Rab’s dead but he won’t lie down.
Lili’s luck is on the upswing. Her acting career is taking off, she’s home in Edinburgh to perform in a high profile Festival play, and romance is blossoming with her famous leading man. The last thing she wants or expects on her first night of passion in two years is her ex-husband looming over her new lover’s shoulder, dripping blood on her pristine sheets.
Rab, self-confessed hedonist and computer geek, has always been a joker, but surely even he wouldn’t go to this length to stop her getting laid—inventing a wild tale of being shot dead and having to track down his own body.
Then again, there’s no logical explanation for why she’s the only one who can see him. Why the police are knocking on her door. And why Rab is still the only man who drives her crazy, in bed and out.
All she knows is, it’s all still there. The fun and the pain. The feelings that never really went away. She owes it to him to never stop looking—even though finding him could take him away for good…
Warning: Contains blood, swearing and hot, spiritual sex.
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
577 Mulberry Street, Suite 1520
Macon GA 31201
Requiem for Rab
Copyright © 2009 by Marie Treanor
ISBN: 978-1-60504-532-0
Edited by Linda Ingmanson
Cover by Natalie Winters
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: May 2009
www.samhainpublishing.com
Requiem for Rab
Marie Treanor
Dedication
For my own geek.
Chapter One
It’s not every day you see a ghost, right? And it’s pretty unusual for your ex-husband to loom over your new lover’s shoulder, especially when you’re in bed at the time. Extraordinarily unlikely, you might think, to encounter both phenomena on the same night, but there you are, they don’t call me Lucky Lili for nothing.
So there I lay, stark naked on the bed, having been undressed with exquisite care by the man of my dreams, who stood beside me, ripping off his silk shirt to expose his gorgeous manly chest, the sort of predatory blaze in his eyes that was guaranteed to make a girl squirm with lust.
Menzies was a mature man, distinguished, successful, with all the self-confidence and glamour that normally goes with such qualities. As well as the firm, fit body, he had wonderfully chiseled features, a square jaw, dark brown hair turning to a sexy iron grey at the temples. I was one lucky girl…
This time, this time…
He didn’t at once remove his trousers—frustrating, perhaps, but it did imply a certain gentlemanly not-counting-one’s-chickens approach. Instead, he sank back down on the bed, resting a hand on either side of me, and began to kiss me while slowly lowering that delicious chest to my breasts. That felt so good, I really did begin to squirm.
“So Lili,” he murmured against my lips in that breathless, soul-wrenching voice that could move nations, “will you make love with me?”
As a line, it certainly beat, “Fancy a shag?”
I was enchanted. “Oh yes!”
His hands were on my breasts, mine on his cotton-covered bottom, stroking, reaching between our bodies to get at his zip.
“Impatience.” He smiled. “I like that.”
Brushing my hands aside, he undid his own zip. The trousers and underpants were scooted down his legs so quickly that I didn’t get so much as a glimpse of his tackle. Well, the night was young, and already he was pressing it against me, between my thighs.
“Oh, yes, you want me, you like this…”
I gasped, wriggling to help him find the spot. Yes!
Which is when Rab’s face appeared over Menzies’s shoulder, looking mildly surprised.
My mouth fell open. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“Beats me,” said Rab with his usual helpfulness.
Menzies was staring at me. “You invited me!”
Thank God. He hadn’t yet clocked Rab’s presence. I tightened my arms around his neck in a hold that probably resembled a wrestling lock rather than a lover’s clinch. All I had to do was get rid of Rab quick and I could still have my long dreamed of night of passion.
“Go away,” I mouthed over my lover’s naked shoulder.
Rab looked around him, then shook his head. “Nah. Who’s the sleaze ball?”
“He is not a…” I broke off, staring at the red drops on my white satin quilt cover. Slowly, I lifted my gaze to the source: a dark, nasty stain on Rab’s T-shirt.
“Rab!” I sat up with so much force that Menzies and I banged heads. I saw a fine array of shooting stars, though hardly in the manner I had hoped for at the beginning of the evening.
Menzies rolled off me, swearing. “Who the bloody hell is Rab?” he demanded, pressing his hand over his right eye.
“My ex.” I blinked, staring around the room. Rab had gone.
Menzies took a deep breath. “Lili…”
But I was furious. How dare Rab sneak in here—how dare he even still have a key when I’d bought him out?—and drip blood all over my bed just to interrupt my first night of sex in two years, my first night with Menzies, for God’s sake!
“One moment,” I said grimly, sliding out of the bed. I grabbed my dressing gown from behind the door, flung it around me and tied it with deadly intent, already heading out of the bedroom and into the living room. The lights were still on, but there was no sign of Rab. I tried the kitchen, then the bathroom, but he wasn’t there either.
Slightly panicked now, I went back to the bedroom. He wasn’t under the bed—which was fortunate for him considering the amount of dust I encountered. Sneezing, I wrenched open the wardrobe door, rummaging among the clothes.
