Dark & Dangerous: A Collection of Paranormal Treats

by Julie Kenner

  And Miranda Garner was perched on the hallway table, smiling and wearing nothing but a pair of unbuttoned and unzipped blue jeans.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  OUTSIDE, A CRACK of thunder split the sky, the brilliant flash of lightning filled the house, and then the electricity went out again.

  There were no candles lit here on the second floor. After his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could see Miranda sitting on the table. Still smiling, still waiting.

  Of course, she was not Miranda. Not entirely.

  And Tony wasn’t entirely gone.

  She had dealt the ghost a mighty blow, asking for the return of the heart and soul he had hoarded for so long. They were rightfully hers, after all. But Tony had possessed them for so long he continued to crave them. Miranda alone could not fight off the man who had haunted her for centuries.

  But together, they could send him away.

  John walked to Miranda and wrapped his arms around her nearly naked body. She was so smooth, so warm and inviting. He was tired of dreams and visions; he wanted the reality of Miranda beneath and around him.

  Tony shimmered behind her, and the annoying ghost whispered something in her ear.

  “Go away, Phillip,” Miranda whispered, her eyes on John’s face.

  “Yes, Phillip,” John said. “Go away.”

  Miranda wrapped her legs around him and placed her mouth against his neck, where she suckled gently. Her breasts pressed against his chest, and the way she moved against him told him very clearly what she wanted. Everything. Now.

  He was so tempted by her, more tempted than he had ever been. But Miranda would never forgive him if he made love to Vera before he ever made love to her.

  John ran his fingers through the short strands of her hair. “Miranda, do you know where you are?” he asked.

  Calling her name triggered something. She blinked and her body stiffened slightly. “Johnny?”

  “John,” he said, stroking her bare back. “Come on, Miranda, come back to me. You know who you are, and you know who I am. Vera’s dead, remember?”

  Miranda squirmed, but she did not let him go.

  “Of course she is,” she responded in a sensible voice. “Vera’s been dead…” Miranda drew back sharply, and her arms shot up to cover her exposed breasts. “I’m naked!”

  “For the most part, yes,” John said, calling upon amazing restraint.

  Miranda backed slightly away, but she didn’t jump down from the table. “Did you…”

  “No, you did it yourself.”

  She glanced around the hallway as if she couldn’t remember getting here. And she probably couldn’t. “This has never happened before. A lot of very strange things have happened to me in the past year, but nothing like this. Why now?”

  John was beginning to understand what was going on here, and it went beyond a simple haunting. Nothing like this had ever happened to him. He hadn’t even known it was possible. “Tony’s haunting has made the walls between this life and the last one too thin. Time is bending, circling around. The most recent past life is slipping in on us, trying to repeat, to live again. Apparently you can tempt history into repeating itself, if you’re not careful, and that’s what’s happening here.”

  Miranda dropped her arms and slowly fell into him to wrap those arms around him. “I don’t want to die,” she whispered, her heart thudding against his.

  “I won’t let that happen.”

  She lifted her head and glanced around sharply, but she did not let him go. “Tony’s back.”

  “Just barely, but yes. He’s here, and you and I are going to send him away once and for all.”

  “How?”

  “We’re going to rewrite history.”

  THE IDEA of tempting history into repeating itself was farfetched, and a year ago she would have dismissed it as absurd. But Miranda couldn’t let herself dismiss anything, these days. She had to ask herself the same question she’d been struggling with for days. Who did she trust?

  This life and the last one were blurring, she knew that, and still Miranda hung onto who and what she was. She had been a librarian with a dull and safe and ordinary life, until Tony had shown up to ruin it all. She had hidden here, in this family home, afraid to take too much of what life had to offer. Afraid to take a chance on love and passion, maybe remembering on a soul-deep level that in the past it had always been love that led to the end.

  Was John worth the risk? Love, passion, life. The way he held her, the way they faced this moment together, made her think—yes.

  She thought that John would tell her what to do next, in order to send Tony away once and for all, but instead he kissed her, and she couldn’t help but kiss him back. Even now, she wanted him. She’d wanted him from the first moment she’d laid eyes on him. She’d thought he was a plumber, then, come to fix her water heater.

  They had been here before, just like this, and the memory that was not entirely her memory made her body react almost violently to the kiss. It was a dream, a deeply sleeping memory, a past life come to life that made her react this way. She leaned into John, her body clenched and unclenched as she threaded her fingers through his hair and hung on. If she…or Vera, whatever the case might be…had removed the jeans as well as everything else as she’d run upstairs, she’d be unzipping John’s jeans and begging him to come inside her.

  He touched her breast, gently at first, harder when she reacted almost violently to the caress. Heaven above, she wanted him more than she’d ever wanted anything else, in this life or any other.

  “I know what you want,” she whispered against John’s throat, her lips barely kissing his as she spoke. “If I give my heart and soul to you, then Tony will go away.”

  “No,” John said, his voice low and rasping. “I don’t want you to give me anything.”

