by Various
Also by Annie Windsor:
Arda: The Captain’s Fancy
Arda: The Sailkeeper’s Bride
Arda: The Sailmaster’s Woman
Cajun Nights anthology
Equinox anthology
Legacy of Prator: Cursed
Legacy of Prator: Redemption
Redevence: The Edge
Vampire Dreams – with Cheyenne McCray
GHOST OF A CHANCE
Shiloh Walker
Shiloh Walker
Chapter One
He’d walked this road before. Countless times, on countless days. Sunny days, rainy days, snowy days, humid. You name it, he’d walked through it.
Coming to the gate, he wrapped his hands around the cool iron posts, stared through them at the grand house that had fallen into disrepair. The paint was chipped and peeling, the grass waist high, the gardens overrun. But when Luke looked at it, he could see the way it looked in its glory days, windows sparkling in the sun, a fresh gleaming coat of paint on the walls. White paint, only white. The house would look weird any other color.
There was somebody new moving in soon. He’d heard the small landscaping company in town was going to be very busy for the next few months. Somebody had been hired to come in and paint, do the necessary repairs. The repairs were cosmetic for the most part. The house had only fallen into neglect in the past few years. Hopefully, vermin hadn’t taken up residence.
Luke wondered about the new owner. Would he last? The most recent owner had been a college professor, and he’d died more than a decade ago. He’d hung around nearly twenty years, much longer than any of the other owners. Of course, from what Luke could tell, the man hadn’t much of a soul, little heart, little feeling. It would take quite a bit to run somebody like him off.
Hadn’t there been a child? A young girl… With a frown, he tried to remember. But there had been so many people, so many memories. And the faces all faded and blurred, running together.
With a sigh, he tucked his hands into the front pockets of his jeans and turned away. He was aching with exhaustion and cold. God, he was always cold. He wore jeans and sweaters year-round, something unheard of in the humid heat of a Kentucky summer.
Even though it was well into spring now, and the temp hovered in the seventies and low eighties, he was freezing.
That, he couldn’t do anything about.
But he could get some rest.
He heard the powerful engine of a car approaching as he took the small, well-worn path. Right before the trees closed up behind him, he glanced back, saw a sleek, shiny red car come flying around the corner.
“Careful. You’re gonna hurt somebody,” he murmured before walking on.
The house was oppressive.
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Leaning against the hood of the silly red Mustang she still couldn’t believe she had bought, CJ folded her arms in front of her, cupping her elbows, hugging herself for warmth.
Or maybe for comfort.
She didn’t like this house.
She had never liked it.
But that hadn’t stopped her estranged father from leaving it to her. She had spent, what, three months here one summer before being shipped off to boarding school? The worst three months of her life, the summer after her mother had died.
The old bastard had put her in a room on the opposite side of the house from his, and when she had whispered the next morning, “I was scared last night,” he had laughed at her.
But not for long.
Because the nights only got scarier, the noises he said she imagined only got louder.
Some mornings he would have a tight strained look about him, like he had heard it, too.
But she learned pretty quickly not to mention it anymore.
He hadn’t laughed the second time she had told him, or the third. On the fourth morning, he had asked her what scared her the most. She had timidly pointed to the library, the room just under hers, hoping maybe he could scare the ghosts away, like Mama would have.
Instead, he took her hand, jerked her out of her seat and forced her into the room.
He had locked the door behind her, saying, “You have to learn that there is nothing to be afraid of.”
For three long hours, CJ had sat there, throat locked tight with terror, tears running down her face. Three hours. The air in the room seemed to weigh down on her, and a strong coppery scent lingered in the air, a scent she was too young to recognize as blood.
And after he let her out, she never once commented on being afraid.
Reaching up, CJ rubbed her eyes and asked herself, “What are you doing here?”
With a weary sigh, she moved around the car to unpack her clothes. She knew the answer to that. She really hadn’t had any place else to go. She’d walked away from her job, her home, her friends.
This grand old mansion in eastern Kentucky was the logical place to come to.
Mouth compressed into a thin, grim line, she stalked up the stairs, noting that the cleaning crew had cleared the debris as asked. And when she let herself inside, the foyer was clean, smelling faintly of lemon polish. Not a speck of dust was anywhere to be seen and she mentally made a note to thank the cleaning crew for their good work.
Dr. Chelsea Jane Stivers lived her life by a certain set of rules.
When you did a good job, you were praised.
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When you did a bad job, stay the hell out of her way.
If you had something useful to say, then say it. Otherwise, shut the hell up.
Oh, yeah.
And there were no such things as ghosts.
Later the night, music playing softly from the stereo, she set her computer up in the ladies’ parlor. Much of the original decor had been painstakingly redone by her father.
And he’d done a damn fine job. Nobody could say that he wasn’t a damn fine historian and antiquarian.
Just a bad father.
