The Ghost of Christmas Present (7 page)

"I am woman. Hear me roar."

Did she possibly know how much an
impish smile like that made him want to kiss her? He hated to think
what would happen if she ever turned a smoky, heated gaze on him.
Probably enjoy his last few seconds on earth touching her in ways
she'd only dreamed of, then die all over again of
ecstasy.

"What?" she asked with a slightly
uncomfortable look.

"I was just thinking how kissable you
look right now."

Her eyebrows shot skyward and she
side-stepped around him.

"In your dreams, big boy. I don't want
to go through another night like last night. Now get in the
Christmas spirit, no pun intended, and show me where they hide the
decorations."

He must be back to normal, since he was
already planning how to sap his strength again. But he'd promised
her. With a sigh, he dragged his thoughts away from how nice her
mouth tasted and tried to remember where the owners had stored the
Christmas decorations back in...what? 1986? 1996? 2006?

"Gotta be in the closet," he mumbled,
more to himself than to Alane. "There's no other storage place
unless it's in the building out back."

He walked through the door and into the
closet's depths, strolling through a vacuum cleaner, lawn chairs,
umbrellas, a badminton game, and an assortment of junk collected
over the years. Scanning with his night vision, he found two boxes
of decorations in the farthest corner under two old suitcases and a
bag of old clothes.

Without bothering to go back to the
door, he stuck his head through the wall and found Alane moving
furniture around, making room for the tree.

"You want the good news or the bad
news?"

She bumped a heavy table a few more
feet with her hip, then straightened and raked a silky blond strand
behind her ear.

"I don't do bad news."

"Okay. The good news is the decorations
are in here."

She looked at the door, then dragged
her gaze six feet along the wall to where his head
protruded.

"Let me guess," she groaned. "You're
standing in the middle of them and there's not exactly a clear path
back there."

"Give the lady a prize!"

When she walked to the closet and
opened the door, he pulled his head back in and waved at
her.

"Down here, under the
stairs."

Alane flicked on the light and groaned
again.

"Oh well." After dragging the heavy,
dark green sweater over her head, she shoved the sleeves of her
pale mint turtleneck up to her elbows and started pulling junk from
the closet. Halfway back she stopped and dragged a hand across her
cheek, leaving behind a brown smudge. His heart melted.

"How 'bout handing me that - " She
stopped pointing at a large box of junk and thumped her head with
the heel of her hand. "Duh!" She giggled and kept plowing her way
through. "I forget sometimes that you can't...well, you know. Not
that it makes any difference..."

Alane kept talking but Jared didn't
hear her words.

He couldn't even hand her something.
Couldn't help ease her life in any tangible way at all. Hell, he
couldn't even open a door for her when she had her hands full. What
was he doing, falling in love with this woman?

"
Tada
!" While he'd wallowed in self
pity, she'd finished working her way to the boxes. "Just let me
cram all this junk back in here and then we can do the fun
stuff."

Jared made himself smile at her look of
triumph. She lugged the boxes out of the closet, then set to work
replacing what she'd taken out.

He wandered out of the closet and
flopped into a chair. This was a mistake. This whole fiasco would
never have happened if he'd controlled himself and remained cloaked
throughout her visit.

But he hadn't bargained on falling in
love.

"Oh, the weather outside is frightful,"
Alane sang in the most horrendous, off-key voice, "but the fire is
so delightful..."

Jared grimaced but couldn't
help smiling. How could he
not
love her? For the first time in his life - or
death - he listened to his heart. Throwing off the self pity, he
stood and followed her voice into the closet.

"Let it snow, let it snow, let it -
GEEZ! Would you stop doing that?"

*******

Alane propped her feet up on the coffee
table and scooped up a handful of popcorn. She gestured for the
third time that night toward the tree.

"Not bad, if I do say so
myself."

"A work of art," Jared agreed, also for
the third time.

They both looked at each other and
burst out laughing. The tree was the sorriest Christmas tree she'd
ever seen. The box had contained every hideous decoration that had
ever been made, from silk-covered balls that had frayed to
furriness, to neon orange glass balls, to Elvis ornaments. And only
one lonely little string of lights worked after she'd tested a
dozen.

She smiled up at him. It felt strange
to sit so close to someone and not be able to snuggle up with
him.

He smiled down at her and scrunched
deeper into the couch, crossing his legs at the ankles, his feet
next to hers, and focusing his attention to the old movie on TV. He
couldn't get enough of the old movies.

She'd spent a long night the night
before, watching his weak form, thinking about what an impossible
situation she'd gotten herself into. Falling in love with someone
she couldn't touch; who couldn't touch her back. Someone who would
never grow old and die. It was as hopeless as if she'd fallen in
love with an imaginary lover.

And when she'd teased him earlier and
told him to behave himself, sounding exactly like her mother. She'd
ignored the voice in her head at first. The voice whispering about
babies and motherhood. But she'd finally had to give in and listen.
And think about never having babies. Would she never have the
opportunity to put to use all that her mother had taught her? She'd
had to ask herself which would be worse? Never having something
she'd never had, or spending the rest of her life thinking about
Jared. Loving and missing him, wondering about him and wanting to
be with him so badly she would ache.

She'd finally accepted the fact that
there would be no easy answer to this situation. She would just
live her life one day at a time, make decisions as they were
presented to her, and pray whatever decision she made would be the
best for both of them.

"Oh! Now, how insulting! Was that their
idea of romantic back then?"

