Home for the Holidays

by Terry Spear

  She gave him a hug and a kiss. Slowly, just a peck. But that wasn’t enough, not for either of them. He slid his hands around her back and pulled her close, her anchor as he deepened the kiss. This was what she needed. The physical closeness, the intimacy between two wolves on the verge of…mating, hopefully, if things worked out between them like she hoped they would.

  He groaned as he pressed his rigid cock against her belly, and she ran her hands over his flannel shirt, loving the feel of the soft fabric against his hard muscles. His hands shifted up her back, underneath her green cashmere sweater, and caressed her bare skin.

  She was already getting wet, just thinking about taking this to the next level, their kisses deepening, their bodies rubbing against each other in a prelude to sex. But then Peter kissed her forehead and pulled his hands out from beneath her sweater, and she knew something was bothering him that he needed to share with her before they went much further.

  She sighed and kissed his cheek, then pulled away to fetch the butter she’d forgotten to set on the table.

  “I didn’t think we’d ever be alone after all that’s happened today.” Peter’s voice was ragged with lust.

  “I agree. I’m sorry about Rollins coming here.” Her own voice was a bit husky with need.

  “We’ll take care of him, if he’s in the area. If not, my brother, Bjornolf, is a retired SEAL, and he and his wife, Anna, go after rogue wolves like Rollins.” Peter lifted the carving knife and fork and began to cut up the chicken. “If Rollins isn’t in our territory any longer, I’ll ask Bjornolf if he can do this. Darien would okay the funds for it, though I’m sure Bjornolf would offer to do the job for free if it means keeping pack members safe.”

  “That sounds great.” Meghan was relieved they could send someone else after Rollins if they didn’t terminate him in Silver Town. She didn’t think Rollins would ever quit his abusive behavior. And after he’d murdered the men in the mine, he needed to be terminated.

  They took their seats and began serving the meal. Peter cleared his throat, and Meghan was afraid he was going to tell her how he felt about her concerning Rollins or the ghostly business.

  Peter set his fork on his plate. “Okay, I need to talk to you about something important.”

  Maybe it wasn’t about her. Maybe it was about the secret? He sounded so serious.

  “Except for anyone who is fairly new to town, most everyone knows I had a wife back in Victorian times.”

  So Chrissy hadn’t made a mistake. Meghan was surprised no one else had made the slip about it.

  She was glad Peter had finally told her. “Um, okay, no, I didn’t know about that. I mean, not from anybody who was living.” She let out her breath. “Chrissy made the mistake of mentioning it. Not that I was totally convinced she knew what she was talking about. Sometimes ghosts get stories mixed up.”

  Peter’s brows shot up. “Chrissy?”

  “Yes. I didn’t say anything to my sisters about it. If it was true, I wanted to learn that from you.” She suspected he hadn’t mentioned it before because, as with her and Rollins, it wasn’t something he’d want to bring up unless he had to.

  “Yeah, she wasn’t like you. She was quiet, reserved, usually eager to please—”

  Meghan smiled a little.

  He chuckled. “I mean you’re different in a good way. Not so quiet, but in this day and age, I love that. You have a mind of your own. You love renovating hotels and really getting into the nitty-gritty part of the business. You’re good at time management, people management, getting things done, and still having fun with family and friends. I can’t imagine all that you do to keep the inn running and still have time for anything else. You’re much more outgoing, and I love that. Yet you have your quiet periods too.”

  He picked up his glass of wine. “I can’t believe of all the people who knew and could have told you about my wife that it came down to one unhappy ghost who shared the secret with you. But yeah, my life just wouldn’t be the same without you in it now.”

  “I’m good with it, Peter. Listen, after the icy response from Bill when I told him what I’d done regarding Rollins, I was so afraid you’d feel the same way. The thing of it was, I hadn’t even told Bill about my paranormal abilities.” Meghan let out her breath, wanting the truth more than anything. “How do you feel about the ghost business as it pertains to me?”

