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Yesterday, I had been trying to save a haunted house.

This morning, it finally felt as though we were building one.

I carried my coffee into Research and Quality Testing, where two crew members were stretching stained fabric around the examination table Duncan had already declared unworthy of further mechanical rescue. The uneven lift had been disconnected completely. With the machinery no longer pretending it might work, the table had become far easier to use.

We lowered one end beneath darker fabric, added restraints that looked unpleasant without being remotely functional, and shifted the lighting so a performer could work from the opposite side without exposing the dead mechanism underneath.

By the time Duncan joined us, I was standing near the entrance while one of the performers practiced pulling back the sheet at the right moment.

He watched a full run without interrupting.

“The table isn’t moving at all?” he asked when the performer reset.

“No. It doesn’t need to anymore. The performer gives us the movement, and the lighting keeps the guest focused above the frame.”

Duncan walked around the table once, checking the edges and the space available behind it. “That’s better than trying to force another night out of the lift.”

His approval warmed me more than it should have.

Not because I needed it to do my job. I knew how to do my job.

I simply liked that he understood what I was trying to accomplish.

For the next several hours, we moved through the attraction in overlapping loops. Duncan repaired, reinforced, disconnected, or redirected the specialty pieces while I worked with the rest of the crew on flow, performer positions, scenic dressing, and timing.

Raw Materials gained steam from a concealed unit and a disgusting mixture inside one of the vats that looked alarmingly organic from six feet away. A broken lunging creature became far more effective once we stopped asking it to lunge and placed it above the exit where guests would discover it only when they turned to leave.

In Packaging and Shipping, we shifted a stack of crates so the guest path narrowed without becoming unsafe, then added a hidden performer position behind them. The wrapped figures waiting for shipment looked increasingly disturbing under the amber industrial lights.

Human Assembly took the longest.

Duncan fitted the workshop track into the production-line frame, added the stops and guards he wanted, then spent nearly an hour working with the crew member who would operate it. He never rushed the explanation, even with the opening clock moving steadily toward us.

I watched from across the room while he demonstrated the hand crank again.

His sleeves were pushed above his forearms, exposing part of the tattoo work I had noticed yesterday, and a streak of gray dust crossed the front of his dark shirt. He guided the operator through the movement, stopped him when the head turned too quickly, then showed him how little force the mechanism actually required.

There was nothing showy about Duncan when he worked.

That might have been what made it so difficult to stop watching him.

He simply knew what he was doing.

I had spent enough years around contractors, vendors, performers, designers, technicians, and people who exaggerated their abilities to appreciate the difference.

Duncan looked up unexpectedly and caught me staring.

My face warmed.

Instead of pretending I had been studying the wall behind him, I lifted my coffee cup in his direction.

His eyes narrowed with unmistakable amusement before he went back to the mechanism.

I took another drink even though the coffee had gone cold.

Last night’s kiss had complicated things considerably.

Before it, I could tell myself that wanting Duncan was an inconvenient but manageable side effect of working with an extremely attractive man.