Nearly Departed in Deadwood (42 page)

      “God, Violet!” He slammed into me, fast, the muscles under my hands rigid, all control gone. I spiraled with him, squeezing my legs tight, burying my nails in his skin, sinking my teeth into his shoulder to keep from crying out. My body clenched, pulsing around him.

      He roared against my throat, his body stiffening, then racked by shudders.

      When the shudders stopped, he looked at me, his grin surfacing. Our breaths mingled, ragged.

      “Wow.” I shifted so I could rub the spot where the ladder had dug into my back. “That’s gonna leave a mark.” Both the ladder rung and Doc’s touch.

      “Tell me about it.” Doc glanced at the teeth marks on his shoulder and winked. “Wild thing.”

      Below my marks were several nasty bruises spreading around to his back. He’d used his shoulder to bust open Wolfgang’s front door, Harvey had said. Without thinking, I brushed a kiss over his bruised skin.

      The tenderness in his eyes when I looked back up at him made me want to do things to him—fun, naked things. “Did I hurt you?” he asked.

      I felt branded, not hurt. “Only in a good way.”

      “I have no control when it comes to you.” He pulled out.

      I missed him already. That couldn’t be good.

      I slid to my feet, my boots clunking on the floor. “Welcome to the club.” I pulled my dress together, feeling vulnerable all of a sudden, snapping as fast as I could. “What are we going to do about it?”

      He zipped his shorts. “I don’t know.”

      “Maybe we just needed to get that out of our systems,” I suggested.

      He laughed. It rumbled in his chest. “As if once will do. All I have to do is hear your name and I get hard.”

      That made me flush, in a feel-good-all-over kind of way. Then I thought of Natalie and nearly gagged on my guilt. I snatched up my undies and climbed into them. “So, what? We keep meeting here until we’re dried-up prunes?”

      He reached out and fixed my crooked snap job, his knuckles brushing my breasts through the jean fabric. His hands grew still and his eyes met mine. “You need to leave.”

      I winced. “You’re not very good at after-glow chit-chat.”

      “Yes, I am.” He tugged me toward the door. “But if you don’t leave, I’m going to have to take your dress off again.”

      “Oh.” The beast inside me perked back up.
Down, girl!

      Doc opened the door and led me out into the hall. “Go get the paperwork started.”

      He dragged me toward the front door, my feet stumbling, my body lovesick. It wasn’t until he’d pushed me out under the warm sun that I found my voice. “I forgot to tell you, Harvey said the police found some kind of nest up in the mine behind his barn.”

      Doc leaned against the doorjamb. “He mentioned that last night at the hospital while you were getting your wrists wrapped.”

      “You had a pretty strong reaction to something at Harvey’s place.”

      Doc crossed his arms over his chest. “Yes, I did, but you don’t believe in ghosts, remember?”

      “I’m not saying this was a ghost. I’m just wondering if you might have smelled this
thing
when you were there.” That half-eaten possum had to have left a sticky stench on whatever was living there with it.

      “No, that’s not what I detected.”

      “You sure?”

      Nodding, he said, “Harvey’s not alone out there, but what I ran into has been dead for a long time.”

      I just stared up at him, speechless. He reached out and tugged on a loose curl. “Come back in an hour, Boots, and I’ll take you to lunch.”

      I’d rather take another trip to the moon.

      He closed the door in my face and clicked the deadbolt. After a wave in my direction, he disappeared into his back room.

      “Holy frickin’ moly.” I pinched myself. Nope, this was the real thing. After taking a moment to pat down my curls and straighten my clothes, I wandered back into Calamity Jane’s.

      Mona’s fingers paused. “What happened?”

     
Criminy!
JUST HAD SEX!
must be blinking in neon lights on my forehead. “Nothing. Why?”

      “You’re beaming.”

      Oh, well, what could I say? Sex with Doc had side effects. I closed my mouth to keep the sunshine from pouring out of it.

      Ray glanced up from clipping his toenails, his crumpled sock on his desktop, his sneer loud and clear. “I heard you burned down your ace in the hole, Blondie. I’d offer to help pack your desk, but I have houses to sell.”

      I locked gazes with the dickhead. While Ray was off my radar as a possible kidnapper, I hadn’t forgotten about that crate at Mudder Brothers. However, today I didn’t feel like fishing for trouble. “I’m not going anywhere, asshole.”

      Ray’s upper lip crinkled. “What makes you so sure?”

      “Doc wants to put an offer on Mona’s client’s house.”

      Mona clapped and cheered.

      Scowling, Ray stood. “An offer doesn’t guarantee a sale.”

      Jane came out of her office. “What’s going on?”

      “Violet got a sale,” Mona answered.

      Jane’s eyes lit up. “You did?”

      “Well, that depends on Mona’s client. Doc’s going to sign an offer letter today.”

      “Congratulations!” Jane squeezed me with a big hug, enveloping me with the scent of vanilla and flowers. I hoped she couldn’t smell sex on me. “When you get Mona’s client’s signature, I’ll take you out to celebrate.”

      I waved playfully at Ray over Jane’s shoulder. “Can Ray come, too?”

      He growled and kicked his desk with his bare foot.

      Mona laughed as he howled and hopped around on his shod foot.

      Aunt Zoe’s cell phone trilled from my purse. I ran over and dug it out. “Hello?”

      “Mom, where are you?” Layne, my other knight in shining armor, asked, his voice a tad breathless.

      “At work.” I could hear a loud, squawking noise in the background. A cloud covered my sun. “What’s that sound?”

      “Elvis. Harvey just came back from the mine with him. Our chicken trap worked.”

      My heart started beating again. “Oh, that’s good.” Except for the fact that I had finally cleaned the last of the chicken feathers from my velvet comforter. “What do you need, Honey?

