Happy Valentine's Ghost Read online

  “Maggie it is, then. Pretty name, pretty lady.” Bill raised her hand to his lips and kissing it.

  If she’d still had a body, she’d have shivered all over and wondered how good those lips would feel on her nipples or clit if they felt that sensual brushing the back of her hand.

  As it was, she still shivered all over. The all over included places she couldn’t name despite her knowledge of anatomy, places that she thought might be more real now than they were when she was alive. She hadn’t believed in souls then, but she couldn’t very well deny them now.

  The thought made her uncomfortable.

  So did the look in Bill’s eyes. It was too admiring, too warm, too interested. A hunk like Bill, alive, would gaze that way at an extroverted prom-queen type of girl—and he’d stare right through her scrawny, geektastic self to do so.

  “Okay, I’ve got to ask,” Maggie flailed, desperate to change the subject. “What’s with the flowers? You don’t look like a flower-pelting kind of man.”

  “Rolled the damn Jeep on Valentine’s Day. I was supposed to have a date that night. I’d already bought the flowers.”

  “That just adds insult to injury. Poor Bill. You missed the war and missed your chance with the girl.”

  Wonder if he was looking for a substitute Valentine?

  Right. If he was, it wouldn’t be her. The woman for whom he’d bought the flowers, the Valentine’s Day sweetheart, had probably looked like a 1940s pinup, fresh-faced and curvy and innocently sexy.

  But Maggie would bet she wasn’t a certified genius, or capable of frying circuits to fight the bad guys.

  Bill wanted a chance to fight back against the evil in the world. She could give him that.

  If she got a bit of flirting with it, that was a pleasant side benefit. Alive, Bill was no doubt the kind of guy who flirted with every female between six and ninety-six and meant nothing by it.

  But a ghost could dream, couldn’t she?

  Chapter 3

  Today proved once again that afterlife was definitely more satisfying in some ways than Maggie’s life-life had been. Sure, nothing in her post-demise existence so far could rival the day Jude Duclos was sprung from the facility, but that break-out had involved his witchy wife, a righteously pissed-off cougar, and some serious-ass magic in addition to her own small contribution. Most of the time you couldn’t expect magical flames and villain-capturing plants and a cougar taking a good-sized chomp out of Shaw.

  But this was another good day’s work in excellent company. Another prisoner freed, some important files fried, the alarm system screwed up but good, and a few people scared out of their wits while they were at it. A lot of the old hands were blasé about ghosts, but being pelted with dead roses out of nowhere startled even the jaded.

  “That was fun!” Bill exclaimed. “No one ever says that about being in a war. Important, yes. Necessary, sure. Fun, no.”

  “At least no one you’d want to be around. The guy who killed me probably thinks war’s a laugh riot, but he’s a psychopath.”

  “That bastard. Pardon the language, but that’s one of the more polite things I can call him. I’ve never wanted to hurt anyone as badly as I did him the night he killed you. Just couldn’t manage to do it.”

  “Thanks for trying, anyway. None of the living people here would have.” She shrugged, the memory of the gesture moving her ethereal body. “Besides, being dead’s not so bad. I miss my cats, and I miss chocolate and sushi, but I don’t get headaches or cramps, there’s not much to worry about because the worst had already happened, and I can punk idiots and villains to my heart’s content. Plus, I have you to hang out with. The geek and the all-American hunk. Face it, would I have been your type when you were alive?”

  He grinned, the kind of grin that liquefied panties and melted hearts. “You bet. I’d have started sweet-talking you so fast your head would have spun.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Bill raised an eyebrow. Even after spending a great deal of time together in the past weeks, he hadn’t gotten used to her foul mouth. He’d said a few times that ladies didn’t talk that way in his day and she was a lady.

  No one had ever called her a lady before. She wasn’t sure she’d have liked it when she was alive, but she could tell he meant it as a compliment.

