“No. Maybe…” She sighed. “Probably.” She caught his amusement and threw up her hands. “You don’t understand… Nobody says no to Luna!”
“Because she’s a part-time white witch?” he asked, a low chuckle rumbling over her skin.
He was a good listener, she’d give him points for that. “Because she’s the human equivalent of a steamroller!” Wrenretorted. Then she squared her shoulders, pushed out her chest—Dane’s eyes flickered down and up again, a barely there glance that set every nerve ending alight—and pushed steel into her spine. “I’m going to tell her that I came to H-Town for a break, that I need some distance from dancing to refill my creative well.”
His lips twitched. “Will that work?” he asked. The guy thought she was a pushover, but he didn’t know Luna. Everyone underestimated her until she got you in her sights. Then, no matter how big, tall, and wide you were, you got mowed down.
“Probably not,” she admitted. She pushed her hands into her hair and sighed. “Shit. I’m toast.”
Dane’s laughter was the sexiest sound she’d ever heard.
ChapterThree
The ghosts of Solstice Springs weren’t interested in rattling chains or theatrical moaning—they had standards, and clichés bored them to tears. They considered themselves perfectly normal, thank you very much, just functioning on a higher vibrational plane than humans.
Granted, they didn’t have access to the fun stuff of human life—food, alcohol, sex (leading to passionate and loud complaints)—but they still belonged to a community. Every spirit was bound to Solstice Springs by birth, life, death, previous living arrangements, or a pivotal moment.
The real difference between them and humans? Well, someone who was living-challenged could spend the afternoon conversing with someone from four-thousand years ago and then drift over to chat with a newcomer who’d arrived four days ago. That made this side of the veil an interesting place to exist.
As for why some souls moved on while others lingered—no one had a definitive answer. Theories floated around: unfinished lessons, unresolved trauma, waiting for an earth-bound soulmate to arrive. Some simply liked this in-between space. They’d settled in, grown comfortable, and saw absolutely no reason to be anywhere else.
Captain Silas Blackwood, Miss Lila Finch, 1920’s vaudeville showgirl, and The Reverend, a travelling preacher, came from different times and places. They couldn’t remember The Reverend’s surname, or how they came to be friends. Miss Ruby, an ex-biker chick (her words), and Naomi, an aspiring novelist, were new ghosts—forty human years and fourteen—and new to their friendship circle but, somehow, they’d found each other. These days they spent most of their free time watching, as Naomi called it, Human TV.
Solstice Springs born and raised, Captain Silas Blackwood, 10th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, heard the faint clatter of beads and kept his gaze fixed ahead. Experience had taught him that to look right was to invite calamity—or at the very least, an hour of moral sermonizing on the sins of the flesh from the good Reverend seated to his left.
Miss Lila Finch’s perfume drifted over to him, spicy and exotic. In ghost years, she was much younger than him, an ex-vaudeville dancer, a blatant attention seeker, a woman who would haunt a convent if only to rattle the windows.
Miss Lila’s polar opposite, The Reverend, claimed a directline to the Almighty and was forever tugging Silas toward righteousness. After the horrors he had seen on the battlefield—men split open, limbs strewn like kindling, the stink of blood and fear thick as fog—Silas believed the Almighty gave up on humanity centuries ago.
“Are you not going to greet me, Captain?” Lila drawled, her voice breathy.
Ingrained civility, the curse of all gentlemen, made him turn his head before his common sense could stop him—and his eyes nearly leapt from their sockets. It was one thing seeing the new fashions as time passed, but he could easily avoid the inappropriately dressed. Silas prided himself on being a gentleman.
It wasn’t easy to ignore Miss Lila.
Every few decades, Lila required an ego boost and some additional attention and decided to remind the good ghosts of who she’d been. That meant hauling her old costumes out of the virtual storage vault and dressing up. Today’s “dress” was a net of beads that left her knees bare. Her knees! God preserve him. Worse still, her bosom was restrained by nought but a narrow band of cloth. Her hair, shorn indecently short, brushed her ears beneath a ridiculous hat bristling with purple feathers.
“Good God,” he muttered.
“Please,” The Reverend huffed, crossing himself, “do not take the Lord’s name in vain…Jesus Christ.”
Silas snorted at the man’s bulging eyes. Lila simply twitched her beaded skirts higher, the jade-eyed devil. “Louise Brooks wore this in her picture show—one year before I fell from that balcony there.”
Across the square sat the old playhouse where she’d danced her last dance and fallen to her death. Lila claimed she’d tripped mid-pirouette; Silas had long suspected excessive absinthe—or perhaps a lover’s quarrel and a careless shove. However she fell, she’d been scandalizing the town ever since. The Reverend looked perilously close to fainting.
“Cover yourself, woman,” Silas growled.
She ignored him, reclining so that her bodice shifted andrevealed a pale curve that made The Reverend emit a strangled sound. Seeking distraction, Silas nodded to Miss Ruby who was across the green, dressed in black leather pants and a black vest heavy with badges—biker uniform, she’d toldhim—andengaged in earnest conversation with Poppy McMaster’s grandmother.
Miss Ruby’d met her end via one of those infernal two-wheeled machines just a mile out of town. Ma McMaster, as all the breathing in Solstice Springs knew her, had passed just a few human years ago. He’d known her, in ghost terms, since she was a child, and understood that her passing was final … so why was she back? And why was she talking to Miss Ruby?
Lila followed his gaze and sat up, frowning. “Why is Ruby talking to Ma?” she demanded. “And where’s Naomi? Did she stay at Solstice Deep this morning?”
Ruby and Naomi liked to haunt Solstice Deep, and that made sense as the big Victorian inn wasn’t far from where Miss Ruby’s accident happened. Naomi, it was said, had visited the inn a few weeks before she died.
Lila shrugged and then her gaze wandered to the man walking toward Crescent Lake, little Wren Dunlop by his side. “Mmm,” she said, licking her scarlet lips. “A fine specimen. Is he new to town?”
The Reverend answered her question. “Arrived recently. He is renting the cottage on the lake, down from Solstice Deep. A surgeon.”