      “You have to come home now!” he whispered.

      “Why?” I whispered back, playing along.

      “I found a foot.”

      Duh, his horse again. “They’re called hooves, Kiddo.”

      “I know that, Mother. I’m not talking about my horse skeleton.”

      I plugged my other ear to block out Ray’s cursing. “I don’t understand.”

      “It’s a human foot.”

      “Human?” I dropped into my chair. I must have heard that wrong.

      “Yeah, hanging in a tree. It’s missing two toes.”

      I laughed. It came out as more of a queasy cough. First Harvey’s ear, now a foot? Were body parts falling from the sky? “You’re kidding me, right?”

      Silence issued from Layne’s end of the line.

      “Right? Layne?”

      THE END ... for now

     
FIVE FUN FACTS ABOUT ANN CHARLES

      1.    When I was fifteen, I got lost in the Black Hills (back near Galena) one summer day because I’d come across a bull standing in the road while out on a walk and I was too chicken to try to skirt around it. For five hours, I wandered the forest, trying not to panic as dusk neared, until I came across a cute little cottage filled with a kind, older couple who took me in, fed me some cookies, and then drove me home. Turns out, I’d ended up on top of Strawberry Hill–only two freaking miles from my mom’s house. My brother, Chuck, later bought me Stephen King’s book,
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
, as a trophy for getting lost in the forest and making it out alive.

      2.    I have an irrational fear of zombies and cows (the latter explains the first fun fact listed). Both give me the heebie jeebies!

      3.    I am a huge fan of roller coasters, amusement parks, and carnival rides. Cedar Point Amusement Park in Sandusky, Ohio rocks!

      4.    I use only nicknames for my immediate family members in the public eye. If you hear me talk about Boe Biddles, Beaker, and Chicken Noodle, that’s them.

      5.    My dream job would be a Coke Slurpee inspector for the 7-11 Corporation. I would travel around the United States on their dime, testing Coke Slurpees in the various franchises, and rewarding or penalizing depending on the Slurpee’s smoothness, flavor, and liquidity. And I would be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to do this, of course.

     
SNEAK PEAK!

      Want a sneak peak at Ann Charles’ second book,
Optical Delusions in Deadwood
*, in the Deadwood Mystery series?

     
Back Cover Copy:

      Word has it single mom, Violet Parker—Deadwood’s most notorious Realtor—likes to chitchat with ghosts.

      With her reputation endangered, her bank account on the verge of extinction, and her career threatening to go up in flames, Violet is desperate to make a sale. When the opportunity to sell another vintage home materializes, she grabs it, even though this “haunted” house was recently the stage for a two-act, murder-suicide tragedy.

      Ghost or no ghost, Violet knows this can’t be as bad as the last house of horrors she tried to sell, but charmingly irresistible psychic, Doc Nyce, has serious doubts. Her only hope of hanging on to her job is to prove that the so-called, ghostly sightings are merely the eccentric owner’s optical delusions. But someone—or something—in the house wants her stopped ... dead

      Now read Chapter One.

      *
Optical Delusions in Deadwood
will be available online in early spring of 2011

     
OPTICAL DELUSIONS IN DEADWOOD

     
Chapter One

     
Deadwood, South Dakota

     
Wednesday, August 1st

      Some jackass has been talking shit around town about me chitchatting with dead folks.

      I didn’t believe in ghosts, or haven’t since I started wearing a training bra, anyway. But a couple of weeks ago, a psychotic serial killer tricked me into being the guest of honor at his macabre tea party with his sister’s ghost and three of his decomposing victims. Since then, my reputation had suffered.

      Normally, I’d just shrug off the stares, whispers, and snickers of sidewalk onlookers and fellow Piggly Wiggly shoppers, but I was relatively new in town—and even newer at this real estate agent venture. With two kids to support, big smiles and friendly service were my bread and butter. 

      Lucky for me, my fellow diners this morning at Bighorn Billy’s were mainly tourists chattering away about what was on their day’s agenda. With the infamous Sturgis Motorcycle Rally right around the corner, the Black Hills were crawling with chromed-out bikes.

      I stirred cream and sugar into my steaming coffee, happy as hell to be upstaged by the leather-clad crew for the next couple of weeks. My stomach growled, antsy from the aroma of fried bacon and eggs thick in the air. A glance at the Harley Davidson clock on the wall made it growl again.

      My breakfast date was late, and if he didn’t get his ornery old butt here soon, I was going to order without him.

      A shadow fell over my table. “Excuse me, are you Violet Parker?”

      That depended on if the woman standing over me with the owl-eye glasses and squeaky voice was one of my ghoul groupies. Her silver-blue eyes were magnified by lenses thick enough to read
War and Peace
etched on a grain of rice; her hair a helmet of brown, frizzy curls. My gaze lowered to the gray turtleneck sweater and long wool skirt covering her from neck to toe. Somebody should tell her it was August outside.

      I smiled extra wide, always the saleswoman. “That’s me. What can I do for you?”

      She seemed harmless enough, but I’d recently learned the hard way that looks could be deceiving. My eyebrows were just starting to fill back in after that lesson.

      She pushed her glasses higher up on her nose. “A gentleman from your office told me we could find you here.”

     
Gentleman?
My smile almost slipped. I had only one male coworker at Calamity Jane Realty. He hated my guts for stealing this Realtor job from his nephew and had made it his personal mission to destroy my career before it could even get one wheel off the ground. We’d hit it off like a sledgehammer and old TNT right from the start.

      “I’m Millie Carhart,” the woman said. “My mother would like to hire you to sell her house.”

      I peeked at the woman cowering behind Millie. With her white hair twirled up into a bun on top of her head and her ample bosom restrained in a faded, red gingham dress, she looked straight out of
Little House on the Prairie
.