Spirited 1

by Mary Behre

  He arched an eyebrow at her but didn’t say anything.

  “I know this looks bad but just ask Big Jim. He’ll vouch for me.”

  “And Big Jim? Who’s that, your pimp?”

  “What? No!” She laughed and shook her head at the absurd thought. “He’s my dad.”

  “Is that what they’re calling them these days?” He scoffed but didn’t give her time to respond. “There’s no one named Big Jim in this building. Try again, the truth this time.”

  “Ernie Ward! Ernie is my dad.”

  “I thought his name was Jim.” He shook his head. He made a sound like a buzzer. “Wrong again. I’ve known Ernie for years but I’ve never seen you before. Want to try another name, honey?”

  His biceps flexed, arms still folded across his chest, as if he wanted to move but barely restrained himself. The sight was distracting. He wasn’t exactly muscle-bound, just finely honed. He stood fierce and masculine like an ancient warrior. Intimidating but ruthlessly sexy. It made her want to . . . She shook herself inwardly.

  Why couldn’t she think straight? This so wasn’t like her. She didn’t go gooey over any guy, regardless of how ruggedly handsome. But her heart pounded at an erratic pace and she’d once again lost the thread of the conversation. What had he just asked?

  Think, Jules! Ignore the instant pull of pointless physical attraction. It had never done her any favors in the past anyway. Something about him must be repellent. Find it!

  She looked at him again, this time skating her gaze past his naked chest and sexy arms and moving down.

  Oh, it couldn’t be.

  She blinked, astonished.

  He wore bright yellow pajama pants, covered in lambs.

  Resisting the urge to laugh, she latched onto righteous indignation and straightened her shoulders. This condescending jerk treated her like a criminal, handcuffed her, and called her a liar. Oh, he was going down.

  “My name’s Jules. Not honey,” she snapped. “And Big Jim—Ernie—is my father. He lives in this building and I live with him.”

  “I highly doubt it. Hookers don’t live here,” he said, tugging a red T-shirt over his head.

  “Excuse me?” she yelled. “I’m not a hooker, and you owe me an apology!”

  “Really?” he said, giving her an obvious once-over, his gaze settling on her bustier.

  Her cheeks burned.

  “Wait. I can explain.”

  “Enlighten me.” He narrowed his eyes, doubt etched on his face.

  “See, there was this costume party and . . .” Her words trailed off. How to explain the theme of her college reunion without sounding like an imbecile for dressing in the ridiculous outfit just to win a blue ribbon? Now that she thought about it, stupid might aptly describe her decision-making skills tonight. “Well, there was a Pimp and Ho party earlier tonight. I was on my way home from it—”

  “And you just happened to climb into my window?”

  Jules opened her mouth to respond, but doubted he’d believe her anyway. So she settled on a half-truth. “It was a mistake. I meant to climb into Big Jim’s window, but it was jammed and yours was . . . open.”

  “Ah ha!” His mouth twisted into a satisfied grin. “You admit to breaking and entering.”

  “Not breaking. Just entering. And who in his right mind sleeps in this city without a screen in his window anyway?” Oops! She hadn’t meant to say that last part, but she pushed on. “If you’ll just let me go find Big Jim—”

  “Don’t think so.” With a grim expression on his face, he tugged her to her feet. “Time to go.”

  “Where are we going?” Jules dragged her heels, her stilettos scraping the wooden floorboards.

  Still in his pajama bottoms, he jammed his feet into a pair of loafers.

  Jules gaped. The gladiator image of him fizzled with each passing second. “Are you really planning to go out in public dressed like an overgrown four-year-old?”

  “Shut. Up,” he growled, jerking on a knee-length, brown leather coat. “Say another word and I’ll charge you with resisting arrest.”

  “Wait, uh, I think there’s been some mistake.”

  “You bet your sweet ass, there has.”

  “Where . . . where . . .” Jules swallowed in an effort to keep her voice from shaking. “Where are we going?”

  “You’re gonna spend the night in lockup.”

  “Please, not jail!” Her words ended on a squeak, but she couldn’t help it.

