Ghost Moon

by Rebecca York

  He didn’t bother with a shirt. Just the pants, and he hoped he wouldn’t be wearing them for long.

  Then he went back to the room where Quinn was sleepingand stood looking at her. She was under the covers, but they had slipped to her waist, revealing the T-shirt she wore. Had she put on panties? Or was she naked below the waist?

  As he contemplated that possibility, he grew instantly hard again. Instantly wanting.

  She had known him when he was a ghost. And she could have run away from him after he’d gotten into his new body. But she’d come here with him to the hunting lodge. And she’d stayed, even when she could have slipped away while he was unconscious.

  Days ago, he had settled for a pale imitation of lovemakingwith her. Because that was all he could have.

  And what could he have now?

  He took a step closer, watching the rise and fall of her chest, seeing her breasts through the thin fabric of the T-shirt, with the darker circles of her nipples in the centers.

  Raising his eyes, he focused on each one of her features in turn, loving the way her dark lashes lay against her cheek. Then he looked at her sun-streaked hair.

  It suited a woman like Quinn.

  Everything about her pleased him. He had felt connected to her. He thought she had felt it, too. Would it be the same—now that everything had changed?

  THE two wolves with light packs on their backs trotted through the woods toward the spot where neither one of them had ever ventured.

  Logan had been out on a job, supervising the construction of a waterfall at an estate in Montgomery County. When he’d gotten a call from Rinna, he’d hurried home.

  He was in the lead. His cousin Ross followed a few paces behind. Since this was Logan’s territory, Ross was letting the other werewolf take charge.

  Ross was good at that. And he kept a cool head. Not like Logan who was likely to go into confrontational mode when he was under stress.

  And he was under stress now. He’d agreed to take in Quinn and Zarah, the pregnant wife of a council member in Sun Acres, Rinna’s home city.

  He’d been glad to help. Partly because he knew his wife appreciated the company of women from her own world.

  But things hadn’t worked out exactly the way he’d expected.Quinn had met a ghost who held a grudge against the family. And she’d run off this morning to meet up with him again.

  Was she helping the ghost plan an attack? Or what?

  A sense of unease gathered in his chest as he trotted towardthe patch of ground that had always made him nervous.

  It was probably the place where the ghost’s body was buried. But he didn’t even know that for sure. He had never seen the spirit. Or really sensed him. Yet some deeply buried instinct had warned him away from this place.

  Now he felt a kind of electricity tingling over his skin as he ventured into the clearing. It looked like an ordinary patch of Maryland hardwood forest. And it smelled like that, too.

  He dragged in a deep draft of the humid air, trying to catch Quinn’s familiar scent. But the rain had washed it away with casual efficiency.

  He took another step forward, then stopped short when he spotted a gaping hole in the soil. It was long and thin. About the size of a man, and it went down several feet, below the layer of forest loam to the familiar red clay that blanketed this part of the country.

  Had the ghost somehow risen up out of his grave?

  Ross came up beside him, and Logan gave him a questioninglook. Ross was a private detective, and he had more experience than Logan in investigating burial grounds in the woods. A couple of times, he’d unearthed private cemeteries that had helped the cops take down serial killers.

  He gave a signal with his head, and Ross trotted forward, sniffing the hole and poking with his right forepaw at a large piece of black plastic, not unlike what Logan used in his landscape business.

  A shovel was discarded nearby on the ground. Not the shovel that Quinn had taken from the toolshed earlier. This one had a rounded blade and a red-painted handle.

  Someone else had brought it. And the plastic. That wasn’t seventy-five years old. He knew the details of his trade, and he knew that such plastic hadn’t existed in the 1930s.

  A wide trail led downhill. Ross started down that way, and Logan followed, keeping alert for danger—or for some clue to what had happened here.

  He stopped short and made a woofing sound when he spotted something interesting, a place where the bark of a tree was newly grazed by a horizontal line.

  Ross came back and eyed it.

  It looked to Logan like a bullet had made the mark. Ross must be thinking the same thing because he turned and followedthe trajectory of the horizontal line until he came to a round hole in a nearby elm tree.

  A bullet hole. So someone had been shooting recently.

  Jesus! Was that why Quinn hadn’t come home? She was dead—or wounded?

  Slipping from tree to tree, they followed the trail downhill to a spot where tire tracks dug into the mud. Tracks from an SUV or a pickup truck, judging from the size of the treads and the space between them. The vehicle was gone, but someone had left a crumpled wrapper from a sandwich shop on the ground. Also a beer can.

  Ross wiggled out of the pack he carried. His eyes took on an inward focus, and Logan knew what he was doing.

  He did the same thing, discarding the pack before he beganto silently say the ancient chant that would turn him from wolf to man.

  Ross was already pulling on sweatpants and running shoes from his pack by the time Logan stood erect and worked his shoulders—then began to dress.

  “That wasn’t where the ghost was buried. That was a new grave. Someone came in an SUV and planted a body,” Ross said.

  “Why not a truck?”

