Table Of ContentDead Man Dating
By Lori Handeland
Chapter One
On the day he died, Eric Leaventhall had a date that couldn’t be broken, so he
went. Dead and all.
Too bad I was his date.
Turned out dead dating was the only way he could get what he needed.
Sustenance.
Are you confused yet? I know I was.
Maybe I should start at the beginning. But I’m not quite sure when that was.
Probably when I decided to become a client of www.truelove.com.
Pretentious? Maybe. But I’d hoped that any man who chose a service by that
name might be a little more grown up than most—had at least moved beyond a
desire to bang supermodels and begun to think about finding a life. Being a
literary agent, I should have known that semantics were as dead as most people’s
belief in a soul mate.
The date itself started out well enough. We met at a martini bar near my office.
A new place, kind of Sex and the City, which should have tipped me off right
away. If not to the whole demon issue, then at least to his hopes for the evening.
He wasn’t after true love.
I hadn’t been completely honest, either. In my bio I’d said I was “in
publishing.” I’d learned that the quickest way to a stack of manuscripts from the
wannabe famous was to tell anyone but immediate family what I really did for a
living.
Of course some people figured it out as soon as they heard my name. My
mother had been one of the top agents in the business before she’d gone and died
on me. Was I following in her footsteps trying to regain some of the happiness
I’d enjoyed while she was alive?
You betcha.
However, that wasn’t working out. I liked to read, but I didn’t like to sell.
Sadly, my degree in ancient civilizations made me fit to do little but teach, and I
doubted I’d be very good at that, either. Kids kind of scared me.
At loose ends—in my job and my personal life—I’d decided to start searching
for that soul mate I’d been dreaming of. Just my luck, the first candidate didn’t
even have a soul.
I should have caught a clue to Eric’s intentions the instant I’d seen his photo on
the web. He was drop-dead gorgeous—dead being the operative word, although
in truth, he hadn’t been dead at the time. Still, what on earth would a man like
him want with a woman like me?
One thing and one thing only. What’s that horrible saying about all women
being the same in the dark?
I’m not a hag, but I am short and just a little dumpy, with long, black hair that
curls too much and the dark eyes and olive complexion of either my father’s
Sicilian ancestors or my mother’s Hebrew ones. Take your pick. With a name
like Mara Naomi Elizabeth Morelli, I’d never be mistaken for a Nordic bimbo,
even if I’d had a prayer of looking like one.
Anyway, call me Kit. Everyone does. I was never able to carry off the Mara
Naomi Elizabeth thing.
Now back to the date—if not from hell, at least from a place very near by.
Manhattan.
Rich, blond, and handsome, Eric was every plain girl’s dream. He was not very
tall, which I liked, since big men always made me nervous; his teeth were white
and straight; his eyes deep blue. He was also a surgeon. Of course he was too
good to be true.
“I’m so glad you came,” he said, and his smile warmed the chill of the early
spring night.
Eric led me to a secluded table, held my chair, let his fingertips drift over my
hair. Sure he got a little too close, rubbed his knee against mine a little too soon,
laid on the interest in my job, my future, and me a little too thick. But I was
lonely, confused, unhappy, and here was this great guy hanging all over me.
“What do you say we take this to your place?” Eric murmured, stroking the
back of my hand.
I hesitated, uncertain how to say no. I’d never been one for sex on a first date; I
wasn’t one for sex at all. I might be smart-mouthed, just a little sarcastic—blame
my mother—but I was also shy with men. The thought of baring my body to a
stranger—well, it wasn’t a thought I entertained very often.
However, I was suddenly struck by the odd notion that tonight was the night
I’d met the man I’d been waiting for all of my life.
“Okay,” I said.
Had that word come out of my mouth?
I’d been raised on my mother’s tales of love at first sight. She’d taken one
glance at my Italian-Catholic, working-class father and defied her wealthy
intellectual Jewish family to marry him.
They’d been happy until the day she died. I’d been in my last semester of
college, uncertain of what I should do with my life.
