Page 6 of Haunted Ever After

“That’s okay.” Cassie frowned at her computer screen, hit a couple keys. “I’ll get around to it soon.”

“What are you going to do until then? Just keep coming here?” He fired off another text to Elmer (She’s requiring a lot of attention) and was about to hit the Call button under Buster’s name when a response came.

Damn, she’s cute. Who’s that?

“Wow. You make me feel so welcome.”

“What?” His gaze flew up from his phone. Cassie had her elbows on the table, cradling her chin in her hands, looking at him with her eyebrows raised and a sarcastic smile. He’d said something wrong. He knew it. But having two conversations at once, while planning a third, was too much for his brain today.

So he stowed his phone back in his pocket. Elmer could wait. Hell, so could Buster. Cassie was a customer first and foremost. The rest could wait. “I’ll get your coffee.”

Her smile only widened as she turned back to her work, and Nick made himself stop watching his new customer and get started on her latte. But he was only human, and Elmer was right. She was cute.

Maybe he could pawn off some of this leftover banana bread on her. Did she like cinnamon?

Three

When Nick brought Cassie’s iced latte to her table, he’d left a little plate of banana bread beside it.

She looked up from her email, confused. “I didn’t order banana bread.”

“On the house,” he said on the way back to the counter.

Well. She wasn’t going to turn down a free treat. She wasn’t a dummy.

Cassie hit Send and returned to her inbox. What was the point in answering all these emails if people were going to just reply to them, sending the ball immediately back into her court again? This was unfair. As she opened the next email, the next fire to put out, she popped a bite of banana bread in her mouth. Ooh. Cinnamon. Yum.

By the time she got to a stopping point, her laptop was charged again, the banana bread was long gone, and the first trickle of customers had started to come in for lunch. Not wanting to overstay her welcome, Cassie dragged the watery remains of her latte through the straw, trying to get every last molecule of caffeine before she brought her dishes up to the counter. Nick was on his phone again, but he put it down at her approach.

“Banana bread okay?”

“More than okay. I like the cinnamon.”

“Yeah? You’re about the only one today.”

“Well, everyone else is wrong. You can make that every day as far as I’m concerned.”

“You’re on.” There was something about his face when he smiled. Frown lines were replaced with crinkles in the corners of his eyes, and he didn’t look younger so much as hopeful. He looked much better when he wasn’t frowning down at his phone. Had anyone ever told him that?

“I called Buster,” he said as she paid for her coffee. His voice had a tone of you’re welcome in it, even though she hadn’t asked him to do it. “He said he’d be by this afternoon.”

“I said I was going to call him.” Her skin prickled, and not in a fun way. She handled her own shit; she didn’t need help.

“But you hadn’t,” he said. “So I did.”

“And you just scheduled him for this afternoon? What if I wasn’t going to be home?”

“Then I would have called him back and told him to come later. It’s no big deal. Are you going to be home this afternoon?”

Of course she was going to be home. That wasn’t the point. She opened her mouth to argue more, but something in his face stopped her. Maybe he really was just trying to help. She sighed. “This afternoon, huh? That quick?”

Nick nodded as he handed over her change, which she promptly dropped into the tip jar on the counter. “I told you. You need anything around here—a plumber, roofer, anything—tell ’em you’re in the Hawkins House. They’ll clear their schedule.”

Nick wasn’t wrong. After Cassie got home, she barely had time to have lunch and unpack the first box of the day when Buster Bradshaw knocked at her door at two on the dot. He was roughly Cassie’s grandfather’s age, and his weathered face lit up like a kid at Christmas as he took a tentative step over the threshold, looking around in wonder. But the glee on his face faded almost immediately.

“What did they do to you, old girl?” The words were softly spoken, not directed toward Cassie, but she heard them anyway.

“What’s wrong?” Cassie looked around the way he did, at the probably-not-original crown molding, her senses on high alert. The electric was already screwed up—what else had the inspector missed?

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