Her eyes opened to the inside of an old car that seemed to have more space than her own—what kind of car did she have again? She couldn’t remember. Inconsistent memories and the notion to worry about them flittered away. She stretched her feet out, enjoying the vehicle’s roominess.
“Good, you’re awake.” A deep voice emanated from the shadowed form in the driver’s seat.
Huh? Confusion yanked her head toward the driver. What the hell’s going on? She struggled to recall something. Anything. Memories—details of her life fuzzed and faded in the fog. But nothing came to her.
“I was afraid there for a minute that I’d hit you,” he added, clutching the steering wheel.
She said nothing, kneading her temples as if she could massage her recall back into place.
“Are you okay? Can you talk?” Out of the darkness, he reached across and rested his hand against her arm. Chills shuddered through her, as if her body knew his touch.
She turned to face him, his features hidden by the darkness. Did she know him? Doubt ran down her back like a cold shower, washing away her defenses.
“Do you live near here?” he asked.
Did she? Hell if she knew.
Fear rocketed from her gut and stalled into a chokehold, leaving her speechless. Struggling breaths accompanied her overwhelming desire to be anywhere but here. Sometimes stranger equaled danger. She prayed this wasn’t one of those times.
Instinct drove her to stay calm, but search for the door handle. When she located the slender lever, relief prompted her. Should she run?
No, not yet.
Finding the door handle had liberated her panic-stricken heart. Izzy no longer felt threatened, just anxious and uncertain. But she clung to the lever—in case.
“I’m going to take you to the hospital.” He straightened in his seat and reached for the keys in the ignition.
Her fingers fumbled in the dark, over the seat and against the back. “Where’s the seatbelt?”
“Seatbelt?” Lips pursing into doubt, he started the car. The engine rumbled to life with thunderous vibrations.
Hotrod.
“You must have hit your head really hard,” he said, shifting the car into gear.
“Tell me about it.” Why did she ask about a seatbelt? What is a seatbelt, anyway?
Izzy took a long, lingering look around the car’s interior. The glove box branded the automobile a Chevrolet, but the monstrous dashboard, bulky gauges and uneven upholstery seemed dated, not the least bit familiar. None of it fit the image of her clothing—jeans and a red tee with the word Southpole glittering across her chest.
She tried to remember the last place she’d been before ending up here, but she had no memories prior to the one where he’d nearly run her over.
Who was the driver? Something about his hands—the bronze color of his skin, the span of his long fingers and their invisible influence—whispered that she should know him.
“What were you doing in the middle of the road?” he asked, backing out of the ditch.
She didn’t know. Noisy grumbling from the engine intensified, making it hard to recall anything but her name. Izzy closed her eyes as if that would help. It didn’t. Nothing else emerged. “I think I’m dead.”
He chuckled. “Sweetheart, you’re not dead, see—” A skeptical yet playful tone surfaced in his voice. “—Unless I’m communicating with the spirit world.”
That elicited excitement that shot her mouth open. What a fascinating concept. Talking to the dead...strangely enough, that seemed possible. Intrigue curled her gaping mouth into a smile.
“I was just kidding.” He laughed. “If you were a ghost, could I do this?” His hand emerged in the darkness and patted hers.
“I think I’d be a spirit, rather than a ghost.” Her words tumbled out, but where the hell they came from she had no idea. “But still, you wouldn’t be able to touch me.”
His hand, still on hers, ignited desire—intense, passionate, heated yearning that promised to smolder long after the contact was over.
Izzy’s headache picked a hell of a time to return. The pain, dull and boundless, bulged like a hot air balloon pushing against the top of her head. Her heart felt like it was deflating, forcing aside her fanciful thoughts. Her vision blurred, and she fought to hang on to the simplest conscious thought.
She blacked out with a single word flittering through her mind.
Jack.
