The Cursed Hollow (Return to Sleepy Hollow Book 1)

by Candace Wondrak

  Fuck it. You only lived once, right? You only had one life, so you had to make the most out of every moment, and all that other Hallmark card bullshit, right? Plus, with how things were going around here, it’d be a miracle if I lasted the week.

  We could brainstorm for a solution to the whole making-Bones-believe-us thing later. Right now, there was only one thing on my mind.

  Maybe it was my expression. Maybe it was the fact that I was this close from being taken by a spirit. Or, hell, maybe it was just a long time coming, but Crane knew exactly what I wanted. He reached for me, pulling me in close with an abrupt intensity I didn’t know he was capable of. His fingers splayed in my hair, holding my head steady, as if I’d try to pull away.

  As fucking if. I was ready to go all the way with him earlier; he was the one who stopped us, not me.

  His lips came down on mine, his neck bent to accommodate the height difference. His mouth was warm and heated, igniting a fiery passion deep within me. I didn’t love this man, but I wanted him more than I ever wanted someone else. I wanted to rip off his clothes, run my hands all along his lean frame, and…

  God, it was hard to think. So you know what? I was done thinking; here, tonight, I was simply going to do. No more internal debating, no more fickleness.

  I set my hands on the collar of his shirt, tugging us both down to the carpeted floor. Crane rested on top of me, his mouth roaming along my jaw, trailing kisses up and down my neck, making me shiver over and over again. His legs pinned mine down, so long and lean compared to mine. Crane was a refined, hoity-toity kind of guy, but when the heat arrived, he could be just as sexy as the rest.

  With the feeling of his lips on my neck, I worked at his shirt, practically tearing at the buttons, needing to touch his chest, feel his bare skin. Button by button I went, practically moaning when I felt him press his hips down on me, making me feel the hardness of his dick. We’d definitely crossed the path of no return now.

  Once his shirt was completely unbuttoned, Crane practically threw it off. Before I knew it, we were both naked on the floor, our clothes in heaps beside us, our hands drifting along each other’s body, taking in each and every curve, every muscle and tender place. His erection poked at me, but he didn’t push inside. He’d taken off his glasses, so when his emerald eyes looked at me, I knew I was a bit fuzzy to him.

  “I would prefer to take you upstairs, if that’s alright,” Crane murmured against my ear, an invitation I would never say no to. A man like him had to get down and dirty in a bed, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care where we did it, as long as we did it. As long as I finally scratched this everlasting horny itch I had.

  I nodded, and Crane pulled me up. We left our clothes and his glasses on the floor as we headed to the stairs. Crane led the way, his hand holding mine with a firm grip. Step by step I followed him, thankful that Crane had enough money to have a big house with no neighbors close by—it meant no one could peer into the windows and see our nakedness.

  Of course, as I made it to the top step, as Crane led me into his room, I started to wonder if I was spiraling. If this place, if Sleepy Hollow, was making me do things I wouldn’t normally do. I mean, today I saw a murder. That didn’t happen every day, you know? Kind of traumatizing. And to be a suspect in that murder…there was really nothing to compare it to. No other life experiences to use to make it not seem as terrifyingly momentous as it was.

  I saw a man die—or at least I was in the same room as him when he died—and I was responding to it by having sex with one of the men who claimed to have feelings for me, even before he met me.

  Nothing at all could go wrong here, right? This wasn’t a recipe for disaster, was it?

  It probably was, but oh well.

  Crane pulled me close to him, our hot, naked bodies pressing against each other. His lips came down on mine, giving me a slow, tender kiss as his arms wrapped around me. Teeny step after teeny step, and soon we were on the bed, me underneath him, beneath the sheets. It was as if we never left, like we’d always been here, lost in each other, needing more.

  Hands moved to my breasts, and I inhaled sharply as I turned away from his mouth, letting out a soft moan as he brushed his palms over my nipples. Sensitive things, they were. I ran my hands down his back, feeling his skin tensing under my touch.

