Christmas Spirit

by Amy Garvey

  She glanced over her shoulder as she opened the door to the spare room. “I don’t know ...”

  “Hey, keeping quiet didn’t help before,” Sam pointed out, edging carefully past her into the dark room. “Where’s the light?”

  “Oh.” She stopped on the threshold, struck by the thick blackness in the room, not alleviated by the dim light at the other end of the upstairs hall. “There isn’t even a lamp in here. But doesn’t turning on the light seem sort of wrong to you anyway?”

  He was closer than she’d realized, huge and solid, and she could feel the heat of him when he spoke, his voice low and a little rough. “You want to sit here in the dark?”

  She swallowed, her tongue darting out to wet her lips before she could think better of it. It sounded incredibly tempting when he said it that way. “I was thinking maybe I could get a candle?”

  “You could do that.” He tucked the wine under his arm and took her glass. “I’ll wait here.”

  She nodded, her mouth suddenly too dry and her heart banging clumsily in her chest. When she stepped back into the hall, she didn’t know if the flush of heat on her cheeks was due to a preliminary emanation of the ghost—or simply to the sinful promise in Sam’s voice.

  What was more, as she hurried along the hall and back downstairs to the kitchen she found herself fervently hoping it was the latter.

  Chapter Four

  Charlie Prescott was too pretty for her own good, Sam thought as he groped his way into the spare room. Too pretty, too shy, much too inexperienced unless his instincts were way off, and thus not his type at all. Except for the pretty part, but that was usually a given. He could be shallow as the next guy, and he knew it.

  What was worse was that Charlie clearly didn’t know how pretty she was, or she would have realized the earrings and the perfume were completely unnecessary. And unless he was mistaken, she had no idea that he was far more interested in sitting up here in the dark with her, hopefully close enough to at least rub shoulders, than in waiting for an apparition he didn’t believe in to show up.

  All of which was dangerous, and bad, and just plain wrong. He was on an assignment here, not on a date, and the whole reason he was working for the ridiculous rag that was Scoop could be chalked up to wanting the wrong woman.

  He groaned as he passed a hand over his eyes, then pinched the bridge of his nose firmly. He needed to concentrate. Focus. And what he should focus on was the fact that no matter how pretty and adorably shy Charlie was, she actually believed that the old house she’d inherited was haunted. By a ghost. Which didn’t exist, and which every sane person over the age of ten knew as well as they knew the boy wizard who’d battled the forces of darkness through, what, ten books, wasn’t real, either.

  Didn’t make him want to kiss her any less, though. She had the sweetest mouth, deep pink and soft and shaped like a bow, and when she licked the taste of the wine off her lips, the temptation to do it himself was so strong he could feel it like an urgent flash of heat.

  Ignore it, he told himself, inching across the room and stubbing his toe once on something hard and solid. When he reached the bed, he slid to the floor and leaned against the side, setting the wine and the glasses beside him. Sitting on the bed was a much more attractive idea, so that was obviously out.

  Ghosts, he told himself when he heard Charlie’s footsteps in the hall. Think ghosts. Doing the graveyard boogie. With crazy women.

  Except Charlie didn’t look crazy when she stepped into the room, shielding the trembling flame of a fat white candle with one hand. The soft gold light threw her features into relief, outlined the gentle curve of her cheekbones and the gleam of her teeth as she bit into her bottom lip in concentration.

  Ghosts, he told himself firmly, sliding over to make room for her. Which was crazy.

  She set the candle down carefully and sat down, keeping a good foot between them. Wrapping her arms around her knees, she smiled shyly at him. “Is there any wine left?”

  More wine was such a bad idea. It really was. He poured her a new glass and handed it over.

  “So tell me about your book,” he said, trying to look at anything but her, which was hard since the candlelight created more problems than it solved. Like making her look beautiful, almost from another time, like a woman from an old, old photograph. What were those called? Daguerreotypes. Yeah.

