“It had to have been Stanford,” I said. “Flora wrote about him spending time in his workshop, inventing things. But how did all this stuff work and make all those weird noises before we turned the power on?” If disembodied electricity wasn’t ghostly, I didn’t know what was.
“Remember that flash of light we saw upstairs in the hallway when we first toured the house — a flickering sconce, maybe? And the wires the electrician said went nowhere?” Landon’s eyes flashed in another flare of lightning. “Maybe they did go somewhere.”
“So there’s an independent source of power? Something was generating enough electricity to power this little steampunk nest down here?”
We looked at each other, and then the answer came to me. “The roof.”
“All those weathervanes—”
“Are not just weathervanes.” I laughed in delight. “And they’re powered by the wind.”
“And right now, it’s definitely windy!”
“I want to see them working.”
Landon’s grin was otherworldly in the weird light. “Let’s do it.”
It was crazy to go out in the storm. But I was feeling crazy.
Once we got out into the yard, Landon grabbed my hand. We ran for the gazebo as the wind kicked up to a roar, lightning arced over the house and a tumbling roll of thunder heralded the start of the downpour.
By the time we got to the gazebo, we were soaked.
“You know lightning can kill us even under this roof, right?” I asked him as a wildly forked bolt crawled across the sky and thunder crashed.
“Maybe,” he said. “But the finial is also a lightning rod. I added lightning protection that should divert the charge away from the gazebo, and—”
I threw my arms around his neck and smashed my lips into his. He grunted and pulled me close. I licked at his lips, then slipped my tongue inside his mouth, tangling it with his. I reached for his buttons, popping open his shirt as I sucked on his tongue. Then I slid my hands up his hard, wet chest, then around his back, then over his tight ass through his jeans. He moaned and doubled down on the kiss, cupping my behind, lifting me, squeezing me tightly against him as I wrapped my legs around his waist and my arms around his neck and his mouth moved hungrily over mine.
Rain was blowing sideways now, right through the supports of the gazebo, and we were dripping, but I didn’t care. Landon had come back to me. He’d never really left. And maybe it was way too soon to think about, but I had a little flash-forward in the wishing well in my brain that whispered that one of the weddings in this gazebo could be ours.
When he set me down, we both had Fireworks smiles. Lightning split the sky again, and I looked up toward Milkweed Mansion. The thunder rattled the world, and in the next flash, we could clearly see the funky weathervanes spinning. A couple of them were quite substantial — turbines, not weathervanes.
I leaned against Landon, and he put an arm around me as we stood there and watched the storm. The rain eased slightly, became more vertical than horizontal, giving us a break in the shelter of the gazebo. It’s not like we could get any wetter, but I wasn’t inclined to go back to the house just yet.
I nestled closer to him. “I think I know who the ghost is.”
“But there isn’t one, is there?”
“Oh, I think there is. Or was. It was Stanford Fountain, tinkering away in that workshop all alone, trying to work through his grief after Flora died.”
“I think we should check it out in daylight. There was some interesting stuff in there I want to look at more closely. But why did he keep it secret?”
“It wasn’t always secret. Flora mentioned him working and inventing and the servants thinking they were crazy. But maybe he closed it up after she died and made it secret then so no one could disturb him. Eventually, everyone forgot it was even there, and when he died, he took the secret with him. What an amazing person he must have been, creating those wind sculptures, powering parts of the house with his ingenuity.”
Landon hugged me again, and then he grabbed my hand. “Ready?”
“For anything.”
We took off running into the deluge, across the lawn, back to the house. He left me on the porch for a moment while he grabbed a couple of towels out of his truck, and once we were inside the foyer, he locked the door behind us. “We should get out of these wet clothes.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Not that I don’t love the idea, but we don’t have a bed here yet, unless you count that creepy child thing Damien invented.”
“Wasn’t there a chaise lounge in the tower?”
I answered his mischievous smile with one of my own. We climbed the stairs to the second floor, then the spiral stairs to the tower. It was really dark up here, but Landon used his phone light to find the blacklight Thea and Duncan had been using for their spider’s lair. He switched it on, and the white paper cutouts and streamers lit up in a dazzling bluish-purple glow, reflecting in the windows. So did Landon’s soaking shirt, which he doffed and dropped on the floor.
We stared at each other for a fraught moment as rain lashed against the windows and lightning strobed outside. The whole house seemed to respond to the thunder, creaking and sighing, supercharging my heartbeat as I drank in the sight of wet, shirtless, gorgeous Landon. I almost swooned as I had a Mr. Darcy flashback. Maybe Landon hadn’t gone swimming in a pond on his English estate, but it didn’t matter.Damn,he was fine. Even in haunted lighting.
