by Ann Charles
“Damn,” his breath came in short huffs. “You are …” he raked his fingers through his hair, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he stared. “Damn.”
“You already said that.” I rubbed my boot up and down his thigh. “You want to see something, Doc?”
He glanced up at me. “I want to see everything.”
I grabbed a handful of my skirt and teased it up over my knees. When his focus shifted downward, I slowly ran my other hand up, up, up. Tracing my inner thigh, I led his gaze, doing my best to tempt him into touching me and more.
His hands hovered over my thighs, fingers flexing. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing to me?” he rasped.
“I know what I’m trying to do to you.” I inched my skirt higher. “And I know what I want you to do to me.”
His hands landed on my legs, his palms burning hot. “What do you want me to do?”
I placed my hands over his and guided him north, to my throbbing center. “Touch me.”
His thumbs skimmed over the inner hemline of my underwear, tempting. “Like this?”
I writhed, my body ready for him last week. “More.”
“Not until you lie back.”
I hesitated. “I don’t want to scratch your hood.”
“Violet, it’s just a car. Lie back and let me play, too.”
I did as told, resting on my elbows so I could watch him. “What are you going to do?”
He pushed my skirt the rest of the way up and stared down at my underwear. “Watch and see.” He bent over and skimmed his lips along my stomach above the waistline of my panties. It tickled my nether regions and then some, making my breath hitch.
“Do that again,” I ordered.
He obeyed, adding a brush of his fingertips to the mix.
I moaned, lying flat on the hood. The heat of the engine warmed my bare back while Doc worked his magic on me, his touch searing me from the waist down.
It didn’t take long for him to have me thrashing, begging for more. He took me close to the edge and then pulled back, amplifying my need to feel him inside of me.
Threading my fingers through his hair, I lifted his head so he could meet my eyes. “I’m ready.”
“I noticed.”
“Let’s make this a two player game.”
“Are you going to start talking sports to me again?” He hooked his fingers in my underwear and tugged them down. “These need to go.”
“Wait.” I sat up. “Do you like them? I bought them just for you.”
“I’ll write an ode to them later. Right now, they’re in my way.” He threw my panties over his shoulder and locked onto my hips, pulling me toward the edge.
“I’ve never had sex on a car before.” I grabbed his shirt and lifted it. He knocked my hands away and took it off for me. It went the way of my underwear. “Have you?”
“Sure, I do it all of the time.” He chuckled when I slapped his shoulder. He ran his hands up my legs, starting at the heels of my boots and ending at my waist. “No, Boots, I haven’t. But I’m happy to give it a try. Wrap your legs around me.”
I obeyed, leaning in to kiss his ear.
He pulled slightly away, eyeing me. “You’re not going to bite that ear again, are you?”
“Trust me, you big baby.” I pulled him back to me and brushed my lips over his ear, being extra tender with it. “See,” I whispered, “was that so bad?”
He turned and kissed me hard, dominating me until I submitted with a sigh-filled moan. I rubbed against him, creating a delicious friction that made my body hum. “What are you waiting for?” I asked. “Written instructions?”
“Your skirt is in the way,” he said, tugging on the cotton material that had somehow wrapped around me.
“Here,” I said yanking it out of the way. “Is that good?”
“It’ll be great in a moment,” he said, fitting against me.
I bit my lower lip in anticipation, grinning at him. “Are you going to show me how hard you can hit the boards?”
“You’re hopeless, Violet,” he said and then drove into me, pulling me tight.
He was right. I was hopeless. I was positively gaga in love with him. I captured his mouth, wanting to taste him as he took me. His hands caressed and rubbed as he pushed me higher and higher with each stroke.
“Doc,” I panted, gripping his shoulders, arching into him. “Right. There. Don’t. Stop.”
“Like this?”
