Free Phantom Affair by Katherine Kingston

Chapter One
     
    One of the few drawbacks to having a ghost for a lover was
the lack of a martini waiting for her when she got home after a rough trip into
the city. Oh, and the back rubs lacked a certain heft. Still, Robert managed to
make her feel amazingly wonderful for someone whose spirit was willing but the
flesh nonexistent.
    Kelly Scranton could fix the martini herself. And unlike
most of the men she’d dated, Robert was always willing to listen to her gripes,
and he generally commiserated. In fact he seemed to crave her tales of woe from
the trenches of the architectural world, or any other world. Being limited to
the house made him hungry for any and all information from outside, which was
why she generally left either the television or a radio going even when she
wasn’t there.
    Her nineteenth-century mansion on the Virginia side of the
Chesapeake Bay coast was almost two hours’ drive from D.C., so Kelly generally
spent a couple of days in town at a time, meeting with clients and other
business contacts before returning home where she could do much of the drawing
in peace and conduct the rest of her business via phone.
    That particular Thursday she’d been gone for three days,
working on a large collaborative project. By the time she got back at eight in
the evening, she was beat. She’d had dinner before she left the city but she
headed for the kitchen right after dumping her briefcase and stepping out of
her pumps. That martini was calling her name.
    Robert was too, materializing beside her while she got out
the bottles and filled the shaker with ice. It no longer startled her. His form
was never fully solid, which made it hard to get a perfect idea what he looked
like. She could tell he had a lean, handsome face with strong jaw and
cheekbones and sensual lips, but it was especially hard to see his eye and hair
color. Both seemed to be light. Otherwise, he’d been a tall man in life, but
thin. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, which made sense since he thought
he’d been about twenty-five when he died. He didn’t like to talk about it, but
he had one time admitted that he’d been hanged in 1706. He wouldn’t discuss the
reason. Nothing she’d learned of him in the three years since she’d bought the
house—and his company along with it—suggested he was a bad or violent man, so
his fate mystified her.
    He must have some way to change his clothes, or maybe just
his appearance, since his dress didn’t reflect a man who’d lived in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He usually appeared to be wearing a
polo shirt and slacks.
    “Rough trip?” he asked, staring at her as she measured out
the vermouth. “Took longer than usual and you look beat.”
    “Busy. Lots of negotiations, a zillion details to hammer
out. And I had to wear heels for three solid days.”
    “Poor baby.” An intriguing hint of British accent underlay
the slang he’d picked up from the TV. “Go put your feet up and I’ll rub them
while you tell me about it.”
    That was an offer she never refused.
    Kelly finished putting together the double martini and took
it to the living room. She settled into the reclining end of the leather sofa
with a sigh of relief, letting the quiet, homey atmosphere she’d created sink
into her tired bones. A puff of warm air surrounded each of her feet after she
raised the footrest. The air began to move around, pressing against her flesh.
    She had no idea how he did that. Another of the drawbacks of
a ghostly lover was his inability to touch her, but Robert had figured out how
to use puffs of compressed air to substitute for it. He admitted it had taken
him years of practice to learn and master the technique. Kelly refused to ask
how many women had gotten similar attentions from him. He admitted there’d been
a couple, though he claimed he first developed the method to use for turning
the pages of books.
    “Tell me what’s happened the last few days,” Robert said,
his