Jealousy?
Even that turned me on in a way it shouldn’t have, just like Gavin himself. Both of these guys were bad ideas, but maybe I’d been without men in my life for so long that I was a glutton for them, no matter who they were.
A beating instant passed as Dean’s touch got a little more possessive on my shoulder. I held back a small sound of pleasure.
Get away from him, my common sense was telling me. But common sense was a distant second to everything else right now.
“I’ll tell you one thing about the Edgetts,” he said. “Watch out. That girl Wendy captured your image on her camera phone.”
I recalled when she’d aimed her phone at me, then the flash. Shit.
“Tonight, she shared the pictures with Gavin,” Dean said.
His fingers branded my skin and I bowed my head, totally under his control.
Needing his touch so badly.
That was a ghost’s curse, wasn’t it? Needing what we couldn’t easily get?
His hand eased up to my neck, skimming over my flesh. My body responded, starving for touch after being robbed of it for so long. My skin prickled, my nipples tightened, the spot between my legs ached hard. My eyes closed, fighting it.
Go away, Jen. Don’t be stupid.
But I was staying, remembering Dean’s skin against mine. Remembering how he used to run his fingertips up my spine and down again, then kiss his way up my back to the nape of my neck, melting me.
Even though I had a body, I felt as if I was floating again. Rising, full of heat, dizzy with wanting…
In a haze, I opened my eyes, and I didn’t see grass or sidewalk around me anymore.
I saw purple. Stars floating past.
The star place?
Just as I started coming out of my lapse, I felt him holding on to me as we rose. And I saw that those stars were closer than before, and they had that strange shape I’d noticed during the first visit.
But now, so near, they definitely looked like…
Pale, glowing, hanging bodies?
Jarred, I screamed, breaking away from fake Dean, falling, falling through the purple…
As I tumbled through space, using all my energy to control my essence, he didn’t follow me. But why wasn’t he giving chase?
Rushing toward the ground, I thought for sure I was about to splat over the asphalt below me.
Pull up!
I summoned everything I had, curving up and scooping into the sky just before I could smack into the street.
Hovering, trembling, I heaved in a pseudobreath, realizing I was back in my old neighborhood, the streetlights yellow and wan. I looked up to the sky at the true stars, wondering what was actually hanging and glowing in the “star” place.
And why fake Dean had called himself a keeper instead of a reaper.
14
If there was one lesson I’d learned in these past twenty-four hours, it was that I couldn’t trust anyone but my new ghost pals.
Amanda Lee certainly wasn’t a finalist in my Inner Circle Sweepstakes. And do I really have to mention the entity that tried to seduce me up to his star place, just like a predator who invites women into his apartment and does heaven knows what to them?
I just wished I had the capacity to shrug off fake Dean as I’d done with Amanda Lee. But it seemed that he was intrigued by me and my different-strokes ghost attitude.
Even worse, those things he’d told me about Elizabeth, my parents, the afterlife, and the Edgetts had really done a number on my mentality. How much of his information had been valid and how much had he just been making up in order to lull me into a position vulnerable enough to take me to his star place? And what would happen the next time he tried to lure me with slick words and soft touches that he knew would undo me?
Boo World had more questions in it than even real life. All I knew for sure, though, was that the next time fake Dean appeared, I wouldn’t give him an inch. It seemed he needed me to come willingly every time he tried to get me to his lair.
Since I’d wasted enough time today, I sailed off to the Edgett mansion, even though fake Dean had warned me about Wendy’s camera pictures and how Gavin knew about them. We would see if Star Guy had been telling the truth about that, though, wouldn’t we?
When I arrived, Constanza the maid was standing in front of the guest cottage outside, unlocking the door. I guessed she lived there.
I swept over her head and she gasped, drawing her collar closer to her stout body. But I was already on my way up to the main roof and chimney, taking the passage down to the foyer fireplace and coming out into all that marble grandeur. I listened for a beat, and when I heard voices down the right-side hallway, I followed the sound.
I found three out of four Edgetts in the study, gathered around a pool table with balls scattered over the felt. A lone light cast illumination over the green as the rest of the room waited in dim relief. Noah was holding a cue stick, dressed in a school uniform like Wendy. Farah was in a pair of pink sweats, her dark hair in a sleek side ponytail, and she was wearing cute strappy pumps, which made no sense to me. Sweats were for working out, right?
Anyway, Gavin wasn’t here, but those books I’d seen in his dream last night sure were. They gave me the jeebs as the details rushed back.
Blood coming from his fingers over the chair… Elizabeth, walking into the room in her bathing suit, dropping a red-stained scarf to the floor…
“. . . so just leave it to Wendy to put him in another bad mood,” Noah was saying, lining up his next shot. His navy blue school tie was loose, his careless dark brown hair hanging over his forehead. His rosy-tan skin looked more flushed than it had the first time I’d seen him, like he’d been outside cutting class a lot.
As he cracked the cue ball into a solid one, putting it into a corner pocket, Wendy crossed her arms over her chest. Was it because she was fending off Noah’s comment or because I’d entered the room and she was cold?
“If you’re going to haunt,” Twyla the Unfriendly Ghost had told me, “commit to it.”
So I wouldn’t fear that I was being too obvious with my presence. I was beyond that now.
Noah straightened up, then hunted down another solid ball. “What did you show Gavin that put him in such a funk, anyway, Wen?”
She fidgeted. “Nothing much.”
But I knew. The photos of me.
So fake Dean hadn’t been lying about that.
I swept thoughts of him aside to think about later as Farah sat half on the edge of the pool table. For some reason, she looked sad, even with her CoverGirl makeup job.
“Gavin just gets in these moods, Noah—you know that.”
Her adopted brother sent her an assessing glance, his mouth firming into a straight line as he took another shot on the table, then missed.
Wendy seemed to be in her own orbit, as usual, wandering toward the sliding glass doors that overlooked the glowing pool outside. But instead of shutting out her siblings, she opened herself up.
“I only showed him something that I thought he’d actually laugh at,” she said. “Pictures.”
Noah snorted, like he was trying too hard to be flip. “Were they of you? I’d laugh.”
“Shut up, Noah.”
“I’m just being honest. He’s your big brother, not Wendy’s Super Special Teenage Crush. Stop trying to impress him with your dumb arts and crafts. He couldn’t give a shit.”
Wendy glared at him. “You’re disgusting.”
He didn’t notice that Farah gave him a look that was just as taken aback before she straightened her face and rose from the table.
I followed her, positioning myself against the wall, spreading over an art deco painting so I could be in front of her and monitor her expressions. I thought I already had a good emotional bead on Wendy.