Alane pulled her dark, gloomy thoughts
back to the cheery room lit by sparse Christmas tree lights and a
cozy fire.

"What? What was insulting?"

"In this movie." Jared flicked a
disdainful hand toward the TV. "These people are on their
honeymoon, and Fred MacMurray asks his new wife - oh, what's her
name? Claudette Colbert! He asks Claudette Colbert, 'Is your dress
you're wearing to dinner very pretty?' and she says, 'Well, yes, I
think so,' and he says, 'Because I want you to be the prettiest
woman at dinner tonight.' And she melts all over him! Now I ask
you, what kind of compliment is that?"

Before she could even absorb the
question, let alone attempt an answer, he turned to her, his fierce
gaze raking the length of her, taking in her scraggly pony tail,
her turtleneck smudged with ten year old dust, her jeans, her feet
clad in three pairs of jogging socks.

"You could walk into any room in the
world right now and be the most beautiful woman there. Without, "
his voice gentled as he traced his hand along her cheek, "even
washing the dirt from your face."

Talk about melting. Alane could have
trickled right off the couch just from his look.

"You're so sweet," she told him with a
grin, "but you must be mentally disturbed."

His only answer was a grunt as he
settled back to finish the movie.

"Tell me about yourself, Jared." She
could almost feel him tense up at her question, but she forged on.
"I don't want to dredge up painful memories, but I feel like this
is something I need to know now. All I know about you is that you
died two hundred years ago and that you had a wife. Did you have
any children?" He continued to stare at the television, but she
could tell he was no longer watching. After a while he blinked and
a muscle flexed in his jaw.

"She was pregnant."

She swallowed back the first words of
sympathy and fought the nauseating pitch of her stomach at the
thought of another woman carrying his child. Even centuries
ago.

"Did...she die in
childbirth?"

He continued to stare at the happy
couple on the television screen. His jaw flexed some
more.

"Leave it be, Alane. You don't want to
know the story."

"Yes. I do. What could
possibly be so bad?" she questioned, then added jokingly, "Unless,
of course,
you
killed her."

His features never changed, but he
turned his head slowly and nailed her with dead, emotionless eyes.
Tingles of icy spiders crawled up her spine and into her scalp. He
couldn't have! Not Jared!

"Don't even try to convince me of that!
I'll never believe you could murder anyone, especially a woman you
loved."

He turned his gaze away, back to the
TV. She picked up the remote and switched off the television, but
he didn't seem to notice.

"Talk to me, damn it! The truth can't
be as bad as what I could imagine." She'd give up everything she
owned to be able to shake him right now. "Nothing will convince me
you murdered your wife!"

"I didn't murder her, but I killed her.
Her and our unborn baby."

Alane wanted to scream.

"Jared, look at me," she said in the
calmest voice she could muster.

His head didn't turn, but he slid his
gaze to her.

"You've got to tell me now. You can't
drop something like that in my lap and then not explain. What
happened? Tell me how she died. Start at the beginning. Hell, start
anywhere, just tell me what happened."

Jared studied her face with cold,
hopeless eyes. Finally, defeat shadowed his features and he drew in
a deep, resigned breath.

"I didn't love her."

Alane was horrified with herself at the
wave of relief she felt. She swept it away and prodded him to go
on.

"Our parents wanted a union of
families. She was the only daughter, and I was the only son. There
was never any question. Back then children married who their
parents told them to marry."

Alane only nodded, not wanting to
interrupt him.

"She was in her seventeenth year. We
married on my twenty-fifth birthday. I was fond enough of her. And
I was gentle with her. I suppose I even grew to love her in time,
but like a sister. I felt no passion for her, no matter how hard I
searched my soul for it.

"She'd tried from our wedding night to
conceive. But it took three years. She was nearly hysterical with
worry, until it actually happened. By that time she'd changed from
a sweet, gentle child to a possessive, clutching
harridan."

He stopped for a moment, as if
searching his soul. Alane was afraid to breathe. Afraid to break
the spell and send him back into himself.

"One night I was going upstairs to
dress. By that time I usually spent my evenings out, looking
for...something...missing in my life. I'd tried to find it at home,
but though Katherine had been a good wife, I could never give all
of myself to her, nor accept everything she offered to
give."

Katherine
. Her name had been Katherine.

"She wanted me to stay home that night.
Her parents were visiting, to celebrate the announcement of the
child, but they'd been there a month and I desperately needed to
get away. Katherine followed me up the stairs, begging me to stay.
She grabbed my arm to stop me and I yanked it back." He jerked his
arm, as if reliving the moment. "She lost her balance and fell
backward. I tried to grab her," he reached out, trancelike, "but
she pulled me with her. We fell. All I could hear through the pain
was the thump of our bodies and the crunch of breaking bones, until
we landed on the floor at the bottom of the stairs.

"When I opened my eyes, Katherine was
dead. I knew it. I don't know how long I was unconscious, how long
her parents and the servants stood over us. I looked up at her
mother, standing there, sobbing. The last thing I remember was the
pure venom in her voice as she cursed me. 'May your soul know no
peace, Jared Elliott, until you give up your existence in the name
of love.' I have wandered the earth ever since." 

CHAPTER SIX

Jared finally dragged his
gaze back to hers, braced for the disgust, the revulsion he knew
would be in her eyes. But all her eyes held were shimmering tears.
And love. Understanding,
healing
love.