CHAPTER 3
JACK BAKER’S ethereal voice invaded Izzy’s restless sleep. She struggled to awaken, the remnants of a dull headache dying away. Fleeting glimpses of a dream faded with the pain. She tried to capture the scattering images and make them stay, but they diminished.
The lumpy cot reminded her she was in the hangar. I’m back.
Back?
Back from where?
“Isabelle, wake up. You’re having a bad dream.” Jack’s voice rang with command, ruling her awake.
The sight of the abandoned hangar drove relief up into her throat. Or maybe it was the sight of Jack looming over her. His face relaxed now that she was alert.
He drifted down and melded into the floor the same way light reaches out and blends into the darkness. The spirit wafted in, close enough to touch the cot and Izzy, if he could’ve made the physical connection.
“Bad dream?” His eyes, gray like dark smoke, pled for details.
She tried to remember, but her dreams had disappeared the moment she woke. Shaking her head, she said, “It was so weird, but it’s gone now.”
“Whatever it was, it had you troubled.” The overhead light glimmered through his translucent form and glistened like shards of ice, an obtrusive reminder that Jack was dead. “You were yelling, ‘look out...look out.’ And you kept saying, ‘I’m not supposed to be here, and, where do I know you from?’” Intrigue rippled through his voice and spilled out into his muddled figure like a pebble wrinkling a pond.
That sounded familiar, familiar enough to make her forget about his crinkling apparition. What was in that dream? Where was she not supposed to be?
Pieces of the dream emerged, broken, jagged and distorted. Standing in the middle of the road in the dark. Parked alongside a desolate highway in the dark. Trying to identify the silhouetted figure veiled inside the shadows in the dark.
Izzy scrutinized Jack. The man in her dream remained faceless, yet his identity bombarded her with regimented echoes.
Jack...Jack...Jack....
“It was you,” she said. “You almost ran me over.”
“You had a dream about me?” The impish glint in his eyes was bright enough to blind the devil himself.
“You almost killed me.”
“Do I look like I’m in a position to harm anyone?”
She tossed the sleeping bag aside. “You fared pretty well in that big old boat of yours.”
“Boat? So, now I have a boat?”
Swinging her legs over the edge of the cot, she skimmed through him. A bizarre energy shot through her like a live wire, propelling her to her feet. She stumbled back, gripped by a force stronger than her typical self-control. Something she couldn’t shake. Something she didn’t understand. But something she’d do her best to conceal.
“Don’t play games with me, Baker.”
“So that’s how it is, huh?”
“I’m serious—” She recalled the manufacturer’s name on the glove box. “—did you, or did you not, own a yellow Chevrolet when you were alive?”
“I don’t remember.” He shook his head.
The conversation died, as if someone had hit the mute button on the remote control.
Izzy felt the center of her heart go hard.
She vaulted to the desk and scoured the boxes. There must be something useful in his records. Something to remind him. Something to prove she was right.
A black and white photograph of Jack standing in front of a light-colored, possibly yellow, convertible—the same car in her dream—slipped out and drifted to
the floor.
A bad feeling crept into Jack’s brain, filling the holes and crevices and cracks with foreboding doubt. He couldn’t recall anything about a yellow convertible, but it did sound familiar.
Curiosity wrapped around him like a sea surrounds a shore. Was he the ragtop kind of guy? Maybe. Probably. Definitely.
Just when he thought he had a picture of the car in his head, the capability to imagine disappeared as if it had rolled out with the tide.
Perhaps this was one of the exorcist’s tricks. A faint trace of something troublesome streamed the idea through the air. Common sense encased him in suspicion. Was she brainwashing him? He could see how the technique might benefit her. She’d draw him in, feed him a fictional account of reality, and then—BAM. He was out the door.
Humph. Jack flittered to the chair across the room. Sitting, he draped one leg over the other knee and folded his arms across his chest.
He was certain of his place in the cosmos. He belonged here. But she wanted him to leave. Misery filled the empty cavity where his heart used to live. His foot fell off his knee and plunged through the floor.
