“Okay.”

  “And he started feeling me up.”

  “Okay.” I wasn’t actually sure what constituted second base, but it sounded legit.

  “And I started feeling him up.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “And then it happened.”

  “What happened?” I asked softly.

  “The man. The ghost made his presence known.”

  “How?”

  “The usual. Flashing lights. Volume blaring. Banging sounds.”

  It would seem Paul Meacham got jealous. Fucking perve.

  “Peter freaked and ran out of the house, leaving me in the basement alone. He called me later and asked me what happened, and I made the mistake of telling him.”

  “You told him you were being haunted?”

  “Yes. I thought… I thought he cared about me. The next day, he told everyone at school, and I became a laughingstock. Even though he was scared shitless at the time, he made sure everyone knew I was crazy.” She raised her chin, and I fought the urge to kiss it. “I learned my lesson. I never told anyone again—not until my parents a few months later. So, did I ruin the mood?” she asked, biting her lip, the action so provocative I licked my lips in response.

  “You want more?” I asked, impressed.

  “I want you.”

  I eased away from her. “Halle, you’ve been through so much.”

  She sat up, too. “I get it. I really do. You don’t want to hurt me because I still have my V-card.”

  “That’s part of it, yes.”

  “And you think I’m too fragile to go all the way.”

  “It’s crossed my mind. I just don’t think you need anyone taking advantage of you right now. Especially a horny biker with a record.”

  “So, you don’t get to come? Because I gotta tell you, that’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever felt.”

  “I’m glad you enjoyed it,” I deflected. “I’ll be here all week.”

  She emitted a husky laugh, lowered her head, and gazed up at me from underneath her lashes. “But I still want to lick you.”

  She had a serious oral fixation. Honestly, it was like she was made for me.

  “And I want to make you come.”

  My insides bucked at her bold confession. “You don’t have to. I’ll live.”

  “Do I need to give the definition of want? I want to give you an orgasm.”

  “You know how?” I asked, the question a clear challenge.

  “I told you, I have Netflix.”

  “They show that shit on Netflix?”

  “Well, it’s more implied, but I think I get the gist of it. And you can tell me what I’m doing wrong.”

  “So, this is like a lesson.”

  “More like a hands-on workshop.” She reached out and ran said hand along the outline of my erection, causing a spike of pleasure that surprised me with how powerful it was.

  I covered her hand with mine and squeezed. “Are you sure about this?”

  She offered me a smile that was part kitten and part jaguar as she rolled onto her knees and crawled between mine. It was my turn to look up at her. Her clear blue eyes. Her ripe mouth. Her delicate, defiant chin. She bent her head and kissed me long and hard before sliding her hands to the button of my jeans and unfastening them. She slid the zipper down, slipped her hand inside, and encircled my erection with her fingers.

  I hissed in a sharp breath as blood surged under her touch.

  “Am I doing this right?” she asked, teasing me with a spectacular pout. When I only nodded, she pushed my jeans over my hips and shoved me against the headboard. She did the pouty thing again. “Now, tell me if this hurts.”

  I was so lost in the moment, I had no idea if she was serious or not. But when she bent down and took me into her mouth, I almost exploded right then and there. And, holy hell, she was right. She did get the gist of it.

  Blood rushed into my cock like a flood tide, and I spilled a drop into her mouth. A point of fact we didn’t talk about. What would happen when I came? Where should I empty myself?

  My breaths came in jagged gasps as she tested how much of me she could take into her mouth. She encircled the base of my cock with one hand and cupped my balls with the other, her teeth grazing the underside of my length as she swallowed almost the entirety of me. My muscles spasmed with each plunge, and I was close to orgasm, but we hadn’t talked about the inevitable end.

  Without breaking contact, I cupped the back of her head with my hand, threw one leg over her, and laid her back on the bed, straddling her head with my cock still in her mouth. I did it so I could control where I came, but she grabbed hold of my hips and pulled me farther inside. I suddenly realized control was the last thing I had a hold of.

  Before I could stop her, before I could warn her of coming events, the sharp sting of orgasm swelled in my abdomen and rocketed through my cock. Pleasure burst through me like a dam breaking, and I came, still cupping her head with one hand and bracing myself against the headboard with the other. I groaned as I spilled my seed into her mouth, worried how she would take it, but she kept hold of my hips, refusing to release me, and swallowed every drop.

  When the spasms ebbed, she eased her hold, and I fell onto the bed next to her in awe.

  “That’s it,” I said, dazed and confused. And still panting. “I’m subscribing to Netflix immediately.”

  She laughed out loud. “I may have watched a how-to video this morning.”

  “This morning?” I asked, surprised.

  “This morning.”

  “You’re a really quick study.”

  Her lashes floated down shyly to fan across her cheeks. “I wanted to be prepared.”

  I rolled toward her. “Halle, you didn’t have to do that.”

  The smile she laid on me would’ve melted a lesser man.

  It was me. I was a lesser man. She reduced me to a puddle of primordial goo in three seconds flat.