The pale ivory walls were covered with tiny pink roses, all hand-painted. No wallpaper. Not for Dr. John Stivers, professor of history. He’d insisted the flowers be applied by hand, the way they had been more than a hundred years earlier. The small delicate couch, CJ had no absolutely no idea what it was called, sat just to the side of the window, where the lady of the house could stare out at her husband’s land and be grateful he was such a good provider.
The couch would have to go. It wasn’t that she didn’t like antiques. She did, when they were useful. This tiny, uncomfortable couch was not useful.
But the rest would probably stay.
She wasn’t a flowers and lace female, but there was something soothing about the room. A restful, welcoming scent, soothing to her, something almost…motherly about the room.
And she needed all the soothing she could get, after the last few months.
“Don’t think about it,” she told herself.
But she couldn’t stop it.
How could she have trusted him?
David Armstrong had come into her life just a year ago, and swept her off her feet.
A fellow Literature professor at Hanover College, they had seemed to fit together so well, so perfectly.
Of course, David had gone out of his way to make it seem like that.
And then he had stolen her work right out from under her.
And after she had gone to the dean, the dean had looked appalled that she would accuse such a fine, upstanding man of such a crime. Of course, she had gotten her revenge.
She had stormed into his offices, determined to rip him to pieces. She had already tried logic, and it had failed.
He had never gotten the spare key back from her, so she breezed through the door.
Walking in, she had heard the noises right away. The kind of noises that you couldn’t 98
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mistake for anything else. Eyes narrowed, she spied the camera lying on the floor, next to the chic leather jacket
and a book bag.
CJ didn’t know why she picked it up, didn’t know what compelled her to do such a thing.
But she did it.
And she stood in the doorway, snapped off a good fifteen pictures before the film ran out. It was a student, all right. A very popular photography student that CJ had in her class just the previous semester.
Her name was Jody Morgan, and this would explain why she had been walking around looking like the cat with the proverbial cream.
Her legs were wrapped around David’s hips, and he was holding her naked ass in his hands. Mutual moans of ecstasy filled the room while they fucked each other’s brains out. CJ was almost loath to interrupt.
She cleared her throat.
Not loud enough, for just then, Jody screamed softly and started crying out his name as she started to come.
Later, CJ might be humiliated. Maybe. But for now, she was too angry to be concerned with that. Reaching out, she took a book from atop the filing cabinet and dropped it.
The resulting loud slam silenced the room.
She met David’s disbelieving eyes while she removed the film from the camera.
“Did I ever tell you I minored in photography?” she asked conversationally.
They broke apart, his eyes narrowing in rage while the student burned red with embarrassment. Jody was in shock but David was furious, his rampant cock wet, ruddy, still thrusting upward.
Jody was holding one arm across her breasts, as she reached for her shirt, lying across David’s desk.
Before he open his mouth, CJ said, “Darling, I’m going to make you a deal. I’ll hide this film up, good and tight, once you turn over all my papers that you took. And I mean all. And if I ever see anything I wrote with your name on it, this film is going to be developed, with a copy sent to every good Lit program in the country.”
“You wouldn’t.”
Arching a golden brown eyebrow, she dared him, “You wanna bet?”
With a smile for Jody, she dug a crumpled five from her pocket and tossed it on the desk. “That will cover your film, sweetie. Hopefully, you are as smart as you seem. If you are, you’d be wise to say the hell away from sharks like him. If you aren’t, well…”
CJ shrugged, pocketed the film and walked away.
Thinking back to that little episode, nearly three months earlier, made CJ smile.
It had been the beginning of the end.
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She had gotten her papers back, turned in her notice that she would leave at the end of the semester. And she had landed here.
CJ was going to forget all about teaching, all about David Armstrong, all about her life, if she had anything to do with it. CJ was going to forget about how good it had felt to sleep in bed with a warm male body next to hers and she was going to forget the belief in happily ever after had to end with a man.
And she was going to write a book.
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Chapter Two
CJ’s first trip to town involved a stop at the small grocery. The post office came first, where she filled out the needed forms for a post office box. She smiled vaguely and politely, sidestepping as many of the locals as she could, brushing off a few, and dealing with those she couldn’t.
“So you’re Professor Stivers’ daughter,” a small woman with cardinal-red hair said, smiling a wide welcoming smile that did little to cover the avid curiosity in her eyes.
“We didn’t see much of you back when your father died.”
“I’m afraid I was too busy with his death to deal with being social,” CJ replied, tucking her hand into her pockets.
“Why, of course, you were. I just meant that we never seen you around until then.”
Arching one brow, CJ gave her best professor look, like the nosy bitch in front of her had been caught cheating on a final exam. Coolly, she stated, “My father and I were not close, Mrs. Fields.”
With a nod, CJ made her goodbyes and walked away, leaving Mrs. Marcella Fields standing in the dust.
Biting back a sigh of frustration, CJ dipped her hands into her pockets as Cordelia Simmonds waylaid her again as she walked into the small grocery store. “I remember you, Chelsea Jane. You were here just for a little while a long time back. Loved the library.”
The library, Mrs. Graham. At the mention of that, a real smile came out, and she held her hand to Cordelia. “I loved that library,” she said. She didn’t ask about Mrs.
