3: In Which She Isn't Glad She Came

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3: In Which She Isn’t Glad She Came

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The fireplace was moving.

According to my phone, it had just gone past midnight and I was curled up on the couch with a blanket reading a well-thumbed copy of Carrie. So, given the ominous circumstances, I was entitled to be creeped out…because the fireplace was moving.

I hadn’t even noticed the stupid stone-carved thing until I saw a section of the wall slowly swing open, like a door. In a castle like this, ghouls were inevitable and since my old Chasing Ghosts character, Bibi, hunted ghouls for a living, I was duty-bound to be badass and check it out.

But maybe after this chapter, I thought, giving the tattered novel in my hand a wistful look before glancing at the partly-open fireplace

“Fucking dust,” the ghost muttered, ducking its head and creeping out from under the mantel.

The “ghost” turned out to be Nikolai, which was just my damn luck.

“What the hell do you want?” I hissed, jumping to my feet so quickly everything on my lap went tumbling to the carpet.

He was too busy dusting himself off to answer me so I took that opportunity to march over there and peer into the space he’d crawled out from.

Amazing. Dim lighting inside revealed that there was a passageway; a stone passageway that probably linked to other corridors behind other walls. I was so engrossed by thoughts of eighteenth-century Alvonich children scampering about behind the walls that I didn’t realise that Nikolai had closed what little space between us that there was.

Once again, I jumped like a cat thrown into water. Nikolai was sniffing me. Sniffing my hair like I was…like I was a flower.

“What are you doing?” I murmured, trying to get as much space between us as possible. “You want an autograph or something? Is that it?”

It was incredible that I was able to string complete words together and make inflections at the end that indicated a question. No sane woman would have been strong enough to do the same when this man was in a pair of freaking silk boxers alone that left little to the imagination. Not that I was imagining.

In fact, I was only more aware of my own state of undress. The flimsy tank top I wore revealed that my nipples couldn’t withstand the cold and my cotton boxers were practically nonexistent.

Nikolai laughed loudly, his eyes scanning my front. “An autograph?”

“Why are you here, then?” I took a defensive step back when he moved forward. “I think that’s far enough.”

He paused mid-step, making an exaggerated show of inhaling loudly. “God, are you using apple-scented shampoo?”

“What?” I sputtered, because that was so left field I just had to have imagined that.

“I smell it now – just like I smelled it that night,” he said thickly, tilting his head to one side. “That explains why apples get me hard.” Ignoring my obvious hostility, he crowded over me, invading my personal space. “Still crawling into men’s beds and calling them Mikhail? You sure as hell know how to bruise a man’s ego.”

“Fuck you,” I spat, drowning in his freaking intense eyes as they pulled me in. “I’m not that Vegas woman. I’ll do more than give you a black eye. You can bet on it.”

His lips crooked into a wry smile. “Pussycat is such an applicable pet name for you, Ophelia.”

I didn’t want him to say my name; didn’t want him to be here. It was bad enough that I’d had to suffer through dinner with him – a dinner that included him becoming my father’s new best friend – but for him to be in my bedroom half-naked? It was just too much. All the memories of what his body was capable of doing to my body filled me with an intense longing. A longing I wasn’t supposed to have.

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