A Little Spooky (Small Town Lovers #7)

Freddie 5

“Did you hear that? Or am I imagining things?” I asked Luna once I could breathe normally again. “Did you hear a voice say something?”

“Ah-huh.” She nodded. “I heard I have waited a long time for love. Is that what you heard?” She was breathing just as fast and hard as I was. I’d moved down onto the blankets, and Luna came down with me, resting her head on my shoulder. The visiting sex ghost had disappeared, and the room had lost its golden glow.

Fuck, I’d missed sex… great sex that claimed your soul. There was nothing else like it. I didn’t know if the rush I felt was a result of my long abstinence, sharing sex with someone I truly cared about, or this damn house had some kind of magical effect. Whatever the explanation, I felt better than I had in way too many years.

“Was that real?” I was talking about the voice, not the way I felt, which I couldn’t put into words now, at least not with Luna. Now that we’d moved our relationship into another level, I didn’t want to take any chances. She could easily tell me this was a one off and utterly gut me.

“If we both heard it, it had to be real,” she said, confirming my doubts. “What else could it have been?”

“Here’s the thing… It wasn’t so much that I heard it, but I somehow knew it. Hard to explain. Like a thought or an inner voice kind of thing. What the fuck? She’s talking to us now?”

She ran her fingers lightly over my chest and sent little shivers down to my groin. She didn’t know the kind of effect she had on me, and now, I wasn’t about to tell her.

“I guess so. And I think I know what you mean. It’s like her words flew into my head. I don’t know whether I heard her speak, or I just knew what she said. Weird shit.”

I had my arm wrapped around her, while I slid my fingers up and down her smooth skin. Part of me couldn’t believe that we’d had such amazing sex, while another part of me knew this had always been our destiny.

Then there was the whole Carrie Ann thing, this house, and this endless night.

“It’s all too crazy,” I told her, trying to sort it all out in my head. “And what about the room? Did you see anything weird?”

“Like a golden glow?”

“Yeah,” I whispered, astounded that she saw it as well. “Could it have been the fireplace?”

“Maybe that’s where it was coming from… the fireplace. I’ll take that explanation instead of some weird apparition. I like that much better.”

We heard Bram and Vince thumping down the stairs, sounding like they were in a hurry. We sat up and got dressed as quickly as we could. Not that either one of us cared whether they knew we’d had sex or not, but I figured she didn’t want to be naked around the other guys.

“You two won’t believe what we just found,” Bram said as he and Vince hustled into the room, out of breath, looking somewhat startled. “This explains everything!”

Vince held up a book. It looked ancient, like he’d pulled it up from the depths of the earth, still dirty and covered with dust.

“What’s that?” I asked, standing. Luna stood next to me. Their timing was perfect. A few minutes earlier, and I wouldn’t have experienced the absolute best sex I’d ever had. I couldn’t believe it still lingered with me, even now when the guys had found something important. Nothing seemed to matter to me. Not compared to sex with Luna.

“It’s a diary or journal or whatever you want to call it. It belonged to Carrie Ann,” Vince said, his voice high with excitement. Whenever he got excited, his voice went up a couple octaves. “She wrote her name on the first page. This is huge.”

As he flipped open the book, I caught the fancy writing. No one wrote like that now. Most people our age and younger printed. We were never taught cursive. A lost art.

“We didn’t find it, exactly,” Bram said, sounding just as excited. “When the playroom door slammed shut and locked us in… didn’t you two hear the door slam? Didn’t you hear us calling for you? We were very loud. Pretty much screaming and banging on the door.”

Luna and I glanced at each other. I said, “We didn’t hear anything but Carrie Ann’s voice or a voice we think belonged to Carrie Ann.”

“What?” Vince asked. “You heard Carrie Ann speak?”

“I have to pee,” Luna said, interrupting what had to be an incredible moment for Bram and Vince. “Freddie will fill you in with the details. Oh, and there may be more than one ghost haunting Stoker House.”

Then she ran off to the bathroom.

“What the fuck did she mean by that?” Vince asked. “I have enough problems with one ghost. I don’t need or want another one.”

“Okay, wait,” I told them. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Don’t panic… yet. We don’t know what we saw or heard, but something strange happened. That’s all I can say about it right now. We all have news, but I want to know where you found that journal first. My crew ripped that room apart. We even tore down parts of the walls and replastered them. No one found anything, yet you say you found her journal? Where?”

Vince went over and plopped down on the end of the sofa, grabbed a beer from the sixpack, popped it open, took a long pull, then began his story, while Bram and I took a seat: me on the floor sitting cross-legged and Bram on the opposite end of the sofa.

