Page 20 of Haunted Ever After

But to his surprise, Cassie didn’t even react. “Thirty-two.” Her eyes were as dark as the cocoa he spooned into two mugs. She turned those big brown eyes to him now. “You?”

Well, that was only fair. “Twenty-nine a couple weeks ago.” He reached for the metal pitcher by the espresso machine, filling it with milk.

“Oooh, a younger man. I like it.” She batted her eyes in light-hearted flirtation that Nick couldn’t begin to parse. “Not even thirty, and you own your own business. Nice.”

“Oh, yeah.” He shot her a glance while the milk steamed, but she didn’t seem to be kidding. “I’m the king of everything you can see.”

Cassie gave a low laugh, acknowledging his sarcasm. “Seems great to me. It was good enough for Elmer, right?” Her lips quirked up in a smile while he poured the hot milk.

“Whipped cream?” he offered. “It’s just the stuff in a can, but it’s not bad.”

“Yes, please. Let’s live a little.”

Live a little. Hadn’t Elmer just said that to him recently? Maybe he was right.

As if she were reading his mind—and Nick was used to that kind of thing, considering his roommate—Cassie leaned her elbows on the counter. “Tell me more about Elmer.”

“What would you like to know?” He passed her one of the mugs before offering up the bottle of bourbon. She accepted both, adding a healthy dollop to her mug before passing the bottle back.

“You really…talk to him? Like, for real? This isn’t some touristy bullshit. You actually believe in ghosts?”

Nick glugged some bourbon into his own mug. “It’s not a matter of belief. It’s a matter of fact.”

“Fact?” Cassie raised her eyebrows. “You’re talking about ghosts here. I’m sorry, it’s just hard for me to get my head around it.”

“Here.” He reached under the counter, where he kept the extra copies of Boneyard Key: A Haunted History. During the season he kept those copies up by the register and they sold at a decent clip—here and at every other souvenir shop in town. Mr. Lindsay must have made a deal with the devil back in the day; the book was one of the top-selling souvenirs. Nick himself hadn’t read it in years. Not since he’d been forced to, back in school. He handed the book to her. “A housewarming present.”

“Ahh,” she said. “The textbook.” She flipped through it while taking a careful sip of cocoa.

“I know it’s a lot to get used to. Especially if you’re coming at it from a tourist mindset. Like mermaids at Weeki Wachee…” He raised an eyebrow pointedly, even as he regretted bringing it up. The comparison had triggered something in him, and he’d reacted badly. Defensively. He wasn’t proud of that.

She looked up from the book, shamefaced. “You know I was kidding about that…”

“I know,” he rushed to reassure her. “And you weren’t far off. It’s just that around here, the mermaids are real.” He kept his voice casual, like they were talking about something totally normal. Which of course they were…to him. If you’d spent your life in this town, lingering spirits were just part of the scenery. Like palm trees and the salty air. But to Cassie, they were still stories, like the fake mermaids or costumed characters at the theme parks. Something to believe in when you’re caught up in the moment, but recognize as fiction when you’re back home in the real world.

She didn’t understand that this was the real world. Nothing she’d heard tonight had been fiction. Well, except for that bullshit about the ice cream shop. He didn’t know where the hell Sophie had come up with that one.

He suddenly felt exhausted. Couldn’t they just skip to the end of this conversation, where Cassie left and he went upstairs to his ghost roommate, and they could both write off this whole damn night? But that wasn’t how life worked. No skipping the hard stuff.

May as well try a different tactic. Plunge headfirst into the hard things. Maybe he could get her to believe. “Look…” He came around the counter, reaching into his back pocket for his phone as he did so. “Check my texts.”

“Your…?” But she put down her cocoa to take his phone and started scrolling through, pausing when she got to what he knew she’d see: text after text labeled Unknown Number. “Damn. You get a lot of spam texts.”

“They’re not spam. They’re all from Elmer.”

“Elmer? The guy who used to own this place?” Now those big brown eyes were filled with skepticism. “You’re really telling me a ghost can text? How? What kind of phone plan does he have?”

When she put it that way, he had to admit it did sound ridiculous. “I’m not pretending to know how it works. But hand to God, the week after I bought this place, I started getting these texts. Elmer sees everything that happens around here, and texts me to tell me what I could be doing better. Believe me, he has a lot of opinions about banana bread.”

“I can see that.” She slowly scrolled through, sometimes tapping before scrolling some more. “He’s wrong, by the way. Your cinnamon banana bread is great. These are really all from Elmer?” Technically the question was directed at him, but she seemed to be musing out loud. “They do all seem to be from the same person. Can I call him a person?” She glanced up at Nick and he could only respond with a smile and a half shrug. She scrolled a little more, then her eyebrows flew up. “He thinks I’m cute, huh?”

“Oh.” Shit. In the veritable ocean of exchanges, of course she’d found those specific texts. The back of his neck burned, and he placed his palm there, soothing the heat. “Yeah. He, ah…He’s pretty old school. You know. Says what he thinks. Doesn’t have much of a filter.”

She gave a hum of agreement, a soft sound that went straight down to the base of his spine. He had to sneak in a deep breath before he could look at her again, and when he did, she was a lot closer than she’d been before. She leaned an elbow on the counter, her body canted in his direction, holding his phone toward him so they could both see it. She took another sip of hot chocolate, the pink tip of her tongue peeking out to catch a stray bit of whipped cream from the corner of her mouth.

It was suddenly warm in here, pleasantly warm. Maddeningly warm. Nick felt a little dizzy, like he was about to jump off a high dive.

Oh the hell with it. Might as well jump. Isn’t that what those Van Halen boys said? He took a step closer to Cassie, closer to that heat.

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