  But the candle didn’t do much for the room, which smelled musty from age and disuse, and the layer of dust on the floor was visible even in the candle’s tentative glow. “What’s it about?”

  She colored again—he could see that much even in the dim light. “It’s probably going to sound silly.”

  “Try me,” he said easily, and leaned back, relaxing, his arms folded over his chest.

  “It’s a children’s book.” She risked a glance at him. “I’ve been working on it for a while, and it’s called Tales of the Darkbriar. When I inherited this place, I inherited enough money, with what I have saved, to take a year off and try to finish it.”

  He couldn’t help it—his eyebrows went up before he could stop them. “Aha. It wasn’t your last red pencil breaking, you’d just had it.”

  She nodded, and her smile was proud. “I did. I figured it was now or never, you know?”

  “That’s ballsy,” he said, and caught himself with a laugh. “Brave, I mean. Sorry.”

  She smiled indulgently. “It’s okay. It was ... ballsy,” she said, testing the word out on her tongue. “I can go back, maybe not to the same school where I taught for years, but somewhere. I’m a good teacher. But I’ve always wanted to write this book, see if I can finish it, and even try to get it published. So ... that’s what I’m doing.” She shrugged, her slender shoulders lifting the soft fabric of her sweater.

  Charlie Prescott, taking her life by the horns. He had to admit he was impressed. If someone had asked him five minutes after meeting her, he would have said she was probably the type who still lived at home with her mother and had taken up knitting at the age of eighteen. Too scared to taste life, too timid to venture out into the world on her own.

  Of all people, he should have known that the surface of any story was usually the least instructive.

  He nudged her calf with the toe of his shoe. “You still haven’t told me what the book is about. What exactly is the Darkbriar? A plant? A place?”

  She swallowed a mouthful of wine and set her glass down, suddenly sheepish. “You’re going to think it’s weird,” she said softly, and smoothed a wrinkle in the leg of her jeans.

  He quirked an eyebrow at her. “It’s the epic love story of a talking dog and a lost penguin with a drinking problem.”

  She laughed. “No.”

  “The mostly true adventures of a transsexual sword swallower in 1950s Brazil.”

  This time, she nudged his thigh with her knee, still grinning. “Maybe next time.”

  “A vampire who’s allergic to blood? A world made of shrimp? A cursed cubic zirconia that gives every girl who touches it a crush on David Hasselhoff?”

  She was laughing helplessly now, and he found he liked the sound far too much. When she finally got it together, he sat back, pleased with himself. “Come on, spill.”

  “Okay, okay.” She tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear and tilted her head up at him. The candlelight glowed in her glasses, twin flames, and without thinking he reached out and took them off.

  She opened her mouth in surprise, flinching. He studied her face without the wire frames, the long lashes sweeping her cheeks as she blinked at him, and laid a hand over hers gently. “I couldn’t see your eyes,” he said simply.

  “Oh.” Her voice was faint. “Okay.”

  “Tell me,” he reminded her, and left his hand where it was over hers, small but warm and sturdy beneath his palm.

  She took a deep, shuddering breath, staring at their hands. “It’s a children’s book,” she began finally. “About twins, a boy and a girl, who move to the country to live with a friend
of their mother’s after they’re orphaned. She’s a little distant, not very comfortable with them, and most of the time they’re left on their own to explore this huge old house in the middle of nowhere ...”

  He was running his thumb over the back of her hand in a lazy circle when he realized she’d let the sentence trail off, her voice slipping into a whisper. And then he felt it.

  She was staring at him, eyes wide and amazed, and he couldn’t believe it, but he could feel it. Heat, a goddamn wall of heat pressing in against him that hadn’t been there a moment ago. His lungs suddenly felt soupy, and his eyes burned with it, as if he’d opened the door to a blast furnace.

  Charlie twisted her hand up to clutch his wrist, hanging on. He stared at her, sweating already, amazed that this was real, actually happening just the way she’d described it. That she had been through it before, all alone, and hadn’t freaked out, hadn’t run screaming from the house, hadn’t simply passed out from the sheer intensity of the temperature shimmering the air around them. Even the candle blazed brighter, feeding on it.

