The Haunting of Josie

by Kay Hooper

  The hardness of his cast brushed past her shoulder, and his fingers touched her hair near her temple. His right hand still lay against her neck, those fingers brushing her nape in a whisper touch she found wildly arousing, and his mouth was moving on hers, his tongue a shattering possession.

  She wanted, suddenly and violently, to be closer to him, to feel the powerful length of his body against hers. She wanted their clothing gone, wanted them naked together here in front of the fire. She wanted to feel his hands on her bare skin, and his lips, and she wanted to touch him with a longing so vast and overpowering it was dimly terrifying.

  Dazed, she opened her eyes to stare at him when he drew away abruptly. Her fingers were clutching his shirt, she realized, holding on as if to a lifeline.

  “Are you sure, Josie?” he demanded, his normally liquid voice a hoarse rasp. “Are you sure now?”

  He was really the most incredibly handsome man she’d ever seen. Dramatically handsome. Striking. And sexy, God knew. And those eyes…

  Then his demanding question sank in, and she blinked in confusion. “What?” she managed, making a vain effort to slow her breathing.

  “Are you sure there’s no room in your life for me?” Without waiting for an answer, he kissed her again, briefly and a bit roughly this time, and his silvery eyes gleamed at her.

  “No,” she whispered.

  His jaw tightened. “No, you aren’t sure? Or—”

  She forced herself to let go of his shirt and ordered her shaking hands to lie on her thighs. She felt color rush to her face and hoped desperately that he couldn’t read her feelings this time. She didn’t want him to realize that she hadn’t been answering his question at all, that she had been protesting something else entirely.

  No, don’t stop. Please don’t stop….

  “Josie—”

  “No, I—I’m not sure of anything anymore.” Her voice was husky, almost a whisper.

  The hardness in his expression softened and he kissed her again, quickly and lightly. “Don’t sound so lost,” he murmured, stroking her hot cheek gently.

  She felt lost. And she felt…unfamiliar to herself. Where was her certainty, her resolve to allow nothing to distract her from her plans? For so long, for nearly ten years, everything in her had been so focused, and now…now she could hardly think at all. God, what had the man done to her?

  “I have to think,” she murmured.

  Marc seemed to hesitate, then said softly, “You want me. Admit it, Josie.”

  “No, I—”

  “Admit it.”

  She couldn’t look away from him. And, no matter how much she wanted to resist saying it, because putting it into words made it too real to be denied, she heard herself telling him what he wanted to hear. Telling him the truth.

  “I—I want you.”

  He nodded slowly, satisfaction gleaming in his eyes. “And you know I want you, don’t you?”

  The heat of his desire was so indelibly stamped into her consciousness—perhaps even her very skin—that she could only nod a bit helplessly. He was still stroking her cheek with just the tips of his fingers, and she had to fight the urge to lean into the caress, to press herself against him. She wanted him to kiss her again, and she was painfully aware that her longing was as plain as neon to him.

  He began to lean toward her, but then stopped himself with obvious effort and slowly took his hands off her. “If I don’t leave right now,” he told her huskily as he rose to his feet, “I won’t leave at all. As much as I want to stay, I don’t think you’re ready to take me to your bed.”

  Josie turned her gaze to the fire as quickly as she could, hoping he couldn’t see the disappointment she felt. Oh, God, what has he done to me? She didn’t get up because she was quite sure her legs wouldn’t support her, and even if he could read her emotions, she wasn’t going to confirm what the man already knew by collapsing at his feet.

  “Josie?”

  “Good night, Marc.” Her voice held steady, rather to her surprise.

  “Good night.” He hesitated for a moment, and she thought she felt him touch her hair fleetingly, and then he left.

  She sat there for a long time, her eyes fixed blindly on the fire, then sighed and stirred. She really should get up. Take the leftover popcorn and unused marshmallows to the kitchen. Bank the fire for the night. And then go upstairs. Maybe soaking in a hot tub would ease the tension from her muscles.

  But she doubted it.

