by Rebecca York
It was cool inside the little building sunk into the ground over a natural spring, and the large ice blocks should keep for several days.
Back inside the house, she opened some of the high windows that were too narrow for a man to climb through.
With the door bolted, she felt more secure. She was glad she didn’t have to go outside to use the bathroom. The house had running water, piped in from the spring. Cold water, at least. If she wanted hot, she’d have to heat it on the propane-fueled stove.
Although she had hardly any appetite, she fixed herself a quick dinner of bread and cheese and brought it to the familiar rough wood kitchen table, along with the gun, which she set at her place. She also opened a bottle of white wine from her father’s stock and poured herself a small glass, then bowed her head and said a prayer for her safety and his.
As she ate, she thought about her family. Her father was her only relative. The only one who counted. Her older brother had been killed by General Lopez’s men, although nobody could ever prove it.
Mama had left them because she’d been too afraid to stay. Isabella hadn’t seen her in years and wouldn’t even know where to find her, since she’d gone into hiding.
Isabella sipped the wine, trying to relax. When the meal was finished, she washed up quickly and changed into a T-shirt and shorts, keeping her thoughts away from the windstorm that had greeted her. But finally it was impossible not to come back to it.
She shivered, contemplating what she’d been trying to avoid. The ghost.
If it had been lurking around the ranch, why hadn’t she seen it when she’d lived here before? And now, why had it called her by name?
She kept the gun with her and laid it on the bedside table before climbing under the covers. She’d been exhausted earlier. She was even more tired now, but she lay in the darkness, her mind churning over everything that had happened in the past few hours.
Finally, she fell into a restless sleep filled with the sound of the wind in the trees and the sensation of being lifted off her feet and carried through the air.
Something woke her before dawn. Not sure what it was, she lay very still under the covers, her eyes slitted, trying to look like she was still asleep. Her gaze flicked to the window, the door, the closet, probing the shadows.
She saw no one, yet she couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that she was no longer alone in the room.
Music wafted toward her, barely audible, yet it sounded like someone playing a guitar.
Straining to hear, she made out the song.
Down in the valley. The valley so low.
Hang your head over, and hear the wind blow.
It was one of the songs Matthew Houseman had played and sung out on the patio at night. Did she really hear it now or was she only dreaming of the past?
She clenched her fist, digging her fingernails into her palm, feeling the pain. That proved she was awake, didn’t it?
Or was it still part of a dream?
As she stared into the darkness, light began to flicker in one corner. Ghostly light.
She might have screamed if the breath hadn’t been frozen in her lungs.
She might have run if she hadn’t felt compelled to stay.
She lay perfectly still, her heart pounding as she waited with a kind of tingling anticipation for what would happen next.
The moon had long since set. The room was almost totally dark, except for the hazy white light still flickering in the corner. She wanted to run, but at the same time she knew that would be a mistake. She couldn’t run from this. She must face it.
As she stared at the light, she thought she saw the shadow of a man, standing very still.
Light and shadow. It was very strange.
She couldn’t see his features. She could only tell he was tall, with broad shoulders.
Her hand inched toward the gun as her confused mind scrambled for explanations. There must be a trapdoor in the floor. The light had come drifting through. Then the man had climbed up.
“Hands in the air,” she called out. “I’ve got a gun.”
The shadow didn’t move.
“I said, hands in the air.”
He stayed exactly as he was, his voice floating toward her like a puff of smoke. “I won’t hurt you.” The sound was raspy, disused.
She kept the gun steady in her hand. “Who are you?” she asked, waiting with her heart pounding.
Long seconds passed, and she wondered if he knew the answer to the question. Finally, he said, “Matthew Houseman.”
She gasped when she heard his name, but she managed to ask the question that had gnawed at her since the wind had called her name. “You’re his ghost?”
“Am I?” he asked, sounding uncertain.
The doubt in his voice made her heart squeeze.
“If I’m dead, what happened to me?”
She swallowed hard, thinking he should know the answer.
“Matthew Houseman was killed five years ago in a raid on a militia compound in Montana.”
Again, there was a long pause. “I . . . don’t remember that.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked in a halting voice.
“Guarding this place.” She heard regret lace his tone. “That’s why I . . . attacked you when you got out of the car. I didn’t know you were Isabella. Not at first. Then I remembered.”
“Remembered me?”
“Yes. I remembered what was between us. It made me happy and sad all at the same time. Is that possible?”
“Yes,” she whispered, feeling her heart squeeze.
She flashed back on the moments when she’d first arrived, when the wind had come rushing at her. It had picked her up and started to hurl her at the stable wall. At the last second, it had put her down. Then she’d heard someone speak her name.
“Matt, is it really you?” she whispered, trying to come to terms with what was happening and failing to make sense of this encounter.
“Yes,” he answered, and she heard relief in his voice.
Her hand reached out for the flashlight.