  The chill bleakness of December, a chill that had clung to this room, utterly vanished.

  Her fingers tightened and he dropped his eyes to watch, feeling the sharp bite of her nails in his wrist, and then realized why she was doing it. There was more. More than just the heat. Under its surface, a ripple, a vibration, was something else.

  And it was ... need. A hi-we-just-met-but-I-think-I-love-you kind of need that made a man back a woman into a wall and kiss her until she was breathless, enjoy her mouth until it was swollen and red, lick into her to memorize the way she tasted, the way her tongue slid along his own.

  Yeah. He gulped in a breath, lifting his gaze to Charlie’s again, watching as she swallowed, the pulse in her throat beating so wildly he could see it even from here, even in the dull glow of the candlelight.

  He could picture it all then, reaching for her, laying her back on the floor, stripping her sweater off and then her bra, filling his hands and his mouth with her skin, her breasts, swallowing her sighs and sobs as she trembled underneath him, sliding his fingers into her if she wanted that, claim her when she was ready ... he was already edging closer, one hand cupping her cheek when he heard the growl.

  It cut through the heat in a scary way, and the temperature dropped in its wake, a blast of pure ice. His breath hung in the air now, a thick, visible frost, and before he could even process what was happening, another strange growl ripped through the silence and the candle’s flame wavered and flickered out.

  “Sam,” Charlie breathed, and then she was skidding sideways, out of reach, her wineglass hitting the floor as something solid slammed him into the bed. His shoulders hit with a dull thud, and it wasn’t possible, couldn’t be real, but the force of the blow was palpable, the heel of a hand connecting with his breastbone. He rocked back, gasping, as Charlie screamed, and just like that the cold melted away.

  But he could still feel the icy outline of a handprint on his chest.

  “Sam, are you okay?” Charlie was crawling toward him in the dark—the brittle chatter of breaking glass on the hard floor was followed by her hand on his thigh, small and shaking.

  “I’m fine,” he managed, and hated the way his voice shook, stripped down to nothing more than a husky whisper. He pulled her closer, hands on her shoulders, on her cheeks, grateful for the warm solidity of her. “What the eff just happened here?”

  “I don’t know.” Her voice was trembling, and he tugged her up against him until her cheek rested on his shoulder. A fine shiver rippled through her as he stroked down her back. “That’s ... that’s never happened before, I swear.”

  He swallowed, willing his heart to stop pounding. This was absurd. He was shaking like a little kid afraid of the monster under the bed, and he had never been that kid in the first place. Not to harp on it—he had to wonder why he’d needed to reassure himself as often as he had since arriving at Charlie’s house—ghosts were bullshit, pure and simple, and he’d known that even when he was a child. Dead was dead, and ghosts were just projections of people’s neurotic fears—or made up to frighten people, draw in tourists, add an air of mystery to an abandoned lighthouse or a run-down inn, give college kids a way to spook each other and snake a protective arm around a girl on a dark night.

  But he’d felt that blast of air, the force of the hand pushing him backward—away from Charlie.

  Right after the heat, as a matter of fact. He sat up straighter, arm still tight around Charlie’s shoulders. Right after he’d reached for her, clutched in the tight fist of that heat, that need, that overwhelming drive to touch her, taste her, own her ...

  “Come on,” he said gruffly, shaking her loose and getting to his feet. He took her hand and pulled her up against him, keeping her close. “Downstairs. Now.”

  Well, she’d wanted to prove to Sam that there was a ghost in the house, Charlie thought as she sank into a chair at the kitchen table.

  She just hadn’t imagined the proof would be so unquestionable.

  Sam was pale, pacing, and somehow furious. He’d held onto her like she was about to break the whole way down the stairs, fingers digging into her upper arm until she’d squeaked a little in discomfort. And then he’d only loosened his grip instead of letting go.

