Page 52 of Deceiving Grier

We’d said goodnight before hanging up, and I’d rolled onto my side, away from the sound of Jake’s rumbling snores, and waited to drift off to sleep. Instead, I laid awake. My eyes were fixed on the dull beige wall before me while my thoughts churned in my head—almost all of them centered on Sawyer and that feeling in my chest, that feeling of light and expansion as if I had swallowed the sun.

Since I’d first met him months ago, my feelings for him had grown and continued to grow. What I felt for him was well pastlike, well past lust. It would be nothing for me to fall in love with him.

Panic gripped my chest and squeezed when I thought of leaving at the end of the school year, of going back to my old, empty life. Intellectually, I knew I should have probably ended things with Sawyer before I reallydidfall in love with him—though a part of me figured it was already too late.

And god damn it, I would havethis. I would have Sawyer, at least for as long as I could before I went back to Wisconsin, back to my family, back to bring forced into the mold they wanted me to fit, the mold that let them pretend I was who they wanted me to be instead of who I really was.

Now, I was home, and I couldn’t wait to wrap my arms around Sawyer, feel his body flush with mine, feel his hands and mouth moving over my skin.

The wind chimes I’d hung at the far end of the porch clattered when the icy wind gusted, pulling me from my thoughts. The hollow tubes rattled like bones, sending an uneasy shiver crawling up my spine. Why had I bothered to hang the damn thing at all? The noise sounded spooky, not relaxing, and it gave me the creeps, as if I was about to enter a slasher movie.

I opened the door and went inside. Warm air wrapped around me like a set of arms, chasing away the chill. After closing the door against the frigid air outside, I leaned back against it.Home.

From the foyer, I could hear the steady clacking of Sawyer’s fingers on his keyboard drifting out from the study. He hadn’t heard me come in. I grinned. I’d dump things in my room, then come down and surprise him.

Quietly, I climbed the stairs and crept into my room, unpacking quickly. I decided to shower before going down. The sound of the running water might give me away, and while I’d had a shower at the hotel before leaving this morning, my skin felt sweaty and itchy from all those hours on the bus.

I washed quickly, scrubbing away the sticky feeling from my skin, and when I got out, I dried myself, then wrapped my towel around my waist. I toyed with the idea of going downstairs like this, strolling into Sawyer’s study and dropping the towel to the floor, demanding he make good on all of his filthy promises from the night before. In the end, I decided against it.

Jett would be home from work soon, and while Sawyer and I were no longer hiding that we were together, I felt I could safely say neither of us was interested in giving Jett an intimate, up-close-and-personal look at our sex life.

I returned to my room and pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of plaid pyjama pants before going back out into the hall and closing my bedroom door. I started towards the stairs when a loud creak from behind me stopped me in my tracks.

What was that?I turned to look back over my shoulder in the direction the noise had come from. There was nothing—except that Jett had left his bedroom door open. Had it been open when I’d first come up? I couldn’t remember, but it must have been. I hadn’t opened it, and I doubted Sawyer had come upstairs, opened Jett’s door and walked away. I liked to think that if Sawyer had come up here while I’d been in the shower, he would have joined me.

Sharing a house with two other guys, our only truly private space was our rooms, which was why we didn’t typically leave our doors open. But if Jett had been in a hurry, scattered, he could have easily forgotten. I was about to cross the hall to close his door for him when there was an audible click, and the overhead light went out. Blackness descended the second floor.

My heart jumped in my chest, and I reached out and grasped the banister’s newel post next to me.

“Shit,” I whispered, looking up at the chandelier above as if I would be able to guess a possible explanation for why it had suddenly gone out. With only the glow from the foyer below seeping up the stairs, I couldn’t make out much, but the light fixture looked intact.

I shifted my gaze to the switch on the far wall, and my breath lodged in my throat, stomach swooping to my feet. There, in the shadows, was the distinct outline of a person standing next to the switch.

The ghost.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe no one was there. Maybe it was all a trick of the light.

For a long moment, I stood frozen, unable to move, while I watched with slowly dawning horror as the shadow figure eased farther back into the hall, blending into the darkness.

This wasnoghost,nosupernatural shadow. This was a living, breathing person, and I had caught them lurking inside our house.

“Wait,” I said. Shit, I’d left my phone in my room.

Before I had a chance to decide whether to go for my phone in my room or continue downstairs and have Sawyer call the police, in a sudden explosion of movement, the figure launched at me.

I let out a yelp and instinctively stepped back, forgetting about the stairs behind me. Rather than a wood floor, there was nothing beneath my foot, and I stumbled backwards, rolling down the hardwood treads.

The sharp edges of the steps slammed against me. I shot my arm out, grasping for anything to stop my painful descent. My arm closed around one of the posts in the rail, but my weight, combined with the momentum of my fall, dragged me down, wrenching my shoulder and bending my forearm between the rungs until there was a loud, sickening crunch.

Pain shot up my arm like liquid fire, my vision whiting out for a second, and I yelled while tumbling the rest of the way down the stairs. I slammed into the wall at the bottom, thrusting the air from my lungs. My head cracked off the hard plaster, and then there was nothing at all.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Sawyer

Thewindoutsidekickedup, rattling the windows and moaning through unseen cracks around the frame like a mournful spirit. The hair bristled at the back of my neck, and my fingers stilled on my laptop’s keyboard. All night, low-level anxiety hummed beneath my skin that I could neither explain nor shake off.

What in the hell was wrong with me tonight?Since Jett left for work, I’d felt an invisible weight pressing between my shoulder blades as though someone was watching me. Every creak or groan from the house had me freezing up and looking around the room, and every time I did, I was almost surprised to find myself alone.

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