  Peter shook his head. “It’s fine with me. It just makes you more intriguing.” He gave her a little smile. Then his smile faded and he was serious again. “Okay, so that’s part of what I’d wanted to tell you—that I was mated. I’ve been wanting to tell you all this, but I was afraid of revealing it to you. But now it’s even more than that. I’m afraid if I took you to the old homestead, you might even find Lena roaming around there. I had never given it any thought, believing I’d buried her many years ago and she was gone. Not from my heart, but she was no longer in our world. I never considered that her spirit would be caught up in our world, not until you found the miners’ spirits stuck in the mine. You made me realize how real it all could be. Hell, what if you saw Lena caught between worlds like the others?”

  “Ohmigod, Peter.” Meghan didn’t know how to feel about that. What if his deceased mate was still haunting their old home? What if Lena didn’t want Peter to mate again? What if Meghan went to see her, and Lena attached herself to Meghan and tried to make her life a living hell? If Meghan went to see Lena, she could really be stirring up a hornet’s nest. On the other hand, Meghan felt compelled to ensure Lena had found peace. At least to give Peter some peace of mind. He might not feel free to mate Meghan until she checked into it. Sometimes she felt her ghostly abilities were a calling. Other times, like now, a curse!

  “I really never thought about it. Even if I had, I couldn’t have done anything about it. The thing was, she died a violent death and that sometimes means the spirit is left behind. Right?” Peter asked, sounding worried.

  “Yes.” Meghan hated to admit it.

  “All right, so ever since we went into the mine, I’ve been thinking about it.” He stiffened his back a little and continued talking. “I need to tell you, too, that I did something I shouldn’t have done back then. The man who killed her was human, looking for money and jewelry when he visited our home. We were poor. And you know as wolves, we don’t wear jewelry. I was a hunter at the time. There was nothing really at the home for him to steal.”

  “I’m so sorry, Peter.” She truly was. Wolves mated for life for a reason. They were devoted to each other for all time. At least Lena’s ghost, if it was earthbound, hadn’t attached to Peter. “Thank you for telling me.” Meghan knew it had to be difficult for him to discuss it or he would have told her a long time ago. “So you weren’t a deputy sheriff then.”

  “No, not then. I tracked the man down in the forest where he’d wrecked a stolen carriage and was running on foot. He turned to fire a gun at me, and I ducked, the tree taking the round. The next time he shot at me, I was able to take aim and I shot him dead. I should have wounded him and turned him over to the sheriff. I should never have taken revenge like I did. He was human. He should have had a trial.”

  So that’s why Peter had been so reluctant to tell her everything. His secret wasn’t just that he’d had a mate. He’d tried to do exemplary work, wanting to be all that the sheriff, Sheridan Silver, hadn’t been. And yet he’d had his own demons to face.

  Meghan touched Peter’s hand. “You did what I would have done, had I been able to. If I’d seen Rollins in the woods, you better believe I would have stripped, shifted, and killed him.”

  “He is a wolf. You would have been justified in ending his miserable life before he claimed any more victims.”

  Meghan sighed. “Okay, I see your point.” Though she still felt the human had it coming to him. But if the regular police had learned of it? Peter could have been found guilty of murder.

&nb
sp; “Anyway, the sheriff deputized me, backdating the paperwork, and said I had been after the man for stealing the carriage while in the line of duty, in case anyone looked into it. The murderer was armed with a gun and fired a couple of shots at me before I eliminated him. And he had shot and killed my wife. So it was justified, to an extent. Sheridan wanted it to look as if I didn’t know the man had murdered my wife when I went after him.”

  “Sheridan seemed to have a good side and a bad side to him.” She knew Sheridan had been in so much trouble for killing Darien’s first mate. Then Sheridan had been involved in several other bad situations. He had been just as much a rogue as Rollins.

  “I’m sure Sheridan did it because of all the shenanigans he’d pulled over the years. He liked to think he wasn’t the only one who had done wrong. If he ever needed to hold it over my head, he could.”