  Not that she could blame him, really. The first day she’d felt the ghost’s presence in that room, she’d sat down hard on the floor, mouth gaping like a goldfish, blinking in some ridiculous combination of shock and fear and disbelief.

  Which wasn’t too far from what she was feeling now, actually. Her heartbeat had finally slowed down to a reasonable gallop, but she was as shaky and winded as if she’d run a mile on the empty winter beach. Her legs were rubbery, and she was still hot all over, shivering in the cool air despite her sweater.

  Upstairs in that room, that had been more than just unexplained heat. More than the unexplained heat she’d felt before, at any rate. A lot more.

  And it wasn’t just the heat this time. It was something like a powerful inclination to do what came naturally. Starting with crawling into his lap and threading her fingers through his hair.

  But it was more than that, a voice in the back of her head whispered. And you know it.

  She had seen something that was almost like frames from a movie, disjointed, flickering in and out the way the candle did. Flashes of bodies half-wrapped in red velvet, naked skin gleaming, mouths open and wet against each other, hands clutching, stroking, tracing need into the gentle slope of a bare breast, the sense of love fully realized in a physical way.

  She shivered, remembering it, and crossed her arms over her chest. That had definitely never happened before. She would have remembered that.

  Sam’s hand on her shoulder startled her out of her thoughts, and she couldn’t help flinching at the sudden weight of it there. When she turned her face up to him, his eyes were dark, the pupils still blown, and his jaw was set hard.

  “You said you’d never felt that cold before,” he began, and pulled out the chair next to hers, finally sitting down. “Is that right?”

  “Never,” she said softly, and let him take her hand. He held it between both of his, clasping loosely now, as if the easy touch was enough to connect them.

  Or maybe simply to reassure himself that she was all right, she realized. This was strangely comforting.

  “You heard the ... growl, right?”

  She nodded, blinking up at him. It hadn’t even sounded human.

  “And you saw it ... push me?” Away from you hung there unspoken, but she knew it as well as he did. She nodded again.

  “And the ... heat,” he went on, carefully now, his gaze sliding over her face. “Was it like what you’d felt before?”

  “Mostly,” she said slowly. It was so hard to look at him now, because she knew what was coming. He’d felt it, too. She swallowed hard, wondering how to explain it, or if even she had to.

  “But there was more, wasn’t there?” Sam sai
d, and ducked his head lower to look her in the eye. “More than just the ... the temperature?”

  She nodded, trying to ignore the way her pulse raced. “It did seem stronger. Maybe it hit the eggnog again on the way up. The ghost or ghosts could be adding more whiskey or something. I’ll have to check.”

  “Yeah. You do that,” he whispered.

  He was so close, so warm, and she could remember the way he’d touched her cheek, strong fingertips grazing the curve of it, learning its shape as he leaned in closer, as close as he was right now ...

  “Charlie.”

  She’d been staring at his mouth, she realized with a jolt, imagining it on hers, hot and demanding.

  “You too?” His voice had dropped to a rough whisper. “Got that feeling, like you were watching—”

  She made an inarticulate noise and held up her hand before he could say it, cheeks burning. “Yes. Like that.”

  “But that never happened before?”

  She shook her head. God, it was so hard to look away from his eyes, the understanding there, as if he knew exactly what two bodies locked together so passionately felt like, as if he’d been about to pin her to the floor upstairs and show her ...

  “Charlie.”

  She’d watched his mouth move, watched her name form, and he was still talking, she realized.

  “We should talk about this,” he said, and his lips were so close to her cheek, she felt the words before she heard them.

  She nodded again, felt him rest his forehead against hers lightly, barely brushing.

  But when he caught her chin in his fingers a moment later and dragged her mouth up to his, that gentleness was gone.

  And Charlie didn’t mind at all.

  Chapter Five

  Charlie tasted like wine and sugar, and Sam licked into her mouth without hesitation. He was hot all over, his skin too tight, and he was hard already—no, still—and part of him knew it was just a side effect, whatever had happened upstairs lingering in this heat between them, but he didn’t care.