I didn’t have a chance to answer. Pleasure steamrolled over me. I cried out his name several times, and then trembled for another round of ripples. When I came back down, I kissed him, lavishing his mouth the way I knew from experience would light his fire with a ka-boom. Then I dug my boot heels into him.
Groaning, he thrust into me a few more times before he seized up, his muscles straining. Then he buried his face in my neck, heating my skin with his exhale.
I stroked his bare shoulders, wishing we could hide out in here for a week. My butt bone ground into the hood, placing its vote for Doc’s bed instead. I squirmed and he stepped back, adjusting himself while I pulled my skirt down, fastened my bra, looked around for my shirt, and pretended I wasn’t a shameless, wanton woman when it came to his touch.
“Violet.” He zipped his pants, looking toward the workbench.
“Yes?” I followed his gaze. My underwear had landed on the counter.
“I really like those panties.”
I laughed, wrapping my arms around his neck, pulling him in for a slow kiss, a finale of sorts. “Are you going to fix me something to eat or not?”
His lips curved, his gaze warm and heart-melting. “I’d peel grapes for you if you’d like on one condition.”
“Name it.” I touched the necklace from Aunt Zoe. “But if you’re going to request that I join you in the shower, I get to choose the soap I use to wash your back.” The cinnamon flavored was my favorite.
“I like it better when you hand wash my front. But first, what did …” He looked down at my necklace I was still fiddling with and stopped. “Where did you get that necklace?”
“Aunt Zoe gave it to me after I told her about last night’s séance. Why?”
He frowned at me. “It has symbols from the book on it.”
“What book?”
“That book about Kyrkozz that you gave to her.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
“We need to tell Cooper how Ms. Wolff died,” Doc said a half an hour later while I sat at his kitchen counter eating the chicken breast and salad he’d set down in front of me.
I’d told him my version of the séance while he stood at the stove, cooking our lunch. From waking up on the wrong side of the mirror in Ms. Wolff’s bedroom to how I reached into the darkness with my mind and grabbed onto Freesia’s hand to return to the present. The shrunken heads weren’t news to him, since he’d been on the scene, too, viewing the events through the greaser’s eyes. We’d both agreed that based on what Ms. Wolff’s body looked like when Harvey and I found it, she had suffered the same fate as the other three in the past—a beheading via a freaky-ass, medieval looking ax. Or “scythe” as the albino had called it.
But just because we knew the where and when answers to the murder equation, and now we agreed on the how part, that didn’t mean I concurred on the Cooper incorporation.
“No way,” I told Doc, who joined me at the counter, his plate in hand. “He’ll never believe us. And even if he did consider what we tell him, he’d wonder how we know this and the truth about you would come out.”
Doc sliced off a piece of chicken. “I’m beginning to wonder if we should be more concerned if truths about you surfaced.”
“Which truths?”
“All of them—Rex, Prudence, the demon book, the mirror trip, and who knows what else.” Doc stabbed the chicken piece. “Next to you, big tuna, I might be a minnow.”
We chewed on that in silence for a couple of chicken bites. Then I remembered a question that had come to me in the middle of
the night during Addy’s earache. “How did you get back inside the greaser’s head? He was already dead when you wrote the word MIRROR on the wall, wasn’t he?”
“I didn’t go back in through the greaser.”
“You didn’t?” I ate the last of my chicken.
“When I was in that apartment in the greaser’s point-of-view, right before you scared the hell out of me by rushing out of the bedroom to face off with the killer, I picked up a scent.”
I swallowed a drink of water. “Of what?” Or who?
“Someone else was there watching, too. Another ghost.”
Chills peppered my forearms. “Ohhh, creepy.”
“After the greaser died, I woke up back in Ms. Wolff’s apartment and noticed two things immediately—you had left the room and that same scent I’d picked up while inside the greaser was there with us, stronger than ever.”
“Let me get this straight. You’re saying the same ghost was in that apartment both in the past and present.”
He nodded, slicing off another piece of chicken breast.
