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“Bee,” Adam snapped.“Bee.”
She stopped, reminding herself she was an adult, not a girl who ran and hid from confrontations—either because she had no choice or because she didn’t know how to stand up for herself. Now, she had both choice and autonomy.
Curling one hand around the mezzanine railing, she turned to face Adam. He’d stopped a few feet away from her, his eyes still dark, his expression shuttered.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Whatever she’d expected him to say, that wasn’t it. She shook her head.
“For kissing me?”
“For…complicating things.”
Her heart dropped a few inches. He was right. Starting anything with him—as much as she secretly longed to, and even if it would be temporary—was a bad idea. She needed to stay focused, and he needed to do his job.
Moreover, she needed him to do his job. All of her own work getting the Explorer Channel to shoot at the Gardenia House would be useless if the episode weren’t actually completed and put on the air. The point was that as many people as possible needed to see the evidence of Captain Marcus’s ghost. The library had to become aphenomenon.
Plus, the captain needed to stop fixating on her and Adam and get back to doing what he did best—haunting the Gardenia House in a conspicuous manner.
“Adam.” She took a few steps toward him. She’d never been one for expressing her deeper feelings. In fact, she’d become an expert at locking them up inside. But despite their mismatched worldviews and lives, she trusted him. He’d been nothing but straightforward and truthful with her.
This made it all the more difficult to convince herself that Destiny was right—not about Adam’s negative energy, but about Bee needing to stay away from him.
Captain Marcus obviously thought so too.
“I like you,” she told Adam. “I enjoyed the kiss. But I agree that getting involved romantically would complicate things more than either one of us needs. So since we’re going to be working together for the next week”—and apparently they’d also be alone for most of the night—“maybe we should just agree to be friends and leave it at that. You do your job, and I’ll do mine. This episode can be fantastic, and obviously, I want it to be, but that means we both have to focus on the task at hand. Not…”
On each other.
Oh, but it had been lovely to be the center of his attention for a few minutes. He’d kissed her as if nothing else had existed for him just then. She imagined he conducted his science experiments the same way—with laser-focused precision.
With any other man, Bee wouldn’t have considered it at all romantic to associate herself with a science experiment, but with Adam? Science was his religion. He believed in it. He cared about it. He love—
“Anyway.” Forcing a smile, she lifted her hands in inquiry. “Friends. Okay?”
His gaze passed over her face, and his jaw tightened slightly. He gave a short nod. “Okay.”
“Good.” The shadow drifting across her heart belied the word, but her mind knew this was for the best. “As I said, I’ll be down in the archives. Text if you need anything. Or if you encounter Captain Marcus again,” she added with a teasing lilt to her voice.
A smile tugged at Adam’s mouth. “Another encounter might give me deja-boo.”
Bee laughed. “That’s the spirit.”
He grinned, his blue-green eyes crinkling at the corners. A warm current passed between them, crackling with electricity.
Still smiling, Bee turned and went back downstairs. As much as she’d have liked to reminisce about their kiss, she turned her thoughts toward the ship captain and his reasons for lingering in the Gardenia House in the afterlife.
In the archives, she pulled on a pair of gloves and began studying John Marcus’s letters and diaries. The captain had been a prolific writer—there were hundreds of letters and several leather-bound diaries for each year.
Bee was familiar with some of them, but the former library director, Pearl Brooks, had been a veritable historian about not only Bliss Cove but also Captain Marcus and his life and family.
After retirement, Pearl had moved to Washington State to be close to her daughter and grandchildren. Bee still stayed in touch with her through social media, occasional emails, and Christmas card exchanges. Though their correspondence sometimes touched on Captain Marcus, they’d never had a reason to talk about him in much depth.
Until now.
Bee made a note to call Pearl first thing in the morning—or rather, at a decent hour—then spent the next few hours deciphering the captain’s sweeping, spidery handwriting and taking notes.
Last year, she’d organized all of the letters and diaries in chronological order, so she compiled the ones dated at the time the Gardenia House was being built or afterward. She also marked the correspondence dated in the fall months in case there was a reference to Halloween.
