by Vivi Andrews
Staring up at her gigolo—she could not call him Cox—Lucy wished she’d taken the time for a brush…and a curling iron…and makeup… before answering the door.
“Jake Cox.”
Thank God. He had a first name. Jake was a nice, normal name. She could moan, “Oh, Jake, yes, Jake, more, Jake,” in bed for hours without any inappropriate giggling.
Lucy smiled cheerfully. “Jake. Hi.” His eyes narrowed menacingly. “Ooo-kay. Cox it is. So, Mr. Cox…” Lucy snorted back a giggle, “…uh, what can I, uh, do for you?” Or to you. Or have you do to me.
“You’re the medium.” There was just enough disbelief in his tone to be insulting, but Lucy had long since learned to let skepticism about her profession roll off her back. He didn’t have to believe in ghosts to make her eyes roll back in her head from sheer pleasure.
“Yep. And you’re…” What was the right term? Did she call him a gigolo? Was that PC?
Mr. Cox thought she was pausing to let him fill in the blank. He jumped right in. “I’m a PI. I sometimes consult with Karmic.”
Lucy frowned, trying to figure out what PI stood for. Pleasure Issuer? It didn’t really matter. He could call himself Mr. Happy Pants if he wanted, as long as the sweaty, naked part of the afternoon started soon.
Mr. Cox kept talking, evidently expecting no response. “I’m investigating a series of murders, and Karma seems to think that the latest victim will be visiting you. Tonight.”
Lucy froze. Okay, what?
It was a sign of how far into the gutter her thoughts had sunk that it took her a solid minute to realize that Jake Cox was not a gigolo, or a pleasure issuer, or any such thing. He was a private investigator. He consulted with Karmic Consultants and he was investigating a murder.
Lucy’s face flamed with mortification as she ran through everything she had said to him in the last five minutes, trying to remember if she had made a complete idiot of herself, or just a partial one. As her brain scrambled in one direction, her mouth went another.
“I don’t do murders.”
Cox snorted. “I’m not accusing you, Ms. Cartwright. I’m here because you talk to dead people, not make more of them.”
“No.” Lucy shook her head, still playing mental catch-up as her hormones stubbornly refused to acknowledge that Mr. Cox was not there for their personal enjoyment. “What I mean is I don’t talk to murdered ghosts. They go to someone else. Someone who knows how to deal with vengeance issues and wrongful death. I get, uh, different cases.” Please don’t let him ask what kind.
“Whatever you deal with, Karma seemed pretty sure he was coming to you.”
Lucy could only think of one possible reason why a murder victim would be knocking on her door—or rather, appearing in her bedroom. She hoped she was wrong, but she wasn’t about to ask. There was no good way of asking a ridiculously hot man—who already thought you were a few bricks short of a load—whether the murder victim he was looking for was a repressed nymphomaniac. At least not without sounding like a repressed nympho herself.
Lucy tried to remember how to do her job. It had something to do with ghosts, didn’t it? “So he, uh, he died three days ago?”
Mr. Cox nodded sharply. “Eleven p.m. So anytime after that, right? If he’s going to show as a ghost, that’ll be when he does it?”
Lucy studied him. She was used to people thinking she was loopy for talking to dead people, but Cox seemed pretty pragmatic about it. He just wanted to get the rules down. Cox looked like the kind of guy who would be big into rules. As long as he got to make them. She was quite willing to let him make the rules. Especially if his rules involved whipped cream and fuzzy handcuffs…
“Lucy?”
“It’s not a strict seventy-two hour thing,” she blurted. “I tend to get mine at night, so he probably won’t show before sundown, but you never know. Some people are more punctual than others. Some ghosts, I mean.”
Mr. Cox nodded again—he had pretty violent nods. Emphatic. Sure. Sexy. “I’ll stay here then. In case he shows early.”
“Oh.”