“But this new ghost hadn’t been a live person during the ax-swinging party.”
“Correct.” He held out the chunk of chicken for me. “He was already dead.”
I took him up on his offering, swallowing before I asked, “Then how did you get back to me and my juggernaut?” I thought Doc’s ability only allowed him to see the events of a person’s death, not anything posthumous.
“He took me there.”
“The ghost took you back in time to me?”
“More like forward in time to you.”
I stole another piece of his breast with my fork. “Clarification, please.”
“We started with his death, and then … I don’t know how but … it’s like he wouldn’t release me. He knew how to drag me to where we needed to go. He took control, like Prudence does each time, to the point where I can’t easily get back out.”
I frowned at Doc. “You went into the past to witness a man’s death and then forward in time through his ghost to witness other deaths.” I was struggling with this one. “That sounds beyond deranged.”
He shrugged. “Maybe, but you traveled into the past through a mirror and showed up on scene in physical form to do battle with what I suspect is a paranormal being whose ax not only kills, but somehow withers or burns and shrinks.” He shot me a sideways smirk. “How deranged is that?”
I stabbed a piece of his chicken with my fork and then pointed it at him. “Touché.”
He leaned over and ate the bite-sized chunk.
“So who was this ghost? Was his death somehow related to the greaser’s or what was going on in that apartment?”
He shook his head. “I think he built the Galena House.”
“You mean Freesia’s great great-uncle, Jake Tender? What makes you think that?”
After wiping his mouth on a napkin, he stood and collected our plates. “When I went back to the time of the ghost’s death, his skin was dark, and he was still tall and muscled, even in old age. I’d seen pictures of Big Jake Tender in that history book you picked up from Ms. Wolff’s apartment. She’d had the page with a shot of him standing in front of the Galena House bookmarked with an old photograph of what I now am pretty sure is the two of them much younger, standing next to one another at a parade. Jake was younger, anyway.” He put our dishes in the dishwasher. “Here’s the interesting thing I witnessed during his death, which was a heart attack by the way.” Doc dried his hands and then leaned on the bar across from me. “I think Ms. Wolff was there with him when he died.”
I frowned, doing the math in my head. “You mean as a little girl?”
“No. She had crow’s feet around her eyes and her hair was bright white. She was leaning over me—I mean him, holding his hand. But she looked the same age as she did in the picture with Big Jake. Like she hadn’t aged, except for her hair.”
“You’re sure?”
He rubbed his jaw, his expression contemplative. “Not a hundred percent, but pretty sure, yeah.”
“Reid told me that Ms. Wolff kept wigs on those styrofoam heads in her closet. If she was alive when Freesia’s great great-uncle was around, and she had white hair even then, you know what that means.”
His eyes locked onto mine. “Ms. Wolff was one of them.”
“She must have used the wigs to blend in over the passage of time.” I chewed on my knuckles, the weight of all this heavy on my chest. “So what does that mean? Why did she call me that day? What is it she needed to tell me before she died that was so damned important?”
Doc came around the counter and took my hand. “Let’s think about this somewhere more comfortable.”
He led me over to the couch, pulling me down next to him. A stack of blankets were draped across the other end, evidence of Harvey’s temporary residence. I leaned back against the sofa arm, stretching my legs perpendicular across Doc’s, close and comfy with him like so many nights over at Aunt Zoe’s in front of the boob tube.
“She knew she didn’t have much time left.” He slipped his hand under my skirt, stroking my bare calf. “Which is ironic considering all of those clocks on her …” he trailed off, his hand going still.
“And she called me an executioner, which isn’t the best way to make new friends.”
“Violet,” he looked at me, his brow pinched. “I can’t believe I didn’t put this together before now.”
“Put what together?”
“The timekeeper. Ms. Wolff is the one Prudence keeps telling you to bring to her.” He squeezed my shin. “It makes total sense now.”
“Not really.” He must be reading from a different script.