  Still not trusting her legs, she twisted around to use the coffee table as leverage—and then froze, both hands planted firmly. She blinked, carefully. Stared while her sluggish mind grappled with an impossibility.

  Lying on top of the biography of Luke Westbrook that Marc had brought in tonight was a small brass key, its loop of ribbon faded. It lay there innocently, winking in the firelight. Just a key. Except that it shouldn’t have been there. Josie was sure it hadn’t been there when she had joined Marc on the hearth rug, because she would have noticed the pale gleam against the darkness of the book’s cover.

  No, it had been hanging in the kitchen, on the cup hook by the cellar door. Where she had left it.

  She looked quickly at Pendragon, only to find the cat still curled up, eyes closed, with all the appearance of a cat who hadn’t moved in hours. Which wasn’t to say that he hadn’t moved in hours. He could have, she supposed. He could have leaped up high enough to somehow get the key. And then he could have brought it in here and left it on the book.

  But why on earth would he have done that?

  After a moment she reached across the coffee table and picked up the key. She stared at it, fingers probing, searching out solidity, reality.

  Yes, it was real.

  Right. And, assuming the cat hadn’t fetched it, it had floated in from the kitchen sometime during the last hour or so, landing on Luke’s bio….

  Hardly aware of speaking aloud, Josie murmured, to herself and to the cat, “An odd place to land no matter which of you did it. Coincidence is a fine thing, but I think Luke’s trying to tell me something.”

  Well, what the hell. She was reasonably sure she wouldn’t sleep a wink tonight anyway, considering the frustration aching in every muscle and tingling in every nerve. And she’d drive herself crazy if she spent the night agonizing about Marc. So why not just take the book to bed and read about Luke Westbrook?

  With any luck at all, she’d figure out what, if anything, one small brass key had to do with a long-dead mystery writer. And why he was haunting her.

  With any luck at all…

  It was chilly outside, but Marc didn’t hurry as he walked through the moonlight back to the cottage. Neither the cold air nor the exercise had any effect on his frustration. He hadn’t really expected it to. It had taken every ounce of willpower and determination he’d been able to summon to get up and leave Josie, especially after she had looked at him with that heart-stopping yearning in her lovely face.

  He was a masochist. It was a hell of a thing to discover about himself after thirty-five relatively blameless years, but he couldn’t ignore the evidence. Any sane man who could walk away from Josie when he knew—he knew—he could have spent the night in bed with her making love had to be a masochist.

  There was just no other word for it.

  If someone had put him on the witness stand and invited him to explain himself and his ridiculous scruples, he wasn’t sure he’d have been able to. What, after all, could he say? That he wanted more? That he wanted her to want him with the same unshadowed intensity with which he wanted her?

  Dammit, I want to make sure she doesn’t have the slightest inclination to kick me out of her bed and out of her life the morning after!

  And that was it, really. He could make Josie want him, make her forget all the doubts and reservations and outright resistance to the mere idea of involvement with him—but he had seen all those things in her remarkable eyes before desire had clouded them, and he couldn’t forget it.

  The si
mple truth was that Josie wouldn’t choose, eyes wide open in the cool light of day, to be his lover. Not now. Not yet. And until she made that choice…

  He stirred the dying fire in his fireplace and piled on fresh wood, then sat on the couch and broodingly watched the flames. When the phone rang, he jumped only slightly and was able to reassure Tucker that, no, he hadn’t been asleep.

  “In fact,” he told his friend wryly, “I’ve never been farther from sleep.”

  “Dare I hazard a guess?”

  “You will, no matter what I say.”

  “True. In my experience, only two kinds of troubles keep a man from his just sleep. Love or money. And I know you don’t need money.”

  Marc stared at the crackling fire until it blurred a bit. He was suddenly aware of his heart beating, slow and heavy, aching in his chest. Another definition of a masochist, he thought dimly, would probably be a man in love with a wary woman he’d met barely a week before.

  “No,” he said finally. “No, I don’t need money.”