“Don’t.”
“Why not?”
“I think you won’t be able to see me any better in the light,” he answered, his tone filled with sadness now.
He moved then, coming across the room, not exactly walking but flowing the way the wind had flowed around her when it had taken her captive.
She lay with her heart thumping inside her chest, listening for his footsteps and hearing nothing.
Yet she caught his clean male scent—mixed with the smell of soap and the desert. The scent she remembered from long ago.
He stopped beside the bed, and she knew he was looking down at her. She remembered the old rules that had always been between them. He shouldn’t be in her bedroom. She should order him to leave.
But she had the feeling that he would do what he wanted no matter what she said. Or maybe do what he needed to do. She wasn’t sure which.
She closed her eyes. If she didn’t try to look for him, maybe she could keep the illusion that he was really in her bedroom.
Because he couldn’t be here, and this couldn’t be happening. It had to be a dream. Or was this like when Nana had come to her?
That notion was comforting.
As she lay with her eyes squeezed tightly shut, the air around her stirred, and she felt his breath against her face, like mist, only it was warm, not cold.
“You’ve grown into a woman. You were pretty years ago. Now you’re gorgeous,” he murmured. “Like a beauty in a Velazquez painting.”
“That’s how you see me?”
“Oh yes. I always wanted to kiss you, querida. You knew that, didn’t you?” He called her sweetheart. He had never said that aloud to her before. But he must have thought it.
That knowledge made her heart leap.
“Yes,” she admitted. “And I wanted to kiss you,” she added, thinking it was a bold admission. But it was only to a ghost. Or a phantom in a dream.
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“We both longed for what was forbidden,” he answered, just before she felt the pressure of his lips against hers.
It was a light kiss, his mouth brushing back and forth against hers.
But it stirred her senses. Finally, after all these years, it was happening.
She knew it couldn’t be real, yet she wanted to pull him closer. Still, she kept her arms at her sides, because she understood deep down that if she reached for him, she would spoil the wonderful illusion.
Heat burst inside her, overlaid by fear.
What was she doing? And with whom?
As though he sensed her uncertainty, he increased the erotic quality of the kiss, his lips moving over hers with the expertise she’d always known he would possess.
Her heartbeat quickened at the sensuality of the encounter.
She wanted more. So much more. Everything she had been denied with him in the past.
And he must know that. Must feel the same.
“Open for me,” he murmured, and this time he spoke in the warm, sexy voice that she remembered.
She did as he asked, allowing the kiss to deepen, feeling his tongue play with the inside of her lips, then the serrated line of her teeth, before plunging farther in to stroke along the side of her tongue.
When he caught her lower lip between his teeth and gently nipped at her, she heard a small moan rise in her throat.
“You like that.”
“You know I do.”
“And you don’t want me to stop?”
Without waiting for an answer, he touched her then, his fingers stroking her cheeks, her jawline, her neck, moving downward, sending tingles of sensation over her skin.
His lips came back to hers and then feathered soft kisses over her closed eyelids, her brows, the tender line of her jaw.
Enveloped by the arousing spell he was weaving, caught between fantasy and reality, she tugged at the covers, pulling them down to her waist to give him better access to her body.
He accepted the invitation, his hand skimming over her breasts, his touch light and playful and at the same time sensual, flooding her with need.
She felt her nipples bead under her T-shirt, felt his thumbs stroke back and forth across the crests.
Yet even as she responded to him, doubts stirred in her mind. When she’d arrived here, the ghost had frightened her. Talking to Matthew, touching him, kissing him had pushed the fear into the background. Now it leaped to the front of her mind again.
She must be under some kind of spell, and she was the only one who could release herself.
She brought her hands up, pushing at his broad shoulders. They felt solid. More solid than they had appeared when she had seen him standing across the room. It was like he was really here, but what would happen if she opened her eyes?
She didn’t want to find out, and she knew this encounter had gone too far. At least for her own sanity.
“Don’t,” she whispered.
“Why not?”
She asked herself the same question. Why not? Was it because this was wrong? Or because it stirred feelings she could never satisfy?
She heard a sigh ease out of him as his weight lifted off of her. His tone changed as he said, “Tell me why you came here.”
“Men from San Marcos tried to ambush me at my house in Phoenix.”
“How do you know who they were?”
“Who else would it be?”
“Describe them,” he said, his voice all business now. The Decorah Security agent on assignment.
She thought about the man who had faced her in the alley.
“Dark hair. Dark eyes. Medium height. Muscular. I couldn’t see much. They looked like Lopez’s hombres.”
“Okay,” he answered, and it sounded like he had left her bedside and was standing across the room. “I’ll guard you while you’re here. Nothing more and nothing less.”
Then he was gone. Vanished, as silently and as swiftly as he had come to her.
Or had he ever been there?
