Page 45 of Chasing Your Ghost

“This game is a stupid piece of trash,” Riley grumbled as she jabbed at her keypad to close the app.

Asher let out the kind of laugh that made even someone who was as darkly furious as she was unable to stop her lips from twitching up into an unwilling smile.

“You are such a sore loser.”

“I am not,” she replied automatically, narrowing her eyes at him when her lie only made him laugh harder. “If anything, you’re a sore winner.”

Asher grinned that infuriatingly devilish lopsided smile, and Riley was struck by how alive he looked for someone whose soul had been irrevocably touched by death. The hopelessness had left him only minutes into the game, and the result was more than she could have hoped to expect.

“Oh, really?” he asked. “Explain your logic, please.”

“Well, you’re laughing in your defeated opponent’s face, for one.”

He hummed, his eyes bright with amusement and possibly something else—something Riley was too afraid to name. “And what else?”

“You kept saying ‘take that’ every time I landed on one of your properties,” she pointed out with a half-hearted scowl. Her anger over her loss was waning at an incredible rate under the soft touch of Asher’s smile.

“Okay, so maybe you have a point,” he conceded. “But I wouldn’t have been half as bad if you weren’t so cute when you’re mad.”

“I am not cute when I’m mad,” Riley argued, even as her cheeks burned with pleased heat. “Incredibly scary, maybe, but not cute.”

He snorted. “I’ve seen puppies scarier than you.”

Riley glared, some of her anger returning. She could be scary when she wanted to be. “Were they demon puppies from hell?”

Asher bit back his smile. “You know what, I think they might have been.”

Riley clicked her tongue and opened up her search engine. Their game had been fun, her disgustingly pathetic loss aside, but she needed to get back to trying to find mention of anything similar to what Asher had been experiencing.

“No, really,” he carried on, and she turned her head to look at him. “They had red eyes, and their hair was patchy like they’d been burned by the very flames from whence they came.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Pretty sure they also had blood dripping from their razor-sharp teeth.”

Riley rolled her eyes and chuckled. “You’re ridiculous.”

“And you’re almost as scary as flesh-eating puppies,” he replied with a wink.

“I’m sure you say that to all the ladies.”

He chuckled, the deep sound sending shivers down Riley’s spine. “As shocking as this may be, you’re the only one I’ve said that to.”

Riley feigned surprise. “I must be special then.”

He nodded, his amusement slowly morphing into something more intense, more vulnerable. His eyes locked with hers, and Riley couldn’t have looked away from the impossibly vibrant green pools even if she wanted to. “Yeah,” he murmured. “You are.”

Riley’s tongue darted out to wet her lips, something that proved to be a mistake when Asher’s eyes moved down to track the movement. This was the precise reason why her dad had always warned her not to get too attached to the ghosts they helped.

Well, maybe not the precise reason, but she was pretty sure her dad wouldn’t have approved of her thinking of a spirit in any way other than as someone to assist. And Riley certainly wasn’t thinking about Asher in that way after their game of Monopoly, especially not when his eyes were still glued to her lips.

She tried to laugh the tension between them away, but the sound that left her was more of a choked snort than anything else. If there were awards for effectively killing a moment, she would be in the running to win one. “True. I suppose most girls can’t speak to ghosts,” she said in a flustered ramble.

Asher cleared his throat and shifted to put some space between them. “Right. Exactly.”

Riley knew how stupid it was to feel anything more than sympathy and compassion for a ghost, but that didn’t stop her from feeling disappointed by the large gap that now separated them. She was playing with fire, and she would get burned.

There was no other way for this to end. So why the hell was she setting herself up for heartache? Why the hell was she going for swims and playing Monopoly with him?

Riley didn’t know the answer, but she knew if it made things better for Asher, she would keep doing those things, even if it meant it would be harder for her to say goodbye when the time came. She would do it for him because she couldn’t bear the thought of him hurting. She would do it because she was scared too.

She was terrified that Asher would be dragged back to that place of torment again. She was terrified that they would never find out what made him different. And, goddammit, she was terrified of the fact that sooner or later, he’d have to leave.

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