  Then he smiled. “No bull, Maggie. Truth. Scout’s honor.” Bill put an arm around her. It felt different than a hug between living people, more diffuse and at the same time more intense. She’d never been a big hugger, but this hug reached places live-person hugs never had and made her feel warm all over.

  Okay, hot all over.

  Maybe without bodies in the way, intentions were clearer, because the way Bill stared at her, even Maggie, who wasn’t too good at reading social cues, couldn’t miss that he was seriously interested. Couldn’t imagine why he was, but the heart that wasn’t there raced, the memory of her stomach did excited back flips, and the place where her pussy should be felt heavy, weighted with need.

  “I always liked smart women. My Valentine’s date was a Cornell mathematics grad student. Little bit of a thing with a big brain and a sassy mouth.”

  “Sounds familiar.” Her confidence sagged. Was it good or bad she reminded him of his lost love, who’d be a great-grandma by now if she was still alive? Were you still Rebound Woman if it was more than seventy years later?

  He laughed, but gently, as if he sensed what she was thinking. “You and Alice had a bit in common. But you know something? I liked her, but we’d only gone on two or three dates. It wasn’t like we freed prisoners or fought enemies of freedom together. That’s the right way to get to know a gal. Lets you know what she’s made of, and I like what you’re made of.”

  “Yeah. Right.” She could believe he liked her. But not in the way she thought she was hearing.

  Then again, if he liked smart, mouthy women, she was his type.

  His voice deepened and burred, and the sound waves traveled into her center, teasing at her senses. “Maggie, I know it’s past Valentine’s Day...”

  “It’s almost April.” Why was she compelled to point this out? This could be the most romantic moment of her life—even if it was technically in her afterlife—and her big mouth seemed determined to ruin it.

  “Minor detail. I’ll overlook it if you will. Maggie, will you be my Valentine?”

  The roses appeared in his head.

  Scientific logic told her a ghostly bouquet shouldn’t have fragrance, but the heady scent of roses filled the air. She tried to tell herself they were second-hand, intended for some other woman...but this bouquet, unlike the original, had her favorite yellow roses mixed in with the red.

  No one had ever given her roses. Not even at her funeral. Her family and her few friends had made donations to the Humane Society instead.

  While she was still formulating her sarcastic comeback—or maybe fighting back tears, she wasn’t sure which—Bill said, his deep voice intense, “I think I love you.”

  Love? She didn’t need a sarcastic comeback for that. She needed a whole sarcastic speech.

  Only Bill kissed her and the sarcasm went up in smoke.

  It was different kissing when you were both ghosts. A bit weird in that you and your partner were only as solid as you remembered to be, and the longer the kiss went on and the more interesting it got, the harder it was to remember.

  But it better, in some ways. No flipper arm or needing to figure out what to do with the roses because they conveniently vanished until they could pay attention to them again, no bumping noses, no worrying if you had bad breath. No breath at all, so you didn’t need to stop and catch it. She and Bill simply flowed together and lusted.

  Oh boy, did they lust.

  Maggie throbbed and tingled. Her pussy throbbed, and the fact that she didn’t actually have a pussy didn’t impede the heat, the wetness, the sheer need, from building. The electric impulses that made up her ghostly form snapped and sparked in fascinating ways that required more ph
ysics than she knew to explain.

  But for once in her life, Maggie didn’t really care about the scientific explanation, the whys and wherefores. It felt good, and for once, that was enough.

  Okay, so maybe he didn’t love her. Not in the grand, romantic, cue-the-movie-music way like Jude Duclos’s witchy wife, whom Maggie had helped rescue Jude from the Agency. Not like Maggie’s college friend who stayed with her spouse as Joe became the Joyce she always had been on the inside. Not even like her mom and dad, who fought and snarked and blustered, but still held hands at the movies. After all, she and Bill hadn’t known each other very long. He didn’t know just how sharp-edged she could be.

  But even if what he felt was a friendly sort of love made up of affection and lust and a need to feel he wasn’t alone in the afterlife, it was real, honest. Spirit to spirit, she could tell that. And that was better than all the false starts, broken promises, and sex for the sake of sex that she’d enjoyed in life. Or more often, hadn’t enjoyed, though some of the meaningless sex had been fun for what it was.

