Kiss & Hell

by Cassidy, Dakota

  Reason flew out the window and hot on its heels was her sanity when Clyde pulled her skirt up, grazing fiery fingers over her thighs, caressing the sensitive flesh at the tops of them.

  Her muscles clenched in aching response.

  So did her ears when dogs number one and five began to howl. Dogs two, three, four, and six joined the mix, their toenails clattering against the hardwood floor, bringing the clinch they were in to an abrupt halt.

  Delaney tore her mouth from Clyde’s with reluctance, leaning her head back against the wall to find air for her tortured lungs.

  Clyde let his head rest against her jaw, his breath coming in jagged huffs. “Do they have to go to the bathroom?”

  She pushed her head from the wall, directing her gaze at her puppies, scratching at Clyde’s ankles, their tongues lolling from their mouths.

  You had to love the timing of the departed.

  This—this was the very reason she was never, ever going to get laid again.

  Maybe not even in the next lifetime.

  Delaney sighed the sigh of the defeated. “No. I don’t think they have to make potties.”

  “I fed them. They can’t be hungry,” he said against her neck, tickling her flesh with a fan of his hot breath.

  He’d fed them? Her gut fluttered in time with her heart because he’d done it without her ever mentioning a word. But no, they weren’t hungry. “No. They’re not hungry.”

  “So what are they?”

  “Excited.”

  “About?”

  “Remember back at Kellen’s when I told you not to freak out?”

  “Delaney?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “If there’s a guy without a head and he’s anywhere near me, you’re going to be a casualty I can’t avoid—’cause I’m out.”

  “Understandable.”

  “Verdict?”

  “Nah. His head’s not on your shoulder this time.”

  A clear, relieved sigh escaped his chest, pushing against hers. “Location?”

  Delaney said nothing. If she did, he’d get the squicks and flip again. How could she possibly help a lost spirit if Clyde, and whatever craziness he’d brought with him from Hell, kept chasing them away?

  “Delaney?”

  “Yes, Clyde?”

  “Where’s his head?”

  “Do you mean the exact, exact location?”

  “Yep. I mean the most exact location you’re capable of giving me.”

  “Can you try not to freak out again if I tell you? Whenever you move, whatever kind of vibe you give off makes the spirits fade in and out. I can’t do my job and help them if I can’t see them for more than a couple of seconds. So if you promise not to move, I’ll tell you.”

  “Uh, no. I’m trying to be a gentleman here and stay calm, but it wasn’t your shoulder his head was on today. That’s too much for even me. Now answer the question or it’s your ass and the floor. You’ll make the perfect couple. The head. Coordinates. Now.”

  It was so crazy hot when he made demands she had to force back a breathy sigh from escaping her lips. “Your foot.”

  “His head is on my foot?”

  “Yeaaah. His expression, from here anyway, screams exhaustion. Maybe he was tired from carrying around his head. So he put it down. I can’t blame him. Carrying your head around has to be a lot.”

  “A human head can weigh up to ten pounds, or so I think I’ve read. I could see him being tired.” And then, as though he’d caught himself being practical when he really wanted to display his disgust and fear by brushing the head off his foot, a violent shudder ran the length of his body.

  “Again, another useless fact I’ll keep near and dear.”

  “Delaney?”

  “Yes, Clyde?”

  “Remember my standing apology between us?”

  Uh-huh. She did. “I do.”

  “Good. Don’t forget I meant it. Oh, and don’t forget to bend your knees,” he warned.

  With those words, he dropped her.

  eleven

  Delaney hit the floor with a sharp, breath-stealing bounce, her ass scraping the wall on its way down. Thankfully, she did remember to bend her knees, the jolt to them no less jarring, but manageable.

  Clyde shook his left foot with vigorous jabs at the room while he hopped on one foot. “Jesus Christ! What is it with these damned ghosts?” he yelled. “And before you say anything, I’m sorry for dropping you, but for shit’s sake, his head was on my foot. His head.” He shuddered once more, his large body visibly convulsing.

  The dogs ran to the back of the store, stopping between the exit of the storefront and the entrance to her living room. Delaney ignored Clyde and ran behind them, hoping they’d sniffed out the entity’s location.

