A Date with the Other Side (Cuttersville #1)(22)
Author: Erin McCarthy

Immediately she pulled her shirt back down, covering her bare breast. “I don’t mean to be a tease or anything, but I just can’t do this.”

So much for his fabulous plans of spending their lockup in bed, drenched in naked pleasure.

“I swear, Boston, you’ll thank me in the long run.”

Please. That was what people said when they took away from you something really, really good.

Shelby watched Boston take a deep breath and walk with slow steps, hands on hips, over to the window. “I don’t want to do anything you don’t want to do, Shelby,” he said to the glass.

“But you’re not.” Oh, Lord, she was acting like a total fool. But what if she let Boston keep on the way he was going and nothing happened? She was out of practice faking orgasms.

And she didn’t want to fake one. She wanted a real one. But how could she explain to Boston that only on rare occasions and during a full moon did she manage to come with Danny and that it wasn’t Danny, it was absolutely, most definitely her. There was no polite way to say she couldn’t get off.

Boston was staring out the window and attempting to pry it open. Apparently he’d had enough of her and her indecisive meanderings. “I’m at a loss here, Shelby,” he said over his shoulder. “So after I figure out that this damn window really won’t open, I’m going to sit down in the rocking chair and we can just have a friendly conversation to pass the time. I’m going to stay away from the bed so I’m not tempted by you, because I really don’t want to do anything you’re not completely ready for.”

Shelby thought that sounded like an okay plan, except when she looked over at the rocking chair he was referring to, to gauge how far away from her it was, her jaw dropped. Good gravy, that thing was rocking. By itself.

Back and forth, faster and faster, like a very agitated person was sitting in it. Only there wasn’t anything but a rose-colored cushion on it, and as far as she knew, cushions couldn’t push rocking chairs.

“Uh . . . Boston?”

“What?” Sounding surly, Boston abandoned the window and turned around, brushing his hands on his shorts.

She pointed to the rocker. “That chair is rocking.”

Boston frowned. Shelby inched farther back on the bed, grabbing a bed pillow. She wasn’t sure that beating a ghost with an eyelet pillow would be very effective, but it gave her a small measure of comfort.

“It’s probably just the draft from the hall or a breeze I created by jerking on the window.”

If he wanted to be dense, that was his business, but she knew what she was seeing and it wasn’t any piddling breeze. “It’s Nanny Baskins.”

The chair rocked faster.

And Boston, that idiot, went over to the chair and tentatively touched the arm.

“What are you doing?!” Did he want to be slapped into the light or sucked over to the other side? Geez Louise, the man didn’t show a lick of sense.

“I don’t feel anything. Not a cold spot, not a warm spot.”

The chair kept rocking, and he made like he was going to sit in it.

Shelby leaped off the bed. “Stop! You can’t sit on the woman, for crying out loud!”

Boston hesitated, then let out a cry of surprise. Jerking forward, he reached down and rubbed his leg. “Something slapped my thigh!”

Shelby rolled her eyes. Really, what did he expect? “Well, she’s a nanny. She was just disciplining you for your rudeness.”

Still rubbing his leg, he shot her a disbelieving look. “I am thirty-two years old. I do not need to be disciplined by a dead nanny.”

“She thinks you do, apparently.” Shelby crossed her arms in front of her chest and shivered. The chair had stopped rocking.

“She couldn’t have children, you know,” she whispered.

“Who?” Boston sat down on the foot of the bed and rubbed his hands over his face.

“Nanny Baskins. Her husband left her when he decided she wasn’t fertile, though for the longest time the town thought he’d died in an accident down in Cincinnati.” Shelby, still clutching the pillow, sprawled across the head of the bed, on her stomach.

“Another vengeful spirit?” Boston cast another look at the still rocker.

“No, not at all. Once her husband left, Emma Baskins became a nanny, and they say she was never the least bit bitter. She got what she wanted after all. Children to raise, and she loved them like her own. Two generations of children she raised here in the White House, and did a fine job of it too. One of her charges became mayor, another a doctor, yet a third was the first woman in Cuttersville to go to college.” Shelby had always imagined Nanny Baskins to be something like her own gran, loving but firm.

“She sounds better than Carrie.” Boston grinned at her.

Shelby laughed. “Much better. And they say she stays on, watching over each subsequent generation of kids living here, just to make sure everything’s alright. But there haven’t been any kids here in twenty years or so. She must be lonely.”

The thought made her melancholy. How many times had she given that speech and she’d never once thought about how sad it was for a woman who loved children to be waiting for more to take care of. And how burdensome it must be to be stuck in the same place for eternity, if there really was such a thing as ghosts. Which she was rapidly coming to conclude either there was, or she was as cracked as a nut.

“Well, Nanny Baskins, I apologize for almost sitting on you,” Boston said to the room.

Nothing happened.

“Maybe she doesn’t forgive me.” Boston rolled onto his side, and Shelby immediately wished he hadn’t.

They were right back on his bed again, and he still wasn’t wearing a shirt, and he still was as sexy as all get-out, and she still hadn’t had sex in three years.

But he kept his promise. Boston started talking to her, just idle chitchat, mildly complaining that he was hungry, and telling her about all the great restaurants in Chicago.

She liked listening to him talk, and he had her laughing with his descriptions of the trauma his arteries were suffering under the greasy diet the Busy Bee Diner had him on. Shelby figured her arteries were immune. If she ate salmon, her arteries would likely shrivel up in horror and die.

Somehow or another, as they talked and the minutes ticked by, they wound up lying next to each other on the bed, Boston flat on his back staring up at the ceiling. Shelby was closer to him than she’d intended, relaxed and enjoying his company. The room was darkening, the sun just about gone, and it had to be past nine.