  Maybe I should’ve given him a warning: having sex with you does not mean I’m yours, nor does it mean I’m in love with you. I’m simply using your body for your dick and nothing else. Hmm…then again, maybe not. That might kill the mood a bit.

  I spread my legs, the universal welcome gesture to a dick. Crane’s mouth left my neck, and he propped himself up just a bit, his eyelids half-closed, his lips parted slightly. He took a moment to position himself, and even though he didn’t have his glasses on, he must’ve wanted to watch me as he entered me. Our gazes locked, and it took everything in me to not close my eyes and look away when he pushed fully inside.

  Crane let out a ragged breath once he was in, and then he leaned back down over me, his arms around my head, holding himself up as his hips began to set the pace of this fuck-fest. I kept my hands on his ass, liking the feeling of it as he pumped in and out. My back arched, and I finally let myself close my eyes, losing myself in the sensation of being taken, being fucked. There was always something so primal about it, something that made me even hornier.

  A warmth spread in my lower gut, and I wanted more, more, more. It would never be enough, I felt like, when it came to Crane. This motherfucking town would be the death of me, but right now, I didn’t care. Let Sleepy Hollow come for me. Let it take me. Let it do whatever the fuck it wanted to me. As long as I had Crane, I didn’t care.

  Whoa. That was…that was almost a thought of budding love, wasn’t it? Shit. Better stop thinking and focus on his dick again.

  I arched my back, and he pushed further inside, as deep as he could go without breaking me. The sounds of our sex filled the air, the twilight world outside inching towards total darkness. Sweat lined Crane’s chest, his cheeks flushed. Every so often he let out a low moan, a sound I never would’ve pegged him capable of. Crane could be just as carnal as the rest, just as hungry, just as raw. It was good to know.

  Crane’s speed picked up the pace, and I cried out with the sudden roughness. His hips jerked, and he nearly collapsed on top of me, an earth-shattering moan erupting from his chest. He didn’t pull out of me right away, he simply held himself there, his dick growing limp inside of me, his chest rapidly trying to catch his breath.

  The poor man thought he was done? Hell no. He might’ve found his release, but I didn’t have mine yet. This sexual encounter wasn’t quite over just yet.

  I pushed him off me, flipping us so instead he lay on his back and I straddled him. His dick hadn’t slipped out of me completely, so it was easy for me to start riding him, and, big surprise, his dick got hard again. Which was good, because it was a lot easier to ride a hard one than a limp one. I mean, I didn’t have much experience with the latter, but I could imagine how unfun it was.

  I rocked back and forth on him, feeling his length slide in and out, dragging myself so far away that his tip nearly left me each time. I did what felt good to me, but Crane didn’t seem to have any problems with it. His eyes were slits, watching me as I took charge, set the pace that felt good for me. His hands found their way to my hips, helping me rock back and forth but not changing my momentum. Crane let out a groan every now and then, and the sounds were like music to my ears. I liked hearing his groans; they were some of the hottest sounds I’d ever heard, probably because I wasn’t expecting him to make them.

  The pressure started to build inside me, and I let the pleasure take hold. An orgasm swept through me, causing me to throw my head back and cry out, heat flooding every part of my body, my toes curling. My inner walls clenched, and Crane sat up, moving his hands to my back but not flipping us to the way we were before. Since I was so caught up in my own orgasm high, he helped me move along him, hi
s hips rocking beneath me.

  Once the orgasm settled, I wrapped my arms around his neck, holding myself close to him as he thrust in and out of me. I could feel myself wet with both his cum and my own slickness, and I was more than content to let him come again. I’d been on birth control since I was eighteen years old; I wasn’t worried about pregnancy, and from what it sounded like, Crane hadn’t been with many other women, for he’d always longed for me.

  Like a star-crossed lover or some sappy shit.

  Crane’s fingers tightened on my skin, his arms locking around me as his hips slammed up into me one final time. He moaned loudly when he came, squeezing his eyes shut and immediately resting his head on my shoulder, breathing hard.

