Page 51 of It'll Always Be Her

“But none of us had had them come to life,” Jay said.

Suppressing the urge to laugh, Adam flipped them off and turned back to the monitor. “Go get your coffee. The bakery van just got here.”

Grinning, they all hurried off in anticipation of French roast and apple fritters.

Adam sat down in front of the monitor and rewound the recording to end of the kiss when his cell phone lit up. The guys hadn’t known he’d turned it off, so they’d probably figured the call was just bad timing.

He rewound it and watched it again. Again. The third time, he shifted his attention to the darkened book stacks on the right side of the screen.

He didn’t know what he was looking for. Actually, he wasn’tlookingfor anything.

He rewound and replayed it a few more times. It was the same footage of him and Bee on the sofa, then the expanse of the stacks and the—

His heart stuttered. He replayed the video and zoomed in on a spot close to the end of the stack labeled section 31-49.2.

A trick of the light. That was all.

He rewound the footage and hit play, squinting at the screen. A shimmering sliver of light and shadow was right beside the stack, almost like the air folding in on itself.

He played it again and looked at the time stamp. The shimmer appeared at the exact second that his cell phone rang. On the screen, he and Bee broke away from each other. The shimmer disappeared.

Adam dragged his hand down his face. He was losing it. Losing. It.

None of the guys had seen the strange illusion, but then they’d been too busy cackling at him and Bee to be looking for evidence of a ghostly hoax.

Except on the video, he was right there. Bee was there. No one else except the weird cat had been in the library.

Or so he thought.

He shook his head. Even for him, it was a stretch to think that one of the other librarians had snuck in to create some kind of illusion on camera or that Bee had rigged up a lighting device in advance.

He knew to his bones that she wasn’t capable of that kind of deception, no matter how badly she wanted to prove her ghost was “real.”

So it was a visual anomaly—something created by a cloud passing over the moon outside the window or a flickering light from the parking lot. He’d seen hundreds of similar occurrences in the past. Maybe it was an issue with the camera or microcard, a brief electrical hiccup.

At least a dozen explanations existed for his cell phone suddenly turning on and all the other little interruptions. Maybe a hundred.

But even he had to admit that it was one hell of a coincidence that the shimmer happened at the exact second that his phone started to ring. Even if he did think Bee capable of rigging up a lighting effect, she had no way of knowing his sister would call at all, much less be able to synchronize the effect to coincide with the ringtone.

Besides. She’d beenkissing himat the time.

A kiss so hot he’d spent the rest of the evening trying to figure out how he could kiss her again. He hadn’t been able to think about anything else until he’d had her up against the car and was devouring her mouth again.

With a mutter of irritation, he fished a new microcard out of a pack and pushed away from the monitors. He hurried up the stairs to the mezzanine and changed the card in the camera.

After installing the new one, he returned to the conference room and put the card with the footage of him and Bee in a pocket of his backpack.

He’d figure out what to do with it later. Right now, he needed to get his head back in the game.Hisgame—not the one involving a certain hot librarian who believed in ghosts and was starting to affect too many areas of his brain.

If he wasn’t careful, she’d have him thinkingpiwas a rational number.

* * *

“Boss, the light meters are still on the fritz.” Jay frowned as he fiddled with the controls on one of the meters. “Spot readings are all over the place, no matter where I am in the house.”

“Paul’s calling around to see if we can rent some extra equipment.” Adam took the meter from the other man and studied the display screen.

It wasn’t the first time they’d had trouble with their equipment—usually because a site’s electricity sources were unstable, there was little natural light, or the spaces were so small it made shooting difficult.

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