Poof.
Gone.
And the staircase gets warmer.
I knew it! I chuckle and mentally pat myself on the back. Lilyvale is haunted and I have proof.
That being said, I can’t keep ghost hours. I need to sleep at night. So I run quietly back up to the bedroom, grab the sage Cassandra gave me (smart woman, that one), and go get some matches from the parlor. Two young women, barely dressed in translucent white dresses, look at me with envy in their eyes. “This is crazy,” I mutter. “You better not wake me up again,” I say as I light the sage and start fumigating the parlor. The women—girls, really—let out a giggle and disappear before my eyes.
“Willow!” A loud whisper almost makes me jump. These ghosts are getting on my nerves.
“And who might you be?” I hiss at the dark shape beyond the doorframe, waving my smoky sage at it.
“It’s me,” Noah says, taking one step closer. He reaches up for the door frame, a question in his eyes, moonlight now kissing his naked torso.
Damn, the man isfine.
twenty-five
Noah
Willow looks a tad insane and a lot desirable with her hair falling on her naked shoulders, spaghetti straps barely holding together the fabric tensing on her breasts, waving a smoldering bundle in a house mainly comprised of wood. “Go back to bed, I got it,” she says as she turns on her heels and moves the thing three times in the air in one corner of the parlor, billows of smoke in her wake, before she goes to another corner and repeats the process.
“Got what?”
She shrugs. “The spirits. I’m showing them who’s boss. They need to go back into the netherlands.”
“The Netherlands is a country.”
She rolls her eyes. “NotthoseNetherlands.”
“You’re going to set the place on fire.”
She snorts. “I’m sageing. Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.” She comes toward me, glancing at my bare chest as I move asideto let her out. “Aren’t you cold? You should put a shirt on if you’re going to stay here. Or a sweater.” She licks her bottom lip, then turns her back to me as she slides to the hallway, then into the dining room.
Holding my smirk, I follow her. “I’m not cold.” When Willow is around me, it could be freezing—I wouldn’t know.
She’s already in one corner of the dining room, then she runs to another. “I need more sage,” she mumbles. Then she turns to me, and her eyes slide down to my abs before hopping back up to my eyes. “Well, you’re distracting me. And you need some sleep. You have a big day tomorrow.” She’s still sageing the place, three strokes in each corner of the room, the smoking herbs leaving a sweet scent in their wake.
I follow her into the study. “What ghosts are you trying to chase, exactly?”
“I’ll let you know if they tell me their names. Although I’m told that stuff from Cass is pretty effective. Used it on my great-grandfather when he wouldn’t stop tickling Ms. Angela’s toes at night because her grandmother had refused to marry him. Said he’d haunt her whole family tree—and he held to his promise.”
“Please tell me you don’t believe that shit.”
She stops, her jaw dropping. “No wonder they live here! You’re giving them free rein.”
I don’t know if she’s insane, or if she’s messing with me. Because no one—no one—outside my family knows how to deal with our ghosts. We don’t talk about them, not amongst ourselves, and certainly not to others.
The last time someone brought them up, I lost a fiancée. Not that I regret it—it was a baptism by fire. She didn’t pass the test.
The thing is, Willow wasn’t supposed to pass the test. At all. Now that I think about it, this was probably my guess all along, when it came to why our marriage would end. She’d tire ofhearing her name called in the night when everyone else was asleep.
I mean, what woman could stand that? Only Mom did.
All the other reasons I came up with were only to give her acceptable excuses. Seeing her now creates an even deeper longing for her. She’s so close, yet so unattainable. So perfect for me, yet so not mine.
Willow is done with the study, and she goes to the kitchen. “You have a meeting with Zach from Coding Club tomorrow. Seven in the morning. If you want to get a run in before, and a shower, and a healthy breakfast, that leaves you—maybe five hours of sleep.” She puts a fist on her hips. “You need to go back to bed. Chipitty-chop.”