“Lili.”
Defeated, I paused and glanced over my shoulder. Menzies stood beside the bed, his trousers back on. He really did have a lovely chest, I thought wistfully. Smooth and broad and muscular, quite without rough hair…
“I don’t think you’re ready for this, are you?”
“Oh, I am,” I assured him.
“Then what just happened here?”
Good question. I swallowed.
Menzies said, “I spoke to Jen tonight. She told me that despite rumours to the contrary, you haven’t been in any kind of relationship since your divorce. I think I took you by surprise tonight. And I think it was a mistake to come here to the house you shared with him. You need some time and a different environment…”
“No I don’t,” I said fervently. “Really, I don’t.”
Only what was wrong with Rab and why was he bleeding? And why couldn’t I find him? Was my mind really playing such cruel tricks?
Menzies walked toward me. He took me in his arms, as if I was precious and very breakable.
“It will be our time, Lili. I won’t give up on you.”
A quick kiss and he left the room, shrugging the silk shirt on as he went. I had no role to help me with this scene. I just felt plain foolish standing by the front door in my dressing gown and slippers while we said polite goodbyes. And although his smile was warm
as he left, I knew in my heart I had blown it with Menzies. Not just tonight, but for good.
I hid behind the curtain, twitching it aside to watch him emerge from the tall building and walk the few paces to his rather swanky car. A bunch of drunks tried to hold him up for an exchange of pleasantries—it’s a risk you take on Friday nights in Edinburgh’s Old Town, especially as the Festival is about to start—but ignoring them, he simply climbed in and drove off in a cloud of exhaust. He didn’t once look up at my window.
Slowly, I sank down onto the arm of the sofa. It had been a long and grueling day. I was tired and disappointed and sexually frustrated. No wonder tears of self-pity began to prickle at my eyelids.
“I’m going to sell this bloody flat,” I promised. Then, glaring into the murky corners: “Just as soon as I clean it.”
“Get a bod in.”
My head jerked round. Rab sprawled on the sofa, his head almost touching my hip. He looked a mess, as he generally did, all shaggy hair, a beard that hovered between definite and merely unshaven, and the same old black T-shirt I was sure I’d thrown out after I poured most of a bottle of red wine over it. He’d been wearing it then, too. Obviously.
Only I couldn’t remember it having that awful messy stain that had dripped on my bed. It was still there, oozing.
I glared at it. “Have you been fighting?”
“Only with you, dear.”
“Then what have you done? Why are you bleeding? And how did you get in here?”
“I haven’t done anything. I was shot. And I don’t remember, I just sort of—arrived.”
My mouth closed. I leapt off the sofa arm. “You were shot? Jesus Christ, Rab!”
I was across the room before I realized it, rummaging in my bag for my phone. “Only you’d get shot round here!” I raged. “Any other self respecting victim gets stabbed in a pub brawl…”
“I don’t see that that’s any better,” Rab argued. “And it didn’t happen here, it was in Glasgow.”
I paused, phone in hand, finger hovering as I stared at him over my shoulder. “You were shot in Glasgow? You travelled here like that? Rab, are you pissed?”
“Lamentably sober. What are you planning on doing with that phone?”
“Getting an ambulance or a taxi or something to take you to the hospital! I don’t understand how you can still talk with a bullet in your chest!”
“Ah. Well, there’s rather more than that I can’t understand. But you’d better put the phone down—you can’t dial like that anyhow.”
He was right. My hand shook like a vibrator on overdrive. I threw the phone down, grabbing my hair instead as if it would somehow impart some strength or even understanding.
“What’s going on?”
Rab moved, swinging his long legs down and sitting up into his smartest slouching position. “Buggered if I know. Thing is…don’t want to freak you here but—er—I’m dead.”
“Dead?” I repeated stupidly. I watched in fascination as something red dripped from his wound onto his denim-clad knee. I frowned, because it didn’t seem to stain his jeans at all.
“Dead,” Rab agreed. “Deid, no more, late, ex, pining for the fjords, dead. Can’t complain really—I was shot in the heart.”
Slowly, I got to my feet. “So. You expect me to believe that you were shot in the heart and died, and your spirit has now come to haunt me?”
“Aye, that’s about it.”
“Couldn’t you find anyone else in?”
He grinned. “Didn’t try. Didn’t really seem to be up to me. One moment, I lay there, heading for the white light, knowing I was a goner, the next I was here. Or at least through there.” He jerked his head toward the bedroom door. “Watching Old Sleazy try to shag you. Not what I imagined Heaven to be like, but there, that’ll teach me not to go to Confession. Who is he anyway?”
“Menzies…”
“With the emphasis on the Ming.”
I glared at him. Menzies—pronounced Mingus—was just too good a joke for him to pass up—minging being his local slang for dirty, smelly and otherwise unsavoury. “Don’t you recognize him?”
“Not with his breeks off.”