  Delaney found her spirit on the couch, his head neatly sitting in his lap as though he held nothing more significant than a plate of Christmas cookies. The dogs hopped up on the couch, sniffing the air and stumbling over each other.

  If you put the spirit’s two pieces together, he’d probably been a decent-looking guy when he was alive. His hair was the color of straw, with white-blond highlights that poked out beneath his scrub cap. His skin was the ruddy color of someone who liked the outdoors and clean living. Eyes, a milk chocolate shade of brown deeply set beneath thick brows much darker than his hair, moved with animation. From his shoulders down, he appeared to be in pretty fine shape. The scrubs he wore clung to wide, lean shoulders. His fingers toyed with the scrub cap on top of his head, readjusting while it rested in his lap.

  Delaney honed in on his lips, kneeling down in front of him to watch them with hawklike eyes. They moved, but no sound came out. Most likely because whatever had happened to him when he died had severed his vocal cords. Major suckage, in her opinion.

  Clyde lumbered behind her with raucous clomps of his feet, stopping just behind the couch, making the entity’s transparent form flutter.

  She threw her hands up to keep him from going any farther. “Stop!”

  Clyde froze in place like they were playing a game of freeze tag. One foot, mere inches from the floor, stopped midair. His eyes and nothing more moved from side to side, attempting to scan the room. “Where is he?”

  She approached Clyde with care. “Right on the couch. Look down.”

  Clyde averted his eyes, staring straight ahead. “Uh, no. No headless guys for me, thanks.”

  “Just hold still. Not a muscle,” she warned with a finger.

  “Call me statue.”

  “Your mouth is a muscle.”

  “Actually, it’s your tongue that’s the muscle and it has—”

  “Clyde!” she admonished low. “You’re gonna be in the market for a new one after I yank it from your head if you don’t can it. Be quiet!”

  He clamped his delicious lips, lips that moments ago she’d accosted, shut. But then he lost his balance and his foot, almost to the floor, dropped like a rock.

  Again, the entity crackled like snow on a television set. Shit, shit, shit.

  Clyde instantly froze again, the glance he sent Delaney’s way was one of apology, but the spirit kept fluttering.

  Out of the blue, an idea came to her. “Clyde, move your head.”

  “My head . . .”

  “Just do it.”

  “Which way?”

  Her eyes darted from Clyde to the ghost. “To the left.”

  “Like this?”

  The silvery transparency of the doctor began to fill in like a small child with crayons had begun to color in his outline. “Just a little more to the left. Like an inch. Oh! And hold your right arm up, too. Do it until I say stop.”

  Clyde did as she asked, tilting his head to the left and raising his right arm in an arc to just above his head.

  Better. The doctor was coming in much better. “Stop. Now lift your left leg, bend it at the knee.”

  “A contortionist I’m not.”

  Her look was pleading. “Help a sistah out, okay?”


  Clyde mumbled under his breath, but obligingly moved his leg up.

  “Stop!” she whisper-yelled. “That’s perfect.” A sidelong glance at Clyde’s awkward position almost made her burst out laughing. “Very Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”

  “Released in the year 2000—directed by Ang Lee—”

  “Clyyyyde,” she warned.

  He scowled at her. “Hurry up. My arm hurts and my nose suddenly itches.”

  Delaney knelt back down and watched soundless lips move in the repeated pattern over and over. Fuck, if she could just hear him . . . “Oh, wait! There’s an o in the word. Yeah, an o . . .” She paused, wracking her brain. “Wait, maybe it’s not an o. Maybe it’s au ... uma! I think he’s saying uma . . .” But that made no frickin’ sense. “I know it makes no sense, but that’s what it looks like.” She watched his lips once more, squinting to get a different perspective. “Uma? What the hell is an uma?” She directed her question to the dead guy. The corpse rolled his eyes upward with decided impatience.

  “Thurman? Uma Thurman?” Clyde blurted out. “Born April 29, 1970, in—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Clyde—” The entity stopped her midsen tence, shaking his detached head left then right on his lap. “See? He says that’s not right,” Delaney said over her shoulder.

