Ghosts of Boyfriends Past (9 page)

Strong, solid,
real
arms.

She looked up into the extremely close—and extremely intent—blue eyes of Mark Ellison, Reporter of Doom. How had he gotten in here? Why had the ladder fallen? Was it the ghosts? The curse? Or was she just a clumsy idiot who’d forgotten to lock the door?

“We’re closed.”

His gaze drifted over her face, lingering on her lips. “Are we?”

Biz squirmed in his arms, but he held her easily. Damn his Atlas muscles. “
I’m
closed. Very closed. Go away.”

His lips quirked into a sexy little smile. Damn his dimples. “But then who will catch you when you fall?”

“My ghosts will catch me,” she snapped without thinking. “And I wouldn’t have fallen in the first place if you hadn’t startled me.”

Instead of dropping her and backing away from her craziness, he quirked one eyebrow and something serious entered his eyes. “You really believe in ghosts?”

Biz gave an exasperated huff. She hadn’t been able to avoid him, maybe she could scare him off with weird. Time for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. “Yes, I have ghosts living with me. Three of them. And I’m a witch, you know. Double, double, toil and the whole nine yards. I bet I can even find a broom around here somewhere.” Which was true, though she’d only ever used it to sweep. Her family line had never been in the flying business. Love was more their thing. “Now put me down or I’ll be forced to turn you into a toad.”

He laughed and his arms tightened around her. For a moment, she didn’t think he was going to oblige her. Then he shifted his grip and let her feet slide toward the ground, while keeping one arm wrapped firmly around her ribs, pressing her torso against his chest.

As soon as her feet touched the floor, she shoved away and hurriedly put the ladder between them. He just grinned—did nothing offend the man?

“Is this the thanks I get for saving you from a broken neck?”

He had a point. That was pretty bad form. “Thank you for catching me. Now go away.”

“Or you’ll turn me into a toad?”

“With warts. Lots of warts.” Even if they were making a joke of it, it was oddly freeing to talk about her witchitude with someone. She had a sudden understanding why killers in mysteries always confessed, spilling way more than they ought to because they just couldn’t stop themselves once the floodgates opened.

Mark’s dimples flashed as he circled the ladder. “Go ahead. As long as you’re prepared to kiss me back into my prince-charming form.”

“I’m not in the habit of making out with reptiles—no matter what form they take.” Biz backed away, playing ring around the ladder.

“Amphibians.”

“Excuse me?” She continued her retreat, weaving a path through the hot pink obstacle course her shop had become.

“Frogs are amphibians.” Mark stopped stalking her, leaning against the papier-mâché bedecked counter.

Biz folded her arms, safe with the breadth of the counter between them. “Fine. Frogs are amphibians and you’re a snake. I’m still not going to kiss you. Could you please go now?”

“You owe me an interview, and I’m not leaving until we settle the score.”

That sounded ominous. “We don’t have a score.
We
don’t have anything. There is no
we
.”
Please God, let there be no we.
The curse specialized in
we
’s.

“I do believe you agreed to an interview then stood me up. I’m just trying to do my job and ask you some perfectly innocent questions. I think the least you owe me is an explanation.”

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“Because you’re closed.”

“No. Yes.” She could close the shop until Valentine’s Day. Would that work? Or was he already in too deep? Whether it was lack of sleep or stress or the dizzying pheromones he projected, she couldn’t seem to think straight anymore. How was she going to beat the curse if her brain kept turning off at random intervals? And wasn’t he supposed to be long gone? Whisked away on yesterday’s five o’clock ferry? “I thought you were gone.”

“And yet, here I am.”

“I mean I thought you’d left. The ferry…”

“News travels fast on Parish, I see. You’re right. I left. Now I’m back. I had to go up to the city to get a change of clothes. And my tools. If I had to stare at your broken awning for one more second, I was going to gouge out my eyes.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my awning.”

“It’s bowing. It’s a hazard.”

“It’s fine. I don’t need or want your help.”

“Don’t you?” He arched a brow.

“I don’t. I’m fine on my own.”
Fine
wasn’t a lie.
Fine
wasn’t happy or even content.
Fine
was holding it together. She refused to fall apart.

