‘Alex,’ he murmured and he sounded so unsure. Regretful…and something else. Something like guilt.
She let herself slump back into the chair, her face flaming as she forced herself to look at him, sitting on the edge of the desk, still painfully aroused. Her face heated with embarrassment and tears stung her eyes.
Fuck, she thought. Fuck, shit and indeed, bollocks.
What had she been thinking? Well, no, not thinking. She had not been thinking at all. He was an employee. She owned thisplace. If the legal team found out about this… Oh Jesus Christ, what had she done?
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know…I didn’t mean…that was…’
Inexcusable. She didn’t know what had come over her. She had no words for how bad it was. These were all things she should be saying but the words kept dying in her throat when she tried to voice them. What on earth could she say?
‘It’s the house,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it just…’ At her confused look he trailed off, unwilling to finish.
‘The house?’
‘You’ve sensed it, haven’t you? You’ve seen them, heard them? Please, Alex, I’m sorry. I should have said something right from the start. But I?—’
The house? How was he using thehouseas an excuse?
‘That had nothing to do with the house, Nick.’ She couldn’t keep the snap out of her voice.
The problem was she didn’t know what had caused it or why. All she had known was that she wanted him. She wanted him so badly it made her crazy. He was handsome, unbearably so. And beneath the grumpy exterior was a man who used it as a defence, as a way to turn people away and protect himself and his daughter…and this house too. No doubt about it. He was trying to get her out of Wildewood Hall. Was this all part of that plan? A new tactic? Seduce her and then blackmail her?
Or just convince her she was seeing things, hearing things, sensing things, that the house of her nightmares was out to get her? It had all the trappings of a haunting that would makeThe Ghost Patrolteam lose their collective shit, send the fans into paroxysms of delight online and launch the ratings through the roof.
But she didn’t believe in any of that. Not really.
The alternative though? That she was losing her mind, that she was hallucinating, that she had just tried to assault a man twice her size, an employee no less…
Oh God…
‘You have to know the reputation this place has,’ Nick continued as if she hadn’t said anything at all. He hadn’t moved away. Just sat there on the edge of the desk, his legs still framing her, gazing down at her, like some kind of glorious Celtic sex god with his long, dishevelled hair, and the huge dark eyes, pupils still wide with desire, flecks of green and gold in the deep brown encircling them. His mouth, his throat, his hands…the way those hands had felt on her bare skin…
She felt her body starting to respond all over again, the heat inside her rising, the need to reach out and brush her fingertips over his skin, to breathe him in again.
Don’t think about that, she told her brain, her brain which just laughed at her and went on doing what it wanted.
‘I know about the ghost stories,’ she told him. ‘I don’t believe them. I have spent my life showing people that ghosts don’t exist. I don’t believe in ghosts.’
‘What if they believe in you?’ he asked, as if it was the most normal question in the world.
Somewhere in the house a door slammed. Then another. And a third. One after the other, all the doors in Wildewood Hall, it seemed. Alex stared only at Nick, and frowned.
‘Who are they?’ she asked, quietly. All her walls were crumbling, and she was losing the battle to hold on to her staunch scepticism.
He shrugged and that shadow of grief flickered over his beautiful features. ‘Anyone who ever died here. They’re trapped. All of them. That’s what Theo thought anyway. He was sensitive to it. Like you.’
‘And this?’ She waved a still shaking hand between the two of them. He got her meaning thankfully because she wasn’t ready to start describing what had just happened. Not right now.
Got her meaning and a hell of a lot more, it seemed.
Nick blushed. Actually blushed, the colour rising high on his face, and all down his neck, down below the fabric of his rumpled t-shirt. Alex found her mouth going dry again at the thought of that flush spreading across the perfect chest she’d caught a frantic glimpse of, the one her hands had ranged across.
She had to force her breath to calm again, and she waited.
Nick hung his head and chewed on his lower lip in far too distracting a fashion before finally answering. ‘Yeah. This. This happens. Like, not to everyone. There has to be something there first. A spark, an attraction, but it happens. Like this…to you, to me… And Theo too. There’s one ghost – I mean, not just one, there’s loads but one in particular – more active than any of the others. Stronger. He plays games with people, with emotions. With desire. They call him the Master of the Revels, Blaise Chambers.’
Alex knew that name.