  Instead of crowing in triumph or otherwise giving Marc a hard time, Tucker offered a sober, “If we’re talking about Josie Douglas, then I have a hunch you’ve got your work cut out for you, my friend.”

  “Why?”

  “Because as near as I can figure, the lady has been through several kinds of hell in the last twenty years. It might be my writer’s imagination, of course, but if she’s a sensitive soul, I doubt she finds it easy to let anybody get close to her.”

  “You’ve finished the background search? So quickly?”

  Still grave, Tucker said, “Something neither of us expected. She’s not anonymous, Marc. Up until ten years ago, when her father died and she went to the other side of the country to attend college, there was quite a bit written about her in national and West Coast newspapers. And in tabloids.”

  Marc drew a breath. “Start at the beginning, Tucker.”

  “It was more like an ending. The ending of a normal life.” Tucker sighed. “Seattle. Twenty years ago this past summer, in 1974. A hotel belonging to Matthew Douglas—Josie’s father—was deliberately set on fire. It was late at night and…well, two hundred and thirty people died. The hotel was heavily insured, and Douglas was rumored to be on the verge of bankruptcy. He was eventually arrested and charged.”

  “My God.” Marc felt grim. “Matthew Douglas.”

  “We would have been about fifteen,” Tucker observed. “I don’t remember the trial. Girls, football, and Watergate had my attention. How about you?”

  “The same. But one of my professors in law school liked to review sensational court cases. That was one of them.”

  “Remember the details?”

  “It’s been a while. Fill me in, will you? And tell me everything you’ve found out about Josie.”

  She fell asleep around four A.M., having finished the biography of Luke Westbrook and having spent half an hour after reading it staring at the ceiling above her bed.

  Luke’s bed.

  Her dreams were unsettled, which was hardly surprising. Keys were everywhere, hung by faded loops of ribbon from doorknobs and light switches. And then there were the men. If it wasn’t a handsome lawyer trying to kiss her in every dark corner of the house, it was a handsome ghost beckoning urgently—and all the time an enigmatic black cat kept appearing suddenly wherever she happened to be and grinning at her like a cross between the Grinch and the Cheshire cat.

  By nine Josie was up and in the shower, trying to wash away the gritty-eyed feeling of fatigue that came from too little sleep and too many problems chasing their own tails. She was drinking coffee and eating toast in the kitchen when the crunch of gravel alerted her to the arrival of a visitor, but by the time she made it to a front window, all she saw was a rather nice Jeep Cherokee parked near her van.

  After an anxious moment she realized it must be one of Marc’s friends, and when she returned to the kitchen and looked out the back window, she saw a tall, casually dressed blond man passing through the garden toward the cottage. She thought, but wasn’t sure, that he carried a little black bag.

  The doctor friend? It seemed likely.

  Josie would have liked to meet him, but she was a long way from being ready to face Marc. The vulnerability of last night was still very much with her, and she was no closer to understanding how he could have such an overwhelming effect on her.

  There was a large part of her that shied away from even considering the matter, a part that reminded her she had a task to complete and couldn’t allow any distraction—even a devastating lawyer or an insistent ghost—to sidetrack her.

  Which was all very well and good, but an hour or so later, as she attempted to work in the front parlor, Josie discovered that she had filled a page of a legal pad with doodles of keys, quill pens, and—most surprisingly of all—a rather good sketch of a handsome, dramatic face with a widow’s peak and light, striking eyes.

  “This is absurd,” she told Pendragon, who was sitting companionably at the other end of the couch. “Three men fighting for my attention, and two of them are dead.”

  “Yaaa-woo,” the cat said softly.

  Sensing commiseration, Josie smiled at him. “Thanks, pal. But something a little more constructive would be nice. Like a suggestion.”

  Apparently, all Pendragon could offer was sympathy, since he began washing a forepaw methodically.

  Josie sighed and studied the legal pad. She certainly didn’t need an expert to tell her that her mind was indeed filled with turmoil. She also didn’t need that same expert to point out that, given a choice between the grim task of reliving her father’s tragedy and exploring the mystery of Luke and her growing fascination with Marc, Josie was naturally leaning toward the Westbrook men.

