The Ghost of Christmas Present (5 page)

Did she have any idea how beautiful she
was? Not just the combination of hair and eyes, skin and
cheekbones, lips that begged to be kissed. But beautiful from
within. A goodness, a serenity with herself that radiated from her
like rays from a sun.

"It wasn't the memories, Alane," he
said quietly. "I left because it hurt too much not to be able to
touch you back."

The apology left her eyes, replaced by
an emotion he couldn't quite name. She dropped her gaze and he
thought he would go mad resisting the impulse to read her thoughts.
She shook her head, then looked back at him.

"Jared, I - "

The blare of a car horn interrupted her
as a four-wheel drive pulled up the freshly-plowed road.

"Damn you, David," she muttered under
her breath.

Alane threw down the snow shovel and
waded over to the car pulling into the drive she'd just shoveled.
Ice on the driver's window distorted the handsome blond features of
her on-again, off-again boyfriend.

The window came down and little sheets
of ice fell into the car. David smiled up at her with his
you-can't-be-mad-at-me smile.

"Hi, sweetheart. Thought I'd surprise -
"

"Don't even bother getting out, David.
Just turn it around and go home." She pointed in the direction he'd
just come.

"Now you don't mean - "

"I meant everything, David. I meant I
don't want company. I meant I want to spend Christmas alone. I
meant I want to get some serious work done, and I meant I want to
be alone to think about us and whether or not there is an us. What
part of that don't you understand?"

He shoved the door open and stepped out
into the snow.

"Okay, okay, just calm down. I
shouldn't have come up here against your wishes. I realize that
now." He leaned against the car and pulled her to him. "But I miss
you, and I hate the thought of spending Christmas Eve
alone."

Alane dodged a kiss and
stepped away from him. If he'd said he couldn't bear the thought
of
her
spending
Christmas Eve alone, she might have caved. Her thoughts went to
Jared, who'd spent the last ten Christmases in a lonely cabin in
the mountains by himself. Her glance searched for his hazy form,
but he was nowhere to be seen. Not, she'd discovered, that that
meant he wasn't still around.

"David, I need this time to myself.
I've looked forward to it, I deserve it, and I'm going to have
it."

"You know, I've come all this way." He
tried to pull her to him again, but she turned her back on him.
"Why don't I just crash here for the night and then - "

She spun around and sent him a glare
that he should have been able to read by now.

"You can stay for lunch and
then you're leaving. You know, this hasn't helped your case any.
You keep telling me you're sensitive to my artistic needs, but when
I
need
to get away,
you give me barely twenty-four hours before you're following on my
heels. You're smothering me, David, and I don't
need
to be smothered!"

He glared at her then with the look
that always told her she was being selfish.

“I’m not trying to smother you. I’m
trying to protect you.” His gaze swept the snowy landscape, the
solitary cabin, the lonely, slush-covered road. “This is an
isolated place here, Alane. Accidents happen. Things...happen.” He
slid back into the driver’s seat and fired up the engine. “Don’t
bother with lunch. I’ll leave you here with your
solitude.”

Before she could even open her mouth,
he slammed the door and threw the car into reverse. Snow and slush
sprayed from beneath all four tires as he spun out of the drive and
fishtailed down the road.

A scant twenty-four hours earlier, his
last words might have spooked her into begging him to stay. But
today, if he’d meant to frighten her, he’d fallen far short of his
goal.

*******

Jared sat at his wife's grave on the
very top of the mountain overlooking the Shenandoah Valley. The
tombstone marking the site had long ago crumbled away under the
boots of soldiers during the Civil War, but Jared could still
remember the first time he'd seen the marker, just months after
their deaths.

Carved in the cold stone had been the
words:

Katherine Evans
Elliott

and her unborn
child

Born 1781 Died
1801

Beloved Daughter

Not, "Beloved Wife and
Daughter."

Jared's existence had been ignored, as
had his burial, for the grave was a solitary grave, and he'd never
found what had become of his earthly body.

He stared at the flat, frozen ground
that held no hint of the grave lying beneath it.

He'd been fond of Katherine. He'd grown
to love her, after a fashion, and he'd treated her with as much or
more respect than most husbands treated their wives in that day.
But he'd married her because his parents wished to join the two
families, and he'd gone into the marriage knowing he would always
want something more than she could give.

And God knows, she'd given him
everything she'd had to give. Loved him to distraction, bowed to
his every wish, very nearly groveled for any crumb of affection
he'd cared to bestow upon her. And still he'd held part of himself
back.

Now he loved someone with the kind of
love Katherine had so craved, and he could not even touch her. For
the first time in two centuries, he knew the full impact of his
mother-in-law's curse.

May your soul know no
peace, Jared Elliott, until you give up your existence in the name
of love.

As the words and meaning finally rang
clear in his mind, he did something he hadn't done in two hundred
years.

He prayed.

*******

Alane slid another set of CD's into the
player, then tossed a couple more logs onto the fire. She settled
back on the stool in front of her canvas and tried to paint while
she waited for him to come.

It didn't take long.

She watched him appear by the
fireplace, the very sight of him sending exquisite ripples of heat
racing through her blood. When he smiled she felt as if a hundred
hummingbirds fluttered in her stomach.