It was not, strictly speaking, a brilliant response, but brilliance could not be expected of a woman woken out of a deep sleep to find a gigolo who was not, in fact, a gigolo pounding on her front door. At least, not if that woman was Lucy. She never woke up well and, at the moment, she was still preoccupied with the depressing realization that she wasn’t going to get to cure her sexual frustration with the hunk of manliness standing in her living room.
And it didn’t help that he was looking at her as if he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to give her a straitjacket or an orgasm.
She was saved from further conversation when his cell rang. He glanced down at the caller ID and barked, “Karma,” before turning away to answer it.
While he was distracted, Lucy escaped back to the bedroom to pull herself together.
Chapter Three: Stud Muffins
Jake turned away, grateful for the distraction when his cell rang. He flipped open the phone. “Yo,” he grunted by way of greeting.
“Don’t sleep with her.” Karma’s voice crackled with desperate intensity.
“Excuse me?” Jake glanced back to where Lucy stood, but she had disappeared.
“You can’t sleep with her. If Lucy gets off, then Mellman won’t go to her tonight. You can’t touch her.”
“Jesus, Karma, what do you think I am? I just met the girl five minutes ago. Do you think I don’t think about anything but how I can get into your medium’s pants?”
The devil of it was, he had thought about it. Since Lucy Cartwright had opened her front door looking like she had just rolled out of bed—all soft and warm and sweetly muddled—he’d thought of little else but finding a way to roll her back into bed. Preferably underneath him.
Nothing about Lucy Cartwright was what he had expected. Mediums were supposed to be seventy-year-old women draped in scarves, who spoke in round, dramatic tones and filled their homes with incense and crystal balls. A young, wholesome blonde in navy silk pajamas did not fit the bill. Neither did her floral, Better Homes & Gardens decorating taste or the slight, lingering scent of baked goods that wafted through her apartment.
Jake had been off balance—and horny as hell—since the moment she opened her door to him, but there was no reason for Karma to know that. As far as he knew, there weren’t any mind-readers working at Karmic Consultants.
“I don’t care what you’ve been thinking about,” Karma snapped. “I just did a reading that showed some serious sexual fireworks, and if that happens, Lucy won’t be any good to you.”
Jake didn’t bother to point out the inherent contradiction in what she had just said.
“Is she some kind of virgin oracle or something?”
“No, no, nothing like that. She just…” Karma trailed off and Jake checked his phone to make sure it hadn’t dropped the call—Karma was never at a loss for words.
“She’s what?”
When Karma spoke, each word was pulled out of her like taffy, slow and sticky. “The circumstances of Mellman’s death, his lack of resolution in his sexual affairs, are what led me to believe he would be going to Lucy. Men who die with unresolved sexual issues often pay her a visit.”
Jake nodded to himself. That made sense. If he died horny, Lucy would be his first stop in the afterlife. “But if I’m with her, he won’t show?”
“You can be with her, you just can’t be with her. In the Biblical sense.”
“So keep my hands to my fucking self. Thanks for that vote of confidence, Karma.”
“I don’t know why I called,” Karma said grouchily. “I knew you wouldn’t seduce her, so I didn’t even mention it when we spoke earlier, but then this reading seemed so certain.”
Jake gritted his teeth, inexplicably annoyed by the assumption that he wouldn’t have seduced Lucy, but he kept his voice carefully devoid of a telling hint of irritation. “Was there anything else?”
“No,” Karma said then prove
d it a lie by going on. “But, Jake? If anything happens to my medium, I’m taking it out of your ass. I may not have kicked your ass in years, but that doesn’t mean I can’t still make you wish you weren’t born.”
“Love you too, sis.”
He flipped the cell closed and looked up to find Lucy standing barefoot in front of him in a little sundress, looking freshly scrubbed and twice as edible as before.
“You’re Karma’s brother?” She blushed as she said it. Jake had known her about five minutes, but he had already noticed that she blushed a lot, so he didn’t read anything into her pink face.
He flashed a smile. “Did you think she had sprung out of the ether fully formed with no family of any kind?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard her last name. I thought her brother lived in Phoenix.”
“I moved.”
