A Date With the Other Side (6 page)

He had no idea how a heavy lamp could have flung off a thigh-high table and nailed him on the shoulder. But it had, and he should be grateful. Another second and he might have actually kissed Shelby Tucker, which was baffling at best, disastrous at worst.

“Of course I’m going to tell you. You’ll need to know if you’re going to live here and she doesn’t like you.”

Boston glanced at Shelby, who was pushing her hair back off her face. She had a lot of hair, the kind that would tease across her nipples when it was let loose. Her shirt rode up and up, the knot still holding, the shirt bunching under each breast and emphasizing its round fullness.

The lamp he was still resting his hand on started to shake, the base clanking on the wood table. He ripped his hand back and stared at it. “Christ, it moved again!”

“Rachel,” Shelby said, her head nodding up and down. “She doesn’t like men, they say.”

“Was she a lesbian?” he asked, picturing that going over big in 1887 Cuttersville.

But Shelby rolled her eyes. “No! She was a regular kind of girl, though a little forceful, everyone says. Christy Levenworth is her descendant through Rachel’s mother’s sister, and
forceful
would describe Christy too. She flattened me in the Easter egg hunt of nineteen-eighty-four trying to get that purple speckled one.”

The really incredible thing was that he knew Shelby wasn’t making this stuff up. “So, okay, Rachel, regular girl… and then what? She died, I take it.”

“Eventually, but first she caught her fiancé diddling with the girl-of-all-work her family had, right here in this very room. Seems the rat was picking her up for an afternoon carriage ride about town, and Rachel had just gone upstairs to fetch her bonnet, and tore her dress trim on the way up the steps. Mending it took her a few minutes, and when she came down, he had the girl in a lip-lock with his fingers in an inappropriate place.”

Boston wanted to laugh at Shelby’s modest phrasing. Inappropriate was something he could certainly imagine. “So she banished him from the house in tears and wasted away from a broken heart?”

Shelby shook her head. “No. She picked up a candlestick and bludgeoned him to death right on the spot while the maid stood there and just screamed like a ninny.”

Despite his best efforts to remain cynical, a shiver raced up his spine. If he believed in ghosts, which he didn’t, he might be a little alarmed to share space with Rachel, the candlestick-crazed ghost. “Holy shit. Don’t mess with Rachel, huh?”

He preferred the image of a young woman reclining on a couch, sniffling into her handkerchief and sinking into spinster-hood, over the idea of some poor guy getting whacked in the parlor. The parlor he was currently trapped in.

“They locked her up, of course, and her parents sold the house and moved to Marietta to escape the scandal. But Rachel overdosed on opium in the nuthouse and since then has been seen from time to time moving back and forth in this room and waiting at the window, searching for her long-lost lover.”

Shelby was good at telling the tale. Her eyes had grown wide, her head moved up and down in reassurance from time to time, and she paused for effect at just the right spots. It was obviously a speech from her tour. Which made it dismissible.

Except that a lamp had levitated and tried to take a piece out of his head. “So, you think it’s Rachel getting riled up? Has she thrown things before?”

It took a lot of effort not to turn and make sure the lamp wasn’t leaping at him again.

Shelby rubbed her arms, goose bumps racing across her golden skin. “Only once that I know of. But she walks back and forth, loud footsteps and cold air, when men are in the room. Men she doesn’t like.”

His ego was taking quite a beating today. Not a single soul in Cuttersville, living or dead, seemed to like him. “Why doesn’t she like me? Do I look like the cheating fiancé?”

With a shrug, Shelby stepped forward, glancing around the room as if Rachel might be watching. She whispered, “Maybe she didn’t like what you were doing. How close you were sitting to me. Maybe when you gave me the candy, she thought it was—”

“Inappropriate?” he provided, logic overcoming fear. There was no way a ghost could throw a lamp at him. No way. It must have been a draft or an electrical surge or something.

“Uh-huh.”

She nodded, looking warm and soft and very, very close, her shiny moist mouth parted just a little, her breasts dangerously close to his chest. A little shift, a little turn, and they could share a cherry LifeSaver again.

“Did you think it was inappropriate?”

“No.” Her expressive brown eyes had flecks of gold in them, and as she spoke, they dropped level with his own mouth. “It was probably the best way to do it. If you had taken the candy out and tried to hand it to me, we might have dropped it. You were being cautious, right?”

