Delighting In Your Company by Blair McDowell

Delighting In Your Company

What more could a girl ask for?

When Amalie Ansett visits her elderly cousin on the small Caribbean island of St. Clements, the last thing she’s looking for is romance. Just out of a disastrous marriage, she’s ready to swear off men forever. That is until she meets local plantation owner, Jonathan Evans. He is tall, good looking, intelligent and incredibly sexy. What more could a girl ask for?

An unsolved murder …

Then Amalie discovers that the man she loves is a ghost. Only she can see and hear him. Perhaps he is real to her because Amalie is the image of her distant ancestor, Jonathan’s bride in that earlier time.  Jonathan was murdered two hundred years ago, and has no knowledge of who killed him or why.

 A perilous trip to the past…

When Jonathan asks her to help him by returning with him to his past, Amalie is torn. If she helps him solve the mystery surrounding his death, she could lose him forever. If she doesn’t, she is stuck with a ghost for a lover.

And a love that crosses the boundaries of time.

To save Jonathan, Amalie agrees to travel with him back in time to the Caribbean of the 1800’s, when sugar reigned supreme and the slave trade was making fortunes for wealthy planters and ship owners.  Her adventures there include a slave uprising, murder, deceit and an enduring love that crosses the boundaries of time.

He was real. Jonathan Evans was what? A ghost, a spirit, a jumbie? But to her he was real. True she couldn’t touch him. She had a fleeting thought that that was a pity. She would rather have liked to touch him. But how could she help him? She wasn’t that other Amalie, no matter what he thought. She couldn’t be, could she? And yet where had those memories of Ansett Plantation come from?

Josephina arrived at the table for breakfast at that moment and all thoughts of ghosts had to be put aside.

“What are your plans for the day, my dear?”

“I’ll spend the morning working in the archives again, and then this afternoon I guess I’ll just swim and read as usual.”

“Could you run me up to town before you begin? I need to see my solicitor.”

“Of course.”

It was mid morning when Amalie entered the basement room at the Museum.

“You!” Amalie looked at Jonathan, perched on her stool, his hair falling over his forehead, his elbows on the table, his long legs stretched out in front of him. He was whistling softly. That same elusive tune.

“You’re rather late getting here. I’ve been searching for evidence.”

She stared at him. He looked so real, so alive.

Reading her thoughts he said, “Jonathan Evans, in the flesh. Except that, unfortunately,  I’m not in the flesh. If I were I could kiss you as I should very much like to.”

Amalie flushed. The thought of being held in those arms, caressed, kissed by those lips…she turned her thoughts hastily away from that direction.

“What’s that tune you’re always whistling?”

“Greensleeves.” He sang a phrase, his voice low and melodious.

“Alas, my love, you do me wrong,
To cast me off discourteously,”

He sighed.  “You used to sing it.”

“I used to sing it?”

“You used to sing it.”

“It must have been the other Amalie who sang it. But I know it from somewhere. I’m not sure where.”  She finished the stanza in her light soprano,

“While I have loved you well and long,
Delighting in your company…”

Jonathan looked long at her. “Of course you know it. You are one with her. Why do you find this so hard to accept?”

Amalie just shook her head. How could she possibly be a woman who died two hundred years ago?  She was alive. She was born in the twentieth century. For that matter, how could she possibly be holding this ridiculous conversation with a ghost?