  “Did he?”

  “A time or two.”

  “So no one else knew what you had done.”

  “It would have been too much of a coincidence that I’d suddenly been deputized, that my mate had died, that I had chased down and killed her murderer, and that it had all been in the line of duty. Some probably suspected the truth. No one contradicted the sheriff. No one ever questioned me. And it’s been so long ago now that I never talk about it and hadn’t ever planned to, unless someone asked me or someone special came into my life, like you.”

  Meghan could imagine how much that had weighed on his conscience. Peter always seemed to do everything by the book when it came to obeying wolf and human laws. He seemed always to take the moral high ground, which she admired.

  “I believe that everyone was glad the man had been eliminated for what he had done to my mate, no matter how it had come about. Still, I knew better. Yet at the time, I couldn’t stop myself.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about your mate before this?” Meghan suspected Peter felt guilty about even thinking of having another mate. That it would make him appear disloyal to her memory. For wolves, that could be a big issue. Just like the triplets’ mom wouldn’t ever take another mate after she lost hers when Meghan and her sisters were little.

  “It took me a long time to get over losing her. For over a year, I howled my distress for nights on end. I wasn’t eating. Darien read me the riot act. And so did all the Silvers. Tom and CJ are my best friends, and they harangued me the worst. I left the pack for about nine months. Everything reminded me of her and of killing the man who had murdered her. But Sheridan sent out a search party of you know who—”

  “The Silver brothers and cousins,” Meghan guessed.

  “Yeah, and a few other good-hearted souls who said they were putting me under arrest for dereliction of duty.”

  Meghan smiled. “In other words, quitting your deputy sheriff job wasn’t going to be allowed.” She and her sisters had never been part of a pack, so learning the ins and outs of the wolves and their dynamics had been a real education. She loved the pack and all they did for one another. Darien and Lelandi had even dropped the price of the inn and the Victorian house so she and her sisters could afford to purchase them—all because they had renovated and managed hotels before and were three eligible she-wolves in a pack without enough of them.

  “Right. I’d sworn an oath of upholding the office, and I was shirking my duty.” He smiled a little, but then his smile faded. “I had a devil of a time coping for years. Everyone and everything reminded me of her. I wanted to isolate myself at the house we’d owned, but everyone kept dragging me to all the pack’s social functions. And the place reminded me too much of her and all that had gone on there.

  “I finally abandoned the old homestead. I still pay the taxes on it, but I never lived there again. Slowly, I began to recover after losing Lena, and when Sheridan was finally removed as sheriff for murdering Darien’s first mate, I became sheriff. Hell, I knew I’d never find another she-wolf I was in the least bit interested in. I wasn’t looking. I had no intention of ever courting another.” He scoffed.

  “Then here you are, all bushy-tailed, red-haired, beautiful green eyes, and well, hell, it was like I’d been given a second chance. I couldn’t stop myself from seeing you. I didn’t tell you about all this because I was afraid you would see me in a bad light. And there wasn’t any sense of bringing it up until we were further along in our relationship.”

  “I completely understand. How long did you court Lena before you mated each other?”

  “Three years.”

  Meghan closed her gaping mouth. No way could she last that long if she really treasured the wolf.

  “I don’t want to wait that long this time,” Peter said. “Her parents had courted on and off for five years. So she thought three years was fast. Because of my work, I was gone a lot, and she was living at home with her parents, so we didn’t see each other on a regular basis. Not like I see you. It would be months before I’d see her, and we were always chaperoned when we got together again.”

  Meghan smiled. “Unlike with us.”

  “Certainly not in this day and age.” He sighed. “We’d been mated for only a year when she was murdered, so we hadn’t had any children yet. We’d both wanted to wait and get to know each other as a couple first.”

  “Which is a good idea, if you can wait. Then you can have fun as a mated couple before you’re doing everything as a family. My sisters are holding off for that reason too.” They lived long lives, so they could afford to wait, and they mated for life, normally, so that was another reason to enjoy their early mated bliss without having to take care of wolf kids for a while. “I’m so sorry for what you went through, and for what happened to Lena.”