  “Would you drive around with a dead guy in the back of a truck?”

  “If it had a cover.”

  “Okay. It could have been a pickup,” Ross conceded.

  “And there were probably two guys. One dropped a beer can on his side of the car. The other threw out a sandwich wrapperon the other side.”

  “And they shot at someone.”

  “Quinn? Did they get her?”

  “I hope not.” Logan ran a hand through his dark hair. “What do you think happened?”

  “I wish I knew,” Ross answered. “Either Quinn got away, or not.”

  Logan winced.

  “What about the ghost?”

  “I didn’t feel him,” Logan said.

  “Can you show me his grave?”

  Logan walked back up the hill and strode into the patch of ground he had always avoided. He walked in a circle, keeping his gaze down, looking for a spot where a man might have been buried seventy-five years earlier. But there was no indication of where that might be.

  Ross did the same, tramping carefully around the area. “You sensed him, sensed something around here prior to this?”

  “Yes. But it’s like he’s gone.”

  “We can search in a wider circle and see if we can pick up Quinn’s trail,” Ross suggested.

  Logan could tell from the tone of his cousin’s voice that he wasn’t hopeful about finding anything after the rainstorm. But he wasn’t sure what else to do. Really, he didn’t want to go back and tell the women that they’d uncovered a nasty mystery in the woods.

  “Maybe Quinn will call you,” Ross said.

  “Maybe,” Logan answered, wondering if he was ever goingto hear from her again—or if she was going to show up making a surprise attack on the house.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Caleb took another step toward the bed. Then another,feeling like invisible ropes were drawing him toward the woman sleeping there. Whatever happened, he had to wake her, because he couldn’t stand not knowing where he stood with her.

  As he drew closer, he could tell that she had showered, too. He caught the scent of the same soap he had used—but on her it was different, with an underlying feminine quality that teased his senses.
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br />   “Quinn.”

  He wasn’t even aware that her name had escaped his lips until her eyes snapped open. For a moment she looked confusedand panicked, and his chest contracted.

  Then she focused on him, and her expression changed.

  “Caleb?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  Quickly, he crossed the last few feet of space between them, wondering if she was going to leap off the bed and back away from him.

  But she stayed where she was, and he felt as though he had won a major victory. He eased onto the side of the bed, his hands clenched at his sides.

  She was looking at him with those beautiful dark eyes of hers.

  “You fell asleep so fast. Are you feeling better?” she asked.

  “Yes.” He raised one shoulder. “I guess I needed to recharge.” His hand trembled as he raised it to her face, stroking his finger against her cheek, marveling at the sensationof skin against skin.

  “It was different before. I can really feel you now,” he murmured.

  “You couldn’t feel me?”

  He cast his thoughts back, trying to explain how it was. “I could. Sort of. But it was different. Not solid. ”

  It had been a disconnected feeling, he realized. Although it had been all he could hope for, he didn’t really want to talk about it now.

  He was sure she could sense the difference in him. And he knew damn well that she was reacting to him—as he was to her.

  Or, he hoped he wasn’t reading what he wanted into the way her body quivered under his touch.

  She opened her mouth to say something, but he didn’t want any more talking. He wanted her. Fiercely. Completely.

  Gathering her close, he brought his mouth down to hers, his lips moving urgently, the contact threatening to swamp his senses.

  He had felt alive under the shower. But the sensation was nothing compared to what he was feeling at this moment. He was aroused to a fever pitch of need, and the woman he wanted was in his arms. On a real bed with him. Not on a bed of leaves out in the forest.

  The covers had become an intolerable barrier. Standing again, he stripped them away, looking up and down the length of her body—from her small feet, to her long, beautifullyshaped legs, to the hem of her T-shirt. It had hiked up, and he could see the dark triangle of hair at the top of her legs. He wanted to touch her there. But not yet.

  From some unwanted place, a wayward image flashed into his mind—the stranger’s face he had seen in the mirror. He clenched his jaw.

  Quinn’s expresson changed. “Caleb, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  He pushed the image away. It didn’t matter what he looked like. What mattered was making Quinn his own.

  He came down beside her on the bed again and lowered his head, kissing her softly as his fingers stroked over her face, then her neck and collarbone. Her shirt was in the way of further progress, so he dragged it up, then stripped it over her head so that she lay naked before him.

  Her eyes were large and luminous in the dim light, and when she reached to touch his lips, he murmured, “You want this as much as I do.”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank God.”

  He heard a sound roaring in his ears and understood that it was his own blood rushing in his veins.

  His own blood!

  Lord, he could hardly believe this was happening. Hardly believe that everything had changed in a split second. Fate had given him his life back, and he could make love to Quinn as he had longed to do.

  He reached for her hand, knitting his fingers with hers, and his heart squeezed when she returned the pressure.

  He could barely breathe. Barely keep his body from trembling.

  He lifted his other hand, so that he could stroke her hair back from her face, then tangle his fingers in the thick strands before angling his head so he could bring his lips to hers again.

  His reality had contracted to this bed. This woman. And he sought contact with her everywhere he could.