CHAPTER THREE
Isabella lay in bed, aroused and unfulfilled. Trying to dismiss the humming of her body, she focused on what had happened to her. Either she had had an erotic encounter with a ghost or she had had an erotic dream about a man she’d been hot for as a teenager. A man who had guarded her here, and now he said he was guarding her again.
But that didn’t make sense, in more than one way. Like, if he was a ghost, wouldn’t he haunt the place where he died?
She couldn’t suppress a wry laugh. Was she so off balance that now she was trying to be logical about ghosts?
Still scrambling for explanations, she thought about the vortexes that were all over the Sedona area. The places of power that the Native Americans had known about for thousands of years.
In modern times, they had become famous among adherents of New Age philosophies, people who incorporated Eastern and Western traditions into their spirituality and who took ideas from many different fields as diverse as motivational psychology, holistic health, parapsychology, and even quantum physics. Rather than relying on dogma, they were willing to use anything that worked for them. Including the vortexes.
They had fascinated Isabella, and she’d read as much as she could about them. In the physical world, they were forces of wind and water. Like the circular motion of a tornado or water whirling down a drain.
In Sedona, they were created by spiraling spiritual energy— locations where the conditions were right to facilitate prayer, meditation and healing. Mystical, magical places, if you put it in those terms.
From her earlier research, she knew they were believed to have an energy flow that existed in multiple dimensions. Some people could get in touch with that energy. And maybe she was one of them.
She remembered when she’d gone riding in the desert with Matthew as a teenager, there were locations where she’d felt something strange, something that seemed to connect her with a spiritual world she couldn’t see.
Was that a factor in her encounter with him now?
That stopped her. When she’d first seen the flickering light in the corner of the room, she hadn’t been sure what was happening. Now she discarded the idea that it had been a dream. What had happened was real, regardless of whether anyone else would believe it if she told them.
The ghost of Matthew Houseman had come to her bedroom and kissed her, touched her, talked to her.
Should she be thrilled or afraid?
She lay in bed for an hour longer, but she knew she was too wired to go back to sleep. Finally, when the dark of night had changed to the gray light before dawn, she swung her legs over the side of the bed.
In the bathroom, she stared at herself in the mirror, trying to see what Matthew had seen. Instead she focused on the dark smudges under her eyes. She brushed back her shiny black hair and then let it fall over her forehead again.
She was still staring at herself when another thought occurred to her. If she was really being haunted by a ghost who had come to her bedroom, then he could watch her anytime he wanted. Did she have any privacy? What if he was spying on her now?
Because she’d go mad if she kept up that kind of speculation, she put it out of her mind and went about her business.
Bringing along the gun, she went into the kitchen and heated water on the stove. Back in the bathroom, she mixed in some cold from the tap until she had two inches of warm water in the tub. Still she hesitated before pulling off her shirt. With a grimace, she finally stripped and climbed into the tub where she washed quickly and dressed again in jeans and a T-shirt.
The shallow bath refreshed her. In the kitchen, she heated more water and made coffee in the French press her father had used, then brought in half and half from the springhouse and added a generous amount.
Breakfast was more bread and cheese, because her appetite was almost nonexistent. Now that the sun was up, she positioned her chair so that she could stare out the window, watching in one direction and then the other. A d
ust cloud would tell her if someone was coming up the road, but she saw none, which was reassuring. She was alone here—at least in the conventional sense.
As she took small bites of her meal, her gaze swung to the grove of sycamore trees. That was where the wind had come from last night. And the faint music.
What would she find if she walked over there now?
Unable to finish her small meal, she pushed back her chair and stood. With a sense of anticipation and also of trepidation, she buckled on a holster for her gun, then slipped out the back door and headed across the ranch yard to the grove.
The countryside was dry, but the runoff from the spring produced enough water for the trees to flourish.
This morning, a slight breeze ruffled the leaves. Nothing like the roaring lion of the night before.
As she slipped into the shade under the spreading branches, the temperature seemed to drop a few degrees, making her shiver.
She stood very still, her gaze sweeping the flickering light and shadow as she looked for the man who had visited her last night. If it had really happened at all.
“Matthew?” she called, her voice barely above a whisper.
No one answered, yet she stayed where she was. And as she probed the shadows, she saw something that made her draw in a quick, startled breath.
A man was standing about twenty feet away. He’d been so still and quiet that she hadn’t even seen him. Or had he been there seconds before?
She called him a man, but that wasn’t quite accurate. He was wearing jeans and a work shirt, like the clothing he’d worn when he’d been guarding her. His dark hair was shaggier than she remembered. His eyes were dark. His jaw was tense. But the flickering light passed right through his body as though he were a figure in a movie being projected onto a gauzy, wavering curtain.
It was such a strange sight that she caught her breath.
He started to hum—not the same song from last night, but the spooky one. “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” It was the song about the dead men doomed to endlessly chase a phantom herd of cattle through the clouds.
When she took an involuntary step back, he spoke.