Control began to slip away, eluding Jack like a revoked furlough. He had to get it back. He didn’t like change. Change meant something he couldn’t comprehend. Something he couldn’t manage. Something he couldn’t allow.
Some primal instinct made him cautious. His gut feeling urged him to get rid of her. Scare tactics seemed like a practical option, but he wasn’t that kind of guy.
He relaxed, leaned back and settled into the chair. His desire to know how he died outweighed the threat of being ordered into the hereafter.
He caught himself staring at her. The woman potentially held his fate in her hands and she’d postponed his doom in favor of something she referred to as Chinese takeout.
Rapt in her ritual of chowing-down, an unfamiliar term, he played with the notion of recall. Was she the kind of girl that would’ve attracted his attention when he was alive? Her hair was a little odd for his tastes, but the mixture of blonde and brown seemed appropriate for her personality.
She had no qualms about showing her true self. He liked that. When he was alive, most girls acted ridiculously, refusing to eat in his presence.
Wait— When I was alive? A paralyzing moment of clarity filled him with insight, his memory had uncovered a snippet from his life.
Jack scrolled his eyes around the room while he searched his brain for more. Just another fragment, anything at all. But nothing.
That’s it? That’s all he had? The memory of women acting silly about eating? Annoyance twitched the muscles around his right eye. He evicted the absurd thought and laughed it out the door.
The faint smell of garlic, citrus and ginger teased his nostrils. The Chinese food? His mouth watered and faint pangs of hunger rumbled in the remnants of what was once his stomach.
Jack’s head shook like a wound-up bobble head. Why couldn’t he stay focused? A hacking cough chased annoyance up his throat. He crossed his legs over his ankles.
She seemed to know, intuitively, how to push his buttons. Maybe it was time to reverse those conditions. He did possess one thing for which she had no immunity. His charm.
The exorcist had blushed, more than once, under his longing gazes. He liked looking at her. Heck, she was a woman. A very pretty woman. And he hadn’t seen one of those since...who knows when. Her body was a walking fantasy in blue jeans. She had the bluest eyes and they pierced him with haunting gazes one minute and shards of ice the next.
An undeniable connection existed between Jack and his would-be evictor. It lit up like an explosive pyrotechnic display each time their souls touched. He saw something inside her awaken. Something she wasn’t used to. Something that made her uncomfortable. Maybe it was something he could exploit.
Jack’s carefree arrogance returned. “So, what’s on the exorcism list for today?”
She splashed him with a glare that said she was running out of patience. “This isn’t funny, Jack.” An exasperated sigh seemed to drain the last of her tolerance. “There’s something holding you to this world and I intend to find out what it is.”
He stared at her, intrigue concocting clever thoughts in his mind. Keeping the exorcist around was dangerous, but her presence made him miss being alive. His desire to live had faded a long time ago, right along with sensations of hunger and pain. He didn’t miss the blistering heat of a boiling sun, or the icy-chill of a blustery winter storm. Human weaknesses had been a distant memory, until she walked in and knocked him off his spirited footing.
When he was alive, he fancied himself having been immune to the power of a woman’s charms—for more than an hour or two.
Perhaps this is payback.
“Is that it?” Jack glanced up. “Am I in hell?” His chest filled with an irritable air and he forced it out in a long, sturdy groan.
She leaned forward and sat the takeout box on the desk. Their eyes locked, like courting tigers. An alluring smile curled on her full lips.
I must be in hell. Her beauty captivated and tortured him all at the same time. There she sat, less than a couple of feet away and it might as well be a million.
The reason she was there, to exorcise him, dulled into the darkest corners of his mind, making way for his current dilemma—hell had finally arrived.
She stood and reached for her luggage.
“You moving in?” He masked his inner turmoil with humor. It’s a good thing ghosts don’t sweat.