Lucy nodded. An awkward lull fell over the conversation. She fidgeted and blushed and squirmed and Jake enjoyed her rosy-cheeked discomfort too much to alleviate it. Her neat little figure, which had looked damn good in men’s pjs, looked even better sheathed in the snug cotton sundress, especially with her pale, bare legs on full display. Jake was perfectly willing to sit back and enjoy the view of warm, soft femininity. Lucy, however, was quite literally tying herself into knots, one leg wrapping around the other, her hands twisting together and, through it all, her face flushing rosy and warm.
Finally, she blurted, “Can I get you an orange soda?”
Jake blinked. “Orange soda?” Did he look like the orange soda type?
Lucy blushed again and shuffled toward the kitchen. “I know I’m supposed to offer you coffee or something, but I don’t drink coffee. Or tea. Or anything hot really. And I don’t have beer, even though you probably shouldn’t be drinking on the job. If this counts as on the job. Waiting for the ghost to show so you can go on the job. I don’t even know what you’re going to do to him. What are you going to do to him? I ran out of milk. So no milk. Just orange soda. Or water. Do you like water?”
Lucy turned away from him to open the fridge, muttering something that sounded distinctly like, “Shut up, Lucy.”
Jake grinned in spite of himself. She was adorable. A little kooky, perhaps, but utterly charming. He wiped the smile off his face—he didn’t want her to think he was laughing at her—before she turned back around holding a liter bottle filled with neon-orange liquid.
“I love water,” he said. Anything to keep that fluorescent chemical concoction out of his body.
“Water it is.” Lucy turned to pull a glass out of a cupboard and Jake watched her putter around the kitchen, completely in her element.
“So what are you going to do with him, supposing he shows?” she asked. “Are you going to ask him who did it? Because I have to warn you, most of the ghosts I’ve met aren’t terribly concerned with the details of their death. Although it might be different for murder victims. The ones who die naturally tend to be pretty obsessed with the unfulfilled things in their life rather than the reason they died. That’s the real injustice—all the things they didn’t get to do.”
She extended the glass of ice water toward him and he took it, letting their fingers brush just to see her reaction. A little crackle of energy passed between them—not quite static electricity, but definitely electric. Lucy scurried back a few steps until the width of the kitchen separated them. She quickly began rifling through cupboards, pulling out mixing bowls and ingredients with a subconscious grace that spoke of serious repetition.
“So, you really talk to ghosts, huh?” he asked casually, leaning back against the counter to watch her hands fly through the familiar motions. “I still can’t quite wrap my head around it. I guess you know the meaning of life, then.”
Lucy shrugged without pausing in her mixing and measuring. “Not in the cosmic sense, no. I’m just about helping people accept their lives for what they are, release the baggage they are afraid to leave behind and move on. Sort of post-life therapy.”
“So, you’re a ghost shrink.”
Lucy grinned impishly. “Yeah. They talk to me and their presence in our slice of reality shrinks.” She giggled a little at the pun and Jake bit back a smile. She was too cute—especially with the little dab of flour clinging to the tip of her nose.
He nodded toward the mixing bowl in her hands. “What are you making?”
Lucy looked down at her hands as if surprised to find them baking without her permission. “Rum Cake Muffins?”
“Are you asking me?”
Jake thought she made a face, but she was turned half away from him and it was hard to tell.
“You still haven’t answered my question,” she said as she preheated the oven.
“About what I’m going to do to Mellman?”
She glanced at him over her shoulder, her eyes even bluer in contrast to the flour on her nose. “Is that his name? Mellman?”
“Eliot Mellman. Thirty-seven-year-old accountant and murder victim.”
Lucy sighed. “I get a lot of accountants.”
Jake thought about what Karma had said about the love-hungry ones coming to Lucy for satisfaction. “Yeah, I imagine you would see quite a few repressed number crunchers,” he said, unable to keep the suggestive undertones out of his voice.
Lucy froze. “Oh God, she told you.”
“About the sex thing? Yeah. Is that a problem?”
Lucy just groaned.
