman. As the hauntings get more frequent—and much more personal—Toni wonders if she’s just imagining things.
At her wits’ end, Toni calls in the popular ghost-hunting TV show “Paranormal Research Team” and immediately falls for its sexy star, Thomas Becker. Toni, Thomas and Buckman’s ghost engage in an otherworldly ménage that helps the dead cross over and leaves the living wanting more.
Dedication
To TJ, for his boundless patience and support
Trademarks Acknowledgement
The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:
GPS: US Department of Defence
Velcro: Velcro
Bye Bye Birdie: Michael Stewart, Lee Adams, Charles Strouse
Nicholas Nickleby: Royal Shakespeare Company
Auntie Mame: Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee
Chapter One
It was well past sunset and Toni Bianchi stood shivering in the stinging rain, up to her ankles in icy mud, her ridiculous Civil War costume clinging to her curves. She glared at the decrepit pickup truck—its bed made over to look like a mid-nineteenth-century military chow wagon—and wondered at exactly which moment her life plan had gone astray.
Admittedly, her ‘life plan’ was a bit fluid. Toni had always believed that spontaneity made life—and her—more interesting. But, as her wet curls clung to her neck and her toes grew numb, she was beginning to rethink her philosophy.
“Impulsive,” she muttered to no one. She’d had yet another knee-jerk reaction. This time, as a result, she’d found herself ankle-deep in unfamiliar muck.
Toni’s ability to think on her feet and execute snap decisions had made her successful at managing luxury hotels. She’d become something of a legend in the business for her ability to pull together grand-scale events in record time. She could simultaneously shuffle appointments, juggle contractors and sweet-talk caterers. The exhilaration of a looming deadline became an addiction. Toni’s inability to snap out of crisis mode in her personal life had made her disastrous at managing relationships.
Six months ago Toni had finally buckled under the stress. She had walked out on ‘Sparky’—her mooching, noncommittal boyfriend—and her cushy salary without so much as a backwards glance. She’d sold her sports car, her furniture and her condo, cashed in her fat stock portfolio and rolled the proceeds into a one-way plane ticket and a down-payment on a new life in a tiny tourist town.
She’d been duped by the fine folks of Soldiers Orchard, Iowa, who had flimflammed her into believing that the answer to her troubles lay in their tiny Midwestern town. The night she’d decided to trade in her hectic life, Toni had typed the words ‘peaceful’, ‘friendly’, and ‘opportunity’ into her Internet search engine. She’d been directed to the Soldiers Orchard Realty website and was greeted by a lovely pen-and-ink image of a tidy brick Federal-style inn. Five divided light windows were spaced evenly along the second story, each neatly framed with a set of proper black shutters. A pair of identical windows flanked each side of the arched double door entry. The caption below read, “A Diamond ‘Inn’ the Rough! A Rare Investment Opportunity! Historic Civil War-era charmer in booming tourist town awaits a handy person with an entrepreneurial flair! Come discover friendly, peaceful Soldiers Orchard. The town council will provide a generous tax incentive to the right buyer. You provide a little elbow grease to make this fixer-upper sparkle.”
“‘A little elbow grease,’ my ass,” she grumbled as she slogged through the deep tire ruts and wrestled open the carriage house door.
The ‘carriage house’, much like ‘the inn’, was deceptively named. Both conjured up romantic images of bucolic rural living and friendly folks stopping by to say howdy and chat a spell over iced tea and molasses cookies. The buildings were, in fact, a pair of decaying two-hundred-year-old money pits—which Toni had purchased, sight unseen, based on a misleading line drawing and an equally misleading real estate agent.
Now, a couple of centuries after it had been built, the carriage house had begun to lean. Toni yanked on the weather-beaten door but it ran aground on a hill of mud before it could be opened wide enough to clear the way for her battered truck. Everything about this financial boondoggle was a struggle. Try to fill the sink with wash water and the faucet crank came off in your hand. Flip a switch in anticipation of electric incandescent light and something deep within the crumbling plaster and lathe walls sputtered and hissed and moments later the entire inn went dark. The roof leaked, the foundation seeped and—according to a parade of plumbers and electricians—every major household system needed a complete overhaul. As she stood in the bone-chilling rain, trying to get the carriage house door to simply do its intended job, Toni wanted nothing more than to get out of the cold and into a hot tub.