  Bill was a man of his times, though. He kissed like a lust-filled pirate, but his hands stayed away from the places she most needed them.

  Maggie didn’t feel like waiting for him to decide the moment was right. She directed his hands to her breasts and put one of hers on his thigh, not quite at his crotch, but teasingly close.

  The invisible khaki shifted. Hot damn! Ghost-cocks twitched at the slightest attention from the right person, just like flesh-and-blood ones did. How did that work without blood-flow?

  She’d worry about the science of that later. Dead people had all the time in the world.

  Bill groaned her name. “Don’t want to push things.”

  “What do we have to lose? We’re dead. We might as well enjoy life.”

  He pulled back from her, caught her eye, glared in a way that might have been angry, might have been hurt. “Maggie, you deserve better than this. You deserve...I don’t know...Paris or Rome or someplace beautiful. A honeymoon suite in a grand hotel. Hell, a comfortable apartment with a clean bed would do. Not a work table in this awful place.”

  She almost argued that she didn’t deserve anything much.

  But hell, she did, didn’t she? She’d helped save lives. With luck, Jude Duclos and Elissa the witch and their other friend, the good-looking cougar dual whose name she never learned, would be able to spread the word about what was going on here and she’d have played a small part in shutting these creeps down for good. She’d done some important stuff in her life.

  Okay, mostly in her death, but some people were late bloomers.

  “Yeah,” she finally admitted, “I do deserve better. We both do. But I’m not sure we can get to Paris or even Ithaca. This is what we have. So let’s make the most of it.”

  “What if someone sees us?” As much as a ghost could blush, Bill did. Maggie made a mental note not to tell him about the time she had sex on the A train in Manhattan late at night during medical school.

  Instead she laughed and said, “If they’re offended by ghost sex but not offended by murder, they’ve got issues. Which they probably do if they work here, speaking as someone who did work here and had enough issues for a lifetime subscription.”

  “Good point.” He was still red-faced, embarrassed, but he was also starting the totally unnecessary process of unbuttoning Maggie’s shirt.

  Of course, the fact she’d moved her hand to his cock might have something to do with changing his mind.

  His cock throbbed, hard and heated, as she stroked it through his khaki trousers. They were wool—or at least the memory of wool—and fastened with buttons at the fly, and she wanted to get them off so she could get to the delicious man inside. Bill was having better luck with her shirt than she was with the fly buttons, though and before she got beyond the first, he slipped her flannel shirt off her shoulders.

  She quickly thought herself into a pretty red bra instead of whatever ratty thing she’d actually been wearing when she died. Cute red panties too, instead of the long underwear that she’d had under her jeans because she’d worked in an underground lab in central New York and it had been cold the day she died.

  On second thought, she imagined the underwear away, and the jeans too, and chortled. “That’s a great trick. So much easier than fumbling with zippers.”

  “Beautiful,” he whispered, “but very, very impatient.”

  “Always. It’s a failing of mine,” she admitted. “But I’m extra impatient now. I know we have eternity, literally. It’s not like we have to rush off to work or make dinner. But I want to be naked with you in the worst way. After all, you’ve been waiting a long time for this.”

  “More than seventy years.”

  “And I feel like I’ve been waiting that long.”

  Apparently that was just what he wanted to hear, because quick as thought, Bill was naked.

  Naked and hard and oh my God, he had the most gorgeous, touchable blond fuzz on his muscled chest and trailing down to a neat V at his crotch.

  Feeling almost shy, she reached out, stroked his chest.

  He felt cold to the touch for a second, then seemed to remember he could be warm. His skin was soft, his muscles hard, the hair crisp yet silky. At the same time, she felt like she was reaching something far deeper than his skin. Was it only because she knew she was stroking spirit and electrical impulses? Did it matter? She tingled from where they touched all the way to her heart, and from there to her pussy.

