Reawakened Passions Read online

  Jon hesitated. “The morgue.”

  She started to laugh, and it cycled up and up until the giggles spilled out of her like bubbles. “You’re kidding me.”

  “No.” He smiled. “Usually people don’t find that funny. Gross, maybe. A little scary. Never funny.”

  Mel shook her head. “No. It’s just that…never mind.”

  It would’ve been too perfect, right? This guy shows up and sets off some sort of screwball ghostly chain reaction in her apartment because he’s what Tesla suggested, some kind of medium. Or, Mel thought assessingly as she glanced at the bulge in his flannel sleeping pants, an extralarge. And as it turned out, the dude worked in the morgue. Too perfect.

  Which meant she’d sound like a gigantic douche-canoe if she asked him if he had any, like, psychic powers or whatever.

  “What?” Jon asked.

  “Nothing. Really.” She gave him her best “nothing to see here, move it along” kind of smile. “Here, take the cupcakes as a welcome to The Valencia present, okay? And let’s just start off on a different foot, how about that?”

  Jon took the cupcakes and gave her a small, tight smile. “Sure. Okay.”

  She held out her hand. “I’m Melissa Benjamin. But you can call me Mel.”

  “Jonathan Adams. Call me Jon.” He shook her hand, deftly balancing the box on his other palm in a show of dexterity that should not have been as sexy as it was.

  Great. Now she was imagining him like some sort of circus act, all bendy and supple and talented with his fingers. What the hell? She admonished herself. Horny was one thing, but this was just totally out of control.

  “Welcome to The Valencia,” she managed to say. “This place is the bee’s knees and the cat’s pajamas, don’t you know.”

  Jon blinked.

  Mel pressed her lips together before she could say anything else. His apartment was stifling. Heat rose in her cheeks, the column of her throat. It centered in her belly and between her legs, making them weak as she backed up another step toward the front door. She put out her hand behind her and found the cool metal of the knob. It centered her, helped her focus. She drew in a breath and let it out. Found her voice.

  He was just a guy, after all. Supercute, yes, but while she might be suffering the effects of an overlong dry spell in the sex department, she hadn’t yet reached desperation level. Mel would never, she vowed, reach that level. And Jon, despite those eyes and that mouth, those shoulders, that ass… God, she thought. That ass. What a masterpiece.

  The handle turned under her palm as she gave herself a mental shake. Jon was not giving off even the slightest hint of interest. No matter how attractive he was, no matter how long it had been since Mel’d done any mattress Olympics , she was never ever going to throw herself at a guy who clearly wasn’t into her. Besides, Tesla’s advice was spot-on. Don’t muddy the waters, Mel reminded herself.

  “It’s a…great…building,” Jon told her. “I’m sure I’ll really…love…living here.”

  That she could respond to, because she’d lived here for four years and loved it. Some of the heat faded as she smiled. More when she turned the knob the rest of the way and opened the door. By the time she got through the doorway, she was no longer quite so consumed with the desire to jump his bones.

  “It’s a great place,” she assured him. Something stopped her as she turned toward the stairs though. She paused to peek back through the door. “Except watch out. Some people think it might be haunted.”

  Jon didn’t raise a brow. Didn’t crack a smile. “Some people are right.”

  * * *

  Sensing the dead was never as it was in the movies. Jon never saw a glowing white light or a floating figure. He never saw anything at all.

  He felt everything, instead.

  Tonight it was the searing pain of a ruptured gut from the guy who’d been riding recklessly on his motorcycle playing dodgem cars with a tractor-trailer. A dozen broken bones. Cracked skull. He’d died at the scene, and his spirit still clung to the corpse that now rested on one of the metal gurneys in the hospital morgue. There’d be no autopsy—the injuries were obvious enough that a description of “multiple traumas” would be enough. All Jon had to do was finish logging in the body and make sure all the personal belongings were put into the property safe.

  If only he could get past the pain to do it.

  This guy had died the way he’d ridden his bike—fast and hard. His relentless squawk of outrage at being cut off cut in and out of Jon’s brain, overlaid by the incessant “oh no, oh no, oh no” that had probably been the rider’s last coherent thought. Even the sight of himself, broken and bloodied on the gurney, face a ruined mess, didn’t clue him in that there was no way he was fitting back inside that body.

  Jon breathed in the scent of chemicals and blood and death. They didn’t bother him anymore. He breathed out, counting one, two, three. Trying to get a handle on this battered spirit who just wanted to see his girlfriend one more time. She was pregnant.

  This guy would never see his child born, but that seemed an unnecessarily cruel thing to point out. Jon concentrated on visualizing a bridge, instead. Damned if he knew if that’s what it looked like. A tunnel of light, a bridge, for some it was a meadow full of flowers. Jon had no clue what the dead saw when they passed from this plane to the next. He could only try to find something, anything, that would get them to go.

  He gripped the metal of the gurney and closed his eyes. Shoulders hunched. The pain was very bad, the worst it had been in a long time. But it wasn’t his pain, and he did the best he could to absorb it and let it go so the man on the table could do so as well . Everything centered inside him, a myriad tiny threads of sensation and emotion. Jon gathered them and concentrated. Then…he pushed.

  A clenching fist letting go, the first heartbeat after resuscitation, the breath you take when you break the surface of the water you thought would drown you. That’s how it felt. A pulse.

  With a hitch, like a bubble bursting, the spirit went.

  Jon let out a shuddering breath and felt the world spin for a moment as he righted himself. He was here, his feet on the ground, hands on the gurney, eyes closed. He opened them. He was alone, thankfully. There’d been more than a few times when he’d come back to himself to find he had a witness. He blamed a weak stomach, an excuse most people accepted without question. It had become sort of a joke among the staff, and that was okay even though he was sure a few of the techs and even the docs laughed at, not with him.

  Now though, he was alone. The spirit had gone, and none of the other bodies in the morgue had anything clinging to them but the odor of chemicals. Jon washed his hands at the sink and finished up taking care of the body, then sat at the desk to go over some of the paperwork while he nibbled on a sandwich.

  He couldn’t shake the feeling of the motorcyclist’s last few minutes, not even after an hour and three mugs of shitty coffee. It reminded him too much of the first time this had happened to him. Something in the sound of the biker’s internal monologue, his desire to see his girlfriend and baby. Maybe even the severity of his injuries. All of it wove itself into Jon’s memories until he was shaking a little too much for even his chicken-scratch writing to withstand. He put the pen down and washed his hands again, breathing in, breathing out. Trying to forget and knowing he couldn’t. He could never forget.

  He hadn’t always been able to sense the dead, or had this ability…no, this responsibility, this curse, to send them on. He hadn’t inherited it or found it along the way, or cultivated it. He hadn’t bought or stolen it.

  It had been forced inside him against his will, and the memory of it, forced on him again by tonight’s stiff, filled him with ineffable fury.

  * * *

  Jon’s on his way home after a long day in which nothing much was accomplished, but he doesn’t feel bad about that. Sometimes you have to take your time to get your reward. The hours he spent carefully removing the nails from the crown molding in the latest