Caution. Yeah, that’s what was driving him.

“Right.” Boston touched a wisp of hair that was falling across her cheek and wrapped it around his finger. “And I also wanted to see if maybe, just maybe, you were even the slightest bit attracted to me like I am to you.”

She licked her lips. “I do feel a small attraction to you.”

They were touching now, and Boston wasn’t sure who had leaned in first. He just knew that her breasts were resting up along his chest and her mouth was close enough to his that he felt her breath caress his lip. Her hair tickled his cheek, and he could smell the cherry musky, floral scent of her.

“How small?”

“Smaller than an ant’s butt.”

“That’s small,” he said, even as he tilted, heading toward her lips.

“Very small,” she agreed, eyes drifting closed.

Pounding on the window scared the crap out of him and sent Shelby leaping three feet back. Half of his brain panicked as he turned, expecting to see a ghost with a candlestick bearing down on him; the other half moaned the injustice of the timing.

That half actually groaned out loud when Boston saw a man in a CFD baseball cap peering in the window curiously.

“They take an hour, then show up now?” he asked wryly as Shelby ran toward the window, all thoughts of attraction apparently abandoned.

Shelby yelled, “The door won’t open and the windows are all stuck, Howie. Try and open it.”

Howie, who didn’t look like a deep thinker on his sharpest day, lifted his hat and scratched his prematurely balding head. “Shelby, I’m trying and it won’t budge.” He tugged again while balancing on a ladder. “And your gran says I can’t use a crowbar, it might break the window.”

“I’ll pay for the window,” Boston said, thinking it wasn’t really his responsibility but he needed to leave this parlor sooner or later. Not that anyone was listening to him. Howie probably couldn’t hear him and Shelby ignored him, giving a sound of disgust.

Heads popped up in two other windows. One was a thin guy wearing a blue Cuttersville Fire Department T-shirt, and the third was Farmer Ted, Shelby’s ex-husband. Which seriously annoyed him. Especially when Shelby raced past the second window and Boston like he and cherry Lifesavers had never existed, and gripped the frame, hugging her body against the pane of glass and, in effect, her ex-husband.

“Oh, Danny, thank God. Get me the hell out of here.”

Boston found himself rolling his eyes. She didn’t have to act like she was being tortured. Nor did he think it was anything less than disgusting when Danny Tucker touched the glass with a finger, mocking a caress. Didn’t the guy have a field to plow or something?

“Shh. I’m here, darlin’. Are you okay?”

Shelby nodded. “I’m fine.”

“Alright, back up then. Keep going,” he urged when Shelby took only a step or two.

Still balancing on the ladder, the guy peeled off his T-shirt, revealing a chest twice as wide as Boston’s and sporting a full six-pack. Boston tried to gauge Shelby’s reaction to Stud Boy over there, but she looked nothing more than faintly worried, her arms crossed.

“What are you going to do?”

Danny wrapped his shirt around his hand and rammed it through the window. When the sound of shattering glass abated, he winked at her. “Break the window.”

Boston fumed, irrational fury and jealousy rising in his gut. Damn it, but that made him look stupid. Like he wasn’t man enough to just break the window and get Shelby out. He had been
polite
. Waiting for the fire department, following the proper channels. And instead of looking considerate and professional, he looked like a pansy.

“Oh, God, are you okay?” Shelby rushed toward Danny, her sandals crunching on broken glass. “Let me see your hand.”

“It’s fine.” Danny was knocking the few remaining shards out, but he paused to give Shelby a loud smacking kiss on her cheek. “You look hot.”

Which was a damn tacky thing to say, in Boston’s opinion.

Shelby didn’t seem to mind. She shrugged. “It’s stuffy in here.”

Like the guy had been referring to temperature.

Boston started forward, intent on repairing the damage to his image. He gently tugged on Shelby’s arm to pull her back. “You’re standing in the glass. Be careful.”

But before Shelby could answer, Danny snorted. “Shelby’s not delicate. Come on, babe.” He gripped her waist and forcibly hauled her through the window and into his arms.

Boston absolutely hated men who went around showing off their strength. He could bench-press as much as Danny Tucker, worked out in the company gym five days a week, but you didn’t see him dragging women through windows like a caveman. Or a farmer.