  She ran her hand down his body, drinking in the noises he made, drinking in the sensation of skin on skin, soul on soul.

  His cock rested heavy in her hand, vibrating with need. Velvet over steel.

  She felt her touch on her own body, so closely were they joined.

  She wondered how a more intimate caress would feel.

  Only one way to find out.

  “No...Maggie, no,” Bill muttered when she sank to her knees before him.

  She paused, one hand cupping his balls, the other guiding him toward her mouth. “Do you mean that or do you just think you should say that?”

  “Nice girls don’t ...”

  She chuckled throatily. She didn’t know she knew how to laugh the way a self-confident, sexy woman would with her lover, but apparently her store of innate female knowledge was vaster than she knew. “You need to get a few things straight, soldier. I’m not a girl—I’m a grown woman with a PhD and a sex drive. And I’m arguably good, but I’m not nice. Never have been, and certainly not starting now if it means not sucking my lover’s cock.”

  He sputtered.

  When she took him into her mouth, the sputter turned into a groan of need. One of his hands cupped the back of her head, but not to control her. It was a soft, delicate touch, the way you might stroke a baby’s fragile little skull, as if to assure himself she was real.

  Every time she took him deeper into her mouth, she felt him entering her pussy as well, an echo, but a strong enough one to push her toward the edge. Every time she eased off, she felt him pulling back, getting ready to thrust again. She swore he was licking at her at the same time. And maybe, somehow, cradling her heart in the palm of his big hand and arousing it too.

  Was this love, or was this simply what sex felt like when the body and its awkwardness wasn’t getting in the way of the mind, the biggest and most complex sex organ of all?

  Did it matter?

  Usually Maggie was all about answers, but right now, even the questions didn’t seem important. Not compared to the sensations overloading her, making her struggle to retain any form at all.

  He was touching only her hair directly, but before long, she was going to explode.

  “Do you feel that? It’s like...it’s like I’m everywhere at once.” Bill’s voice was husky with need, but full of wonder as a child’s at Christmas.

  “Oh, yes.” How great was it that she didn’t need to stop sucking him to answer?“You’re touching me everywhere, and I’m touching you. Pl
aces I’m not sure it’s even possible to touch. Like we’re blending. I don’t understand...”

  “Hush. No need to understand. Just feel, little lady. Just feel.”

  She took him deeper into her throat, deeper than she thought was possible to go, and she swore the phantom cock in her sex bumped the one in her mouth, an impossible, impossibly full, impossibly wonderful sensation.

  God, he was delicious, and the echo of him fucking her was wonderful. But she wanted...

  Bill pulled away, hands lingering on her hand. “I want to be inside you. More than I am, that is, because I’m feeling all kinds of wonderful, crazy things.”

  “And I want to be inside you.” Bill raised an eyebrow and she quickly added, “Not like that...I’m mean it’s fine if you like that kind of thing, but it doesn’t sound like your style. I want us to blur together. Want to forget where I stop and you start.” She couldn’t remember ever feeling like that before, but this time she meant it.

  He nodded as he helped her to her feet, then eased her back onto the ugly work table.

  She tensed, expecting it to be cold and uncomfortable. For a second it was.

  Then she remembered she didn’t have to feel anything she didn’t want to feel, and the table felt as cushy as any bed.

  Maybe it was an advantage of being a ghost.

  Or maybe she was just ignoring the table because Bill was lying over her, light as a thought yet warm and solid as the big, muscular man he was and his cock...oh his cock teased at her slippery clit and wet, needy, aching pussy so she arched and opened for him.

  He eased, opening her up inch by excruciating inch until she wrapped her legs and arms around his ass and pulled him home.

  Bill’s eyes widened.

  For a second, he became insubstantial, everything but the cock that filled her, as if his pleasure was so intense he couldn’t hold on to form. A deep, totally unnecessary breath and he turned solid in her arms again, but still barely visible. His eyes were huge in his dim face, huge and, she thought, moist.