A Date with the Other Side (Cuttersville #1)(11)
Author: Erin McCarthy

But nonetheless, he took the candy and pressed it against her closed lips, forcing her to open for him. Both the candy and his finger slipped inside her hot moist mouth, and when the tip of her tongue traced his skin, he felt a raw groan rush up from somewhere deep in his gut. He managed to stifle it in time to prevent long-term humiliation.

Then she sucked.

He jerked his finger back faster than a stock market crash.

Swallowing and tucking the candy into her cheek, Shelby spoke in a low, breathy voice. “Thanks, I appreciate it, Boston.”

“Anytime.”

Anytime she wanted to torture him, he was right here, stuck in Cuttersville, with nothing to do but contemplate the many ways he could pleasure Shelby Tucker.

Her eyes widened. “Look out!”

Chapter Four

Sluggish from the sugar rush and the surge of hormones coursing through her body at the feel of Boston’s finger in her mouth, it took Shelby a second to realize a lamp was winging across the room right at Boston’s head.

She yelled, he turned to look behind him, and Gran’s faux Tiffany lamp, with the pink glass tulips on the panes, clipped Boston on the shoulder.

“What the hell?” He jumped to his feet, rubbing his arm and working his shoulder around.

Shelby gaped at the lamp, now resting right side up on the floor, cord trailing behind it, still plugged in to the wall socket. She judged the distance from point of origin to Boston’s shoulder to be four feet or more, which was so doggone weird a scream rose in her throat.

Not wanting to look like a wuss, she clamped down on it, and glanced around the room for any other mobile inanimate objects. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, it’s just my shoulder and it didn’t hit with all that much force.” He looked a little wild-eyed, left hand still resting on the sleeve of the opposite arm. “But how the hell did that lamp move?”

“I don’t know.” But she had an idea, one that was more than a little unnerving. One that had goose bumps rising on her skin despite the heat, and she crunched the remains of the candy in her mouth hard, with excess nervous energy.

“Boston, do you believe in ghosts? You know, spirits of dead people hanging on?” First-class skeptic, she’d always been, though now and again she’d wondered if there wasn’t some truth to it. But in all her tours, she’d never encountered anything that wasn’t explainable.

An acrobatic lamp was unexplainable.

Boston’s eyebrows rose. “I know what ghosts are. I just find myself hard-pressed to believe in them. Most sightings occur in the presence of people who want to see a ghost for whatever reason. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”

“I’ve never been one to think much of it either, despite my job. I mean, I’ve lived here my whole life, in Ohio’s most haunted town, and never saw a single otherworldly occurrence.” She shivered and stood up. “But that was nuts. That lamp just rose off the table and came right at you, like it was aiming for you.”

“So you’re saying I’ve offended a possessed lamp?”

Shelby could see the temptation to wing something at him. He was so condescending sometimes, though she wondered if he knew he was or if it was just a by-product of being successful.

“No, you must have offended one of the two ghosts who are known to be in this room from time to time. Red-Eyed Rachel or the Blond Man.” Shelby sincerely hoped it was the Blond Man sharing space with them, but she had the sneaking suspicion it was Rachel instead, which made her want to karate-chop her way around the room, clearing the air.

And where the hell was the fire department anyway? She was locked in a room with a sexy Samson VP and a looby ghost. It wasn’t helping her overextended bladder in the least.

Boston picked up the lamp, turned it over, inspected the cord, set it down again. He walked the distance between the table and the lamp, then back again, obviously searching for a logical explanation.

“I think it’s Rachel. She lived in this house, you know, back in 1887 with her folks.”

Boston put the lamp back on the table and sighed. “Oh, God, you’re going to tell me a ghost story, aren’t you?”

The last thing in the world he felt like listening to was an overexaggerated local legend about some poor biddy who froze to death in the Great Winter. He was starting to feel claustrophobic and was considering calling the fire department again, or just taking the ugly pink lamp and throwing it through the nearest window to escape.

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 ni**les 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?”