  “You have no idea how much I wanted to,” she said. “And it was, I don’t know… I don’t want to sound cheesy.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It was strangely empowering.”

  Her statement surprised me at first until I realized I understood. “I get that. I felt the same going down on you.”

  A curious smile spread across her face as she gazed at me. “Have you always been this handsome?”

  I laughed. “You’d be surprised how often I don’t hear that. Have you always been this beautiful?”

  “Now it’s your turn to be surprised. I’ve never found anyone I wanted to share this moment with. I’m glad it was you. I wanted to experience this kind of surreal magic at least once before I die.”

  My chest tightened at the reminder. “I’m going to do everything in my power to keep that from happening.”

  She frowned at me. “That’s not why I did this, Eric. I don’t expect anything from you. Dad and I will figure it out. If my death can be avoided, so be it. If not, that’s not on you. I don’t want you to feel obligated just because you have this gift.”

  “Gift?” I asked. I’d never seen it as one. Especially since changing fate had proven far more difficult than I ever imagined. Zachary Church was an exception, not the rule.

  “You’re a gift whether you see that or not. I hope you find happiness wherever you go.”

  “You sound like you’re saying goodbye.”

  “Not at all. I hope you stay longer, but I don’t want you to feel—”

  “Obligated.”

  She nodded. “Exactly.”

  I had every intention of staying a while and getting to the bottom of Halle’s last moment before it happened. I decided to give it one more shot before calling it a day. There was always tomorrow. “Halle, can you tell me what happened when you were twelve? Can you tell me how all of this started?”

  She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling, but when next she spoke, her words didn’t quite register. They didn’t fit, like a dissonant note in a favorite song. She yawned as fatigue took over and then said softly, “It all started when I killed a man in the woods.”

  Chapter Eight

  I either give too many shits or no shits at all.

  I can’t seem to find that middle ground

  for moderate shit distribution.

  —True fact

  “Can you repeat that?” I asked, not sure I’d heard her correctly.

  She faced me again. “I’ve never told anyone. I’ve never dared. See?” she said with a sparkling grin. “I told you, you’re supernatural. Less than twenty-four hours after meeting you, and I’m having sex for the first time and spilling all my secrets.”

  She was stalling. I waited for her to gather her thoughts and courage. Surely, she didn’t mean she’d actually killed a man. It had to be a metaphor for puberty or something.

  “When I was twelve, I went to a cousin’s birthday party at Baymore Park. She was turning sixteen and invited me to the cookout. I was so excited to hang with her. She was the cool cousin. Very popular. Very enigmatic.”

  “And you wanted to be just like her.”

  She shrugged. “I did. But she was also a bit wild. Always in trouble. And most of that trouble revolved around boys.” She started rubbing her hands, and I knew this was not going in a good direction.

  I took one of her hands in mine and kissed her knuckles. “Take your time, hon.”

  She nodded and seemed to think back. “She wanted to go for a walk in the woods, but she was grounded. They only let her have the party because they’d already paid for everything. But my aunt and uncle didn’t trust her. That was when I realized why she’d invited me to her party when she never gave me the time of day. Not that I blamed her. I was a twelve-year-old geek. She was the homecoming queen. We may as well have lived on different planets.”

  “I wish I would’ve known you when you were a geek.”

  “Oh, you do. I still am. I just hide it better.”

  “You think?” I asked in doubt.

  She punched me, despite the fact that I’d been sideswiped. Zero respect. “Because my cousin promised we’d be together, they let us go. They thought I’d be a good influence on her.”

  “Had they met you before that day?”

  A bubble of laughter escaped her. “Smartass.”

  “Sorry,” I said, not sorry in the least. “Go on.”

  “We walked deep into the forest to a set of caves I didn’t even know existed. A boy came out. No, a man. He was way older than my cousin with a beer in one hand and a bottle of mouthwash in the other.” She looked at me and shrugged. “I still don’t get that part.”

  I wasn’t about to tell her. I braced myself for what came next.

  “Anna told me to stay outside, said she’d just be a minute, and went into a cave with the man. Only she didn’t come back out for a long time. I walked around a little, but it was getting dark, so I went inside. There was no one there. I figured she must’ve come out when I was walking around and headed back without me.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me? She left you there?”

  “It was partly my fault.”

  “No, Halle, it wasn’t.”

  “I should’ve stayed put like she said.”

  I decided not to argue with her. “What happened after that?”

  “The sun was setting, and I’d been walking around for hours. I have, like, zero sense of direction. Anyway, a man found me and told me he was part of a search party. Said the whole town was looking for me. I found out later that wasn’t true. Worried she’d get into trouble, my cousin told everyone we got into an argument, and I went home. No one was looking for me. My parents didn’t even know I was missing.”

  I pulled her hand to my chest and held it there. “I’m so sorry, Halle.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Do you remember what the man looked like?”

  She nodded. “He was huge, like a bear, with a long, dark beard, thick glasses, and a baseball cap.

  Paul Meacham was a big guy, but that was where the similarities ended. I’d looked him up on the company website last night. But a beard, thick glasses, and a baseball cap were all perfect articles to help obscure an identity.