Jake studied her, puzzled. Lucy’s cheeks were getting redder by the second and she stood staring down at the mixture in her hands, refusing to meet his eyes. She was obviously embarrassed, but he couldn’t figure why. It was a compliment of sorts that all of the horny ghosts wanted her. He certainly couldn’t blame them. Although it probably got old, night after night, ghost after ghost. There was no end to the horny men out there. There must be even more horny dead guys.
A sudden thought had Jake straightening away from the counter. “You just talk to them, right? You don’t actually, you know, do anything with them, do you?”
“Mr. Cox!” Lucy exclaimed, scandalized. “They don’t have bodies! And they’re clients! It wouldn’t be ethical.”
“So, that’s a no.”
“Of course it’s a no.” Lucy glared at him and slapped a silicon muffin tray onto the counter.
Jake began prowling around the kitchen. In part to hide his smile at her adorable indignation. And in part to hide his body’s reaction to her sexy, flour-coated domesticity. “So he shows, you talk to him, then what?”
“He sort of…transcends.” Lucy waved floury hands vaguely in front of her face.
“And what? Disappears?”
“Yep.” Lucy paused in the act of filling the muffin tray, staring off into the distance. “The actual transcendence is kind of pretty. Sparkly.”
“I need to talk to him before you transcend him.”
“I don’t transcend him,” she corrected. “He allows himself to transcend by releasing worldly cares.”
“Yeah, whatever. I need to talk to him first.” Jake frowned. “Will I be able to talk to him? Will I even be able to see him?”
Lucy shrugged, apparently unconcerned by this potential hitch in his master plan. “Probably. A ghost’s presence is magnified by linking to a medium. If you aren’t naturally sensitive to supernatural energies, he may look like nothing more than a wisp of white smoke to you. Though if Karma is anything to go on, the paranormal runs in your family, so you may be able to see ghosts even more clearly than I do.”
“So I’ll be able to interrogate him directly.”
“You can’t upset him.” Lucy shot him a stern look that was somewhat less effective due to the flour that had spread from her nose to both cheeks and her chin. “When they’re upset, sometimes it takes days for them to transcend. I do not want to babysit a ghost for a week just because you can’t be tactful.”
“Hey. I’m the picture of tact.” Jake grinned his most charming, bullshit-innocent grin.
Lucy sni
ffed to show him just what she thought of that. “There will be no upsetting my ghost.”
“Oh, so he’s your ghost now, is he?”
“He’s more my ghost than yours. No matter what he’s a victim of. He’s my responsibility until he transcends and I will not have you bullying him.”
“I won’t bully him,” Jake lied absently, barely even aware of what he was saying. How was it that Lucy looked even sexier with her face covered with flour? She was a quirky, muffin-cooking medium, and yet he was in real danger of breaking his promise to Karma and irreparably fucking up the job. Literally.
He comforted himself with the knowledge that Karma hadn’t said anything about what he was and wasn’t allowed to do to her medium after Eliot Mellman made his appearance.
“So he shows, I talk to him—without upsetting him—and then you get him to transcend.” And then I seduce you. Jake grinned in anticipation. “Done deal.”
Chapter Four: If You Can’t Stand the Heat
Lucy took one look at that devastating grin and knew she was in trouble. Not the James Bond dodging bullets, running for your life kind of trouble, but trouble of the Moneypenny variety—unrequited lust with a man who knew exactly how mouthwatering he was and was going to tease you with his gorgeous body and wicked, flashing eyes until you melted into a puddle of hormones. Moneypenny should have gotten hazard pay.
Lucy looked down at the loaded muffin tray—baking was supposed to relax her, dammit—and mentally tried to navigate a path to the oven that did not put her in the line of fire, so to speak. He seemed to be everywhere. Long legs, massive shoulders, fantastic ass—every time she turned around, she saw something else to be tempted by.
And, oh boy, was she tempted.
Even if he was her boss’s brother. And so far out of her league, she had no business even fantasizing about him.
Lucy knew what she was, and more importantly, she knew what she wasn’t.