Then—bam—my mother had died from a brain aneurysm. Life suddenly
seemed so short. Her work wasn’t done, and I had no pressing place to be. So I
slid into her job, and two years later I was still doing it.
My father never recovered from her death. He’d passed away just this winter. I
was so lost without him, I felt hollow inside. Which had no doubt precipitated
my sudden search for true love.
Hand in hand Eric and I left the bar and strolled south toward Chelsea.
I had an apartment on West Twenty-fourth Street. My mother had been a very
good agent. Throughout her married life, she’d made three times the money of
my electrician father. They’d deposited the checks and never mentioned it. So
when Daddy died, I’d nearly choked at the size of his bank account, which was
now mine.
I’d spent the money on a condo, not too far from my Fifth Avenue office.
Trying to live up to my mother’s reputation meant I had to work harder and
longer than everyone else. Saving commute time had seemed like the best way to
invest my inheritance.
Eric’s arm slid around my waist. Sighing, I leaned my head on his shoulder.
“This is nice,” I murmured.
“It’ll get nicer, I promise.”
His palm drifted lower, cupping my bountiful butt, squeezing a little. His
thumb slid down the center, and I jumped.
“I can’t wait to get inside you. You’ll die of the pleasure, baby.”
Baby?
Uck. I was going to have to put a stop to that. He sounded like a used car
salesman, trying to sell me a vehicle I did not want.
His thumb teased me again, and I decided later would be time enough to
discuss endearments. Who’d have thought a guy’s thumb could be so arousing.
Of course, I couldn’t recall ever being this aroused.
Eric must have felt the same way because he yanked me in between two
buildings and shoved me against the wall, slapping his lips against mine a little
too hard. I tasted blood when my teeth cut my lip, shuddered when he licked the
blood away.
I should have been angry, disgusted, a little scared. Instead I felt…wanted.
Something I’d never felt before. Sure, in a tiny sane portion of my mind I knew
I’d lost it, but right now I couldn’t summon the will to care.
Eric’s body shielded mine from the night, his erection pressed against me too
high to be of any help. I’d have to climb his body, wrap my legs around his waist
if I wanted any relief. I was contemplating doing just that when the snick of a
match made me still.
Someone else was in the alley.
I yanked my mouth from Eric’s. His lips slid across my jaw, then latched onto
my neck. My gaze went past his shoulder to the man hovering in the shadows.
The glow of his cigarette did nothing to reveal his face. I got a sense of height,
breadth, and darkness.
“Eric,” I whispered.
He continued to rain kisses across my chest, then rooted at the neckline of my
brand-new black dress like a nursing child. My nipples tightened in anticipation,
even as the glitter of eyes from the shadows caused a tingle of unease to dance
across my skin.
What in hell was wrong with me? I was definitely not an exhibitionist.
“There’s someone here,” I said more loudly.
“Doesn’t matter,” Eric muttered, fumbling with his pants. “Gotta do you now
or I’ll fade away.”
That got through to me. I might be attracted, aroused, insane, but I was
definitely not so far gone that I’d let a virtual stranger screw me in an alley while
another one watched.
“No,” I said.
He ignored me, sliding my dress up my legs, yanking at my pantyhose. The
nylon went ping as his thumb popped through. A run shot down my leg, even as
his erection beat a pulse against my stomach.
I began to struggle, becoming just a little afraid, yet in the midst of all that, I
wanted him. And that scared me more than anything else.
“You’ll die happy, baby,” he muttered. “They always do.”
A hand slapped onto Eric’s shoulder. “She said no, hibrido.”
Though the words were harsh, the tone was mellow, the accent south of the
border. A voice that could haunt me for the rest of my life.
Eric shifted, his shoulders blotting out everything but him. Neither the hand on
his shoulder nor the whispered warning even slowed him down.
The salt, however, did.
I wouldn’t have known what had been thrown in Eric’s face, except some of it
hit me. The grains burned my eyes like hellfire.
Eric made a sound that was half snarl, half shout, and shoved away from me so
hard my shoulder blades scraped the brick wall.
He swung around and the other man shot him.