Graham. The woman had been ancient when CJ had been here twenty years before.
There was no way she could still be around. And CJ wasn’t quite ready to hear what she knew had to be true.
“I think I remember you, too. You ran the church bazaar that summer,” she said, squinting one eye slightly as she tried to remember back. “You came out to the house every week, until Father agreed to make a donation.”
Baldly, in the way only a very old person could get away with it, Cordelia said,
“Your father wasn’t a very generous man, was he, Chelsea Jane?”
A sad little smile tugged at her mouth and she said, “No. No, he wasn’t.”
“He didn’t deserve a daughter like you, either,” Cordelia mused, remembering the sad-eyed little girl who had been so eager to please. And never able to do it.
Chelsea didn’t know what to say to that and she stood there, the awkward silence starting to settle. Before it got too bad, Cordelia patted her shoulder and said, “I’ll be 101
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out in a few weeks for donations for the bazaar. Maybe we can have lunch when I come.
You are looking well, Chelsea. Well, indeed.”
CJ’s cheeks were flushed as she took a cart from the corral, looking around the small store. She hadn’t realized had pathetic she must have appeared to these people, motherless, her only parent a cold, uncaring man who didn’t know the meaning of charity. Of course, not everybody remembered her. She’d only been seven when her mother had died, and she’d only spent a few months here.
Since John Stivers wasn’t a social creature, the only time she saw others was when the housekeeper’s daughter, Chrissie, had taken CJ into town to visit the library, and rare trips to the store.
With a sigh, she set about the task of trying to find her way through an unfamiliar store that didn’t carry any of what she was used to.
And CJ asked herself, yet again, what in God’s name she was doing back in Warren, Kentucky.
Settling into her bed, CJ gritted her teeth against the urge to take some sleeping pills. Last night, the night before, none had been pleasant. Bloody, disturbing dreams that she couldn’t remember… She didn’t want another one. But damn it, she was going to live here. She would. She could make this house her home, and she could and she would. Without the help of drugs.
The whisper of a sigh, a breath that smelled of roses, whispered through the room as she lowered herself to her pillow, but CJ barely noticed as she snuggled down under the covers and closed her eyes.
It wasn’t long before she was dreaming again.
But it wasn’t an unpleasant one…far from it…
Big warm hands, strong and calloused from hard work, stroked over her torso, up the curves of her breasts, pushing them together as he plumped the mounds together before taking one hard pebbled nipple in his mouth and suckling, each slow draw of his mouth echoing deep in her aching pussy.
CJ was aching and wet… One of his hands slid down to cup her and a rumble of male approval echoed through the room, racing along her skin. His thumb circled around her clit and she whimpered, rocking her hips against him, inviting him inside.
Deep male laughter whispered through the room just before a soft voice asked, “Are you hungry, darlin’?” as he pushed one long finger deep inside.
“Please—” she keened sharply, digging her nails into his shoulders and sobbing as he started to pump his finger in and out of her dripping sheath.
“Oh, I
’ll please. I promise.”
Forcing her lids to open, she stared up at him, seeing soft gray eyes, smoky and hot with hunger, set in an angelically beautiful face, tumbled curls falling around the bones 102
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that were cut just shy of being almost too beautiful for a man’s face. His mouth, wide, sensual, was curved in a warm, hungry smile as he lowered his mouth down to hers, whispering, “I’ve been waiting, years and years, for you to come back.”
“Luke, I’m sorry it took so long… Make love to me, please,” she whimpered.
His body, long and strong, came down on hers, and his cock, thick and hard, probed at the entrance to her core before he started to take long, slow possession of her body. “Sweet, sweet woman,” he murmured against her mouth. “Mine, mine… You’ll never be taken away again.”
“Never,” she whispered as he started to thrust deep, his cock burying completely inside her, the rounded blunt head stroking so deep inside her, she could feel it in her heart, in her soul.
He shafted her slowly, pulling out, pushing back inside her pussy with slow, delicious thrusts as he nibbled and suckled on her breasts, shifting his weight to circle his thumb around her clit in just the right way. He brought his hand up and licked the cream from his thumb with a hungry groan before starting to ride her harder, pumping into her with stronger thrusts, until the heavy, wet sounds of him fucking her filled the room, mingled with the ragged sounds of her moaning his name, and his long, deep growl as he buried his face against her neck.
“Mine…” he muttered, driving deep.
“Mine…”
Digging his fingers into the soft curves of her ass, he rose up onto his knees and held her open, filling her with short, hard digs of his cock, staring into her eyes, while she stared up at him, into the beautiful, familiar face as she started to come, squeezing down around him and shuddering throughout her entire body.
His head fell back, the veins in his neck standing out, his lean, muscled chest gleaming under a fine coat of sweat as he pushed his thick, wetly gleam cock back inside one last time, rotating his hip in a slow, clockwise motion and stroking over the bundled nerve endings there as she screamed out his name as he came inside her, flooding her with his come.
“Lucas!”