  We fell back to the bed, and he pulled out of me. I lay on my side next to him, and Crane kept an arm around me, still struggling to get his breathing back to normal. By the awe and the bliss in his expression, you’d think he just succeeded in doing the number one thing on his bucket list, or won the lottery, or something as impossible.

  Maybe it was impossible. He’d worked with my dad, after all. All of the old stories, how Katrina Van Tassel chose Abraham over Ichabod, maybe Crane never thought he’d have me. He wouldn’t have, if my dad wasn’t dead. I never would’ve come back here. This town didn’t call to me, or at the very least it never did before this.

  Neither of us said anything for the longest time. Hell, I wasn’t sure what to say. I felt like telling him that this didn’t mean anything, that it was just sex and not a proclamation of feelings would’ve been too bitchy. Then again, I’d practically attacked him with a frying pan when I first met him, so it had to be a step up from that.

  Crane let out a sigh. “I should get up, do some research. You should rest here, Kat. Take it easy. You’ve been through a lot today.”

  I wanted to smack his chest—which was a lot nicer than his slim frame would suggest. Crane wasn’t overly muscled, but he hadn’t an ounce of fat anywhere on him. He was lean, and a lot stronger than he looked.

  Why was everyone’s solution to trauma resting? Resting wouldn’t do shit. I could help him research…even though I didn’t know the first thing about researching things involving Sleepy Hollow. I had the feeling it involved more than Googling a few things.

  So I resisted my urge to smack him, letting him get up. My eyes fell to his ass, watching as he went into the walk-in closet. “So the spirits have to know that I’m the key,” I said, “to…whatever. Closing the veil. Opening it. Why would the Headless Horseman—” I paused, hating that I couldn’t think of another word to say to describe what he did.

  I wouldn’t say he’d protected me, but no other words came to mind. Protecting me by killing someone. How twisted was that?

  Crane came out, wearing pants but nothing on his torso. It was a good look for him, I’d admit. His brown hair was ruffled a bit from our excursions, and his eyes still had trouble focusing on me, but still, I was struck with the sudden thought of: damn, he’s cute.

  “I don’t know if he wants the veil open,” Crane spoke, sliding his arm into a shirt, one sleeve at a time. “I think his search for his head is his primary focus.”

  I bit my lower lip, wondering what the Headless Horseman would do if he found his head. Or, more likely, if I found it for him. Would he stop haunting the bridge? Would he kill me? Would he be able to cross over the veil like these other spirits and enact mayhem on Sleepy Hollow?

  One thing was for certain. The Headless Horseman was the least of my problems now.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It turned out, doing research involved looking at a lot of old, musty books. Crane had a lot of them. After I showered and threw my clothes on, I did my best to help, even as the hours ticked into the night. Crane had a vague plan, but it was not one he would disclose to me, probably because I’d think he was ten different kinds of nuts. Or I would have, provided I never saw the Headless Horseman and was still in my own personal la-la land when it came to spirits.

  All Crane kept saying was: “Your father and I were working on a few different things.”

  Okay, yeah. So specific.

  So I kept my mouth shut, not knowing what the hell I was looking for. Basically, I turned into the food-fetcher. The drink-getter. The person who Crane told to fetch a pen and all the other useless stuff. Like I was some kind of assistant to his crazed brilliance. I wouldn’t go so far as to label Crane or my father brilliant, but seeing as how this shit was real, neither were as crazy as I’d thought.

  Sometime during the night, I must’ve fallen asleep in the chair near the windows in the library, because the next thing I knew, I woke up, the barest hints of sunlight streaming onto my face. As I came to, I found a blanket had been draped over me, laying atop my toes all the way to my hunched torso.

  I sat up straight, a crick in my back from the uncomfortable position. Beneath the blanket, a book slid out, hitting the wooden floor with a thud. Stretching first, I bent to pick it up, snapping it shut as I glanced all around. The library was practically the size of my apartment back home, its walls full of floor-to-ceiling bookcases, jam-packed with ancient texts and leather-bound tomes. Some of it, I’d discovered last night, was in another language. Crane had told me he could read every single book in this space, which I just found ridiculous.