After Danny had carried Shelby down on the ground and enveloped her in another one of those smothering hugs that made him wonder why the hell they had bothered to divorce if they couldn’t keep their hands off each other, Boston climbed out the window himself. And met the steely gaze of Mrs. Stritmeyer. She shook her head, clearly disappointed.

“What?”

“I just thought a slick businessman like you, a city boy, you might work faster than the cowpokes around here. Guess I was wrong.”

And with that charming insult, she turned and yelled at the fireman. “John! Get that ladder off my house, you’re chipping the paint.”

Boston descended the four rungs of the ladder, not the least placated that the fire department had three men and three ladders scattered window to window yet it had taken Danny Tucker to spring them from the parlor. No, it didn’t make him feel better at all.

Shelby had left Danny’s arms, but he still shadowed her as she went and helped John pull the ladder off the house. “John, you smell like a burger and tries. Is that what took you so long to get here?”

The guilty flush on John’s extremely youthful face gave truth to what Boston suspected had been a joke on Shelby’s part.

Danny laughed. “That’s where I hooked up with them. I was having a cheeseburger, and they sat down with me and told me what was going on.”

Shelby smacked John on the arm. “How could you do that? Run off and eat a big old cheeseburger when I was stuck?”

Boston had to agree. If they had gotten there sooner, he wouldn’t have been cuffed with a demonic lamp or come close to kissing Shelby, who was a flake and a distraction and not why he was in Cuttersville.

Except he didn’t believe that Shelby was a flake, and he didn’t want to be saved from himself anymore. He still wanted to kiss her. Especially when her shirt rode even higher as she reached for the second ladder. The underside of her breast flashed him and he gave himself up for lost.

Danny reached out and stuck his fingers between Shelby’s breasts and undid the knot so her shirt fell back into place. “You were showing us your hooters, hon.”

Shelby grabbed at her shirt, tugging it down farther. “Oh! Sorry.”

“I’ve seen them before, I’m happy to say, but the other guys might mind,” Danny said with a grin.

Boston knew right then and there what Danny Tucker was up to. He was making it clear that he had been married to Shelby, knew her and her body, and that he still had a claim on her.

It should be a reminder that he, Boston Macnamara, Samson executive, had no business messing around with Shelby Tucker, haunted house tour guide. That she belonged to Danny Tucker or another man just like him. A local.

But it didn’t. It only sent his blood pounding and his lust soaring, and he wanted. With the intensity he had wanted that scholarship to U of C. That first job. That VP spot at the age of twenty-eight. This he couldn’t have.

Only his body didn’t like that answer.

Howie stuck his head out of the broken window, standing in the parlor. “Hey, I’m confused. If you all were stuck, why did the parlor door just open for me when I pulled on it?”

Shelby looked at him and shivered.

Jesus. Now he actually found himself believing in a ghost named Red-Eyed Rachel.

“Right about here, hovering between the graves of an old Episcopal minister and his wife, is where some folks swear two pale white hands can be seen intertwined on dark nights as the happy couple rests in the hereafter together.” Shelby gave a dramatic flourish with her arm to the grassy knoll in the Cuttersville Memorial Cemetery and enjoyed the appreciative murmurs of her latest tour.

It was bunk. It was theatrics. It was the power of suggestion and she knew that. There had to be a scientific explanation for why she and Boston had been locked in Gran’s parlor together. One that didn’t have to do with disembodied beings with a hatred of testosterone.

A kid tugged on her shorts. Shelby looked down into his round moon pie face, a little sticky around the edges, an empty popcorn kernel clinging to the corner of his mouth. “What’s up, bud?”

“You don’t believe in all this junk, do you?”

She was getting there. “I believe there are some things we can’t explain. Some things we see and hear that don’t make any sense with the knowledge that we have.”

He rolled his eyes with the authority of a seven-year-old skeptic. “My mom says ghosts aren’t real. That God would never let anyone suffer so long between here and heaven.”

“Then why are you on the Haunted Cuttersville Tour?” Shelby was considering slapping a PG-13 rating on her tour anyway, and this was confirming it. She spent the two hours talking about philandering men and women, drunks, violent crimes, and psychotics bearing machetes. She didn’t want to be responsible for churning out the next serial killer.