  “You really don’t feel anything negative about me having had a mate already and then…all the rest? Especially with a mating in the plans?”

  “Is that what you’re trying to do? Propose to me?” She couldn’t help but be amused at the offhand way he was leading up to it.

  “I’m working up to it.”

  She chuckled. “You don’t have to worry about me. I was glad Eric could convince his mate, Pepper Greycoat, to give him a chance after she’d lost her first one. They’re perfect together.” Then she frowned. “But you’re all right about my paranormal abilities? And the situation with Rollins?”

  “Hell, yeah. And if I don’t get you to agree to be my mate soon, I’m afraid other bachelor males will do something about it. I don’t want to tarnish my reputation of being a good sheriff by throwing them in jail if they hit on you.”

  She laughed. “And Bill?”

  “Bill better not even think about coming near you.”

  “You don’t want to wait three years?”

  “Hell no.” Then Peter’s brows lifted a little. “Do you?”

  “No, but I don’t think you’re ready.” That was the hardest thing for Meghan to say. She realized, after how good Peter had been about the Rollins and ghost situations, that he was the right one for her. She was certain that until this business about Lena possibly being a ghost was resolved one way or another, he could have real misgivings. Neither he nor she needed that kind of conflict in their lives. It sure wasn’t something she could have anticipated either.

  Peter glanced down at his food and poked at his chicken. “You’re right.” He looked up at her again. “After I saw the way you were talking with the miners’ ghosts, I figured I couldn’t settle down until I knew for sure if Lena was at peace or if she was roaming around the old homestead. If it wasn’t that we promise our mate it’s for life…”

  That was what Meghan was afraid of, but she was glad Peter wasn’t ignoring his feelings. She thought it was best they got this out of the way first. Hopefully, Lena would already be gone, and it wouldn’t be an obstacle for them.

  Chapter 11

  Once he’d seen Meghan communicate with ghosts, Peter knew he couldn’t mate her until they were certain Lena was at rest.
Not only for his own peace of mind, but especially for Meghan’s. After all, she was the one who could see her and be bothered by it most of all. What if his mate’s spirit would speak to or hassle Meghan if they discovered she was still hanging around the homestead?

  He hated putting Meghan in this position and even considered that one of her sisters might be the one to ask. He didn’t want to slight Meghan in any way, though. He suspected she’d want to be involved.

  “Okay, so I don’t really want to ask this of you, and I could ask your sisters instead, but I want you to be completely honest with me. Will you see if Lena’s at peace? Or would it be too upsetting for you, and should I ask Laurel or Ellie instead?”

  “I’ll do it, Peter. But I have to warn you there might be consequences.” She ate a bite of her chicken leg.

  “Like…?”

  “Ghosts often are attached to something. In one case we worked, it was a ghost who had built a home for his lovely wife and daughter. We had looked at it as a possible Victorian bed-and-breakfast in Waco, Texas. His wife and daughter had died of cholera. He stayed in the home until he died of old age. As a ghost, he continues to live there. Some are hard to exorcise. He’s content there, and he’s not moving. The heart and soul of him are wrapped up in that house. All the love he poured into it to make his wife and daughter happy is still there.”

  “So you’re saying if Lena’s spirit is still at the homestead, she might never want to leave.”

  “Right. My question to you then is can you live with her being there if we can’t give her peace?”

  Hell, he’d never expected to have to deal with anything like this. “Yes.” But he suspected he’d never want to go to the old homestead again. He’d have to sell it. Then again, deep down, he must have considered she’d never left the place. That he didn’t want anyone living in their home. That he didn’t want anyone tearing it down and leaving her “homeless.”

  “Here’s another scenario. Sometimes people will attach themselves to objects. And sometimes to…people. If she attached herself to you, I probably couldn’t do anything about it. You wouldn’t know she was with you, but I would.”