Lucky Stars (Ghosts and Reincarnation #5)(176)

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Finally home, Belle.”

He felt her chest expand with her breath, she let it go and nodded. Then she fully relaxed into him, her hands gliding along his arms to hold him where he was holding her, her head falling back to rest against his collarbone but the uninjured side pressed lightly into his neck as she kept her gaze trained out the window.

After they stood close for a while, she queried, “So, what’s happening down there?”

“Yasmin is having a drama in the morning room. She’s decided she wants Quincy back, she told him and his response was that he’s refused to take her back.”

He heard her swift intake of breath and her hands convulsed on his arms but he kept talking.

“Lila is off to the stables likely on the ruse of working but definitely with the intent of matchmaking. Miles, she reports to me, is there. And Miles, she explained to me, is the person she intends to send in to comfort Yasmin.”

“Oh my goodness gracious,” she breathed and Jack smiled.

Then he continued.

“There are ghosts in Leeds, nasty ones, and Angus and his white van are currently to the rescue.”

Her body started shaking gently and he knew she was laughing silently.

He couldn’t hear it but it certainly felt good.

“And last,” he carried on, “your father is planning his version of our engagement party for when we return in three weeks from wherever it is we’re going. We’ll start at your cottage and I don’t know where we’ll end. Perhaps Australia. And perhaps we’ll extend our time away to a month.”

She turned in his arms and raised shining, happy grey eyes to his.

“A month?”

“Maybe two,” he muttered, lost in her eyes in which there was no storm. Just amusement.

And happiness.

And seeing it, Jack decided, he’d be happy to be lost in those grey eyes for a lifetime.

Though, this was a decision he’d made ages ago.

Approximately a millisecond after he first saw them.

“If we’re gone two months, we can’t get married next month,” she reminded him and he grinned.

“Right, then, a month away, come back, get married then go on our honeymoon,” Jack declared and a giggle burst out of Belle even as she pressed closer and wound her arms around him.

“That sounds like the perfect plan,” she whispered, coming up on her toes.

“Bloody right it does,” Jack agreed, dipping his head to hers.

“Love you, Jack,” she whispered when his lips hit hers.

“And I you, poppet,” he whispered back.

Then in the place over two hundred years before, the ghost of a terrified, newly dead, young boy witnessed the murder of his mother, a man in love kissed the woman who loved him back as the sun shone on Chy An Als Point.

* * * * *

Lachlan

Through the misty dark, Lachlan McPherson walked to the house he left too early the night before.

He was hoping she was home.

Emma.

Except during obvious times when he had to think of other things, like driving like a lunatic and not killing himself or holding a struggling Belle-slash-Brenna so she wouldn’t topple over the cliff in her drive for vengeance, he hadn’t been able to think of anything else.

Anything.

But Emma.

This was unusual.

Never, not once in his twenty-nine years, had a woman preyed on his mind.

And Lachlan McPherson had had a variety of women who could do it. It was just that none of them did.

Be careful, he heard her words in his head said in that sweet whisper, the like he’d never encountered before, as he moved up her front path deciding if she wasn’t home, he’d go to the pub he’d found her in and ask after her.

One way or another, he’d find her.

Absolutely.

He stopped dead at the door.

It was ajar.

“Fuck,” he whispered.

He looked to the left, to the right and up.

The house was dark.

Then his neck grew tense and his eyes narrowed when he sensed it.

Putting his hand to the door, slowly, he pushed it open.

Slower still, he walked into the dark house.

Even in the shadows he could see it was in disarray. It looked as if an almighty battle had been fought throughout the front rooms. And a sense of deep unease stole through him as he saw the dark splatters in the shadowed rooms that looked disturbingly like blood.

He stopped dead in the entry, his gaze slicing to the hall where he saw the large, brawny male ghost hovering and smiling.

“You want ‘er,” its eerie disembodied voice sounded all around then for some reason the ghost lifted its forefinger to its nose before dropping it, leaning jeeringly forward and hissing, “catch me if you can!”

Then it disappeared.

Lach stared down the empty hall.

Then he pulled out his phone, engaged it, slid his thumb on the screen and tapped it.

He put it to his ear.

“Seriously, Lach, what the f**k?” his sister said in his ear.

Lach stared down the hall.

He smelled her perfume, his gut lurched and his heart squeezed.

Then he replied, “I need you.”

* * * * *

Belle

Loved Up in Holy Matrimony.