  Earth-bound ghosts, bent on driving the living crazy, seemed to love hanging out in graveyards and jails. When they realized she could actually hear them, she’d be defenseless.

  The needy ones would annoy her, but the evil ghosts—who’d managed to elude the hell beasts that usually put them where they belonged—they could attack en masse.

  Their vicious thoughts would seep into her consciousness like a staticky radio she couldn’t turn off. They could strip her of her sanity. A single night in jail nearly drove her mad once before. She doubted she’d survive it a second time.

  She pleaded, “If you’ll just let me talk to Big Jim, he’ll straighten this out, I promise.”

  He glared at her, wrenching open the front door. “You have the right to remain silent.”

  Guess again.

  She rushed into the hallway, screaming at the top of her lungs. “Big Jim! Big Jim! Help me! Big Jim!”

  “Quiet!” the cop shouted. He grabbed her from behind and clapped a hand over her mouth as the door slammed shut.

  He pulled her against him. With her cuffed hands behind her back, she pushed against him, trying to twist away. Leveraging her weight, she clutched and got a fistful of coat leather in one hand and warm, cotton pajama bottoms in the other. She froze. Her hands were lined up with the apex of his thighs.

  Could this get any worse?

  Of course it could.

  His body reacted to her unintended groping. Jules attempted to push away, but only succeeded in pressing harder against his tightening groin.

  No, no, no.

  Images of their naked bodies joined together slammed into her mind, stealing her breath. Never in her life had she experienced such vivid fantasies, only these weren’t hers. Like the entrancing smell that drew her into his apartment, these images were coming from outside of her, manipulating her senses.

  The sex scenes playing through her mind had to be courtesy of the cop holding her too close. Jules nearly swallowed her tongue at the onslaught of the explicit images he’d somehow sent winging into her mind. Before she had time to wonder how a living person managed to project his thoughts—and they had to be his—he’d spun her around to face him.

  Her gaze dipped past his abdomen before zipping back to his implacable expression. She hadn’t intended to look, but in his fantasies he was huge. According to the sword tenting his pajama bottoms, that part of his fantasy was real.

  And the gladiator image sprang to life again.

  He cleared his throat, drawing her attention to his lethal gaze.

  “I, uh . . .” Her cheeks heated as she stammered a muffled apology. His hand loosened, but remained pressed over her lips. “P-please—”

  “Look, Happy Hooker, do you really want to add soliciting a police officer to your list of offenses tonight?”

  “No,” she whispered and shifted farther from him, pressing against the wall behind her. He crowded closer. At first it seemed threatening; except he emanated desire, not hostility.

  A stream of heated images flitted through her mind, images of his lips exploring her . . . everywhere. Her breath skittered, her cheeks burned hotter, and her mouth went dry at the flare of attraction in his eyes.

  “Mmm . . .” She tried to speak, inadvertently moistening his salty palm with her tongue.

  The cop sucked in his breath. His darkening gaze flicked from her eyes to his hand on her mouth and back again. Then he drew his fingers across her lips in a manner so sensual, she shuddered.

  “Don’t push this any f
urther,” he whispered against her ear. He lightly traced her bottom lip with the tip of his index finger. Time stopped as his face lowered to hers.

  Lost in his nearly obsidian gaze, she waited for him to kiss her.

  And he was going to kiss her.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew this was a bad idea.

  But, God help her, she couldn’t think of a single reason why she should stop him. His gaze lowered to her mouth and Jules licked her lips.

  He leaned closer.

  Her heart raced.

  A rusty-hinged door squeaked open. Big Jim—who wasn’t really big at all—appeared out of nowhere.

  “Seth? What’s with all the noise?” Big Jim yawned, stepping out into the hallway and closing the door behind him. “You’re gonna wake April.”

  The cop leapt away from Jules but kept a firm grip on her upper arm. “Hi, Ernie. Sorry for the disturbance. Police business. I thought you and April were in Florida this week.”

  “Nah. We leave Monday.” As if seeing her for the first time, Big Jim turned to her. “Jules? Is that you?”