  His mouth on hers, his hands moving over her body. His cock pressed against her thigh.

  He thought he might explode with need. But he knew he had to hold himself back long enough to give her the same firestorm of pleasure that gathered inside him.

  It had been so long since he had been a flesh and blood man holding a woman in his arms. And now Quinn was here. With him. The right woman.

  His life mate.

  That startling thought almost swamped him.

  His life mate.

  He had thought that joy would be impossible for him. Yet here she was. And it felt so real. So right.

  If you counted the years of his life, he was too young to have bonded. But he thought maybe the time of being a ghost had made a difference.

  Thrusting the ghost out of his mind, he rubbed his lips against hers. “Quinn, I love your sweet mouth and your sexy body. I love the way you smell. I love your silky skin.”

  He punctuated each phrase with little kisses, starting with her face then moving downward over the tops of her breasts and the valley between them, burying his face in her softness and breathing in her intoxicating scent.

  Her hands cupped the back of his head, holding him to her as she combed her fingers through his hair.

  “Oh, Lord,” he gasped. “I want to drown in you.”

  He turned his head one way and then the other, glorying in the feel of each breast and the beautiful sight of her erect nipples. Then he moved a few inches so that he could circle one tight bud with his tongue. The taste was glorious. And when he sucked it into his mouth, she surged against him, wordless vibrations coming off her like waves of pleasure.

  He rolled her to her side, keeping her hip against his cock, clasping her against his heat and hardness as he devouredher mouth.

  He was almost dizzy with the sensations zinging through him. Touching her. Tasting her was almost too much for him. Yet he couldn’t stop.

  “Lord, I can’t believe you are here with me. After all this time,” he said, his voice husky, his hand tracing the curve of her hip, then drifting lower to tangle in the wonderful crinkly hair at the top of her legs.

  “Oh!”

  Touching her there sent darts of sensation to his nerve endings. Craving more, he slid his hand lower, into the slick, moist heat of her pussy.

  She was plump and swollen. Ready for sex. Ready for him.

  Wordlessly, she told him how much she wanted him as her hips rose against his fingers.

  He stroked through her sensitive folds, dipping two fingersinside her and withdrawing. Her breath was coming broken and fast as he built her pleasure.

  He wanted everything. All at once. He wanted to run his tongue through the wonderful moisture of that most intimate part of her. But they would have time for that later. All the time in the world. For now, he was afraid that if he didn’t finishthis soon, he would embarrass himself.

  When he ripped off the loose pants, his cock sprang free. He was so hard that he wavered between pleasure and pain.

  “Now. I need you now,” he gasped.

  “Yes!”

  His blood had turned to a molten river, but his physical response was only part of what he felt. He sensed she was with him—body and soul.

  He rolled her to her back, parting her legs with his knee.

  “Now!” he said again, claiming her with one powerful thrust.

  He heard her catch her breath.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  For a long moment he held himself still, staring down at her in wonder. He was inside her. It was real. And physical.

  He wanted it to last forever. This gut-wrenching moment of claiming his mate.

  But the urgency was too great. He began to move inside her, with measured strokes at first, until it was impossible to keep the pace slow and deliberate.

  She clung to his shoulders and his hand moved between them, stroking and pressin
g as he urged her toward completion.

  “Caleb!”

  The sound of his name on her lips made his breath catch. It caught again as he felt her tighten around him, heard her cry out in ecstasy. And as she came, waves of pleasure took him, carrying him to some far place where he had never expectedto travel again.

  He felt her clinging to him. When he tried to look down into her face, moisture blurred his vision. He didn’t want her to see that weakness, so he clasped the back of her head and pressed her face against his chest.

  He felt her lips moving over him. “Caleb,” she said again, her voice a soft caress.

  He kissed the top of her head as he folded her close and rolled to his side. Climax had left his body limp. But the emotions he felt were even more intense than when he’d first taken her into his arms.

  There was so much that he wanted to say to her about what the two of them would mean to each other. But he sensed that it was too soon. At least for her.

  And maybe for him.

  He held her, sliding his fingers over her damp shoulder, kissing her cheek.

  “Thank you,” he murmured.

  She reached to stroke her fingers against his lips. “I thought we could never have this,” she whispered. “And I was so sad.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m glad you’re here. Like this.” She slid her hand down his arm, over his hip, tracing the length of his body. The body that didn’t match his mental image of himself. But he would learn to deal with that. He had to.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know—about this world.” She laughed. “A lot I don’t know, either. But I can show you some of it.”

  She cleared her throat. Her head was tipped down, away from his face, and he wondered what she was going to say.

  “Did you remember anything?”

  “About what?”

  “The . . . man . . . they buried.”

  He had been avoiding that subject. Deliberately, he turned his thoughts inward. When he tried to recapture any of the memories from the man, he drew a big fat blank.

  “No.”

  “We have to find out who he was. And why they wanted to kill him.”

  “Yeah. But not now.”

  She looked like she was going to protest, but she ended up closing her mouth.