Right in the head.
Chapter Two
The shot was muffled—silencer, I thought—yet the sound still bounced off the
walls and echoed down the alleyway. Tensing in expectation of the blood
splatter, my eyes slammed closed.
Nothing happened.
When I opened them again, I was alone.
No Eric. No stranger. No blood. What the hell?
I stepped onto the street. No one appeared to have heard the gunshot, or if they
had, they didn’t care, continuing on their way with the typical zombielike trance
of lifetime New Yorkers. The tourists were too busy staring upward, either
dazzled by the neon or trying to find their way to their hotels by way of the
skyscrapers—a method similar to using the stars in places where stars could
actually be seen.
I was dizzy with the adrenaline, both confused and frightened, so I wandered
back into the alley, and I saw him.
Just a shadow, a slip of darkness against the light as he moved onto the street
one block over.
I didn’t think; I ran. If he vanished into the crowd, what would I do? How
would I prove anything that had happened tonight? I didn’t consider why I
thought I needed to prove anything.
I burst out of the alley, and someone grabbed me around the waist. The force of
my forward motion, and the sudden end to it, swung me about so fast, my feet
lifted off the ground. A choked sound came from my throat, but I didn’t have the
air left to scream.
Even if I had, it wouldn’t have mattered since he slapped his hand over my
mouth and dragged me backward. I just couldn’t win tonight.
“Why are you following me?” he asked.
“Why do you think?”
My lips moved, but the words were garbled. His body, rock-hard against mine,
tensed.
“If I lift my hand, do you promise not to scream?”
Since screaming hadn’t worked very well for me so far, I nodded, and the hand
went away.
“You shot my date in the head!”
“What date?”
I blinked. “The guy in the alley.”
“What guy?”
“Eric Leaventhall. Slim, blond, handsome.”
He snorted.
“What does that mean?”
He didn’t bother to answer, continuing to hold me aloft, my feet dangling near
his knees. He was so much taller, so much broader, so much stronger, I felt
helpless. And while that should have unnerved me, instead I got kind of
annoyed.
“You mind?”
I swung my feet, almost cracking him in the shin, and he set me down but kept
his arm around my waist. I could neither see him nor run away.
“There wasn’t any man,” he said.
“Of course there was. He bought me a drink. He—he—”
I ran my tongue across my lip, felt the telltale ridge where my teeth had
ravaged the skin when Eric kissed me. I wasn’t crazy.
But this guy was.
“Let me go,” I ordered.
Amazingly, he did, and I scampered out of his reach and spun around.
My first thought: What a shame. He was too gorgeous to be insane. As if
beauty and lunacy were mutually exclusive.
As dark as Eric had been light, bulky where Eric had been slim, this man was
large, hard, his hair shaggy, his face shadowed by at least two days’ growth of
beard. The clothes had obviously been slept in, a lot, though even before that,
they’d been years away from new.
His blue work shirt had faded nearly to white from repeated washings. With it
unbuttoned to his sternum, I saw the hint of a tattoo, though I couldn’t tell what
the shape was. The jeans were ancient, too, the boots scuffed and dusty, his black
leather jacket a relic.
His eyes were as dark as mine, but he had longer lashes. Isn’t that always the
way? High cheekbones, a fine blade of a nose. I wasn’t certain, but I thought I
saw the sparkle of an earring. Nothing fancy or swingy, just a shiny silver stud
piercing one lobe.
He was so different from anyone I’d ever encountered—exotic and wild—I had
to remind myself he’d just murdered my date in cold blood. Except…
Where was the blood?
According to him, there hadn’t even been a date.
I was back to the eternal question—was he crazy, or was I?
“There was a man with me,” I said, “and you killed him.”
“If I had, you shouldn’t be troubling your pretty little head.”
My eyes narrowed, but he ignored me.
“That’s the quickest way to getting it shot off,” he continued.
“In other words, Eric troubled his pretty little head? About what?”
“I don’t know any Eric. I walked through the alley. You were leaning against
the wall. Figured you were high on something.”
“I was—”