She extended the suitcase’s unusually long handle, dragged it across the room and disappeared behind an old wall screen. “I’m here for the duration.”
“Duration of what?”
She began to undress behind the partition. His nomadic imagination amplified his animal instincts. He savored the view of her silhouetted figure.
“At the risk of sounding rude, Captain Baker—” Tenacity tangled with her velvet-edged voice, seducing him, “—the United States Government wants you gone.”
And you’re my eviction notice. That did present a problem. He paused, wanting to keep his thoughts to himself, but some overriding consideration prevailed. “But why?”
“My details are sketchy,” she said, “but somebody wants to buy the property, and they want it ghost-free.”
“But I’m not a ghost, see...according to you.”
“They still don’t want you here.”
She continued to work behind the screen, changing her clothes and shuffling things around in her suitcase.
The reason she’d waltzed into his afterlife attempted a come-back. He discarded it like some incurable disease.
“Darlin’, don’t you have somewhere else to be?” He posed the question conditionally, testing the idea. “Surely there’s a fellow out there that’s better company than me.”
“Whether or not I have somewhere better to be is beside the point.” Her stern words cut his confidence in half. A chill frosted the space around him.
Damn. He swore at the useless feelings, insisting they depart. Settling down, he waited for the silence to restore his ingenuity. His only chance to distract her was by changing the subject. “How old are you, Isabelle?”
“And my age matters how, exactly?” She tossed a pair of jeans across the top of the partition.
“Obviously you’re not married.”
She stepped out from behind the screen, fully clothed. Her coolness implied she was not amused.
Uh oh. He tilted his head sideways, a mischievous grin setting the tone. Hands on her hips? That can’t be good.
“Why is that so obvious?”
“Well...” He stalled, relaxing on the edge of the desk. “If you were married, see, you wouldn’t hang out here with me all night.”
Discomfort painted her cheeks red like Maraschino cherries, but one smile from him and her frustration faded.
She moved closer, leaned back against the desk and crossed one leg over the other. “Are you able to leave here?”
; “I’m able to wander around outside a bit. But I always end up back here, right where I started.”
“How much power do you have over your manifestation ability?”
“The only time I lose control is when I’m surprised or caught off guard.”
“So, as long as you’re comfortable, then you can remain in contact with me?” She fished for details with great expertise. The quality was admirable, if not dangerous.
Letting her know too much about him wasn’t safe. Still, he continued to reveal himself. “Yep, so long as you don’t drop another bomb on me.”
“Why don’t you want to go on?”
“Go on?”
“To the hereafter,” she said. “Heaven, if you will.”
“Because I like it here.”
“Here?” She looked around, a mask of disappointment hardening on her face. Her expression supported the notion that she saw the hangar as deserted and void of life.
Jack drifted up, as if standing. “Come here.” He beckoned her with a waggling forefinger. Just a few strides into the wide-open area of the hangar, he stopped. “What do you see?” One look into her inquisitive eyes and his distrust vanished like a distant memory. One moment it was there and the next it had disappeared without a trace. “Nothing, right?”
“It’s empty.”
“Maybe so. But sometimes I remember flying. And when I do, I see the Spitfires and P-51 Mustangs.” He paused, an invisible veil of gloom draping around him. “I just can’t fly them. Talk about hell.”
She dragged her fingers through her hair and held it out of her face. Exasperation clouded her eyes as they darted between him and the vacant area. “Why in the world would you want to stay here if it feels like hell?” She let her hair go. It fell around her face, seducing him into a dangerous place—vulnerability.
Jack huffed and reverted back to his distraction tactic. “Why did you send my friends away?” he said of the sprites and fairies.
She ignored his question. “Maybe you could fly a plane up there if you went on to, you know—heaven.”
“Good one.” He glided back into the office.
She matched his drifted pace. “I’m serious.” Her tone intensified. “Why do you want to stay here?”
Incredible Dreams Page 3
