Page 106 of It'll Always Be Her

A sudden banging made her heart jump. Startled, she spun around and stared over the mezzanine railing.

For an instant, she thought Captain Marcus was actually responding…and then she saw the big male silhouette behind the window next to the front door.

Her heart went haywire.

Adam?

She shook her head. No way. He was in Washington, DC. He had meetings and appointments and his parents’ anniversary party.

He banged on the door again. “Bee! I know you’re here. I saw your car in the lot.”

She went downstairs, her breathing shallow. She unlocked the door and pulled it open.

Adam stood on the porch in jeans and an old sweatshirt, his fists clenched and face dark. His hair was a mess, his jaw unshaven, and he looked so unbearably beautiful that everything inside Bee lit up like a pinball machine.

“Adam.” She could barely get his name out. “What are you—?”

“I love you,” he snapped.

She stared at him, her hand reflexively going to her chest to grip her locket. “Oh. Um, I…”

“I love you,” he repeated, stepping into the foyer and getting so close that his delicious scents of nighttime, ocean waves, and autumn air flooded her nose. “I know it’s fast, and I know you don’t love me, but I want you to one day, and I’ll do everything I can to prove why you should.”

She couldn’t be hearing him right. “Adam, what…what are you even doing here?”

“You have to get Millicent.” He stalked past her to the stairs. “I’m going to help you.”

If Bee had thought that reuniting two ghosts was a ridiculous idea, then having hard-core scientist Adam help her after just declaring that he loved her took the task to a whole new level of crazy. And miraculous.

She hurried after him, not sure what she wanted to do more—fling herself at him and kiss him hard enough to make the entire world disappear or actually try to get some answers out of him.

Well, she definitelywantedto do the former, but she firmly told herself that would have to wait. She had to stay focused. This whole endeavor was on a tight Halloween time schedule, and she assumed midnight was the deadline for reuniting the ghosts because…what else could it be?

“Adam, what’s going on?” Breathless, she followed him upstairs to the cupola. “What happened at your meetings and with your parents and—”

“What happened is that I realized that I wanted and needed to be somewhere else.” He looked through the telescope lens and adjusted the focus. “That is, in Bliss Cove with a couple of ghosts who shouldn’t exist in any rational, scientifically proven world whatsoever, yet somehow…here they are.”

Her heart zinged in a huge arc, as if it had just been shot from a catapult. “You…you came back for John and Millicent?”

“No.” He threw her a faint scowl before returning his attention to the telescope. “I came back foryou. But John and Millicent are important to you, and that makes them important to me. And you want to reunite them and save the library, which means I want to reunite them and save the library. Because what’s important to you is important to me, and what you want, I want because I love you so damn much that even science can’t handle the enormity of the feeling. But that all has to wait because Millicent just arrived.”

Bee was so dizzy she had to grab the back of a chair to steady the spinning world. Her brain didn’t even know which part of his speech to grab hold of.

“Come on.” Adam pushed away from the telescope and strode to the door. “We need a large glass jar with a lid, a candle, and matches. Do you have all of that in the break room?”

“Probably, or in the basement.” She hurried after him. “What’s it for?”

“To catch Millicent.”

“We’re catching her in a jar?” Bee’s thoughts darted around like swooping fireflies. “I thought we’d need a proton pack like inGhostbusters.”

“Ha,” Adam scoffed. “That’s not how you catch a real ghost.”

Bee almost had to run to keep up with him as he crossed the main floor to the break room.

She followed him in and dug through the drawers for matches and a taper candle, which she kept on hand for her meals. She found a glass Mason jar in a lower cabinet and quickly rinsed off the dust as Adam tossed extra candles into a plastic bag.

“Let’s go.” He turned on his heel, stalking toward the door like a man on a mission.

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