Dead People (Haunted Hearts, Book 1)

Chapter Six

Chapter Six

The fuck you look Cassie gave him made Luke want to laugh, but he’d laughed once today and didn’t want to overdo it. “Learn anything?”

“I learned you hired a decorator with no imagination.”

“An expensive decorator.”

“In that case, she robbed you.”

He leaned against a door jamb and crossed his arms over his chest, lowering his eyelids to study her beneath his lashes.

Her eyes looked hard, but her body looked soft. Everything about her was rounded. Her face, her lips, her eyes, her breasts, her ass. Despite her roundness, or because of it, she was pretty. Hell, who knew what made a woman pretty? He sure didn’t.

“You charge a hell of a lot more than the decorator,” he said, and wondered at the coolness of his voice, when he felt anything but cool.

She smiled, showing her canines. “I’m worth more.”

“You wanted to talk to me.” Knowing she was coming to his tower studio had made him restless, too unsettled to concentrate on his music. Forcing him to seek her out.

“I did.” Her eyes flickered. “I do.”

Sexual energy throbbed in the air, pounding a rhythm in his blood that sent it flowing downward.

Too damn bad. His blood would have to redirect. The therapist had said Erin would feel threatened by any relationships he entered into, at least for awhile. Erin would feel as if he were betraying Vanessa. A bunch of crap, considering all Vanessa had done. But emotions weren’t logical.

Uncrossing his arms, he straightened. The therapist had nailed that point. His emotions right now weren’t even close to logical. And Erin’s bedroom wasn’t the place to talk.

Any bedroom wasn’t the place to talk to the pretty ghost buster.

“Shall we talk downstairs?” Her right hand brushed her hair back over her ears, her left hand rubbed the spot above her breastbone.

So, she felt it too.

“The library.” He stepped back into the hall and started downstairs without waiting to see if she’d follow. He listened, though, hearing the slap of her shoes on the carpeted treads, the slight rasp of her breath, the expectant hum of the walls.

A tune started in his mind—slap, rasp, hum, slap, rasp, hum. Words formed. Go away, curvy girl, far away from here. Come back again some other year.

His shoes clomped on the downstairs hallway, the tune stopping. He felt as though he were being chased but didn’t want to run. A memory popped into his mind. Sixth grade, one of the big kids, in the school playground with Amie Kinsale.

He’d been the one chasing Amie. But he felt the same now, the speeding heartbeat, the lightness in his head, the heaviness in his groin.

Sixth grade had been a hell of a year.

He left the library door open. Less closed in. Less intimate.

He pulled out one of the four mahogany chairs at a square table and plopped down, then gestured at the chair kitty corner to him.

“I’m talking to Isabel’s housekeeper tomorrow morning.” Cassie passed the chair he’d indicated and sat across from him, her narrowed eyes challenging him to mention it. “I can ask her.”

His suspicions, lulled by her roundness and her contrary attitude, returned with a slam in his gut. “Why talk to the housekeeper when you could ask the ghost herself?”