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“It’s a fixer-upper,” I said. I left out the part about inheriting a nice chunk of change from a great-uncle back in Italy. That little twist of fate was more Victorian than my house. “But here’s the thing.”

“I’m all about the thing,” Chase said, coming over to join us.

I didn’t mind including him in the conversation at all. Chase had studied Psychology in college and was great at listening without judging. And I really didn’t want to be judged for everything I was about to say.

I stepped a little closer to the guys. “I love my new house and I’m having fun fixing it up. Kyle has already come by and given me a lot of suggestions and even helped with some things. But....” I let the sentence trail off, feeling incredibly silly about where I was going with it.

“But?” Chase prompted, clearly curious.

I sighed, then leaned in closer. “I think the house is haunted,” I whispered.

Chase and Diccon exchanged glances. Both looked like they were fighting hard not to laugh.

“Haunted?” Diccon asked, rubbing the bottom half of his face like he was wiping away his smile. “By who?”

“I know, I know,” I said, holding up my hands. “It’s weird to think the house is haunted. But it’s old, I heard stories about the reclusive millionaire who had some sort of thwarted love affair who built the place, and things keep happening in it that I can’t explain.”

I mentioned that I hated things I couldn’t explain, right? Weird house crap was definitely at the top of that list.

“What kind of weird things?” Chase asked, trying to take my concerns seriously.

I shrugged. “The bedroom door keeps opening in the middle of the night, no matter how firmly I shut it. I hear noises from other rooms that are empty all the time. And the windows in one of the bedrooms, the one across the hall from mine, keep fogging up, regardless of the weather.”

“That is creepy,” Diccon said, though he didn’t seem to take the whole thing much more seriously than he had a second ago when he was grinning. “Did Kyle have anything to say about it?”

“I haven’t mentioned it to him yet.”

I liked Kyle and considered him a friend, but I had the feeling he would blame everything on the age of the house, doorframes being off-center or something, or floors being tilted or sagging. All things that seemed perfectly reasonable, but didn’t quite sit easily with me as explanations.

“You should get him to check it out,” Diccon said. “Those old houses tend to settle a lot over the years. We had to replace a lot of flooring in our house because of age, and it turned out there was a damp problem from one of the gutters being clogged.”

I shook my head. “The previous owners had the gutters cleaned right before I bought the place. That and the electric were about the only maintenance they did.”

“Sounds like you’ve got maintenance problems then, not ghost problems,” Diccon said.

“Yeah, but I…I hear voices coming from the other rooms in the middle of the night,” I went on. “Not like I’m overhearing someone’s TV or radio either. Quiet voices. Whispers.”

“Dude, that’s incredibly weird,” Chase said, shivering a little.

“It probably still has a logical explanation,” Diccon said.

“You’re no fun,” Chase laughed at him.

“Um, Theo might dispute that,” he teased him in return.

A quick pang of longing filled my chest. The Meyers brothers had all found true love over the summer, and I envied them.

Okay, maybe it was my overly romantic soul deciding that the relationships they’d all fallen into since the spring were true love, but they all seemed so happy. I wanted what they had. I loved love, and I was approaching thirty. I really wanted to fall head over heels for someone and build a life with them. There wasn’t anything wrong with hooking up when I had an itch that needed scratching, but what I really wanted was someone to fall asleep with every night and wake up with in the morning. I wanted someone to share a house with.

A haunted house, maybe, but a house all the same.

“Oh!” Chase said with a sudden burst that had Diccon and I both jumping. “You know who you need to talk to?”

“Who?” I asked hopefully.

“Bastian Gorman.”

“Bastian Gorman?” Diccon snorted.