UNWILLING ANGEL by Caitlyn Hunter
Available now from Red Rose Publishing
BLURB
Emma Bradshaw: Unhappy widow, bored school teacher, aspiring writer. Emma doesn’t know it, but she’s about to be touched by an angel—in more ways than one.
Ted “Mac” McNabb: Best-selling author in life, reluctant Apprentice Angel in death. Mac just wants to finish his missions and move on to his Personal Heaven—and he doesn’t care how many rules he has to break to get there.
Can Mac earn Emma’s trust and point her in the right direction to meet her destiny--without incurring the wrath of Archangel Gabriel and ending up in Angel Exile?
“I see dead people.”
The whispered, somewhat embarrassed words of a child from a popular movie several years back echoed dully in Emma’s mind. Squeezing her eyes shut, she took a deep breath, counted to ten before opening them again and…the dead man was still there. Shaking her head to clear it didn’t make him disappear, squinting only made him a tad blurry, and tilting her head to either side like a curious dog just made her dizzy. No matter what she did, he remained right where he was, leaning with studied nonchalance against the wall beside the newspaper rack in KC’s, arms and ankles crossed, smiling at her like she was the answer to all his prayers.
“I see dead people.” The child’s voice was insistent now with a slight plea as if begging her to believe him. A shiver ran up her spine. She believed, oh how she believed. It was a chillingly accurate statement as far as she was concerned.
“You and me both, kid,” she muttered then looked up at the clock on the wall above the dead man’s head. It was four minutes after two, Monday, December…she wracked her brain to remember the date, something that often slipped her mind during school vacations. Oh, yes, it was the twenty-third. School had been out for three days. She’d spent nearly every waking moment of each of those days trying to finish her latest labor of love—and failing miserably.
Three days blown to hell, unless she could get through this despicable bout of writer’s block, finish the young adult novel she’d been working on for nearly two years, and get up the nerve to actually submit it to a publisher. Then, well, then the possibilities were endless. Submitting the book would probably be enough to put a small dent in the depression that had taken over her life since she’d become a widow. If—and it was a very big if—she could actually sell it, it just might be enough to chase away this persistent hopelessness and give her something to live for again.
Desperate to fight her way out of the depression without using drugs or, worse to her way of thinking, going to a psychiatrist, she’d decided the book had to be finished and submitted before the stroke of
The dead man…ghost…whatever the heck he was…cleared his throat and drew her attention back to him.
Wrapping both hands around the steaming cup of coffee, she reveled in the heat as she studied the…apparition. I’m one up on you, kid. I not only see dead people, I hear them too.
He looked up and gifted her with a charming smile then went back to perusing the headlines on that day’s newspaper.
He doesn’t seem to know he’s dead. Should I tell him? If I do, will he disappear? Just Poof! Could it be that easy to get rid of him?
He lifted his eyes, frowned at her then shook his head as if he knew what she was thinking.
Jiminy Christmas, did he know what she was thinking?
Holding the cup of coffee beneath her nose, she inhaled the fragrant mist, and wished she could remove the lid and dive into the wonderful heat. She was always cold these days, had been ever since her husband died. It was as if Bill’s death had leached all the warmth from her body along with all the hope from her heart.
And now she was seeing dead people. What next?
She lowered her head, peeked at him from beneath her eyelashes. He looked good for a dead guy. Nothing like the last photograph she’d seen of him where he’d looked terribly old and washed out, like he was standing on his last leg—well, she guessed when the picture had been taken, he was, but now, he looked more like the earlier pictures, tall with a slim build and a slightly craggy, albeit handsome and appealing, face.
Incredibly sexy, outrageously alluring; the man of her dreams come to life.
He winked, straightened away from the wall, and started walking in her direction. Yikes! Dead man walking! She heard him laugh then the air around him seemed to shimmer and shift as he passed through a rack of candy bars—directly through it as if he were made of nothing more than smoke—and the old Almond Joy/Mounds commercial ran through her mind, “Sometimes I feel like a nut, sometimes I don’t.”
Ye gods, it was official. Emma Bradshaw, bored elementary school teacher, depressed widow, aspiring young-adult novelist, just tripped the light fantastic, took to the air and flew around the bend into La-la land.