“Why is the shop closed? Are you redecorating?” He frowned at the crimson drape puddled at his feet. “Was it this red in here yesterday?”

“I’m…” She waved a hand helplessly at the red floral explosion. “It’s Valentine’s.”

He grinned—and there were those dimples again. “I can see that. Tell you what. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll hold the ladder for you and you’ll tell me about your ghosts.”

She narrowed her eyes, suspicious. “I thought you were doing a piece on Valentine’s Day.”

“I was, but you’re more interesting.”

Biz was not consoled by the change in direction. It was still too close to the curse for comfort. And he was still in her shop, in her presence, falling even deeper under the influence of her accidental death magic.

“I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.”

“It isn’t about what I believe. It’s about the story. You’re the story.”

“I don’t want to be the story.”

“Then we’ll do it anonymously. No one has to know it’s you.”

“Why are you so interested in this?” she asked, even though she knew the answer—the curse. She just wanted to find out why
he
thought he was here.

“You fascinate me, Biz.” His expression was so sincere, so terrifyingly earnest. “You’ve had three years of Valentine’s tragedy and you’re still decorating your shop for the holiday. That kind of resilience is awe-inspiring.”

Biz studied the grain in the floor again, fighting her disappointment that she couldn’t be the awe-inspiring woman he thought he saw. “Gillian did it. To surprise me. I was taking it down.”

He just nodded, demonstrating again his inexplicable ability to adapt to whatever she threw at him. He was such an odd blend of closed and open-minded. He extended his hand, palm up. “I’ll help you.”

He didn’t smile. No smarmy
tell-me-all-your-dirty-secrets
look. But she wanted to tell him every dirty secret she had. She was so tired of keeping everything in. She had the boys for company, but the fact of the ghosts had driven a wedge into all of her relationships with the living. And here was Mark, asking for all the crazy she could give him. He wasn’t judging. Probably with a boatload of ulterior motives, but she couldn’t make herself care.

This time, she couldn’t say no.

Mark stood at the base of the ladder and looked up at the curve of Biz’s calf disappearing into her snug brown boots, forcing himself not to look at any higher curves. The single frosted window let a dribble of light into the shop, but it was more than enough to appreciate the charms of Miss Elizabeth Marks.

“So how many ghosts do you have?” he asked, as much to distract himself as to interview her.

“Three.” She jerked on a snagged strand of hot-pink heart-shaped lights, and the curves he was most definitely
not
looking at jiggled interestingly.

“How do you know you have three? Couldn’t it be just one really active one?” Though three made sense if she was imagining them as her dear departed boyfriends.

“They arrived at different times. And they manifest differently.” She gave another yank, another section of the strand came loose suddenly, and she swayed backwards on the ladder.

Mark reached up instinctively to steady her, realizing when she stilled that he was palming the sweet round curve of her ass. They both froze as he silently commanded his hand
not
to squeeze, no matter how tempting the impulse was.

When she was stable on the ladder again, he cleared his throat harshly and moved his hand back to brace the ladder. “How do they manifest?” he asked, his roughened voice the only sign that he’d just gone to half-mast copping a feel.

“Paul appears visually—very
look at me, look at me
. Like a big toddler.”

“Does anyone else see him?”

Biz winced. “No one. I know how this sounds…”

“No, I’m sorry. Go on. What do the other two do?”

“I hear Gabriel. He’s the poet, the dark, dramatic one. If there’s an ominous song on the piano or a moaning in the rafters on a stormy night, I know Gabriel is around.”

In a drafty old Victorian, Mark would have been more surprised if there
wasn’t
moaning in the rafters, but again he kept his mouth shut.

“And Tony. I never see or hear him, but he’s the only one who can move objects around.”

Mark held his tongue, managing not to suggest that a stray breeze could just as easily move things.

“He’s the considerate one,” Biz continued. “Opening doors, handing me things I can’t reach, cooking meals. He takes care of me.”

Mark frowned. “Cooking meals?” That went beyond coincidence to full-on delusion.

“Mm-hmm. Tony was a great cook.”