  The tension in Clyde’s voice mounted. “Well, there is no such word as uma, Delaney, and could you hurry up? The Mr. Miyagi in me is about to crumble, Grasshopper.”

  “Omigod—The Karate Kid! I was ten, so, like, 1984 or so. Just starting to like boys. Ohhhh, I had such a crush on Ralph Mac chio.” She smiled fondly at the memory. “Remember wax on, wax off?” Delaney flipped her hands up and made swirling movements in the air. “Take that, trivia man.”

  “Delaney,” Clyde said through teeth that were clamped, “now isn’t the time to best me in movie trivia. I’m sweating bullets here, and my muscles are this close to spasm and becoming so bunched, I’ll permanently be three inches shorter. Hurry up.”

  Delaney clucked her tongue at him. “If you’d taken yoga and found your happy place, you’d be there right now and your muscles would be all yippy-skippy.”

  “Delaney . . .”

  Okay, he was growling, and sweating, if the glisten on his forehead wasn’t the lights in her living room playing tricks.

  Her attention returned fully to the spirit, but she continued to remain as baffled as she’d been when he’d first moved his mouth. His insistence that she was wrong was compounded by the continual shake he gave his poor head in the very distinct manner of the word no. Desperation became helplessness. “Dude,” she muttered to him, “I don’t get it. Let’s try something different. Are you a doctor?”

  His fingers, nestled just above his head’s ears, tilted it forward.

  “Yes!” she shouted triumphantly. “Okay. A doctor. What kind of doctor? Pediatrician? General practitioner? Chiropractor? Ooooh, what about brain surgeon?”

  The head moved to the left and the right again while his lips kept moving in the same pattern.

  She bit a fingernail in concentration. “Damn. Okay, forget what kind of doctor you were. Is the reason you found me because of your profession? Like you want me to pass on a message to a patient, or their family?”

  The spirit’s outline began to fade again, frustrating her.

  Clyde let out a grunt, his arms and legs giving out.

  The moment Clyde slumped was the moment the spirit slipped away, evaporating into the air like a sliver of smoke. “Damn.”

  His look was apologetic. “I’m sorry. I’ll get right on those yoga classes the moment I’m free of a little thing like Hell.”

  She pressed a finger to her temple. “Did you see him? Maybe if you’d watched his lips move, you might have caught something I didn’t.”

  Clyde’s body did that shudder thing again. “Delaney, I’ll say this one more time. No. I didn’t see him because I didn’t want to see him. He has no head. I repeat. No head. I can’t stress that enough. That’s just too weird for me. Besides, I was too busy clenching every muscle in my body to focus on much else. I’m also not ashamed to admit I’m just a little squeamish about blood and detached body parts anywhere on my person. So what more do we know about him tonight than we did this afternoon? He’s a doctor?”

  “Yep, I think so. At least he made his head nod yes when I asked him if he was. Or he did something in the medical profession. He definitely lost his head in some kind of accident that had to suck big fat weenies. He was decapitated, I’m guessing. Can’t think of another explanation for why he’d be carrying around his head.”

  Clyde jammed his hands in his pockets. “And we have the word uma. Which isn’t really a word.”

  “Yep. Maybe he’s foreign like the lady with the doily on her head.” Damn, she should have asked him that, but with Clyde being her conduit for all things spiritual, it was distracting.

  “Well, shit. I have to give you patience. This would drive me out of my mind.”

  Her shoulders lifted, then released. “It’s what I do and sometimes, that’s how the spirits roll. They aren’t always sure why they’re here either, or the message they’re trying to send. It’s all a part of my medium package. Sometimes I have to figure it out on my own with most of the pieces of the puzzle missing.”

  “Decapitated . . . you know, ironically, I once knew a guy who was decapitated.”

  “Ugh. Really?”

  “And as a matter of fact, he was a doctor, too. Brutal car accident.”

  Maybe the spirit wanted to talk to Clyde? He’d said he was sick as a child . . . “Was he a young guy? Really blond with brown eyes? Very fit?”