The sanctuary of a warm bath seemed an eternity away as Toni wrestled with the seemingly simple task of getting her repurposed pickup into its parking spot. She widened her stance and tried to find purchase on the slippery drive. She gave the door a mighty yank. The age-softened wood groaned as it gave up the screws holding the handle in place. Toni had time to notice that the handle in her hand was no longer attached to the carriage house door, but not enough time to register what that meant—until her plump butt plopped into the mud. Toni jerked her hand out of the muck, and with a primal snarl flung the door handle. The moment it left her fingers, she wished it hadn’t. She cringed as she watched the heavy iron hardware slice through the air and ping off the pickup’s windshield. The crack didn’t form immediately, but once it started its sickening crawl, it didn’t stop until it had
drawn a craggy horizontal line the entire length of the glass.
“Fuuuuuuuuuuuck,” she screamed and slapped her hands against the ground, consequently splattering herself with a spray of ice-cold sludge.
Rage bubbled up. Her mind began to race as she tried to find something or someone—other than herself—to blame for the mess she’d found herself in. She thought of the eighteen-hour work days and shady contractors and neurotic brides that had been part of the career she’d left behind. Back in the city she had slept fitfully, worried obsessively, and regularly gulped stomach medication straight from the bottle.
Each evening, when she had finally arrived back at her condo, exhausted and stressed to the breaking point, she had invariably found Sparky sprawled out on the sofa with a video game controller in his hands and a regiment of empty beer bottles standing in formation on the coffee table.
Sparky worked about ten hours a week as a wedding reception DJ, which was how the two had met. He and Toni had exchanged brief pleasantries every time he emceed a wedding at her hotel. One evening Toni was leaving her office just as Sparky was wheeling his DJ equipment out through the lobby. He’d asked her to join him for a drink in the hotel lounge after he’d loaded his van. Toni would always remember that he’d ordered several rounds of expensive, imported beer and then apologised profusely for having ‘forgotten’ his wallet.
Indulging in luxury at Toni’s expense fast became a habit. Toni’s frenetic work life had left her little time to meet men or develop relationships. She had been so grateful for companionship that she’d ignored the glaring warning signs surrounding Sparky—including his nickname. She’d once overheard the caterers at a wedding reception comment, “‘Sparky’? Really? That’s a name for a Dalmatian or a Little League baseball shortstop—not a grown man.”
Right from the beginning Toni had chosen to disregard every red flag. Sparky had got so drunk on imported beer the night of their ‘first date’ that Toni had driven him back to her condo and tucked him in on the couch—where he’d remained for the next three years.
Toni shivered, not sure if it was due to the memory of her ne’er-do-well ex or the fact that she was soaked to the skin. Toni had, she realised, traded in one set of problems for another. Six months ago she had convinced herself that the only way out of her predicament was to create an entirely opposite circumstance. Well, she’d certainly done that, and now as she sat seething in the frigid mud, she decided that she hated the broken-down inn, and the off-kilter carriage house, and the decrepit pickup truck, and the whole stupid town of Soldiers Orchard.
The economy of the town of Soldiers Orchard hinged on two industries—the factory that took perfectly good bar soap and cooked it down into a soupy liquid to be pumped from bathroom dispensers, and the historic Civil War trade. The truck had originally been part of the delivery fleet for the former before being sold off and converted into a food vending vehicle for the latter.
The pickup had come with the inn. No surprise there as its specialised modifications made it virtually unsalable. The front end looked like any other rust-riddled old truck. The rear, however, had been made over to suggest a battlefield chow wagon. The bed had been outfitted with a bowed frame over which was stretched a canvas cover. Every sheet metal surface had been faced with rough-hewn boards, and wooden pegs on each side were strategically placed to act as hangers for old wagon wheels. Stowed away in the bed were crates of period-correct—or almost so—props. A cast-iron pot and a tripod to hang it from, cast-iron skillets and cooking utensils to dangle from the wagon’s sides, and a purposely tattered oil-cloth apron that Toni tied over her calico costume. Hidden from view—so as not to shatter the illusion—was a collection of modern coolers that stored the deli sandwiches, individual-serving sized bags of chips, cans of pop and beer, and cases of bottled water that Toni sold to the men who came to Soldiers Orchard to act out the brief moment in American history. Toni had learned early on that the doctors and lawyers and accountants who made Civil War re-enactments more obsession than hobby thought nothing of paying a four-hundred-per cent mark-up for the privilege of enjoying a frosty beverage between make-believe battles. Nor, it seemed, did they mind breaking character—ever so briefly—to toss their empty aluminium cans and plastic water bottles into the recycling bin, as long as it was disguised as a wooden whisky barrel.
The odd few dollars that Toni earned selling overpriced refreshments to overpaid weekend warriors helped her to keep the utilities turned on while she renovated the inn. But on fall nights like this—when the wind whipped through the cornfields and the rain slashed at her skin—she longed for the climate-controlled condo and inflated salary that she’d left behind.