  Even if Marc left her confused and unsure of herself, there was also more than a thread of exhilaration and the inescapable temptation to experience a kind of passion unlike anything she had ever felt before.

  As for Luke, the puzzle of what he required of her was intriguing enough even without the eeriness of his being a ghost, and she did want to get that situation resolved.

  “It’s very simple, really,” she told Pendragon, this time in a tone of relief. “The short-term problems should be dealt with first. That means Luke. At least, I hope he’s short-term. Anyway, he’s obviously not going to leave me in peace until I do whatever it is he wants me to do. Right?”

  “Yah,” the cat replied.

  Josie eyed him suspiciously.

  Pendragon blinked, then said, “Mmaaarrc?”

  After a startled moment Josie said, “Cats never use k sounds or hard c’s. Never.”

  “Mmaaarrc,” Pendragon repeated, quite distinctly, almost coughing the difficult hard c.

  Josie decided that she had spent entirely too much time talking to the cat. Because she was sure he had said “Marc,” and that was, naturally, ridiculous. Even so, she heard herself ask uneasily, “What about him?”

  “Prruptt,” Pendragon replied, lapsing back into cat.

  She was about to ask him to clarify that, when he started suddenly and jumped down from the couch, hurrying from the room as if he had abruptly remembered an appointment.

  Josie shook her head bemusedly as she gazed after him, then looked back at the legal pad. Well. The logic definitely made sense. She would temporarily postpone the work of putting together the case to vindicate her father; she had a year, after all. And she would concentrate on solving the mystery of Luke Westbrook.

  What about Marc?

  Her mind wanted to shy away, but she held it firmly as though it were a skittish horse. Marc. She thought Marc would be every bit as insistent as his ancestor; it seemed to run in the family. He wanted her, and he’d made her admit she wanted him. Out loud, so she could hardly deny it now.

  Did she even want to?

  Think it through.

  In no more than two or three weeks Marc would return to his law practice and his apartment in Richmond. He might come out her
e for the occasional weekend, but it was really too far from the city to be a convenient weekend retreat. So…even if they became lovers, time would end it eventually. Gradually, inevitably, he would be occupied by his busy life in the city.

  Inevitably, there’d be no room for her.

  Josie felt her lips twist in a painful smile. Ironic. She had no room in her for the consuming demands of a love affair, no emotional energy to spare, but if she gave in to what he made her feel and accepted at least the overwhelming physical passion he offered, it would very likely be the demands of his life that would ultimately end it.

  Give him the benefit of the doubt and say he really wasn’t interested in a brief affair; his definition of “lasting” could be anything more than a long weekend. And certainly, no matter what aberrant fixation he’d developed on her, it was highly unlikely that a dramatically handsome, sinfully charming, and irresistibly sexy lawyer would be at all interested in someone like her once he could return to his normal life.

  The thought of endings hurt, and Josie told herself sternly that it shouldn’t. They were both adults, after all. Both past the age of disguising perfectly normal and healthy lust beneath the pretty wrappings of euphemisms. He wanted her; she wanted him; and there was certainly a spark between them.

  So—why not? As long as they were both responsible, as one had to be these days, and as long as both of them understood that nothing lasting would come of it, then…why not?

  She forced her mind into a matter-of-fact mode. Being responsible, now, that might prove difficult under the present circumstances. She certainly hadn’t come out here prepared for an affair, and she doubted that Marc had. Of course, after last night Marc could have no doubt that he would, eventually, wind up in her bed, and he was undoubtedly a responsible man. And his friend the doctor was visiting him now, and doctors were rabid on the subject of protection.

  As they should be.

  Her matter-of-fact mode slipped away, and Josie sighed a bit raggedly. Why did it all have to be so complicated? She didn’t want to feel anything, not deep inside where all the painful, raw emotions already lived, taking up so much room and demanding so much of her energy. All she wanted to feel were the simple physical pleasures of a healthy young body.