  I sat in the only chair in the large room; Crane had made himself at home at the desk. It was a wide, spacious thing, made of a dark wood, leather stitched into its top. Nearly a dozen books sat splayed atop it, most of them open to random pages—although Crane would never say they were random.

  Crane, I noticed, was nowhere to be found.

  I swear to God, if that bastard went to bed on a comfortable mattress and left me here only to get an ache in my lower back, I was going to kill him.

  Tossing the blanket off me, I set the book down on the chair before marching out of the room, heading straight across the hall and to his bedroom…where Crane wasn’t. The sheets didn’t look touched since our prior intimate activities.

  Huh.

  I checked the bathroom; nothing in there, either. I headed down the stairs, checking the living room and the dining room, half expecting him to be there, sipping tea with a superior expression on his face. For him to look at me, smile, and proudly proclaim that he’d solved every single one of our problems. I fucking wish.

  But nope. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t even in the kitchen, although I did spot something new hanging on the fridge. A note, like we were some couple in the fifties. A man and his housewife. I moved closer to the note, reading it over a few times before it actually dawned on me.

  Went to the house, I will be back soon. Eat something. And then, because it was Crane, the note was signed with his real signature.

  What a noob.

  I reached around, feeling my pockets. Nothing but my cell phone. The bastard took my keys and went to my dad’s house, all without waking me up. How? I would’ve felt his creeping fingers while I was sleeping in that chair upstairs, right? Crane wasn’t that sly.

  A gust of wind brushed past me, settling along my spine and causing the tiny hairs on my arms to stand straight up. An eerie calmness grew inside of me, and I immediately turned, finding that the set of glass doors that led to the patio in the back were wide open, the breeze gently blowing past them as if nothing at all was out of the ordinary.

  But, you know, it was a little strange, because I knew for a fact those doors were closed a minute ago when I came out of the dining room. I knew, because wide open doors were something you tended to notice when spirits were after you.

  I moved to the doors, glancing around as my hands found their handles. I was seconds from pulling them shut and locking them when a bead of sweat fell from my forehead, trailing along my nose, even though it wasn’t warm. Even though I was in the real world still, I had the peculiar feeling that I wasn’t alone.

  I was being watched, but the question was, by who? What spirit lingered in the otherworld just outside these
doors, wanting me to come out? Crane had said spirits prefer weak victims, so was the white-haired spirit just waiting for me to crack like an egg? Was that why the Headless Horseman was always nearby?

  Fighting the unease settling in my gut, I shut the doors, flipping the lock just in case. Which was pointless, apparently, because locks and doors and windows didn’t seem to be able to keep them out. Crane’s house was warded, or spelled, or whatever the word was—protected by some of the best magical hoo-doo money could buy. My dad’s house wasn’t, because my dad had a thing for spirits.

  I had no idea why. None of the spirits I’d met so far were very likable or friendly.

  After taking a quick peek through the cabinets, I discovered that Crane had a lot of food stocked that I never tried before. Brands I’d never heard of, the kind of stuff you bought at those expensive, earthy grocery stores. I settled for coffee, heading to the grand couch in the living room once it was made and turning on the TV.

  I flipped channels, curling my feet beneath my butt as I sipped my warm mug. Almost immediately, after five channel flips, I came upon a news station. They were, of course, talking about what happened yesterday.

  Mike Reese, a local lawyer, found dead in his office. Foul play was obviously suspected, because how the hell could one inflict a wound like that on yourself, but the suspect pool was slim. I rolled my eyes when they started talking about how he was with a client when it happened, but it’s unknown whether the client was the culprit, and I was seconds from changing the channel when the news lady came onto the screen, sitting at her desk with another man she was about to interview.

  I didn’t recognize the man, but something in the back of my mind told me not to flip channels, to hear what he had to say.

  The newscaster was a pretty blonde woman, middle-aged but looking great. Then again, that could’ve been the makeup. Her bright blue eyes stared straight at the camera, almost like she stared right at me. “I’m here with Tom Wyland, a local historian of Tarry, and a firm believer in all of the legends of Sleepy Hollow.”