“We need to go see Prudence,” he said.
“Or we could skip that and have another nooner.”
His grin rounded the corners of his eyes. “You name the time and place, and I’ll be there.”
“I like the privacy in your garage.”
“I like the softness of my bed.” His hand crept up over my knee, stroking my thigh. “Especially when you’re naked on top of me.” He leaned over and kissed me. “Now quit trying to distract me with your body.”
“Is it working?” It was on me. My pilot had the engines all fired up again.
“No.”
“Liar.” I could feel otherwise and moved purposely against him.
He held me still. “When can you arrange a visit to the Carhart house?”
“I don’t suppose taking off my shirt will dissuade you?”
“That will inspire me to do several things, but when I’m finished with you I’ll still want to go see Prudence.”
I sighed, fingering my necklace. “She wants those teeth, you know. If I show up without them, she’ll be ticked.”
“She’s a ghost, Violet.”
“Are you sure that’s all she is?”
“Mostly.” He pushed my fingers away and lifted the charms on my necklace, leaning closer to get a better look at them. “You need to ask your Aunt Zoe about this necklace, if there’s a purpose for it.”
There was. “She said I needed to wear it for protection from those who kill.”
His gaze met mine, searching. “She said that?”
I nodded.
His focus returned to the charms. “It looks like colored glass over some kind of metal etched with symbols that I swear I remember seeing in that book.”
“The metal is probably silver.” I lowered my chin, trying to look at the pieces, too. “All of the other charm jewelry she’s made for me over the years is silver and glass.”
“I remember you mentioning the boot bracelet she made, as well as some pieces for your brother and your children.”
“Yeah, she’s made me stuff since I was a kid.” I pointed at one of the charms. “See that symbol there? I think that’s one of the runes stone symbols, isn’t it? Several of the pieces she’s given me have runes on them.”
He let go of the necklace and sat back. “I have a feeling y
our Aunt Zoe knows a lot more about things going on with you than she’s letting on. Take that mirror in her workshop that she said belongs to you. That’s not a normal mirror, and after your trick with the mirror at Ms. Wolff’s place, I’d like to pick your aunt’s brain about you.”
“That’s not a good idea.” Aunt Zoe knew I was pretty gonzo for him. After her past troubles with Reid, she might say something to see where Doc stands before I was too far gone. Unfortunately, I had a feeling she was already too late.
One eyebrow lifted. “You afraid she’ll warn me off?”
“I’m afraid she’ll scare you off.”
He twirled one of my curls around his finger, his attention on my hair. “I’m not an easy man to scare.”
Yet Tiffany’s talk of marriage made him take flight. “Your ex did a good job of it.”
“Tiffany?” He scoffed. “You’re on a whole different level.”
“Just out of curiosity, what are the various levels we’re talking about here?”
He shifted me around so I straddled his lap. “How about I show you?”
Was he evading my question for a reason? Did he know I’d fallen for him and was trying to change the subject so I wouldn’t voice it? Jeez, I hated this relationship shit. Maybe it was time we just laid this out on the table so I’d stop agonizing over it.
“Doc,” I shifted, unwinding my skirt that had gotten all twisted tight around me. “Don’t worry, I don’t expect any kind of long term commitment from you.”
He stilled, frowning at me. “You don’t?”
“No. We’re having fun here, enjoying each other’s company for the time being.”
His head cocked to the side. “Is this about what I told you in that hotel stairwell? About why I broke it off with Tiffany?”
I’d only obsessed about that for weeks now. “Not at all.”
“Your nose just twitched.”
I crossed my arms over my chest, wishing he didn’t know my tell so well. “It did not.”
“And there it twitched again.” He unwound my arms and tugged me closer. “Violet.”
“What?” His eyes were like rich, dark chocolate.
“If you’re not in this for the long run, then I want out.”
I blinked twice. “If I’m not in it? I’m the one with kids.”