He turned in a circle and scanned the
room with a grin. She'd scattered a dozen or so candles over every
surface, and they cast their soft yellow glow into the evening
gloom, perfuming the air with scents of pine, cinnamon and
vanilla.

"I like what you've done to the place,"
he said in his usual teasing tone.

"I tried to stay busy while you were
gone."

He smiled and nodded but didn't say
what he'd been doing or where he'd been.

"I thought you might need a little time
alone with Duncan." He looked around. "Where's he lurking,
anyway."

Alane laughed and the knots in her
stomach loosened a little.

"You're a good one to talk.
And
David
went back
to Roanoke."

Jared flopped into the recliner and
muttered under his breath, "A good place for him."

"How do you do that?" Alane
asked.

He looked up at her and arched a
brow.

"How do I do what?"

"That. How do you walk through walls
but manage to sit and lean on the furniture and counter and
things?" She figured that was a pretty safe question to ask. It
shouldn't stir up painful memories of a dead wife.

He looked at himself sitting in the
recliner, then shrugged.

"Basically, I will it. It's a thing
left over from my mortal days, I suppose. It doesn't take any
energy. In fact, I don't even think about it."

"So, if you can lean on things, can you
pick things up?"

Jared looked away from her and she had
the distinct feeling she'd hit on a topic that bothered
him.

"Yes and no," he said when he looked
back at her. Whatever had flashed in his eyes moments earlier was
gone now. "I have to really focus my energy to actually touch
something. If I use all my energy, I'll cease to exist on this
plain. And since I'm not sure of which direction I'm headed in the
hereafter, I plan to hang around here as long as I can." His
devilish grin set the hummingbirds to flapping again.

"Does it take any energy
to
be
touched?"
Alane walked over to him and dropped to her knees beside the
chair.

A muscle in his jaw flexed before he
answered.

"I can't be touched."

"No?" she said quietly. Then she raised
her hand and slowly traced the air along his jaw to his chin. All
her fingers encountered was that same elusive warmth. "Can you feel
this?" Her words came out barely above a whisper.

He closed his eyes, as if in pain, and
swallowed hard. When he looked back at her it was as if his gaze
looked into the deepest part of her soul. He curled his hand into a
fist and placed it in the center of his chest.

"I feel it here."

Tears burned behind Alane's eyes and
she blinked them away before they could spill over onto her
cheeks.

In the silence between them the CD
player whirred as it changed discs. Jared drew in a deep breath and
let it out.

"Let's change the subject, shall we?
For instance," he nodded toward a speaker from which Colin Ray's
latest song drifted. "I wouldn't have guessed you to be a country
western fan."

Alane worked to shift from the
tenderness overwhelming her at his admission, to his statement
about her taste in music.

"I...uh...I'm a recent
convert."

"So what converted you?"

What converted her? Would he understand
if she told him?

"Well, I'm not into the 'crying in my
beer' music, but some of these songs are so...I don't
know...visual. They're truly poetic. The love songs are so
plain-spoken they can speak to everyone. And some of the other
songs just tell it like it is. Like this one, for
instance."

Jared listened for a few minutes to the
upbeat music and lyrics.

"So do you like the country western
dances?"

She got to her feet and picked up her
paintbrushes.

"How do you know about country western
dances?"

He pointed out the television like a
game show model displaying the latest prize.

"Meet my main source of information for
the last quarter century. I had to watch whatever the people
renting the place watched." He leaned toward her conspiratorially.
"Some of those people had very odd tastes."

She chuckled at the thought of who all
had passed through this cabin over the years, and how horrified
they'd be to know they'd had a witness.

“Did you ever show yourself to anyone
else?”

A look of tenderness flashed in his
eyes before he replaced it with a wide-eyed look of
innocence.

“Not here at the cabin. You’re the
first. Couldn’t resist you. So, what about the dances? Do you know
how to do them?"

She smiled at his efforts to stay off
the previous topic.

"I like the line dances." She tossed
her paintbrushes back down. "There's this new one out that I can't
quite keep up with. It sort of goes..." She did a little
step-together, step-together, kick, kick, tush push. "There's a
couple extra steps but I can't seem to get them all in and keep up
with the music."

"Hey, I know that one." Jared jumped to
his feet and waited for the beat. "There was a couple here last
month who watched nothing but that country video station. I thought
I'd go mad for want of hearing the news." He looked up at her and
winked. "It's amazing what idle hands will do when there's not even
a devil's workshop to be had. Besides, you don't need a partner to
line dance. Now watch."

He did her steps and then added the
others as smoothly as a country western Fred Astaire.

"See how I'm doing this?" he asked as
he did a ninety degree turn and repeated the steps.

She stared, a little speechless at
watching a ghost line dance in the middle of the living room floor.
And dance flawlessly at that.

"If you do sort of a triple step here,
it all fits in. C'mon. You try."

Alane chewed on her lower lip as she
moved to stand beside him, watching his feet and waiting for the
music.

She followed his steps fairly easily
but screwed up the triple step.

"Come on. You can do it," he told her,
never missing a beat. "It's like this. One, two, one, two,
onetwothree."

"Hey! I think I've got it." She managed
to squeeze in all the steps, but not with Jared's
finesse.

They continued to dance, side-by-side,
with Jared coaching her along the way. She watched her feet and
chewed on her lip until the steps felt right and she could keep up
with him. Just as she started to feel comfortable, the song
ended.