  She glanced at the man, barely twelve years her senior, who’d adopted her shortly after her thirteenth birthday, then back at Seth the Cop. Thanks to Big Jim’s appearance, her illogical and ill-timed desire quickly morphed into anger.

  Glaring at the cop with triumph in her eyes, she shook free of his hold. With as much pride as she could muster, which wasn’t much considering she was dressed like a prostitute in handcuffs, she strode over to her rescuer.

  “Hey, Big Jim.” She planted a kiss on his cheek.

  “Oh Lord, Jules! You look like a hooker.” Big Jim’s lips twitched.

  “I won first prize in the Pimp and Ho contest.”

  “Oh God, you really did it! April said you were going to . . . but I never dreamed you’d actually have the guts to wear that in public.” Big Jim laughed out loud. “I hope she took a picture.”

  The cop, who must have followed her, now stood so close his warm breath feathered across her ear. It sent electric tingles down her spine. Oh boy! She liked it. A lot.

  This needed to stop. Jules slid from between the men.

  “Do you know this girl?” the cop asked, oozing disbelief. “She climbed into my bedroom window tonight. She claims to live with someone named Big Jim. Then she tried to tell me she lives with you.”

  “I’m not a girl, I’m a woman.” Jules bit off the words. She lifted her chin and added, “I do live here. I moved in this morning.”

  “She’s my daughter. She—she calls me Big Jim. Family joke,” Big Jim managed to say before lapsing into a guffaw.

  “See?” Jules narrowed her eyes. “I told you so.”

  The cop took a step back. His eyebrows disappeared beneath the curly locks that fell over his forehead.

  Big Jim’s whooping laughs filled the hallway. Not seeing the humor in her situation, Jules glared defiantly at the cop.

  He gaped, clearly bewildered, but made no effort to let her go.

  With waning patience, she tapped her stiletto-clad foot on the linoleum and cleared her throat.

  “Use your key next time, precious,” the cop growled in her ear, spinning her around. Then the cuffs were blessedly off. “You could have climbed into the window of a psycho. Good thing for you it was me. You got lucky.”

  Jules rubbed her sore wrists. “Gee, I never knew getting lucky could be so disappointing.”

  The cop opened his mouth, then snapped it closed. “Good night, Big Jim,” he said, looking pointedly at Jules.

  “ ’Night, Lambkins!” she called out, wiggling her fingers in a mock wave as his door slammed shut.

  Big Jim guffawed again. “Jules, for a woman determined to lead an ordinary life, you’re off to an exciting start.”

  “Thanks a lot.” Jules frowned at her salacious costume. Jeez, she needed to change into her own clothes.

  With a sigh, she reached for the knob and twisted it. It didn’t budge.

  “Juliana . . .” Big Jim held open his front door.

  Dang it! That cop had her so flustered she had tried to enter the wrong apartment again.

  “You know,” Big Jim said with a snicker when she finally crossed her own threshold, “you have a terrible sense of direction for a psychic.”

  • • •

  STRETCHED OUT IN bed, she forced her mind to clear. Considering it was four in the morning, Jules should have been exhausted, but her mind raced. Across the room, her clothes and black wig lay in a pile on the dresser. The costume had been killer, but that wig itched all night. She scratched her head, capturing the coppery strands of hair between her fingers briefly and examining them with a grin.

  Shock value. She won for that alone. After all, who would have suspected that she—a former preschool teacher, who never swore—would dare show up dressed as a member of the world’s oldest profession?

  Pride flooded through her. All through college she’d been the oddball. The one who was different. For a few hours tonight, she was normal. No one looked at her as if waiting for her to talk to a wall or an invisible person. Or a ghost.

  Being crowned “First Ho” wasn’t quite the same as being Homecoming Queen, but the general acceptance had been glorious.

  Okay, so she had veered from her plan to be completely normal and boring, but it had been fun. After what she’d been through in the last two years with her divorce, she needed a little excitement. At least the party had nothing to do with ghosts or psychic abilities.

  Tomorrow, she’d go back to being plain, ordinary Juliana.