She concluded that the cold was seeping into her brain when she smelt cap-gun smoke. The aroma immediately conjured up tiny tight red-paper rolls with bumps of gunpowder spaced along the surface. She remembered helping her little brother load his cap gun. She’d swing open the metal door that was disguised as a pistol barrel, centre the cap roll on the metal peg, then feed the tail end of the paper under the gun hammer—lining it up just so before fastening the latch. Her brothers would chase around the neighbourhood, ducking behind cars and houses—alternately saving the city from the bad guys and being the bad guys. She could almost hear the sharp crack of their toy guns as the metal hammers came down on the tiny dots of gunpowder. She sniffed the air and the acrid, smoky aroma took her back to the carefree Julys of her youth, and far from this dismal late-October of her adulthood.
Toni toyed with the idea of lying back in the puddle and hoping that sleep would overtake her. When her teeth began to chatter, she knew that escapism was an impossibility. And, given that the chow wagon currently was her only reliable income, she would have to get it inside—out of the rain—before the canvas top was irreparably damaged.
By the time Toni got to her feet, the tears were flowing freely. She trudged over to the wedged door, knelt down and clawed away the mud doorstop with her numbed fingers. She pulled back the door enough to make way for the pickup and wiped her hands on her sodden calico skirt. Something glowing on the ground caught her eye and she stooped down for a closer look. She immediately recognised it as her cell phone, but still patted the pocket hidden in the folds of her skirt to verify that it wasn’t there. She scooped up the last vestige of her former, high-tech life, found a clean patch of fabric and wiped off the screen. Toni felt her shoulders droop and the rain stung her skin as she watched the screen glow bright green for a moment before fading out to black. She deposited the dead phone back into her pocket and slogged to the pickup.
Toni slid into the cab, trying to ignore the muddy swipe she left on the seat. She cranked the key forward and squeezed shut her eyes at the weak groan the engine made as it fought to turn over.
“Start, you miserable bitch,” she muttered.
She pumped the gas pedal and leant forward, twisting the key in the ignition, willing the engine to fire. She cycled back the key, and then pressed it forward again. She rested her forehead on the cold, hard steering wheel.
“Please,” she whispered.
The old truck teased with a rrrrr, rrrrr, then seemed to take pity on her. It gave one more anaemic groan before catching. The plugs sparked and the engine finally fired, roaring to life in a cloud of gasoline-soaked exhaust.
“Thank you,” she said and the tears flowed anew.
Toni sat for a moment, shivering and defeated, slowly pumping the gas until she was sure the engine would keep cranking. Sitting back against the scarred vinyl seat, she stared through the windshield, trying to ignore the new horizontal crack. Sniffing her running nose but not bothering to wipe her tears, she gave the gas pedal two more pumps for good measure, then pivoted her numb foot to the brake. She grasped the long, utilitarian gearshift and thunked the transmission into drive, then eased the pickup into the carriage house and shut down the engine. She left the keys in the ignition—after all, who would bother to steal this beast?
Toni ope
ned the cab door and slumped out. Something fluttered in the open rafters above and she hoped that it wasn’t bats. She ducked against potential dive-bombing from flying rodents as she hurried out the carriage house door. She tried to yank it shut, but the downpour had built a new barrier of earth on the inward side of the door’s swing. Defeated, Toni decided to leave the carriage house open.
She trudged out into the mire of the driveway and looked towards the lights from the inn. They were at once a beacon and a betrayal. Inside she would find dry clothes and a warm bath…and a mile-long list of deferred maintenance items.
Toni decided that the worries of leaky roofs and hazardous wiring and porous plumbing would still be there in the morning. What she needed now was to be warm and dry—and to sleep. She stepped on to the uneven slate stepping-stones that would lead her indoors. Movement in her peripheral vision caused her to pause and turn. A figure drifted through the shadows on the far side of the alley that led behind the carriage house. Toni dipped her head and squinted. His head was bent against the rain, but she could make out the brim of his flat-topped cap. The circle of light from the bare bulb above the carriage house door didn’t quite reach him, but was just close enough to glint off his brass buttons and the handle of the scabbard that hung at his hip. A pistol with a foot-long barrel was stuffed into the sash that circled his waist. The end of the sash trailed down to his right knee and was tipped with a thick tassel.
A re-enactor, she thought. He must’ve been heading home after a day of pretending to fight a Civil War battle. Maybe he was making his way to one of the other, more respectable, inns that lined Main Street. She wondered what this guy did for a living in the real world to be able to afford such an historically correct getup. The uniform even had tears and stains to mimic the effects of war.
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