  “He did have brown eyes, but he was balding and had a paunch. It was a shame, too. He was a nice guy.”

  “And he was a doctor?”

  “Yeah. Geriatric. My mother’s.”

  Damn. “Well, your doc doesn’t match my ghost’s MO, anyway. So back to square one for the headless scalpel wielder. That’s two ghosts in the matter of days who’ve shown up and I couldn’t help them.”

  “Does that happen often?”

  “Nope. So far, the only ghost I don’t get is Darwin. I don’t know why he won’t hit the field of endless tennis balls and rawhide bones. But it’s early in the game. Some spirits require more investigation than others and longer periods of interaction. But it’s bothering me that they don’t come in as clearly.”

  Clyde put a hand of sympathy on her shoulder, creating mayhem in her stomach. “And I realize that’s my fault. However, I know what’d make you feel better.”

  Your rock-hard body up against mine? On mine? Under mine? In a boat, on a float? Or even in a moat . . . She mentally gasped. Enough. Delaney cleared her throat, moving away from Clyde. “What’d make me feel better?”

  “My Slurpee. Bet if you had some of my banana Slurpee, you’d feel better.”

  She grinned. “Bet I’d rather just hand over my left lung and a kidney.”

  Clyde laughed. It rumbled from deep in his chest, making it strain against his borrowed polo shirt. “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”

  His laugh was sexy when it was unbidden. The word unbidden sounded a lot like forbidden—which Clyde was. As had been that kiss she’d thrown at him like she was whoring for dollars. She needed space to recover. Like big. “It’s on my list of things to do. And now, I have to finish my inventory. Go amuse yourself. In fact, why not teach the dogs how to eat with the proper fork and polish my toenails for me. You’re good at making them listen.”

  “You sure you don’t need help?” His stance said, I’m just trying to be polite by offering, but his eyes said something different.

  Something she couldn’t quite read and was better off remaining illiterate to.

  Flapping a hand at him, Delaney turned and backed out of the living room. “Nah. Go watch TV or something. It’s just boring paperwork,” she offered dismissively, turning toward the storefront. “I’ll try to be quiet if you crash
on the couch. But be warned,” she called over her shoulder, “tomorrow—we go digging around your life and death.” Because you have to go—soon—if not sooner. He was too appealing on too many levels to be ignored, and that just couldn’t be.

  End of.

  “Clyyyyyyve . . . How’s it goin’, brother?”

  The voice from behind Clyde, gravelly and harsh, crackled in his right ear as he sat on the couch, watching some inane program about a chef attacking unsuspecting women in a grocery store and taking them home to teach them how to cook. He didn’t turn around, keeping his face impassive and his tone cool. Whoever it was, it was someone who’d come to check up on him, and they expected to find that psycho Clyve, not the tame, unassuming, nonconfrontational Clyde. So this would be where he could rely on all those movies he’d watched when he was so sick. “What the hell are you doing here?” he said, dry and disinterested, cracking his knuckles.

  “My job, asshole, which is checking up on your sorry behind.”

  Clyde’s jaw clenched while he ground his teeth together. It was crucial he remember he was pretending to be a sociopath. “Fuck you. I don’t need a goddamned babysitter.” Niice, he commended himself. Nice snarly quality to his tone with just enough affront in it to make it sound like he was really that freak Clyve.

  The voice hopped over the couch, slouching down next to Clyde, his greasy stench, like dead, rotting flesh, putrefying in his nostrils. “Don’t you think I fucking know that? I’m just doin’ what I’m supposed to do to get by. That psychopath Pauley sent me to check up on you because I was in the area. So here I am. Nice cover, by the way. You never woulda gotten within a hundred yards of this chick looking the way you did before you left Hell. What made you pick a guy who looks like a reject in a Calvin Klein underwear ad?”

  He grunted, jamming his fingers under his armpits. He hadn’t picked anything. This really was what he looked like. But he remembered what Delaney’d said when he’d been duct-taped to the radiator and how some demons chose other forms to appear in. Clyde shrugged indifferently. “Saw it on the subway, and it wasn’t Klein, it was Kors somebody. You know, like the beer?”