  A surge of disappointment washed through her. John did want her, she knew that without doubt. Physically, at least. Perhaps he wanted her body but not her heart and soul. Perhaps all they had ever shared was physical love.

  “Your heart and soul are yours to keep, Miranda,” he said as he pulled her close. “They are meant to be shared, not given away. Share yours with me, the way you share your body. Combine them with mine so we blend the souls and hearts together.”

  A squeak on the stairs told her Tony was here…. No, Phillip was here, solid and dangerous and intent on murder. And yet she didn’t look that way. Her eyes remained on John’s face. He was right; together they were stronger than they would ever be apart. Arms and legs entangled they did merge, not physically—not yet—but in every other sense they were one. Heaven above, she felt him inside her in a way she had not imagined possible, and she laughed with pure joy.

  “How could you do this to me?” Tony whispered in her ear. “You’re mine.” The glint of a silver knife caught her eye as he lifted it high. Her ghost remained misty, but the knife looked very real.

  “I’m not yours,” she whispered, unafraid. “I belong to no man.” She held onto John and buried her face against his shoulder, turning her back on the ghost with the knife. “Go away, Tony.” Her voice was no more than a breath, and yet as soon as she spoke the words he did as she asked. He vanished.

  In the dark, with the rain pounding against the roof and the windows, John lifted her from the table and carried her to his room. There was no one in the world but the two of them, no thought on her mind but holding him until dawn, and beyond.

  It was too soon, but past lives were indeed melding into this one, and she knew her feelings without doubt. “I love you,” she said, draping her arms around his neck and holding him close as he carried her down the hallway. A flash of lightning lit the way for them.

  “I have always loved you,” he said as he carried her into his room and gently placed her on the four-poster bed.

  When she thought of how close she had come to sending John away, she was as afraid as she had ever been. She grabbed his shirt and dragged his face down to hers. “Think we’ll
make it work this time around?”

  “As strongly and surely as I’ve ever known anything…” He drifted down to join her on the bed. “Yes.”

  “YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS,” Elyse said in a hoarse whisper. “You’ve known the man less than two weeks! You can’t just up and move to Atlanta on a whim! You can’t even think of marrying the man, and you certainly can’t expect me to sit back and let you run off to some courthouse somewhere and legally bind yourself to this…this strange man.”

  Miranda smiled. When she’d told Elyse that John was not an old acquaintance from Dallas but a new one, her oldest friend had been shocked. Elyse had always known Miranda to be cautious where men were concerned, especially in the past year. “It’s not a whim. I haven’t been happy here for a very long time. John makes me happy.”

  Elyse gestured wildly with her hands. “There are lots of men in Cedar Springs who would love to make you happy if you’d give them the time of day. Sex is no reason to sell the house you’ve lived in all your life and get married to a man you barely know, no matter how cute he might be, and leave your friends behind and…” Elyse ended the tirade with a snort.

  John walked into the parlor with Lara Hilliard trailing behind him. Miranda had been a little dismayed to find that the ghost hunter was an attractive young woman, and that she and John had known one another for years. But it hadn’t taken her long to realize that John and Lara were friends, nothing more. Lara was fascinated with the house, and there were indeed ghosts here that needed to be released.

  But not Tony’s. Tony was well and truly gone.

  Miranda smiled when she saw John. He smiled at her. Elyse grunted in open disgust. “You’ll be back in six months, when the excitement of this new relationship has faded, and by then the house will be sold and what will you do?” Elyse muttered, but she did so loudly enough for everyone to hear. “Oh, all right,” she finished. She looked at John, and her eyes flashed. “So, Mr. Stark, what are your intentions? How are you going to take care of my friend? If you’re a gigolo planning to live off of her money, I swear…”

  “I have a job,” John said. “I don’t want Miranda’s money.”

  “A job,” Elyse snorted. “What kind of a job?”

  John didn’t answer, but instead looked at her and waited. Miranda smiled. “John is a psychic,” she said. “An extraordinarily talented psychic who makes a very good living helping people. I feel quite confident that he cares nothing about the Garner family money.”

  Elyse was silent for a moment. “A psychic,” she repeated softly.

  “Yes,” Miranda answered. “A psychic.” She would never deny him again. Not in this life, not in any life to come. They were past that challenge, at last.

  “And what are you going to do in Atlanta while he’s…psychicing?” Elyse asked.

  “I’ll help out around John’s office and travel with him on occasion.” And have babies. Not right away, but within the next few years…babies. They had never gotten that far before, and she wanted babies more than she’d imagined possible. She hadn’t discussed that with John yet, so she didn’t want to bring it up now.

  Of course, it was always possible that he already knew exactly what she wanted from their life together. It was difficult to hide things from a psychic lover, not that she’d ever tried to hide things from John—or ever would.

  Sometimes she knew what he was thinking, just as he knew her mind. An aftereffect of the joining that night they’d sent Tony away, she imagined.

  “I also have the urge to get back into painting,” she added.

  “But…” Elyse began.

  “I love John,” Miranda said before her friend could come up with another argument. “I love him, and I’m going to marry him, and eventually the two of you will be the best of friends.”