Hysteria caught in my throat. I choked it off. “J. Menzies,” I said severely, even while wondering why it was so important to explain. “Well known actor, writer and director. He’s won BAFTAs.”
“And bufties,” said Rab, clearly unimpressed. “Couldn’t you do better than that?”
“Couldn’t you just leave something in my life unspoiled?”
He stared at me. I knew him very well, but for some reason, I couldn’t read the expression in his eyes. “Lil, I’ve left your life altogether. And mine, come to that.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake!”
I’d had enough. Storming across to the sofa, I took hold of his T-shirt and yanked it up. He didn’t wince, even when the fabric came noisily unstuck from his skin.
I stared at the neat hole in his chest, quietly oozing blood. I’d seen a few excellent make-up jobs in my professional life. This was considerably less gory than most, and yet scarily more real. I just knew that if I put my finger on it, it would be a genuine hole.
The world swung out of focus for an instant, and when it came back, I was kneeling at his feet, clutching his knee.
“I can feel you,” I whispered. “You’re solid!”
“I kept telling you that. Underneath all this irresponsibility and pointless misbehaviour, I said, lies a truly solid and worthy human being…”
“Rab!”
“Sorry.”
“Look, you moron, you’re delirious! The only spiritual thing about you is the booze you’ve been slinging down your neck! Solid wounded flesh needs a solid doctor! Now stand up and I’ll get you a taxi. And if you think I’m going to sit in Casualty with you after…what?”
“Expletive deleted,” Rab growled. “Look, you’re an actress, can’t you just pretend this crap is real or something? I need you to call the cops.”
“After the hospital! At the bloody hospital, if you insist…”
“Now,” Rab interrupted. “I’d do it myself but I seem to have a couple of disadvantages at the moment.”
“Well losing your voice isn’t one of them.”
“Actually it is.”
I opened my mouth to dispute that with all possible sarcasm. And then closed it again in silence.
“You’re the only one who can see or hear me Lil—unless your Minger’s deaf as well as blind.”
I didn’t even want to correct the name. Something huge, really huge and scary, was closing in on me. It would swallow me if I let it. Instead, I hung on grimly to the facts I had: that Menzies had given no sign of knowing Rab was in the bedroom; that Rab had a hole in his chest that should surely have killed him outright, and yet here he sat on our old sofa—my old sofa—exchanging insults with me as if he’d never been away. And dripping blood on his jeans that didn’t stain or wet them.
Rab had been shot.
I caught my breath. It came with a sound suspiciously like a sob or a moan. “You can’t be dead,” I raged. “You’re too bloody annoying to be dead!”
Rab gave the lopsided grin that had reduced my limbs to jelly as a young and impressionable student. “That’s my girl. Now phone the polis for me. I’m not a forgiving sort of a ghost and I want the bastards who did this to get theirs.”
I closed my eyes. “Who were they? What can I tell the police that they’ll believe? Am I really having this conversation?”
“The philosophy might have to wait. I can’t control the vanishing trick and I could go at any time.”
“Don’t build my hopes,” I snarled, snapping my eyes open again. “OK, shoot.” I glanced at him in sudden quick apology. “Sorry.”
“Very funny. Call the Glasgow police. Anonymously. Tell them you heard a shot in the carpark below my office building this evening. That should get them over there…”
“Won’t someone else have reported that?”
“Christ. Who did it? Can I describe these suspicious characters?”
“Two men. Both dark, one wearing a dark suit, one with an Italian leather jacket—he did the shooting, the other drove the car. Dark green Peugeot, last three letters of the registration FMS, though they’ll have ditched that now. You could say you saw them speeding away—and the leather man had a gun.”
I nodded, stowing the information in my brain like the lines of a script. Other questions clamoured for answers. “Will they find you there? Oh, God, your parents!”
“No, they won’t find me there. They took me away in the green Peugeot. But it should at least get the cops down there. There’s blood. As for my parents,” he added inexorably as I closed my eyes again, “go and see them sometimes?”
“Oh shit.” Suddenly the reality of this grisly story was galloping on me, but he wouldn’t let me dwell on it.
“The phone, Lil, do it now before you forget.”
“Forget?”
I knew even before he grinned that he was winding me up. Letting go of his knee at last, I jumped to my feet and ran across the room. I bent to pick up my discarded phone.
“Good girl… Lili?”
I knew what he was going to say. It was the only time he ever called me Lili.
“Nice ass.”
It was a play on my real name—Lilias. I don’t know why that more than anything else that had happened that night should have set me off, but suddenly I couldn’t see the phone in my hand. A tear splashed on my fingers and I turned on him in an uncontrollable mixture of rage and pity.
I only caught the tail end of his grin. Along with his big, lanky, untidy body, it faded away into nothing.
Chapter Two
“You’re late!”
When I finally hurled myself through the theatre doors, the observant chorus nearly blasted me back out again.
“I know! Okay, I’m sorry!”
“His Nibs is hopping mad,” Martyn Cowan offered.
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