Ready & Willing by Elizabeth Bevarly Read Free Book Online

Sean Magill, come to think of it. And even with Sean, there hadn’t been that electric zing of immediate awareness. When she’d first met her husband, at a dinner party thrown by mutual friends, she’d thought him cute and funny and sweet, and she’d been charmed by him. But there had been no explosion of heat in the pit of her belly, the way there had been with Nathaniel. And when she’d shaken Sean’s hand the first time, there had been no tingle of odd anticipation as there had been with Nathaniel. What on earth she could have possibly been anticipating, she couldn’t have said. She only knew that, the moment her palm connected with his, she’d felt . . . hopeful somehow. As if something . . . major . . . was about to happen between the two of them.
    She’d told herself that helping the man keep his soul was pretty major, but there had been something else there, too. Of course, once she’d realized what a jerk the guy was, that feeling of anticipation and hopefulness had fizzled. All she’d anticipated then was leaving, and all she’d hoped for was a swift departure. But the heat in her belly hadn’t fizzled at all, and that had bothered her a lot. Heat was the last thing she wanted to be feeling for a man—any man. But most especially one like Nathaniel Summerfield, who was the complete antithesis of the man with whom Audrey had fallen in love.
    Nathaniel, however, was the least of her worries at the moment. Because at the moment, there was a hallucination of his great-great-however-many-greats grandfather standing in her pantry, and that bothered her way more than bizarre dreams about either of them had. Bizarre dreams meant too much Chunky Monkey. Hallucinations meant . . .
    Well. They just weren’t good, that was all.
    She squeezed her eyes shut tight for a moment—but didn’t loosen her hold on the knife—then opened them again. Nope, Silas was still there. Dressed the same way he’d been in her dream, in black trousers and an open, collarless white shirt, its cuffs, wider than was fashionable these days, rolled back to his elbows. But where he’d been cordial and reserved in her dream, now he looked kind of angry and intense. He stood with his legs spread wide, his hands fisted on his hips, his dark eyebrows arrowed downward. His square jaw was set rigidly, and his black hair was in disarray, as if he’d swept both hands through it in frustration only moments ago.
    “Madam,” he said, addressing her as he had in her dream the night before, “you have failed me most egregiously.”
    Wow. He even sounded real. She truly had to get to bed earlier tonight. She closed her eyes again, this time accompanying the gesture with three long, steady breaths. Then she opened them again.
    Silas was still there. Only now he looked even madder.
    “I assure you I am no hallucination,” he told her.
    Oh, well, if her hallucination was telling her he was no hallucination, of course Audrey should listen to him.
    She started to say something along those lines to Silas in retort, then decided that if she started talking back to her hallucination, she might as well start talking to the box of Cheerios behind him. And then to someone in the mental health field who might be able to help her separate fantasy from reality. So she only grabbed the can of tuna she’d come into the pantry for, tugged on the light string again to turn it off, completed two steps backward, and pushed the pantry door closed. Then she inhaled another deep breath and turned around.
    Only to find Silas Summerfield standing in front of her again.
    This time Audrey did drop the knife. And the can of tuna, too. And although she tried to close her eyes again, she found that she could not. Because the afternoon sun was streaming through the windows over the sink behind him . . . and through the good captain, too.
    He’d seemed opaque enough in the pantry, but in the bright sunlight, he was vaguely translucent. She could just make out the line of