  Elyse was not so sure about that, and neither was John.

  But Miranda knew that one day her husband and Elyse would be friends. She wasn’t sure how she knew with such certainty that this would come to pass…but she did.

  After Elyse and Lara had gone, John wrapped his arms around Miranda and smiled—that bright smile she had learned so quickly to love. “Teach me to paint?” he asked.

  “I didn’t know you were interested in art.”

  “Neither did I,” he muttered.

  He placed one large, warm hand over her stomach. “Babies, huh?”

  “Yeah. I want three.”

  “Well, you’re going to get…”

  She silenced him with a kiss, a long, deep kiss that distracted them both, and within a matter of minutes they were on the couch, fumbling with buttons and zippers.

  And then she remembered why she’d kissed him. “Some things are supposed to be a surprise,” she said as John pulled her blouse over her head. “Just because you can see everything, that doesn’t mean you’re supposed to…”

  He shimmied her trousers down, freed himself and then he was inside her.

  Miranda threw her head back and shifted her hips up to meet his thrust, and a startling vision filled her head. While John held himself deep inside her body, and she responded with ribbons of intense pleasure that never ceased to surprise her, she smiled. “Oh, John,” she whispered, her heart swelling with love. “Twins….”

  Her Best Enemy

  Maggie Shayne

  TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

  AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

  STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

  PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  EPILOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  IN THE TIME IT TOOK Kiley Brigham to submerge her head, rinse out the shampoo and sit up again, the temperature in the bathroom had plummeted from “steamy sauna” to somewhere around “clutch your arms and shiver.” Sitting up straighter, with rivulets fleeing her skin for warmer climes, Kiley frowned. Her skin sprouted goose bumps. She muttered, “Well, what the hell is this?” and then frowned harder because she could see her breath when she spoke.

  Had late Halloween week in Burnt Hills, New York, turned suddenly bitterly cold? There hadn’t been any warning on the weather report. And even if there had been a sudden cold snap, the furnace would have kicked on. According to the overall-wearing, toolbox-carrying guy she’d hired to inspect the hundred-year-old house before agreeing to buy it, the heating system was in great shape. True, she hadn’t run it much in the three days since she’d moved into her dream house, just once or twice during the late October nights when the mercury dipped outside. But it had been working fine.

  She tilted her head, listening for the telltale rattle of hot water being forced through aging radiators, but she heard nothing. The furnace wasn’t running.

  Sighing, she rose from the water, stepped over the side of the tub onto the plush powder-blue bath mat and reached for the matching towel. Her new shell-pink-and-white ceramic tiles might look great, but they definitely added to the chill, she decided, peering at the completely fogged-up mirror and then scurrying quickly through the door and into her bedroom for the biggest, warmest robe she could find.

  As soon as she stepped into the bedroom, the chill was gone. She stood there wondering what the hell to make of that. Leaning back through the bathroom door, she felt that iciness hanging in the air. It was like stepping into a meat cooler, she thought. Leaning back out into the bedroom, she felt the same cozy warmth she always felt there.

  Kiley shrugged, pulled the bathroom door closed and battled a delayed-reaction shiver. She closed her eyes briefly, just to tamp down the notion that the shiver was caused by something beyond the temperature, then turned t
o face her bedroom with its hardwood wainscoting so dark it looked like ebony, its crown molding the same, its freshly applied antique ivory paint in between. Her bedroom suite came close to matching: deep black cherry wood that bore the barest hint of bloodred. The bedding and curtains in the tall, narrow windows were the color of French cream, as were the throw rugs on the dark hardwood floor. Ebony and ivory had been her notion for this room, and it worked.

  “I love my new house,” she said aloud, even as she sent a troubled glance back toward the bathroom. “And I’m going to stop looking for deep, dark secrets to explain the bargain-basement asking price. So my bathroom has a draft. So what?”

  Nodding in resolve, she moved to the closet, opened the door, then paused, staring. One of the dresses was moving, just slightly, the hanger rocking back and forth mere millimeters, as if someone had jostled it.

  Only, no one had.

  She could have kicked herself for the little shiver that ran up her spine. She didn’t even believe in the sorts of things that were whispering through her brain right now. And had been ever since she’d moved in.

  I jerked open the door, it caused a breeze, the dress moved a little. Big deal.

  In spite of her internal scolding, her eyes felt wider than she would have liked as she perused the closet’s interior. Her handyman-slash-house-inspector had asked if she’d like a light installed in there. She’d said no. Now she was thinking about calling him tomorrow morning to change her answer. Meanwhile, she spotted her robe and snatched it off its hanger with the speed of a cobra snatching a fieldmouse. She back-stepped, slammed the closet door, and felt her heart start to pound in her chest.

  B-r-e-a-t-h-e, she thought. And then she did, a long, deep, slow inhalation that filled her lungs to bursting, a brief delay while she counted to four, and a thorough, cleansing exhalation that emptied her lungs entirely. She repeated it several times, got a grip on herself and then felt stupid.