  For some reason, the neighbor-cop’s face flashed through her mind at that moment. The man topped the charts on the sexy scale. He met her three H rule: hot, huge—the man had to be at least six foot two, not to mention where her hands had been earlier—and oh, so handsome. Yep, he could send a nun’s hormones raging. And she wasn’t a nun . . . she just felt like one.

  Jules stared at the ceiling. She counted all the tiles three times before her eyes drooped closed. Just before succumbing to the exhaustion, Seth the Cop’s face appeared again. This time his lips curled up in a roguish smile, making him more handsome than ever. She’d slipped into the state between dreaming and waking and drifted along with the fantasy.

  His rich brown eyes grew black as he leaned in close, captured her mouth with his, and drank her in. He tasted like hazelnut coffee. Jules sighed with delight. He chuckled and buried his hands in her hair, pulling her closer. She breathed in the scent of sandalwood as he licked a path from her lips down to her collarbone before returning to her mouth. He swept his tongue inside and her senses exploded with the heady taste of him.

  She opened her eyes but Seth had disappeared. Thick, gray fog blinded her.

  Her world tilted and twirled, like a carnival ride, spinning faster and faster until it jarred to a halt. Lighting, sounds, colors—everything . . . changed. She was no longer herself but someone else. Jules had taken this particular type of trip too many times not to know when she’d fallen into someone else’s gruesome reality.

  “Pleeaaasssse,” she cried in the darkness and shoved at the walls crowding in around her. She scraped her fingernails down the metal walls, searching for a release latch that wasn’t there. The stench of copper permeated the tight space. Blood oozed from her raw fingers. “Let me out!”

  The car’s trunk flew open. White light blinded her, then snuffed out. She lay still, unable to focus. She didn’t need to see who had rescued her. Only he would have come. He’d promised he’d protect her. How could she have doubted him? Relief washed through her.

  Hands wrapped around her wrists and tugged her from the Buick. Free from the vehicle, he released her wrists and caressed her shoulders. She slumped against him, then jumped at the sensation of the foreign planes of his chest.

  This wasn’t her lover. She tried to pull away but he manacled one of her wrists, refusing to allow her to escape.

  She searched his face. Even masked by shado
ws, he exuded a lethal air. He might have cared for her once but not now. This man was a cold-blooded killer who meant to punish her for betraying him. His gloved fingers traced around her neck, while his thumbs stroked the hollow of her throat. She swallowed convulsively.

  “Where are they?” The whispered words made her flinch.

  “I don’t know. Please, don’t do this.” She flinched and tears sprang to her eyes. “I did it for all of us.”

  “Where are they?” His grip tightened. “Give them back.”

  “I c-can’t.” She couldn’t return them, even if she’d wanted to—he knew that.

  His fingers dug deeper into her neck. She clawed at his leather-encased hands. Yellow spots blinked before her bulging eyes. Her ears buzzed. No! She’d only wanted to do the right thing. She couldn’t die. Not yet. It wasn’t fair! She had a future. Two lives depended on her.

  She jerked her knee into his groin. He grunted but squeezed her throat harder. The buzzing in her head became a tidal wave of noise.

  Her vision narrowed to a sliver of light then winked out to black.

  CHAPTER 2

  “BREAKFAST.”

  “Nooo!” Jules cried out. “Somebody help me.”

  Sunlight streamed between the purple curtains into the lilac-colored bedroom. She stroked her neck, as if massaging it could excise the memory of the life being choked out of her.

  “Jules?” April, Big Jim’s tiny, blonde-haired, blue-eyed pregnant wife, stared at her with wariness from the open bedroom door. Softly she added, “You’re safe now.”

  The smell of fried eggs wafted in at the same moment the rest of Jules’s physical senses returned in a violent rush. Bile burned her throat. Sweat beaded on her forehead. Her stomach lurched. Clapping her hand over her mouth, she bolted to the door.

  Racing past April and nearly knocking over Big Jim, she hurtled to the bathroom. Her body trembling, Jules retched and silently cursed herself.

  “Juliana?” April knocked on the bathroom door. “Are you okay in there?”

  “Fine. Just had a nightmare,” Jules called back, pushing to her feet.