  “The man started playing tricks on me as we walked. He would take sticks and pretend I had bugs on my legs or accidentally fall into me and, well, touch me inappropriately. Then he would laugh like it was all a joke.”

  An indignant heat erupted as I listened. She was so vulnerable. So innocent. But I had yet to figure out what this had to do with the Nordstroms’ head of security. Had he been working for them yet? Or did he go to work for them because of Halle? And what did any of this have to do with him? She knows him. Surely, she would’ve recognized him from the forest.

  “He kept asking if I wanted to stop and rest. I kept saying no. I got a very bad vibe from him and knew pretty quickly I was in trouble.”

  Smart girl.

  “Finally, he pretended to hurt his ankle and insisted we stop, but when we did, he grabbed my arm and tried to push me to the ground.” She was visibly shaking now, and a tear slipped past her lashes. “I fought him with everything I had in me. Then I kicked him, and he tripped on a limb. He fell back and hit his head on a boulder.” She swiped at her tears, annoyed with herself. “I took off. I ran until it was too dark to go farther, then I saw lights. I walked to a cabin and asked to borrow a phone. My parents picked me up an hour later. They thought I was staying the night with my cousin.”

  “And you never told them what happened?”

  “I never told anyone. I was too ashamed.”

  “Why?” I asked. “None of that was your fault.”

  “For being stupid enough to believe my cousin. For being stupid enough to walk away when she told me to stay put. For being stupid enough to believe the man, even though no one else was searching for me. And for killing him.” A sob shook her shoulders, and I pulled her into my arms. “I just kept waiting for the cops to knock on my door. For a set of handcuffs to be locked around my wrists. But that never happened. And to this day, part of me is still waiting.”

  I ran a hand over her hair. “Are you sure he died?”

  She swallowed hard and nodded. “There was so much blood. It soaked into the rock and pooled on the ground around him.

  “That doesn’t mean—”

  “Hikers found his body a few months later,” she added, knowing where I was going.

  “They found him?”

  “Yes,” she said between hiccups.

  Everything was finally making sense. Well, almost everything. “You think he’s been haunting you all this time?”

  “I know he has. It started right after.”

  “And you think you deserve to be haunted. You deserve to be arrested. You deserve to die.”

  “I do.”

  “You’re so wrong, Halle.”

  She pressed her mouth together, refusing to believe me.

  “Wait, how long after?” I asked. “How long between the incident and the strange events at your house?”

  “I don’t remember. It took me a while to catch on to the fact that I was being haunted.”

  “If you had to guess.”

  “Maybe a couple of weeks? A month?”

  I nodded in thought. “And how long did it take for his body to be found?”

  “A few months. We were way off the beaten path. It’s a miracle it was discovered at all.”

  “Perhaps.” Something else made sense to me now. “Is that why you didn’t want me looking for your ghost? You didn’t want me talking to him? You thought he would tell me what you did?”

  She put a hand over her eyes as though doing so would shut out the painful truth. Once again, I wondered how much to tell her. But this was her story, not mine. She’d been lied to and betrayed by her cousin. By her own parents when they had her committed. By the man in charge of her security for years. She deserved to know the truth. To be in on the plan. But how would I tell her without alerting Meacham? He almost certainly had her phone bugged, but he could also have her bag, watch, or her key fob bugged. Deranged psychopaths should never be underestimated.

  I grabbed my phone and did a search for the body they’d found. It had happened almost two decades ago, so it took some time to find the right one, but I did begin to wonder about Idaho and all the discovered bodies. Not that New Mexico was any different.

  When I finally located a decent article about it, I asked her, “Do you mind if I show you a picture of the man they found? It’s from his driver’s license.”

  She shook her head. “Not at all. I’ve seen it before, a long time ago.”

  “Okay, if it bothers you, let me know.”

  The look on her face, the one that suggested I hung the moon and regularly changed its lightbulb, had me questioning her sanity. Again.

  “What?” I asked, wary.

  “I’ve never had anyone treat me like this.”

  “Like a human?”

  “Like my story matters. Like it’s valid. Like my emotional distress is real and I was never crazy.”

  “Like a human,” I reiterated. I turned my phone and showed her the pic of a man, clean-shaven

  “I barely remember his face, but he does look like the man in the woods. Especially if you add a beard.”

  “They said he’d been missing for seven months when he was found.”

  “The timing sounds right. Do you think this is a different guy?” she asked, surprised. “How many dead bodies could there be?”

  “Bear with me. When is your cousin’s birthday?”

  “May 4th.”

  “And the cookout was actually on her birthday?”

  “Absolutely. Anna always insisted her birthday party be celebrated on her actual birthday, no matter what day of the week it fell on. She always said it was stupid to celebrate a birthday the weekend before or the weekend after, just because it was inconvenient.”

  “She sounds like a peach.”

  Halle snorted then questioned me with an arch of her brows.

  I scrolled to the second paragraph. “Halle, this hiker didn’t go missing until a month after your cousin’s birthday.”