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My Lois.
*Haunted by Her Curves is an insta-everything standalone instalove romance with a HEA, no cheating, and no cliffhanger.
Chapter One
Lois
A part of me wants to keep driving.
Drive back to the city, but I just got here and I’m not gonna let her ruin my first day on the job.
People like her have tried to ruin most days for me. Plus, I can’t not have a job.
It’s a crummy internship that pays next to nothing but it is journalism. It’s what I went to college for.
It’s all I want to be. A reporter.
Her voice echoes in my mind as I drive from the newspaper office. Her thick eyeliner fresh in my mind, narrowing as she spoke, making her eyes look dull. Hollow.
Like a skeleton’s.
“I think you’re lucky to have any assignment at all, getting here a day late and now turning your nose up at the first real assignment I give you,” she’d snapped.
My new boss. Barbara.
More like angry Malibu Barbie.
She looked me up and down, clicking her tongue behind her Botox lips, shaking her head as she brought her thin hands to her temples, careful not to disturb her perfect hair.
Of course, I apologized. I told her I’d do whatever she wanted. What on earth Malibu Barbie was doing running a small town newspaper, I’ll never know.
But seriously, spending the night in a haunted house?
I almost laughed at first, but when I was alone it scared me, so I’m checking it out in the daytime. On my own time.
Or am I driving back to the city?
Back to what? Unemployment and nowhere to stay?
“Just get me a story for the Saturday edition,” she spat. “Kids have been sent for therapy after going out to the old Barnes place. Halloween’s coming up, people want answers,” she exclaimed.
“And I for one am not gonna get my hands dirty, that’s your job, now get out and don’t come back until you have a story!”
I study my own hair in the rearview mirror as I slow down, approaching the crossroads near the town’s limits. It looks like my life right now, dry and scattered.
Messy.
Left, the road leads to the haunted house, where I’m supposed to go. Straight ahead? The freeway in another hour, and back to the city I couldn’t wait to leave just a few days ago.
There’s a hot wind blowing, even though storm clouds are coming and there’s something in it as it hits my face from the direction of the haunted house.
It makes me shiver.
I’ll check out the house in daylight.
I tell myself I might do the story. If nothing amazing happens before Monday, I’ll head back to the city, beg Becky for my place on her couch back in the city, and start over.
But something in this wind… this feeling…
The hatchback grunts and grinds into gear and then chugs as I swing a hard left towards the haunted house on the hill.
The closer I get, and especially once I see the old place, the more intense the feeling becomes.
The spooky huge windows of the faded, timber-clad mansion are like piercing eyes, watching me as I drive closer.
I feel a shiver again, but it’s not fear.
Shaking my head, I tell myself to get a grip. Now is hardly the time to feel…tingly, but I can’t help feeling I’m going to do more than just spend the night in this place.
This town.
Something seems to bore right into me as my little car starts to chug, splutter, and finally hiss as the radiator overheats.
Again.
I try to sigh but feel nothing but rage as my little car dies yet again, the dark clouds swirling above having opened up; drenching the car and me with large, heavy drops of warm rain as I feel myself torn between feeling mad at the car and wanting to go inside this house.
Well. I’ll be here for an hour at least until I can safely open the hood and give the old girl another drink anyway.
I lost count of the amount of mechanics I passed on the way into town. I didn’t want to be any later than I already was.
But the closer I got to the house, the more it registered that something else has been pulling me here all along.
Not the newspaper job. Not a haunted house or even a headline story.
I shudder a breath inward as I feel it again, shivering at the front door.
Something familiar from my fantasies but never anything like this.
A man…?
I’m not sure which is more likely. A ghost or a real live hunk of a man in a place like this.
It’s like a dream all of a sudden, feeling compelled to go inside, with what feels like a pair of dark eyes on me… wanting something I barely have a concept of, but if the feeling between my legs is anything to go by…