“So, we get upstairs and walk into the playroom, hoping for a visit by our local ghost, when all of a sudden… should I wait for Luna?” Vince asked. “I don’t want to tell this story twice.”

“Aww, man, I’m dying over here,” I told them. We all knew that waiting for Luna when she was in the bathroom was like waiting for an old man when he had to pee. It took forever! “Can you just give me the shortened version, until she gets here.”

Just when Vince opened his mouth, in walked Luna. “Did I miss anything? If I did, start over. I want to hear every word.”

“How did you pee so fast?” I asked.

“What? I’m always fast.”

“No, you’re not. You take forever,” Bram teased.

“Maybe I do, but this was too important. Now tell me! Tell me! Where did you find that book? What’s in it? I’m so excited. And Bram, were you able to catch any pictures of her?” Luna grabbed a pillow and stretched out in front of the fire, so that her entire body had a glow with every curve. Her breasts, full and round under her shirt. She hadn’t slipped on her sports bra this time, so we saw the full outline of each breast, her hard nipples poking into the fabric, begging for one of us to suck on each of them. Her hips round and soft and those incredibly long legs of hers. They led to what was nestled between them, a pussy so warm and tight, the mere thought of how that had felt set my thoughts spiraling into the depths of wicked lust. I knew Bram and Vince felt the same way. I could only imagine their questions once they learned that I’d had sex with her.

Fuck but her sweet mouth had felt good on my shaft.

More wicked images raced through my mind.

My cock was getting hard again, and if I wasn’t careful, someone would notice real soon. I grabbed a pillow and placed it on my lap.

The three of us stared at her for an awkward moment, like we were waiting for her to call each of us over… as if that could ever happen. I couldn’t believe how beautiful she was naked. I’d seen her in a bathing suit countless times, but to see her naked… That was an entirely different experience. I imagined fucking her all over again. Only this time, I’d eat that sweet pussy first until she begged me to stop.

Yep, I was rock hard again, thankful for the pillow.

When Vince cleared his throat, it was our signal to return to earth and listen to what he had to say about the book and any photos or video Bram may have caught.

I moved around a bit to make myself more comfortable, but until I calmed down, comfort wasn’t an option.

“Okay,” Bram started. “I picked up some wispy stuff in several of the pictures that I’ll show you on my laptop once we finish telling you about the journal we found. We haven’t read everything yet, but we skimmed a lot of it. You’re not going to believe this, but It seems Carrie Ann’s so-called parents, weren’t her parents at all. Get this, she believed she was kidnapped. And from what we read, and the descriptions she gave, we believe her.”

“What? No,” I said, hardly able to grasp what he was saying. “Do you have any proof?”

“Just what she wrote in her journal,” Vince said. “She remembers a blond-haired woman who loved her, laughed with her, and they played together. She also remembers another girl, several years older, who would play with her. And a baby boy in a buggy. She couldn’t remember much about him. The weird thing is, with the only picture we have of Carrie Ann, she had light-colored hair, and everyone in my family has black hair like me, even Carmen Stoker, Carrie’s so-called mom had black hair.”

“Yeah, but that still doesn’t prove anything,” Luna said, contradicting Vince. Luna had always been the skeptic in the group. She needed concrete proof to change her mind on anything she’d already come to a conclusion on.

“Here’s where it gets creepy,” Bram said. “According to this journal, which we found in the bottom of the rocking horse, by the way—”

“What made you look there?” I asked, curious over this whole find. “Seems like no one would ever look there. How the hell did you find it?”

“Here’s the creepy part,” Vince began. “When the door slammed shut, the rocking horse fell over. It shouldn’t have. The base is too big for it to fall over like that, but it did. We tried to get out of the room. No luck. The door wouldn’t open. Then we tried to get your attention by pounding on it and yelling. When that didn’t work, we finally calmed down and took in our surroundings, thinking there must be a reason why we were locked in. We both agreed and decided to look around. That’s when we finally checked out the rocking horse and noticed the line on the bottom, like the rocker was made from two pieces of wood, which was unusual. Giorgio Ballucci from the repair shop told me about it, saying there might be a secret compartment on the horse’s rocker, but he didn’t want to break it open. The horse is so old, he was afraid he might not be able to repair it if the wood cracked. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but for some reason, when I saw that line on the bottom, I had to know what was inside.”

“Giorgio was right,” Bram said. “We had to destroy the rocker to get it open, and as soon as we did, this journal fell out. Somehow, Carrie Ann created the hiding spot with some rudimentary tool, and after she died, her parents, or rather captors, never checked it out. Never moved anything around, so they never found it. It’s like a history of her miserable life.”