Was
. The change in tense caught his attention. At least she drew a distinction between the living man and the ghost. Mark stared straight up at those curves, but this time didn’t let himself be distracted. “Tony as in Anthony Gable?”

“That’s the one. Tony Gable, restaurateur extraordinaire.” There was a fond catch in her voice that annoyed him on some inexplicable level.

“And the others are Gabriel Fox and Paul Lundgren? Your other boyfriends.”

She freed the last of the heart lights and extended the strand down to him, her face as rosy as the bulbs. She fidgeted on the ladder. “They weren’t my boyfriends. I was sort of dating them, but it wasn’t serious. Not yet. I didn’t really have as much of a claim on them as everyone thinks.”

That went along with his suspicion that she was using terminally ill guys as a buffer from real relationships, but it didn’t explain his possessive surge of pleasure that the ghosts didn’t have a romantic hold on her.

Still, there was one detail that implied things were much more serious.

“You were a major beneficiary in each of their wills and the recipient of at least two life-insurance policies,” Mark said, playing his trump card.

Biz paled. “No one knows that.”

“Did you think I would come all the way out here without doing any research?”

“You think I…I did something to them? For the money?”

Even if he hadn’t already known she wasn’t at fault, the look in her eyes would have convinced him. “I don’t think that at all. But you can’t tell me you didn’t matter to them. And that they didn’t matter to you. People don’t leave that much money to strangers.”

“I haven’t touched the money,” Biz whispered.

Mark didn’t bother telling her he’d already known that. After seeing the disrepair her house was in, he’d tried to follow the trail to find out what she’d done with her inheritances, only to learn the entire bulk of her money was just sitting in an account collecting interest and dust.

“It isn’t mine. None of them had any family, but I didn’t deserve… It shouldn’t have been me.”

“They cared for you.” He brushed a curl back from her face, and she shied away, stuffing the stray lock back into her ponytail. “You really believe they haven’t left you? They must still love you if they stay here as ghosts to look after you.”

“If they even have a choice.” She shook her head and the curl fell forward again. “The relationships were all so new. Kernels of potential. Just love that might be.”

He nodded, picking up a discarded light strand and looping it over his forearm. “Which is just as bad in its own way.”

She stilled, her eyes searching his face. “It is?”

“Sure. You’re all twisted up and aren’t quite sure how you’re supposed to feel, so you feel guilty because you mourn the possibility of what might have been more than you actually mourn them.”

Her eyes went round. “How did you know that? No one gets that.”

He shrugged, starting to see a new Biz. One that fit her much more than the Black Widow guise.

When life dealt her loss after loss in a senseless, random stream, she developed a coping mechanism to keep the reality of her situation at bay. Her boyfriends died, but they didn’t leave her. They loved her. They weren’t gone. They were just ghosts.

It was poetic in its emotional simplicity. An optimistic echo of the can’t-let-go suckers who went to mediums to reconnect with lost family members. The ghosts made the loss bearable—and they kept both real, living relationships and loneliness at bay.

But the truly amazing thing was the way the town had adopted her coping mechanism, wrapping her delusion around them all in support.

It was an incredible story. His editor would eat it up.

“I don’t know if they care,” Biz confessed softly, turning back to the decorations. “Sometimes I wonder if they have any choice but to stay with me. I would let them go if I could.”

Of course she would. Because as soon as she could let go of the ghosts, she could release her own misplaced guilt and move on with her life. “You can,” he said.

She glanced down at him over her shoulder, her smile achingly sad. “Maybe. I’m trying to find a way.”

There were more secrets tucked away in that smile. He didn’t know the full story yet. But he would.

Mark wasn’t going anywhere. His editor could wait a few more days. He had a few more columns stored up. They could run those until he got back.

He looked up at Biz, seeing all her curves and contradictions. She was worth the wait.

Chapter Twelve—Schnapps ’Til You Drop

“Miss B-B-Biz?”

Biz looked up from the encyclopedia-sized spell compendium she’d brought as homework to the Winter Festival. A pale, vaguely familiar man hovered nervously to one side of her booth, holding two cups of Parish Cocoa.