Page 7 of Whispers at Seaside
She looked up at him as they walked beside a row of headstones. “I figured as a professor you’d be more, I don’t know, grounded than that.”
“You mean stodgy?” He tugged her closer.
“No,” she insisted. “More scientific, maybe.”
“I’m plenty scientific.” He reached into his pocket and withdrew his cell phone. “Let’s get a few pictures and see about those orbs.” He held the phone up, with the camera facing them.
“A picture ofus?”
He grinned and clicked off a few shots. “To start.”
They walked deeper into the cemetery, stopping beside a large tree with moss snaking up the trunk.
“Look,” Mira whispered, pointing to mist rising from the ground around an old, unreadable headstone. “Get a picture!”
Matt took the picture, and she walked closer to the headstone, still clinging to him like a security blanket. She crouched to get a better look, bringing him down with her.
“Why is there mist only on this one?” she asked, looking around at the other headstones.
Matt moved away and frigid air engulfed her as he took a picture of her huddled there on the ground amid the mist.
“Get back over here!” She darted to her feet and wrapped herself around him again. “Something happened. As soon as you walked away the air turned cold.”
“You missed my body heat.” He shifted so she was pressed against his chest and thighs.
She laughed to cover up her agreement. “It was different.Ghostly.”
“My body has been known to evokeotherworldlyexperiences.”
Even in the darkness she could see the wicked look in his eyes. Her mind immediately sprinted down a naughty path.
This was not good.
It wasmarvelous.
Marvelouslyhot.
A marvelously hotfantasythat was never going to happen because she wasn’t about to risk Hagen’s heart—or her own. Or her job. She banged her head on his chest and groaned, trying to reel her dirty thoughts back into submission.Submission?Oh yeah, she’d submit to him.
Hushed whispers filtered into her foggy brain. Other people from the tour were just a few feet away, and here she was having an erotic fantasy about the man who wasn’t even her official date. She realized she was practically panting and clinging to his biceps. And he was looking at her like he knewexactlywhat she was thinking.
She forced herself to step away on wobbly legs.
Matt scrolled through his phone. “Sunshine? I think you’re going to want to see this.”
He held his phone out, and Mira looked at the picture of her crouched beside the headstone. Mist floated up from the ground like ghostly arms reaching for several startling visible orbs floating around Mira.
The hair on the back of her neck stood on end and goose bumps chased up her arms. “Matt!” she whispered urgently, pushing the phone away as she wrapped her arms around Matt’s middle, then pulling the phone into view again. “I don’t want to see it, but Ihaveto.”
Matt chuckled and rubbed his hands soothingly along her back. “They can’t hurt you.”
“How doyouknow? Maybe they can. Maybe they’ll follow us home and watch us.” She rambled, too nervous to stop, conjuring up all sorts of awful thoughts about ghosts and evil spirits, until Matt shoved his phone in his pocket and pressed his hands to her face, silencing her with a serious stare.
“How do you know they’re bad? My mother and your father are gone. Couldn’t the orbs be their spirits? Or maybe they’re not spirits at all, but a symptom of the weather.”
“Uh-huh,” she mumbled.
They moved silently through the cemetery, awareness and heat twined with the eeriness of the evening, leaving Mira in a heightened state of hot, bothered, and frightened. The rustling of the leaves sounded like feet shuffling on pavement. Every noise brought her closer to Matt. He was eating up her clinginess, whispering scary stories to make her hold him even tighter. By the time Malena gathered the group for the walk back, Mira was a trembling mess of lust and ghostly thoughts—lust was winning by a mile.
