Free Riding the Storm by Sydney Croft Page A

tagalong spirit, Kate, or Kat, or whatever she was called,
was helping him.
    "So…
much… blood," he rasped.
    "In
the house?"
    "Where
we're standing."
    A
chill that had nothing to do with the temperature ran through her. She hadn't
known exactly where Dev's parents had been killed, but now she couldn't help
but imagine them bleeding out in the spot where her feet were. Poor Dev.
    Annika
hadn't known her birth father; her mother had never named him. And really,
she'd never known her mother either. But she did know that her mother had bled
to death, her throat slit, so she had an idea how Dev must feel about his
parents' murders.
    A
presence broke in on her thoughts, a shadowy specter that writhed in the air
all around her, until icy tendrils snaked around her shoulders. Instantly, she
flooded her body with energy, too late realizing that the volts would pump into
Creed as well as the apparition. Energy sizzled across her skin, crackled in
her bones, stretched her muscles, and the cold fingers released her.
Thankfully, Creed relaxed, completely unaffected by the massive output of
electricity, just as before, when she'd tried to shock him out of his boots.
    No
one had ever been immune to her power, but she didn't have time to think through
it because Creed dropped his head to her shoulder as though exhausted,
muttering a few choice curse words, "Did this thing kill Dev's
parents?"
    "No
ghost could have done it," he said tightly, like he knew more than he was
saying, and was trying to protect her. If he only knew the things she'd seen
and done, he wouldn't worry about sheltering her ever again. Hell, he probably
wouldn't even look at her. "Not like that."
    "Itor,"
she breathed. "Bastards. Why is the spirit telling you all this?"
    "It's
trying to befriend me."
    "Why?"
    "It
wants something from me," he said, and holy crap, his breath was coming
out as white puffs of air, but she didn't detect a drop in temperature. This
thing must not want him talking. "Spirits hang around for a lot of
different reasons. Some have unfinished business. Sometimes, a spirit can get
confused, although that usually happens to little kids or adults who die a
quick, unexpected death and don't realize that they've passed on."
    "So
which one is this?"
    Creed
shivered, and she rubbed her palms up and down his back because, strangely, she
was the warm one now. And was it her imagination, or was one side of his body
colder than the other?
    "This
one's a guilty conscience," he said, and all around them, the house seemed
to shudder in one large, collective sigh. "The spirit doesn't want to move
on because it knows it'll be judged harshly for what it's done."
    "And
what, exactly, is that?"
    "It
won't tell me."
    She
became aware of his hands smoothing over her flesh, across her back, around her
waist, and when the tips of his fingers probed under the waistband of her very
low-slung jeans, her heart caught, mid-beat, but that didn't stop the pulse of
desire that shot straight to her core.
    This
was so not happening. "Can we let go of each other now?"
    "No.
It's not safe." His hands kept roaming, each circuit dropping a fraction
of an inch lower.
    "My.
Ass," she ground out, wriggling to escape, but he closed his arms tighter
around her and buried his face in her neck.
    "Shh,"
he whispered against her suddenly sensitive skin. "Kat is settling it
down, leading it away. It wants to use one of us, so as long as we're together,
we're okay. Too strong for it."
    "Use
us?"
    He
nuzzled her. "To get out. To talk. To get to who it really wants. Maybe
something worse. Not sure."
    So
maybe he wasn't full of shit, but she seriously doubted that being together
required his hands on her butt. Or his erection at her belly.
    But
wow, he was big. All over. She'd noticed his size before; he was hard to miss.
But being like this, against him, surrounded by him, she almost felt lost.
    Then
again, that could be because no one had ever held her, no one but Dev and the
mother she didn't