“Come on, Piper. I remember. You used to ask me to draw pictures for you. Pictures of the ghosts you saw.”
Dang. She couldn’t believe it. Why would he remember something like that? And why were they having this conversation while he wasn’t wearing a shirt? She had almost whimpered when he’d exposed his chest to her. Brady had filled out a bit in the last twelve years. In all the right places.
“I was just a kid. I had an active imagination.” Her parents had forgotten about her imaginary friends and ghost sightings. Or at least they never mentioned them to her anymore. It wasn’t something Piper ever wanted to discuss with anyone, least of all Brady Stritmeyer, a lifelong crush she clearly hadn’t quite gotten over.
“Bullshit,” he said.
She was surprised that he hadn’t just dropped it. And that he was swearing at her. Raising an eyebrow at him, Piper clutched his damp shirt, glad she had it to mask her clammy and trembling hands. If there was one thing she was good at, it was changing the focus of a conversation from her to someone else. So she said, “I do remember the one time I had you sketch my mom in Victorian clothes. She was so upset that her hair was pinned back like that, even in a drawing, but she made an effort to fake that she liked it. How is Chicago, by the way? My mom said you work at a marketing company. That sounds interesting.”
It hadn’t seemed like a good fit to Piper, but then she had reminded herself she knew nothing about him except the impressions of an eight-year-old girl of a teenage boy. People matured, changed. Not that she had changed much, but maybe he had.
“It’s not really interesting at all.” He gave her a slow grin, shaking his head. “Don’t try to change the subject on me, Piper. That sketch you had me draw was the ghost in the mirror. I remember it distinctly. You were all sorts of worked up about it, insisting she had something to say.”
Piper felt her cheeks heat. She remembered it distinctly, too, and it embarrassed the hell out of her. She was standing in front of a shirtless man—something that didn’t happen all that often to her—and she was being reminded of the odd little kid she’d been.
“You don’t really believe in ghosts, do you?” she asked him. Most people didn’t. Or if they did, they still thought the person who saw them, who could talk to them, was strange.
“I’m not sure if I do or not,” Brady said with a shrug. “There were certainly a lot of unexplainable noises and doors closing around this house back in the day. If it wasn’t ghosts, I don’t know what it was.” He studied her so intently that she fought the urge to squirm. “Do you believe in ghosts?”
It was a test. She could feel it. So she stared him straight in the eye, heart pounding too swiftly to be normal, and lied. “No.”
Then she blew it by darting her eyes to look past his shoulder. The ghost had started waving, which was distracting and weird. The movement caught her attention and she reacted by looking, which of course Brady noticed. He half turned.
“What’s behind me, Piper? Red-Eyed Rachel?”
No, she was in the doorway to the kitchen. Piper could see her out of her peripheral vision. Knowing she couldn’t form another lie on her lips, she just shook her head and figured he could interpret that however he chose.
“Nothing? No ghosts?”
She fisted his shirt tighter in her hands. Why didn’t he just drop it? “I should get your shirt in the dryer.”
Whatever reaction she expected from him, it wasn’t for him to turn and punch the Blond Man in the direction of the gut.
“No!” she shrieked instinctively. It didn’t matter that the ghost was dead and couldn’t feel anything. It was so shocking, so disrespectful, she couldn’t prevent her reaction. Then she clapped her hand over her mouth when he turned back to her, smug.
“I knew it.” He tilted his head and said over his shoulder, “I’m sorry, whoever you are. But I was trying to prove a point.”
Piper left her hand fall. “He’s not there anymore. You scared him, I think.” There was no point in denying her reaction. But she didn’t feel like sticking around to have Brady gloat or grill her on her freakish ability. So she headed for the basement door off the kitchen, skirting past Rachel, the cold of the beseeching apparition tripping goose bumps over her arms.
He followed her. She could feel his presence falling into step behind her, but she refused to look. Flicking the switch at the top of the basement steps, she tried not to think about how much she hated Shelby and Boston’s basement. The house was almost a hundred and fifty years old and the basement was a true hole in the ground. Support walls had been added over the years and the laundry area was lit with flourescent bulbs, but the dark still clung to the corners and there was a musty, decaying smell. When she had been about fourteen she’d seen a dark shape moving around down there, a malevolent spirit that didn’t seem quite human, and she’d avoided it ever since.
“I didn’t mean to scare anyone. And I didn’t mean to upset you,” Brady said behind her.
Hanging on to the railing, she took the rickety steps down into the gloom. “I’m not upset.” Lie. Total lie. Piper despised lying to anyone else, or most importantly, to herself, but she didn’t want to admit to Brady that she didn’t like to be Ghost Girl to anyone, least of all to him.
She hesitated at the bottom of the stairs and he bumped into her, his thighs brushing her backside in her barely there cotton shorts, his bare chest warm against her back for a brief second.
“Sorry.” His hands touched her arms as if to steady himself.
She was grateful he couldn’t see the burn in her cheeks in the dark. The goose bumps were back, full force, and she was painfully aware that she wasn’t wearing a bra and he wasn’t wearing a shirt. “It’s fine.” But it really wasn’t. She wasn’t good at casual flirtation. She took everything too seriously, too literal.
So when he turned her around, slowly, she let him, but she dropped her eyes, not wanting him to see her confusion. For a guy like Brady, touching a woman’s arms in the dark was no big deal, she was sure. The same couldn’t be said for her. She wasn’t particularly experienced with men. Actually, come to think of it, she had no experience with men. Over the years, she’d had small pockets of interaction with boys, but not men. Brady was over thirty years old and she felt like a child next to him.
“I didn’t hurt the ghost, did I? It was kind of impulsive, actually, just trying to get a reaction from you. I’m not going to get sucked into hell or anything, am I?”