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I can see why her brother’s lapping it up.
Love is a drug, especially love that blind.
I thought I wanted to make her scream, but now I want to make her smile, too. It doesn’t matter what order.
I want Remi to look at me like that.
In fact, I just might make her.
* * *
3
REMI
By the end of the first night, we’ve got running water, though it takes twenty minutes for the water to run clear instead of dark with rust. Jude sweeps out his room and sets up his camp bed while I’m nailing boards over the most egregious holes in the walls, windows, and ceilings.
I thought I was really gonna be hot shit living it up in the main suite, but it doesn’t take long for me to regret my choice. The space is cavernous, my lantern hardly casting light around the bed, let alone the rest of the room. The wood paneling is as black as the heart of a mine, the large four-poster surrounded by musty hangings that I pull down at once. The mattress has some nasty stain right in the center, so I yank it off and swap it for my inflatable.
The wind moans over the chimney and whispers down into the fireplace. The ashes stir as if shifted by invisible fingers.
The idea of haunting seemed laughable by daylight but less so at midnight. I’m having a hard time falling asleep with a thousand projects zinging through my head, plus intrusive thoughts about my new neighbor.
Why do hotness and assholery go hand in hand?
Probably because nobody would dare punch that aristocratic nose.
Dane intimidates me, like he must intimidate a lot of people. He’s fucking scary. I bet nobody says shit to him.
Wish I could say the same.
He was so calm and controlled throughout our encounter, while I could hardly keep from exploding. Of course, that’s exactly what he wanted—he set the whole thing up to confuse and upset me.
And what does he want tomorrow?
Probably to hold his leverage over me and rub it in my face.
I know guys like him. I’ve encountered plenty, working in construction—men who want to feel big by making me feel little. Well, I am little. But I don’t let anyone make me feel small.
I’ll fix or clean or haul whatever I have to. Then I’ll give him two middle fingers straight up in the air while I cash the check for this house.
I am curious to see his place. I could only spot the gables through the tree-tops, but it looked dark and airy and elegant compared to the shambling, peeling mess Blackleaf has become.
I wonder if he really was my uncle’s doctor. Ernie never mentioned him. But it’s not like we were that close—we only exchanged letters a couple times a year. Ernie was more than “eccentric.” This house was falling down around him long before he got sick.
My uncle fancied himself an inventor, and he actually did invent a couple of things over the years—a garden tool with an exchangeable head and color-changing candies—among a hundred abandoned projects and outright failures.
His shed is still stuffed with old equipment and beakers, plus notebooks full of his mad scribbles.
I loved Ernie because he was the first one to teach me to use a lathe and a circular saw. When we’d visit him as kids, he’d give us the full run of the place and let me fuck with all the leftover bits of pipes and boards he wasn’t using.
My parents sure as shit didn’t know how to do anything practical. My father was a trust-fund baby and my mother a southern belle—she did cotillion but never held an actual job in her life.
They loved us, though. God, how they loved us. That was the best thing about my parents—life was a game, it was purely for fun. They took us to Africa on safari, Thailand to wash baby elephants, Brazil for Carnival, Paris for Christmas…
Every day with them was play and laughter, my mother’s quips, my father’s arms around my shoulders.
That’s how I know there aren’t any ghosts. My parents would send a message to us if they could—my dad for certain.