“She states that her life was relatively okay until a woman with blond hair knocked on the door, looking for a missing child,” Vince continued. “Carrie Ann says she recognized the voice but couldn’t get downstairs fast enough to talk to the woman. Her name was Chantel, Chantel Darling, a name that Carrie Ann recognized. She tried to call out to the woman, but her dad stopped her, distracting her with a doll, her favorite doll. He threatened to rip it apart if she continued to call out to Chantel, so she stopped. Once that happened, Carrie Ann was banished to her playroom, never to come out again.”

Bram took over, “Carrie Ann speculated that the woman had been her mother, and her parents got scared they’d find her, or she’d go looking for them. So, they hid her. Up until then, her life had been relatively okay. She’d been allowed out in the yard, and they’d play with her. She even had a cat for a while, but once they locked her away, everything changed.”

“I wonder if that’s why she haunts this place?” Luna asked. “She was trying to get her story out.”

As soon as she said the words, the fire grew in intensity behind Luna, and we yelled for her to get out of the way. I leapt for her and brought her to safety. When I did, the fire receded once again. But this time, we heard a deep, malevolent laugh.

One we hadn’t heard before. A laugh that caused my eyes to water. A laugh that sounded wicked and not in a good way. More like the devil himself had showed up inside Stoker House.

“Who the fuck is that?” Vince asked, but none of us wanted to answer.

WE FINALLY FELL asleep sometime around one or two in the morning. Luna slept on the sofa, while the three of us slept on the floor. Not very comfortable, but none of us wanted anything to do with the second floor or separating from each other.

Morning had a way of making everything that happened the night before seem like a dream. Even sex with Luna didn’t seem real in the light of day.

We were the only two in the kitchen, when I came up behind her, slipped my hands under the shirt she’d slept in, and cupped each naked breast, flicking her hard nipples with my thumbs.

“Can we do this every morning?” I asked, nuzzling her warm neck.

She leaned back and let me have my way with her breasts. It didn’t take long before my cock reacted to the moment.

“Sure, but that would mean we were living together, and you always said you liked your space.”

“I was wrong, so fucking wrong,” I teased as I slid one hand down the front of her pajama bottoms and found her pussy. She instantly pressed her ass up against my hard cock while my fingers pushed her panties aside and found her wet clit.

“All I wanted when I came in here was a cup of coffee,” she whispered.

“But isn’t this better?”

“Much,” she said, as I slid two fingers deep inside her. “I’m really sensitive this morning, and if… if you keep doing that… I’m going to come.”

“That’s the whole point, Love.”

She grabbed the counter, spread open her legs, and I pushed in deeper.

“Fuck, Luna… you’re so wet. So fucking amazing. Just let it rip. Let yourself go.”

“Do you smell the scent of roses?” she asked, a bit breathless. “It’s overpowering.”

I’d been too lost in the smell of her skin to notice anything else, but when I moved away from her gorgeous, long neck, there it was… the scent from last night, roses.

“Yes,” I said, trailing my tongue down her neck, then running kisses up and down that same path.

“Oh, fuck, Freddie,” she mumbled. “I can’t hold it back. You feel so damn good.”

“You’re so wet. Just go with it. Feel my fingers up inside you.” She shattered in my arms, and I felt her body spasm around my fingers several times. “Mmmm, there it is. That’s what I wanted this morning. Let it rip you apart.”

She leaned back into me, grunting in a high-pitched voice that combined with the girly laughter we’d heard last night. Only this time, I could barely hear it. Like it was drifting away or coming from another room.

Either way, the laugh was happy.

I eased my fingers out of her and twirled her around for a morning kiss, which she gave me, willingly.

“Well, good morning! We made it through the night, so I guess that means you’ll be in the casket for the race, Luna?” I heard Bram say from somewhere behind us. “I hope I’m not disturbing anything.”

We broke the kiss, and she said, “No. Not at all. And yes, I’ll be sitting inside the casket for the race.” Then she kissed me once again, softer this time, like she was happy with what just happened between us.

“Well, don’t let me stop you two,” Bram teased, but I caught the awkwardness in his voice.

She pulled out of the kiss and poured a cup of coffee from the full pot, adding sugar and cream. Then she turned back to Bram and said, “We’re already done, and it was spectacular!”

She sashayed out of the room with Bram standing there watching, his jaw on the floor.

“That’s our girl,” I said and followed her out.

Bram never moved.